by Lydia Millet
“And who are the Whydahlee?” asked Jax. “And their bones … is it like an Indian burial ground?”
“Who knows?” said Max, making a face. “Not exactly ol’ Bill Shakespeare, is it.”
“Why don’t you take that one,” said Cara. “For now, Jax and I will try to find out where in the sea we’re looking. And you try to find out who Whydah Lee is, where she’s buried or whatever. OK?”
“And how should I do that? Ask around?”
“Like, you could start by just googling Whydah Lee or something.”
“True,” said Max. “When in doubt, google.”
“We’ll leave the underwater fires till later,” said Cara. “That one does seem kind of vague.”
She and Jax set off on their bikes by mid-morning, knapsacks on their back holding bottles filled with melting ice cubes and a couple of chocolate bars they’d picked up at a gas station convenience store. They headed for a spot in the next village along, called Eastham, inside the national seashore. Jax said he thought they would find the finger there.
They coasted along the curving, tree-shaded streets of Eastham after they crossed Route 6, calling back and forth.
“So—I don’t get it,” said Cara. “If she could tell you where to find the finger, why couldn’t she just tell you where in the ocean we’re supposed to look? Isn’t it, like, adding an extra step? I hate when they do that in stories.”
“She just didn’t trust me to know what she was talking about,” said Jax. “It was easier for her to tell me where the finger was because it’s on land. Because I know this place. But I don’t know the ocean and it’s so huge and she couldn’t give me a picture of the location because it’s just under waves that all look the same. A needle-in-a-haystack-type thing.”
They rode up a street that climbed a hill past an old fort and locked their bikes on to a rack in a small parking lot. From up here, on top of the aptly named Fort Hill, they could see a sweeping vista below—the grassy marsh with its blue channels cutting through it, the lagoon, and a long, thin barrier island that protected the beach. The ocean looked very blue beneath the green fields of the headland.
Near where they left their bikes, a trail led along the shoreline, past meadows of wildflowers (and poison ivy; you always had to watch out for that). It wended its way through a swamp full of red maples, where sometimes Cara had seen tiny voles and shrews peeking out of holes in the ground.
Jax led her along the swamp trail, through the trees, and then over some raised wooden walkways where the mud turned to water.
“Here?” she asked.
Jax jumped off the walkway and into the muddy water.
“Are you kidding?” asked Cara. “I’m wearing my favorite sandals!”
“Shoulda worn boots, like me,” said Jax.
She stood there shaking her head in disbelief. She really didn’t want to go with him. The water was dark brown and stagnant looking, about a foot deep over a sludgy bottom.
After a long hesitation, reluctantly, she decided to keep her sandals on—who knew what she might have to step on?—and ducked under the wooden rail, splashing in after him. She felt the cold mud overflow the edges of her shoes and enfold her toes.
“Gross, Jax,” she moaned, complaining.
“It’s just mud,” said Jax, ahead of her.
The water came up higher on him, she realized, but he didn’t seem to care. He parted tree branches—it was some kind of thicket, growing right in the water—and they sprang back into her face as she went after him. Plus there were mosquitoes, which were already biting her arms and legs. She slapped at them and shook her head, exasperated.
Jax, of course, was immune to mosquitoes. Or at least, immune to the itching. He never seemed to notice when they bit him.
“You’re not even supposed to go off the walkways,” she yelled. “If the Park Service sees us, we’ll be in trouble.”
But Jax was paying no attention.
“It’s over here, I think.” And he pushed through some wet undergrowth into a shallow hole shaped like a grave and surrounded by twigs and moldy, dead leaves. The hole was lined in what looked like white, chalky pebbles.
“This is a shell midden,” said Jax authoritatively.
“A shell what?”
“Midden. It’s the remains of human settlement. There are a bunch of them around here, and they can be hundreds of years old, even thousands. This one looks like it’s never been excavated; maybe it’s even undiscovered. At least, by archaeologists.”
“I don’t get it, why’s there a pile of shells?” she asked impatiently.
“They’re mollusk shells, mostly,” said Jax. “See? Oysters, mussels … it was probably someone’s kitchen midden, and these could be what was left over from their meals. Like a trash pile, more or less.”
“So we’re supposed to what—go through someone’s ancient garbage? To find a finger?”
Jax climbed over the snarl of vegetation and knelt down beside the white depression, his knees on a rotting log.
“Help me,” he said.
She sighed, and then she knelt down too.
Combing through the old shells was hard; they were crumbly, and in some places the midden was like a pile of chalk dust. Her fingers turned white with the powder, and when she turned to look at Jax she saw he’d touched his face and left ghostly fingerprints on it.
“Start in this quadrant,” said Jax after a minute, pointing to one of the corners. “Move along this way, then begin again here. See? Methodical. That’s the key.”
“Methodical,” she repeated, nodding. “Wow, Jax. This is so fun!”
He kept raking his fingers through the old shells, and after a minute she felt sheepish: he was more patient than she was, and she was supposed to be the mature one. Not sarcastic.
“You’re doing a good job, though,” she said softly.
He flashed her a quick smile.
It was when Jax smiled that you could tell he was a kid; when he was serious he might as well be a senior citizen.
“Cara! Look!”
It was a row of long, thin shells, splayed out beside each other like—
No. It was a skeleton hand.
“Oh my God,” she said. It seemed unreal. She realized she was sweaty and dizzy and let her head fall back so she could stare at the sky. She saw mostly branches.
“Don’t worry—Cara! It’s not a person, OK? It’s not a dead person.”
“Not a person?”
She felt dazed.
“Rare to find human remains in a shell midden,” said Jax. “No, it looks like a human hand with fingers, but in fact it’s a seal flipper. See? Claws.”
“Oh,” said Cara, letting out her breath.
“It’s what she meant,” nodded Jax. “Yep. This is it.”
“They ate seals? The ancient people?”
“Maybe they were using the blubber for oil. Who knows? Point is, I need to do some mapping.”
He pulled out his phone.
“I can pinpoint this using GPS, then use the compass to map a vector from here. It’ll give us a general area in the water, at least.”
“But which seal finger is it? Look, they’re pointing kind of different places. Aren’t they?”
“Only one is complete,” said Jax. “I’ll use that one.”
She watched as he knelt down, punching buttons, taking photos with his phone’s camera function.
“Do you need my help for this part?” she asked.
“No, take a break,” said Jax. “It’s cool.”
She stood looking through the trees, letting her eyes rest on the water, where insects walked, seeing the movement of tadpoles or minnows now and then. She zoned out. And then, a few minutes later, he was done and packing his equipment back into the knapsack.
“So?” asked Cara. “What did it say?”
“Thing is, I couldn’t get quite as precise as I wanted to,” said Jax. “My guess would be just offshore at either Nauset or Marconi. But I�
�m not sure.”
“Let’s get out of here, then,” said Cara. “I’m wet, muddy and covered in mosquito bites.”
On their way out, for icing on the cake, she slipped in the water and fell backward, soaking her shorts right through to her underwear. It felt grainy and slimy and made her itch even more than the bugs had. Slogging onward in her wet clothes and clammy sandals—ahead of Jax now in her eagerness to get home and change—she passed under the trees and out into the meadow again, and looked down to see a snake slither right by her foot. She jumped back.
“There are no venomous snakes on the Cape,” said Jax. “That was probably a black racer.”
“It just startled me,” she said, annoyed but resigned. “I’m not afraid of snakes, anyhow.”
“I know you’re not,” said Jax.
“So those middens are—archaeologists come and study them?” she asked.
Jax nodded.
“And that was probably someone’s kitchen a long time ago?”
“Not exactly,” said Jax. “But close enough. It could have belonged to the Wampanoag, for instance. They lived here for centuries before white people came.”
“So now it’s ruined, probably. I mean history-wise, we wrecked it. No one will be able to study it now.”
“Cara,” Jax said gently, “we were the ones who were meant to find it. Think of it that way.”
“And the Indians, I mean what if it was sacred to them?”
“It was their garbage dump, Cara.”
“Still …”
“This isn’t just about finding Mom, you know. I mean, obviously.”
She stopped walking and looked back at him, startled.
“No?”
“It’s bigger than that,” said Jax. “Far bigger. You can feel it. I know you can.”
She considered for a moment. There was the mysterious and the unexplained—the water falling and falling off the Pouring Man, coming from some unending, invisible source … the ancient turtle hovering just to talk to them, a stream of air rippling and twisting between it and Jax.
Even the skate eggs. Pulsing with some malevolent life.
A secret world hidden in the world they’d always known. A secret all around them.
Yes, she could believe there was something going on.
She could.
But what she wanted was just to find her mother.
“Why us, Jax?” she asked after a while. “I mean, I can see why you would be part of … you’re one of a kind. But Max and I—I mean—I’m just an average kid.”
Jax reached forward and grabbed her hand.
“Not true,” he said.
With his hand in her own she felt better, less like an unpaid assistant to a Great Genius. And for once their two hands, both caked in white, were equally grubby.
There was just enough room on the dirt path for them to walk abreast. Butterflies flitted over the meadow and a mouse darted over the path in front of them. She saw a red-winged blackbird rise out of the tall reeds, and as the two of them cut through the meadow a breeze swept through and swayed all the grass in one direction, with a sound like a long, gentle hush.
They went home, showered (at least Cara did; you never knew with Jax), and changed into dry clothes. Then they each wolfed down a couple of sandwiches, standing up at the kitchen counter. While she was eating, it struck Cara that she’d hardly thought of her mother all day.
Right away she felt guilty, as though she’d betrayed her, as though her mother was being forgotten, and the sandwich turned dry in her mouth.
She wouldn’t want me to think of her all the time, she told herself to make herself feel less guilty. She’d say it wasn’t healthy.
She closed her eyes and pictured her mother smiling as she said that, smiling wryly and shaking her head. It made her feel better, but only a bit.
A few minutes later they got on their bikes again and rode out to meet Max at a mini-golf course where one of his friends had a job. Because Cory worked there they could always play for free, and this way they wouldn’t have to worry about their dad hearing them talk about their plans.
When they went in Max was behind the counter helping Cory with customers, which in practice meant handing out scorecards and stubs of pencils and eating stale popcorn from the machine.
He threw back a last handful of popcorn, grabbed three clubs and three different-colored balls, and walked them out onto the first hole, where he put down his ball and teed off into a miniature windmill.
“So? What’d you find out?” asked Jax.
“No luck yet with the Whydahlee,” said Max. “I did some research on fires in the ocean, though. It could be volcanoes, for one. Like submarine volcanoes, right? That’s fire under the ocean. Right?”
“Magma, technically,” said Jax.
“Problem is, there aren’t that many active ones near here. The nearest might be too far for us to get to.”
“Like where?” asked Cara.
“Um, the Caribbean,” said Max.
“Big help,” said Jax.
“Yeah, so I figured that’s probably not it,” said Max. “So then I figured maybe it’s something that hasn’t happened yet, you know? Like say a tanker has an oil spill or something, and that catches fire.”
“But that wouldn’t be under the sea,” objected Jax. “It would be on top of it. On the surface.”
“True, my man,” Max conceded. “I also thought, maybe it’s the mid-Atlantic ridge, you know? I guess lava comes up there, from the rift or whatever. But that’s a bit of a hike too. Kind of beyond our travel budget.”
“Anyway,” said Jax, “we know the general area now, and that’s not it. It’s not going to be too far offshore.”
Cara felt disappointed; she’d thought Max would be more help.
“You guys play golf, I’m going to ride down the street,” she said. “To buy some fries. Be back in fifteen.”
If you cut back down the road behind some buildings there was a greasy spoon/convenience store, one of the mom-and-pop operations off Route 6 that was only open in summer. Their fries were skinny and crunchy. Cara stood in line behind a couple of fishermen, waiting to order; one of them she thought might be Zee’s father, a bearded guy who was always sunburnt on his nose, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
He was talking to the other guy about work—something about a red tide, which she knew was a bad thing because it meant the shellfishery had to be closed, at least while the red tide lasted. It was bad for business; it hurt the fishermen and in the restaurants it irritated the tourons.
“Chris was saying it’s polluted runoff that causes it,” said the one who might be Zee’s dad.
“No way. It’s a natural deal,” said the other. “It’s algal bloom, man.”
At that Cara started and edged closer. Algal bloom … She thought she remembered something about them. They could be phosphorescent, sometimes; they might be poison, but sometimes they were beautiful.
“But pollution can make that stuff happen. They had one in China last month.”
She was almost sure it was Zee’s dad. Should she ask him? Ask him where the next one was supposed to be?
“You seen one when it’s glowing? A few years back there was one like that … glowing all over the bay at night. Friend of mine saw it, I didn’t. They didn’t shut down the beds that year though.”
“In ’05 that one came down from Canada, right? But that one didn’t glow.… Yeah, hey, Lynn, I’d just like a burger.”
“Hi, Lynn, I’ll take a burger and a Coke .… Yeah, looks amazing. Kind of this greenish blue on the waves. Those little critters turn bright green, and there are billions of ’em….”
They moved away from the window as Cara stood there, frozen. This was it.
“Just fries, please,” she said, distracted.
She had her fries in one hand and was holding her handlebar with the other, bumping slowly back through the gravelly lots behind the row of buildings, when she stopped and whisp
ered it to herself.
“The fires. Green fires beneath the sea.”
“No,” said their dad at dinner, which was frozen lasagna since Lolly didn’t cook for them on Sundays. “I haven’t heard of a red tide this year. Not around here, anyway, or not yet. Why do you ask, Cara?”
“I heard some men talking about it, is all,” she said.
“Speaking of men talking,” said their dad, “I have to be away tomorrow, and the next night, too. Now, I’ve been thinking about it, and I can certainly ask Lolly to stay here with you at night, if you’d like. Or one of your old babysitters. But the thing is, most of the ones that are still around are barely older than Max—the older ones have gone off to college. And I was thinking we might try it without a sitter, because I’ve been impressed lately with your maturity. All three of you, actually. Now, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be nervous. And I’d need you to check in by phone frequently. This would be a first time for us, and it’s been a tough summer. But I do know Max is perfectly capable of watching Jax, and Cara, for the most part, can take of herself. Still, if you have any doubt about going it alone, I’d feel better if there was a grownup here with you.”
“What are you going away for?” asked Jax.
“I’m supposed to give a paper in Chicago,” said their dad. “It was scheduled way back, before … you know. They plan these academic conferences for years in advance. And actually, if any of you don’t want me to go—I mean, given the situation, I was thinking of canceling anyway.”
“No way,” said Max and put down his glass of water. “I can watch Jax. We’ll be fine. Really.”
“Go,” said Cara. “We’ll be OK.”
“Definitely,” said Jax.
“What’s the forecast?” asked Cara suddenly.
It had struck her: the three of them alone in the house, at night.
With rain falling.
“I haven’t checked,” said her dad with a quizzical look. “Why so meteorological?”
