The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook

by Lydia Millet

  “Oh, nothing,” she mumbled and stuck her fork into the remains of her lasagna.

  Rain again. The rain that brought him.

  “Lolly will come to make you dinner, anyway,” their dad went on. “That much I planned with her already. Both nights, on Monday and Tuesday. But if you’re comfortable with Max as a babysitter, she’ll just go home after that.”

  “I promise,” said Max and raised his hands like he was surrendering. “No wild parties.”

  “And no girls over,” said their dad, and then coughed discreetly.

  Usually he didn’t even go there; it was their mother’s job to have the embarrassing conversations with them about safe sex and responsibility. She’d just had one with Cara this spring. Even though she was pretty easy to talk to, it still made Cara cringe to think about it. Ugh. Why did they even bother?

  “Scout’s honor,” said Max, nodding.

  Jax had pulled out his phone and was typing away on it. His fingers were small, and he could go incredibly fast, even over the miniscule buttons. Cara could tell he was on the Web; the house had wireless. Then he put it away again.

  “The forecast,” he told them, “is for storms.”

  Five

  “See, the bioluminescence associated with some red tides, or algal blooms,” said Jax to Cara the next morning, while they were out walking Rufus, “is caused by phytoplankton.”

  They’d waved their dad off to catch the boat for Boston; Max had gone with him on the twenty-minute drive to the ferry dock and would bring the car back. Then they’d headed out on their morning dogwalk, toward the general store that was beside the small post office. The store carried donuts sometimes, which were baked fresh at the beginning of the day. Jax had a thing for their bear claws.

  “… basically, a whole bunch of microorganisms thrown together,” said Jax, in lecture mode. “And the phytoplankton that make up these kind of blooms are often dinoflagellates. One species in particular has been noted for its bioluminescence: Lingulodinium polyedrum.”

  Dino-whatever-it-was rang a bell—she’d heard the word recently. Maybe at her mother’s office—Roger talking about her mother’s research. Which meant this obscure—algae?—had cropped up twice in just a couple of days. That seemed like a strange coincidence.

  “So, once we know where to look,” said Jax, “that’s what we’ll be looking for. A kind of light on the waves.”

  “You think that’s really it? The fires beneath the sea?”

  “I do,” said Jax. “You saw it, Cara. You really did.”

  She felt a small surge of satisfaction.

  “You know,” she said slowly, as they waited to cross Route 6, “I didn’t tell you what I heard Dad and Roger talking about when I went into Mom’s office.”

  “What?” said Jax quickly.

  She saw his look and winced. That was why she hadn’t told him—he was ten, and he missed their mother, and maybe, just maybe, their mother was missing because she’d been … what had their dad said?

  Taken.

  But she should have told him before. She had to tell him things, even if he was young—even if, sometimes, he looked into her brain when he wasn’t supposed to.

  “There was a break-in at her office,” she said haltingly. She found she was still pretty reluctant to talk about it. “And Roger, you know, her boss?—he was telling Dad that they stole her work off her computer.”

  “Stole it?” asked Jax.

  “The data, he said? Or dataset, something like that.”

  The light had changed, but Jax was just standing still, holding onto Rufus’s leash, looking up at her.

  “They took her data?” he asked.

  Cara nodded. She felt guilty: she really should have told him, and Max, too.

  There was just something about all of them, at the moment, that had made her not want to say it out loud … life in their house seemed so delicately balanced lately, as though—even before the Pouring Man—things were barely holding together, a kind of imitation of their old life. They kept to the same routine, her dad doing his research, Max working his job at the restaurant and hanging out at the courts or the skatepark, Jax trekking off to daycamp or doing his databases … but through it all they were just going through the motions.

  And waiting.

  They were on hold until real life began again.

  Her mother was real life, she thought.

  Also, if you didn’t let yourself talk about something, it stayed a little unreal. It stayed an arm’s length away. Once it was mentioned, there was a kind of concreteness to it.

  “This was the numbers on ocean pH and shellfish?” prodded Jax.

  “I don’t—it kind of went over my head. They said ‘CO2’ a lot, but that’s all I know.”

  “Dad was talking to me about that project on the drive home that day,” said Jax, nodding as he made the connection. “But he didn’t say anything about information theft or hackers….”

  “Let’s go,” said Cara, because the light was blinking DON’T WALK already.

  “I’m tired of being treated like an infant,” said Jax suddenly, more loudly than usual. “I don’t deserve it. Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t you?”

  She looked at him, then at the DON’T WALK sign again. Jax wasn’t budging.

  The sign froze, and cars started speeding by them again.

  “I guess—”

  “What? You have to tell me everything. We’re in this together!”

  “Then you have to promise not to ping me again without asking. Ever,” she said, with a loudness that matched his own. “Or else I can’t trust you, either!”

  They looked at each other.

  “OK,” said Jax, more quietly. “I promise if you do. I’ll always ask before I read you.”

  “And I’ll tell you what I know,” she said.

  They stood there for another minute, waiting for the light to change back, and finally crossed, a little awkward, with Rufus loping beside them.

  “She was supposed to go to Washington and tell Congress what her study said,” she added when they reached the opposite sidewalk. “Maybe so they could pass a new law about it or something? And then …” She trailed off. “And then she disappeared, Jaxy.”

  “But ocean acidification is common knowledge,” said Jax. “At least, in the scientific community. I mean, it’s not like she’s cornered the market on marine pH dropping. Lots of people are studying it.”

  There was the general store, with a bakery beside it and the small post office. A few feet behind the row of shops, past a thin screen of trees, the bike path ran almost the whole length of the Outer Cape—along the edge of the strip of forest that gave way to cliffs and dune grass and sand, and then the surging Atlantic.

  She wished she could just ride again, the way she used to—coast along the smooth path, warmed by the sun.… It was what she’d always loved to do, every summer since she first started taking off by herself. She coasted with her hands free, the seashore on her right with its pine and oak-tree woods, creeks with frogs splashing and silver fish flashing through them, marshes with herons, ponds with water lilies. There were the soft-looking deer that ambled through the patchwork shade of the trees, where the old dirt roads wound through the cool forest and came out on the bright cliffs in the sun with their wild roses trembling as the breeze swept over them … on her left side were the distant sounds of a steady river of traffic, the long row of shabby, cozy motels on Route 6. There were the seafood restaurants with their ocean themes, round windows like portholes, and old rusty-orange life preservers hanging in nets on the walls.

  And where there weren’t restaurants there were the friendly neighborhoods where kids played, their wind-worn saltbox houses covered in climbing roses, and behind them, next to the path, the rambling, overgrown green backyards….

  The Cape, they taught in school, was just a big sand bar beneath their feet; it was young, in geological terms, only a few thousand years old, made of the silt left behind b
y glaciers. It would be gone soon, they said, like a pile of dirt in a puddle of rainwater—going, going, gone. …

  But she was here now. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  And she wished so much she could be sure, the way she used to be, that when she decided to go home again both her parents would be there waiting.

  The feeling—which was almost like longing, or like a caught sob that didn’t go away—faded a bit as they went into the general store, stopping to tie up Rufus outside. It was one of their old haunts, being so near their house. She liked its dusty wooden floors, its dimly lit, homey atmosphere. When they were younger, and allowed to walk to the store by themselves for the first time, their dad used to let them pick up the newspaper for him. He would give them a couple of dollars extra to get snacks for themselves, along with the paper for him, two coffees, and a bagel with cream cheese for their mother.

  Jax beat her over to the fresh baked-goods section, where they had muffins and donuts if you got there early enough.

  “No bear claws,” said Jax glumly.

  “Have the raised maple,” she said.

  “Maple,” said Jax and made a face. “Who eats that? It’s so weird. Plus it’s the color of vomit.”

  Max honked the horn at them in a jaunty rhythm as they were walking home, pulling up alongside. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, duh duh. Her dad always sang to that rhythm, some old-time jingle: “Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.”

  “I got it!” Max called out as the passenger window rolled down so that they could hear him.

  They stood there for a second with Rufus on the sidewalk, and then Cara bent down to look through the window.

  “Got what?” she asked.

  “The Whydah! It wasn’t the Whydahlee or Whydah Lee, it was just the Whydah! Get it? The lee side of the Whydah! ”

  “What’s the Whydah?”

  “A pirate ship!”

  Max was exuberant—obviously happy he’d redeemed himself by solving the mystery.

  “A pirate ship?”

  “It’s sunk right off Marconi! It wrecked there in 1717. I saw stuff about it in P-town, where they have that pirate museum. I was dropping Dad off, you know? And we ended up having to park in the lot near the pier, and then he got on the boat, and I was walking back to the car and I saw the pirate flag and went in. It’s right there on the pier. And inside there was this whole thing on how they’ve dug up artifacts from the Whydah, and where it is, and everything!”

  “C’mon, Jax,” said Cara, “let’s just get in.” And she opened the car door for Rufus, who leapt past them.

  As they pulled away from the curb Max was still babbling excitedly.

  “It’s this pirate’s ship that’s, like, less than a mile off the beach. Totally underwater. It’s not that far out at all. I figure I can get Zee to bring out her dad’s powerboat, you know? She’s great with it, she can totally handle the steering. And we can use their scuba gear, or maybe Cory’s. They have it all, the tanks, everything. Even wet suits. I think there’s even a buoy out where the Whydah is, you know? Because this treasure-hunter guy has, like, an exclusive on it, it’s some kind of finders, keepers deal? He found the wreck back in the eighties and ever since then he’s been pulling stuff out of it, artifacts and things. Swords and pistols and jewelry….”

  “A real, actual pirate ship,” said Cara. “I didn’t know there were any of those around.”

  “Hardly any,” said Max. “Just the Whydah, as far as I could find out. On the Cape, anyway. And it’s three centuries old. It’s pronounced like widow, by the way. Or widda, or something. That’s what it means, it’s some old-fashioned spelling. And most of it you can’t see even if you’re diving. Most of it’s under the sand. They use this fancy vacuum to suck up all the pieces of the boat. And the treasure.”

  “We still don’t know when to go, though,” said Jax. “Even if we can be sure where.”

  “Listen, if we really mean it,” said Max, “there’s only one way to do it. We have to patrol. We’ll have to do it in shifts, trade off sleeping. Have someone out there every night, watching for your glow-in-the-dark waterbugs, or whatever they are.”

  “They’re not bugs at all,” said Jax. “They’re dinoflagellates.”

  Cara was thinking that Max’s newfound enthusiasm was almost funny. Just give a guy a pirate ship…

  “I’m thinking we each take a friend, then switch off. Like Cara? You could go with Hayley say from nine to one in the morning, then I could go over with my crew. Jax, though—being only ten and all?—maybe should stay at home.”

  “Unfair,” said Jax. “Age discrimination, apartheid, and segregation.”

  “You heard what dad said,” said Max. “I’m the boss.”

  They were silent for a minute, Jax sulking.

  “Whoever saw them, obviously,” put in Cara, “would call the others right away on the cell. ’Cause we all have to be there for the actual dive. Ultimately. So Jax, all you’ll miss is the boring part. Are you kidding? You’re lucky.”

  They talked about it as they pulled up to the house and got out, walking up the front steps. Max suggested they reveal only part of the story to their friends—tell them they were looking for the luminous algae, but say they had to do it for Jax, who had been assigned a big science project for a gifted-kids think tank in Washington, DC. (It was true that a school for geniuses there wanted him. It was even true that he was working on a project for them—or at least he had been. But their mother had been his advisor on the project, and it was kind of in limbo, since she wasn’t around.)

  Cara wanted to tell Hayley the truth. She felt bad about hiding it from her. She’d been keeping a lot to herself lately. And even if Hayley hadn’t believed her about the driftwood thing … Hayley was her friend, and it felt awkward to keep this a secret. But Max said it was all too much; he said the bizarreness of the story would stress out their friends.

  “I mean, let’s face it,” said Max. “Who would believe the story about the turtle mind meld? It adds this whole other level of weirdness and explaining. Plus, let me be frank, I don’t want to be seen as a freak. Let’s take the path of least resistance. Feel me?”

  He planned to tell Zee and his other friends that the scuba-diving trip was to collect algae for Jax, for him to study it, but that the whole thing had to be secret from Zee’s father. After all, you weren’t really supposed to swim in red tides, and her father probably wouldn’t let them.

  “Plus I still have to figure out how to teach you guys scuba at warp speed,” added Max. “And right now? I don’t have clue one.”

  Cara stopped by Hayley’s house to invite her to sleep over.

  “I’ll go ask,” said Hayley, and left Cara standing in the front hallway looking at her mom’s big shelf of figurines, which she liked to show off whenever she got a new one on ebay. They were called Hummers, or something. They made Cara feel ill. There was a chubby girl with a white goose, a gnome with a basket of mushrooms, a drummer boy with a flag on his shoulder.… Cara thought they were sort of ugly, but they had big, round eyes and pink cheeks, and Hayley’s mom loved whatever she thought was cute.

  Once Cara’s own mother had stood here with her—they had come in to talk about carpooling or something—and Cara had seen her look at the statuettes with kind eyes. She smiled reassuringly at Cara as they waited, then looked at the figurines again, studiously, examining them—not like they were cute but like they were very, very strange. Cara’s mother had a way of looking at tacky stuff sometimes that was kind of deliberate and quizzical—like she was a traveler from afar, born in a different, finer place, where such things did not exist.

  Although apparently she was born in Topeka. Where they probably had plenty of Hummers of their own.

  Actually, come to think of it, Cara wasn’t sure where her mother had been born, though for some reason she had a vague picture of cornfields with windmills slowly, creakily turning, or maybe the black-and-white landscape Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. Her mother
didn’t talk much about her childhood.

  Cara heard Hayley ask her mother if she could stay over at Cara’s house. Her mother seemed to be scrubbing the bathtub, to judge by the back-and-forth scratching that went on and on as Hayley talked, so Hayley must be standing outside the bathroom door.

  Her mother had kind of a carrying voice.

  “I guess so, honey,” said her mother.

  Hayley mumbled something about Cara’s dad not being there to supervise.

  “Well, that family needs a lot of extra support,” said her mother, who sounded like she was trying to be discreet but was actually practically yelling. Cara cringed. “We have to be real supportive of that whole family.”

  Anyway, said Hayley’s mother, they were right down the street, so as long as Hayley called her if anything made her uncomfortable …

  Out on the sidewalk, while Hayley tossed a tennis ball up and down and popped her gum, Cara explained that she had a science project of Jax’s to help with, and would Hayley mind spending a few hours on the beach that night?

  Then they would come back here. Hayley could borrow Max’s bike, since she didn’t have a light on her own.

  Hayley shook her head uncertainly. She didn’t like to keep things from her mom; it was just the two of them.

  “Max is pitching a tent for us,” Cara added. “We’ll trade off shifts. So he’ll be there, too—you know, part of the time.”

  Which she had to admit was sort of devious of her, since she knew Hayley had a big crush on Max.

  But this was about getting their mother back. Desperate measures…

  “Oh,” said Hayley and nodded. “OK, then.”

  They went to a pool that belonged to one of Max’s friends, whose parents were off at work, and practiced with the scuba gear for a couple of hours, mostly in the deep end. It made Cara nervous, but Jax liked dealing with the equipment; he was always a quick study. The tanks were surprisingly heavy, she thought, and you had to trust that other people knew how to fill them off a big machine and then carefully check them—Max, in this case. Who had been diving with Cory for years but still didn’t have his certification.