Robin and I spent hours sitting side by side on Dr. Marion’s green sofa, Robin in silence, refusing to draw the pictures that were supposed to help us express our feelings. The more he withdrew, the more I talked of alligators circling our parents’ plane, of their caskets closed tight. And the more elaborate my drawings became. Sometimes it seemed everything that would go wrong with Robin began with those drawings. One in particular roiled up from a dark corner inside of me. While Robin watched, I had pulled crayons from the jumbo box and begun by creating the same horror scene as usual—a tangle of green jungle, black sky, brown water streaked with red, a gray airplane half immersed, and beneath the water, two broken stick figures.
“You sure you don’t want to draw, too?” Dr. Marion asked Robin, holding out a blue crayon. “It can be anything you want. How about your room? What does that look like?”
Robin glared at him, arms folded over his six-year-old chest, then took the crayon. He might have actually drawn something that day—the stuffed frog on his bed, the Empire Strikes Back poster on the wall, the baseball cards on the bulletin board—but he was distracted by the surprising addition of a third tiny stick figure I was drawing beside the other two.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
I scribbled a mess of red on the little body.
“Who is it?” Robin said, and I heard the frantic tone, but still, I didn’t answer him.
“Do you want to tell us?” Dr. Marion asked me. “You don’t have to, but your brother . . . he’s interested.”
“It’s me,” I said, the picture starting to distort through my tears. “I don’t want to be here if they’re not here.”
“You want to die, too?” Robin’s voice sounded small and faraway, and then he began to cry, terrible gulping sobs, the first tears he’d shed since our parents’ deaths. His whole body shook, and seeing what I’d caused, I began to sob with him. I knew even then, I didn’t mean what I’d said. I didn’t really wish I’d been in the plane, but wishing it seemed the only way to convey the power of my distress, to communicate how much I missed Mom and Dad.
Dr. Marion told us it was okay to cry, but that seemed to backfire on him as the tears and wails went on and on. In the end he summoned Perri from the waiting room. She squeezed between us on the sofa, gathering us against her. When the outburst was finally over, Dr. Marion tried to help Robin understand what I’d meant, but I don’t think Robin ever understood. My confession landed on him like a betrayal, like a brutal rejection. After that we saw Dr. Marion separately. I never knew what happened in Robin’s sessions. Revealing my awful wish that day was the beginning of mending myself. My grief morphed from excruciating sadness into a kind of resignation, and finally into peace. Perri became my greatest solace and closest confidante. But the plummeting planes in Robin’s nightmares continued, though our parents were no longer in them; now, it was only me. He would bolt awake shrieking my name, once so loudly a hotel guest called the front desk. Terrified by his screams, I would crawl into bed with him and grip his hand beneath the covers. “I thought you were dead, too,” he would whimper.
The following year his night terrors ceased, giving way to all sorts of misbehavior and acting out—biting and shoving classmates at our new elementary school, mouthing off to the teacher, and once lashing out at Perri when she ordered him to clean his room, yelling, “Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my mother.”
In time, he returned to something resembling normalcy. He, Daniel, and I formed our alliance, hanging out on the beach and roaming the hotel. I have a memory of Robin doing his Rocky Balboa impression for hotel guests, one of his many budding charismas, but his grief never seemed to heal, not really, and he never became comfortable talking about Mom and Dad, as if his mind just couldn’t go there.
Troublemaking would be his go-to method of expressing his grief, and I believe writing must have been an outlet for it, too. He did both, on and off, with great aptitude.
I’d never stopped feeling bad about that drawing, never stopped feeling responsible.
Perri liked to say that some kids just had swing sets in their backyards, but we had the Gulf of Mexico. The island and every living thing swimming in the Gulf became my Eden. And Daniel, he became my Eden, too.
Daniel’s mother, Van, worked at the hotel reception desk when she wasn’t teaching ballet. Daniel was always at loose ends in the hotel, lugging his skateboard around, occasionally rolling across the marble floors in the lobby. Almost a full year older than Robin and I, Daniel was the first friend we made on Palermo. It didn’t take long for the three of us to become inseparable. His father had been the high school baseball coach on the island, and from all appearances, a reasonably good father. Until he left one day, simply disappearing from Daniel’s life, a cataclysm that he rarely talked about. Robin, Daniel, and I shared fatherlessness—whether from abandonment or death—like some tragic glue that cemented us in ways none of us really understood. Constantly mistaken for our older sibling, he had a mess of dark hair like us that the sun leached to golden brown. Robin liked being confused for Daniel’s brother, but I never wanted to be Daniel’s sister.
The shark attacked on July 30, 1988, early in the morning, when the air was hazed with mist and the beach deserted. Daniel and I had wandered to the water’s edge to investigate a washed-up horseshoe crab, when I spotted a brown-and-white-striped osprey feather nearly a foot long floating on the waves ten or so yards out. Maybe I wanted to impress Daniel with how audacious and unfettered I could be; maybe I just wanted that magnificent feather; but I waded out in my shorts and T-shirt until the water lapped a cold circle around my waist.
“What are you doing?” said Daniel, gaping at me from the shoreline.
“Are you worried about getting a little water on your shorts?” I teased, plucking the feather off the surface and using it to wave him in.
Grinning, he treaded out to where I stood, lifting his arms and bare shoulders to stave off the chill. He swiped the feather from my hand and stuck it in the band of my ponytail. “There,” he said.
I reached back, feeling for it, aware of how close he stood to me, his shoulders peppered with freckles, his skin caramelized brown, his eyes the color of a blue tang fish. Leaning up, I kissed him, jolted at how he kissed me back, at the salt air on his lips. For a moment I felt dizzy, like the world I’d wakened in had fallen away, and I had become someone else. It thrilled me and it scared me.
“I think I’ll love you forever,” I said.
Daniel glanced back toward the beach, where Robin and Perri were beginning to set up lounge chairs beneath the chickee huts that studded the sand in front of the hotel. “Me, too,” he said.
Suddenly, he pitched forward in the water like he’d been struck behind the knees. “What was that?” he said. I thought he was trying to scare me, but whatever had bumped into Daniel then collided into me. I lost my balance and dropped beneath the water as an unfathomable force attached to my leg. I held my breath and flapped my arms, trying to fly right out of the water like the diving seabirds I often watched splash up into the air. I could see it very clearly, the top of the shark’s gray head, its teeth clamped into my leg, the fin’s black tip, the tail ruddering back and forth.
It was noisy under the water, sounds and vibrations whipping off both our bodies. Blood coursed from my leg like a can of teargas going off. Nothing at all went through my head, only a primal, ferocious instinct to live.
Stretching my neck toward the surface, I glimpsed one of the shark’s eyes—a small, black, unblinking night. I felt certain the shark regretted sinking its teeth into me, or did that thought come later? Its eye disappeared under a lid that closed from the bottom up, and then as suddenly as the commotion had begun, it all ceased.
The shark let go of my leg and swam off. I had no idea why. Now I know it was exhibiting classic hit-and-run behavior: a bump, a single bite, and then a retreat when it realizes
its prey is not food, but a case of mistaken identity.
The bite had been oddly painless at first, but then a searing sensation ripped through my leg. I wanted air. I needed air. Breaking the surface, I gasped and tried to stand, but my right leg was useless. I floated on my back using my left foot to push against the ocean floor.
Panting frantically, I couldn’t raise a single sound from my throat. Water sealed my ears. I thought I heard someone yell, “Maeve! Maeve!” Daniel grabbed me under my arms and began pulling me to shore, running backward.
“A shark bit me and swam away,” I said as calmly as if I’d suffered a jellyfish sting.
Daniel shouted for Perri, his voice hoarse with terror. Water rushed into my nostrils, filling them with salt sting, causing me to choke, but the pain in my leg had dwindled to a strange burning sensation from my hip to my toes.
Daniel laid me on the sand. I gazed at him bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, his eyes filmed with water. “A shark bit me and swam away,” I said again.
Struggling onto my elbows, I stared at my leg. The back of my calf was ripped open, ragged and bloody like a science class dissection gone horribly wrong. I flopped back onto the beach as Perri reached us, morphing into one of those women you hear about who become superhero strong and unflinchingly clearheaded in times of crisis, lifting cars off children and barking orders like General Patton. “Robin, run to the hotel. Call 911. Daniel, get towels!”
A little border of darkness began to close in around everything. I shut my eyes to make it go away. Perri pushed a web of hair off my face. “Maeve, honey, open your eyes.”
I concentrated on a V of pelicans that glided across the high blue dome of sky overhead, their wings unmoving, all of them ready to turn at once if their leader changed course.
Daniel dropped a stack of towels in the sand, and Perri twisted one and tied it tightly around my thigh. Her bobbed hair was swinging across her face in a white blur. “We’ve got to stop this bleeding,” she said, her voice starting to take on more urgency.
As Perri applied pressure against the wound, the dull burn in my leg erupted again into a blaze of exquisite pain. I rolled my head to the side as a terrible keening sound filled my throat. I began to flail.
Robin dropped beside me, his face blanched and terrified. He put his mouth by my ear. “You’re okay.” He went on repeating it. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”
Perri hovered over me, blocking out the sun. She shouted at the crowd that was beginning to gather, “Somebody give me a belt!” She lashed it above my knee. “You’re going to be all right,” she said. “Take a deep breath. Come on.” She nodded at me and I sucked the air like I was drowning. “There you go. Slow down. That’s good.”
Perri placed her hand on my chest, and something inside of me unclenched. I felt safe.
“Let’s get her warm,” she said, and instantly a coral-colored canopy snapped open above me and the hotel emblem, an oyster shell with a small pearlish-looking book inside stitched in navy, fluttered down.
Searching for Daniel, I pressed my cheek against the sand and saw him a few feet away. “The shark pulled her under,” he was saying to Perri. “I tried to get to her. It was all so fast. I—I couldn’t get to her.”
“How long was she under the water?” Perri asked.
“I don’t know. Five seconds? Ten?”
It had felt so much longer.
Much later, Daniel and I would talk about what that day was like for him, how the Gulf had never felt as deep or endless as when I vanished beneath it, how he’d looked underwater for me, afraid of what he might see in the water muddled with a storm of blood and upturned sand.
In the seconds before I lost consciousness, he turned and looked at me, and I saw he was holding the osprey feather that had come loose from my hair.
I think Perri feared I’d become infatuated with my attacker, the blacktip, but Dr. Marion assured her that while what I was experiencing was unusual, it was harmless. I sat beside her in his office one day, staring into my lap, looking up to see her gazing at me sympathetically. She decided right then to no longer worry about the jars of saltwater I hoarded under my bed, the medicine cups I filled with shark teeth, the pictures of shark eyes I drew and tacked to the wall. That same evening, I overheard her explaining to Robin that the doctor wasn’t worried about me and he shouldn’t be either. He tried, eventually venturing into the Gulf with me, but he kept inventing reasons we should cut it short. He never lost his dread that something in the water would take away what was left of his family.
Perri would continue to send me to Dr. Marion. At twelve, I had a million hashed and unhashed thoughts. Flashbacks about my parents’ crashed plane. Ambivalence about Robin and me living in a hotel, which really was like the Swiss Family Robinson, and which my friends thought strange, how I wished sometimes for a normal house. I confided that I hated the scar that jagged across my calf, but I forgave the shark, who was just being a shark. I told him about Daniel, who saved me. Daniel, whom I loved.
I was fourteen when I visited Dr. Marion for the last time. We were having one of those August tropical storms that blows up quickly around Palermo. Rain was slashing sideways against the windows of his office with flashes of lightning in the distance. When I jumped at a sudden clap of thunder, he asked if I was afraid of storms.
“No, not storms,” I said.
He laid his pen down on his tablet. “What then?” he asked.
“Everyone already thinks I’m crazy. I don’t want you to think I’m crazy, too.”
“I won’t think you’re crazy, Maeve. I’ve never thought you were crazy.”
Moments passed while I stayed silent, terrified of saying it. The words were burning a hole in my throat, and for the first time I felt like keeping them in would feel worse than letting them out. “Well,” I said. “I—I want to know everything about sharks. I want to study them when I grow up, to really understand them. Know what they’re like. I check out books all the time about Jacques Cousteau and being a marine biologist. That’s what I want, but I’m afraid my grandmother will tell me I can’t. I’m scared it would come between me and Robin. That Daniel and my friends will think . . . you know, that I’m weird or something.”
I stopped, feeling like I might cry. I sat there listening to the rain, waiting for Dr. Marion to say something, but he waited, too.
“I’m not stupid,” I told him. “I know what the shark could’ve done to me that day, but it didn’t. It let me go. It could’ve ripped me to shreds, but it let me go. This year I got to be in a play at school, and my class went to the Edison Museum, and I read Anne Frank’s diary—all things I loved. But I’ve never felt about anything the way I feel about sharks.”
“And how do you feel about sharks?”
My longing to answer this question, to say it out loud, was so intense that a flood of feelings hit me at once and the tears I’d been holding inside let loose.
“I know it’s weird,” I said, shoving them off my cheeks. “But happy. When I think about sharks, I feel happy.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Jacques Cousteau seems like a happy guy. I bet Eugenie Clark is happy. Have you heard of Eugenie Clark up in Sarasota?”
I shook my head.
“They call her the Shark Lady because of her research with sharks. She trained them. Got them to ring bells. Can you believe that? And then there’s Sylvia Earle—she’s from Florida, too. Ever heard of her?”
“No.”
“She just happens to be the only person ever to walk solo on the ocean floor. A quarter mile down. She’s known as Her Deepness. You should look them up.”
“I will,” I said, and it felt like something in my chest was opening. A clamshell.
“I don’t know much more about oceanographers than that, but I do know this. Whatever makes you feel alive, you ought to pay attention
to it. If it makes you happy, it’s worth following.”
Three
Nicholas and I surfaced simultaneously. The sun was lower than I’d expected and the wind had picked up. Our nineteen-foot Twin Vee teetered on the seesawing waves, small swells slapping the sides. As we swam through the ruffling chop, I could hear a Midnight Oil song drifting from the radio on board. We climbed in, stripped off our equipment, and shared a spontaneous, celebratory embrace, wet suit to wet suit.
Simon, the local captain who’d been piloting our boat for the last six months, managed a smile from beneath his oversized straw hat, its cord drawn snug under his chin. “Your lemons showed up, did they?”
“Sylvia, Captain, and Jacques,” I told him.
He nodded and cranked the engine, swinging the boat toward the dock at the research lab. Nicholas and I stood in the stern, struggling to peel down to our bathing suits without losing our balance as Simon picked up speed, the noise of the motor drowning out everything else.
Wrapping a towel around my black one-piece, I sat on a cooler and squeezed the water from my hair, then shook it out around my shoulders. As I watched the expanse of ocean open up behind us, I was hit with a small surge of sadness. I despised endings.
I glanced up. Nicholas was watching me.
“Happy birthday,” he mouthed.
“Thanks,” I mouthed back. I expected him to look away, but he didn’t. It was only when Simon asked him to take the wheel that he turned his attention elsewhere.
The sadness of my life was losing Daniel. The memories had a belligerent quality, retreating for long lapses only to return, as if from a nice, replenishing rest. He’d proposed to me on the dock behind his childhood home in Palermo on Christmas night, 1998. “Let It Snow” floated out from a neighbor’s lanai, a totally incongruous tune in the 68-degree weather. I said yes. Of course, I said yes. Back in Miami, where I was a grad student at the university and Daniel was in culinary school, we rented a stucco house painted an appalling shade of aqua and began planning a beachside wedding at Perri’s hotel. We set the date—June 5, 1999.
The Shark Club Page 2
