The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  For a few weeks, our life together seemed perfect and unassailable. But we’d been engaged only briefly when the fault lines began appearing. Coming home from class one day in January, I found Daniel in the kitchen, looking morose and distracted as he scooped the green flesh out of a half dozen avocados.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He waved it away. It’s nothing. But it was hardly nothing—he’d turned down a chance to study in Italy for eight weeks in the Spring. He explained he didn’t want to be away that long, especially since he wouldn’t return until right before the wedding.

  “But it’s Italy,” I told him. “You should go. I can handle the wedding plans. Perri will help.”

  “No, really, it’s a done deal. It’s fine.” He smiled at me, but I felt his disappointment sail across the room and hit me in the face.

  Neither of us spoke the word Italy until several weeks later, when, by a monumental twist of irony, I was one of two graduate students chosen for a ten-week academic program at the prestigious Shark Behavior and Conservation Reserve in Fiji. The program ran from May 18 to July 27 and would cinch my dissertation work. I swept into the house that evening blinded by euphoria, certain I could make him understand.

  He sat on the beaten-up leather sofa we’d bought at a garage sale, his hands dropped between his knees while I did my best to explain and justify. Finally, I knelt in front of him. “We’ll have to postpone the wedding till August. Just for two months, Daniel. That’s not so bad.”

  He gazed at me almost expressionless, then stood and walked to the middle of the room, leaving me there on the floor.

  “I turned down Italy,” he said, his words drenched in hurt and disbelief.

  I went to him. I tried to twine my arms around his waist, but he pulled away.

  “I would have loved an opportunity like Italy, and I turned it down because . . .”

  “Because what, Daniel? Are you saying you turned down Italy because of me?”

  “Not because of you. Because of us.”

  “I was the one who told you to go,” I said.

  His face flared with anger. “For Chrissake, Maeve, you want to postpone our wedding so you can take off to Fiji for ten weeks! I put our relationship first. I put our wedding first. Would it be so hard for you to do that?”

  “You act like I’m going off on vacation. It’s for my dissertation. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  “Right.”

  He stormed toward the front door.

  “I don’t want to hold you back, Daniel,” I called after him. “Please don’t do it to me.”

  Daniel came around, and we postponed the wedding until August, but after that night, a strange crevice opened between us, a vague distance that welled up when all the busyness and demands fell away and it was just us. The week before I left for Fiji, he began spending longer hours at school. I told myself he was protecting himself from the pain of me leaving. I know how injured he must have felt. How he believed he wasn’t as important to me as the sharks in Fiji or my dissertation. Perhaps he felt I was leaving, the way his father had. Abandoning him. But my leaving could never pardon what he did while I was away.

  I returned from that pivotal trip at the end of July, ten days before Daniel and I were to be married. He swooped me into his arms at the airport and held me for so long, I’d finally laughed and said, “Missed me, huh?” He let me go with a wan smile. On the ride home, he seemed oddly quiet.

  He made coffee while I walked around the kitchen, noticing how he’d rearranged the countertops. I was woozy with jet lag, woozy with happiness at the sight of him. We took our mugs to the little sunporch, where I plopped onto his lap.

  “God, I’ve missed you,” I said.

  He’d tapped my leg, signaling me to get up. I slid to my feet and watched him set down his coffee, pace a few feet away, and stand in the arched doorway, his face still and grave. I felt my stomach tip over.

  He said, “While you were gone . . . While you were gone, I made a mistake.”

  Bounced rent checks came to mind. A forgotten deposit to the florist. Perhaps he was going to Italy after all and we would postpone the wedding till December.

  “What kind of mistake?” I asked. He looked away, toward the window, at the thick, graying clouds. “Daniel, what is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t easy to say to you.” His eyes suddenly grew shiny, filling with tears. “I’m going to be a father.”

  I stood there motionless and confused.

  “She’s in culinary school,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. Any of it. I just found out two days ago.”

  Daniel, a father. With another woman.

  For a long, shocked moment, I didn’t feel anything, and then a crushing sensation like I couldn’t breathe. He stepped toward me, but I held up my hand. Don’t.

  “I’m sorry. God, Maeve, I’m so sorry.”

  I dragged myself to a chair and sat. He was talking, begging me to forgive him, but I could barely hear what he was saying.

  I didn’t feel anger—that would come later—only a gut-wrenching anguish, the bottom dropping out of everything. I tried to right myself by asking calm, rational questions.

  “Are you sure about the baby?” I said. “I mean that it’s yours?”

  He nodded. “It’s mine.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “It matters to me.”

  “Holly.”

  Holly.

  “How many times?” I asked.

  “Maeve . . .”

  “How many times?” I repeated. “Were you with her the whole time I was gone?”

  “No,” he said, coming toward me again.

  I picked up his mug of coffee and threw it across the room. The ceramic shattered and the smell of coffee rose up, enveloping us. “Just long enough to get her pregnant,” I said. “Well done.”

  I walked to the front door, where my bags still sat packed. I picked up my car keys from the wooden bowl on the side table and dropped my engagement ring into it.

  Cheating is so mundane until it happens to you. Then it’s the first time such deceit has ever happened.

  The same week he broke the news to me, I sent a card to every invited guest, regretfully informing them that there would be no wedding. I retrieved the deposit for the small band we’d reserved for the reception, a calypso trio; let go of the block of rooms at the hotel Perri had set aside for out-of-town guests; informed the minister; and terminated the gift registry. Then I went underwater in more ways than one.

  Daniel escaped to northern Italy, and despite the fact that he was alive and well, practicing techniques for grilling plums and asparagus, sampling Parmesan polentas, and curing meats, I experienced his loss like an actual death. One day he existed. The next day he did not.

  Not only did I let him go, I let go of everything we’d planned. We would not get married at the hotel under a chickee hut on the beach. We would not have a child who might inherit the flat bridge of his nose. We would not housetrain a puppy, or talk about my work with sharks or his work with risotto.

  I threw myself into finishing my dissertation and found a job at the Conservancy that put me in the water with sharks, and the sharks saved my life. I was too busy during the day to grieve; it was nights that were a torment. I imagined a time in the future in which Daniel would be assembling a crib or viewing an ultrasound image. He would be reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, saying things like, “Has the baby kicked yet? It happens around five months, doesn’t it?” The worst agony, though, was not Daniel raising a child with another woman, it was realizing I couldn’t trust the person I’d known and loved since childhood.

  Although it sounded good and noble when Keats said it, maybe I could die for love; it might truly be the
death of me.

  It took two solid years, but in the interest of saving a life—mine—I moved on the best I could. There are places in the sea deeper than Everest is high, places that light cannot reach. That is where I placed Daniel.

  After Simon docked the boat and Nicholas and I unloaded scuba gear, coolers, and cameras into the equipment shed at the dive station, we stood side by side at the large outdoor sink, sloshing our masks with fresh water, presumably for the next batch of scientists who would no doubt be struck with our same clownish smiles at the sight of one magnificent creature or another, a spiny lobster, a sea horse with its tail spiraled around a thin blade of feather grass.

  We hung our wet suits to dry. I pulled a pair of shorts over my suit and wriggled my feet into flip-flops. Nicholas went barefoot, always barefoot—I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him wear shoes. He picked up a large white bucket stuffed with a muddy cast net that he and Simon had tossed around in the shallows near the mangroves. A pump in the desalinator shed kicked on with a low hum, as he spread the net across the concrete, clattering the lead weights around the edges. “We must leave no footprint. Or dirty cast nets,” he said, turning the hose on it.

  I stood beside him watching the mud wash away. When the net was clean, Nicholas nudged me with his hip.

  “You looked a little depressed back there on the boat,” he said. “Come on, cheer up, it’s your birthday.”

  “I’m fine. I’m going to miss Sylvia. All of them, actually. That’s all.”

  “So, on to Africa?” he asked. His nose was pink with sun, and his short dark hair glistened with sand and the first traces of silver. Above his right knee, his skin was still inflamed from a jellyfish sting a few days earlier.

  “Mozambique by way of Palermo,” I told him. “First, I’ll go back to the Conservancy and try to compile all the data I’ve collected here into something publishable. What about you?” I asked. “I guess you’ll be glad to see your ray buddies?”

  Nicholas laughed. “Yeah. I plan on teaching them some new tricks. Sit. Stay. Roll over.”

  A rainbow spectrum appeared in the mix of sun and spray, then evaporated abruptly as he cut off the water and knelt down to peer closer at the net. “Look at that. A juvenile stone crab. Still alive.”

  I stooped beside him. “Where?”

  “There,” Nicholas said, and pointed.

  “Oh my God, it’s . . .”

  “Impossibly small.” It was no bigger than a plum pit, its minuscule pincers locked onto the nylon threads.

  “And purple,” I added.

  He pulled on a gray T-shirt. “Let’s take him to the beach and let him go.”

  He gently gathered up the net and lowered it back into the bucket. We slung our bags over our shoulders like we’d done every week for the last six months and headed down the path toward the beach, bypassing the living quarters and the lab, Nicholas toting the bucket with the tiny stone crab inside. The solar lamps had already popped on along the path, glowing yellow around our ankles as fiddler crabs and tiny geckos darted in front of us.

  Out on the beach the sky had that faded, stonewashed look, the sun hovering just on the horizon, engorged, ready to spill its colors. Nicholas fished up the net from the bucket and spread it over the sand. Poring over it on our hands and knees, we searched for the infinitesimal crab, our fingers passing over the net like we’d discovered a washed-up harp.

  After a few minutes, I spotted its royal purple carapace dotted with white flecks. “There you are.”

  Nicholas tenderly pried it free and held it up between his index finger and thumb.

  “The little prince,” he said, and that made me smile. His eyes were a funny hybrid of light brown and deep green. Under his jaw, a streak of mud I hadn’t noticed back at the sink smudged the side of his neck. His hair had been blown straight up by the wind.

  For the entirety of my six-month term, we’d kept it professional. Friendly, maybe a little flirtatious. But definitely professional. Nicholas was my dive partner—there were rules of conduct here between scientists, and I hadn’t allowed myself to consider anything more. He was separated from his wife and soon to be divorced. They’d been married four years and separated for one. No kids. He’d divulged all this one day while we were cutting bait, not long after we’d begun working together. I can’t remember now how the conversation turned personal, only that he’d brought it up. I had the feeling he wanted me to know. There’d been just one moment after I’d first arrived—New Year’s Eve, in a fog of champagne—when we’d almost broken the rule.

  “You better let the little guy go before he freaks out and autotomizes a claw,” I said.

  “That happened to me in Curaçao,” he said. “I picked up a hermit crab on the beach and it self-amputated a claw right in my hand. So badass.”

  He stepped into the water, then turned around. “You want to do the honors?”

  “It’s all yours.”

  As he released the crab into the waves, I thought of Daniel, and it angered me that I’d let him insinuate himself into the moment. This moment. For a while after our breakup, Robin was so furious at him I thought he might get on a plane, go to Italy, and beat the shit out of Daniel. Eventually they’d mended their relationship, but Daniel and I, we hadn’t spoken since the day I broke the engagement. Now and then Robin and Perri had passed on bits of news. The mother of his child lived somewhere in Florida. Daniel visited regularly, but the prevailing opinion was that Daniel never pursued a romantic relationship with her. He was head chef of a restaurant in Miami that I wished I didn’t know the name of. I knew too much. Before I’d left for Bimini, I’d asked Robin and Perri to stop with the updates. Keeping him out of my head was another matter.

  After several seconds of watching the spot where the crab had disappeared, Nicholas walked out of the water and straight up to me. Without saying anything, he studied my face the way I’d studied the crab.

  I looked away toward the wild peach stains the sun had left in the sky. “We missed the sun go down.”

  “Let’s sit,” Nicholas said, and we settled onto the sand where the tide stopped just short of our feet, depositing miniature flotillas of foam.

  “You remember when we met?” he asked.

  “It was in the hallway of the dorm, the day I got here. You said, ‘You’re the shark person,’ and then you eyeballed my scar and used it as a quasi scale to estimate the force of the shark’s bite.”

  “Right. I calculated the shark that bit you did so very, very hard.”

  I laughed.

  He went on. “I went to my room after that and thought: she was literally bitten by the object of her obsession. That made you the single most fascinating person I’d ever met.”

  “Or the craziest,” I said.

  “Plus you live in a hotel—who lives in a hotel?”

  “Who doesn’t live in a hotel with a book-obsessed grandmother and a ne’er-do-well twin brother?”

  “So, do you two share that psychic twin connection? Is he into sharks, too?”

  “Hardly. Robin manages the hotel, but he’s been working on a novel for a while,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? That doesn’t sound like a ne’er-do-well.”

  “It’s just, for years Robin couldn’t exactly keep a job. He had his share of trouble, and I made a habit of rescuing him. Maybe that is a psychic twin thing.”

  When his car was impounded, I paid the parking tickets. When he partied too much and was in danger of failing a class, I wrote his papers. Whenever he woke up hung over on a fraternity sofa, I drove him home and put him to bed.

  “I’m simpatico with sharks,” I told Nicholas. “Not always so simpatico with my twin.” For a second, I felt I was being too hard on Robin. “I’ve made it sound like he’s a bad guy,” I added, “but he’s not. He’s done a good job managing the hotel. The last few years he’s really settled
down; he gave up being the life of the party, but he’s still the most magnetic guy in the room. I admit, he can be self-centered, but he’s my brother and I love him.”

  I looked at Nicholas, self-conscious that I’d divulged all those family details. “So after all that, am I still the single most fascinating person you’ve ever met?”

  “I’m definitely rethinking my earlier statement,” he teased.

  “That day we met I asked you what your field was—remember?—and you said you were a ray person, but you never told me why.”

  “Here it is, short and sweet. My mother took me to the aquarium when I was a kid—maybe eight. It had a touch tank full of stingrays and they were looping around and around. I put my hand in the water, a bit nervous—I didn’t know if they would sting, but then I touched one. Its skin was like velvet. Nothing like I thought it would be.”

  I liked listening to him, liked watching him as he told his story, the way he stared straight ahead as if he were talking to the water. “There was this one ray that repeatedly broke ranks to flutter under my hand. It was like a cocker spaniel wanting to be scratched. It was seeking me out on purpose, and I knew there was more to these animals than I could imagine. That was it. I was a goner for rays.”

  “Sounds like a true religious experience.”

  “It was, sort of. My father was religious. He used to take my brother and me to church—the good ole Church of England. I didn’t mind; I liked it well enough. Then, one Sunday the rector gets up and reads some Scripture about man having dominion over the fish of the sea and every living thing on the earth, and I thought uh-oh, here’s where it went wrong. Not to second-guess God or anything, but the next thing you know the ocean is full of junk, we’ve got trawling, gillnetting, oil spills, whole species disappearing, and half the coral reefs are gone.”

  The whirring of waves rose, fell, rose again. Imperceptibly, the sky had darkened, and turning, I glimpsed a faint wedge of moon rising behind us. I reached over and touched the place beneath his jaw where the mud had splattered and dried, then dragged my thumb down his neck.