The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  An S-hook crease furrowed around his left brow. “Sarasota is only two hours from Palermo,” he said.

  “Are you saying you’re going to miss me?”

  He kissed me then. He smelled like saltwater and sunblock. Like fish and mud and stone crabs.

  He said, “I’ve wanted to do that since . . .”

  “Since I got here?”

  “Well, for sure since the second week.”

  “You could come to Mozambique,” I told him, and then feeling the gravity and implication of what I’d said to a man who was separated and not yet divorced, added, “The Indian Ocean is prime territory for mantas. Anyway, you might think about it.”

  “I don’t need to think about it,” he said.

  Four

  Arctic-like air broke across my face, carrying the familiar scents of the hotel. Stargazer lilies, coffee beans, pineapple, coconut-scented sunscreen. Light poured through the bank of windows along the back of the lobby, showing off the bright curve of a pool, and beyond that a prairie of sand and infinite green Gulf.

  Pulling my suitcase behind me, I stopped in the middle of the lobby before a four-foot twisting glass sculpture that sat on a pedestal, glowing blue from the lapis ceiling tiles. It was new, Chihuly-like, something Perri had added while I was away. It looked like radioactive seaweed.

  I smiled. I couldn’t leave for a minute without some new spectacle appearing in the Hotel of the Muses. A couple of years ago, I’d returned from a term in Australia to find she’d redone the section of the lobby known as the Library with love seats arranged around ottomans the size of tidal pools and loaded them with tangerine and steely blue pillows. At the moment, the sofas were unoccupied, but a few guests perused the bookshelves that encompassed the wall behind them. Two women in swim sarongs had paused to read a sign propped on a brass easel.

  ~June 13~

  Happy Birthday, William Butler Yeats

  Join us in the Library at 7:00 P.M. for

  An Evening with Yeats.

  Complimentary cake, wine & poetry.

  The author birthday parties had started when I was a kid. Perri had gotten a whim to celebrate Virginia Woolf the whole month of her birth. Poaching the menu display case from Botticelli’s, the hotel restaurant, she’d showcased Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own, and roped a local actress into doing a dramatic reading from each, dressed in period costume. A tradition was born, and over the years, book clubs poured into the hotel to celebrate their favorite authors.

  I looked around for Perri, and spotted Robin behind the reception desk, busy with a guest. As I strode toward him, he caught sight of me and handed off the guest to one of the staff, who, I noticed, was now dressed in a shirt the same tangerine color as the pillows. Another innovation in my absence. I hadn’t seen Robin since Christmas, and we’d not kept up with each other very well while I was in Bimini. As he swung around the desk, I wished I’d been better about e-mailing him.

  “Well, if it isn’t Dr. Donnelly, returned from the sea.” He pulled me into his arms, and I squeezed him, then leaned back to look at his face. His dark hair was longer, curling on his neck, the front pushed to the side like he’d worn it in college. He was starting to resemble Dad more—the sideburns, his chin, the light brown eyes. At thirty, Robin and I had almost lived longer than Dad, who’d been thirty-two when the accident happened. The thought was surrounded by a tiny corona of ache, and I reached for Robin again, holding on a moment longer.

  “You shaved your beard,” I said.

  “It wasn’t much of a beard to start with.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his cheek. “Besides, it was hot.”

  “I like being able to see your face.”

  “All you have to do is look in the mirror,” he said. It was true. Our features were nearly identical, except perhaps for my skin, which, unlike his, was pale like Mom’s. It didn’t seem fair that Robin, who hardly ever ventured in the sun, bronzed like some Greek god while I, who practically lived beneath the sun, pinked and freckled.

  “Thirty suits you,” I told him.

  “You, too.”

  We wandered over to one of the love seats, and I drew my feet up under me, dismantling the assembly of pillows.

  “Yeats, huh?” I said to Robin.

  “Yep. I just hope we don’t have a repeat of April. The Shakespeare crowd can put away some wine.” He broke into his famous smile. No one could resist Robin when he flashed that smile. He said, “No new scars from Bimini, I hope.”

  “I’m unscathed,” I said, holding out my arms as proof. “Where’s Perri?”

  “You haven’t seen her?”

  “Not yet, just walked in the door.”

  “Your coming home is all she’s talked about.”

  “What’d you do on our birthday?” I asked.

  “Drank too much. What about you?”

  “Swam with sharks. Packed.” I kept the evening with Nicholas to myself. I pointed to the glass sculpture. “Where’d that come from?”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it.”

  He stared at it a moment, his face growing serious, then slid up to the edge of the sofa. “Look, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  I studied him, suddenly worried as he pressed his hands together, then rested his elbows on his knees. “What?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Sorry. I guess when I say it like that it sounds bad. No, it’s good, actually. A publisher accepted my book.”

  I put my hands on top of my head. “Oh my God, Robin, that’s great! When?”

  “This week.”

  I gave his knee a shake, genuinely bowled over. There was never any doubt he’d gotten Dad’s creative genes and talent for writing. In high school Robin had won a partial scholarship from the Naples newspaper after placing first in its yearly short-story contest. Then at college, he’d majored in English, announcing his aspiration to be a novelist—assuming it gave him license to act the part of the hard-drinking, free-spirited writer. To his surprise, the college literary journal, The Lyceum, turned down every short story he submitted. The rejections soured him, but didn’t put a dent in his confidence. He promptly set out to write the Great American Novel. Though he seemed largely motivated by a need to prove The Lyceum wrong, he threw himself into the writing—skipping classes, flunking a couple of courses, and working through the summers. It became an obsession—a book about a boy whose parents died in a plane crash.

  Shortly before graduation, he let his English professor take a look at it. I think he expected a coronation. Instead the professor gave him a long list of the novel’s flaws, pronouncing it not ready for publication, but urging Robin to keep working. Devastated, Robin snatched the manuscript from the professor’s desk and walked out. He got his English degree, though barely, and moved back home to the hotel, where I watched him turn into the Ernest Hemingway of Palermo—not on the page, just the boisterous, fraternizing part: fishing, partying, betting on greyhound races, and generally charming his way across the island. He became that strange commodity—a writer who didn’t write. His aspirations, however, never left him. He made a painful, repetitive ritual of sending his novel out to a publisher and receiving, in turn, a rejection. After sixteen of them, I lost count.

  It was during this time that Robin began bouncing from job to job. A clerk at a scuba shop, an island tour guide, a property manager, a limo driver. He had less problem getting jobs than keeping them. Following a spate of firings and preemptive resignations, I got him a job at the Conservancy writing marketing material for the brochures, only to have him quit a month later. He claimed the work was menial and boring.

  It was Perri’s turn next. She trained him to be the manager of the hotel. Soon after, he began writing again. He’d been at work on his novel for the last three years, goi
ng about it with determination, writing in the evenings, often taking his laptop to Spoonbills Bar and running up a tab. He’d given up on the book at one point, only to return to it a month later, unable to abandon this thing he seemed consumed with but would never discuss. Had he returned to that old college manuscript, finally rewriting it? Whenever I asked about it, he was vague: it was either too early or too difficult to talk about; he needed to incubate the idea in silence; he wanted to contain the energy of it. All he ever revealed was that it was set in a hotel exactly like this one.

  “It’s autobiographical, then?” I’d asked. “A little,” he’d said.

  I’d wondered then if it was about the moderately famous Rachel Gregory. Three years ago, at the height of success with her second novel, she arrived at the hotel for the summer as writer in residence, a new program Perri had added. A celebrated writer stayed free of charge and wrote undistracted, and in exchange she or he offered lectures and book signings. Robin, recently employed at the hotel, was infatuated from the moment he picked her up at the airport.

  The first hint I’d gotten that something unusual was going on between them came the day I got on the hotel elevator and found the two of them standing exceptionally close, arms-touching close, and the air thick with awkwardness.

  Two nights later while reading in bed I heard the unmistakable sound of a woman’s laughter in Robin’s bedroom. Peering into the living room, I glimpsed the red leather tote bag I’d seen Rachel with since she’d arrived.

  I was curious about her. The next time she held a reading in the hotel I sat in the back row. Every chair was taken, not just by hotel guests but by residents of the island. According to the jacket flap on her book, the story explored a family’s resilience through crisis. It also noted that she lived in Vermont with her husband and Saint Bernard.

  Later Robin would call their meeting seismic, and in truth, it did seem like his world opened, and for the first time he fell in love, but I worried that it was one sided. I worried he would get hurt. He seemed unphased that the thirty-eight-year-old author had a husband. The pair became inseparable. They were discreet, setting up shop in the family apartment that Robin and I shared on the hotel’s second floor, reading one another’s work for hours. Occasionally they disappeared for the day, once returning from the Dalí Museum wearing fake Salvador Dalí mustaches from the gift shop and laughing hysterically. Robin believed she would make a clean break from the marriage, but at the end of the summer she went back home.

  I looked at him now sitting beside me, remembering the wreckage she’d left in his life.

  “Wow, my brother, the author. Perri must be ecstatic.”

  Robin, however, looked like someone who’d written his own eulogy. “Why don’t you look happy?” I asked.

  “I’m happy.” He smiled, but there was no life in it this time.

  “You have to let me read it,” I said.

  “I want you to, but I don’t want to tell you anything about it beforehand.”

  “I can’t believe you’re still being secretive about it. You do realize it’s going to be in bookstores, right?”

  He laughed. “I know. I care more about you reading it than anyone, that’s all.”

  “I suppose Perri is already plotting the party. An Evening with Robin Donnelly.”

  “I told her not to plan anything until I talked to you,” he said.

  That should have been my first clue, but I let it pass. “Has she read the manuscript?” I asked.

  “Yes. And Daniel read it, too.”

  The mention of Daniel caught me off guard, and I flinched slightly as a familiar reflex of hurt and longing recoiled through my body.

  Seeing my reaction, Robin said, “We’re friends, Maeve.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’ll get you a copy of the manuscript tonight.”

  “Can’t wait,” I said, trying hard to seem delighted, proud, beaming, but there was something off about the way he was behaving. As I pulled my suitcase to the elevator, I felt a thump of trepidation in the middle of my chest.

  Turning the key, I stepped into our apartment and paused a moment, taking it in. Needing her own quarters, Perri had moved out around the time Robin and I left high school, leaving the entire suite of rooms to us. He took over her spacious bedroom with the sitting area, while I kept my small childhood room with its separate entrance and inherited Robin’s old room, too. That was the deal we made. I turned his room into a workspace, or as Robin called it, the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Room. I’d attached underwater photos to every wall, images of the sharks I’d tagged and surveyed.

  The apartment was neater than I’d expected. Robin had picked up the living room. There wasn’t a single stray dish lying around with food stuck to it. No messy piles of mail, papers, or clothes. Magazines were straightened on the coffee table. In the compact kitchen, dishes had dried in a rack beside the sink. I opened the refrigerator. Brown mustard, soy sauce, American cheese, a variety of microbrews from Ybor City, not much else. Peering into his room, I saw a stack of towels folded and placed on the edge of his bed. I was starting to think Robin had made the extra effort on my behalf when I spied a pair of turquoise flats by the balcony door. So, who was the girl?

  I wandered into my bedroom and was greeted by the oversized blue shark photograph that hung above the rattan headboard. I’d spotted this migratory queen in the deep open waters of the Caribbean Sea at the beginning of her journey, one that would take her as far as Europe. She was still the rarest shark sighting I’d ever had, and probably the most dangerous. I’d snapped the photo quickly, but perfectly, capturing the big black pupil and a knockout mouth parted into an almost-smile. I named her Mona Lisa.

  Everything was just as I’d left it. My terry-cloth robe slung across the bed. On the floor, photographs from Christmas I’d forgotten to pack. A bowl on the bedside table heaped with shells—pear whelks, banded tulips, augers, iridescent jingles—covered in a veil of dust. The osprey feather that lured me into the water the day the shark bit, still stuck in a green bud vase on my dresser, looking lonely and rather pathetic. I should have tossed it out long ago, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. Once, I’d planned to stick it into my bridal bouquet.

  I opened my suitcase on the bed and began making a laundry pile on the floor when a knock sent me leaping over the clothes, expecting to see Perri. Instead, I found Marco. He was wearing his usual fishing guide uniform and short gray beard. He liked to joke that we shared a common wardrobe: pants that zipped off at the knees, UV-protected shirts, and polarized Costa Del Mars.

  He gave me a bear hug and my feet came off the ground. His neck was sticky with sunscreen and his shirt damp with sweat.

  “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” he said.

  “Sore eyes? What, are the fish not biting?”

  “I’ve been trapped on my boat since dawn with a rich, entitled New Englander and his snotty kid.”

  “This is why I work with sharks,” I said. “They’re nicer.”

  I got him a glass of water in the kitchen sink, watching his Adam’s apple slide up and down as he drank. “If I’m not mistaken,” I said, “you were once a rich, entitled New Englander.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “It’s also why I’m an expert at detecting them.”

  At fifty-eight, divorced and unhappy, he’d walked away from a career in investment banking in Boston to become a fishing guide on Palermo.

  Marco and I had never spoken outright about our relationship, but as I had no father or grandfather, I think we both saw him as filling the role, at least partially. He’d taught Robin and me how to tie a double fisherman’s knot, cast a rod, drive a boat, and had turned us into Red Sox fans.

  He sat on a barstool, filling up the little galley kitchen. “Perri has me doing a third sunset cruise,” he said.

  Marco had
been taking guests out on the hotel’s pontoon two evenings a week ever since I could remember. The boat departed from the landing in front of the hotel where Perri kept it docked, the cruises timed to the minute to be in the Gulf when the sky went psychedelic.

  “So you finally caved in.”

  “Yeah, never mind that I have my own charter business—anything for Perri.”

  The two of them had met the summer of my shark bite and become more than just friends. A year later, on Perri’s sixtieth birthday, he proposed. To everyone’s shock, she turned him down. Anyone could see she loved the man, but she insisted she didn’t want to be a wife again. My grandfather had died before Robin and I were born, and eventually Perri had fallen in love with being on her own. She’d bought the hotel. She’d started painting. She’d begun orchestrating birthday bashes for dead authors. Though Marco was bruised at first, he accepted her decision remarkably well and never pressured her. As he told me once, he wanted Perri more than he wanted a wife. Now Perri was seventy-eight, and her relationship with Marco was approaching its eighteenth year.

  He fell silent, toying with his empty water glass. “I— Look, I do have some news. I hate to welcome you home with this, but I thought you should know. In case you haven’t heard.”

  It was the second time in half an hour I’d been told there was something I needed to know. Marco hesitated, sitting down the glass, clearing his throat, then staring a moment through the sliding-glass doors that opened onto the balcony, and I was seized with impatience to have it over with, whatever it was. Homecomings never went off the way you imagined. I thought of Robin letting Daniel read this mysterious book of his. And where was Perri?

  “A guy was caught on Bonnethead Key with close to a hundred shark fins drying in his backyard. The Fish and Wildlife people are saying a shark-finning operation may have moved into the area.”

  I sank onto the stool next to him. An acute feeling of nausea started high in my stomach. I closed my eyes, picturing the graveyard of fins . . . “A hundred? At one time?” I said. “My God.”