The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  Once, at a conference, I’d watched a video about shark finning that had been secretly filmed on a boat off the coast of Costa Rica. One hammerhead after another was caught, had its fins hacked off, and was then tossed overboard, where it drowned and hemorrhaged in a slow, torturous death. The finnings had been more gruesome than anything I was prepared for. Horror-struck, I’d covered my mouth as gasps and groans from the audience filled the dark auditorium. I’d been hit then by the same groundswell of nausea I felt now.

  I wrapped my arms around my middle. “There are a hundred dead sharks on the bottom of the Gulf and those are just ones we know of,” I said more to myself than to Marco, as if repeating it aloud would make it possible to believe. “Some of them are bound to be part of my Conservancy research.” My eyes burned, then beaded with tears.

  Marco gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Goddamned finners,” he said.

  The way he said it, hissing the words, abruptly halted my tears and ignited my anger. “They’re wiping the sharks right out of the ocean—some estimate that eighty million were slaughtered last year. Eighty million, Marco, and for what? Shark fin soup! Jesus Christ! There’s nothing in that soup but a lot of gelatinous goo and it’s thought of as a delicacy.” I paced into the living room, too irate to sit. “And you know the worst of it? Nobody cares!”

  “I know,” he said, trailing behind me. “I know—people see them as monsters.”

  “It makes me crazy! I follow the Shark Attack File like a bible. Do you know how many people were bitten by sharks last year?”

  “Two hundred?” he guessed.

  “Fifty-eight bites and four deaths. Probably all cases of mistaken identity.”

  Marco had seen me rant about shark endangerment before. He stood there, nodding, waiting for me to get it out of my system.

  “Sorry,” I said, and took a deep breath. “So, when did this happen?”

  “Two weeks ago. It was on the local news, but I haven’t seen anything else about it.”

  I was surprised that Russell, my boss at the Conservancy, hadn’t e-mailed me about it.

  Marco said, “You remember Troy Fuller?”

  Of course, I remembered him. Like Marco, he was a fishing guide around the Ten Thousand Islands. From time to time, when I saw him in Spoonbills, I said hello.

  “Troy is over at Bonnethead Key a good bit,” he said. “He knew the guy caught with the fins. According to Troy, this guy was just a small cog in the operation, just a middleman. He hasn’t given up the ringleaders.”

  The sliding doors were open and I could hear the waves, the endless rhythm. I yearned to disappear beneath them. “The man was arrested, right? I mean, he’s in violation of the Lacey Act at the very least.”

  “Yeah, he was arrested,” Marco said. “Out on bail now.”

  He stood. “I hate to run, but I’ve got a customer and the tide is right for going out. If I hear anything more from Troy about the finnings I’ll let you know,” he said.

  He pecked my cheek. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “I won’t.”

  I closed the door behind him. The apartment filled with silence, the kind that almost hurt my ears. Retuning to my bedroom, I mechanically picked up the laundry, then dropped it back onto the floor. What was my work for? What difference did it make? Eighty million dead sharks. I would never be able to save them. What I was doing was a drop in the bucket.

  I sat on the side of the bed overcome with sadness, unable to look at the photo over the headboard. The black shark eye that had seen more of the earth’s depths than I could ever hope to see. The Mona Lisa smile.

  Five

  I wandered past the pool, through the coral umbrellas at the Courtyard Café, then took the steps down onto the beach in front of the hotel, hoping to take a swim before Perri turned up. The south end was breezy, blowing my hair into Medusa-like strands. Even the flock of seagulls resting near the shoreline fell victim to the wind, their white feathers ruffling up into Mohawks. Except for a few tourists who were shelling or fishing off the rock jetty, most of the beachgoers reclined with their books beneath the hotel’s chickee huts, shielded from the fierce afternoon sun. The pontoon rocked on the water, empty.

  As I pulled my snorkeling gear from my bag and fixed the mask over my nose and eyes, a little girl in a yellow sundress—a first grader, I guessed—ran full steam toward the gulls, causing them to lift off and flap away like little ghosts fleeing an exorcism, their squawking carrying down the beach until they circled around and resumed their resting positions.

  I turned to look at the girl who’d caused the maelstrom. She stared out at the Gulf, hands on hips, elbows cocked, looking like a four-foot conqueror.

  How many times had I told Perri to post a sign telling people not to chase the gulls? “The birds get tired, Perri. They fly massive distances. They have to recuperate,” I’d told her.

  Perri reminded me that I’d done it as a child. “But that was before I knew,” I said, and she’d declared me a killer of fun.

  Aware of how serious I could be about saving the world and how the lightheartedness sometimes drained out of me, Perri made attempts to keep me balanced, teasing me in an exaggerated way that only she could get away with.

  Wading into the surf, I shuffled my feet along the bottom to shoo away burrowing stingrays and thought of Nicholas returning to a generic house to unpack his shorts and T-shirts before heading to the aquarium to check on his rays. “We should spend time together above the water,” he’d said when we’d parted at the airport.

  “Oh, you mean you actually want to talk to me instead of just making underwater hand gestures?” I’d replied.

  I wished I could tell him that I’d come home to the calamity of finned sharks. Nicholas would understand the ruin and distress of that more than most. My colleagues were passionate and devoted about their work, but the sea was a religion for Nicholas, like it was for me. He would never give up on rays just like he hadn’t given up on the crab caught in the net. I told myself I would call him. Right then what I wanted was to hear his voice.

  Slipping the snorkel into my mouth, I floated facedown, my ears filling with water, turning the sounds of wind, gulls, and boat engines into muffled notes. I listened to my breath whoosh through the snorkel. I watched for everything and nothing, afraid that many of the sharks I’d tagged and photographed in these waters had been finned.

  The queasiness in my stomach had nearly gone. Flipping onto my back, I closed my eyes against the sun, seeing phosphorescent splotches on the inside of my lids, and forced myself to think about something besides drowned sharks. The words didn’t belong together. I tried to picture Mozambique instead, a place I’d seen only in pictures. Snapshots floated into my head of the whale sharks there, Rhincodon typus, of Nicholas in bare feet, the first person since Daniel to actually make me feel something.

  I floated for a while, glancing over my toes now and then for the clay-colored roof tiles of the hotel, to be sure I wasn’t drifting off to Cuba. Thirty yards out, halfway to the channel marker, I swam back to the beach, where I dug my cell phone out of my bag. After a few rings, Perri’s voice mail picked up. “Hey, I’m home!” I said, chirpier than I felt. “Just had a swim and heading inside now to track you down.”

  A caravan of Jet Skis sped by, sending wakes onto the rock jetty, and for a moment I watched the pelicans bob on the water like rubber ducks, thinking how melancholy they looked, and then suddenly there she was again, the girl who’d disturbed the birds. The mini conqueror in yellow.

  She stood at the water’s edge, holding a glass bottle. I waited to see what havoc she would wreak next. Twice she lobbed the bottle into the water, but each time it washed back to her feet. The third time she threw it underhand, catapulting it in a high, useless arc. Again, the tide boomeranged it right back at her. This went on for several more tries, until I began to feel sorry for her. Why did
n’t the girl’s mother step in and help? Or better yet, tell her not to throw trash into the ocean.

  As I pulled on my cover-up and adjusted it around my waist, the girl raced over to me, halting inches from my toes.

  “Can you throw this for me?” She thrust out the bottle, and for the first time I noticed the scroll of paper inside.

  Before I could answer, she pointed the bottle at the jagged scar on my leg. “How did you get that?”

  “A shark bit me,” I said. Maybe I should’ve lied, told her it was a bicycle accident, and not given her a reason to fear the water.

  “Was it a big one?”

  “Not really. Bites don’t happen that often.”

  “A megalodon would have taken off your whole leg. Or your whole body.”

  I stopped worrying about scaring this girl.

  “I wouldn’t have stood much chance against a megalodon,” I said.

  “Or a plesiosaur. They had, like, four hundred teeth. I’ve seen their teeth in a museum.”

  “That’s cool. You know a lot about prehistoric stuff.”

  “Well, sea creatures I do,” she said, smoothing pieces of her short, wheat-colored hair behind her ears. She reminded me of someone. I wondered if it was me as a child.

  “Are plesiosaurs your favorite prehistoric animal?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and liopleurdons. Have you seen Swimming with Sea Monsters?”

  “I haven’t seen that one.” I loved that she’d asked. I said, “What I’m really crazy about are sharks.”

  Her mouth parted. “But one bit you.”

  “I know, but he was just testing me out. Trying to find out if I was food or not.”

  She laughed. “You’re not food.”

  “I have one of the teeth from the shark that bit me.”

  She jutted out her neck, her eyes big.

  “The doctor found it stuck in my leg. It’s in my jewelry box. I find shark teeth out here all the time.”

  “Can you help me find one?”

  “I suppose I could do that one day,” I said, worried suddenly what I was getting into.

  “You promise?”

  “Okay, I promise.” Chances were I would never see her again. “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “I used to live in St. Petersburg. I was in Beauty and the Beast.”

  “Were you Beauty?”

  “I was a spoon,” she said. “All the little kids had to be forks and spoons.”

  “I bet you were good.”

  “Yeah, so will you throw my bottle?”

  Technically, it was a bad idea. The ocean didn’t need another piece of garbage, but the bottle had a message in it, and she was a child, and I didn’t want to be a killer of fun.

  “Okay,” I told her. I thought of Perri. She would be proud.

  We walked a few feet into the water and I took the bottle, turning it over, feeling flecks of the wet, crackled Giacomo’s Olive Oil, Extra Virgin label peel off in my fingers. A glob of dark yellow oil clung to the paper inside. I swung my arm back and pitched the bottle as far as I could.

  When I turned around, the girl was studying the ripples where the bottle landed. “Look, it’s not coming back!” She let out a squeal, a battle cry of exuberance and victory, and though I knew nothing about children really, there was something about this one that seemed distinct.

  We stood there gazing at the bottle that was starting to miraculously glide south with the undertow. “My dad gave me the idea to throw it,” she said. “It has a message in it. Dad said it would help me.”

  She squinted up at me, waiting to see if I would ask, Help with what? She had pixels of gold in her brown eyes, and they reminded me of the beads of olive oil inside the bottle.

  I bit. “Help with what?”

  “My mom died.”

  “Oh. I’m very sorry.” I instantly felt out of my depth. I scanned the beach for the inventive father she mentioned. The shell seekers were gone, and while a couple of men still fished, there wasn’t a single person around who seemed to be looking for a wandering child. She was small and trusting, and that worried me, her being on the beach by herself.

  “Where do you think the bottle will go?” she asked.

  It would probably land on the first barrier island past Palermo—Shell Point Key, I guessed, a small island known for the abundant variety of shells that washed up there, but also for the trash. In high school, instead of adopting a highway, we’d adopted Shell Point.

  “I think it’ll go all the way to Mozambique,” I said.

  This made her smile. She seemed to consider this place with the unusual name, satisfied with my exotic answer. Or perhaps she was just tolerating me.

  “Do you feel better?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Where’s your mom?”

  I paused. “She died, too. A long time ago, when I was a kid like you.”

  “Oh,” she said, and made a tiny twist with her mouth that suggested the two of us were cut from the same cloth.

  “Is there a grown-up with you?” I asked.

  “My dad’s waiting for me inside. He told me I could throw the bottle, but then I had to come right back.”

  “Then you should probably get back. It was nice to meet you. I’m Maeve. What’s your name?”

  “Hazel.”

  “You’re the only Hazel I’ve ever met,” I said. But then my breath stuck in my ribs. It took me only a second to realize I already knew this child. I had imagined her many times before.

  A voice called from far across the beach. “Hazel! Hazel!”

  Both of us turned toward the source. He was standing at the end of the hotel access path.

  Daniel.

  “You’re gonna help me find shark teeth,” she said. “Remember? You promised.”

  I halfway nodded and watched her scamper off. White tan lines from her bathing suit straps crisscrossed between her shoulder blades. Daniel scooped her up, and they spoke nose to nose. By the time Hazel pointed in my direction, I was already disappearing beneath the water.

  Six

  I left a trail of sandy footprints that stopped at Perri’s door. I knocked hard, and waited for her to answer, glancing at my reflection in the mirror at the end of the hall. Wet, openmouthed, and a little stunned, I resembled a bulgy-eyed goby fish.

  Perri swung open the door, her fine hair shorter than I remembered, blunt cut at her chin.

  “There you are,” she said. “And you’re sopping.”

  Once Daniel and Hazel had left the beach, I’d dashed out of the water and back to the hotel after a feeble toweling off. Perri put her arms around me anyway, her silver bangles clinking, and pulled me inside her suite, where I stood barefoot and shivering on her cherry-red Turkish rug. She fetched a towel from the bathroom, while I rubbed my arms and glanced around. I’d always loved this room best: a wall-to-wall holy sanctum of books. They were crammed on floor-to-ceiling shelves, heaped on the round pedestal table in front of the window, and assembled in short stacks on the floor by her comfy armchair. If it weren’t for the sketch pad on the coffee table and the easel in the corner, you might’ve thought reading comprised her entire life.

  I thought of the mural she’d painted in the tiny alcove off the lobby. The spot had once been a utility closet, but Perri had turned it into a quiet spot where guests could read or simply sit and stare at the mural. She had painted Charlotte Brontë standing on a clamshell, the hem of her blue dress dampened by emerald waves. Around her, fat swirls of wind created a tempest, causing pages, books, feather quills, and inkpots to fly about in the air.

  “I called your room earlier and just tried your cell,” Perri said as she returned, handing me a thick, white towel—only Egyptian cotton for Perri. I blotted my face, arms, and hair before wrapping the towel around my shoulders and dropping onto a wooden chair.
<
br />   “I was on the beach,” I said.

  One of her Polynesian drumming CDs played in the background. Perri sank into her armchair and took off her slender black glasses. “I’m so glad you’re back. When you’re not here . . . well, I miss you, is all.”

  “I missed you, too. And not that I expect nothing to change in my absence, I mean life goes on, but I’ve come back and suddenly Robin is getting his book published, my sharks are being destroyed, and—” I broke off, my face contorting in an effort not to cry.

  “Daniel is here,” Perri said, finishing my sentence. “The minute I saw your face I knew you knew.”

  “I just met Daniel’s daughter.”

  “So you met Hazel.”

  “Not only that. I threw a bottle into the Gulf of Mexico for her with a message in it to her dead mother.” I took a breath. Then quietly, “She looks like him.”

  More than that, she was the manifestation of Daniel’s betrayal.

  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling as they started to fill, feeling Perri study me. When I finally looked back at her, she wore the smile you see at funerals, not pity, but a mix of compassion and sadness.

  “She seems like such a great kid,” I said. “She talks to strangers, but . . . really great.”

  Perri scooted forward in her chair so our knees almost touched.

  “I’m okay,” I told her.

  “You don’t seem okay.”

  I rested my fingertips against my eyes for a moment, realizing how useless it was to pretend, that I didn’t want to pretend. In the lull, the South Pacific drumming grew deafening, and Perri got up and turned it off, then sat back down and placed her hands on my knees.

  “I feel twenty-three again,” I said. “Back on that day Daniel told me about . . .”

  “Holly,” Perri said.

  Holly. I think I’d hated her right up until I found out she was dead. I’d never met her, never even seen her, but I’d imagined her as some great beauty, possessing qualities I didn’t have. She probably didn’t grind her teeth at night and need a mouth guard. She understood the necessity of adding tiny edible flowers and wild raspberry coulis to the edge of a plate. Yet she’d been responsible for that adorable little girl on the beach, and I saw her suddenly as the best kind of mother, the kind who wanted them both to have botanical names—holly and hazel—and the same first initials; the kind who dressed her daughter up like a spoon for Beauty and the Beast; the kind who bought her books on prehistoric sea creatures and sundresses the color of marigolds.