The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She had an asthma attack,” Perri said.

  “Asthma? I didn’t know you could die from that.”

  “Apparently it was some really severe kind.”

  “How terrible,” I said, relieved that my tears were slipping back into the dark, nonsensical place they’d come from.

  Perri said, “Hazel was the one who found her. She was unconscious in the house. She had her inhaler in her hand. The child dialed 911 herself. It was just too late for anything to be done. She died before they got there.”

  “God. Poor Hazel,” I said. She would be around six now—I knew that without having to calculate it in my head. The same age I was when I lost my mom and dad.

  “When did all this happen?” I asked.

  “Five months ago, not long after you left for Bimini. I think it’s been really hard for her, but she seems to be coping pretty well now. Daniel has been great. Right after it happened, he took a leave of absence from the restaurant in Miami and went to stay with her in St. Petersburg. After a few weeks, though, he brought her back to Miami.”

  Hazel and Daniel together in Miami—I tried to take it in, unsure how he managed it on a chef’s schedule.

  Perri paused, sliding back in the chair and running her fingers through the little cowlick that sprang off center in her hairline. She seemed to be holding back.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “They’re here now. Daniel and Hazel.”

  “I know. Visiting Aunt Van.” Daniel’s mom had always been Aunt Van to me.

  When Perri spoke, her voice was gentle, a kind of whisper. “No, not visiting. They live here now. They moved in with Van three weeks ago.” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “This is my fault, Maeve. I gave him a job—he’s the new chef here at Botticelli’s.”

  “He works here?”

  “Not long after Daniel took Hazel to Miami, his restaurant closed. The owner just shut it down. Daniel felt like they couldn’t stay in Miami anyway, not without help. He needed his mom, and God knows Hazel needed her. And me, I needed a chef.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, not meaning for it to come out so angry.

  Perri put her glasses back on. “I hate making excuses,” she said. “First, I told myself you put a moratorium on talking about Daniel and I was honoring it, and then I told myself Daniel coming back here wasn’t the kind of thing I should dash off in an e-mail. Maybe I should have. I just convinced myself it would be better if I told you in person, and frankly, I worried if you knew ahead of time you might not come home.”

  She was right about the last part. If I’d known Daniel had brought his daughter to live in Palermo, I’d still be in Bimini, trying to negotiate an extension so I could stay there instead of coming home.

  “Robin kept it from me, too,” I said.

  “Blame me for that as well. I told him I’d tell you as soon as you got back. It didn’t work out as I’d hoped. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you were blindsided on the beach.”

  I wanted to tell her it was all right, but I couldn’t.

  She said, “I guess I didn’t have to give him a job, but he was desperate. And it’s not bad for us to have him here. The name Daniel Wakefield is well known among Florida foodies now.”

  “I get it,” I snapped, not wanting her to justify it.

  All this talk about him—Daniel did this, Daniel decided that. He was someone I didn’t know anymore. Why did I care so much? Daniel was like a wound I carried that wouldn’t heal.

  I looked past Perri at the framed pencil sketch she’d made of my grandfather. It hung slightly crooked on the wall behind her. He stared at me with graphite eyes. I didn’t know how she’d endured the death of him, and then later, of Dad. It was too much, but Perri had borne it with the help of books. Books had saved her the way sharks had saved me.

  It was cooking that had saved Daniel. Once a year his dad had made spaghetti sauce—marinara, puttanesca, Bolognese. It had been the one domestic thing he’d done, and then, only on Van’s birthday—a hard-and-fast tradition right up there with turkey at Thanksgiving. When his mom’s birthday rolled around the year after his dad left, twelve-year-old Daniel found a recipe in one of Van’s cookbooks and made the sauce for her himself. He was trying to comfort her and carry on the tradition, of course, and perhaps that’s when he began to fill his dad’s shoes, a job he took on dutifully. He gave up junior varsity baseball that season. He said it was so he could be home more and help out, but I suspected it was also a way to defy his baseball-coach father. He began preparing dinner most every night, and cooking became an escape, a place to disappear, a place the hurt couldn’t find him. The surprise was how much he loved the mystery of chopping, measuring, and stirring—creating from scratch. By the time he was in high school, Perri had given him a job in the hotel kitchen, and he worked his way from dishwasher to busboy to steward. It must’ve meant a lot to him to be back in the place where it all started.

  “I do get it,” I said softly to Perri. “I’m not upset with you—it’s just coming back and finding him here. I still think about him. I don’t want to, but I do.”

  She reached for my hand and I smelled her signature cherry blossom hand cream. What came to me was the day we’d spent together before I left for Bimini, when she’d treated me and Robin to the hotel’s sunset cruise. The cherry scent had mixed with the wind and spray coming off the wake as we’d leaned over the side of the boat to watch dolphins scudding in the waves.

  Perri’s bedroom opened directly off the living room, and glancing through the doorway, I could make out the first part of a quote stenciled on the wall over her bed. Every room but mine had a literary quote. I could never settle on a single set of words that seemed adequately self-defining. Perri’s quote was from Charlotte Brontë, and it was so Perri: “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

  “I didn’t just see Hazel,” I told her. “I saw Daniel, too. He was at the top of the beach, waiting for her. I didn’t want him to see me so I jumped back into the water.” I laughed, a bitter sound. “I’m ridiculous.”

  “You’re not ridiculous. You’re not the first person to avoid seeing an ex-fiancé.”

  Perri was being kind. I was good at escaping. Even right now part of me was plotting to fly off somewhere. Somewhere like Africa. Maybe I could convince the center in Mozambique to let me start my research earlier than August.

  “It’s not like you were expecting to see Daniel,” Perri was saying. “Or Hazel, for that matter.”

  I’d read an article last winter in the waiting room at the dentist’s office called “The Science of Love.” I’d read it slowly, as if it contained the secret for my happiness or, at the very least, an answer. I’d ripped out the pages and stuffed them into my purse, hoping that whatever I felt for Daniel came down to a couple of haywire neurotransmitters or an overproduction of oxytocin. Was there something wrong with my brain—did my tegmentum regularly misfire dopamine? Was my caudate nucleus, otherwise known as the reward center, stuck in the year 1999?

  I still wanted a way to explain Daniel. I said, “That’s why I declared the moratorium on mentioning Daniel. I don’t want to be stuck.”

  “Are you stuck?” Perri asked.

  “I met someone in Bimini, so that’s something.”

  I watched Perri’s eyes widen behind her lenses, how she seemed to lift up in the chair a little. “Someone?” she said.

  “He’s a biologist. Nicholas. He’s British.”

  “And you two were a thing in Bimini?” I wished she didn’t seem quite so dumbfounded, but why wouldn’t she be? You could probably count on one hand the guys I’d been out with in the last seven years, but dating them had not amounted to anything serious.

  “We were just dive partners until the last night . . . when we weren’t.”

&n
bsp; She pressed her lips into a suppressed smile.

  “Well, technically he’s married,” I said. “He’s in the middle of a divorce. Proceedings are so much quicker in England.”

  “Still,” she said, “it sounds vaguely promising.”

  “Maybe. Yesterday I asked him to go to Mozambique. Today Daniel pops up and I’m . . . I’m stuck again.”

  “Maeve, can I tell you what I think?”

  Before I could nod, she said, “Clearly it’s not all water under the bridge with you and Daniel. You’ve been avoiding this for years, and yes, maybe you two could be a little less Cathy and Heathcliff, but his being here on the island could be a good thing. You can’t avoid him any longer. You can’t hide from him, and you can’t hide from yourself.”

  I hated the obvious truth in her words, but there was a strange relief in them, that first sighing moment when I accepted what was. There was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t dive into some other world. I couldn’t make Daniel disappear. I couldn’t make his daughter disappear. I’d come up for air and here we were. Me and Daniel on the same island. That was that.

  Perri stood and brushed at her black pants. “Come on,” she said, and pulled me out of the chair to the table by the window. “I’ve got something for you, a birthday present.”

  She handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper. Inside, I found a portrait of myself. Perri had painted me at the edge of the Gulf, standing atop a loggerhead turtle shell wearing my company uniform, a black one-piece swimsuit. My body was angled to the side just enough to reveal a shining silver shark fin growing out of my back. A jagged scar blazed lava-red on my calf. My hair was blown to the side. Waves splashed around the shell onto my scarred leg in foamy, white curls. On the sand before me, horse conchs, lightning whelks, and one rare junonia glistened. Behind me, the water fanned out to the horizon the color of topaz. Hovering over my head was an osprey, its wings open like two arms.

  I stared at it, speechless. Perri had a benign obsession with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—the curvaceous goddess of love standing on a shell, arriving on shore. She’d painted her own versions of it over the years, like the Charlotte Brontë opus in the alcove, along with numerous paintings of herself standing on the shell holding an open book or sometimes a paintbrush, but she’d never painted me.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” I said, running my finger over the shark fin.

  “You like it, I hope.”

  “I love it! You made me part shark.”

  “Aren’t you?” she said. “Turn it over.”

  “The Birth of Maeve (on her 30th birthday)” was scrawled in Perri’s handwriting on the back.

  “Thank you,” I said, throwing my arms around her, letting the towel around my shoulders fall to the floor.

  “Go get changed,” she said.

  In the corridor, I pressed the elevator button and when it didn’t immediately pop open, I pushed it again and again. Maybe it was seeing the shark fin on my back, the osprey floating over my head . . . the Botticelli image of Maeve arriving slowly on the shell of a turtle, finally showing up after seven years of self-exile. You can’t hide from him, you can’t hide from yourself.

  I made up my mind. I wouldn’t wait around for Daniel to find me. I would change out of my wet clothes and go down to the kitchen. I would figure out what to say.

  Reaching the second floor, I began to walk faster until I was loping along the hallway. Turning a corner, I saw him, standing beside my door.

  I halted abruptly, my chest filling with sound, a furious thudding.

  He turned toward me, and I thought I saw him take a long breath.

  Seven

  “Sorry to just show up like this,” Daniel said.

  “You saved me a trip. I was about to come find you,” I told him, trying to sound impassive. I didn’t know if I should behave friendly or coolly unaffected. Was there a statute of limitations on how to feel about betrayal? How was it possible to feel the pull and force of him again after all this time?

  He ran a hand over the short, sandy-brown waves in his hair as if trying to brush away his own uncertainty about what he was feeling, then jammed his hands in the pockets of his work khakis. He was wearing a short-sleeved chef’s jacket with BOTTICELLI’S stitched in small, navy lettering on the front, partially unbuttoned and flapped open, showing a wedge of gray T-shirt underneath. He smelled like seafood primavera and Parmesan, like an oven of baking bread.

  He looked older, of course. Any remaining boyish features Daniel had had were gone. His jaw was more angled. There were tiny lines beginning around his eyes. But then, there was the flat place on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes were as I’d always thought of them. The electric blue of a tang fish.

  “Would you, um . . .” I handed Daniel the painting while I dug my key out of my bag. There were little crescents of sand under my nails, my eyes were red, and I reeked of heat and Gulf water. I had pulled my wet hair back into a ponytail while in Perri’s room, which made my freckles look more pronounced, and I wished I wasn’t seeing him for the first time in seven years looking a little bedraggled.

  The tremulous feeling along my ribs had moved into my hands. They quivered visibly, and I fumbled the key in the lock, dropping it onto the blue-and-brown lattice-print carpet. Damn.

  I bent over quickly to retrieve it before he could, and unlocked the door.

  He followed me inside, and I immediately wished I could retrace my steps and bring him in through the main door that opened into the living room instead of the private entrance into my bedroom, which seemed to suggest the old intimacy between us was unchanged. How many times had we come in just like this? Hundreds? I flushed, berating myself.

  My suitcase was spread open on the bed and dirty clothes were separated into three piles on the floor. Whites, colors, bathing suits. He stepped around them as I stuffed down the urge to apologize for the mess.

  I watched as he propped the small painting against the mirror on my dresser, then folded his arms over his white jacket and stared at it.

  “Perri at work,” I said.

  “Only Perri,” he replied. “It’s something else—Maeve, the shark.”

  “It’s a birthday present.”

  I wanted to undo that, too—to unmention my birthday, take away the reminder that birthdays were things we used to do together. We used to celebrate with ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins. There were so many little things I hadn’t forgotten about Daniel. That he considered “Ring of Fire” the best love song ever written; that he could perfectly produce any recipe he laid his hands on, but couldn’t bake a cake to save his life. It was possible neither of those things was still true. Did he still hate fondue, had he overcome his aversion to circuses, taken the trip to France he’d always wanted to take?

  “Happy birthday,” he said. “Thirty, huh?”

  “Yeah, all grown up now.”

  He wandered from the dresser to the bedside table, then over to the glass doors that led to the balcony, as if remembering the spot where his photo had been, the lounge chair where we used to curl up and fall asleep. I imagined the black eye of the Mona Lisa blue shark following him. Finally, he pulled the desk chair out and sat, so I took a seat on the bed.

  “Can you believe Robin finished the book?” I said, desperately wanting to keep it casual. “He said you’ve read it.”

  “I read it in one night.”

  He smiled and I had to glance away. For what felt like an eon, but was probably only seconds, neither of us spoke.

  “I think you met Hazel today,” he said, plunging in, and I had the sensation of falling through some strange wormhole into a place where events were happening, words were being spoken, but I was far away underwater, watching it through goggles.

  “She’s beautiful,” I managed to say. She looks like you.

  “Yeah, she is, isn’t she? A
nd really precocious.”

  “I could tell. She knows more about prehistoric sea creatures than your average thirty-year-old.”

  “You made quite an impression on her.”

  I could have made a joke. Something about how tremendously impressive I was, something about dropping the key earlier. I sensed how easy it would be to return to the way we used to talk, back when being with Daniel was effortless. But how could we go back? I decided to get through this with detachment, ignoring how entirely unnatural it felt to do so.

  He said, “I know it must have been a surprise running into her.”

  And you. It was a surprise running into you.

  “You could say that. I didn’t exactly know you were back.”

  He drew another long breath, and I could see how excruciating this was for him. “I guess I wanted to come up and say that I’m here, that Hazel and I are here.” He forced himself to laugh. “Which seems pointless now because it’s all pretty obvious. I mean, I’m sitting in your room, and you and Hazel played together on the beach.”

  “Played? No, not really. I mean, we talked. I threw a bottle.”

  “She hasn’t stopped talking about ‘the shark lady with the scar.’ I knew it was you before she mentioned your name. You should have seen her face when I told her I knew you.”

  That’s one way of putting it.

  “She told me about her mother. I’m really sorry,” I said.

  At the mention of Holly, Daniel gazed across the tan carpet, at the hills of clothes, as if carefully mulling over his words. “It was awful for Hazel at first. Now, I guess it’s . . . less awful. Mom is really helping.”