“No, but he ate a lot,” I said.
She laughed again. “He still eats a lot.” She bugged out her eyes incredulously. “And he cooks stuff I don’t like.”
“Like what?”
“Eggs.”
“You don’t like eggs?”
“I like cracking them,” she said, smoothing the sides of her tower. “Dad likes coloring them.”
“What are your favorite foods?”
“Chicken nuggets. Dad says I’m going to turn into one. Cake is better.”
“Okay, I’ll make you a chocolate cake,” I said.
Abandoning her castle, she watched as I shaped a sand cake and pressed shimmering translucent jingles and coquinas on the top.
“There. It’s ready,” I said.
“It doesn’t look like a cake. It looks like a turtle wearing jewelry,” she said with her palms up. Then, she sang the words fancy turtle three times. She wasn’t wrong, and I liked that she’d said so.
“You know, I used to make necklaces from the teeth I found,” I said, leveling the fancy turtle.
She raked her fingers through the demolition. Holding yet another lump of sand, she swirled her finger through it until there was nothing left but a shiny, black splinter. “What’s this?” she asked.
The tooth was half an inch long, shaped like a tiny T-bone steak. The knob at the top was only as wide as my pinky nail.
“You found one!”
Hazel leaped up, her feet smashing into her tower. She held the tooth up to her gums, her elbows sticking out like wings. “What do I look like?”
“Hmmm, like a tiger shark.”
She handed me the tooth. “Is it from a tiger shark?”
I studied it. “I think it’s from a lemon shark,” I said, giving it back to her. “Or it could be millions of years old. Practically every shark tooth out here is a fossil.”
Suddenly she seemed overcome by her find. She sucked in her breath and blinked, cradling it in the cup of her hands as if it were a baby bird that had fallen from its nest, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry out of sheer awe. I remembered the day we’d met, how she talked about megalodons and plesiosaurs and asked if I’d seen some DVD she had . . . what was it called? Swimming with Sea Monsters. That was what she loved, not so much dinosaurs like the one on her bag, but the preposterous ancient ocean dwellers.
I said, “Maybe this tooth came from a shark species that has died out, like one you saw on your DVD.”
“I need to watch it again,” she said in a resolute way, and carefully placed the tooth inside one of her labeled Ziplocs, then inspected it through the plastic.
“Score one for the Shark Club,” I said.
Hazel gave me a funny look, and I thought I was getting my first taste of being an uncool grown-up, but then she darted into the waves, kicking wildly at the water, yelling “Shark Club!”
Before we reached the kitchen, the potent smell of garlic caused Hazel to pinch her nose. I pushed open the swinging door and let her walk ahead. Daniel stood at the stove with his back to us, shuffling a pan back and forth over a burner. The garlic culprit. Hazel tiptoed up behind him, squeezing the shark tooth between her fingers while I hung back, holding her field bag, watching as she tugged on his white jacket.
Turning, he took her in, smiling, and then, spying the tiny fang, he gave her exactly what she wanted: shock and amazement. “Wow, Little Bug, you found this?”
Hazel nodded four times at least, and Daniel looked over at me. “Good day, huh?”
“Very good. She waited until the last minute to find it, though. It was a nail-biter.”
Daniel removed the pan from the heat and asked a woman in an apron to take over, rattling off instructions and pointing to a bowl of thinly sliced prosciutto.
“We’re in a club, Dad,” Hazel said.
“A club?”
“Yeah, the Shark Club. I want you to be in it. Maeve’s in it.”
She grabbed his hand and led him over to me, where she opened her field bag and pulled out a third badge. Daniel spied the circle clipped to my shirt, then met my eyes as if to say apologetically, It’s the first I’ve heard of this. Once he’d attached the badge to his jacket, Hazel stepped back like a director taking in the scene she’d created, obviously pleased at her achievement—she’d found a fossilized shark tooth, formed a club, and membership was up.
I took off my badge and offered it back to her. “You keep it,” she told me. “Wear it next time.”
I hadn’t imagined a next time.
There had been little to say when it was only me and Daniel and our history filling up the room, but Hazel’s presence required us to be cheery and speak about things like the Shark Club, yet also to be empathetic and commiserate over the child’s grief. I couldn’t think of another way this sudden alliance with him could have happened.
She peered up at him. “Can Maeve come over and watch my video?”
At the back of the kitchen, a clacking erupted as someone stacked plates for the lunch hour. Daniel hedged. “We’ll talk about it, okay?”
“Okay, but it would be for the club,” she said.
“I have a book you can borrow, if you want,” I said. “It has lots of pictures. I remember one of a prehistoric shark with a protrusion on its back shaped like a small ironing board.”
“Oh yeaaaah,” she said.
“That’s very cool, right?” Daniel said to Hazel, and she nodded as the plate clatter gave way to chop, chop, chop. Flames mushroomed up from the garlic pan and turned into a puff of smoke, and the smell of scorched prosciutto wafted up, prompting Hazel to bury her nose in her father’s side. He said, “Why don’t you wash your hands, and I’ll make you a grilled cheese.”
As she started to saunter off, Daniel called after her. “Wait. What do you say?”
“Oh, I forgot.” She wrapped her arms around my waist. Her small body was sun soaked, and smelled like sea wind. I tried hugging her back, but given our height difference my hug amounted to covering her arms with mine. Letting go, she navigated through the stainless steel surfaces, holding her nose.
Daniel said, “Mom and I have a saying: if you want the truth, ask Hazel.”
Yep, fancy turtle. Got it.
“I’ll bring the book by later,” I told him.
Back in my room, I checked my shelves—no luck—then went to the storage area in the hotel basement, where Perri kept the Christmas decorations. She’d marked off a section for my belongings, basically a heap of cardboard boxes containing everything from childhood puppets and macaroni jewelry boxes to high school yearbooks and college theses.
There was no trace of the box that held my wedding dress. Perri had probably stashed it with her things so I’d never have to stumble upon it. But there was the small white hatbox containing the remnants of Daniel. I hesitated a moment, then wriggled off the lid. Wedding gloves, CDs, R.E.M. concert ticket stubs, a pile of old photos: me in the front yard of the aqua house; our engagement photo; high school graduation; ten-year-old Daniel and his dad at Perri’s Fourth of July party, roasting hot dogs on the beach. At the bottom I found a small stack of letters held by a taut rubber band. When I pulled at it, the band crumbled. I took the envelope on the top of the stack and pulled out the letter.
Maeve,
It’s been six weeks since I made the biggest mistake of my life. The regret and pain I feel over what I did are with me every day. It was stupid and I’m so sorry. Letting you go is incomprehensible to me. Love like ours doesn’t just go away.
You are the first person I ever loved, and I love you still.
Please, let’s talk.
Daniel
A little bolt of pain shot through me. I stuffed the letter back into the envelope, quarantined it inside the hatbox, and forced myself to look for a box marked MIDDLE SCHOOL.
; Finding the book for Hazel, I sat on the concrete floor and thumbed through the pages until I found the picture of the extinct shark I’d told Hazel about, Stethacanthus, “the ironing board” shark. As I sat there with the book open on my lap, I noticed my hair was infused with the scent of garlic-prosciutto. I pulled a lock over my nose and breathed it in.
Nine
Returning to my apartment, I opened my laptop, planning to sort through my field notes from Bimini and begin a catalogue of dorsal fin profiles of the sharks we’d tagged, but my thoughts kept spinning back to Hazel in her hot pink swimsuit and those gigantic safety goggles . . . to Daniel holding the osprey feather, Daniel scrambling pink eggs, Daniel’s eyes meeting mine in the kitchen.
I stared over the computer at Hazel’s hand-drawn badge with the shark on it with sudden panic churning inside my rib cage, the sensation of diving too deep or swimming too far. The Shark Club. How had I let things unspool like this? I’d been an island of my own making, but being with the two of them had unhinged some fixed, unquestioned place inside of me, and as terrifying as that was, the thought of putting everything back the way it was before I’d arrived home scared me more. I told myself that Daniel and I could be in a club together with his daughter, that we could pass one another in the hotel corridors, and run into each other at Spoonbills, our old hangout, and it would be okay. It would become routine, a new normal. Right now I felt unmoored, that’s all, but in time, bumping into Daniel and Hazel wouldn’t dredge up all these unsettling memories and feelings.
I listened to the air conditioner whining through the vents, to laughter passing in the corridor, then to a weighed-down silence until I couldn’t sit there anymore. I headed for the living room to flip on the TV and stopped abruptly as my eyes fell on a box perched on the coffee table with a pale-green sticky note on top bearing my name. The box was tied with a piece of string and had seen better days. I was sure it hadn’t been here earlier.
Knowing suddenly what was inside it, I carried it to my bed, kicked off my sandals, and removed the lid.
The Hotel of the Muses
by
Robin Donnelly
I lifted out the manuscript pages. Three hundred twenty-one of them. Robin’s novel. I turned the page to find a dedication.
For Maeve & Daniel
It suggested we were a couple. What was Robin thinking? Couldn’t he have put our names on two different lines? Or with a little clarification?
Was that so hard?
Any other sister would have felt pride in her brother and recognized that of all the people in the world he could have dedicated the book to—Mom, Dad, Perri—he’d chosen me, his twin, and Daniel, his best friend. Stop quibbling, I told myself.
But a kind of foreboding swirled up in me, making me want to slide the lid back on the box. Instead I sat cross-legged on the bed and began to read.
CHAPTER ONE
Moments before Margaret was pulled on shore, bleeding, a breath from unconsciousness, she and Derek stood waist deep in the ocean, water tilting around their waists as Margaret scooped a feather off the surface. At thirteen, she had already loved Derek half her life, and though only slightly older, Derek routinely teased her about his six-month edge over her.
“Osprey,” she said, studying the feather.
She was always doing that. Expertly identifying bird feathers, seashells, fishes.
Derek slipped the feather from her hand and tucked it into her ponytail. It stuck up from the crown of her hair, turning her into an exotic bird. Then he kissed her. A one Mississippi, two Mississippi kiss.
“I love you,” she said, blurting it out. Then, embarrassed, she dived beneath the shimmering green water, emerging with her dark hair slicked back, tiny sequins of water on the ends of her lashes. She tried not to look at him as he swam toward her, parting the water between them with his arms, causing it to ripple in wide, half circles.
“I love you, too,” Derek was saying when suddenly his knees buckled and he lunged forward as if he’d been shoved.
Pain exploded through Margaret’s leg as she was jerked violently beneath the water, then whiplashed back and forth. Stinging water rushed into her nostrils as she fought against a monstrous black shape fastened to her calf. A blacktip shark.
Derek grabbed for her, thrusting his arms frantically beneath the water. A plume of blood rose up like a gruesome flower.
“Margaret,” he screamed. Over and over.
Seconds later, her face broke the surface, water peeling off her cheeks as she coughed and gasped. “Shark,” she cried, her voice chopped up by her breath.
Derek pulled her through the water, leaving a bright red tributary in the waves . . .
I looked up from the page to the other side of the room, my eyes falling on The Birth of Maeve, which still sat propped on my dresser. I stared at the painting while pressure built in the back of my throat. I wanted to scream. It was unthinkable. Robin had spent the last few years secretly writing the story of me and Daniel.
Part of me wanted to dump the manuscript into a trash can, but it was like an accident on the side of the road that I couldn’t help slowing down to gape at. I read to the end of the chapter, to its last shattering line.
The day Margaret was bitten by the blacktip, the two great loves of her life intersected, traversing like lines of latitude and longitude at the place where love saves you and breaks you.
I slammed the pages onto the bed, where they made a soft, unsatisfying thud on my white comforter. Is that what Robin thought? That I was broken?
I stormed into his room without knocking and, finding it empty, grabbed the phone to call him, then put it down.
He’d stolen my life.
My first kiss, my admission of love, the shark bite—those moments belonged to me in the most private way. I’d confided them to Robin, but I’d never imagined he would usurp them from me. Daniel had never been comfortable divulging details about our relationship to Robin, at least back when we were together, but perhaps he’d been more revealing than I’d suspected, and perhaps Robin had been more observant than I’d given him credit for. And he’d been sly. He’d given me the manuscript when it was too late for me to do anything about it.
I returned to my room as the silence in the apartment turned into a headache of white noise. I rubbed my forehead, sickened as I remembered that Daniel had already read this. He’d read it in one night. I pictured him in Van’s kitchen, the pages spread across the countertop. God.
Gathering up the manuscript, I slid onto the floor and leaned my back against the foot of the bed, where I read until far past midnight.
Robin had written a love story. The shark that bit Margaret ignited a bizarre love of sharks in her, which led her to study marine biology. Derek was a chef who betrayed her on the eve of their wedding. His betrayal, his “mistake,” as Robin referred to it, didn’t alter his love for Margaret, but she, poor, broken Margaret, rebuffed all his penitent attempts to talk to her and set things right. Crushed, stubborn, and inflexible, she walled herself off. She became completely alone.
Somewhere around 1:00 A.M., I read a sentence that caused me to stop in the middle of the page. For hours I had been reading in a stupor of benumbed disbelief, but there was something different and arresting about this sentence, a kind of genuineness, a kind of truth that left me defenseless. I read it over several times until the tears leaked out.
Margaret was a woman racked with regrets. A woman who could have had everything she ever wanted if she’d been able to forgive.
It split me apart the way magma cracks open rocks. Was Robin right? If I’d been willing to pick up the phone all those times Daniel called, if I’d been willing to write him back, to see him, to listen, could I have moved on and learned to trust him again? Back then, I didn’t owe him forgiveness, but maybe I’d owed it to myself. Perhaps we would be together now, married, with a child o
f our own. And Hazel. In a way, she would be mine, too. Had I stood in my own way? A woman who could have had everything she ever wanted if she’d been able to forgive.
The sentence was going to keep me up for the rest of the night. Maybe for the rest of my life.
I shoved the manuscript under the bed, grabbed my car keys, and without any real thought about what I was doing, I careened out the door, unable to bear the years of regret, the thought of Daniel reading that line. I hurried down the hallway, past all the DO NOT DISTURB signs, seized by the need to see him, to look him in the face and know if I could forgive. Too much had gone unsaid for too long. I was always so damned rational, so deliberate, so controlled—what if I just knocked on his door?
I paused in the dim, deserted lobby, forgetting for a moment where my car was, then remembering it had been parked in the employees’ lot since Christmas.
When I turned the key in the ignition, a twitching sound emanated from under the hood. I looked past the dirty film on the windshield and tried again, hoping the engine would catch life before the battery died completely. I tried again and again, pressing the pedal harder with each effort. Click. Click. Click. The lights on the dash went dark.
Back inside the hotel lobby, trembling and agitated, I slipped into the alcove that housed Perri’s Charlotte Brontë mural. Overcome with exhaustion, the desperation and impulsiveness starting to slip away, I laid down on the bench, resting my head in the crook of my elbow, unsure whether or not I was relieved that the car stalled. Was I, as Robin had written, a woman racked with regrets? Daniel’s betrayal had broken us apart, but I was the one who’d kept us apart. Deep down, I’d wanted to forgive him, but I’d been proud, principled, unrelenting.
It was a relief when sleep came.
When I opened my eyes, the ceiling in the alcove was lit with morning sun. I swung my legs off the bench, recalling my insanity of the night before, almost showing up at Daniel’s in the middle of the night. It came back to me then, my fury with Robin. He’d breached something between us, the sacrosanct thing that bound us, our twin-ness.
The Shark Club Page 8
