The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  “I owe you an apology,” I said.

  “Why? You didn’t steal any liquor at the market, did you?”

  I laughed. “No.”

  “Well, if it’s about your grandmother putting me in the erotica room,” he said, “I forgive her.”

  “It’s about earlier at the grocery store.”

  He raised his hand. “You don’t have to explain anything.”

  “I want to,” I said. “Daniel and I . . . we grew up together, and a long time ago we were engaged.” I took a breath. “Up until a few days ago, I hadn’t seen him in years, but he just moved back, and I guess I’m getting used to that.”

  “I figured something was going on with the chef,” he said.

  “It was a little weird back there. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Maeve, it’s okay. Really. You don’t need to apologize.”

  I unwrapped my sandwich. “Also, I think someone has a crush on you.”

  “Do you mean you?” he said.

  “I mean Hazel.”

  He swigged his beer and smiled.

  We downed our grocery store sandwiches, munched the chips, ate the KitKats, and clinked our bottles together.

  “I called the Indian Ocean Center in Mozambique,” he announced. “It looks like they have an opening.”

  “And?”

  “And I took it. Well, I told them I would take it . . . hopefully. They’re holding the spot for me.”

  “You think there’ll be a problem getting approval from the aquarium?”

  Nicholas got off the blanket and took a few steps into the sand, where he stood with his back to me for several strange seconds—so long that a little spiral of dread began inside of me. I watched his shoulders rise, then fall, before he turned around. “I have to go back to London,” he said.

  I hadn’t seen his face like this before, clenched and serious. “Okay,” I said, involuntarily bracing. Why did I have the feeling he was about to say he was going for a job interview or a heart transplant?

  He turned back now, coming to kneel on the edge of the blanket, putting his hand on mine and trailing his thumb over my knuckles. “Right after I got back from Bimini . . . my wife, Libby, called and asked for a reconciliation. She has stopped the divorce proceedings.”

  I scanned the water, the beach, then the sky, trying to absorb what he’d said. Did he mean he was going to London to reconcile with her?

  “Maeve. Look, I’m sorry. I have to go back and deal with this. I leave in a couple of days.”

  “Is that what you want, to get back together?”

  “No . . . no.”

  The music from the hotel seemed farther away, carried off by the wind and drowned out by the waves.

  “What happened? Why the divorce in the first place?” I tried to sound unaffected. My heart was beating against my ribs.

  He squinted into the wash of light. “She never wanted to leave London and come over here, but she did it for me. She hated it here. She missed everything. Her parents, her sister, her friends. She resented me for taking the job, for upending a perfectly good life. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t enough, why she couldn’t be happy with me anywhere.”

  I listened, thinking of us on Bimini, as friends and colleagues all those months, of our last night there and how he’d spoken about his feelings for me, how I’d let myself have feelings for him.

  “Libby and I went on like that for years,” he was saying. “She finally gave me an ultimatum. She was moving back to London, and if I didn’t go with her, she wanted a divorce.”

  “She asked for the divorce?”

  He nodded. “So she left, and last summer I went to Bimini and waited for the papers. You were a complete surprise, by the way. You changed everything. I want the divorce. I didn’t in the beginning, but I do now. I want us to go to Mozambique.”

  I looked past Nicholas to where the heron still stalked the shallows and watched it spear a wriggling sliver of a fish. Nicholas was not holding back anything, while I was hiding the fact that last night, I’d run out to find Daniel.

  I got to my feet. I said, “I spent the last seven years believing I was one of those people who loves once, and that’s it. I told myself that’s the kind of person I am. I work. That’s what I do. Everything else exists on the outside of that. But then, after all those months together we had that single great night, and I realized when I’m with you I don’t want to be the kind of person who loves once. Or just works, but . . .”

  The inevitability of what I had to do came to me, and it filled me with sadness. “I don’t know, Nicholas. I just don’t think we should continue with this or think about Mozambique while you’re in London.”

  And I have to protect myself, I thought. Who could say what would happen when he was back home with her? It could all be different for him then. And how could I live knowing I was the one who gave him a reason to end his marriage? Maybe that’s all I was, a convenient reason.

  “Your wife changed her mind,” I said. “How do you know you won’t change yours?”

  “Because I’m in love with you.”

  I didn’t think I could bear knowing that, not now. I kissed his cheek. “Go to London. See your wife.”

  Overhead, the wings of the heron snapped like a sheet. It gave two throaty croaks as it flew over the hotel. Then it was gone.

  In the morning, Nicholas was gone, too.

  Eleven

  I stuffed my research material into the green messenger I’d used since college and took the elevator to the lobby, hoping to find some willing soul to jump-start the battery in my car. Catching sight of Robin coming from the office behind the reception desk, I decided now was as good a time as any to stop avoiding him and the grand theft of my life he’d committed for the sake of his novel.

  “Hey, the battery in my car is dead,” I called. “Can you get it started?”

  “You’re speaking to me again!” he exclaimed, and jogged over, ignoring the scowl on my face.

  “Don’t get excited, you’re not forgiven. I just need to drive to work.”

  I headed for the doors, while he hurried to catch up. Stepping into the atomic afternoon light, I paused by the bell captain’s stand and popped on my sunglasses, taking in the blood-orange hibiscus and the gardenia bushes curving in thick, manicured rows in front of the hotel. That was the thing about Palermo—everything was eternally, outrageously in bloom. It made it very hard to feel sorry for yourself.

  “It’s Sunday,” Robin said. “Why are you going to the Conservancy? Wait, don’t tell me—it’s Eco-Sunday.” It happened once a month, targeting some aspect of marine life, usually a creature on the endangered list, involving an open house with exhibits, films, and talks, but I had no idea really whether this was Eco-Sunday or not. I wasn’t due back at work till Monday.

  “I’m going in because I have work to do; because I have to do something.”

  If I gave my mind an inch of room to think about Nicholas, it took over the entire acreage of my frontal lobe. I pictured him standing in the sand yesterday saying he was in love with me, how disconsolate he looked as we walked back to the hotel. After he’d left, I’d formulated a few lines I wanted to say to him, something about timing and patience and letting things play out, but I’d never called. I would think about Libby. He would divorce her or reconcile with her. He had to sort it out. Wasn’t it best that he go back to England without my voice in his head? Wasn’t it best that I protect myself?

  I waited in the driver’s seat of my tan Pathfinder trying not to think about Daniel, but it was hopeless. What had sent me out into the night to find him?

  Fanning myself with a file folder, I watched Robin pull his car over and clip the pliers onto the battery. At his signal, I tried the engine. It cranked immediately.

  Leaving the engines running, he slid into the passenger sid
e. “All right. Let me have it.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  “Did you read the whole thing?”

  “Does that matter?” I asked, raising my voice. “How could you work on this book for all that time and not tell me you were writing about my life? It’s my life, Robin, and I feel like you’re parading it out there without thinking how it would affect me.”

  “I’m sorry, Maeve. I really am. I’m a selfish prick. You know that.”

  “You don’t have enough shit in your own life to write about? Rachel Gregory, for instance, or do you totally lack imagination?”

  “You don’t think I tried to write about her? It was too devastating to sit with all that every day. I just couldn’t relive that pain again, dissecting it, parsing every molecule of misery it caused me. I loved her. The day she left the island, supposedly to ask her husband for a divorce, I found a copy of her novel she’d left on my bed. It was inscribed: I’m sorry, Robin. She never returned one of my calls. She was sitting in a house in Vermont with her husband and it tore me apart. Besides, the last time I wrote about my life it was a complete failure. Five hundred forty-three pages about a boy who lost his parents and looked for a family anywhere he could. My great professor proclaimed the boy’s struggle ‘insipid’ and said the story veered off course. When I try to write about myself, I’m too close to the material; I can’t see it clearly. It’s easier to see someone else’s life.”

  “Well, you could have at least tried to conceal me and Daniel a little better. What the hell were you thinking with these characters?”

  He shook his head. “I know, but just hear me out. When I started, yes, I was writing about what happened to you—the shark bite, Daniel—but you have to know, the more I wrote, the more I imagined. Margaret was inspired by you, especially in the beginning, but she became less and less you. If you keep reading, I think you’ll see that.”

  “You know what I resent? You always seem to take Daniel’s side. Even back then, after everything he did, you tried to convince me to work things out.”

  Robin said, “After it happened, the first time I saw him, I punched him in the face.”

  “You did?” For a fleeting moment, the thought pleased me.

  “I damn near broke his nose.”

  “Then why did you pressure me to give him another chance?”

  “I don’t know. Because he pressured me? Because I love the guy? Because I love you? Daniel was there for me, for us, and after his dad left, we were there for him. Honestly, I felt like you two were supposed to be together. And for what it’s worth, when I said you should take him back, you hung up on me, remember? And I never brought it up again.”

  I stared straight ahead through the grime on the windshield, pressing on the accelerator to give the battery some juice. The noise and vibration of the engine filled the car.

  “How did you know all that personal stuff you put in the novel?” I asked.

  “I was there, Maeve. For all of it. I’m very observant.”

  “But some of the things you wrote were just between me and Daniel. You couldn’t have observed them.”

  “He told me blow by blow what had happened. There was one time—” He stopped.

  “What?” I asked.

  “After you’d broken off the engagement and Daniel was in Italy, he called, asking me to forgive him. It was like seven P.M. here, and I figured it had to be one in the morning over there. He’d been drinking—he confessed to a half bottle of French Brenne, but it had to be more than that—and he was in this sad, talking mood. He said he’d tried calling you every day, had sent you letters.”

  Letting you go is incomprehensible to me, he’d written.

  “He was hurting,” Robin continued. “The poor guy broke down crying, and then he started reliving everything the three of us did as kids and in college, and then things just the two of you did. He needed to talk . . . and okay, I listened.”

  “But you didn’t just listen,” I practically shouted. “You used what you heard. You violated his trust and mine.”

  The smell of exhaust hung around the car and seeped through the air vents. I folded my arms across the steering wheel, laying my forehead in the crook of my elbow. My eyes welled with tears. I squeezed them shut, then lifted my head and looked at him.

  “Do you think I’m unforgiving?” I asked.

  “First of all,” he replied, “I wrote that about Margaret. Not you.”

  “Yeah, well, I hate Margaret,” I said.

  I blotted my eyes with my sleeve, while Robin riffled through the glove compartment for a tissue, coming up with a brown Starbucks napkin.

  He handed it to me. “I don’t want you to hate me,” he said.

  “I don’t hate you. I hate that you told the truth.”

  Robin gave me a confused look.

  “It was Daniel who ruined things between us,” I said. “I’m clear on that. I don’t think for a minute his cheating was my fault. But what if you’re right? What if I’d forgiven him? People do that. Married people do it. Things happen, affairs happen, and people stay together. They work at it. Maybe you’re right that what we had was worth fighting for—I don’t know. I was so mad and hurt I never even considered forgiving him. If I had, we’d be together now.”

  “I would’ve done the same thing you did,” Robin said. But he wasn’t very convincing.

  “Now thanks to your damn book, I have all these questions, and . . . regrets.”

  “I didn’t want that to happen.”

  “How could you not know that would happen? Did you not care?”

  “I guess I didn’t think,” he said.

  We sat for a few moments not saying anything. Robin got out of the car, dismantled the jumper cables, and banged down the hoods. I thought about the pair of turquoise flats I’d seen in the apartment, and for a second, I thought of asking him about the woman who’d left them behind, but I had no energy for it.

  Robin came around to my window and rested his arms on top of the car. “I’ll pull the book if you want me to. You’re more important to me.”

  “I don’t want to be the person who ruins this for you,” I told him.

  “Think about it. After that, if you still want me to pull it, I will. I’ll give back the advance.”

  I put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space. “Be careful,” I called. “You might be sorry you made that offer.”

  “We all have to live with our mistakes,” he said.

  Twelve

  A banner inside the main exhibit hall of the Conservancy proclaimed June the Month of the Manatee. Robin was right—it was Eco-Sunday. The room hummed with parents glad to have a worthwhile outing for the kids, environmental supporters, and vanloads of tourists from area hotels. Perri typically provided transportation for guests from the Hotel of the Muses, and I glanced around to see if Marco might be the driver today, but didn’t spot him.

  A manatee mascot in a baggy, silver-gray costume mingled with the visitors, posing for photos and peering through two eyeholes cut above the end of a whiskered snout. As I slipped around the edge of the crowd, I wondered which docent had been roped into wearing it. Through the large plate-glass window that stretched along one side of the hall, I could see numerous people launching red and yellow kayaks from the dock, nosing out into the mangrove estuary, where they were likely to see a real manatee.

  Passing the touch tank, I paused to watch an exuberant toddler yank a starfish from the water. “Be gentle,” one of the new teenage docents begged. “The starfish are alive.” She pried it from the toddler’s fist and placed it back in its habitat. That was me fifteen years ago—a high school volunteer, clocking hours during summers and on weekends, trying to keep small children from shaking the horseshoe crabs to death and reciting my spiel on sharks and local ecosystems to anyone who’d listen.
/>   I peeked inside the small auditorium, where Russell was giving a lecture. “Manatees are gentle, slow-moving creatures, the aquatic relatives of the elephant,” he was saying. Peeking out from the sleeve of his white Columbia shirt was the toothy mouth of the University of Florida Gator, a tattoo from his college days, which had to be at least twenty-five years ago. I watched him tuck a shoot of shaggy, golden hair behind his ear as he strode across the small stage in his flip-flops. His stage presence always made me think of a tanned, laid-back Steve Jobs.

  Spotting me, he nodded in my direction. I waved.

  God bless Russell. Years ago, when he’d hired me, I’d started off assisting with the shark monitoring program in the bays just south of here, known as the gateway to the Ten Thousand Islands. Eventually, I’d taken over the program, and Russell made me associate director of research, then later, director. Whenever I came up with grant money for research trips, he always encouraged me to go, letting John, my associate director, take over the shark monitoring until I returned. I’d had multiple research terms—in the Keys, Belize, Australia, and now Bimini, with Mozambique on the horizon only two months away. It was unusual for me to leave again so soon, but Russell had given his blessing anyway. Studying sharks around the world was the job I’d dreamed of.

  Entering my office in the administration wing, I flipped on the fluorescent light, taking in the familiarity and quietness, and heard myself exhale a tiny gale. The space was, as Perri would say, a room of my own. It was one of the larger offices, with three windows overlooking a copse of flamboyantly orange poinciana trees, and beyond that, the parking lot. I twisted the rods to open the blinds, noticing the fine layer of dust that sifted through the light, then walked over and dropped my messenger on my desk.

  The desk was really an old oak dining table I’d found in a secondhand store in Miami, something Spanish-mission-looking with carved pedestals. A true find. Maps of Mangrove Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands lined the walls, along with the wooden shelves piled with project files, grant applications, books, professional journals, three shark jaws, a dashboard shark in a hula skirt, and a specimen jar cocooning a baby hammerhead that floated ghostlike in a vat of formaldehyde.