Hazel added, “We’re sorry you’re dead and we hope the guys that killed you will be put in jail.”
Hazel and I turned to Daniel.
“My turn, huh? Okay. Well, I’m sure this was a good shark. Good-bye, shark.”
Hazel laughed, a little knowingly, as if Daniel was a token member of Shark Club, not a full-fledged one like she and I were. Whatever the reason, I was grateful for the laughter.
“Daniel, you want to take that end of the blanket?” I asked.
“Wait, what about the pledge?” Hazel said. “Let’s do the pledge.”
Water slapped hard against the side of the boat as she led us, Daniel reciting a split second behind us so Hazel wouldn’t think he didn’t know the words.
Daniel and I each took an end of the blanket and lifted the shark over the side. Its ravaged body rolled out of the blanket into the water with a galumphing splash and started to sink. Hazel hung over the side of the boat and peered through her binoculars at the spot where the shark had disappeared, then she tossed in the hibiscus.
We stood there a few seconds and watched it float.
As Hazel lifted the binoculars back to her cheeks, Daniel took my hand and held the back of it to his lips. The way his hair stuck out from under his hat, the sheen of his ultrablue eyes, just the way he stood, reminded me of the thirteen-year-old he used to be. The face that looked back at me the first time I said I loved him. I saw the nineteen-year-old who’d kissed me in the elevator, a kiss filled with hunger and release. It was difficult to separate our history from who he was now. Was it hard for him, too? Did he look at me and see who I was instead of the girl he’d hurt, the girl who’d stormed out of his life, the girl he’d begged to forgive him, but who couldn’t?
I turned my hand over and opened it across his warm cheek. What would happen if neither of us ever mentioned yesterday, if I never mentioned the scene with Nicholas? I realized how much I didn’t want to talk about it, as if confronting it could change everything. And, if I knew Daniel, he wouldn’t want to lift up the stone and look underneath it either. He would let it rest.
I heard a plop in the water. “My binoculars!” Hazel yelled. “They went in the water!”
Daniel was saying, “They’re only binoculars, we can get another pair,” when I stepped over the rail of the boat and dived in after them.
The water rushed up around me, cool and fizzing. Overhead, and far away it seemed, I heard Daniel and Hazel call my name. Then a hollow noise filled my ears and I heard nothing but the inside of the Gulf.
The water was clear, but not crystal. Nor was it very deep, twelve feet, maybe. I descended quickly, spotting the binoculars right away. The strap floated up as though it were draped around some ghostly neck. I slipped an arm through it and was about to push off the bottom when I saw the dead shark lying nearby on the sea floor. Without its tail or its fin, the chopped-up creature appeared more incongruous in the water than on the boat. By now, other sharks would already have detected its presence. In a short while it would become part of the food chain.
My lungs ached as I ascended from that beautiful graveyard, knowing that one day it would be my graveyard, too. My ashes would be scattered out here, and I wondered for a split second who would do the spreading.
I popped out of the water and gulped for air, holding up the binoculars. Hazel clapped with excitement. Daniel stared at me as though I’d lost my mind.
That night Daniel and I sat on the edge of the hotel swimming pool and dangled our legs in the water. I held my leg against a water jet, feeling the stream pummel my calf, the skin turn numb, and the muscle soften. As the last of the night swimmers toweled and packed their belongings, Daniel leaned over and kissed my neck.
“I’m going to look at another house tomorrow. I want you to come with me,” he said. “Hazel starts school in two and half weeks, and I’d like to get us settled in a place of our own as soon as I can. It’s a little two-bedroom on Bay Court. It has a small backyard. A nice kitchen.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
The illumination from the pool glowed across our legs. A stray piece of light fell on Daniel’s face like a lightning strike. He was beautiful.
“Maeve, I don’t know what Nicholas was doing with you yesterday,” he said abruptly. “Is there something I should know?”
I felt ambushed and unprepared, surprised that I’d guessed wrong—he did want to talk about it. I pulled my legs out of the water, instantly chilling them, and drew them against my body.
“Come on, Maeve. You know what I mean. I saw how you followed after him when he left the kitchen.” He splashed his hand across the water. “Tell me I shouldn’t worry.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said. “Nicholas was here because of the finned shark. He ended up helping me with the necropsy. He’s a friend.” Even as I said those last words, I doubted even that much was true now.
I lay back against the cool tiles and stared up at the palms. The branches swept back and forth in the wind, thrashing like giant brooms. One of the fronds twirled in the wind, hanging by mere fibers.
“We haven’t talked much about the future,” I said. “Why is that?”
“I’m trying to now,” he said, reclining onto his elbows. “Come see the house with me.”
“Okay. I’ll see the house with you. Russell will be out of the office tomorrow for donor meetings in Tampa. I’ll take the afternoon off.”
It was a relief another day would go by before I had to face Russell about the reward I’d impulsively offered. I rolled my head to the side and looked at Daniel. The light was gone from his face.
Suddenly, the suspended palm frond crashed onto the pool tiles near our heads. I jumped, and all the breath left me.
“God,” I said, seeing how close it had come, gazing past Daniel’s startled face into the capacious, unreliable dark.
Twenty-seven
The house on Bay Court was a lime green Key West cottage with white shutters and a glass-paned front door that creaked when the Realtor opened it. She was sporting black-and-white-checked capris, red sandals, and sunglasses cocked on her head, holding back a torrent of gray corkscrew hair. She’d introduced herself to me in the driveway as Alex.
Stepping inside, my heart began to pound a little. The vacant house brimmed with light and windows and shining wood floors. I couldn’t quite decide what I was feeling. Exhilaration, fear, caution, certainty—it was some of everything.
I turned a full circle in the living room, taking it in. The room had built-in bookshelves and sliding doors that opened onto a back screened porch.
“The yard is small, but it’s fenced,” Alex said, peeling back the sliding door so we could peer out. “There’s no pool, but I don’t think you specified a pool, because if you specified a pool—”
“Right, that’s fine,” Daniel said. “Where’s the kitchen?”
It was as big as the living room, with white cabinets and glossy cobalt counters and backsplash. Daniel began to tinker with the stove, turning the burners off and on. He opened the oven, the refrigerator, the pantry, each and every cabinet and drawer. He turned on the little flat-screen TV affixed beneath one of the cabinets, surprised to find the cable still turned on.
I said, “You can heat up a lot of chicken nuggets in that oven.”
He gave me a look of pure happiness, lifting his eyebrows into a question. Wanna live here?
“I don’t suppose there’s an orange tree outside,” I asked Alex, half joking.
“Lemon,” she said.
I stepped over to the empty breakfast nook and gazed out the bay window. The lemon tree was sculpted like a lollipop.
Alex guided us through the rest of the house. The bedrooms were small, but there were two of them. One was blue. I thought how much Hazel loved her blue room at Van’s, because, she said, it was the color of the sea, and it made me wi
sh she was here to claim it for herself. Daniel hadn’t wanted her to see the house, though, until he was certain about it. We’d slipped away this afternoon while Hazel was at her dance class.
After we’d scrutinized each room and Daniel had asked umpteen questions about copper pipes and hurricane shutters, we wandered back into the living room, where Alex announced she needed to return several phone calls and stepped outside, giving us privacy to talk.
Daniel and I wandered onto the back porch, where he stretched out on a La Siesta net hammock that hung in the corner. “Well?” he said.
“I like it. And Hazel would love the blue room, don’t you think? And the yard. You could get her a swing set or maybe just one swing to hang on a branch. And I’m sure you realize the plain, black mailbox out front will never do. Hazel is going to insist on a dolphin mailbox like Van’s so she can dress it up during holidays.”
“Come here,” he said.
I went to him, and he pulled me down into the hammock beside him. The net splayed beneath us and the hammock pitched, threatening to topple us, making me grab for him, laughing. When it settled, we stared at the ceiling, which was painted a cloudy pastel blue.
He said, “You know, you could go to Mozambique and live with the mosquitoes and the malaria for four months, or you could move in here with us now.”
I clumsily sat up and swung my legs over the side of the hammock, my back to him. “Daniel, why do you make this so hard for me? You know it’s going to be awful to leave you and Hazel.”
He reached for my hand. “It’s settled then? You’re definitely going?”
“It’s been settled. I’ve been clear about that.”
His hand on mine went a little rigid, but he didn’t move it away. He said, “I guess I thought you might change your mind.”
Looking back at him, I felt the hard, irritated edge inside of me soften. “For a while, I thought I might, too. But going to Africa is a big deal for me.”
“So is me asking you to live with us,” he said stiffly, getting to his feet.
“I can still live with you when I get back,” I told him, feeling a brush of fear about where this was leading. “I mean, you’re not giving me some kind of ultimatum, are you? You’re not saying now or never?”
“I’m not saying that. I would just like to think I mattered to you as much as some shark in Africa.”
Gazing through the porch screen, I spotted another lemon tree. Beneath it, a spray of lemons lay in the grass like bright, golden orbs. I wanted to smash them.
Daniel whirled toward me, eyes flashing. “Is this about Nicholas? Is fucking Lord Nelson going to Mozambique?”
“I asked him to go when we were in Bimini, but I doubt he’s going now,” I shouted.
“What is it with you and this guy? What happened in Bimini? Did you sleep with him?”
“Jesus, Daniel.”
He stared at me, and I had the feeling he was sorry for what he’d said, but I was too angry now to care. I said, “So what if Nicholas did go to Africa? You trust me, right? Right?”
“I trust you. I don’t trust him.”
I headed toward the sliding doors, noticing every smudge and fingerprint on the glass, every dead moth on the floor, every ringed rust stain left by leaky old planters.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Daniel said.
“What? Whether or not I slept with Nicholas in Bimini before I came home and found you here? No! I didn’t. There. Feel better? If anybody should be questioned about trust it shouldn’t be me.”
Daniel drew back, then charged into the yard through a screen door in the corner that I hadn’t even noticed. I regretted saying it, and I regretted nothing at all. I watched him pick up a lemon from the grass and hurl it at the side of the house.
In the living room, I followed the sound of the TV into the kitchen, where I found Alex with her elbows propped on the counter, watching the little TV.
I tried to look unruffled. “We’re all done.”
She squinted at me, as if trying to get my face to come into focus, then pointed at the television. “I thought this was you! You’re on CNN.”
And there I was, standing in front of a white sheet inside the freezer in Daniel’s kitchen, pointing to the grisly gash on the shark’s back. The CNN news caption projected across the bottom of the screen: MARINE BIOLOGISTS SPEAK OUT ABOUT SHARK FINNING IN FLORIDA.
My God. CNN. They had picked up the story.
At that moment, Daniel walked into the kitchen to find us spellbound before the TV. He stared at the screen, at Nicholas and me standing in front of his freezer. “I’ve always cared. Sharks matter,” I was saying into the microphone.
“What the hell?” said Daniel.
“You’re famous,” Alex said to me.
I turned to Daniel, taking a deep breath. I should’ve told him about the interview. I should’ve told him.
He strode out of the kitchen, my voice on the TV trailing after him. “Everything swimming in the oceans matters. Dolphins, stingrays, the tiniest sea horses, and the smallest crabs.”
Twenty-eight
The morning after the disastrous house showing, I showed up at Perri’s office before leaving for work, resolved to tell her what an absolute mess Daniel and I had made of things. I was furious at him for his jealousy and possessiveness, his antediluvian attitude toward my career, and at the same time I was filled with remorse over my retaliation. I’d dredged up Daniel’s old betrayal and thrown it in his face. I felt like I’d crossed some dangerous line, and I didn’t know how to undo it. I hoped Perri might know. I’d spent a sleepless night reliving the awful pain that had come from losing him before, and I’d wakened desperate to repair the breach.
Perri was always in her office early. I spotted her through the half-open door seated at her desk, and barreled right in, not bothering to knock, speaking before she looked up. “Do you have a minute? I really need to talk—”
I stopped abruptly. She had company. Daniel and Robin sat across from her, clipboards and pens in hand. I’d interrupted a meeting.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “You’re busy.”
“We’re going over details for the Book Bash,” Perri said, waving me in. “The food orders have to go out this morning, and I’ve even dragged Daniel in here during his off-hours.”
He glanced at me, then away, staring blankly through the window behind Perri’s desk, where an osprey hovered like a flyaway grocery bag.
I said, “I’ll go. We’ll talk later; it can keep.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Perri said. “Not until we talk about you being on CNN. Who would’ve thought! Everybody I know has called me about it. I saw the interview last night. You were spectacular. Wasn’t she spectacular?”
“Absolutely you were,” said Robin. “Our own CNN superstar.”
Daniel offered Perri a small, perfunctory smile.
Yesterday, after seeing the interview, neither Daniel nor I had even told the Realtor good-bye. I’d simply followed him out of the kitchen, out of the perfect house with the lemon tree, and we’d driven back to the hotel in an almost smothering silence.
Daniel stood. “So if we’re done discussing the menu, I’ll just go place the food orders.”
Perri cut her eyes at me. “Sure, I think we’ve talked the menu half to death.”
As he passed me, he said quietly so that I barely heard, “Maybe we can talk, too?”
When he was gone, I said, “Okay, I’ll let you get back to work.” As if the whole awkward scene hadn’t occurred.
Perri was not so good at pretending. “Maeve, honey, is everything okay?”
“No, but it’ll all work out. Let’s not talk about it now, okay?” I said and changed the subject, forcing a lilt into my voice that I didn’t feel. “So, the Book Bash is coming right up.”
“But—”
Perri said, giving me a reluctant, worried look.
“Yep, coming right up,” Robin said, coming to my rescue. I don’t think I could’ve borne talking about it to them right then, and somehow he knew it. Our twin thing. “Get your George Sand costume ready,” he went on. “I told Mindy to come as Cinderella, which would be perfect, right? She told me Hazel’s coming as a mouse. Some dancing mouse.”
“Angelina Ballerina,” I said.
“Right.” Robin sounded surprised.
“I know because Hazel loves the Angelina Ballerina books.”
It was taking enormous energy to make small talk about costumes and dancing mice.
The lobby at the Conservancy was empty of people except for the gift shop attendant, who was smashing rolls of coins against the cash drawer. I peeked into the touch tank, as I always did before heading to my office. Despite all the racket, the orange and magenta urchins sat undisturbed. A starfish crept along the bottom on tiny tubular feet. I stood there watching, a bit mesmerized by the scene.
I was stalling. Not only did I have to apologize to Russell for promising a sizable and unauthorized reward from the Conservancy to the viewing public, I had to somehow ask him for the funds.
His door was open, but I knocked lightly before he waved me in. Before he could say a word, I started my speech. “I’m sure you’ve heard about the interview. I spoke without thinking when I offered the reward. I was in the moment, and it suddenly seemed like a way to get some information. It just came out of my mouth. I shouldn’t have put that on the Conservancy. If we can’t drum up the funds, then I’ll pay it myself.”
Russell sat there as still as one of the tank urchins. “Okay. Have a seat,” he said.
Taking the chair in front of his desk, I said, “I’m sorry.”
“First of all, I saw the interview. I’m proud of you. And I think the Board will be willing to give you a pass for giving away their money in exchange for the free publicity. But just in case, let’s offer for you to pay up to half of it and see where that gets us.”
The Shark Club Page 20
