The Lightkeepers

by Abby Geni

  Suddenly Charlene stiffened. A look of horror crossed her face. Gazing past my shoulder, she murmured, “Oh no.”

  “What?”

  She pointed behind me. I pivoted with some care, trying not to dislodge any shingles. My feet scrabbled for purchase on the slanted roof.

  In the distance, I glimpsed a boat on the water. The Lunchbox was bobbing in the calm surf near Mirounga Bay. There was only one passenger. To my surprise, I saw that it was Lucy. Evidently she had rowed out alone.

  “I hate it when she does this,” Charlene said. “I just hate it.”

  I peered at the rowboat’s faraway contours. Lucy’s work—observing, tagging, and cataloging the birds—did not necessitate travel on the water. Galen and Forest, the shark boys, could often be found on the briny blue, but in Lucy’s case, a pair of binoculars would suffice. Still, her inquisitiveness might have gotten the better of her. Maybe she had decided to row to the Drunk Uncle’s Islets. Maybe she wanted to visit Arch Rock, which was shaped like a gigantic lock with an old-fashioned keyhole. From there, she would be able to see the burrowing owls and cormorants right under her nose.

  And yet, as I looked closer, I saw that Lucy was wearing a neoprene wetsuit. Her body seemed different, wrapped in rubber. Usually she obscured her curves beneath layers of clothing, but now I could see the fleshy arc of her hips, the full measure of her generous bosom. She held a snorkeling mask up to her eyes, adjusting the strap. Beside her on the deck was a bulky breathing apparatus, a snaky hose coiling among the benches. Lucy lifted the end of this tube and stuck it between her teeth. Then she sat down and tugged on a pair of bright blue flippers.

  “Is she doing what I think she’s doing?” I asked.

  Charlene sighed. “It’s her hobby, believe it or not. She’s a diver. She goes down there and looks for anemones. She collects sea urchins and shells. She likes to see them up close.”

  With a splash, Lucy plunged into the water. For a moment she was visible in the surf, pushing her mask into a better position. A swell washed over her, and she disappeared.

  “But the sharks,” I said.

  The rowboat, abandoned, slid back and forth on the waves. I could hear the smack of the surf on the hull. Lucy’s breathing hose was unrolling slowly, spooling over the side.

  “We’ve all tried to talk her out of it,” Charlene said. “Especially Galen. He put his foot down. Big arguments in the kitchen. Lucy was polite, but she wouldn’t budge. She asked us to show her in writing where it said she wasn’t allowed to do it. And we couldn’t. There aren’t any rules for this. Nobody thought to make a rule about recreational diving.”

  “It’s crazy,” I said.

  Charlene bit her lip. “She doesn’t do it that much. Only a few times since I came. I did ask her about it once. She said it was something she had to do.”

  The sea was opaque. Slippery waves. Drifting shadows. A clamor of sunlight glinting off the surface. The water did not allow me to pick out a human shape.

  THAT EVENING, THERE was tension in the air. Lucy had not returned. I found it difficult to settle to anything. A cat on a hot tin roof. I was amazed that Galen and Forest could sit with their heads together, poring over a tidal chart. I was amazed that Charlene could focus on her book, pencil at the ready, occasionally underscoring an important word with two precise lines.

  In my travels, I have learned that biologists are a strange breed. A certain kind of individual is drawn to this work. I have grown accustomed to the type. In Texas, I met a herpetologist who caught wild rattlesnakes with his bare hands for fun. In northern California, there was a botanist who enjoyed free-climbing the giant redwoods, scaling those massive trunks with no ropes or harnesses. In Greenland, I encountered an ichthyologist who imitated Jesus, walking on water. Born and bred in that climate, he was able to determine the density of the ice by sight. I often watched him, heart in my throat, as he strode over the surface of the ocean, sending out ripples in the layer of standing water above the deeper core of dark, porous frost.

  In short, Lucy’s behavior was not that far beyond the pale. Still, as the evening passed, the clock ticking, the breeze brushing the windows, I was worried. The sea was rough and cloudy. Visibility was limited. It was starting to get dark. Lucy was down there alone, armed with nothing but a wire basket in which she liked to collect interesting shells. In my mind, the water teemed with white sharks, thrashing against one another in the rush to get to her exposed figure first.

  In recent weeks, I had learned a lot about these wily predators. White sharks did not typically hunt humans—but it was common knowledge that a diver looked a lot like a seal from the right angle. Same color, same size. The sharks were inquisitive by nature, too. One might swipe Lucy with its tail, bump her with its nose, even give her what Galen called a “love bite” to investigate her presence. She could be killed, not out of malice or hunger, but from idle curiosity.

  I was frankly astonished that there was diving equipment on the islands at all. It was perilous enough to travel around by boat without venturing below the surface. Probably, like the helipad, the diving kit had been purchased for emergencies—a man overboard, a discovery of sunken treasure. Surely it had never been intended to be used for fun.

  Each time the door banged in the wind, I glanced up hopefully. Mick was out there, I knew, working the crane to bring Lucy home. At a prearranged hour, he had headed off to meet her. It seemed as though he had been gone a long while. Too long. Charlene set her book aside and began scribbling down notes. Galen and Forest continued their discussion in low, insistent voices. Forest was looking even thinner than usual, as willowy as a ballet dancer, with cavernous cheekbones.

  He and Galen were arguing about the white sharks. I was getting better at following their jargon. The Rat Pack was the group of males responsible for most of the attacks on seals and sea lions. A strip of ocean by Indian Head was their hunting ground. The Rat Pack lingered to the south of the archipelago like a clique of teenagers at the mall. Galen and Forest had come to know them well. Some were curious, easily lured to the surface. Some were aggressive, thudding into the Janus’s side or trying to bite the motor. They were usually named for their wounds: Bite Head, No Fin, One-Eyed Jack.

  The Sisters, however, were something else. The puny males were dwarfed by the female sharks, which could be as long as limousines, twenty feet from snout to tail. These ladies were nobility. They did not demean themselves to hunt with the Rat Pack but maintained their own turf, staying to the east, patrolling from Sugarloaf to Jewel Cave. I had yet to see a Sister myself (though any day now, I was sure that I would find the courage to go out on Shark Watch). They cruised the waters with a lazy grace, and the Rat Pack, those lesser peons, treated them with unswerving respect. The Sisters had so much gravitas that Galen and Forest claimed to be able to sense them underwater even before they surfaced.

  There were three in particular who ruled the islands. Galen had named them after the witches in Macbeth. They swam together, hunted together. Their dorsal fins sliced through the surf like ships in a fleet. The leader of the trio—Hecate—was the largest shark that had ever been seen on the islands. Twenty-four feet at least. If she were ever hooked and measured, she would break every record in the book, Forest had said. But she would never be caught. Not here. Her two companions were smaller, though still massive enough to merit awe. Nineteen feet, maybe. They were called the Twins, since they bore similar markings.

  Now Galen and Forest began to debate the sharks’ feeding habits. Live prey. Styrofoam dummies. Better ways to dupe the Sisters into approaching the Janus on the water. They threw ideas back and forth like jugglers tossing silk scarves in the air. The fact that Lucy, their friend and colleague, might be at the mercy of these same creatures at that very moment did not dampen their enthusiasm.

  Andrew, however, was the worst of everyone. In the early evening, he was cloistered in the room he shared with Lucy, doing whatever he usually did in there—napping, leafing through refe
rence books, masturbating. Then a creaking of floorboards indicated that he had finished his work. He strolled into the kitchen in his languid way, yawning a little. He wore his usual uniform: slouchy jeans and his crimson knit cap with the phoenix emblem. He did not speak to any of us. I gritted my teeth. It would have been natural—it would have been human—for him to stop at the window and glance out for any sign of Lucy, to pace the floor as he awaited her return. Instead, he gave a cry of delight. At the back of the cupboard, he had discovered a supply of tinned peaches, his favorite. For the next few minutes, I had to watch him eating his way through three syrupy cans.

  By the time the dinner hour rolled around, my nerves were shot. Charlene was cooking—macaroni and cheese, with tuna mixed in for protein. (This, sadly, is a staple of our diet.) The occasional “Oops” or “Oh no” wafted out of the kitchen, indicating that she was having her usual trouble managing the cantankerous cast-iron range. Galen was now dozing in an armchair, his head sagging comically to the side. Andrew had settled next to me on the couch to read, though I could feel his gaze shift to me, heavy and thick. I resisted the urge to wipe his attention off me like oil. When the door slammed again, I did not even look up.

  “Sorry,” Lucy said in her clear voice. “I hope we’re not late for dinner.”

  She brought the smell of the sea into the room. One hand held a bucket, the other a wire basket that shimmered with shells. She was still wearing her wetsuit, now with a man’s jacket draped over her shoulders. Mick’s jacket. He eased through the door behind her, kicking off his boots and spattering the floor with mud.

  For an instant, I saw that the others were relieved too. As Lucy hung up Mick’s coat, Galen shot her a look that swept from her feet to her brow, verifying that she still had all her limbs. Forest beamed, showing his teeth—something I had only seen him do once or twice before. Usually, any gleam of humor from him was just that: a gleam. A crinkle at the corner of the mouth, a bit of frivolity near the eyebrows. This wide-open grin sat oddly on his angular face. Mick collapsed onto the couch with a groaning of springs. His hair had been blown into a ragged bird’s nest by the breeze.

  Swishing in her wetsuit, Lucy marched over to Andrew and gave him a kiss. He patted her shoulder gently, though I noticed that he kept one finger planted in his book to mark his page.

  “How was it?” Forest called from the table.

  “Fine.” Lucy straightened up. “No problems. I saw the most wonderful bed of sea urchins. They were marching around in extreme slow motion. Inch by inch. The spines waving everywhere. I found an enormous clam, too. One of the biggest I’ve ever seen. I could probably fit inside it.” As she spoke, her hands flitted through the air, miming the shapes of anemones. “It was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. You can’t blink without seeing a stingray or a rockfish.”

  “Any sharks?” Forest asked.

  Lucy considered. “Not really. The only guys who got close to me were a couple harbor seals and a huge sea lion. He nosed me a little. Wanted to bite my air hose. I had to whack him with my basket.” She pursed her lips. “Well, I did see some of the Rat Pack at a distance. They were over by Mussel Flat, circling around and acting weird. They didn’t bother me.”

  “No Sisters?” Galen asked.

  “None.”

  Then, to my surprise, Lucy turned to me.

  “Come here, mouse girl,” she said.

  She snapped her fingers impatiently, as though summoning a recalcitrant pet. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet. Lucy pointed into her bucket, yellow and plastic, filled almost to the brim.

  I approached it cautiously. At the bottom of the pool, there was a lump of clay. I bent over, peering into it. Then the object twitched. I let out a gasp as it changed shape, like a flower opening its petals or a fist uncurling. A few brown tendrils snaked across the bucket’s floor. A gauzy sac ballooned upward—a wealth of tentacles.

  I stepped back instinctively. Lucy laughed. She reached into the water and picked the tiny octopus up. Before my eyes, it changed color, its skin roughening, suffused with deep red. Its skinny arms braided themselves around her wrist in a death grip. The pouch of its body dangled like a bizarre ornament on a charm bracelet. Yellow eyes pivoted on stalks. Droplets rained onto the floor.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” Lucy said.

  8

  IT IS OCTOBER, and most of the white sharks are gone. Like sightseers in Venice, they avoid the colder months. Galen and Forest have been tagging them for years, attaching an electric device to each creature. Stuck below the dorsal fin, these machines have relayed back the precise coordinates of the sharks’ winter breeding and hunting grounds. The animals travel south to balmier seas; they head west to harass the surfers in Hawaii. I thought I had missed my chance at an encounter.

  Then, a week ago, Forest crashed into my room at six in the morning. Dawn was near, the eastern sky aglow.

  “Get up,” he shouted. “There’s a big kill off Sugarloaf!” He kicked the edge of the bed. “And don’t forget your camera.”

  I climbed wearily to my feet. I had not slept well. There was an octopus in the cabin now, and it was occupying my mind. Lucy had kept the tiny creature she had pulled out of the sea. Oliver the octopus—she had named him with cartoonish assonance. She had dug an old aquarium out of some closet, God knows where, and filled it with salt water, a lumpy rock, and a spray of seaweed rising from the pebbled floor like a column of steam. She had made a home for the animal on her bureau. The octopus lived in her bedroom now, directly below mine.

  Somehow this made it difficult to sleep. Last night I had lain awake for hours, aware of that monster lurking in the darkness. Its alien intelligence. Its bizarre, oblong eyes. I had been having nightmares. Imagining I heard the octopus slithering in the hallway. The wiggle of his tentacles. The kiss of his suckers.

  Twenty minutes later, I was on board the Janus for the first time. The sun had not yet risen as we skimmed across the water. A smoky layer of fog obscured the eastern horizon, rendering the light diffuse. The sea itself was as black as tar. We were heading north. The islets there were prehistoric—the sort of rugged, primal peaks that might have appeared behind a group of dinosaurs in a documentary. Even the mist seemed uncanny. Each island wore a belt of gauzy white.

  I swear that I smelled the blood before I saw it. Tangy, oily. A group of seagulls was wheeling beside Sugarloaf—a bulbous promontory, aptly named. The birds were screaming. I watched three of them get into a swordfight of flashing beaks. Then a patch of mist moved aside, curtains parting at the theater, and the blood appeared. It was phosphorescent, spilled across the surface of the sea. It glowed against a landscape of gray. (I have since learned that a seal’s blood is so highly oxygenated that it just about fluoresces when exposed to open air.) The torn carcass was still visible, bobbing on the waves. The seal was human-sized. Purple strips of flesh. A tail as broad as a catcher’s mitt. It had no head. Whatever killed it had decapitated it cleanly. Blood was still fountaining from the raw wound where its neck had been. I leaned over the side of the boat, wondering if I was about to throw up.

  I have learned too much about white sharks lately. I know that, as a species, they predate the existence of trees. I know that they have survived four global mass extinctions. I know that they are born live, not hatched out of eggs like most fish. The pups emerge fully formed, about four feet long, with their predatory instincts already buzzing. White sharks have their own sixth sense, used for detecting prey: they can pick up the electrical impulses generated by muscles in motion. They can also smell blood in the water from a mile away. Their odd manner of swimming, the snout swinging side to side like a pendulum, helps them to track exactly where the scent is coming from. To me, it seems reminiscent of the way human beings tilt their heads to locate the source of a distant sound.

  I know that white sharks are warm-blooded. Unlike other members of their species, they do not start out each day sluggish and chilled, waiting for their nervous systems to fire up, grad
ually accumulating enough energy for the hunt. White sharks are always ready to hunt. They are unique in other ways, special and bizarre. They sometimes breach like whales, leaping clear of the sea. Nobody is sure exactly why they do this—to scope out the nearby surroundings, to shake off clinging remoras. Maybe they do it for fun. They have even been known to land on boats. Indeed, a few registered victims of shark attacks were killed outside the water, the accidental casualties of a two-ton fish leaping jubilantly but carelessly, unaware that its bulk was heading not for the open sea but for a hapless ship in the line of fire.

  This morning, Forest was at the helm of the Janus. Galen had his binoculars in hand. The seagulls were busy, a mass of wings above the iridescent slick. I snapped photo after photo: mist-soaked islands, bloodthirsty birds, and a splotch of crimson burning like a bonfire.

  Then Forest cut the engine, pointing into the ocean.

  “Look there,” he said.

  “What?” I said, stepping forward cautiously.

  The surface of the water did seem strange. A bulge had appeared, different from the choppy waves. Moments later, a fin broke the surface. The shark was moving fast. I barely had time to take in the massive torso, the slick skin, before it had plunged again, disappearing from view. I gasped as another one skimmed past. It was difficult at first to pick out their silhouettes in the dark sea. Two sharks. Three sharks. None of them bothered to break the surface again. With my untrained eye, I wondered if they could all have been the Sisters.

  Forest, however, shook his head. “It’s just the Rat Pack,” he said. “The ones who haven’t left for warmer water.”

  “Males, males, males,” Galen agreed. “Nothing special, I’m afraid.”