The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  “It didn’t seem like much. My dad bought a chain of islands when I was born and named them after me. That seemed excessive.”

  I swallow any rude response. Several come to me with little bidding. At the top of the stairs, I find myself in the small room nestled on the roof. Four walls of glass, with a cushioned bench running along three of them. Two shelves of books ring the room beneath the bench, and more books are lined up along the deep sills. Ness cranks one of the windows open—they’re the kind with a spinning lever at their base. I turn and work the window opposite him. The sea breeze courses through the small space, whistling its way inside, between us, and then back out again. I glance up at the exposed beams overhead where a wind chime made of seashells softly rattles.

  “Holly never really took to the place. It was my fault for making her sleep out here by herself when she was little. She got scared, tried to find her way back to the house in the middle of the night, and got lost.” Ness opens the door on the front of the small room and steps out onto the deck. He invites me to join him, then points down at the boardwalk leading toward the enclosed bay. “She fell asleep behind the rocks down there, out of the wind. I found her the next morning. It was the first really big fight Vicky and I ever had. I don’t think Holly has been in this house since. I just use it for guests now. Replaced all the children’s books with classics.” He waves his hand at the collection behind us. “I don’t think any of them have even been cracked.”

  “Must’ve hurt, finding her out there.” I peer down at the rocks and think about what it must’ve been like for his daughter, running around in the pitch black, the crashing sea deafening and the wind chapping her face with her tears.

  “I think I’ve overcorrected since then. Never really put pressure on her to be adventurous, to try new things. I have more regrets over all the stuff I didn’t do later in life than I do over that night.”

  If this were a normal person, a normal conversation, I would ask how old his daughter is. But it’s Ness Wilde, so I know she’s twelve. If this were a normal person, a normal conversation, I might reach out and place a hand on his arm, let him know he’s not alone, that we all have regrets, that I feel his sadness, and that I’m sorry for him. But it’s not a normal conversation. In fact, I feel a sudden out-of-body sensation, the same surreal and disjointed feeling I felt in the White House, shaking the President’s hand. Like the Earth is tilting beneath me.

  As my sister would say, my life is already strange enough day to day, with devoted readers recognizing my name as I make a reservation or hand them my credit card to buy groceries, that it takes the truly absurd before I realize how dumb lucky I am, how bizarre my life is. I’m standing above this commanding view with one of the most infamous and now most inaccessible men on the planet. Moments like this come with my job, but some still fill me with vertigo.

  “I’m sorry, what did you call this place?” I ask Ness, trying to reel myself back down to reality. “Some kind of a watch?”

  “A widow’s watch,” he says, perking up. He seems just as glad for the change in topic. The breeze tries to steal away his hat, but he grabs it in time and tucks it under his arm. He points toward the horizon. “A lot of the houses up and down the coast here had these before the sea swallowed them. They don’t build them as much anymore. Back in the day, women whose men went to sea would sit up here and watch for the sails that told them their husbands were returning. Often, they would come up and watch the empty horizon long after there was any hope. I have to admit, it’s a morbid name, when you think about the literal meaning.”

  “I think it’s sweet,” I say. I stop myself from saying “romantic.” But that’s what I mean. The idea of such powerful longing, of hoping for a return, a reunion, is incredibly desirable. Most of the relationships I’ve been in lately, one or the other party was just looking for a way out, not a way back.

  “Well, we’ve already missed the tide, and now it’s more my fault than yours, but if you want to get changed, we’ll hit the beach. I’ve got a very precise sequence of days laid out to show you where those shells came from.”

  Ness shields his eyes and studies the shore below. Then he peers down the coast, and I turn and notice the lighthouse for the first time. The widow’s watch is just high enough, and the guest house juts out of the dunes just far enough, to see the tall pillar of mortar and stone sitting on the high bluff south of the estate.

  “You brought sandals, right?” Ness asks. “The boardwalk will be warm. You can kick them off once we get to the beach.”

  “We’re shelling right here?” I try not to sound disappointed. It would be anyone else’s dream. “It’s just … I would’ve thought those shells you showed me came from someplace far away from here, someplace exotic. I mean, no one’s seen a lace murex in years. And the quality—”

  “They didn’t come from all that far away, in fact.” Ness turns and heads back inside. I follow him, close the door behind me, and we take the stairs. “Besides, we’re not going to look for the murexes right now. I’ve got to show you what led me to them. It was years in the making, but I think I can tell the story in a week.”

  “Why not just show me the molds?” I say, unable to stop myself from coming right out and doubting their veracity. “I was thinking maybe you move other slugs in, like a different species, after the shells are cast.”

  Ness laughs. “You’re jumping ahead.”

  “Of course I am. I’m a reporter. As much as I look forward to the shelling, I want to know where the murexes came from. I want to see this mythical beach you seem to believe in where extinct shells just roll up with nary a mark on them.”

  Ness stops at the bottom of the stairs. Turns to me. “Let’s say you wrote a piece in four parts,” he says. “Each part is thousands of words long. And your readers decide to skip all the way to the last paragraph of the last part and read only that. What would you think?”

  “I think that would suck,” I say.

  “Exactly,” Ness says. “So don’t suck. Let me show you the whole story. No skipping ahead. Promise?”

  I hesitate. Ness gives me that intense look of his, that unwavering gaze. “I promise,” I finally say. And then, perhaps because of the morbid nature of the guest house, I add: “Hope to die.”

  “That’s the spirit. And don’t worry, I’m going to show you where the shells came from, but I want you to understand a little history first. See what led me to them. Which means you’re going to have to tolerate my little cliffhangers.”

  “I think you probably mean teasers this time,” I tell him. “And I feel like you’re just delaying this because whatever you’re doing with those shells isn’t legal.”

  “Oh, it’s not legal,” Ness admits. “It’s highly illegal. But you promised not to jump ahead.”

  15

  I’m not sure how I can jump ahead when it’s difficult enough just to keep up. I’m a fast walker. You can’t live in New York City without also being on the cusp of qualifying for the speedwalk event at any given Olympics. And yet I find myself trotting across the boardwalks and taking stairs at an unsafe clip, while Ness seems to casually stroll ahead of me.

  “There used to be homes all along here,” he says.

  I descend the last set of stairs and find myself back on the beach I visited a few nights ago. I kick off my sandals. Ness and I both have our shelling bags, our hats pulled down tight against the breeze, the smell of sunscreen in the air. Scanning the beach, I see why the bay is so loud. The two jetties of rock—the natural one and the manmade one—funnel the sea up the beach. They also corral the noise, so you get the crash of the ocean as well as the echoes of those crashes. Sound waves pile up like sea waves, overlapping and amplifying. In an east swell, I imagine the break here is amazing. It makes me wish I’d brought my board.

  “So did the sea take the homes that used to lie along here, or did you?” I ask Ness. It’s an honest question, but it sounds harsh now that it’s out in the air. As if I mean to say
that, either way, his family had a part in clearing out whatever beach communities used to lie here, either by purchase or by environmental ruin.

  “The sea took them,” Ness says. “We like to build on the edge, don’t we? Right on the edge of disaster. Because if we don’t, it leaves room for someone else to build between us and whatever it is we desire. We’re all like Icarus in that way.” Ness points toward the natural jetty to the south. “Let’s walk the shell line this way.”

  “Icarus flew too close to the sun,” I point out. “That story is about ambition.”

  “The story is about understanding nature’s limits,” Ness claims. “It’s about craving more than we can possess. It’s about ego. And don’t forget, it was the sea that killed him. Not the sun. Icarus drowned.”

  A periwinkle catches my eye. I stoop to pick it up and add it to my bag.

  “There’s a better one just over there,” Ness tells me. He points an impossible distance away. I can’t tell if he sees the shell or if he knows it’s there from being down on the beach earlier that day. I inspect my specimen. It’s the finest shell I’ve picked off a beach in years. The lip is cracked, the crown chipped, a hole straight through the apex, and the interior is dull from too much time in the sun. But it’s gorgeous. Rare. I slip it into the bag.

  “A week from now, you’ll step right over that shell,” Ness tells me.

  “I hope you’re wrong,” I say. “I don’t want to ever get like that.”

  He shrugs. I see a nutmeg and an auger. Both worn. I wonder how long they’ve been bouncing along on this beach, no one here to pick them up, to rescue them.

  “Are you old enough to remember when everyone had shelling stories?” Ness asks.

  “I’m not much younger than you,” I say. “But thanks for asking.”

  He turns and smiles at me. I have to remind myself that his family made their fortune by ruining the world. And while the rest of us agonized over the floods and the erosion and news of every sea life extinction, Ness was at a fancy college, rowing boats, getting into trouble, always smiling, always having a good time, not a care in the world. I am constantly reminding myself of this around him. My story is not going to change. I’m just here to write a second story, the story of the lace murexes.

  “So, I have a theory on why we don’t hear shelling stories like we used to,” he says. “Why those stories suddenly stopped a few decades ago.”

  “You mean because shells have become vanishingly rare? Because sea life is going extinct?” I stop myself from spelling out the ecological disaster that led to this. Or pointing out that most people don’t have gas-burning cars in their garages any more.

  “Good shells have been hard to find for a long time, but when the fad hit, and the magazines for collectors came out, and the stupid shows hit cable TV—the Shell Hunters, Diving for Sand Dollars, all that nonsense—there was a flurry of boasts, but then everyone clammed up. No pun intended.”

  “Lightning whelk,” I say, retrieving a half-buried shell and seeing that only the lip is chipped. A stunning specimen. I put it in the higher pocket of my shelling bag so it doesn’t rub against any of the others.

  “Nice find,” Ness says. He seems sincere. I note he has yet to pick up a shell. The wind catches the end of his empty bag and twists it and flaps it around. “And then News Journal did their big piece about the value of shells, and within weeks, they all seemed to disappear.” Ness snaps his fingers. “Which isn’t possible. What really happened, I think, is that everyone shut up about their finds. Not just where they found them, but that they’d found anything at all. It was about this time that people started calling what you and I do the latest Dutch Tulip Craze.”

  I notice that he lumps us together, me and him, as if our shelling is anything alike.

  “People were getting up at four in the morning, three in the morning, two in the morning, and grabbing every shell they could scoop up. Shells kept rolling in, but someone would be there immediately to take them. Nobody trusted anyone else not to follow them to their favorite spot. You remember when just a handful of cars by a remote beach would cause rumors and then traffic jams?”

  “I remember,” I say. “My dad used to wake us up in the middle of the night, say he got a tip from a friend, or just had a feeling, or that some storm had just hit the beach, and we’d get dressed, grab our bags and flashlights, and jump in the car. It was the only time he let me eat fast food. That’s what I remember the most, when I was young. Breakfast biscuits in the middle of the night.”

  The memory is so clear: my mom and dad in the front seat, me and my sister leaning up between them, my mom telling us to buckle up. I pretend to study the sand, lowering myself to one knee, and wipe my eyes.

  “It was twenty years before the shells really thinned out,” Ness says. “I mean, they were dying off before. The reefs were dying long before that. Have you ever been to the Great Barrier Reef?”

  “No,” I say.

  “You should go. Everyone should, as soon as they can. I went when the reefs were at ten percent of their former glory, and I remember thinking before I flew down there, ‘Why bother?’ But you should have seen the reefs then. And if you wait another ten years, you’ll kick yourself for not seeing them now.” Ness points toward something a dozen paces away. “Imperial venus. Still intact. But you’re more of a gastropod girl than a bivalve, aren’t you?”

  I find the shell he’s referring to. The two halves are still joined by a sturdy hinge. Shades of pink slide into ivory white. I slide the gorgeous shell into the padded bivalve pouch along the lip of my bag. “I like both,” I say. “I’ve always loved shells. And I can see your point. My dad got real secretive about our favorite shelling spots. And I remember him and my mom arguing about whether it made more sense to stay up until one in the morning or go to sleep early and set alarms for two. It got crazy there for a few years.”

  “Exactly. But even my grandfather had memories like that. Back in the eighties, people still got up early on vacation to beat their neighbors down to the beach. Shellers watched the tides. And my dad used to tell me about snorkelers beyond the breakers when he was a kid, swimmers trailing bags of finds behind them—”

  “And now people use subs and cranes,” I say. “They mine for them like minerals. They use abandoned oil platforms. Takes the romance out of it, don’t you think?”

  Ness inspects a shell on the beach, then places it back where he found it. “I think it can,” he admits. “But not always. One of the most romantic places I’ve ever seen was a gem mine. The way the walls sparkled in our flashlights. Water dripping everywhere. It was industrial, sure, but it was intensely beautiful.”

  All I can imagine is it being intense. Overbearing. Then again, the sea is throwing up walls of foam right beside me, roaring like a great, incessant engine, churning up the waters and depositing small finds upon the beach. To me, nothing gets more romantic, more hauntingly lovely, than this setting right here, and yet the surf can be a dangerous and deadly place.

  “I don’t want to skip ahead,” I say, “but I’m guessing the murexes didn’t wash up here.”

  “This is the first stage of shelling,” Ness says. “Walking the tideline. Picking through whatever is deposited here. The history of what we’ve done to the sea can be told in where we do our shelling. It started on the beach, where a distant abundance of life allowed shells to leak out at the edges. There used to be so much life that it appeared where it was never meant to. You need to see this to understand how my journey started. Because it started with an idea.”

  “What idea is that?” I ask.

  Ness stops and turns to me. The wind toys with the brim of his hat. He holds up a shell for a moment before tossing it back to the beach. “You and me,” he says. “We collect dead things.”

  16

  I used to tell Michael until his ears bled all the ways that shelling is the greatest metaphor for relationships. I told him this a thousand times, back when we were married. He got si
ck of hearing it, but I have hundreds of examples, and now here’s one more: Be careful of the bounty you pine for.

  This came to me after my first day of shelling with Ness, which was both the best day of shelling that I’ve ever had and also the most disappointing. Maybe disappointing is the wrong word. How about unsatisfying.

  Just as with relationships, you think you know what you want, but once you have it, the hole you thought it would fill is that much bigger. The want is what exists, not the thing we lust after.

  I feel very Buddhist, thinking this. I’ve arranged myself in the reading nook at the top of the guest house, my spoils for the day arranged on the bench around me. I washed the sand off them in the sink and dabbed each shell dry with one of the terrycloth towels from the bathroom. None of the specimens are flawless. None are museum-quality. But there are at least four shells here that are in better condition and of rarer variety than any shell I own. And I scooped them all off a single beach in a single afternoon in daylight. The shells in my apartment back home represent two decades of striving. What I collected today was just too easy, and so the victory feels a tad hollow. A little depressing.

  The lighthouse to the south swings its beam through the reading nook, and I think back to Jacob Sullivan, my first boyfriend in high school. It’s not our first kiss that I remember, it’s the sudden ownership of a boy that I could kiss at will. The night we made out for the first time—after we had taken a break because of him fumbling for my belt and freaking me out—I remember leaning forward and kissing him on the lips just because I could. Any time I wanted. The forbidden and impossible were now at my beck and call.

  So many shells arranged around me. And there’s the knowledge that I could go for more. There’s a beach beyond my door that I won’t have access to forever. There’s a flashlight. My bag. Half a moon. I am dying to lean out for another kiss, to pour goodness into emptiness faster than it can leak out.

  But part of me is worried that I can’t take these shells home. Not that I don’t have permission—Ness told me whatever I pick up this week is mine to do with as I please—but that it will break something inside me to add this bounty to what I have labored to collect over the past twenty-odd years. It would be like bringing a harem home to join an otherwise monogamous relationship. The sudden infusion of so much threatens to cheapen the intense enjoyment of so little.