by Susie Bright
When she’d first set foot in Santa Cruz, she’d walked all the way out on the pier to watch the sun sink into the ocean. It would be spectacular, she’d imagined. But the sun did not set behind the water. It felt as if the sun set in the wrong direction here, to the north, as if she’d landed on some alternate planet that was otherwise just like earth. She still looked at maps to remind herself of the simple but disorienting fact that the Santa Cruz coast faced south.
A seal swam in the water, near the shore. She watched it playing in the waves. She loved the harbor seals the most, those spotted gray meat tubes, their black marble eyes and dog-mermaid bodies. They were so elegant. Almost human. Then the seal stopped, treaded water, and looked directly at her.
You haven’t failed. You haven’t been ready. Some just need more time to adjust to all the feelings.
Mischa rubbed her eyes. Had the seal spoken? Did even seals here spout New Age aphorisms? Had somebody slipped something in the mai tais? On the chaise longue facing the sea, Mischa slipped into the drifting sleep of the drunk. When she woke it was twilight and all the tourists had gone inside.
At least you hear me.
* * *
Mischa met James the same way she met everyone: while impersonating a hotel guest. He was standing by the railing looking out into the bay. She walked over to check the waves. He held binoculars up to his eyes and scanned the ocean. When he lowered them, she was right beside him. She guessed he was in his forties. He was noticeably attractive, built like an athlete, but slightly worn, like he’d been in the sun a little too long and worked out at CrossFit a little too hard.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Oh, seals and otters,” he said, “. . . and you.”
“So, endangered species?”
He smiled, the crow’s feet around his blue eyes crinkling. “You’re in danger?”
“Of not living up to my potential, maybe.”
“You here for one of those weird self-development seminars?”
“No, I just live here.”
“At the hotel?”
“Sort of.”
“Really?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m James,” he said.
“Mischa,” she replied. It was the first time she’d given anyone at the Dream Inn her real name. “Where are you visiting from?”
“I live down the street.”
“You have a stolen towel too?”
“No, what kind of person steals a towel? I walked up from the beach. The door is sometimes just open and if I see that, I come in. This is the perfect spot for watching sea lions and otters and sometimes even a seal.”
She smiled as they stood, suddenly together, a crack forming in their private spaces, facing the waves.
“Have you been to the lounge?” she asked.
He suddenly seemed nervous.
“They just remodeled it,” she said. “It’s nice.”
“Does that mean you’ll let me buy you a drink? You’re old enough to drink, right?”
There was something lonely about James, as if he’d missed out on pet adoption and wanted to take care of someone. Mischa felt like a stray, eating other people’s leftover food scraps during her waitressing shifts, looking at other people’s lives from outside. This could be all right, she thought.
* * *
Their second date, they went surfing. It was a bigger day—five-foot swell, negative tide. James’s sexy, sculpted body looked even more outstanding in a wetsuit, like some kind of hot human-seal. She loved his blond sun-streaked mass of surfer hair. They caught the same wave, rode it all the way in to the beach. The sign, Mischa thought, because she always looked for signs, was the seal. The beady-eyed harbor seal rode the wave along with them, watching them, a silent witness.
That evening she went back to his house off West Cliff Drive, two sprawling stories and a separate garage large enough to be a second home. He showed her his office, his three-screen setup that faced the bay. Turned out Surfer James was also a multimillionaire day trader. Her mother would have been pleased.
After that, they were rarely apart, only when James worked or went out for solo fishing expeditions. He had a dirty old truck filled with fishing equipment. It was where he did his thinking, he said, his planning. Her skin prickled but she ignored this in favor of everything else he was: He shared her love of the bay and the creatures that inhabit it. He didn’t seem fazed by her lack of direction. He seemed to want to be her new one. Maybe she could do this, become a mom who walked back and forth on West Cliff rolling a baby all day, free of troubles. She loved strolling the pier, listening to the barks of sea lions, those little beacons of ursine aquatic fuzziness—the otters—and slick, observant harbor seals.
During the day, while James did things with stocks, Mischa returned to the Dream Inn with the stolen towel. James never asked where she went. Come to think of it, James was secretive himself. He sometimes wouldn’t call for a night or two, and sometimes he slipped out at odd hours, saying he had to be on East Coast time and didn’t want to wake her. They spent almost every free moment together but he never insinuated she should move in or that anything should change.
“Are you seeing other people?” she asked one night while they were grilling tofu steaks, veggie burgers, and onion-
and-pepper skewers on James’s porch. Her eyes fixed on the locked garage.
“I would never do that to you,” he said, and took a sip of sauvignon blanc.
She took him at his word. James was removed and solitary, tough to pin down, but so was she. “Why don’t you use your garage for something? It would be a great studio or something.” Like for me, she didn’t say.
“It’s just storage for my old surfboards and crap. Just crap I don’t want to deal with.”
“I can clean it out and organize it for you.” She sunk her teeth into some tofu.
“Nah,” he said, “not worth the trouble.”
* * *
While James holed up in his office, or went on boat trips to fish and think, Mischa surfed. After changing out of her wetsuit at the bathrooms and pulling the towel from her mother’s St. Tropez beach bag, she absconded to the pool and drank mai tais.
Were she and James growing apart? she asked herself one afternoon. Should she end it, legitimately become alone? Was he cheating on her? Why did the pier jutting out into the ocean sometimes look so sinister?
Then the seal popped up from the waves. She didn’t know how she knew this was the same one, but it was—this she knew as it rose and watched her back.
You need to find out. Dig into it. You’re practically a scientist. You need evidence. Take a closer look.
“You can’t communicate with me, telepathically or otherwise, seal. Sorry. What kind of rum do they put in these drinks?”
It’s Captain Morgan, love. But listen to me. Those mai tais are not the only thing that’s spiked. A look of intensity crossed the seal’s face before it dove under and disappeared.
Regretful of her dismissal, Mischa went to the pool every day and stood by the banister looking for the seal to resurface. She listened for it, becoming convinced that whatever its message, it was dreadfully important.
* * *
Mischa got her shift covered on a Wednesday night. She would follow James. He was still so aloof. They lived as if there was no future, and she had started wanting all of the false securities and illusions.
She borrowed a car from another waitress, and waited around the corner from James’s house. Hours passed. At almost eleven, she was about to give up when the lights of his truck went on and he pulled out onto West Cliff Drive, headed toward Natural Bridges. She hung back, then followed. He drove on. He parked near the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. If he was having an affair, this was a strange place for an encounter. Then she saw what he took out of the back of his truck: an Airbow, a lightweight rifle that precision-shot arrows. The downy fuzz on the backs of her arms and legs stood up. That was no
fishing instrument. Hadn’t he said he threw them back? Or was that something she only wished was true?
She trailed him down to the cliff. He put on a high-beam headlamp, carried his Airbow down an opening to a trail to the ocean. He emitted a strange, low, hypnotic whistle. Mischa, lulled by the tone, resisted the urge to drift toward it. The moonlight rippled over the water. She plugged her ears as his whistling continued. And, as if he was a pied piper of marine life, animals began to surface: a pod of dolphins, some sea lions, a raft of otters, and a few seals. In the distance, under the moon, she saw the head of a solitary seal, keeping its distance. Even from there, she knew. It stared at her, caught her eye even from so far away.
You see? Now you know. What are you going to do about it?
The arrow struck. The pained howl of an animal rang out above the sound of the crashing waves. James cast a line, a wiry noose, and pulled it in. He covered the body with a tarp and dragged it back up to his truck, threw it in.
Was that her seal?
She followed him back to the house, her hands trembling in shock as they gripped the wheel. This was what he did when he went out by himself? She would have preferred if he were having an affair, because then at least he would be normal.
He unlocked the mysterious garage, pulled in the bloodied tarp, heavy with the body. Silently, she crept around the corner and watched.
It was no cluttered fisherman or surfer’s garage. It was as if a caveman’s home and a surgeon’s operating theater had merged into one. The walls were lined with James’s trophies: a baby otter, several sea lions, and a slew of seals among them. Some eyes seemed familiar. A light hung above a surgical steel table littered with scalpels, knives, hammers. A hot, bright rage consumed her. He was a criminal and a taxidermist. Addicted to his hobby like a drug. She fled back to the car and drove off.
A serial killer of otters and seals—if James could turn out to be that, anyone could be anything, really.
* * *
I know it’s hard. But you’re going to be all right.
“Oh my god, is it you? I was so worried I lost you.”
The head popped out of the water. Mischa wrapped her towel around herself and ran down the stairs to the shore. She dropped the towel and walked into the sea.
“You tried to warn me. I’m so sorry.”
Don’t apologize—stop your slacking.
“I’ll call the cops, they’ll search the garage—”
Nobody else can handle this for us.
“What do you mean? I couldn’t—”
You saw how many corpses line his shelves. But it’s not the same. Our lives are not of equal value, you see. Not according to his kind. You have to decide who you want to be. But I think you finally have.
* * *
Mischa had to pretend everything was normal with James until a ninth night with a swell and negative tide—a rare occurrence, even more so on the dark night of a new moon.
But eventually, the night did come.
They sat at his dining room table, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling glass. So close, but entirely separate. James was talking about some successful trade he’d made and how he was finally planning their surf vacation to his other home on the Big Island.
“I can’t wait to take you, honey,” he said.
“I can’t wait to go.” She feigned a sweet smile even as her mind flashed to the stuffed baby otter in the garage.
“You all right?” he asked. “You seem a little bit . . . distracted.”
“Oh no. I’m just daydreaming about these well-deserved plans—”
“Excited to finally do this?”
She nodded. “I think it’s more than time.” Him, cutting into the flesh of a dolphin. Sewing up a seal. Sawing. All those terrible instruments surgeons use to save lives, give new hearts, bring life into the world, he was using to maim and kill her innocent compatriots.
“Yeah, I know. I’m so sorry I haven’t planned a vacation for us yet. It’s just been a really busy time. But that is about to change!”
Damn fucking straight it is, seal murderer.
He looked giddy, like a young boy whose home run had just won his Little League baseball game. Mischa’s stomach turned. How could he be so happy about going to Hawaii when his hands had gutted a small family? She had nightmares of the forever-frozen, terrified faces of those marine animals on secret garage shelves.
Did he say he grew up hunting deer in Minnesota?
“You know what?” she said. “I actually have a surprise planned for you.” She took out the wetsuit, the glow sticks, and a bottle of champagne. “It’s perfect conditions right now.”
He smiled. “I’ll go get ready.”
It would take him ten minutes to get into his wetsuit. Mischa knew she had that long. She worked stealthily.
* * *
James paddled out ahead.
“I’m following you,” she said. “It’s hard to see in the dark. I’ll just stay as close as I can.”
She realized how little she’d ever known about James. The Airbow only weighed seven pounds. It wasn’t hard to paddle out with it. But she’d always had strong arms. As she watched him sitting atop his board with the little glow stick, waiting for the next set, she almost felt sorry for him. She set the Airbow on the end of her board and peered through the precision viewfinder at James. What an easy, elegant little weapon. No wonder he liked it so much. She saw her seal, keeping its distance. The stillness was interrupted by an oncoming wave. The set was arriving. She gripped the trigger as she watched him paddle. She felt the lift beneath her board.
Now.
The arrow departed with force. James pummeled forward, off the board. The seal moved. A slight splashing in the waves, then silence. What a perfect collaborator. Who else could disappear a body with such grace? She could already see the headlines: “Cold-Blooded Killer,” “St. Francis of the Seals.”
She went home and took a shower. Early-dawn light poured through the open windows, the thin, sheer curtains undulating like waves in the sea breeze. There wasn’t much time. If she didn’t go now she would have to wait another nine days, and by then it would be too late to go anywhere. She pulled her coat from its hanger and hurried to the beach.
* * *
When the detectives finally searched the house, he’d been missing for weeks. They broke the lock on the garage and turned on the light. Nothing but some power tools, old papers, and a dirty hotel towel. They would have questioned the girlfriend, but she was nowhere to be found, as if she, too, had slipped into the sea and vanished.
* * *
I am home again. I stayed too long, mesmerized by their world, avoiding my purpose until I forgot my identity. In the human terms, a slacker. A slacking selkie. But there are more like James, his kind, and even worse. Now we are just getting started.
FIRST PEAK
by Peggy Townsend
Pleasure Point
Boone sat in the lineup, waiting.
The swell was chest high, out of the south.
He drew his hands through the water and felt the power of the storm that had given birth to the waves, the force that brought them to Pleasure Point. It was a heartbeat, an urgency, a gift from Tūtū Pele’s capricious womb.
He wondered if something would happen before the day was over. He was her servant.
Already, the two kooks were paddling out, both of them in wetsuits that were new and smooth and black. Their arms dipped in choppy strokes. Their feet kicked as if they needed to also propel themselves by air.
He watched them come toward him, felt the energy building behind him. He flattened himself on his board, dug three hard strokes into Mother Ocean, and stood in a single motion that was as natural to him as breathing. He was riding on her supple back, sailing on the force of her slick, wet power. He crouched, let his arms go loose, and knew what the two kooks would see: a bearded apparition in faded neoprene, with long hair that trailed his head like seaweed. He gauged speed and distance, turned sligh
tly so he slowed and was aimed directly at the two men.
He could see the spark of fear in their eyes.
But what they could not see, what they would not see, was what had been left behind. What was now lying secret and powerful in the dirt next to a charcoal-gray monstrosity of a house.
That was what they should fear.
Not him on a board.
* * *
“What a dick,” Jonah said, coming out of the water, leaving damp footprints on the concrete steps as he climbed to the top of the cliff. “He could have killed me.”
“Asshole,” Nate agreed.
The September day had an unseasonably dark feel to it, as if winter were ready to pounce. At the top of the stairs, the two men turned back toward the pewter ocean, trying to pick out the man among the two dozen surfers at First Peak who had ruined their day.
“I should call the cops,” Jonah said. His chest rose and fell. Not from exertion but from the emotion of being assaulted by a guy who had looked like some watery Jesus coming at him on Judgment Day.
“You belong here as much as he does,” Nate said.
“Fuckin’-A,” Jonah replied.
Jonah had bought the house on the Point a year earlier, a single-story shack with a triangle peek of the ocean. It had been occupied by a long-haired woman and a young child who, he was told, was autistic. According to his realtor, the mother of the long-haired woman had purchased the place in 1998 for $325,000 and left it to her daughter after she died of metastatic breast cancer. Jonah had offered $1.5 million for the house a day after it went on the market and raised the price an additional $100,000 after another buyer had come on the scene.
He was twenty-nine years old and already worth $40 million.
“You’re doing her a favor,” the realtor had said.
The day after the longhaired woman accepted his offer, Jonah had driven by and seen her sitting in the front yard with her head in her hands. She hadn’t looked like anybody was doing her any favors, but that wasn’t his problem.
