Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  “She looks sad.” Charlotte’s voice startled him. Her mouth was so close to his ear, it might as well have been a bullhorn.

  He jumped into the air.

  He turned to face her.

  They stared at each other.

  He was caught. He’d never betrayed her before. TJ couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, he felt flushed, ashamed.

  Charlotte moved the pile of papers and articles off the adjacent chair and sat down beside him, sliding her arm around his upper back and neck.

  “So that’s her,” Charlotte said with finality as she scooted the chair closer. “Uh-huh. You two look a lot alike.”

  He still couldn’t speak. “I-I…”

  “Niinimooshe,” she said, smoothing the back of her hand against his cheek as she sighed deeply. “You’re up at bat now. Nothing stands between you and her.”

  It had been as much a refuge as it had been a torment.

  He said nothing but hung his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So this is your secret.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, looking at the floor.

  “It’s okay, Niinimooshe. Look at me.” This time she said it without sarcasm.

  She held his gaze and smiled in relief, nodding slightly as if this was the final puzzle piece she’d been expecting.

  He rested his head on her shoulder, about to cry. Losing his mother, he let the broken heart of a boy wash through him.

  She held him with the relief of a best friend’s forgiveness.

  TJ sat up, watching as she looked with interest at the Web site.

  “So, that’s her, eh?” Charlotte said quietly, studying the familial contours of the woman’s face.

  He nodded.

  “Same color eyes, shape lips.” Charlotte then began reading the text under the photos.

  “And she’s a marine biologist.”

  “Yes, she is,” he said.

  “So, why don’t you start by telling me all about her?”

  7

  It was morning. Amelia opened the front door in the middle of Bryce’s sequence of knocks, her cavernous yawn being a replacement for the last taps back.

  She squinted and lifted a hand to shield her face. The bright sunshine felt like bees stinging her eyes.

  “Going somewhere?” Bryce tugged at the sleeve of her jacket that she’d slept in.

  She snorted a laugh mid-yawn and was about to tell him to shut up but then remembered the NSF. The sick feeling in her stomach returned.

  “Nice to see you too,” Bryce said.

  “God, what time is it?” Amelia stepped aside to let him pass.

  “Almost eight.”

  “You’re kidding.” She hadn’t slept that late since having the flu.

  Her neck was kinked, her body so stiff it felt like she’d pulled a muscle.

  “I called last night,” Bryce said.

  “My phone died.” She looked to where it lay after talking with Alex.

  “Stopped by, knocked.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really.”

  “Really,” he repeated. “How come you didn’t answer?”

  “How come you didn’t do the knock?” How stupid to have thought it was Myles.

  “Did you see my truck?”

  “No.”

  He always did the knock. “You didn’t do the knock,” she said.

  “Nothing like the sound of tautology first thing in the morning,” Bryce said.

  Not knowing what else to say, Amelia headed toward the kitchen to make coffee.

  “Coffee?” she asked in the middle of another yawn.

  “Sure.”

  Grabbing the kettle, she filled it and set it on the burner.

  “You gonna—” he said.

  “Gonna what?” She looked up.

  “Helps if you turn it on, darlin’,” Bryce reached across her and turned on the burner.

  “Oh.” She rubbed her face. “Sorry,” she said in a yawn and then stood hypnotized by the blue flames tickling up around the circumference of the kettle.

  “Jen thought you might be with Myles.”

  She snorted in a disparaging way and stepped to retrieve the phone and plug it in by the toaster.

  “Your front shutters were open; I’m surprised you didn’t see my truck.” Bryce sat down to face her at the breakfast bar.

  Her face felt hot, she hoped he hadn’t seen her crawling under the windowsill, spying out for Myles. Then she squelched a laugh. Ordinarily something like that would have been the first thing out of her mouth, describing in detail to Bryce how idiotic she’d been.

  “Yeah, well.” She rubbed her eyes. Water in the kettle began to pop. “The laws of thermodynamics are our friends,” she said in a snide way.

  She heard him smile. His breath always changed when he did.

  Slipping off her jacket, she tossed it onto the couch. “Talk to Jen yet?”

  “Nope. Probably still up from last night.”

  They were quiet as the kettle became noisier.

  “So tell me why you didn’t answer the door?”

  “Tell me why you didn’t do the knock.” She threw up her hands and then leaned on the breakfast bar, chin in hand, staring back.

  “We’re having a staring contest?” he said.

  She turned away.

  “You lose,” he said.

  “In more ways than one,” she mumbled, reaching up for two of the largest coffee mugs in the cabinet. Setting them onto the counter, she began to spoon out double heaps of instant coffee.

  Springing her barrette, Amelia re-combed her hair using her fingers, raking out knots as she watched him patrol the living room and then re-clipped the barrette. Leaning on the kitchen counter, she traced a crack with her fingernail.

  “I was worried when you didn’t answer,” Bryce said. “Jen thought of calling the cops.”

  “The cops.” Amelia looked up and nodded, placing her hands on her hips. “Really.” She nodded. “And Jen wanted to call Myles too.”

  She imagined a squad car with lights ablaze in front of her house.

  “‘Dr. Drakos,’” she began in an official voice. “‘You’re under arrest for hubris and the crime of never believing the NSF would turn you down.’”

  She’d almost succeeded in comedy until she choked up in a spastic, embarrassing way. Her throat pinched. She covered her face.

  “I’m so sorry, Bryce,” she said through her hands. Her lower lip quivered. Looking up at Bryce her face clenched. “I let you both down.”

  He rushed to her. Her head didn’t even reach his shoulder as she buried her face into his fleece. He squeezed so hard she couldn’t breathe for a moment.

  The kettle’s screaming whistle broke them apart.

  She poured water over the instant coffee crystals and handed him a cup.

  “We’ve got a month to vacate the lab space,” he said.

  Amelia looked at him, stirring her coffee as she thought. People switched careers over less. Losing a grant of this size often shook the foundation of a person’s life. A few dark grinds floated to the surface as she picked them out.

  For years her backup plan had been to teach high school science. For the past ten summers Amelia had created and ran her Teen Summers at the Sea program for adjudicated youth as part of the NSF community outreach. She’d always figured that if need be she could parlay it into a job. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  For more than twenty-five years she and Bryce had sat elbow to elbow at the same lab bench, five as co-researchers in a larger lab, twenty years running their own gig. She’d known Bryce longer than she’d lived in the Revolution House. Bryce was the only other living human who’d watched Alex grow up. He was like an uncle or a de facto father. He’d played broom ball on the floor of the lab with Alex when school was out or he was home sick. He’d taught Alex to scuba dive, helped him earn his certification through the more difficult scientific and professional licensing. And Alex’s foray into marine biology was inspi
red by watching the two of them work together all those years. After school he’d come help run experiments under Bryce’s supervision, prepare Petri dishes, rinse out specimen tubs, and help to rearrange coral and transfer sea horses—an endless array of tasks that by the end of tenth grade had turned Alex into a bona fide laboratory assistant.

  “—there’ll be another grant, Ammy,” Bryce said, his voice soft.

  She looked up at him, guessing he hadn’t slept much either. His eyes were red and watery, the rims inflamed, making the blue irises look more vivid, like the horizon of the Indian Ocean.

  “Something’ll turn up.”

  “It’ll be different.” She made a face.

  He looked at her as if deciding something.

  “What’s wrong with different?” Bryce bent to eye level.

  “Maybe nothing depending on what different is.”

  “Grant money dries up, new funds flow,” he said. “Life goes on.”

  “Yeah, but Jen’s and my stipends end in a month.”

  “We’ll get new funds.”

  “That could take a year.”

  It would leave her and Jen with no income until summer. Bryce had a cushion of family money. She and Jen lived hand to mouth. Amelia still paused before buying paper towels in the grocery store, thinking of them as a luxury item.

  “Last night we tallied a spreadsheet,” he said. “Later today we can go over it at the lab.”

  Over the years she’d sat with scientists in this very situation, listening as they’d read in the most bureaucratic of terms that “your career has been canceled.” In some cases trying to offer comfort, encouragement while secretly harboring the unspoken belief that somehow the scientist had screwed up. Now she smiled at herself, reeling at how her own judgment had come full circle, after having been so self-assured that it would never be her in that position.

  Amelia sighed deeply and looked down at her toes, guessing that as kindhearted as the scientists in the lab might act, they were probably thinking the same thing.

  They turned as her phone beeped—having charged enough to have a voice.

  “Probably fifty messages from me,” Bryce said.

  “No doubt,” she said. “Yep. Five thousand and one to be exact,” she said. “One from Diane,” she said and jerked up to check the clock on the stove.

  “Oh shit, shit, shit,” Amelia yelled. Diane was director of the Biomes Marine Biology Educational Center where Amelia maintained the aquaria as a condition of one of her smaller grants.

  “Holy shit.” She looked at Bryce as she punched Diane’s number. “I’m supposed to be at the Biomes now. Right fucking now—oh my God, I totally forgot.”

  Amelia sighed and dipped her face into her hand, waiting for Diane to pick up.

  “Oh my God, Diane, I’m so, so sorry.” She looked at the clock on the stove again, running her hand through her hair as the digit flipped to one minute later.

  “Don’t worry, Amelia. Take your time, there’s no rush.”

  She’d never been late to the Biomes before.

  “I’m leaving right now.” She hurried into the living room, dropping to her hands and knees to hunt down her socks and shoes. Pulling on one sock and then the other, she mouthed to Bryce that she’d call him later.

  He strode over and bent down and kissed the top of her head in such a gentle way that it made her stop.

  She looked up at him; such an odd kiss. Their eyes searched one another. His with a sad expression she’d never seen; was it a good-bye kiss or perhaps a hello?

  He waved good-bye and mouthed “Later” and then left as the heavy front door yawned before shutting in that satisfactory way it sounded as it closed.

  She watched out the front window as he circled around her Jeep and climbed into his truck. Something felt unsettling, like she wanted to run out and stop him, talk to him some more. She wanted to get Diane off the phone so she could call him.

  “First off, I’m so, so, sorry about the NSF, Amelia,” Diane said.

  She turned away from the window, already in flight mode she hurried into the back room where she stored her dive gear, sorting through damp wetsuits to determine which was drier and then tossed a pair of fins into a gear bag hoisting up her tank and regulator and setting it all by the front door.

  The Biomes was an hour drive from Providence, and she calculated just how badly she’d have to break the law to shave off maybe fifteen minutes. The place opened to schoolchildren and Diane always like to have the business of underwater maintenance done before the buses arrived.

  Rushing to the bathroom, she grabbed her toothbrush, furiously brushing while trying to mask the sound of doing so.

  “Uh-huh, Diane, so you said it’s the reef that looks like it’s in decline,” she said after rising out her mouth and spitting into the sink.

  “When you get here I’ve got a couple of ideas,” Diane said.

  “About the reef?” The toothbrush dropped onto the side of the old porcelain sink with the double spigots as she tucked the phone under her chin while securing her hair.

  “No, about you,” Diane said. “About Bryce and Jen too.”

  She dashed to the kitchen and grabbed an apple on the way out

  “Oh?” Amelia asked. “What about us?”

  “Well—just drive safe,” Diane said. “We’ll talk when you get here.”

  8

  Amelia texted Diane as she pulled the parking brake. She then tore across the lot toward the Biomes facility, feeling as if her shoulder would separate as she lugged the heavy gear.

  Fumbling with her security card, the Biomes metal door beeped and unlocked. She grabbed the handle and pulled it open as a caffeine depravation headache set in with a dull ache. Hurrying into the women’s locker room she yanked off her top, a few threads popping as she did, and kicked off her jeans. Wriggling into a bathing suit she pulled up the wet suit.

  Grabbing her BCD vest, she attached one air tank, grabbed her dive fins and belt, and headed out toward the marine exhibit area to wait for Diane.

  Climbing up onto the deck of the marine tank, Amelia set the air tank into the water and then stepped down the ladder into the salt water. The whoosh of the water felt like heaven, fresh, cool as she visualized the coral reef. Sometimes reefs did decline in large aquaria but it wasn’t often.

  Swimming into the BCD vest, she clipped it on, slipped on her fins, and hooked one arm through the bottom rung of the ladder, treading water as she waited for Diane.

  Amelia closed her eyes and lay back, floating in the cool water as it cradled her head, giving into weightlessness, trying to slow her mind as it was still speeding on the highway.

  She pulled the face mask down over her nose and eyes and wiggled it into place so that it wouldn’t leak and moved her fins ever so slightly to stay buoyant, imagining a jellyfish in reverse evolution.

  Tears slipped out, down the sides of her head as she floated. So often she was alone except for Bryce and Jen. And now Alex seemed to have settled so far away. Alone except for when face-to-face with a bottle-nosed dolphin or when a wild sea horse wound its tail around her finger and she was one again claimed by the sea.

  Her face mask quickly fogged. She flipped over and pulled it away ever so slightly to dip it in water and then set it back on her face. She looked at the time, wondering what was keeping Diane.

  A stingray swam just beneath the surface and she watched its billowing form.

  The scraping sound made by the metal security door made her tip upright. In came the singsong greeting from Diane.

  “Hi, Amelia.” Diane’s cheery voice laughed as it always did when entering the marine tank area. About the same height as Amelia, Diane wore thick glasses, had cropped gray hair, and was always more professionally dressed as if in meetings all day long. “You’re such a doll for coming in given what’s happened.”

  She didn’t think of herself as a doll. She could fast-talk her way onto any research vessel in the world, or out of trespassin
g violations in international waters when local authorities would threaten to arrest her team and take command of their ship.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Diane said.

  “Yeah, well,” Amelia looked into the clear water. “What are you gonna do when you live in a shoe?” Amelia snorted, something she’d always say when in a jam. This was her last funded dive in the facility. The Biomes had just lost a grant that helped pay for Amelia to maintain and preserve their reefs and aquaria, though she’d promised to come work for free.

  “I mean it, Diane,” she said in that nasally way through the dive mask. “This keeps me sane.”

  Diane tried to catch her eye to smile.

  Holding on to the ladder’s bottom rung, Amelia watched as a puffer fish swam by, inflated as perfectly round as the planet Venus except for the two eyes, a beak for a mouth, and spikes that hurt like hell.

  For a moment neither spoke.

  Diane broke the silence. “I mentioned that Felice thinks the big reef’s in decline.”

  “Yep, I’ll go take a look, let you know what I find.”

  Amelia gave the OK sign, bit into the regulator, and slid beneath the gleam of the waterline. Her head rushed with the roar of her first breath, the feel of her lungs—she was one of them—an Aqua-Lung.

  Water flooded the roots of Amelia’s hair as long strands whooshed with the current, blending into the reef—heaven for a woman whose heart pumped seawater.

  The two e-mails with her father’s name came to mind. Why think of them now? It made her shiver, recalling the Arctic folktale of Sedna, the Inuit sea goddess whose father had thrown her overboard to appease the raven spirit he’d enraged. Sedna’s hair was hundreds of fathoms long and was believed to get tangled up in the nets and propellers of Arctic fishermen even to this day. Ever since eighth grade the folktale had both fascinated and horrified her. As Sedna had grasped the side of her father’s kayak, he’d axed off her fingers and shoved her under with his oar. Each of the young woman’s severed digits was believed to have turned into all of the lobsters, crabs, sea urchins, and other marine animals that make up the ocean floor. Instead of perishing, Sedna had become goddess of the underwater Arctic.