Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  * * *

  Heading out of Providence that day opened memories of other leavings and losses. Like being eighteen again, that phone call from the U.S. embassy, or leaving Stony Brook after the charming Chris Ryan. A few times she’d called his office but hung up as soon as he’d answered. In a gutsy move after finding out she was pregnant, she’d driven to his house using her late parents’ car and parked down the street, watching as a car pulled into his driveway. Presumably his wife climbed out, carrying grocery bags toward the door. The front door swung open and a blond daughter much taller though not much younger than Amelia came running out to help unload groceries. Amelia watched with the type of shock that wises you up and makes some things as clear as a bell yet so many others not clear at all. She sometimes wondered what their lives would have been like had Alex known his father.

  Amelia remembered thinking it was good that her parents had died. They hadn’t lived to see what a mess she’d made of her life, what a disappointment she’d become.

  As she’d sat driving to Minnesota, it now seemed like a harsh judgment to pronounce on herself at nineteen. And Lord knows, she’d spent the better part of her life atoning for if not trying to prove it wrong. Memories dogged her, bumpety bumping along as if someone had tied rusted cans to the chassis of her Jeep. The Place of No Comfort—clattering and clunking against the asphalt as reminders that sorrow had pulled up a chair again; demanding to be heard until, for some reason, crossing into Ohio. Maybe it was possible to run away from yourself if you crossed enough state lines.

  The job at Sea Life would be different. No lab to run off to at 3 a.m. when she’d thought of something or needed to run away from something else. But now there’d be no open seas in which to dive and extinguish her soul’s burn.

  Like Jen had once said, science is easy, life is hard. To enter a stream of focus to the exclusion of all else was heaven’s reward for scientists. Once the overdrive of concentration kicked in nothing could penetrate, not memories, nor the question of what it would be like to love without doubt. Work had helped tamp down the unraveling corners before they’d land her in the Place of No Comfort.

  * * *

  That first night they’d piled into a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of Cleveland, all of them collapsing dead asleep within moments of settling in with bags of microwave popcorn from the vending machine.

  But then Amelia bolted up awake as adrenaline blasted through her like someone had fired off a shotgun. She struggled to modulate her breathing to calm down.

  “Hey.” Jen looked over from the other side of the bed. “You okay?”

  “Think I’m gonna take a walk, maybe get some fresh air.”

  “Want me to come?”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. But it was 3 a.m.; a tangle of interstate highways bordered the hotel on both sides and the rushing of cars and trucks offered no relief. She went back inside and walked down the hall toward the vending machine and studied the offerings. Nothing looked good except for Good ‘N Plenty, her favorite, and that selection was sold out. She sighed and went back to the room, lying awake until it was time to leave.

  * * *

  Climbing into the Jeep for the last day’s drive to Minneapolis, she felt excited, the kind that happens when one makes a new best friend. She followed behind Jen’s rickety Toyota Corolla, leapfrogging through traffic, calling each other on their phones, since Amelia had added Jen to her phone plan, reminiscing about stupid things that had happened, captains that Jen had slept with, including one who was a polygamist and wanted to take her back to the Sudan to be his third wife, as they wove between interstate truckers when things got boring.

  Bryce followed with his van loaded with all the aquarium gear, buckets carrying sea horses, anemones, and coral along with other aquatic plants and oxygenation machines pumping in air through hoses so that all of it would stay alive until they reached the “Gopher” state. Stopping frequently at the interstate waysides across Wisconsin, they checked on the marine life and made adjustments to the buckets. So far there’d been no casualties as the three of them stood discussing each animal as they feasted on vending machine Kit Kats and tiny bags of chips.

  * * *

  Sight unseen they’d rented a two-bedroom apartment online just a short bus ride from the mall. They’d spent years sleeping berth to berth in close quarters on research vessels, not to mention 24/7 summer dives where they’d often slept burrowed together on boat docks on several continents. They’d worked through having nothing to say, along with the embarrassment of unseemly body smells and noises.

  Jen and Amelia would share a room; Bryce would pay more for having his own. There was enough living room floor space for him to set up his fifteen-hundred-pound saltwater aquarium and they prayed the floor joists were sound enough so as not to be awakened by the sound of it crashing through to the apartment below. The aquarium filled the living room and they had to scoot sideways to get near the couch to watch TV.

  While the apartment listing described it as “convenient to Minneapolis/Twin Cities airports,” it was really code for being on a flight path. The walls rattled and conversation was silenced in regular intervals to wait for jetliners to pass.

  The apartment’s only saving grace was the fireplace. Each would come home exhausted after a twelve-hour shift. Amelia came home first, since she was the early bird and had volunteered to get the 5 a.m. shift. She’d hit the fireplace ignition and then collapse in her down coat onto Bryce’s couch, too tired to crack open the prepared salad she’d brought home. Dozing off, the sound of keys in the lock and then Bryce’s footsteps were comforting. She’d hear him uncapping a beer bottle.

  “You gonna eat this?” Bryce asked. It was after 11 p.m., the crush sound of his down jacket as he’d plop down in the opposite chair, her unopened salad in his lap, his clothes smelling of singed french fry fat.

  “It’s yours,” she’d say into the throw pillow. “There’s a new bottle of ranch on the counter too.”

  “Already got it.” He’d said as she heard the peeling off of the plastic wrap around the top.

  “Jen home yet?”

  “Went out with some musician/mall guy she just met,” he said.

  “What’s a musician/mall guy?”

  The roar of a jetliner shook the walls and he paused. “Uch—this place is such a shit hole.”

  * * *

  Likewise, the three of them shared a cramped office at Sea Life, not much larger than the lab space they’d had in Rhode Island, only now Amelia was their supervisor. A manager she was not, so they’d work as they always had back in Rhode Island, as partners. The first three weeks were spent mostly underwater, getting to know the marine animals, assess their health, behavior, and overall habitat.

  Amelia noted how the staff glanced at watches to mark time, clocking each other’s breaks. Elements of it felt more like an after-school job.

  During the first week they’d gotten lost in the main floor of the mall together during a lunch break, coming back late and joking about it with the staff. Amelia kept getting lost during lunchtime, a few times calling Jen’s phone for directions back.

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Amelia, twice this week.” Jen’s muffled voice, Amelia could hear she was busy.

  “Sorry, Jen.” Amelia turned in circles, disoriented as she held the phone to her ear. “But it all looks the same.” She’d walked around a good ten minutes with no sense of direction.

  She’d heard Jen’s exasperation. “You navigate the world’s waterways but can’t handle a fucking shopping mall.”

  “Alright—I said I’m sorry.” She whirled around, half laughing as she looked for landmarks.

  “Okay,” Jen said. “Look for SpongeBob.”

  She spun around until she spotted him.

  “Got him.”

  “Okay,” Jen continued. “Turn left like I’ve explained before.” Amelia could hear the studied patience in Jen’s voice as an intern was asking questions. “Walk past the Death Star, bac
k past Build-A-Bear, and you’ll see the orange-and-blue Sea Life sign and the down escalators.”

  “Sure you guys didn’t move all this crap around just to mess with me?” she joked but Jen had already hung up.

  Lunch breaks had become too anxiety-provoking so instead Amelia brought sandwiches from the corner store near the apartment and tucked them behind tissue samples in the laboratory’s specimen refrigerator.

  * * *

  Sea Life’s hallways and ceilings were clear Plexiglas and circumnavigated the entire exhibit, the Ocean Tunnel. Visitors were surrounded by marine life in what appeared to be seamless divisions of salt water and freshwater tanks. People paused to watch stingrays, green moray eels, horseshoe crabs, and puffer fish. Others pulled out phones to capture images of sand and tiger sharks, sea turtles, sawfish, a restless arapaima, an alligator gar, and an antediluvian sturgeon.

  The aquarium offered overnight birthday parties as well as special underwater “experiences” to hand-feed fish. Amelia, Bryce, or Jen were required to supervise these parties with two interns at a time, teaching children to snorkel in groups of twelve at a time. Plus there were “Package Experiences” that the franchise would tailor to any group. Overnight sleepover parties, wedding receptions, and experiential learning for elderly adults were promoted aggressively.

  Over the first few weeks Amelia took groups of younger children snorkeling in the freshwater tanks with some of the sturgeon, stingrays, and alligator gar, taking older children with scuba experience into the saltwater marine tanks. This was the more enjoyable part of the job so far, reminding her of the many years she’d spent running the Teen Summers by the Sea for the Department of Corrections of Rhode Island.

  Twenty-two years ago during her first grant renewal cycle, Amelia had created her Teen Summers by the Sea program as a type of community outreach and science boot camp for adjudicated youth, funded through a blend of Rhode Island’s Department of Juvenile Corrections and a section of the NSF grant earmarked for “Community Awareness.”

  It had taken a summer before Amelia had figured out how to play them. On day one, she’d wade through installments of “fuck you” and “I hate this shit,” until someone broke down to ask the first question: “How come the north shore beaches are so rocky when the south shore is as smooth as powder?”

  This prompted a hush—everyone listened while pretending not to—that would not be cool.

  Amelia then would explain how “the Late Wisconsin glacier had stopped and melted mid-island, ten thousand years ago, dumping enough rock and debris from as far away as the Arctic Circle to fill up the entire New York State several times over.”

  “Wow. Man. That’s just fucked up.” One of them shook his head as others concurred.

  “At its thickest point the glacier had carried thirty-three hundred feet of packed ice and debris,” Amelia had gone on to explain. “Almost three Empire State Buildings’ tall.”

  No one spoke. She could hear their minds clicking away as they stacked one Empire State Building on top of another and another.

  “But why? What made it melt?” another asked without the slightest trace of irony.

  Amelia glanced down to hide her smile. She had them and she knew it.

  She explained what makes a rock a rock, why seashells only wash ashore in halves, what causes ocean waves, and how the moon’s cycles temporarily elongate the earth’s crust with high and low tides.

  “Holy shit, that’s too fucked up.” Someone else squealed, others were silent as their imaginations pictured the earth’s travail—torn between an indifferent silver moon and its own molten core. Their adolescent faces, some sprouting crops of whiskers like itinerant weeds, were rapt with the first burn of curiosity.

  She’d taught them to swim and snorkel as undergrads with lifeguard certification. They’d look through their face masks, eyes stripped away to baby innocence in the water’s silence, asking her permission with a slight tilt of a head if they could lay a finger on the fleshy skin of a starfish, or the shell of a sleepy, half-buried horseshoe crab. She’d wanted to shelter them, take them back to the singularity of her lab in Rhode Island rather than return to families who so often were the authors of their strife. But life doesn’t work that way. No one’s safe for long. And last year’s state budget cuts as well as the end of the NSF grant had spelled the end of the Teen Summers by the Sea.

  By comparison, the kids at Sea Life were tame. With most of them having grown up landlocked, with the exception of lakes, the underwater forays were uneventful. Most were scared to death they’d drown if they didn’t follow her instructions carefully and Amelia did little to dissuade that type of thinking. She appreciated that level of cautiousness—especially as it was making for easy crowd control.

  * * *

  The day after Thanksgiving was open season. Holiday shoppers flooded into the mall in record numbers since Chanukah and Christmas coincided that year. Lines at Sea Life’s front admission counter would snake all the way to the bottom step of the escalator. Even the interns were working twelve-hour shifts, after Bryce had said during a staff meeting, “All hands on deck, nobody ask for time off, the answer’s ‘no’ already,” to which some laughed, others gave him a dirty look. But customers began lining up with young children by 7:30 a.m., an hour before the doors opened.

  College students (mostly with an interest in marine biology) staffed the front entrance, clamping wrist bands as customers coughed up the $20-per-person entrance fee. A crowd-control strategy for incoming visitors was to get families to pay another $10 for family photos, grouping together in front of backdrops of their favorite fish.

  Amelia arrived by 5 a.m. along with Meagan and a second intern (she’d become Amelia’s charge since Jen and Bryce would have nothing to do with, in their words, the feckless intern), the three of them carrying a change of fresh T-shirts and caps for the day’s shift. Normally it was a job for just one intern, but as Jen had pointed out about Meagan, “Bet ya a hunj that if we could buy her for what she’s worth as an intern and then sell her for what she think’s she’s worth we’d make a killing.”

  Amelia swiped her card to enter the treatment rooms. Suiting up alongside Meagan and the other intern, every day they dove the tanks before the aquarium opened, searching for animals that didn’t look right, were sick, injured, or deceased. Amelia called it “Death Patrol.”

  “Don’t want to have some little kid spot a sick or dead animal first thing in the morning,” Amelia said in a cheery voice, underplaying how early and how cold the tanks were. “Sort of casts a pall on the day.” Any such animals were removed or cordoned off into the off-exhibit area for further examination, or to perform a necropsy to find out cause of death and test for other more menacing conditions.

  “Come on, ladies, chop, chop,” Amelia said as she climbed the ladder up to the saltwater tank. “Time’s a-wasting.” And as she looked back, catching their grim faces, it was all she could do not to laugh.

  15

  It was the first week of December when Amelia went to check on a juvenile sea turtle that had been laying on the bottom of the saltwater tank. Bryce had told her that it had been listless.

  Amelia suited up in scuba gear, sealed her face mask, and slipped on her fins. The official policy was to check on animals either before or after hours but she was more concerned about the turtle than the rules. The display staff watched as she geared up.

  “Bet ya a latte the thing’s dead in the water,” Meagan said. Her eyes ignited seeing Bryce climb up onto the deck to help.

  Amelia eyed her.

  “Interns don’t get to bet, Meagan,” Amelia said.

  “I thought they liked it on the bottom,” the intern said as Bryce brushed past her. Meagan had this crotchety way of swallowing her words into back-throat vocal-fry noises. Amelia noted several of the others had begun to sound just like her.

  Amelia climbed down the ladder and slipped underwater.

  Visitors gathered in the Ocean Tunnel to wa
tch her glide toward the turtle and she smiled and waved, grumbling to herself. The turtle offered no resistance where ordinarily a healthy one would have swam away. She tucked his bony body under her arm and glided toward the ladder where Bryce was waiting on deck with another staffer to help haul the turtle out to be examined.

  Amelia then circled around the rest of the tank, studying the movements and demeanor of stingrays and other saltwater species, checking for signs of lethargy.

  * * *

  Later she entered the examination room, her feet squishing on the cement floor as she squatted to watch the sea turtle as it lay still in the holding tank.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  Bryce stood with his hands on hips watching it. “Well.” He turned. “He’s still alive.” It wasn’t encouraging. She’d seen this before in the Biomes with one of their turtles when there’d been a problem with the oxygen levels. Sea turtles were particularly sensitive.

  “Could be failure to thrive,” Bryce said. “He is quite young.”

  “Wonder where he came from.”

  He shrugged. “Haven’t the foggiest.” Bryce flipped the turtle over as if looking for a manufacturing label. “That’s the problem. We still know so little about any of these guys.” Bryce turned the turtle back over and set him in the shallow water.

  In the lab in Rhode Island as well as in the Biomes and surrounding aquariums, she and Bryce knew everything about the filtration systems; they’d torn the system apart multiple times, rebuilt some of it, and knew where all the marine animals came from. Here it was anyone’s guess. And while the water quality was tested several times a day, they were told not to monkey with the equipment because they had a crew from the University of Minnesota contracted for maintenance.