Returning to Shore

by Corinne Demas

  When she looked up to call Richard she saw that he was already paddling towards her across the cove.

  “I saw one,” she told him. “It was right here—but I was watching it and forgot to try to catch it. I’m sorry.”

  Richard smiled. “That happens,” he said. “But come with me back to the beach now; I’ve got two that need to be measured.”

  “You’ve got two?” Clare exclaimed. “Where are they?”

  “Right here,” said Richard, and he pointed down inside his kayak.

  Suddenly Clare spotted the head of a turtle pop up just in front of them. “There’s one,” she cried, and pointed. The head popped down back under the water, but Richard had seen it, too. He was after it in a flash.

  “Get your net ready!” he called. “She’s heading towards you.”

  It happened so quickly that Clare didn’t know how she actually did it. Some instinct had taken over and in a second she’d spotted the turtle, reached out with her net, and the next thing she knew she was struggling to hold on to the weight at the end of her net and keep her kayak from tipping over. Richard’s kayak was beside hers in an instant.

  “Great job!” he said.

  The turtle was a clawing, thrashing creature, big as a dinner plate and heavy as a rock. It scratched Clare’s arm and she almost dropped it, net and all. Richard got it out of the net and held it for her to see. Clare stared at it and it stared right back at her. It had a wild, prehistoric look, like a dinosaur or a dragon.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” Richard asked.

  They brought the terrapin back to shore and Richard got out his equipment for measuring and marking them.

  “Yours is a female,” he told Clare. “They’re always bigger than the males. And she’s one who’s never been captured before. We’ll do her first.” Richard showed Clare how to hold the turtle so it couldn’t claw her, but it was difficult to hold on to that heavy weight and keep her hands free of the sharp claws.

  “Steady, Sweetheart,” he said to the turtle.

  “What happened to her shell here?” asked Clare.

  Richard rubbed the damaged spot with his thumb. “Got hit by something,” he said. “Probably a boat propeller, but it’s healed up fine. It isn’t slowing her down.”

  The turtle didn’t like to be weighed. She didn’t like to be measured with calipers. And she did not like having the edge of her shell notched with a file. It seemed like a cruel procedure to Clare, but Richard assured her it didn’t actually hurt the turtle. Every turtle had a different series of notches that stood for numbers, this was #1430 and it would be entered in the database.

  “This little lady’s gravid,” said Richard.

  “What’s that?” asked Clare.

  “Full of eggs. She’s going to be coming up on the shore any day now to lay them. Here, you can feel them inside her.”

  Richard held the turtle and showed Clare where to slip her fingers in the back, between the shells. It seemed like too intimate a thing, an invasion of the turtle’s privacy, but Clare didn’t want to say so. And it was miraculous, after all, to reach in among the folds of turtle skin and feel something like marbles, which were the eggs the turtle would be laying, future baby turtles.

  “Could we give her a name?” asked Clare. “I know she has a number, but wouldn’t it be nice for her to have a name, too?”

  “Certainly. What do you want to name her?” asked Richard.

  Clare looked at the turtle. The turtle’s eyes were bright and intelligent looking. She looked a bit like a photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt in Clare’s social studies textbook.

  “How about Eleanor?” she asked.

  “That’s fine by me,” said Richard.

  When they were done recording all the information about the turtle, Richard handed her over to Clare to take back down to the water to release.

  “So, she’s going to have to swim all the way out into the bay, and around Blackfish Island, watching out for boats, lobster traps, fishing nets, and all sorts of dangers, then climb across the beach and up to the dunes and find a place to lay her eggs?”

  “That’s the way it is,” said Richard.

  “Couldn’t we just find a nice spot for her and take her there?”

  Richard shook his head.

  Clare held the turtle out at a safe distance and walked down the beach looking for the best place to put her down. She waded out into the water and picked a spot where there was nice eel grass to slither away into.

  “OK, Eleanor,” she said. “You’re on your own.”

  She set the turtle down in the water and it scrambled out of her grasp before she had quite let go. Without looking back once the turtle took off, swimming just as fast and gracefully as the turtle Clare had spotted on the other side of the cove. She was gone in an instant.

  “Good luck, Sweetheart!” cried Clare.

  15

  Clare helped Richard with the other two terrapins, and then she released them both into the bay. One was a male and the other was a female. The male was missing a back leg.

  “Could have been bitten off by something or gotten caught in netting or rope and then he gnawed it off himself.”

  “That’s horrible,” said Clare.

  Richard shrugged. “It happens. If turtles get tangled on something underwater they can drown. If they’re desperate to get up to air they’ll do anything. And this guy looks as if he’s survived OK.”

  The female had been captured and marked before, #721. Later, back at the house, they went to Richard’s study. Richard pulled up a chair so Clare could sit next to him at the desk and they could look at the screen together. They entered all the information about Eleanor and the male terrapin. They checked out #721 and found she had been tagged six years before and captured again a year ago after laying eggs on Blackfish Island.

  “What happened to the nest?”

  Richard flipped to a new screen on his computer and scrolled down. “We marked it and put a cage protector on it, but it seems the eggs didn’t survive.”

  “Why not?”

  “In this case, probably beach grass,” he said. “The roots seek out moisture and nutrients and basically suck the eggs dry.”

  “You’re kidding!” cried Clare.

  “No,” said Richard. “The grass roots are as dangerous as any predator. That’s why we need those bare sandy places, those eroded dunes.”

  “What about Eleanor?” asked Clare. “She’s going to be laying her eggs soon. What about her nest?”

  “We do whatever we can for every nest we can find,” said Richard. “That’s the best we can do.” He started shutting off his computer.

  Clare sat there for a moment watching the screen go dark. Then her eyes moved to the photograph in the frame behind it.

  “That’s us, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing.

  Richard lifted the photo and set it closer to them on the desk. He nodded. “That was taken when you were here,” he said. “It was always a battle to get Vera to come. She called it ‘roughing it’—though we had hot water and indoor plumbing. Her idea of an island was Manhattan.”

  “Who took the picture?”

  “My mother—your grandmother. She was always so happy to have us visit.”

  “I don’t remember her at all,” said Clare.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Richard. “She would have loved to have known you the way you are now, all grown up.”

  “I don’t really think of myself as all grown up,” said Clare.

  Richard laughed. “You know something, I don’t think of myself as all grown up, either. Especially now living in this house, where I’d spent so much time as a kid.”

  “Do you have other old photos?” asked Clare. “Photos from back then?”

  “I’m sure there are some old albums around,” said Richard. “I’ve never had occasion to dig them out, but I suppose it’s the right time for that, while you’re visiting, isn’t it?”

  Clare’s eye moved to the other
photograph on the desk. She felt the wave of jealousy come over her as it had when she’d first seen it. She wanted to tip the frame so the photo would be facedown on the desk, so whatever kid it was who had been part of her father’s life when she had been exiled from it would be staring into the dark wood. But her curiosity was too strong. She reached for the photo and set it closer to them.

  “Which is the kid you know in this picture?” she asked.

  Richard’s hand moved towards the photo frame and his fingers settled lightly along the edge. He looked at the photo for a long time. Then he looked at Clare. “I don’t know any of the kids in the photo,” he said. “The person I know in the photo was the teacher. His name was Charlie McNeil.”

  Clare looked at the man in the photo. He had dark hair that was falling across his forehead, a mustache, and a boyish, friendly look.

  “He’s not alive anymore?”

  “No,” said Richard softly.

  “How come you have this photo?”

  “It’s the way I like to remember him. He loved teaching. He inspired his students to do great stuff. He really got them to care about achieving things, even students whom everyone else had given up on.” Richard’s voice filled with—what was it?—pride? Yes, pride, as if Charlie wasn’t simply just a friend.

  Then Clare knew. The idea hadn’t occurred to her before. But now, looking back, she saw that there had been small hints, which she had observed but not actually noted. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She’d been afraid to let herself think it, afraid to say it in her mind, but strangely, now that she knew, at least she wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

  She looked at Richard. They didn’t say anything, but as they watched each other’s faces it was all made clear. Clare saw that Richard could tell that she now had figured out what he had been wanting her eventually to know.

  They sat there in such quiet that all Clare could hear was the plastic clock on Richard’s desk. It made a thunking sound each time the second hand jumped from one dot to the next, like the beating of a heart.

  16

  At night, in her room upstairs, Clare turned off the lights and opened the window wide. The smell of the marsh was strong and constant, familiar to her now as the smell of her own body. She pressed her face against the screen and it bulged under the pressure, then flattened again as she leaned back a little. She bounced her forehead against the screen, stretching it in its metal frame. Each time, it resumed its flatness.

  Somewhere, deep in the marsh, there was a melancholy three-note cry—some bird of night—repeated again, and once again. But no other bird answered it. Clare pulled back from the window. She stretched out on her bed and closed her eyes and concentrated on the comforting smell of the marsh.

  Once you knew something, you couldn’t un-know it. It was there, always, and there wasn’t any way you could tuck it away again, make it something that didn’t exist.

  It wasn’t that Richard was different; it’s just that something about Richard was different. Well, not that it was different, really, because it had been there, hadn’t it, even if she hadn’t realized it.

  Yet how could it always have been there? Richard had been married to Vera. And Richard was her father, wasn’t he? How could he have been married to Vera; how could he have had a child? It creeped her out, the whole thing. It didn’t make sense.

  But part of it did make sense. The part of it that had to do with what puzzled her before. What that woman Steffi had called Richard: “a man of many secrets.”

  The idea of what Richard was had formed in her mind, but she hadn’t allowed herself to use a word to describe it. Now she confronted the words. It was one thing to consider the terminology in general—something else entirely to find a term for her own father. “Homosexual” sounded like something out of a pamphlet on sexuality from her school health class. “Gay” sounded like something frivolous, unserious, not like Richard at all. But what would you call it if you didn’t call it that?

  Clare tried to think about men she knew who were gay. There were actors of course, and the blond singer who came out and everyone at school was talking about it. But in her own life? The only people she could think of were a few kids who were in the Gay-Straight Alliance, and she didn’t know them very well, and Monsieur Langlois, her seventh grade French teacher, and she hadn’t even figured it out on her own. She’d always thought he was really cute, and she’d been envious of Ms. Miransky, who taught social studies, because they were always hanging out and laughing and once she’d seen them together in a restaurant in the city. When she’d asked Susannah if she thought they were living together Susannah had said, “Come on, Clare, Monsieur Langlois is gay.”

  “How do you know?” she’d asked.

  “Everyone knows,” Susannah had said.

  “That’s not a reason,” she had insisted. “Maybe it’s just that he’s French. French men aren’t like Americans.”

  “Oh, Clare,” Susannah had said. “Don’t be so naïve.”

  Vera was certainly outspoken in favor of gay rights, but that didn’t tell Clare how Vera really felt about people who were gay. Peter had a friend who was a lesbian, a poet in his writing group, whom Vera didn’t like very much, and once when they were arguing about something about her Peter had accused Vera of being homophobic. Vera had been furious. “Marcia’s sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with it,” she’d shouted. “That woman is a dreadful poet with an enormous ego. And whenever your writing group meets at the house she never brings even a bag of chips, but she eats everything in sight.”

  Clare wondered if Vera had any idea that Richard was gay. And what would her response be if she found out now? Not that Clare had any intention of telling her.

  There was so much Clare didn’t know about all of this, but there wasn’t anyone she could ask. There wasn’t anyone she could talk to about any of this. Not Susannah. Not even Aunt Eva. She was stuck with this, and it was hers alone. Hers and Richard’s.

  17

  In the morning when Clare came downstairs Richard had glass of orange juice and a cereal bowl and spoon laid out at her place on the table. He looked exactly the same, the way he’d looked every morning since she had arrived—the same blue shirt, the same shorts, the same tanned arms. There was nothing different about him at all, except for this fact that she now knew about. It seemed that it should have changed everything, but strangely, nothing seemed to have changed. They ate breakfast and talked about terrapins, and by the time she was putting the milk back into the refrigerator she had almost forgotten what had happened the night before. Almost forgotten what irrevocable knowledge was now hers.

  Jaylin called not long after breakfast to say that they were back and to ask Clare to come over.

  “Mark’s friend Kip is here and I’m entirely outnumbered,” she wailed.

  Clare guessed that Jaylin wanted to see her only because she had no one else, and not because Jaylin liked her in particular. But she did want to get away from the house—from Richard, from everything. And if Jaylin was inviting her because there was nobody else to hang around with, that was true about her, too: she had no one else to hang out with. If Susannah or any of her own friends from home were here she wouldn’t even have met Jaylin in the first place. So as long as the relationship was even that way, it didn’t matter, did it?

  Richard didn’t mind her going off for the day. And he didn’t ask any questions about where, exactly, she was going. “I’ll make dinner around six,” he said. “You like grilled fish, don’t you?

  “Sure,” said Clare.

  When she went over to Jaylin’s, Mark and Kip were in the garage where a Ping-Pong table took over one of the three places for cars.

  “They won’t play with me, but they’ll play doubles with us,” said Jaylin.

  “I’m not very good at Ping-Pong,” said Clare.

  “That’s all right,” said Jaylin.

  Mark was wearing a bandana tied pirate-style around his forehead to hold h
is hair back. He was sweating as if he were in a tennis match.

  “I’m going finish Kip off,” said Mark as he got ready to serve, “and then we’ll take on the two of you.”

  “Like hell, you’ll finish me off,” said Kip, but he didn’t turn around to look at them. He was not much taller than Clare, a head shorter than Mark, but not as skinny.

  Clare and Jaylin watched the end of the game. The ball moved faster than Clare had ever seen before. It skimmed the net. Clare’s stomach tightened.

  It was Kip who beat Mark. Mark threw his paddle on the table and shouted, “Shit! I can’t believe I blew it. One more game!”

  “No way!” yelled Jaylin. “I’ve been waiting to play for hours and if you’re not going to do doubles then it’s my turn with the Ping-Pong table.”

  “Time to take on your sister,” said Kip. Mark picked up his paddle and Kip moved around to his side of the table. Kip’s hair was straight and sandy colored, and his eyes were so dark you couldn’t see the outline of the pupils.

  “This is my friend Clare,” said Jaylin. “She’s from New York.”