Shark Island

by Chris Jameson

  They’re out there hunting.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dusk was just settling over Boothbay Harbor when Jamie Counihan pulled his rattling Chevy pickup into a spot at the back of the lot behind the Salty Dog. The name was a cliché, but he loved it. Boothbay Harbor had its share of wealthy folks and tourists, but there were still some corners of town where a working man could have a few beers and play a round of darts with the assholes he called his friends. Jamie loved them all, except when he hated them.

  The Dog’s clapboards were peeling badly and Jamie knew that sometime this fall Nathan, the owner, would offer free lunch and beer to his army of regulars if they would help paint the place. They would all do it, too, mostly because the decades of shitty paint jobs had created an outer skin on the bar that was pretty much the only thing keeping it from falling down.

  Jamie had taken a shower and changed his clothes, but he still smelled like the morning’s fishing haul, which wasn’t a big deal at the Dog. Half the clientele were fishermen and the friends, girlfriends, and spouses of fishermen. Most of them could barely smell that stink anymore.

  Jamie’s stomach growled as he pushed open the door. Hinges squealed as it swung open and closed behind him. Voices were raised in greeting and Jamie clapped shoulders, nodded, and grinned as he made his way through the bar. The warped floorboards stank from generations of spilled beer. Nathan stood behind the counter pouring pints with Alice Hoskins, whose husband, Ray, had a heart attack some years back while reeling in a ten-foot swordfish. Ray had hauled that beauty out of the deep, but by the time he’d won that fight he could barely raise his arms, and while it was thrashing around on the deck it had stabbed him in the leg. Nobody knew if the heart attack had killed him or if he’d bled to death, and Alice didn’t like to talk about it, even now.

  God, she’s beautiful, Jamie thought as he tipped her a wink, passing by the bar. He had the same thought every time. Winked every time. And every time, Alice gave him that heartbreaking smile, as if they shared some kind of secret, some kind of pain. He would have loved to take her out some night, but he had never had the courage to ask. She had turned down everyone he’d ever known to ask her, so what was the point?

  Alice pulled a pint of Guinness from a tap and as she started to pace him along the bar, he realized it was for him.

  More voices called out and Jamie tore his gaze away from Alice. Walter sat waiting for him, had saved him a spot at the bar, and the two men engaged in a three-part greeting that involved a little sideways-five, a fist bump, and a single jostle of the hand in the classic Hawaiian shaka, the one surfers used to mean “hang loose.” Walter and Jamie had been greeting each other that way since they had built a fort together back in the fourth grade.

  Walter Briggs was six-four, shaved bald, and a deeper mahogany than the gleaming counter of the bar, which was the only part of the Dog that Nathan kept in decent condition. Jamie and Walter would both turn forty in November, three days apart. Like every year, they’d celebrate together, unless Walter’s boyfriend, Joe, had something to say about it. Walter kept saying Joe wouldn’t mind, but Jamie felt pretty confident that he would. Time would tell.

  “I believe this is what you’re looking for,” Alice said as she set Jamie’s Guinness on a coaster on the bar.

  “It’s a start, m’dear,” Jamie said, raising the pint and tipping it toward her in a salute before taking a sip. When he exhaled with satisfaction, it was not for show. All the tension went out of his shoulders. He was a casual alcoholic. Kept out of trouble, claimed he could quit whenever he wanted to, but he would never find out because he did not want to. And what the hell difference did it make? Half the guys he knew drank a little something every day. Half the women, too. It wasn’t like they were driving into telephone poles or beating their wives like Tom Paulson, who had done both. Now that fucking guy was an alcoholic.

  “Wings?” Walter asked.

  “What else?” Jamie said.

  Alice smiled. She knew what they were going to eat just as well as she knew what they were going to drink. Jamie had to force himself not to stare at her. Her eyes were hazel, but they had golden rings around the irises, completely hypnotic. He saw those eyes, her lopsided smile, and the gap between her teeth that made her real, and he wondered if she found predictability in a man boring or reassuring.

  “Hey, Alice, can I get a salad to go with that? Maybe some peppercorn dressing?”

  “Salad?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “You feelin’ all right, James?”

  “Figured I’d eat something healthy for once.”

  “Coming right up,” Alice replied. She shot Walter a disapproving look. “Maybe you’ll start a trend, be a good influence on some of the other guys in here.”

  Walter toasted the sentiment with his beer, and Alice snickered as she walked away.

  “You are hopeless,” Walter said.

  Jamie sipped his Guinness, wiped the froth from his beard. “What?”

  “Please. You’re so in love with her you’ve got little cupids flying around your head. Probably fartin’ Shakespeare sonnets in your sleep. Can you just put me out of my misery and ask her out?”

  “I’m working up to it. Can’t rush these things.”

  Walter rolled his eyes. “Life’s too short, man. The clock’s ticking away and every one of those seconds is one you could already have her answer, for better or worse.”

  “It’s the worse part that worries me.”

  Walter shook his head, took a gulp of Old Speckled Hen, or whatever other British ale they had on tap tonight. Then he nodded toward the television behind the bar.

  “You seen this yet?”

  Jamie glanced up, thinking it must be the Red Sox game and that Walter would start ragging on the team as usual. He had never met anyone who loved to hate a team more than Walter loved to hate the Sox.

  Instead, the television was tuned to an NECN report about the morning’s shark attack on Cape Cod.

  “Shitty luck,” Jamie said.

  “Luck, nothing. All them fucking seals down there, anyone who’s been half paying attention knows that’s the sharks’ feeding ground. This girl apparently was in there swimming with the seals, taking pictures or whatever. Surfer tried to save her and now he’s chum.”

  Jamie stared thoughtfully at the television above the bar. Fishermen down that way hated the seals because they ate the fish, and over the past decade or so, the seal population had been exploding. The way the guys he knew down on Cape Cod saw it, every seal that got born was taking money out of their pockets. And the seals … well, the more seals there were, the more sharks showed up to eat them.

  “What about the girl?” he asked. “She gonna make it?”

  “Lost a leg, but she’ll live. Turns out her mother’s the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, so of course we’re gonna be seeing nothing but this shit on the local news for a month.”

  Jamie paused with his pint halfway to his lips. A smile spread across his face as he set the glass back down and turned to stare at Walter.

  “You gone looney all of a sudden?” Walter asked. “What the hell’s that look for?”

  Jamie laughed. “This is good, man. This is real good.”

  “How do you figure that, you morbid bastard?”

  “No, no. Think about it. This thing is a P.R. nightmare,” Jamie said, nodding to himself. “The Massholes are gonna have to do something about the seals now. They won’t have a choice.”

  Walter’s eyes lit up. He raised his glass.

  They toasted.

  When Alice came back, Jamie ordered another round.

  ELEVEN MONTHS LATER

  CHAPTER 6

  Naomi sat on a threadbare towel, faded images of dolphins and whales swimming beneath her. Her sweatshirt lay beside her, with her car keys and the copy of Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages she’d been reading. The book made her smile, and smiles were good for her.

  A Frisbee hit the sand a few feet away and ro
lled past, followed by a pale little boy of about nine or ten. He grinned as he raced after the Frisbee and snatched it off the beach while it was still rolling. Triumphant, he tried to turn and throw it back to his father, but instead he tripped over his own feet and tumbled onto the ground. Naomi propped herself up farther, started to rise in alarm, but the boy began to laugh, which was always a good sign.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  A dozen feet away, clutching the Frisbee, he seemed to notice her for the first time. His grin vanished. He blinked with fascination, staring at her leg.

  “Wow.”

  Naomi smiled. What else could she do? Kids, at least, never tried to pretend the prosthetic wasn’t there.

  “Were you in the army?” he asked, blue eyes wide as he walked toward her, Frisbee dangling at his side. It was a natural question. One people asked a lot. Sometimes she wished she could just say yes, make it simpler, but she would have felt ashamed to lie about military service.

  “Nope. A shark got me.” The truth was the best answer.

  The boy’s eyes widened even further and somehow he turned paler as he glanced up and down Lighthouse Beach. “Here?”

  “No, no. Don’t worry. It happened a long way from here.”

  It was only partly a lie, depending on how the kid might define a long way. Truro was down at the end of the Cape, a fair distance, but not so far at all. Not for a shark.

  The boy’s dad jogged over, casting a sheepish grin at Naomi. “Hey, Spence, come on. Let’s not bother people.”

  Face wrinkling in irritation, Spence glanced at his dad. “I’m not bothering her. She’s nice. Her leg got bit off by a shark.”

  Dad went almost as pale as his kid. “Oh. I’m sorry.” Awkwardly, he took the Frisbee from the boy’s hands and started to guide him away. “Come on, bud. Let’s see what mom packed in the cooler.”

  Spence dug his feet into the sand and looked pointedly at her leg. “How come you can be on the beach with that? Can you swim with it, or do you have to take it off?”

  Naomi lifted her prosthetic foot, bending it at the ankle to show him how well it moved. “It’s waterproof, actually. There’s pretty much nothing I can’t do. It kind of makes me a superhero.”

  This made him grin.

  “Thanks for putting up with him,” the dad said, a bit less awkwardly now.

  She told him it wasn’t a problem. Told them to enjoy their lunch. Was it weird, she wondered, that she would have liked to tell Spence more about her prosthetic? The truth was that the thing was a miracle. She had grown up knowing that prosthetic limbs were remarkable, that wounded veterans and the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing were capable of things that people injured in earlier generations could never have done. But the X4 attached below her knee still filled her with a fascination even greater than Spence’s. The battery lasted a week between charges and the charger was magnetic—she could attach it to the back of her prosthetic calf without having to plug anything in. Didn’t even have to have to take off her pants. And the fact that it was waterproof just blew her away. It was a complex mechanism, but it felt simple.

  Explaining all of that to Spence, seeing his wide eyes, might have helped her to fight the urge to go back to her car, crank the radio, and drive as fast as possible back to Andover.

  Stop it, she thought. Just breathe.

  Naomi listened to her own advice. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. Other people on the beach had been glancing at her ever since she walked onto the sand, but she had ignored them all until Spence and his Frisbee. She wore a bright yellow bikini top and a pair of black Nike Pros, which her mom still insisted on calling booty shorts, a phrase that made Naomi cringe. If she’d wanted to go unnoticed out here, she could have worn sweats, but she had never liked to hide. Not the way Kayla likes to hide.

  She didn’t like to think about Kayla.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  The answer had been sitting in the back of her mind, shut away like a dark family secret. Lighthouse Beach was in Chatham, a stone’s throw from a spot where seals sunned themselves on the shore. Just three days ago, the beach had been shut down for several hours thanks to sightings of multiple sharks. Nobody had been attacked.

  Not yet.

  Naomi stared out at the water, her book forgotten. She sat up farther, one hand propped behind her, and scanned the waves, knowing they were out there. It was only mid-June, so although the sun warmed the air and the sand, the water was still chilly, which meant there weren’t many people in the water today. What amazed her was that they knew the sharks were there, and still they swam. But then, she hadn’t been any different a summer ago, had she?

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her mother’s words lingered in her head, along with the image of her imploring eyes. The lieutenant governor was used to getting her way, but she never tried to order Naomi around. No, Ellen Cardiff was sneakier than that. She sowed the seeds of doubt and hoped they would prosper.

  Are you sure you should be doing this? You haven’t been in the water since—

  I’m not going to be in the water, Naomi had told her.

  But you’ll be on the water. What if you have a panic attack? You still have nightmares. I hear you sometimes, talking in your sleep.

  She was troubled by the image of her mother standing at her open bedroom door, listening to the things she murmured while dreaming. She was also disturbed by the fact that Kayla had said almost exactly the same thing.

  Kayla. Just the name in her head made her tense up with something that was not quite anger, not quite regret. By the time the doctors had let Naomi out of the hospital last summer, Kayla only had a couple of weeks left before she was scheduled to fly to California for med school. She had talked about deferring a year, which had sent her parents into a frenzy. Naomi wondered if they suspected she and their daughter were not just friends, if their panic arose from the fear of having those suspicions confirmed. They had wanted Kayla to go far away, and Kayla had hesitated. For half a day, she had considered telling her parents the truth, professing her love for a girl.

  Naomi had told her to go, told her that if she stayed neither one of them would ever be sure if it had been out of love or just guilt and that resentment would poison them. They would see each other at Christmas, they promised each other, at the tail end of the semester Naomi would be skipping, and then when summer came around again they would feel each other out, see if their feelings had changed.

  Kayla hadn’t even made it to Christmas. She had a new girlfriend by October. Naomi had expected it all along, knew that the separation would be the end of them, but somehow it felt so much worse than it would have before the attack. Before she had lost a limb and had to take the semester off to get fitted for her prosthetic and learn how to walk with it. Before she had to endure the constant looks of pity, the questions, and the feeling that she needed to reintroduce herself to the people in her life, as if she had somehow become someone or something new, when she was still just Naomi.

  She didn’t hate Kayla for not sticking it out, but she thought what they’d had together at least would have earned her the courtesy of a few months of lies. If Kayla had waited to tell the truth until after the holidays, when Naomi had started back to school …

  But Kayla hadn’t waited. She said she owed Naomi the truth.

  Naomi told her the truth was selfish.

  When she was being honest with herself, she had to admit that the attack had changed her. Of course it had. She might still be just Naomi, but she was a different Naomi now. A more focused, less patient, more honest Naomi. That honesty had complicated things for her mother, who had been raising hell in the media about the need to do something about Cape Cod’s seals. Local fishermen loved Ellen Cardiff now, because she backed their calls for culling the seal herds, which basically meant a free-for-all for sadists who wanted to kill the cute little bastards. The governor had begged her to back off, because just the idea of a public seal slaughter was
terrible for publicity. Tourists were especially turned off by the idea, but the media would have shown up in droves, filmed it all, and shown it on the five o’clock news.

  Naomi was the one who told her mother there might be another solution. She had spent her free time during her semester off doing research, making phone calls in which she identified herself. Scientists who would have passed off the typical twenty-one-year-old college student to some assistant or just never returned her calls had proved very willing to talk to the one-legged shark-attack-survivor daughter of the lieutenant governor. By the time Naomi had started back at B.U. in January she had decided to add journalism classes to her marine biology major, and now she was combining those two with her passion for photography. For the first time, Naomi knew exactly how she saw her future unfolding … and it all started here.

  Her mother had set up a meeting for Naomi with a friend at The Boston Globe. Ellen Cardiff had wanted to attend that meeting, but Naomi had insisted she go alone. She had to make her own way now. Her mother might be able to provide connections, but Naomi would have to turn them into opportunities, and that was exactly what she had done when she pitched The Globe her idea. She had gone in with a portfolio of her photographs and writing samples and come out with a commission for an article and photo essay for their Sunday magazine. Now that commission had brought her back to Cape Cod for the first time since the attack, and it was the reason she would be going to sea in two days’ time. The Globe had been unable to resist the combination of the survivor-facing-her-fear with the political angle and the long-simmering community debate over the seal problem, which so many now thought of as a shark problem.

  The idea of getting on a boat, going out on the water, made her blood run cold, but Naomi was getting on that boat Thursday because she had to.