by Ashley Ream
The breeding had, it was said, come before them, and it would continue on after. But his elders had not been ecologists. They had not been given front-row seats to every major environmental disaster in the last decade. They had not seen whole swaths of ocean, whole sections of waterfront, whole colonies of animals wiped off the face of the earth in less time than it took to smoke a cigarette. He did not have the faith of his ancestors. He knew the breeding would continue only if it were allowed to continue, and it made him watchful, and being watchful made him distrustful, and being around Dr. Bell made him paranoid.
John knew about the hallucinogenic effects. All members of the tribe knew, but the breeding had been too rare for the news to catch the public’s attention. If it became widely known, the effect would be devastating. And to become widely known, it only needed to be known by one wrong person.
Dr. Bell had recognized his tribe. She had known his tattoo, and she was, of all possible things, a chemist. So he stood there, and he watched.
The pull-down shades that were in each of the cabins, including hers, were at least thirty years old. They were ill-fitting, cracked, and torn and, in this state, provided him with perhaps three-quarters of an inch of clear glass to see through. The view was a small slice of the middle of the room, which was taken up by her camp bed. He could not see the door to his left or the back of the room to his right. It was not the best of eye lines, but it was the best that he could do.
He had seen her come in struggling to carry the cooler. It was clearly as heavy as he had thought, and his mind worried it like fingernails over a rough scab. Inside the cabin, she moved stiffly, something she had not done at the site, and he watched her do a few old-lady jumping jacks, which was odd but not interesting.
It was cold, and he was tired. The ground was wet. The trees were wet. The ferns that rubbed against his pant legs were wet. He wanted to go to bed, and then he saw it.
She crouched down by the cooler, and when she stood up, she was carrying specimen containers from the site, two large ones. She walked toward the back of the room, disappearing from view. Light from a source he couldn’t see—something not overhead—switched on. Then the sounds came, the low hum of mechanical equipment. Within a minute, she had returned. Again she crouched down and again came up with more containers, more and more, over and over. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of Artemia lucis passed through her hands.
John’s body went rigid. He knew it. He damn well knew it.
He pressed his face harder to the window desperate to see where she was taking the containers, what she was doing with them, but no matter how hard he tried, his three-quarters of an inch of glass did not get larger. He took a step back, his hands in fists. He would have to get inside.
* * *
Rachel tested the UVA and UVB lights, the fans, and the pumps. She made sure the chiller, which kept the tank water swirling around the flasks at forty-five degrees, was working, along with the probe thermometers. Each of those had an alarm that would beep if anything got too hot or too cold. She made small but different adjustments to each tank and placed the samples in. It was important that there not be too many creatures in each flask, or they would use up all their resources and die or cannibalize one another.
Once she was satisfied with the setup, Rachel made her notes, copious and exacting notes, which she kept in her bag at all times and the bag with her. It would be better if she could keep a closer eye on the tanks at night, if she could make measurements and adjustments. But the cabin was too far from the bay, and her absence would be impossible to explain.
She could not have carted all of this additional equipment unnoticed onto the ferry, and so she’d rented a box at the Olloo’et Mail-and-More that promised to accept and hold packages for as long as she continued to pay them. There was no limit on the size of the packages, and when she’d snuck off to retrieve everything shortly after arriving, the Mail-and-More manager was both relieved to be rid of her things and annoyed with her existence. She suspected that future box rental agreements would include more restrictive language.
Rachel stepped back and studied her makeshift lab. The room was not quiet. The fans, which she hoped would simulate breezes across the bay, hummed along with the pumps and chiller. The aerating lines gurgled. The two different light systems, one for each spectrum, shined. She wondered if the light was too bright and would kill the specimens. She wondered if the stress of relocating them to her lab would kill them. She wondered if the arthropods lived a symbiotic relationship with some other living thing in the bay that she had yet to guess at, and the lack of it would kill them. She wondered about all the things she hadn’t thought to wonder about yet.
Standing there, scrutinizing her work, Rachel became aware of her smell. It wasn’t a good one. She was still wearing the clothes she’d worked in all night. The layers of fleece and waterproof nylon, which kept her from freezing in the bay chill, held sweat to her skin, where it dried. What didn’t smell of sweat smelled of the bay, like salt and fish. Sand coated her jeans. It was only this degree of filth, an uncomfortable degree, that kept her from collapsing onto the one made bed in her cabin. The insides of her eyelids itched with tiredness, but still she dragged herself into the shower. The water was cold, far too cold, and she had to move carefully to keep it from touching her back. She did the minimum amount of soaping before pulling on two layers of sweats and surrendering to her four allotted hours of sleep, trusting the alarm on her phone to wake her in time to go back to the beach.
9.
Harry still hadn’t made an appearance when Tilda went downstairs to start the morning coffee. She’d showered and dressed and blow-dried and perfumed after coming home from the pool, but she could still smell chlorine if she put the back of her hand to her face. It was something she both loved and hated about swimming.
While the coffee perked, Tilda walked to the sliding glass door at the back of the house and looked out at the bay. The water was gray and choppy with no trace of the Miracle. It was like a tart who had returned home and washed herself clean of lipstick and eye shadow.
Tilda could see the waves lapping at the beach and the rocks, but when she slid the glass door open, the sounds hit her like a whoosh, washing over her and bringing with them the salty brine that sticks to your skin and gets in your nose. She breathed it in, and something in her loosened.
She stepped onto the deck. It was multitiered and as large as the great room inside the house. The wood was smooth under her bare feet, weathered and probably in need of some kind of sealant. Tilda padded across it, watching the scientists down by the water’s edge. They seemed less hurried during the daytime, less frantic. They clustered under the canopy, which in the early-morning gloom was lit. She could hear the growl of the generator along with the crash and hiss of breaking waves, one not so different from the other.
She took the stairs gingerly, her feet already picking up blown sand. At the bottom, careful of the rocks and broken bits of shell, she curled her toes into the beach and let them sink down into the wetter, colder layers below.
With one hand on the balustrade, Tilda swung around to walk south and didn’t make it a single step. Under the deck, up close to the house where the open area was more than a dozen feet high, stood a sailboat. It was a small sailboat. It couldn’t have held more than two people. The wooden hull was painted white on the bottom and red at the top. Four jacks, two on either side, held it upright so that the keel dug an inch or so into the sand. From the hull jutted an outrigger on two arms, and it had a mast that nearly touched the uppermost decking above.
She stared at the hulk of a thing as though it were some sort of leviathan that had come up from the waves and beached itself here under the house.
“Tilda!”
She heard Harry shouting and then the clomp, clomp of his cane on the deck above her.
“In a minute!” she yelled back.
She took a few steps forward. Inside the hull was the sail. It had been lowered
and stuffed into a bag with a long length of rope wound around it. She wanted to unwrap it, see what kind of shape the material was in. She touched the wooden edge of the cockpit with the tips of her fingers.
“Tilda!” Harry shouted again.
She closed her eyes before she could bark back something short-tempered and regrettable. “I’m coming!” she said instead, giving the thing one last look. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.”
Tilda had climbed three-quarters of the deck stairs, her head not yet visible at the top, and already Harry was complaining. “You left the sliding glass door open.”
Had she? If it was open, she supposed she must have. “So close it,” she said, reaching the top of the stairs and then walking past him and into the house.
Harry was wearing the same gray sweatpants she’d seen him in the night before. His hair stuck up in a sort of spasmodic swirl in the back, and he needed a shave. Both of those things could be remedied in less than fifteen minutes, rendering him fit for public display. That was one disparity even the ERA had not attempted to address, and Tilda would carry that bitterness with her until the end of her days.
Harry followed her inside, and Shooby ran over, prancing a circle around their feet. She would need to walk him. She’d forgotten dogs needed walking first thing, having not had one of her own since leaving Harry. They were lucky Shooby was so well trained and had been doing his Kegel exercises.
She patted his ears, and he followed her through the house toward the kitchen. Harry brought up the rear.
“When did you get a boat?” she asked.
There was a pause, and Tilda knew he had forgotten it was down there.
“Maggie wanted it,” he said when his memory caught up. “Bought it from the guy who used to run the hardware store but never did anything with it. Now it just sits down there eating insurance money.”
“You could get rid of it,” Tilda said, opening the cabinets and taking down coffee cups.
Harry shrugged. She knew he shrugged. She didn’t have to look over to see it. It wouldn’t occur to Harry to get rid of the boat. It just wasn’t Harry’s way. It would rot through and sink into the sand first.
“Is it seaworthy?” she asked.
“Doubt it. Been sitting there for years.”
Tilda took a pause to think about the next sentence, but in retrospect, it probably wasn’t a long enough pause. “I could take a look at it.”
Harry snorted, and this time Tilda did look up. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“I know about boats.”
“Didn’t say you didn’t.” It took Harry this far into the conversation to make it with his cane to the kitchen table. He seemed stiffer than yesterday, but there was no point in mentioning it.
“I grew up with boats.”
Tilda took the half-and-half from the fridge and gave it a sniff before dumping it down the drain and throwing the carton in the trash.
“That was still good.”
“It smelled like baby vomit,” Tilda said and loaded the stainless steel four-slice toaster. The dials were unnecessarily complicated, a purchase of Maggie’s no doubt. It was too early for that, so she just pressed the two plungers and let the crumbs fall where they may.
“Those sell-by dates are just there to get you to waste more and buy more. You’re a cog in the consumer machine.”
Tilda splashed plain 2 percent, which passed the sniff test, into her coffee and put the half gallon back. Harry took his coffee black. She poured it for him and placed it on the table along with a tub of margarine and a half-empty jar of orange marmalade that had formed crystals around the lid, making it hard to open.
Harry watched her struggle, which ended in victory, before saying, “I eat strawberry jam on my toast.”
“Since when?”
“Since the past ten years.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You love orange marmalade.”
“If I loved it, the stuff wouldn’t have turned to sugar in the jar.”
Tilda didn’t see a good reason to answer that. The toast popped, a little too light perhaps but serviceable. She dropped the hot pieces onto a small plate and brought both that and a jar of strawberry jam to the table.
“You’re not eating?” he asked.
“I’m going to walk the dog,” she said. “Don’t eat it all.”
“I’m not making any promises, and don’t be long. I need a ride into town.” Harry had stopped driving six months before and had sold his car. He had done it quickly and a little impulsively, but he was glad that he had. He wouldn’t have wanted to have to look at it sitting in the garage getting dustier each week.
Tilda decided it was in her best interest to take something to go and snatched a plain piece from the top of the stack, making Shooby wait a minute more while she buttered it.
“A ride into town for what?”
“I’m going to church.”
Tilda stopped buttering. “You don’t go to church.”
Harry was using a spoon to fish a glob of seedy jam out of the jar and onto his toast. Spoons had a larger margin of error than knives. “Why do you believe my life stopped when you moved out?” he asked, getting the glob onto the bread and using the back of the utensil to spread it around. “I eat strawberry jam. I go to church.”
“What church?”
“Episcopalian.”
Neither she nor Harry had ever gone to church during their marriage. They had never gone, and they had never discussed going. They had not, as far as she could recall, had a single religious conversation of any kind up until this very moment. It was one of their sincerest compatibilities. That and their love of orange marmalade.
“Well, don’t expect me to go in,” Tilda said.
“Don’t worry. You’ve been banned. We had a vote.”
“I thought churches were supposed to welcome everyone.”
“Most of the time, but we made an exception in your case.”
10.
Rachel woke to her alarm, feeling more tired than she had a few hours before. She sat up and groped for her hooded sweatshirt, the one with the university’s husky mascot on the front. She was already wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt, but the cabin’s heater was anemic, and the doors and windows leaked.
This was the second night of the breeding. There were only four nights left. In the time it took fish to go bad, she would know—either everything would be different, or she would spend what savings she had left on her own burial plot.
She rolled over to the side of the bed, slid out, and performed her stretches, impatient at the time they took. When they were done, she padded over toward the glowing, whirring, hissing tanks at the end of the room. There was no doubt the machinery was alive, and it spoke to her exhaustion that she was able to sleep next to the growling, gurgling—
The thought froze Rachel before she could finish it.
She pivoted on her heel like an officer corps cadet, careful of her tender back, and opened the door of her cabin a crack then enough to stick her head out. The air smelled of rain and the rot of leaf litter. In another half hour or so, her colleagues would be waking up, too, but for now she saw no one and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.
Cold in her stocking feet, she listened. There were birds and leaves that rustled. She heard those right away. No fans or sprayers though. She had half a second of relief and then stilled her breath and listened harder. Maybe there was something, or maybe it was the blood rushing in her ears. She pressed the side of her face to the cabin door. There. There she could hear something. She could definitely hear something. She pulled her head away. Still, Rachel could hear the sound, faint but there. Faint enough to wonder if she was imagining it but distinct enough to tell herself that, no, she just knew what to listen for. She pressed her ear to the door two more times and then walked around the side.
The ground was muddy with only a layer of pine needles over it that went from thin to downright sparse. She could fee
l her feet sinking in like pressing a handprint into wet clay. She’d never get her socks clean again. Almost to the window, she stopped. There were already footprints here, larger ones with the tread of a hiking boot. When and who? Careful not to disturb them, she tiptoed up to the glass and listened. It was thin, single-paned. It was easier to hear through the window. And maybe someone had heard, someone who had stood right there.
Her stomach roiled with worry like a snake in death throes.
Shit.
She needed to do something, and she had no idea what. She hadn’t brought any soundproofing materials with her, and she didn’t have time to find a hardware store and shop for something suitable. She tried to follow the trail of boot prints, but they disappeared in the leaf litter almost immediately. It was hopeless and a waste of time.
Rachel ran back around to the front, her feet sinking deeper in the mud.
And then she screamed.
She had been looking down at her feet, scanning the ground, and she had not seen him. The top of her head bounced off his chest, and John reached out a hand to steady her then withdrew it sharply as though he’d been given an electric shock.
“What are you doing here?” Rachel demanded.
“Can I come in?”
“No.” The single syllable came out fast like a punch. He started to respond, but she cut him off. “Wait, show me the bottoms of your shoes.”
“What?”
She was looking at his feet, but he didn’t raise one up. “Show me your tread.”
He did not comply. “Dr. Bell, there are some issues I’d like to go over with you.”
