by Kate Allen
“I don’t know who brought the alcohol. And nobody forced us to drink it,” I said.
“You don’t give booze to a couple of kids and let ’em go in the water. Especially when you’re studying to be a paramedic.”
She stood up and took a lap around her chair. I felt terrified. There was a knock on the open door. Fiona leaned against the molding.
“Hey,” she said softly, eyeing her mother.
Fiona crept into the room and sat down beside me on the bed, her left shoulder gently bumping my right shoulder from behind. I hoped she would stay close like that, but Maggie barked, “Don’t mess up the sheets!” And Fiona slid off the bed, onto the carpet.
I hadn’t seen her since the funeral. Fiona’s hair was sticking up on the right side of her head like she’d been sleeping. She looked like she could use another eight hours. And I hadn’t seen her with bare lips since she was my age. For some reason I started picking and flattening her cowlicks with my fingers like we were a couple of gorillas.
“Dad said for you to call,” Fiona said.
“What does he want?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“For Jaysus’ sake,” she said, putting her empty glass on the drafting-table blotter. I expected it to roll off into the open backpack, but it stayed in place. Maggie left the room.
“Don’t stop,” Fiona added, resting her head on my knee. I continued separating and smoothing pieces of her pixie haircut. She looked boyish with messed-up hair and no makeup.
I slid off the bed and sat beside her.
“You okay?”
“What do you think? How are you?”
I shook my head. She nodded.
“Where’s Bridget?”
“Staying at a friend’s. Probably at Dominick’s. My mom hates him even more now.”
“She’s really angry,” I said. Fiona nodded.
“I’m so tired,” she finally said. “Every time I try to sleep I start thinking about horrible things. Seeing Freddy. The cops and divers who kept pushing Bridget and my mom away. Reporters.”
“You saw Fred?”
“Just a flash. When I left you in the ambulance to check on my mom. The paramedics brought him by on a board, wrapped up in blankets. They hadn’t given up on him yet, but he was dead. So pale. Paler than usual. And his face was scratched.”
I couldn’t swallow and I almost got up to run to the bathroom. I must have looked like I was choking because Fiona said, “You all right?”
I nodded, working down the saliva. My heart was racing.
“Lucy, I’m sorry.”
“I really feel like I’m going to throw up,” I said, leaning my head back on the bed. Fiona took my hand and started pinching my palm between the thumb and index finger.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know. One of these pressure points is supposed to help.”
“I forgot about puking because my hand hurts like hell.”
“Just don’t barf in here. My mom will go nuts.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“You must miss him like crazy,” she said.
“I do,” I said.
Fiona kept squeezing my skin and muscle.
“You mind if I ask you something?” she asked.
“Go ahead.”
“I saw him kiss you that night. I thought you were friends,” she said.
“We are.” Were.
“Were you something else too?”
“You mean like boyfriend-girlfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I mean, I don’t know.”
She stopped pinching my pressure points and held my hand.
“I suppose Maggie would be upset if I brought a few things home, from Fred’s room, I mean.”
“What do you think?”
I shrugged.
“What do you want?” Fiona asked.
“The field guide and my mom’s research proposal. They’re in the backpack.”
Fiona stood up and walked to the window. She pinched the tabs and pushed the screen up. “Get the backpack,” she said. “Hurry.”
“What are you doing?”
“My mom isn’t going to let anyone walk out of this house with anything that belonged to Fred. Not yet. And not even you,” she said. “You can pick them up on your way home. Hurry.”
I picked up the backpack, but before I could hand it off, I looked at the license plate CD case and stuffed it into the bag. I passed the backpack to Fiona. She tossed it out the window.
“Really, Fiona?” I said.
“Go pick it up,” she said. “Before Mom goes out there.”
Now that the backpack was lying in the grass, I had a sudden urge to run outside and grab it.
We heard Maggie’s feet on the steps.
Maggie entered the room again, just as Fiona clicked the screen tabs shut.
“What are you doing at the window?” Maggie sniffed the air.
“Letting a spider out,” Fiona answered.
“Just kill it next time,” Maggie said, picking up the empty glass.
I looked at Fiona.
“Thanks for inviting me over, Maggie,” I said. “It was good to see you.”
“Anytime, dear. Say hi to your dad.”
I nodded, then looked at Fiona. “Thanks for the talk, Fi.”
“You too,” she said. By her face, I thought she was sad to see me go.
I busted out of the house to scoop up the backpack.
17. Fred’s Backpack
Once in the house, i sat at the foot of the stairs and unzipped Fred’s backpack, the smell of cinnamon gum leaking into the air. It felt a little weird to be looking in his bag, even though he wasn’t there to complain.
I pulled out the field guide with its blue canvas cover and leafed through the pages. Everything was printed in Fred’s tiny, precise handwriting. His penmanship was a sure indicator that he would have had a future at MIT, the minuscule mechanical pencil marks designed to maximize the amount of cryptic data a genius could record on one page.
I grabbed a yellow legal pad where Fred had recorded pages of notes on great white shark behavior, reproduction, and something called osmoregulation. In the behavior section, Fred wrote “spy-hopping” and drew a trio of stars in the left margin that caught my eye.
Spy-hopping—Great whites, one of a few shark species to regularly lift their heads above the surface to seek prey!
I liked his exclamation point. The idea of spy-hopping was creepy because it was so human and calculated. I imagined a shark popping her head above water, getting a look at a colony of fat, tasty seals sunning themselves on the rocks. Then she’d slip below the surface, swim nearer, and attack them from beneath.
I did not speak the language of biology or understand the characteristics that grouped one shark with another. But I liked the behavioral anecdotes. So I kept reading about shark embryos that snack on their lesser sisters and eventually devour other siblings in the womb until the fittest shark remains and the mother gives birth to only one baby. Freaky.
I skimmed pages of notes about how great whites breathe, digest, and reproduce, stopping every once in a while when Fred included a thought followed by exclamation points like, No one has ever seen a white shark mate!!
I put the legal pad on the step beside me and slipped my mom’s research proposal out of the backpack.
PROPOSAL FOR CAPE COD WHITE SHARK AND GRAY SEAL STUDY
I smoothed my palm over the cover, flattening a corner that might have bent in the fall from Fred’s window. The date and her name were typed in the lower-right-hand corner, along with someone else’s name.
Helen Everhart. That was my mom.
But there was a name below hers. Vernon Devine.
I ran my finger over Vernon Devine.
I could hear my dad banging jars around in the refrigerator. I set the proposal on top of the legal pad on the stairs and walked into the kitchen.
My dad was sticking out of the open fridge, balancing on one crutch.
“Want some pie?” he asked, backing out of the refrigerator with a glass dish. It was blueberry with a golden crust.
“Where did that come from?”
“Someone from work brought it by today.”
I pulled down the plates from the cabinet and grabbed a couple of forks from the drawer. Dad poured two glasses of milk and we sat at the table.
“How did it go across the street?” he asked.
“Really weird,” I said. I was going to leave it alone, but he kept looking at me like he was waiting for me to elaborate. “Maggie is a mess. Fiona is afraid of her. I almost threw up in Fred’s room.”
I took a small bite of the blueberry pie and chewed carefully. But when it came time to swallow, I panicked and reached for the milk, taking large sips to wash down the pie. I pushed the plate aside. Dad had his foot up on a chair and was trying to scratch an itch inside of his cast with a chopstick.
“How long until you can dive again?” I asked.
My father put the chopstick down. He rested his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand.
“By winter,” he said. “We’ll see.”
“You really haven’t talked too much about what happened.”
He rubbed his face. In another couple of days, his stubble would be a beard. “Lucy, I don’t want you to hear all that stuff. It’s better for you that way.”
“I want to know,” I said.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and breathed out. He thought for a moment.
“Lester and Bridget showed us where Fred went under. But when we went down, we came up on a mess of debris. Mostly tree limbs. That stuff can hook your tanks and hoses. The line tender was concerned about the divers’ safety.”
“Were you afraid?”
“No. The captain went down to inspect the area. We’d already passed the end of the golden hour. But everyone holds out hope anyway.
“I thought we’d wasted so much time. I just started to lose it. I felt like I was looking for my own kid.”
My throat was starting to close up again. I felt panicky and grabbed the milk. My dad didn’t notice anything. He was looking down at the half-eaten pie.
“I couldn’t see anything down there. Not even with a light,” he said. “And there was Fred, in a precarious spot. I should’ve gone at it a different way, but I moved some debris so I could get to him, and a log came down on my foot. And all I could think about was getting him up.”
“I’m sorry you got hurt,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten in the water at all because it was Fred. It’s personal. But I never would have stayed out of the quarry. I thought I could bring him back.”
I put my elbows up on the table, dropped my face into my hands, and started to cry. Dad rubbed my back.
We just sat there for a long time.
“Why did you go over to Fred’s tonight?” he asked.
“I was looking out the window into Fred’s room and Maggie was there. She saw me and told me to come over,” I said, stopping to blow my nose on a napkin. “I wanted the field guide back.”
I didn’t have to explain the field guide to Dad.
“Fiona didn’t think Maggie would let me take anything of Fred’s. So Fiona threw them out the window and I brought them home.”
“Maggie knows the field guide is yours. She wouldn’t try to keep it.”
“Well, she didn’t seem like herself, and it was Fiona’s idea to make it into a projectile.”
“Okay,” he said. “What else did Fiona throw out the window?”
“Fred’s backpack,” I said. “And the last research proposal that Mom wrote.”
He scratched his left sideburn. “Why did Fred have it?”
“We found it the other day. He wanted to read it, so I let him take it home.”
It was quiet for a bit. I could hear a car drive down our street.
“Who was Vernon Devine?” I asked.
He half smiled. “Vern’s a shark expert. Kind of like your mom’s mentor. Why?”
“His name was on the proposal too.”
“They worked on a lot of projects together.”
“Was he with her when she died?” I asked.
“Vern? No. He was retired even back then and he didn’t go out on research boats much anymore.”
I nodded.
Quietly, I headed for the stairs. Fred’s backpack sat like a peeled banana on the step. I scooped up the proposal and the legal pad, but when I went to stuff them into the backpack, there was a noise like two metal things colliding. I figured one of them was the license plate CD case, but I dug my hand inside anyway and pulled out a strange package. It was a pathetically gift-wrapped box, the size of a Band-Aid tin. The grandma-like paper was a meadow of watercolor flowers, held together by yards of Scotch tape. It wasn’t my birthday. Not even close. It wasn’t Maggie Kelly’s birthday or Mother’s Day. I shook the box a few times. It made a tiny sound, like something soft shifting from top to bottom.
I slung the backpack over my shoulder and carried the package upstairs, closing my bedroom door behind me. I stared at the box, wanting to open it. Technically, it had no owner, which meant that I could claim it for my own. But I didn’t want to take away someone else’s gift from Fred. I shook it. I smelled it (more cinnamon gum). And then I dropped the backpack and tried to rip it open with two hands.
18. Postcard
I stared at the hideous paper, my heart pounding. It could be something I might actually want, like a silver ring with a moonstone. Or it could be bones and teeth from an owl pellet, which only Fred would have thought was cool. Though the more I thought of Fred this summer, the more I wondered if it could be something I’d never guess.
He must have used a whole roll of tape. I jammed my finger into an open pocket in the seam, wiggled it until the tape split, and the flowery paper fell away like a snake shedding its skin.
It was, in fact, a Band-Aid box, made of tin with a flip-top, that once held a family-size assortment of “Plastic Strips.”
“He’s resourceful,” I whispered, flicking the lid with my thumbnail. Pop.
I looked inside. The mystery object was bundled in Kleenex—no, toilet paper. I slid my fingers inside and pulled out the wad. It felt thin and long, weighty. I ruled out shark’s teeth and a ring. I put the tin on the floor, so I could peel away the sheets of tissue. Slowly the object came into focus as the toilet paper became thin and sheer, like I’d adjusted a microscope. A skinny rod of yellow gold. I removed the final ply of tissue to reveal what looked like a crayon dipped in gold with a lanky mermaid swimming the length of the piece.
“What is it?” I whispered to nobody.
There was no chain, but there was a loop on top, as if it were a pendant. I turned it on its side, revealing two clasps, like hinges. It wouldn’t open. There was a small hole in the base. I ran a fingertip over the mermaid. The whole thing looked really old.
I took a seat at my desk and surveyed the landscape—a small village of nail polish bottles, colored pencils, a rubber finger-puppet beast, and a hill of assorted notepads. And then I spotted the little plastic container of dental floss— cinnamon, no less. I made a long triple loop and tied a knot at the back of my neck. The mermaid hung below my heart like a pendulum on a grandfather clock. It smelled like Fireballs—another candy Fred and I never bothered with. I wished I knew where it came from and whether it was mine.
I picked up the Band-Aid tin and looked through all of the toilet paper for a note, but there was nothing. Maybe he figured he’d explain it himself or maybe it was not for me.
I
wanted to ask him what it all meant.
I opened my desk drawer. Somewhere in there was a stack of postcards from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I bought them on a field trip to decorate the front of my sketchbook and inside my locker. Under an old day planner and a couple of overdue library books, I found the museum gift shop bag.
I brought the stack of cards to my lap, sifting through the images before deciding on a Japanese woodblock print with white foam like snow atop the blue ocean waves. I flipped over the postcard to the side with the box for the stamp and the artist’s name. I chose a pen and began to write.
I stared at the final product for a while, wondering what to do next. I found a pair of shoes and I went downstairs. I looked into the living room, where Dad was asleep in front of the Sox game, and slipped out the door, relieved.
I pedaled my bike in the dark to the end of Smith Street, turning onto King, the road that ran into the ocean. The water was a black open space beneath the starry sky. The night air felt clean on my skin and it smelled like wet sand. It had been a while since I’d been on my bike without Fred. I wobbled into town, as though I had lost muscle memory.
I pedaled to the mailbox at the top of a landing in town, the one that abruptly split the bookstore from an art gallery and offered a sloping alley with a bench at the bottom, a bench with a perfect view of the rocky shoreline. I came to the US mailbox just beyond the bookstore and straddled my bike. I opened the loud metal door before dropping my note into the mailbox. I had no idea where it would land, but I felt lighter inside, as though I had cleared something out of my head.
19. All Biologists Want to Know Why
The next morning, i looked for stories about the quarry accident in the Boston Globe again. I was getting to the point where I didn’t want to read any more details, but I also wasn’t ready for Fred’s story to dissolve. I worked my way to the metro region section and stopped. It was like when your brain recognizes a snake in the woods before your eyes see it. The story wasn’t about Fred. There was a large, grainy image of a body of water and two shapes were at the surface: a long mass like the trunk of a tree, followed by a stubby triangle. I read the caption: KAYAKER TRAILED BY WHITE SHARK OFF CAPE BEACH.