by Kate Allen
I nodded.
“I liked seeing the work that my mom used to do, the necropsy,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, Lucy,” said Robin. “We are hoping to get her tags on those sharks any day now. You’re welcome to come out on the boat with us.”
I nodded.
I saw Mr. Patterson, Dad, and Sookie walking up slowly behind Robin. They settled into a space beside Ray.
“Thanks for your help getting the containers to the truck,” Ray told Sookie.
“Thanks for the jaws,” he said to both scientists.
Mr. Patterson shook hands with Ray and Robin and thanked them for the opportunity to watch the necropsy. “I never dreamed I’d see something like that today,” he said.
I walked to the edge of the rocks. The waves were close to swallowing up whatever was left of the shark, the remains of muscle and organs that were already being picked apart by isopods. I watched the water wash into the cracks between the boulders, racing to see how far it could travel before being pulled back into the sea.
Dad came up beside me. He took a picture of the pile of shark in the rocks.
“Mom would have freaked out over those shark pups. I can see her face,” Dad said as he looked at me.
“Didn’t she see a lot of those?” I asked, thinking of the woman in the Cousteau book, looking at the babies pouring out of the mother shark.
“Not white shark pups,” said Dad. “Remember what Vern said? Your mom was looking for a range of different ages. A healthy community has young sharks, middle-aged sharks, and old sharks.”
“Except the community just lost two young sharks,” I said.
“That’s true,” Dad said. “But it means there are probably more out there.”
Mr. Patterson stood next to me, and Sookie pulled up beside Dad. We watched a wave crash onto the rocks, dragging part of the shark out with it. I wondered how long it would take for there to be no trace of the shark. For the rocks to be clean, for the creatures in the ocean to eat the rest of it, for a three-thousand-pound shark to dissolve.
“That’s all she wrote,” Mr. Patterson said, as we watched a section of the tail sink into the water.
“You wanna head back?” Dad asked.
“Yeah, I’m starving,” Sookie said. “What’s for lunch?”
“Good Lord, you’re hungry after that?” Mr. Patterson said.
“We could pick up something on the way home,” Dad said.
“I guess I could eat,” Mr. Patterson said.
We walked up the beach, with Dad on one crutch. I held on to his other arm.
33. The Field Guide
Ms. Solomon grew vegetables in her front yard. There were huge wooden beds, a jungle of leaves, and ripe crops right under the dining room window. I walked between the rows of beans, climbing up a twine grid, and the low, bushy vines spilling squash across the plot. It smelled like tomatoes and dirt. I could hear a bee buzzing nearby, and I tugged on the straps of my backpack, hurrying up the porch steps.
I knocked on the glass pane of her old front door and waited.
Ms. Solomon opened the door with a baby on her hip. Rosie. I had seen her in the school a bunch of times last year and heard about her much more frequently in Ms. Solomon’s science class. I already knew Rosie didn’t sleep well, that she liked avocados, and that she was named for Ms. Solomon’s grandmother. Today, the baby was gumming a washcloth.
“Lucy,” said Ms. Solomon, smiling. “What’re you doing here?”
“I was hoping you’d be around,” I said. “Hi, Rosie.”
Rosie stared at me with huge, bulging eyes like a younger Vern Devine. She kept gnawing on the cloth and looking at my face.
“Is it an okay time?” I asked.
“Of course. Come in,” said Ms. Solomon.
We walked into the house and down the hall, Rosie watching me over her mother’s shoulder. I smiled at her, but she looked at me like I was someone to be avoided.
“Come into the kitchen,” said Ms. Solomon.
She plunked Rosie in a wooden highchair and put some blueberries on the tray. Rosie pinched a berry with her fingers and rolled it between her lips, shivering at the tart taste. All this time, she kept her eyes on me.
“She likes you,” said Ms. Solomon.
“Could have fooled me,” I said.
“She’s curious. She’s trying to figure you out.”
I shrugged and pulled my backpack around to the front. “I have something to show you.”
I unzipped the bag and pulled out the blue canvas journal, placing it on the kitchen table.
Ms. Solomon picked up the book, brought it to the head of the table, and sat down. I stood behind Ms. Solomon, near Rosie, who had popped another blueberry into her mouth. Ms. Solomon opened the cover and looked down at the title page, nodding.
“It’s the field guide,” she said, looking up at me. “Can I take a look?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” I said.
She nodded and turned to the book. I thought maybe she would scan the pages, but ask to keep it, so she could read it more thoroughly later. She was reading every word.
“That’s the merganser we found at Mill Pond,” I said, pointing to the duck with a Mohawk. “The day Fred and I spotted it, I lost my sneaker in the marsh, trying to get close.”
“Good effort,” she said.
“We had one rule,” I said. “We only could include the animal if we saw it with our own eyes. So it’s not really a complete guide to Cape Ann.”
She peeked ahead to the last page in the book we’d filled, about halfway through the journal. “I’d say you saw quite a bit.”
“Fred wrote most of the text and I made all the illustrations,” I said.
“Very nice markings, Lucy,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Ms. Solomon was a terrible artist, but she always encouraged us to draw. Her sketches on the chalkboard looked like preschool illustrations that someone had poked a hole in and deflated. It always perked me up when she drew in class.
She read the pages about the sea urchin, the horseshoe crab, and the moon snail. At which point, Rosie let out a huge squawk, like a crow. Without looking up from the guide, Ms. Solomon said, “Lucy, can you grab the box of Cheerios on the counter and give some to Rosie.”
“Uh, okay,” I said.
I looked at Rosie. Rosie looked at me as I put a handful of Cheerios onto her tray. She wiggled both wrists like she was turning two doorknobs, excited. I sat down at the table.
“I love that you included the golden ratio and the shells on the beach with the holes in them,” Ms. Solomon said about the moon snail. “Beautiful color and dimension, Lucy.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Now, I could see Ms. Solomon’s face. She was very quiet, though she nodded a couple of times. It was an extra-credit project, so I wasn’t going to flunk science if she didn’t like the field guide. But I felt jittery, wondering what she was thinking. I don’t ever remember caring about a project as much before, or working so hard. I kept waiting for her to come to the last section, to the part about the white sharks. After the Cheerios and another handful of berries for Rosie, Ms. Solomon made it to the white shark page.
Even though Fred and I started the research together, the white shark page was blank when he died. I entered all of the text and the drawings myself. I took his words and ran with them. The section was at least five times longer than any of the other ones. Fred probably would have disagreed with this. It might have implied that white sharks were more important than mergansers or spotted salamanders, but to me they were.
Ms. Solomon picked up the washcloth that Rosie had been chewing, and Rosie followed the cloth to her mother’s face. The baby watched silently as her mom wiped her eyes.
“Well done, Lucy,” she said. “W
hen you’re a teacher, you always hope that your student will find something meaningful in the assignment to latch on to and that she’ll make it her own.”
“For most of the project, I think I was along for the ride, helping Fred,” I confessed.
“When did it become yours?” she asked. “When the shark got stuck in the net?”
I shook my head. “Not exactly. I think it was seeing my mom on TV that night. It made me curious.”
Ms. Solomon nodded.
“Every time I tried to draw the shark it looked like a blob, or a windup toy. So I started trying to fix it.”
“Sharks stay in constant motion. It’s hard to capture that,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I started looking at all of the different parts and how they work. And I drew and drew and drew.”
“I knew you would catch things that Fred wouldn’t see,” she said. “But artists and scientists aren’t really that different, you know. They both want to figure out how things work.”
I remembered gutting fish with Sookie the day we talked about why Mom liked dissecting things.
“Why does a squid have three hearts?” I said.
“I think they have two hearts that feed the gills and one larger heart that pumps blood to the rest of the squid. They need high levels of oxygen in their blood to survive.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “Squid have two lines of defense: squirting ink and escaping quickly. They need a lot of oxygen to move away from predators. Maybe they have three hearts to keep up the oxygen supply.”
I looked at the drawings of the shark teeth, the rows and rows, just waiting in line to pop forward.
“Kind of amazing how animals are built to survive,” I said.
“Yes. They adapt.”
Rosie made a humming noise, so I looked over. She put a blueberry to her lips, still watching me, unsure. Then she pulled it away and reached the berry up to my face. She fed me with her slimy fingers. I gave the berry a good mash and swallowed it with no trouble.
34. Darkroom
In front of the open refrigerator, i unwrapped a piece of leftover pizza and took a quick bite, like a shark, trying to decide if it was really worth eating. Nope.
I closed the fridge and spotted a bowl of peaches on the counter. The smell of the ripe fruit was so strong that I could almost taste it before I got my lips around it. My teeth snapped the fuzzy skin and I wiped the juice from the corner of my mouth. This was one of the last great summer peaches. After I swallowed, I heard a noise coming from below the kitchen floor, like metal scraping concrete.
I opened the cellar door. “Dad?”
“Down here,” he yelled.
I walked down the steep staircase, wondering how he made it to the bottom in his cast. We had a real basement. Dirty, cement floor, wires and pipes, and terrible lighting, but at least I couldn’t see the cobwebs or ghosts who’d probably been hanging around since Lincoln was president.
When I got to the bottom, I smelled the darkroom—chemicals, vinegar, and something sweet. I knew it was safe to go inside when I saw the light coming from behind the cracked door. I took a bite of the peach, slurping back the juice.
I pushed the door open quietly. Dad stood over the trays with his weight on both feet, against doctor’s rules. He transferred prints from a tray of chemicals to the water bath in the last container and gently swished them with a pair of tongs.
I looked to the left where he had hung a series of prints on a clothesline over the long, old work sink. Dad clipped a dripping photo on the line.
“Whoa,” I said, startling Dad.
He looked over his shoulder. “It took me all summer to finish a roll of film.”
I took a noisy bite and looked at his work.
“Don’t eat in here. Throw that out,” he said, pointing at the peach like it was contaminated.
I couldn’t believe he was telling me to stop eating. “Fine.”
On one side of the clothesline was the beginning of the summer. I stared at a picture of Fred and Mr. Patterson.
“When did you take that one?” I asked, pointing.
“Fourth of July. They were out on Ernie’s porch, playing their instruments.”
Mr. P was blowing into the French horn, and Fred was watching him, his trumpet in his hands.
“I’m really sorry that we’re not going to get a chance to see where that kid was headed,” Dad said.
“Me too.”
I looked up at the half smile on Fred’s face, wondering whether he still had liked playing patriotic songs with Mr. P, while he was listening to experimental jazz upstairs in his room. I got chills on the back of my neck, like Fred was tapping his toe on my foot.
There were photos of Sookie’s shark, bound and hanging in a loop on the wharf, the heads of people in the crowd framing the huge fish.
“I forgot you took pictures that day,” I said.
We looked up at the photo of Fred and me in front of Sookie’s shark. Even in black-and-white, my face seemed red. Fred’s curls were dark around his hairline from sweat.
“I was a lot taller than him,” I said.
“You were.”
There was a photo of Sookie talking to Lester under the shark.
“I thought I’d give that one to Sook.”
I nodded. “I was mad at you that day.”
“For what?” he said.
“For going diving at the beach. I didn’t want you to be eaten by a shark. Then I’d have no parents,” I said.
“Lucy.”
“No, I don’t want to hear the statistics or probability or whatever. That’s just how I felt.”
Dad looked at the shark photos. “I needed to clear my head,” he said. “When Sookie caught the shark, I thought, ‘She should have been here. She missed it.’”
“I know,” I said.
There were photos of the dive team, taken on the banks of Salem Harbor. Most of the divers just looked like insects, indistinguishable in their masks and regulators, but there was one shot that felt human. It was a photo of a guy in a life vest and baseball cap with one hand on a diver’s back and a bag of rope in the other. Dad stared at it for a few seconds.
“The line tender.” I recognized him from the quarry.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Do you miss them?” I said. “The team?”
He nodded.
I walked farther down the line to the photos from the necropsy, the shark twisted into the rocks like a huge white sea monster washed up from the pages of an old story. Some of the photos were gruesome, but there was a closeup of the intestines that seemed like a photo of a beautiful sculpture.
“That’s my favorite one,” Dad said, moving to the last photo, the one he’d been hanging when I walked in the room.
It was me, crouched beside the carcass, drawing on my sketch pad. Just me and a big dead shark.
“Did you ever think you’d be there?” he asked.
“Not without Fred. Or Mom,” I said. “Why’s it your favorite?”
“It reminds me of them,” he said. “But it also reminds me of you. You’re determined to figure out that shark. And you’re sensitive to the details.”
“Plus, I look pretty tough.”
“Definitely,” he said. “You’d make a good line tender.”
“’Cause I avoid the water?” I asked, not even joking.
“No. The line tender sees everything. Reads the divers’ signals, the terrain, the equipment. Uses all the resources to stay connected to the other end of the line.”
“Who’s on the other end?” I asked. “Mom? Fred? I’m pretty sure I lost them.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “Look.”
He pointed again to his favorite photo.
“Part of it is them. A
nd part of it is you. Some lines don’t break.”
35. As Fluid as the Fish
My room had become a dump. Most of my clothing was on the floor in dirty heaps. My drawers were so empty, I was wearing an old soccer uniform. Dad had stopped by a couple of times in the last week to collect dirty clothes, but I didn’t want to deal with it, so I sent him away.
And it wasn’t only clothes. There were half-empty teacups that were now homes to bacterial colonies. My wastebasket was overflowing with crumpled drawing paper and pencil shavings. Just about everything I had touched this summer hadn’t been returned to its origin. It was all here.
There was a knock at the door.
“I’m cleaning,” I said.
“The prints are dry,” Dad said from the hallway. “Do you have room for them, or should I hang on to ’em?”
I opened the door. “I’ll make room.”
Dad went back downstairs and I carried his photos over to my desk. I pinned the photo of Fred and me under Sookie’s shark to the bulletin board, next to the photo of Mom, Dad, and Sookie when they were young. I rearranged a few things to make room for Dad’s favorite picture, the one of me crouching next to the shark with my sketch pad.
If I was ready to clean up, I knew that I should start with one thing. Just start somewhere. Ms. Solomon asked to keep the field guide, so she could write up comments for me. With the project finished, I decided to reshelve the books that Fred and I had borrowed from Mom’s library. They were all over the place—on my desk, in a pile beside my bed with a glass of old water on top, and under the windowsill. I gathered them and carried them into Mom’s office, stacking them in front of the bookshelf. I tried to remember what went where, knowing that with Fred and Mom gone, nobody was going to notice if the books were in the wrong places.