by Lydia Millet
“He sends me messages, right? Last night, he wanted us to see him. He wanted us to hear the question. The question Where is she. And if we’d known the answer, trust me, he’d know it now, too. So it’s just as well that we didn’t.”
“Wait. You mean he can know what we’re thinking? Like—he can ping us?”
Jax opened his window and set the frog out on the roof, where it hopped away toward a tree branch.
“Is that a tree frog?” asked Cara. “Because—”
“He can read me, at least,” said Jax, turning back to her. “I’m not sure if he can read you or not.”
“How about—the stuff about the water? He told you that too?”
“No. That stuff—I just knew it. The way you know what up or down means, but it’s hard to describe them without using the words up or down. See what I’m saying?”
“Kind of,” said Cara uncertainly.
She half wished Max or Hayley were here, to make Jax explain things in a more basic way. Or just so she didn’t feel like she was the only one whose head was spinning.
“It doesn’t seem empirically verifiable,” said Jax. “Any of it. I realize that.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Cara.
“But Car, I promise you. It’s real.”
He said this softly. He’d sat back down on his bed, opposite her, and his scrawny legs were crossed in front of him. Jax always managed to have scabs on his knees and bruises on his shins.
“I guess, if I’m gonna go with this,” she said slowly, “I have to stop second-guessing you. It’s kind of like I have to either believe it all or believe none of it. Otherwise I’ll just keep feeling like my head is going to explode.”
“Like the posters from that old TV show,” said Jax, and nodded solemnly. “Remember? I Want to Believe.”
“Mmm,” murmured Cara. Actually it was more like she had to suspend disbelief—a term from English class. “But what does he have to do with her? I mean, how could Mom be connected to a scary—whatever he is? And why is he looking for her?”
“I don’t have those answers yet,” said Jax, and shook his head. “But I did remember something. The leatherback? In the writing on your driftwood?”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“They have one at Woods Hole—at the Aquarium. They got it recently. It hasn’t been there for long. Mom was telling me about it though, how she wanted me to come see it. But then she….”
He trailed off. Then she vanished.
After a second Cara spoke.
“You think that could be the one in the message?”
“I don’t have any other ideas,” said Jax. “I mean, how many leatherbacks can there be on the Cape? Unless we want to head for the open ocean, that is.”
“Then we need to come up with an excuse to get Dad to drive us there,” she said.
It was Jax who invented the pretext: a flash drive he claimed must have been left in their mother’s desk, with some of his data. Their dad wasn’t happy about it, but Jax played on his heartstrings. Cara suggested they could combine it with a trip to the Aquarium, which was in the building next door.
At the last minute, as they were getting into the car, Max appeared on his skateboard, flipping it up into his hand right before he hit the sandy stretch of their street. He jumped into the backseat next to Jax, his board tucked under his arm.
It was a new one, Cara noticed—flames and a grinning skull. Really cute.
“Slide over,” he ordered him. “I got long legs.”
“You’re coming?” asked Cara.
“You kidding? Miss the dogfish swimming around in the dirty water? And the quahogs that look so yummy? Forget it.”
Cara didn’t like to eat quahogs, or anything slimy that came from the sea. When she had to watch people slurping oysters in restaurants, she felt like throwing up.
Maybe she shouldn’t plan on bussing tables after all.
“Didn’t expect you back so soon,” said their dad to Max as they pulled away from the house.
“This scuffle broke out at the park,” said Max mildly.
He meant the skatepark, near the pier.
“You were fighting?” asked their dad.
“Not me,” said Max. “I had to break it up, sorta.”
Max was hardly ever on one side or the other. He was the kind of guy who got along with all the groups at school but wasn’t really a part of any of them: the jocks, the geeks, the stoner types. He was kind of a free agent, which was hard to carry off if you also wanted to be popular. But somehow Max did it.
“What happened?” asked their dad, flicking on his right-turn signal as they reached Route 6.
“Oh, you know,” said Max, shrugging. “What always happens. Nothing much. Two guys with supersized egos. Name-calling, whatever. It wasn’t too bad, maybe a sprained wrist was all that happened. Anyway, I just wasn’t in the mood after, so I figured I’d cut out. No biggie.”
Cara glanced back at Jax, who was looking at Max admiringly. Max was a hero of Jax’s but had no idea his little brother worshiped him. In fact, Max thought Jax thought he was stupid. Which made him come down hard on Jax sometimes. Especially lately.
“That’s cool,” said Jax, trying to sound cool himself.
Max shrugged again, settled back in his seat and stuck in his buds.
When they finally got to Woods Hole, Cara was relieved: her dad had taken advantage of the long car ride to deliver a lecture on the Protestant Reformation—mostly to her, since Jax was typing on his smartphoneand Max was listening to London Calling (with the volume cranked up so high that she was practically listening to London Calling too). Her dad tried to spice up the lesson with details about how Martin Luther got married to a nun he smuggled out of her nunnery in a stinky fish barrel, but that part sounded made up and the rest was a bit on the snoozy side.
They drove through hilly, tree-lined neighborhoods and out into the town, which was arranged around a harborfront, with restaurants and bars built right onto the pilings and a big salt pond set back from the shore in the middle of the ocean institute’s buildings.
“Let’s do the Aquarium thing first,” said Max when they’d all climbed out of the car and stretched.
Jax and Cara exchanged looks.
“There’s no rush on the thumb drive, I guess,” said Jax.
“How about I’ll go check the office for you, Jax,” said Cara. “I’m better at finding things. You guys can hang with the seals or whatever.”
Jax nodded. “OK with me.”
“I’ll let you in, Cara,” said their dad from the driver’s seat. “I’ve got her keys somewhere in here.” And he fiddled with the door to the glove compartment.
“See you in a few,” said Max, and he and Jax split off toward the Aquarium entrance.
Cara hadn’t thought it would affect her the way it did, being inside her mother’s office. But as soon as her dad unlocked the door and opened it for her (“Take your time, honey, I’m going to step down the hall and talk to Roger”) she felt overwhelmed. The feeling washed over her that her mother had been with them a long, long time ago.
And that long-ago time might never be coming back.
Her knees went weak and she had to sit down in her mother’s desk chair.
As she sat there, a strange feeling of mixed dread and anticipation trilling though her, she looked around slowly. The office wasn’t much different from how she remembered it; the only sign of anything out of the ordinary was a dried-out plant that had dropped some dead leaves. No one had bothered to water it.
“You got your kids with you?” Roger was asking her dad in the hall, friendly. “The boy genius?”
“Jax is over at the Aquarium,” answered her dad.
There were the framed pictures of all of them on the desk, which seemed pretty neat and well-organized considering how many stacks of reports there were. Her mother wasn’t in any of the pictures, Cara realized, because she had always been the one taking them.
She was ju
st killing time; Jax had given her a thumb drive to show their dad, pretending she’d found it when she was ready to go. Through the open office door she could hear him saying hello to Roger. Roger was one of her mother’s colleagues—an older biologist type who was more or less the boss, as far as Cara could tell.
She opened and closed drawers, then took a tour of the keepsakes on the edges of the bookshelves. Miniature seals and sea lions, dolphins and walruses carved out of bone … Out in the hall, her dad and Roger were getting closer and harder and harder to ignore.
“This kind of occurrence is unprecedented here,” Roger was saying, sounding worried. “To actually have data stolen—I mean her drive was wiped clean.”
“And this was the, what—this was the work on ocean acidification? Effects on shellfish, trophic ramifications?” asked her dad.
“She was slated to testify before Congress,” said Roger. “Of course, that was before … but this break-in only happened two days ago. I was going to call you. Only reason it was discovered was one of her grad students was working late, saw her door open, went in, and found the hard drive busy erasing itself. Someone had programmed it to do so, obviously. Every printout that was back from peer review was gone too, but copies of the article are still floating around. It’s the original dataset that’s missing. And without it…”
“But why would anyone do that?” asked her dad.
The two of them were at the door now, her dad shaking his head.
“The research is important,” said Roger. “It has major political impact, potentially. This was the first data to show conclusively that the ocean food chain is beginning to collapse from higher acidity and will crash completely if CO2 emissions aren’t curbed. First the calcium-carbonate forming organisms will die off, plankton, pteropods, shellfish of all kinds, every species of coral. Her sample showed actual evidence of that beginning to happen. Then the species that depend on those organisms for food will start to crash, and of course that’s where her interest originated: marine mammals.”
“Yes I know, we talked about it,” said Cara’s dad. “She was deeply concerned.”
“Fish stocks will collapse. Macroalgae could force out what’s left of the coral reefs, already bleaching and stressed. Cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates could rise. The oceans as we know them could virtually die off….”
The men were silent for a long moment. Then Roger cleared his throat.
“My point is, if she hadn’t—disappeared, for lack of a better term—she was going to Washington, DC to testify on this.”
“So you’re saying, with this break-in—you think maybe someone actually might have—taken her?”
His tone made Cara’s pulse quicken, so she moved away from the door, picking up a small box from the desk, mostly to occupy her shaking hands. It was decorated with spiral designs and made of a white, pearly material. Idly, trying not to hear the conversation, she slid the top open.
“… can’t believe anyone would go to those lengths,” came Roger’s voice. “It’s not like she’s the only one studying this. New data are being gathered constantly.”
“Then what happened, Roger?” asked Cara’s dad in an urgent tone. “Where is she?”
Inside the box, Cara saw, was a small piece of rolled-up paper. She uncurled it.
What had he meant, “taken”?
There was some kind of poem on the paper, though she couldn’t focus on it at the moment.
The night of fires beneath the sea …
“Cara? You ready, honey?” came her dad’s voice.
“Sure,” she said hastily, and stuffed paper and box into her shoulder bag. “Coming.”
“Find what you were looking for?” he asked.
They were walking together to the elevator over the slick linoleum.
But he was distracted and not really listening.
“Dad,” she said slowly. “I heard what you guys were saying. Someone hacked into Mom’s computer, right? When you said maybe she was ‘taken,’ did you mean kidnapped?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” said her dad. “No, no. Look. I was just throwing out ideas. The truth is, that’s preposterous. We don’t live inside a great conspiracy theory, after all. I’m just—just trying to figure out our situation. And you’re helping me. Right?”
He clapped her reassuringly on the shoulder, but he seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
Her dad took a walk around the village harbor while she went to find Max and Jax. She went by the Aquarium’s outdoor tank with the seals and through the front doors, stopping only to sign in. She passed the row of tanks holding blue lobsters, the ugly, snaggle-toothed wolffish and the conger eels; the place was practically empty today.
Her brothers were probably upstairs, she thought, where the holding tanks were—the part of the Aquarium the management called “behind the scenes,” though it was open to the public like the rest and really just rougher and messier looking, with more cement and metal and exposed pipes and stuff. She took the stairs up and then stopped.
A few feet away, near the long, shallow tray table that held the animals kids were allowed to touch, stood Jax, gazing into a tank that held a massive turtle.
The leatherback, she guessed.
Opposite him the turtle floated in the tank’s brackish-looking water with its beak almost up to the glass and its large flippers moving slowly. It was huge—almost as big as a person. Cara couldn’t see its eyes; they seemed to blend into its black-and-white-spotted body. It was a strange-looking sea turtle, not like others she’d seen—streamlined and more graceful. It didn’t seem to have a real shell on its back at all, only the dark hide with ridges in it.
It was quiet in the room. All she could hear was the buzzing and bubbling of the tanks’ filters and the constant soft trickling of their water.
A sign on the tank said LEATHERBACK SEA TURTLE. RESCUE ANIMAL BEING REHABILITATED FOR RE-RELEASE. THIS SPECIES IS ROUGHLY 110 MILLION YEARS OLD.
Jax and the sea turtle were face-to-face.
That in itself wasn’t so unbelievable. What was harder to fathom—and Cara was used to mysterious events occurring when Jax was around—was the stream that seemed to flow between them, like a turbulence in the air. If you weren’t watching closely you might not see it, or if you did see it you might just assume it was an optical illusion or some kind of minor air disturbance, an interruption in the atmosphere. It reminded her of heat waves hovering over a long road in the desert—the rippling transparency some people called a mirage.
Cara had caught sight of it once or twice before, when Jax was reading someone and there was an especially strong connection. At first she’d thought it was some kind of mirage herself, until Jax explained it had to do with the signal and was a “thermal perturbation.”
But she’d never seen it between Jax and an animal.
And never this visible or this clear.
As far as she knew, Jax had only ever been able to read people. He didn’t, for instance, have a clue what Rufus was thinking—ever. Or identify too strongly with the frogs and crabs he brought into his room. That was obvious.
It was something about the human cerebral cortex, he had suggested once to her, maybe its size or thickness—about the structure of the brain or language, she thought she remembered him saying.
But here he was, talking to a turtle.
Good thing the Aquarium was so empty, she thought, looking around at the room’s leaking, rusty pipes and concrete walkways with the rubber mats on them. She wondered what the general public would think of the scene: a blond boy with dirty fingernails, his phone clutched in one hand, leaning his small face toward the beaked, hooded face of a turtle that hovered a couple of feet away from him and was contained behind glass.
Around the turtle, in its watery enclosure, dark reddish seaweed waved.
And a few feet behind Jax—one of his hands dragging unnoticed in the touching tank near a baby octopus, where he seemed to have forgotten it—was Max.
Looking
thunderstruck. Staring.
Max had always dismissed the idea that Jax could read people. “No offense,” he liked to say, “but I’m a skeptic.”
“What the hell,” he said now to Cara, his voice lowered. He snatched his hand out of the tank. “Is he—like, OK?”
“Jax?” said Cara. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Jax uncertainly. “It’s—the turtle’s talking to me.”
“Yeah, right,” said Max sarcastically in the background.
“He’s—it’s not like the Pouring Man, is he?” asked Cara. “Where he’s all blank? But he can get into your head?”
Jax shook his head.
“No, not at all,” he whispered. “Not at all. There’s a signal, like with a person. And it’s not a he, it’s a she.”
“What did you say? The foreign man?” asked Max.
“Kids!” called their dad, coming up the stairs behind Cara. “Time to get going.”
Max insisted that Cara share the backseat with him on the way home. She hadn’t had a chance yet to ask Jax what had happened—for instance, why on earth a turtle whose ancestors had been around for about 110 million years would want to shoot the breeze with a ten-year-old kid whose worn-out stegosaurus pajamas had gaping crotch holes.
Or whether the turtle had anything to say about their mother.
But Max was getting his chance to grill her.
“First off,” said Max into her ear, so her dad couldn’t hear him, “what was that—what was that, like, stream moving through the air? You know what I’m talking about.”
“I thought you were a skeptic,” she muttered.
“I’m totally a skeptic,” he hissed. “But I have eyes. I saw something. So what the hell was it?”
“Jax once said it was a thermal perturbation,” she said. “Don’t ask me what that means. But it’s what happens when he reads a signal. With people. And he can tell, more or less, what they’re …”