Hotel guests, shiny with freshly sprayed sunscreen, mingled just outside the alcove slurping to-go coffees, their noses in maps of Palermo. I felt around for my keys beneath the bench, but ended up retrieving them on my hands and knees. I smoothed my hair, smudging away last night’s mascara, and tried to appear as though I’d just slipped into the alcove on my way to breakfast instead of sleeping there half the night.
Speed walking through the lobby, I spotted Robin and Daniel by the radioactive seaweed sculpture.
“Maeve, wait,” Robin called, catching up with me.
My face must have said it all.
“You read it,” he said. “Please don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know where to start,” I said, and gazed past him at Daniel, buttoned up in his chef’s jacket.
“Let me explain,” Robin said.
“You think I don’t want you to explain? You have to explain,” I told him.
I left him standing there, the whole world off kilter.
Ten
When the phone rang at 2:00 P.M., I glanced at the caller ID—Ridley, N.—and hesitated, unable to place the name. I’d been shut in my room all day working on my lemon shark research, ignoring the unread half of Robin’s manuscript under the bed and the tap-tap that had come and gone on the door, accompanied by Robin’s voice, “Maeve? Can we talk? You all right?”
I’d demanded an explanation from him, then promptly become incommunicado. It was unlike me, but I was angry, too angry to be sensible. I wasn’t ready to hear his bullshit explanation.
I had just turned back to my log notebook when the name on the caller ID finally hit me. Nicholas.
“I’m in the lobby,” he said, when I picked up.
“You’re here? In the hotel?”
“I’m sitting here with your grandmother. I wanted to see you. I hope it’s okay.”
In the background, I heard her say, “Call me Perri.”
“Of course, it’s fine,” I told him. “I’ll be right down.”
Taking a peek at myself in the bathroom mirror, I decided the reflection could’ve been a whole lot worse. No dark-bluish circles under the eyes despite sleeping hours on a wooden bench. I dragged a brush through my hair, glossed my lips, and took a long, steadying breath.
He was sitting beside Perri on one of the coral love seats in the Library section of the lobby, a book upside down on his knee and a backpack slumped at his feet. He looked rested and clean shaven unlike most mornings in Bimini, when he’d turned out of his bunk and headed straight to the lab. The sight of him was a relief. What had I been thinking last night, tearing off to find Daniel?
“I wanted to surprise you,” he said, getting to his feet and giving me a kiss on each cheek, European style.
“Mission accomplished—I’m very surprised,” I said. “So, Perri’s been keeping you company?”
“Nicholas was just telling me that Alexander Pope lived in his hometown of Twickenham,” Perri said.
He gave me an artful twist of a smile, as if caught in the act of trying too hard to make an impression.
Judging from Perri’s adoring expression, he’d clearly succeeded. I gestured at the book on his lap. “Considering your connection to Pope, I’m guessing Perri dug one of his books out of the library for you?”
“This? No, this is Little Birds,” he said, flipping it over. I’d never heard of it.
“I found it on the shelf. It belongs with the room I’m putting Nicholas in,” Perri said, standing.
I lifted my brows. “Oh. You’re staying the night?”
“The jury is still out on that. It was Perri’s idea. I am, however, quite willing to give up a night of my life for the Anaïs Nin Room.”
My reading may have consisted almost entirely of science journals, but even I knew Anaïs Nin was a writer of erotica. The Nin Room was typically reserved for honeymooners.
“That’s practically the only room left,” Perri was saying. Mostly to me.
“If I’ve got my authors straight, she had an affair with Henry Miller,” Nicholas said. “Am I right?” He grinned, and there was all that overpowering British charm.
“You are quite right,” Perri said. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work.” She pecked my cheek, giving me a look she barely attempted to hide. “We’ll talk later?”
When she was gone, Nicholas held up Little Birds, which sported a nude woman curled seductively on the cover. “I do like your grandmother,” he said.
“God. Sorry about the erotica. Perri’s an artist.” As if that explained everything. “Come on, I’ll take you to your room.”
As we moved along the hotel corridor, he read the authors’ name plaques on the doors: “William Faulkner . . . Zora Neale Hurston . . . Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings . . . James Baldwin.”
“Did you hear about the man who was caught with all the shark fins?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s terrible,” he said. He stopped abruptly, placing his hand on my arm. “I’m sorry, Maeve. I know this must hurt.”
He understood better than anyone how I felt, how much it mattered, and I had a sudden desire to lean my forehead against his shoulder and cleave to this perfect thing he’d just said.
“It happened near here, didn’t it?” he asked.
“Less than ten miles. A hundred sharks were slaughtered for their fins, and I’ve heard nothing about an investigation and only one news report—a TV reporter asked some guy on the beach about it and he basically said the best shark was a dead one. This is what we’re up against.”
Nicholas let out a sigh, took my hand, and pulled me along the corridor. “I know a sergeant in the Marine Bureau in the Sheriff’s Office here. I’ll give her a call and see what I can find out.”
I flipped on the light switch in the Nin Room and two mother-of-pearl sconces lit up on each side of the bed. Plum-colored pillows slanted neatly along the headboard with a matching one in the seat of an antique wooden captain’s chair that was tucked beneath a small desk. On a wall shelf over the desk, Perry had displayed a small collection of books to carry out the Nin theme: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One and Volume Two; Delta of Venus; Tropic of Cancer; Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
One of Nin’s tamer quotations was stenciled on the wall: “You don’t find love, it finds you.”
I watched Nicholas’s eyes drift over the words. “Every room has a quote,” I said.
He tossed his backpack on the bed, flung open the French doors, and stepped onto the tiny terrace overlooking the beach. A cloud of warm, humid air floated into the room, followed by the caw-caw of gulls. Bending over the rail, he scanned the beach. I watched him, his body mounted against sky and water, so much wide open blue, and I let myself feel for a moment what I’d felt on our last night in Bimini—the possibility of him, the possibility of a future—before suddenly remembering Daniel. Daniel, whom I’d loved, who was very much here, and who somehow still possessed a strange sway over me. I wanted to believe that what I was feeling for Daniel was merely ricochets from the past, but I couldn’t explain their power. Was what I felt for Nicholas, in fact, more real? I looked at him, aware of how unburdened the two of us were by shared history.
He said, “When I was a kid, the view from my house was an old toilet the neighbors used as a planter in their front yard. Drove my mother mad. She used to say, ‘You can put all the petunias you want in it, but it’s still a toilet.’”
I laughed.
“You laugh, but that toilet got me a record,” he said.
“As in criminal record?”
“My brother and I stole it. We loaded it into my father’s car and tossed it in the trash bin at our school.”
“How’d you get caught?”
“No, we got away with it. But our mother was so delighted over the toilet’s disappearance that my imbecile brother told he
r who to thank. That we were thieves outweighed her delight. She made us apologize to the neighbors.”
I groaned. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen. Jake was thirteen.”
“So this criminal record . . .”
“It’s not a police record, more like crimes against the neighborhood. What about you? Surely you got into trouble living in a hotel.”
“Mostly sneaking out to go night swimming, and eavesdropping on the guests. Eating ice cream out of the industrial-size containers in the restaurant, that kind of thing. We left the toilets alone.”
“Fire alarm?”
“God, no. But there was the time we lifted a bottle of Crown Royal from the restaurant bar.”
“I think you were in deeper than me,” he said. “How old were you?”
“Seventeen. Perri had just stenciled the wall quote in the Emily Dickinson Room, so the room was unoccupied while the paint dried. We took it in there and mixed it with ginger ale.” Of course, Robin was doing the pouring.
He was the only one of us who’d gotten into real trouble. At sixteen, he’d been arrested one night for indecent exposure. After an evening of drinking with his friends, he’d peed in the parking lot of the Palermo Pub and Brewery and been sentenced to community service. For two weeks, after school, Robin wore an orange vest and picked up trash under the canal bridges and along the roadsides.
The wall quote in the Dickinson Room came back to me suddenly, full blown, and I made a little show of reciting it. “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
“Is that the Dickinson quote?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’m duly impressed,” he said.
“That was the great thing about growing up in this place—I absorbed the quotes, which makes me seem far more literary than I actually am.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” He glanced up at Nin’s words again. “So, Perri painted the quotations herself?”
I nodded. “Every single one. But this is the only room that has a second hidden quote.”
He stepped back inside from the balcony, casting his eyes toward the ceiling, then the closet. “And where exactly would I find this mysterious line?”
“Well, if I told you, there’d be no fun in finding it.”
“So you know this room well, do you?”
“I know all the rooms,” I told him. “Of course, this one always had the most allure.”
He examined the books over the desk. “I can see that,” he said, then turned to face me. “I have to take off early tomorrow morning. I thought we could get dinner tonight. I saw there’s a restaurant here.”
A romantic meal. Cooked by Daniel.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s make a picnic and take it to the beach. You won’t even have to wear shoes.”
“Sold. A picnic then.”
He walked over to the bed, pulled a large envelope from his backpack, and held it out to me. “I was going to give this to you tonight, but I guess I can’t wait.”
I sat on the white duvet and opened it. Inside were a couple of dozen underwater photographs Nicholas had taken during our last dive in Bimini. I spread them across the bed and studied them—me and Sylvia suspended in varying depths of blue shadow and slanted rafters of light. They were beautiful, Sylvia was beautiful, and I felt an abrupt stab of missing her, the hope that she hadn’t swum into trouble somewhere. If she hadn’t been finned and drowned in the name of soup, diced up for beach-store necklaces and vitamin supplements, had her jaw cut out for a decoration, or mounted full scale on a wall somewhere, then in seven or eight years she would be producing pups.
In the last picture, Nicholas had captured me close up as I’d watched Sylvia swim away for the last time, focusing on my eyes behind the mask. They looked large and sad and ecstatic.
I lowered the photo to my lap and looked at him. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
“I thought you might be missing her.”
Nicholas wrestled a grocery cart free from the queue and pushed it into the produce section at Publix.
“They make really good subs here,” I said.
“Thank God. I was worried we’d end up with pâté and designer grapes. Water crackers and caviar. Some sort of black olive tapenade.”
I liked how he made me laugh. I liked him.
We passed over the red plums and nectarines to pick up chips and beer, then made our way to the deli counter.
“Okay, it’s your last chance for a real sit-down dinner,” he said as the man behind the counter, sporting a hairnet, asked for our order.
“I kind of like sitting on the beach with you,” I told him, and I thought he would kiss me right there.
Ten minutes later, as we stood in the express checkout line, I noticed Hazel near the entrance with her arm in one of those grocery store blood pressure machines, and my stomach did a little flip. Daniel. I glanced back toward the produce, then along the wine and soft drink aisle just behind us. I didn’t see him.
She could be here with Van, I reasoned. Please. Be here with Van.
Glancing up, Hazel spotted me and waved with her free hand, and the magnetic thing that had happened to me during our shark tooth excursion happened again, the way she set loose a funny gladness in me. I excused myself while Nicholas paid for the subs and ambled over to her. “Hey, there. How’s your blood pressure?”
She giggled and slipped her arm out of the cuff. “I’m just waiting for Dad,” she said, leaping up, pointing toward the first register.
He was leaning on his elbows on the cart handle, second in line. As his eyes dutifully scanned for Hazel, he noticed me beside her, straightened, a smile breaking over his face. He held up his forefinger—Wait up.
Hazel said, “Dad gave me the shark book you left for me.”
“What’d you think of the ironing board shark?”
She rolled her eyes. “Stethacanthus. It was crazy.” Then, just as Nicholas showed up, she added, “When are you coming over so we can have Shark Club?”
I willed myself not to look back at the checkout lane. “Hazel, this is Nicholas. He’s my friend. You know how we know about sharks? Well, he knows tons about rays.”
She smiled a little sideways, appearing shy, something I hadn’t thought possible with her, and sat back down on the seat, flutter kicking her legs.
He squatted in front of her. “What’s Shark Club is what I want to know.”
“It’s this thing I started,” she answered. “Well, we started, me and Maeve. It’s for people who love sharks.”
“Hazel is a biologist in the making,” I said. “Or a paleontologist. She knows more about ancient sea creatures than anybody I know.”
At that, Hazel pressed her lips together, causing them to pink like watermelon flesh.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Nicholas said, extending his hand. “We could use a person like you at the aquarium where I work.”
Hazel’s cheeks flushed. She looked flattered and smitten all at once as she placed her hand in his. They were in the middle of a handshake when Daniel walked up holding two plastic grocery bags, one filled with nothing but lemons, the other, a large tin of olive oil. Giacomo’s. The same brand I’d tossed into the Gulf for Hazel.
Hazel skipped over to his side and slipped her hand over his, the one that gripped the lemons, and we all stood there while the silence seemed to elongate into something that could snap. Later, I would tell Perri it was the intersection of Awkward and Awkward, and we’d laughed, but right now I didn’t feel so droll.
Daniel and Nicholas introduced themselves. Nicholas reached out his hand. Daniel took it, the grocery bag with the Giacomo’s dangling from his wrist.
“Nicholas and I worked together in Bimini,” I said, sounding a little overeager to explain his presence in
a casual way.
Daniel looked at me. “Oh, right. Good. Are you visiting?”
“I’m down from Sarasota,” Nicholas said.
Hazel twisted at her dad’s side. “He works at an aquarium. He knows tons about rays.”
For several uncomfortable seconds no one spoke. An elderly woman had taken a seat at the blood pressure machine, and the cuff buzzed as it inflated. Hazel fixated on the woman like she was watching a shuttle launch.
I said, “Daniel is the chef at the hotel.”
“I tried to talk her into a proper restaurant meal, but it’s sandwiches on the beach for us,” Nicholas said, holding up his bag.
“Oh yeah? A picnic?” Daniel said. “If you change your mind you know where to get a good meal.”
I moved toward the sliding doors. “We were just on our way to the hotel.”
“Us, too,” Daniel said, then, turning to Hazel, “Ready to go, monkey?”
The four of us walked to the parking lot together, Hazel singing some jingle from a candy commercial. “Dad, can Maeve come over?” she asked when Nicholas and I stopped at his silver Jetta.
“If Maeve would like that, then I would like that,” he said.
Hazel turned to me.
“Well, sure,” I said.
As Daniel and Hazel veered off to his car, he turned back. “Maeve, have you finished Robin’s novel?”
“Not yet.”
“You should. It’s a good ending,” he said.
I paused, one foot in the car, his words reverberating across the hot, shining asphalt.
We spread a blanket on the beach in front of the hotel. The sound of singing and live guitar coasted from the restaurant terrace: The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me.” A fixture at the hotel, Billy had been crooning for as long as I could remember. He had to be at least as old as Mick Jagger.
Even though it was after six o’clock, the sun was high and still at work, busy cranking out heat. Nicholas opened a beer and handed it to me as I unloaded the sandwiches and chips, noticing he’d thrown in KitKats for dessert. We sat, arms touching, facing the water just like in Bimini after he’d released the little prince of a stone crab. Along the shoreline, a great blue heron stood like a yard ornament, perfectly stationary, glaring at its next meal.
The Shark Club Page 9