A half moon hung in the sky, a bright, broken shell. Around the edge of the dock, lights shone in puddles on the water, making wavy, iridescent patterns across the surface. We dangled our feet over the side, listening to the water lap in whispers against the pilings. There was nowhere to hide. There was me and Daniel and the night splayed wide open. He’d asked me to marry him right here.
“I’m looking at a house in a few days,” he said.
“Hazel mentioned you wanted to buy a house. That’s great.”
“Staying with Mom was always temporary. Game night is out of control over here,” he joked. “The drinking. You heard the language.”
“That Tweetsy is a bad influence, huh?”
And just like earlier in the kitchen, being together felt surreal and normal and filled me with longing. I didn’t know whether being here was good or bad, whether it was like recovering something precious that I’d lost or falling back into a bad old habit. I just knew it was happening and I was letting it.
“Robin’s book,” he said. “It’s strange seeing all of that on paper.”
“I was furious with him when I read it. I still am, really. I thought all this time he was working on his old college novel or something. You didn’t know he was writing about us, did you?”
“I had no idea.”
“He told me he would pull the book from the publisher if I wanted him to. Can you imagine me taking him up on that? He flails around for years, going from one job to another, and then to everyone’s shock he actually writes a book that’s getting published! How could I take that away from him?”
I stared out into the bay, at small lights twitching on the opposite shoreline. “I just feel betrayed, and embarrassed. God, I’m so embarrassed. Maybe if he changed the dedication. At least then the book wouldn’t seem to broadcast that it’s about us.”
I could feel Daniel looking at me.
“You’re not angry?” I said. “About the book, I mean?”
“Parts of it were hard to read, but no. I’m not angry. It’s us. Well, it’s us right up until Margaret decides to give Derek another chance.”
We were silent then, the air turning thick and uncomfortable and unfairly loaded.
“The other night when I was reading Robin’s book, I almost came to see you.”
“Really?” His voice sounded genuinely surprised. “So what happened?”
“The car wouldn’t start. I decided it must have been divine intervention. It was the middle of the night. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You should’ve called me. I would have come to you.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“That day you arrived and I stopped by your room, I saw the osprey feather on your dresser. It’s the one, isn’t it, the one you went into the water for the day the shark—”
“You mean the one you stuck in my ponytail before I kissed you?”
“Yeah, that one,” he said. “Why’d you keep it?”
There were so many old ghosts between us now.
Did he remember I’d planned on putting it into my bridal bouquet? “It was our first kiss. I guess I couldn’t part with it.”
“What about you and this Nicholas guy? Are you with him?”
I looked away from him and into my lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s none of my business.”
“We put things on hold,” I told him. “Or we ended it completely. I’m not even sure.”
Daniel placed his hand on my knee, and I resisted the urge to close my eyes. His touch resurrected that whole tempest of longing and regret, the what-might-have-been. I felt almost dizzy at how quickly I’d gone from living with the memory of Daniel to eating pie with him. “Have you been okay?” he asked.
Have I been okay?
The question was like a bone in my throat. I scrambled to my feet, wanting, needing, to get my bearings. Daniel stood, too, and I stepped away as he reached for me.
“There is always a sadness in me,” I said. “I don’t want it to be there, but it is. It sleeps inside of me, and when it wakes there’s nothing I can do about it. It takes over, and when that happens nothing else exists. You did that. For the last seven years I’ve hated you for it.”
Daniel’s face seemed to collapse. “I tried so many times to fix everything.”
“I know. I refused to forgive you, and I live with that, too. Now all of a sudden I doubt whether I made the right decision. It’s that stupid book of Robin’s—”
“Maeve,” he said. He stepped toward me.
“I should go home,” I said, pulling away.
Despite the darkness, I found my way along the path, Daniel following behind me. “You don’t have to go,” he said.
I had invested years in trying to move on. To go down this road with Daniel again would be insane, completely reckless, but when I got to the driveway I didn’t really want to leave.
I stopped and turned around. “Dan—”
At that same moment, Hazel jumped out from behind my car. “Boo!”
My feet left the ground.
“Hazel, you’re supposed to be in bed,” Daniel said. “Does your grandma know you’re out here?”
Her voice thinned into a whine. “No, I was looking for you. I couldn’t find you.” She held out my clutch purse. “Maeve forgot this.”
“Well, would you look at that?” I said. “I’ll need my keys, now won’t I? Thanks.” I took the bag and hurried to my car.
I backed down the driveway, then watched them in the rearview mirror until I couldn’t see them anymore.
Fourteen
The next few days and nights passed in a tightly coiled blur, as if I’d crawled into the tiny space inside a conch. After that night with Daniel and Hazel, I’d put my head down and worked feverishly on my Bimini research from early morning until well past nine in the evening. The work was enough. That’s what I told myself.
On the sixth day of my cloistering—my absentia, as Perri had pointedly referred to it earlier that morning when I’d bumped into her in the lobby—I had nearly finalized my findings on the lemons and drawn up an outline for my Eco-Sunday lecture. It was after ten when I switched off the lights in my office and drove back to the hotel, my brain saturated with the woozy, tired feeling that comes from an overload of reading and writing and thinking, and my stomach screeching with hunger. I usually ate lunch at my desk, whatever pizza the volunteers brought in, then slipped into the hotel kitchen when I got home, after it had closed, foraging for a turkey sandwich or the soup of the day, whatever I could find left over from Daniel’s dinner specials.
I hadn’t spoken to Daniel since the night of the Shark Club. Not since the Spanish chicken marinara and the meringueless key lime pie. Not since we sat on the dock, his hand on my knee and my throat choked with regret and recklessness. Communication with Nicholas was nil, too, but that was just as well.
The kitchen was dark and cool and smelled like Mr. Clean. The refrigerators were churning out a baritone hum, a surprisingly loud serenade I’d grown accustomed to during my nightly pillage. I set my bag on one of the sparkly stainless steel counters and perused the walk-in cooler. The first things I saw were six of Daniel’s key lime pies. Tomorrow’s lunch dessert.
I picked up one and removed the lid. The sweet, tangy smell hit my nostrils, sending me back to the barstool in his kitchen. I closed the cooler door, grabbed a fork, and carried the whole pie through the dining room out onto the empty terrace.
A diffuse white glow spilled out from the lobby; spotlights illuminated the pool and the palms. The only sound was the slush of waves. I pulled a chair close to the rail overlooking the Gulf and used my knees as a tabletop. I took a bite and turned the fork over in my mouth.
Twenty minutes later,
after I’d eaten almost half the pie, I heard the French doors open behind me. Twisting around, I saw Daniel standing on the terrace, holding my bag and the pie lid.
“I knew you had to be somewhere around here,” he said.
“I stole a pie,” I told him, and stood up, the graham crumbs falling from my lap.
“I see that.” Had the moon been brighter, I might have seen satisfaction in his face. Or was he thinking about the way I’d run away from him a few nights ago?
“Sorry. I just saw it and . . .” I threw up my free hand. “What are you doing here? It’s eleven o’clock.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Daniel laid my bag and the lid on the nearest table. “I usually come back and catch up on paperwork. What about you?”
“I worked late again. I came looking for dinner, but found the pies . . .”
“So you’re the pie thief.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Daniel looked at the half-empty pie shell and laughed quietly. “God. Can I make you something to eat?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Neither of us spoke, and the lull floated there like something alive and hovering.
Finally he said, “After the other night, I thought I should give you some space—”
“I’m sorry I took off like that,” I interrupted.
“I understand.” He smiled and turned back toward the kitchen. “Well, I’ve got an inventory to go over. And I guess I have to make a pie.”
“Wait. Daniel.”
He turned back, standing in a little slab of shadow, his face lost to me.
“I don’t want space,” I said. “Not from you.”
He walked toward me and didn’t stop until he was kissing me.
Everything came back with strange suddenness. Memories, the old feelings, the believing, the wanting. And then a sort of déjà vu. I’d never told Daniel, but the first time we spent the night in the Forster Room, I’d gotten a picture in my head out of nowhere of Victoria Falls, of unfathomable amounts of water falling over a cliff. I’d only seen pictures of the falls in a National Geographic when I was a girl, and although it had made no impression on me then, the glossy photograph came back to me on that first night with Daniel. I didn’t know why that was, but later I would think how a person could step into the water knowing she might pitch right over the side, drown, and not care. The force of my feelings for Daniel that first night awed me.
Now, given another chance, I wouldn’t have stepped away from him for anything in the world. We left the terrace and walked to my room. “It never felt over,” he said when we stepped inside.
He kissed me again and, with the scruff and warmth of his skin on my cheek, everything gave way. I’d made a fortress of myself and it caved like one of the sand castles that dotted the beach.
I slipped right over the falls.
Fifteen
I steered the Sundance with my bare feet, navigating the Conservancy’s twenty-five-foot bay boat through the manatee slow zone, nosing between the mangrove isles surrounding Palermo. Moving at the speed of a very old turtle, barely cracking a wake behind the boat, I kept my eyes peeled for the manatees’ big gray noses, which often broke the surface.
I’d cast off around 6:00 P.M. with the crew—John, my associate director, three other biologists at the Conservancy, and a grad student named Olivia—for a late-night shark-monitoring expedition. For the next ten hours or so we would capture and tag as many sharks as possible, obtaining measurements and blood samples, and then safely release them. The mission was completely routine, but since learning about the mass finning, I’d been impatient, nervous really, to see how the population was faring, and I’d pushed the expedition ahead of schedule.
The engine buzzed in my toes and my neck stung with the heat of a late June afternoon. I reached for the milk jug I’d filled with water and drank. The crew sat in the stern poring over the plastic-sleeved pages in our monitoring notebooks. They contained printouts of the hundreds of sharks we’d tagged, listing their names (i.e., Oscar, Wendy, Eloise), photos, dorsal fin profiles, body measurements, blood analyses, field notes, latitude/longitude of capture, and the depth, temperature, and turbidity of the water.
As we left the manatee zone, I grasped the wheel with both hands and opened up the throttle. As the bow lifted, everything pitched into sudden, exhilarating speed, and a box packed with our dinner tipped, sending an orange back to the center console where I sat. I tossed it back to Olivia. It made me think of the breakfasts Daniel sent me on the room-service cart practically every morning. Sometimes a blueberry muffin, homemade granola, a cinnamon scone, but always an orange.
We’d spent almost every night together since that first night almost one week ago. He would arrive at my room late after the dinner shift and leave before dawn in order to be home when Hazel woke. We’d been careful about concealing his visits. Well, except for the room-service cart, which wasn’t particularly discreet, but it was hardly a giveaway. Even Robin, who shared part of my living space and who had proved himself all ears and antennas in the past when it came to Daniel and me, hadn’t picked up on us. Hazel had to be considered, and as for Robin, Perri, and Van, we weren’t ready to announce our . . . what?
This morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, Daniel had said, “What if I tell Hazel about us?”
I rolled onto my side, tugging the sheet around my shoulder. “What would you say?” I felt wide awake all of a sudden, acutely aware of the breathy anticipation in my voice.
As he twisted around to look at me, I watched the knobby bone at the base of his neck disappear. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never been in this situation before.” He stood and crossed the room, then turned back. “What are we doing, Maeve?”
I was glad he was the one to ask the question. At times during the last couple of days it’d felt like we were regressing into the same teenagers who’d sneaked into the Forster Room the summer before I went to college, like we were making up for lost time, not thinking, at least not with our heads. Other times, most of the time in fact, what we were doing felt miraculous, as if we’d lost our way back then, had been blown wildly off course, and were finally rescuing ourselves, rescuing our life together.
Even when I told Daniel about my plans to go to Mozambique in August, he didn’t protest, didn’t bring up the future. Did he see a future? He only asked how long I would be gone. When I said till Christmas, he merely grew quiet.
What are we doing, Maeve? The question hung between us. It felt slightly dangerous, like some small, feral creature had been accidentally set loose in the room. “You tell me,” I said.
“What matters is that we’re together, and I love you. I always have. We’ll figure the rest out.”
Right now his words were enough.
After he left, after the room-service cart arrived, I took a cup of coffee to the balcony. I was sitting there wrapped in my robe blissfully not thinking, just watching the sky blister with light and the gulls descend on the Gulf to feast on minnows, when an osprey landed on the balcony railing less than ten feet away. A small fish was clutched in its talons, flopping helplessly back and forth. As I let out a breath, the osprey cocked its head and turned its sharp yellow eyes toward me. Then dropping the fish, it flew off, its wings churning a rush of air.
I decided to leave the fish where it was. More than likely the osprey would return to finish the poor thing off. After I showered, I peeked onto the balcony and there was nothing left but a fish head and a mess of guts. I tossed them into the trash and, using wads of paper towels, wiped the blood into scarlet streaks. As I scrubbed the floor with Lysol, Daniel’s question welled up.
For years, part of me had fantasized about this very thing, Daniel and me together, but I’d never imagined a scenario beyond our reunion. I stared at the bloody paper towels
as if reading tea leaves. Nature was both saving and inviolately cruel.
“A roseate spoonbill at eight o’clock,” a voice called, jolting me back to the boat and the green rippling breakwater, to the pink-plumed seabird stretched out in the air like a feather boa.
We anchored in Calusa Bay two hours before sunset and began the meticulous process of cutting up mullet for bait and fastening the hunks of flesh onto hooks. Once the hooks and buoys were attached to the lines, we dropped them in the water. While a couple of the guys filled the shark wells, I checked the bilge system. The only thing to do now was wait.
We watched for sunken buoys, listened for the splash of a shark taking a hook, and filled the time with fish tales—the fifteen-foot sawfish that had torn up our gear on the last outing; the enormous dolphin fish John once caught, only to have his boat followed for ten miles by the female dolphin fish who was left behind. “It was enough to make me give up fishing,” he said.
After the sun set, night hammered down quickly, a huge well of blackness above and below. We put on our bug shirts and hats, drawing the nets over our faces, but not before the no-see-ums and mosquitoes fell on us like a plague from the Old Testament. They swarmed so loudly, I shushed everyone to be sure I wasn’t mistaking them for a distant plane.
I kept my eyes on the buoys, shining my flashlight from one to the other in a kind of timed syncopated rhythm. Overhead the planets flickered and glowed, and talk turned to unexplained configurations of lights, to sworn UFO sightings, then to teasing, then to silence.
Every forty-five minutes, we pulled up the lines, checking the bait and repeating the exercise. Waiting.
Close to ten o’clock, Olivia said, “Where are the sharks?,” disappointment heavy in her voice.
“We have nights when they never show at all,” John told her, but before his words drifted over the hull and were swallowed by the night, I saw the buoy yanked under.
We pulled in a juvenile bonnethead and shortly afterward, two juvenile bull sharks, all small enough to fit in the shark well. On past trips, I’d used a vinyl kiddie pool, which was easier on the sharks and on us, too, but it had been missing from the boat. We lowered each of them into the shark well, then hitting the boat lights, tagged, photographed, and collected our data.
The Shark Club Page 12