The Shark Club

by Ann Kidd Taylor

  Near midnight, we hooked the star of the night—a female bull with purple scars between her dorsal fins. I’d not seen scars like these except in textbooks, but I knew instantly I was looking at the trauma caused by a pursuing male during mating season. Breeding between sharks was violent, with the female often sustaining injuries from males. They would be struck, flipped, gouged, and bitten, ending up with raw skin and bite marks. To deal with the harshness of it, female sharks had evolved to be larger than males with rougher and thicker skin. Back in grad school that had stirred up jokes by women in the class, jokes that carried an undertone of seriousness, about how male aggression had ended up honing females into the more superior species, that kind of thing.

  “So much for romance,” I said, pointing out the marks to the others.

  She was so big we left her in the water. I worked over the side of the boat, drawing blood and getting measurements, while Olivia took photos and John logged data in the notebook. “I’m recording her name as Rose—that okay?” he called.

  “Fine,” I said, moving as fast as I could. I didn’t want to subject her to any more stress. Sharks were like people when it came to stress. My fear was that we would release her and she would exhibit none of the fight she’d displayed when we’d pulled her in.

  “There you go, Rose,” I said, and gave her a pat. She thrust away, disappearing into the black water.

  Sixteen

  Two nights after the shark monitoring trip, I trekked down the access path from the hotel shortly after 10:00 P.M., feeling the wind pick up and hearing the soft roar of waves intensifying off in the darkness. Tonight, instead of coming to my room, Daniel had proposed that we meet on the beach. He had always loved the Gulf better at night. About now he would be finishing up in the kitchen. He would come late, bearing some sort of food offering.

  Looking up, I searched for the moon, which had been visible earlier but had now disappeared into a thick, starless sky. There were no lights on the beach either, a courtesy we offered the sea turtles, the first of which had already begun nesting. When the babies hatch, they use the moonlight as their compass; they become disoriented by artificial light, mistaking it as lunar and wandering off in twenty wrong directions. I was thinking how ridiculously nature seemed arranged against the tiny creatures when I almost stepped on top of a fresh nest.

  The mother, probably a loggerhead, had made the long crawl from the water and dug her clutch right at the end of a public access, then turned around and gone back to sea. She would never return to the nest.

  I examined the large, bowl-shaped hole where she’d buried her eggs, then followed the distinct, fresh drag she’d left in the sand all the way to the water, wondering if I’d just missed her. I made a mental note to have the nest roped off with yellow caution tape.

  Since I’d been home, squares of yellow had dotted the beach as if it were some horrid crime scene. Around mid-August, the islanders would begin “turtle watch,” waiting nightly for the hatchlings, hoping to see them break for the water, one of the true wonders of the natural world. It occurred to me that I could bring Hazel, until I remembered I would be leaving for Mozambique around that time. If I wasn’t here . . . well, Daniel should take her. She shouldn’t miss it.

  I watched him emerge suddenly from the opaque stretch of beach. He kissed me, then handed me a canvas bag. Inside, resting on top of his kitchen shoes, his chef’s jacket, and a rolled up towel, was a key lime pie. “There should be a fork in there,” he said.

  “This is our thing now—pie?” I said.

  “It’s one of our things.” He spread the towel on the sand and we sat.

  I peeled off the pie shell lid and took a bite. “One of them? We have others?”

  “Late nights.”

  “True.” I handed him the fork.

  “That’s my fault,” he said. “Chef’s schedule.”

  “And movies. Well . . . used to be.”

  Daniel set down the fork. “The last one we saw together was—”

  “That rocket movie.”

  “No, it was Saving Private Ryan.”

  “Really? I’m pretty sure it was Jake Gyllenhaal building rockets.”

  “Yeah, I’m positive. We rented it. ‘Every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel,’” he said, doing a pretty good Tom Hanks impersonation.

  “I take it you’ve seen the movie a few times since.”

  “A few,” he said, and laughed. “Lately, it’s the animated stuff with Hazel. She was five before she sat through an entire movie.”

  “What was it?”

  “There was a purple elephant.”

  We sat bundled up in the dark, just out of reach of the tide and the sea foam collecting in the wrack line. The wind died, and for a few minutes the moon poked her head through the curtain of gray clouds, causing light to spangle on top of the water and across the rock jetties.

  Quietness rose. “Come here,” he said. He grabbed my hands, and as I moved over, he made room between his legs, where I reclined against him. He wound a strand of my hair around his finger.

  I asked, “What has your life been like? Since back then, I mean.”

  “There was the restaurant in Miami. And Hazel. Before her mother died, I would drive up to St. Petersburg twice a month to see her.”

  “That must have been hard. Not having her all the time.”

  “It’s just the way it was.”

  “Did you . . . you and Holly . . . did you ever have a relationship?”

  I felt him let go of my hair. The moon had withdrawn again, but the waves seemed calmer now, rolling small and lakelike, barely making noise.

  “We tried,” he said. “Hazel was a year old. It made sense to try.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “Four or five months, that’s all. Neither one of us was very happy.”

  My longest relationship had lasted three months, ending right about the time I realized it was going nowhere. Drawing up my knees, I turned into his body. My chest filled with desire and happiness, and then was marred by a shoot of old hurt pushing up into the center of it like a noxious weed.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “I had my share of dates, some memorable, most utterly forgettable.”

  “I always worried one day Robin would call up and tell me you were getting married.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Let’s go swimming,” he said.

  “Now?”

  “Come on.” He stood and pulled his shirt over his head.

  “You don’t have to be a marine biologist to know that swimming in the ocean at night is a bad idea.”

  “We won’t go out far.” He stepped out of his pants.

  I laughed at him standing there in his boxers, and though we were alone, I looked around for passersby, for people far away on the hotel terrace.

  “Swim with me,” he said.

  When I didn’t move, he wandered into the water calf deep. “You aren’t scared, are you?” he said, reminding me of the way I’d taunted him into the water the day of the shark bite.

  I wasn’t like him. For him the Gulf was entertainment. A vast water park. I was more like Nicholas. He once told me that when he looked at the water, he saw something dark, relentless, and ancient. And I felt that mystery and its dangers even more so at night. I didn’t underestimate its ability to pull me into its depths or pick me up by the neck and toss me to shore, but staring at Daniel, his body striated with shadows, his fingers grazing the water, I began to take off my clothes. I left my bra and underwear on and waded in, thinking of the sea turtle that had lumbered out of the waves, then made her way back to the water.

  We swam into the swells and stopped waist deep. Daniel faced me. The lustrous blue of his eyes had disappeared in the darkness. He cupped the tepid water over my shoulders, while I wondered if al
l those times I’d lain in bed remembering Daniel he’d been imagining this, the two of us swimming in the Gulf.

  He said, “Do you remember in high school when you came out here screaming at me and Robin to get out of the water?”

  “What I remember is that you two had been drinking and insisted on swimming in the middle of the night. Then you pretended to drown just to scare me.”

  “Not to scare you. To kiss you. You were the only one who knew CPR.”

  “I thought you were dead until I started breathing into your mouth.”

  “That was mean of me,” he said. “And juvenile.”

  Daniel pulled me closer, hooking one arm around my waist, then the other. As I rested my forehead against his cheek, something moved under the soft bottom of my foot, and I shook my leg. In the next second, Daniel plunged under the water taking me with him, then sprang back up still holding on to me, laughing.

  I gave him a shove. “You’re still juvenile!” I said, wiping the water from my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, half laughing. “Come here. I’m sorry.” He drew me into his arms and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Over and over. “I’m sorry.”

  Seventeen

  At the hotel’s Fourth of July gathering, every guest seemed clad in red, white, and blue. I watched them mill about the restaurant’s terrace, pinging from one high-top table to another, seeking a place to rest their hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. I wore a lavender sundress. My patriotism ended at fashion.

  A server strolled by with a tray. “Key lime martini?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s good,” she said.

  Daniel had to be the Frankenstein of this concoction. It was sweet and sour, tasting of vodka, lime, sweetened cream, and vanilla. The rim was coated in graham cracker crumbs, necessitating that I brush off my lips after each sip.

  I found a niche near the steps leading to the beach that was devoid of people and leaned back against the low stone wall, listening to Billy strum Dusty Springfield on his guitar. He stretched out the lyrics, turning the song melancholy, making me believe he was singing about some woman he never got over. When he finally, mercifully, got through it, Perri sashayed over in her red capris and crisp white shirt and whispered in his ear. Immediately, he lit into Willie Nelson’s “Island in the Sea” and Perri, who was old enough now to genuinely not care what anyone thought, started dancing. She looked like she was practicing a form of yoga, rolling her shoulders, stretching her neck, swaying from her waist, bending her knees. I smiled, watching her.

  I hadn’t been avoiding Perri, but I hadn’t sought her out either. I was still in no hurry to explain that Daniel and I were testing the waters, or catching up, or getting to know each other again, or all of the above. She would naturally ask if we were dating. She would ask about Nicholas. I didn’t have any answers.

  It was enough of a challenge to keep Robin in the dark. He’d noticed I no longer seemed resentful about his book. “I’m glad you’ve moved on,” he’d said. In truth, I had merely tabled the matter. I hadn’t read a word of his manuscript past the line about forgiveness that had so thoroughly upended me.

  I spotted Hazel standing by the French doors, the waitstaff buzzing like mosquitoes behind the panes. She was in yellow again, a little cap sleeve tee with a big white star in the middle and yellow shorts. Her field bag was draped across her chest as it had been the day on the beach. There was no telling what was in there. Her club badge, a shark tooth, sunglasses, a ticket to the moon.

  Perri abandoned the dance floor, going over to greet her about the same time that Van showed up in a blue skirt and red-and-white polka-dot blouse. Hazel took her grandmother’s hand as the women talked. She looked as out of place in her yellow as I was in my purple. I was sipping the last of my key lime martini when they all turned and looked at me. I waved, as they motioned me over.

  “Well, as I live and breathe, if it isn’t my granddaughter,” Perri said as I ambled up. “I think you’ve been hiding out with the sharks again.”

  I manufactured a laugh and took a step over to block the sun from Hazel’s eyes. As her face relaxed, I caught a flash of Daniel in her expression. Here was his daughter. It was still sinking in.

  “I’ve got something,” she said, patting the field bag. “Wanna see?”

  “Can’t wait,” I told her.

  She dug around inside the bag and tugged out a sheaf of papers. “I made a comic book.”

  “She’s been working on this since you were over at the house,” Van said.

  Perri looked at me. “Oh? You were at their house?”

  “Why don’t you come show it to me,” I said to Hazel, and led her to a nearby table while Perri and Van caught up, or, as I suspected, discussed my recent visit to Van’s house for dinner and the newly inaugurated Shark Club.

  Hazel’s cheeks were rouged with sun and excitement as she laid out her comic on the table. She had folded white construction paper in half, punched two holes along the crease, and looped it together with a piece of white yarn. On the front she’d drawn a shark and written the comic’s title in plump red letters: SIR FIN.

  She asked me to read it aloud, and I did, frame by frame. It was the story of a small shark that fought a catfish army and was knighted by a shark king wearing a spiky crown.

  There were extra pages in the comic, waiting to be filled in.

  “You should keep going,” I told her. “I want to read more about Sir Fin.”

  She squinted at me. “We could do one together.”

  “I would love that,” I told her, and I had one of those funny experiences where I was in the moment, but also outside of it, observing myself, and I thought, I do love it. I love her. I love this. The same thing had happened in Bimini as I swam beside Sylvia, this same rush of knowing.

  Hazel pulled out a handful of colored pencils and crayons from her bag. “What should our story be about?”

  “Oh, you want to do it now?”

  She grinned.

  “Okay. Well, let me think.” I blankly scanned the crowd, waiting for an idea to strike. Van and Perri, I noticed, had been joined by Robin.

  I leaned back in the chair and thought of the scarred female bull shark I’d tagged on our recent shark-monitoring expedition. “I have an idea,” I said. “How about a girl shark?”

  “Mmmm, okay,” she said.

  “Rose?”

  Hazel handed me a pencil. “Rosie.”

  “If you want, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking and you can write it however you want.”

  “You do it,” she said.

  I doodled a lump buried in the sand on the ocean’s bottom, then drew a dialogue bubble over it. Inside it I wrote: Help! Help! In the next square, I sketched Rosie the Shark, a task I should’ve been better at. She looked a little like Charlie the Tuna minus the hat and glasses. I sketched a Superwoman cape tied around her and in the bubble I wrote: Someone is in trouble. Rosie to the rescue!

  In the next box, I drew her plunging toward the lump on the sea bottom, adding fitful dashes around her body, and making whooshing sound effects to sell Rosie’s super speed to Hazel.

  My effort to illustrate Rosie digging in the sand with her nose was slightly feeble, but Hazel seemed riveted, her eyes wide and glued on the paper.

  Hold on, I’m almost there, Rosie cried.

  In the final frame, I drew Rosie’s mouth wide open, adding dimples and displaying rows of pointy teeth. In the midst of them was the stone crab Nicholas had rescued. Safe and sound.

  “Is that a spider?” Hazel asked.

  “It’s a baby stone crab. He’s called the Little Prince.”

  She found this hilarious. I made the crab’s pincers bigger and defined the edges of its shell, then shaded in its body with a purple crayon. In the crab’s dialogue bubble, I wrote: You saved me! I’m free! Thank you
, Rosie.

  Hazel studied every square.

  “It’s not as good as Sir Fin,” I said, “but . . .”

  Before I could get the rest of the words out, Hazel raised her hand for the Shark Club salute. We smacked our “fins” together, causing a small craving at the back of my rib cage.

  Van, Perri, and Robin wandered over and took the empty seats at the table, curious to see what Hazel had drawn. Van oohed and aahed.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Daniel making his way around the terrace, shaking hands with partygoers, accepting compliments for his mini crab cakes and shrimp alla buonavia. He slipped up behind Hazel’s chair and surprised her with a kiss, then leaned around my chair and kissed me on the lips. I looked at him, dumbfounded, the sensation of his mouth still on mine. My eyes darted from him to Hazel.

  “Wait. Are you Dad’s girlfriend?” she asked.

  “You could say that,” Daniel told her.

  Van, Perri, and Robin looked gobsmacked, the words knocked out of them.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” Perri finally managed to say.

  “It’s been a surprise for me, too,” I said, looking at Daniel, lifting my eyebrows.

  His hand drifted to my shoulder and I reached for it and squeezed while Hazel grinned at us like the mailbox dolphin.

  Later that night, after I’d fallen asleep on the sofa to the eleven o’clock news, Robin wandered in and tossed his keys on the table, waking me. Raising my head off the pillow, I narrowed my eyes in the sharp light from the TV. “Hey,” I griped.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

  I sat up, rubbing the back of my neck, stiff from the oversized sofa pillow. “I should go to bed.”

  “Wait a sec,” he said, turning on a lamp and flipping off the television. “You and Daniel? This is huge. And neither of you said a word.”