Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  Gliding toward the reef, Amelia tucked the tips of her fingers into her dive belt, imagining Sedna as she thought of her father’s e-mail. Her dive fins and the gentle movements of her hips guided her forward. Silence blotted out time and urgency. She imagined it was quiet under the Arctic Ocean.

  Stingrays and sea turtles billowed past as Amelia watched for unusual behavior. As she swam through their water currents, she spotted the reef in question. Like glittering jewels, clusters of green cabbage coral, honeycomb, and fuchsia clumps of mushroom corals had all grown together in gardens. Tiny colonies of marine invertebrates with saclike bodies swayed in the wake of her fins. Their calcified cone skeletons grew outside of their bodies, like residents in high-rise apartment buildings, thriving on only food, sunlight, and good water flow.

  Amelia touched the leathery edge of a cabbage coral and lowered to get a better look. Instead of in decline it was a new colony of coral reef polyps—evidence of health and new life.

  Then a pair of orange sea horses flitted toward her. She offered a finger. The female, the bolder of the two, wrapped its tail around her index finger. Turning its head sideways, it studied her with a black shiny bowling ball eye. Her mate’s belly was swollen with a clutch of babies, looking as if he was about to give birth.

  A sea horse’s metamorphosis made them impossible to spot in the wild. Twenty-two years ago Amelia had spent an entire year swimming past coral reefs, seeing nothing until her eye had finally learned to spot them. The little buggers could mimic the exact details of coral reefs and underwater grasses, making them virtually indistinguishable.

  This particular pair of orange sea horses had been bred in her tiny lab at the University of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay. The female held on to her finger with her prehensile, monkey-like tail, not letting go.

  Gently unwinding the sea horse’s tail, she placed the female back on a fan coral next to her mate. The two turned to face each other, undulating in the current of a disgruntled sea bass as it swam by.

  Amelia then approached one of the largest natural clam shells growing in an American aquarium, one she’d secured out of harm’s way by a proposed oil rig in the east Indian Ocean. She touched the outside of its shell. Bubbles escaped from its fanning lips as it sensed her presence as a disturbance in the current.

  Approaching the surface, she saw Diane’s face, distorted through the water’s own fun-house mirror, looking like a worried Miss Piggy, scouring the tank for her. Bubbles careened up in time with each convulsive laugh into the regulator as Amelia chuckled, feeling bad that she found it so funny—but it was.

  “The reef’s fine, Diane,” Amelia called out after removing the regulator from her mouth, squelching a laugh, not sure the woman would find it as funny. Tucking the face mask under her chin, Amelia grabbed the ladder and stepped up. Amelia’s chin dripped water as she pulled off her face mask and tossed it on top of the gear pile.

  “Just a new colony—nothing to worry about,” Amelia said. Sliding off her lime-green dive fins, she set them up on the deck and slipped out of the buoyancy compensator vest. Rolling the air tank up onto the deck, water rushed down. As she climbed up the ladder, torrents of salt water streamed past her ankles. “Probably have to move some of the sponge coral, transplant the polyps.”

  Amelia sniffled and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her wet suit. She squeezed water out of the long strands of her hair as if it was a wet towel.

  “How ’bout you get changed and meet me in my office.” Diane crossed her arms and tilted her head to one side as the two women looked at each other.

  * * *

  Amelia pushed open the locker room door, hurrying to pile her fins and dive equipment into the gear bag. She grasped the zipper pull along the back of her wet suit and guided it down to the base of her spine. Wrestling out her arms, she pushed the neoprene form past her hips, pulling out one leg and then the other. Standing in her bathing suit on the cement floor, she held the wet suit as her hair dripped.

  “Good enough.” She jammed the wet suit on top rather than artfully arranging it as she usually did and forced the zipper closed, the plastic teeth straining and pulling apart.

  “Shit.” She left it.

  She quickly rinsed off in the shower and then rushed to the hand dryers, hitting the metal button and leaning over as she fluffed her hair to make it dry faster.

  Her jeans felt grubby as she wriggled them up over damp thighs, jumping to yank them up so she could button the top.

  Since 1980 Amelia wore only blue jeans, black T-shirts or turtlenecks, fleeces, black one-piece bathing suits, clogs, or else just dive gear. Blending into the topside world was her adaptive niche.

  Jen would encourage her to live large, coercing her into buying colorful T-shirts and sweaters though Amelia counted herself lucky if she could find two matching socks without holes. “Never buy anything that’s for sale” was Amelia’s policy as she raided the lost and found box, looking for items that had been in the lab for more than sixty days.

  “Bet ya a new face mask you’d get more dates if you wore pink.”

  “Bet ya there’s a greater chance of a catastrophic asteroid collision with earth than there is of me finding a man even in pink,” Amelia shot back and made a sour face.

  “Keep making that face and it’s gonna stick,” Jen warned with her pointer finger.

  Neither had she any jewelry nor did she want any. What could match the beauty of marine life? She’d seen an octopus disappear against a rocky cliff wall and watched sea horses change color faster than a human breath. Some grew filament tendrils like bridal veils to mimic the surrounding reef corals and grasses. Had she not seen all of this Amelia would have chalked it up to someone’s fish tale.

  She’d played tag as Galapagos dolphins chased her Zodiac under the blackest new-moon night as sea water phosphoresced a milky greenish blue that only single-cell plankton give off when disturbed—nature’s burglar alarm. The grooves and arcs of the mammals’ necks and tails were illuminated as they sliced through in hot pursuit.

  On research vessels, sitting down in the darkness of marine labs, Amelia, Bryce, and Jen would be watching live feed from deep-water ROV submarine cameras. Seeing a creature new to science, a species with bioluminescence—animals that manufactured their own light in the midnight zone of the ocean—close to cracks in the earth’s mantle where not one photon of light was anywhere to be found. With crazy, neon colors, oscillating in patterns in the blackness like some far-fetched sci-fi alien movie, but it was all real, all in their oceans that few would get to see. For Amelia, there was nothing more spectacular than this.

  She buttoned the top of her jeans and then sat down on the wooden locker-room bench, plunging her arms into the sleeves of her black fleece jacket and zipping it up to her chin. She shoved her waterlogged hands into her pockets and thought of her father. He’d always say, “the older you get the more like yourself you become.”

  “If you are the Amelia Drakos Greek-American who grew up on Long Island … your father…”

  “Dad,” she said and closed her eyes. It sounded unpracticed, strange. She’d not said it since 1978. She’d think of him especially if she’d smelled someone smoking Pall Mall king-size cigarettes.

  “My father.” Her own voice sounded strange even saying it. Who would she tell? Why would she tell? There was no e-mail the year her father died. Too bad the dead couldn’t drop a line now and then, check in, and catch up.

  She buried her face in her fleece jacket as she sat on the wooden bench. Calm settled like a narcotic. It always did after a dive. She hunched over and let it wash through and claim her—a decompression necessary to gain her emotional sea legs.

  After about a minute, she sat up and pulled out a metal barrette from her jeans pocket. Harnessing her damp hair into a ponytail, she could still feel the warmth from the hair dryer along her spine.

  Tugging up her wool socks, she thought back to March just after the Java Conference. She’d warned Bryce
and Jen that it might be a rough ride—researchers with more institutional clout than her worried about the fate of their labs. And while neither Bryce nor Jen believed her, she couldn’t shake the uneasy pall that had accompanied her return from the conference.

  After Java, Bryce had teased, even though ordinarily cautious and prudent to a fault.

  “Amelia’s like Chicken Little. This is her.” He’d blown up a latex glove and somehow managed to attach it to his head while dashing through the aisles of the lab calling out in a scratchy chicken voice, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Everybody laughed, including her.

  “Funny, Bryce.” Amelia said without a laugh. “But things are different.”

  “You know, Amelia,” Jen had affirmed, nodding in her big sister way. “You do say that every time—sorta like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Her Orange County golden hair shook like a mane. Tall and runway thin as Amelia used to call her, Jen’s heavily made-up eyes had locked with Amelia’s in trying to get her to concede the point—eyes that remained, to Amelia’s amazement, always lined with makeup, even when out on dive projects.

  She knocked on Diane’s office door though it was open.

  The woman motioned to come in and have a seat though she was on the phone, having a discussion about an invoice.

  Amelia sat, pretending not to listen as her eyes drifted up to an image of a giant eyeball on a poster immediately above the woman’s head. WHO AM I? asked the huge eyeball of the giant squid.

  Amelia stared back at the eye, returning its intensity. “No one knows the mind of a squid,” her father used to say.

  Underneath were the words, I AM GENUS ARCHITEUTHIS, with a long explanation comparing it with others of the same genus. I AM A CEPHALOPOD.… Off to the side of the desk were piles of colorful educational folders and brochures for the children’s programs at the Biomes.

  Amelia turned as Diane ended the call.

  “Okay, Amelia, sorry to keep you waiting.” She jotted down a few notes and then looked up. “You look tired, dear,” Diane’s face softened in a motherly way as she cleared stacks of papers off the middle of her desk and then leaned on both elbows, resting her chin on each palm.

  Understatement of the year. Amelia nodded.

  “I made a couple of calls last night,” Diane said. “You know how bad news always travels faster than good.” She looked straight on at Amelia. “So I did some checking.”

  She waited. “This was a very political decision.” Diane’s eyes narrowed.

  Amelia furrowed her brows. Aren’t they all?

  “Someone who worked in your lab…” Diane waited for Amelia to guess. “… took your theory of the winter sea horse migration in the northeast, added some other lines of inquiry to hide the intellectual theft, and submitted the grant as her own.”

  Amelia sat thinking and then turned to her, almost laughing at the preposterousness of who it might be.

  Amelia wrinkled her forehead and sat up. “Juney?”

  Gauging by Diane’s reaction she’d guessed right.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” It felt like she’d smacked her head on the hull of a ship in the sudden wake of a storm. She laughed, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “It certainly didn’t hurt that a close personal relative with the same last name was on the funding committee.” Diane pursed her lips and rolled her eyes.

  “But I hired her.” Amelia stood up and began to pace. “My God, Diane, I gave her a post-doc three years ago when no one else would take her seriously.” Juney Lowell had worked with them for two years until the post-doc ran out and Amelia hadn’t renewed it.

  And while she and Juney Lowell had never warmed up to each other, Amelia attributed it to both Juney and Bryce being from Rhode Island’s old moneyed families. She could measure Juney’s resentment at taking direction from her and Jen by her terse little movements around the lab as if considering them more fit to be running a string of nail salons rather than being principal investigators with the authority to call the shots.

  Early on Juney and Bryce had also begun sleeping together for a short period of time until Amelia and Jen had arrived at the lab one morning to discover Bryce’s clothing and toothbrush strewn on the laboratory floor along with a Fuck You note. Jen had commented, “Well, she looked like a rough ticket from the start. Guess she threw him out with all his shit.” It had made for some tense times in the lab, even more so seaside where they’d worked for weeks at a time out on the ocean.

  The crew didn’t have much use for Juney either. She was never around when the dive grips on the ROV needed to be replaced or when it was her turn to clean the latrines. She’d put Bryce up to it.

  “Where’s Juney?” the captain had asked.

  “Probably cramps again,” Jen answered deadpan, hating how Bryce was “under her spell,” attributing it all to “the power of pussy.”

  After Juney’s uncle had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics she was insufferable, declaring that “… the roots of inquiry have always run deep in my family.”

  Needless to say when awarded to a different scientist, Amelia and Jen were clinking glasses down at the AA and cackling up a storm.

  “So.” Diane pushed a printed copy of Juney’s grant application across the table followed by a memo listing names on the Appropriations Committee. “Remember…” Diane looked at her. “You never saw this.” Diane pointed but didn’t speak as if there were people in the corners listening.

  Amelia picked up the documents.

  “Anything look redundant?” Diane asked.

  She read Juney’s abstract and then bowed her head. The sting made it difficult to speak.

  “Diane.” Amelia looked up. “I took that girl on dives, shared all our information, and included her in everything. I taught her how to dive, how to use scuba equipment. She knew nothing, had no equipment, not even a face mask. I took her to the store, advised her what to buy.”

  “Now look at the names of the award committee.” Diane pointed on the paper.

  The name Lowell: Nobel Prize loser.

  “See how it’s been written as to make you redundant yet not be in violation.”

  Amelia looked up and frowned, shaking her head and opening her hands, asking why.

  “Because she could,” Diane said in a sad way as she sighed and raised her eyebrows into high arches.

  Amelia closed her eyes, reeling with a tangle of thoughts and emotion.

  “You brought something new to science; she maximized your discovery, your hard work, and used it against you. The grant was well written.”

  Amelia laughed out loud. “By someone else. Not Juney, that’s for sure. Juney can’t write worth a shit,” she almost yelled. “I’ve corrected Juney’s writing.”

  The two women sat thinking. Amelia resolved to never tell Bryce or Jen.

  “Shit.” Amelia covered her face with her hands, feeling bitter. “Too bad the Ocean Explorer’s phone call hadn’t come in January.”

  Diane leaned over and touched Amelia’s hand.

  Amelia looked up.

  “Amelia, don’t get stuck here.”

  Alex had said as much on the phone last night.

  “Sometimes we need to get shook loose to get free,” Diane said.

  Amelia looked down at her waterlogged hands, the skin on her fingers still prune-like.

  “Don’t know that I have that kind of resilience, Di.”

  “Maybe not now, not today.” She looked at Amelia in such a way as to hold strength for her. “But you’ve raised your wonderful son, built a research lab from nothing and kept it going more than twenty-five years, discovered all sorts of new things. How many people have done that?”

  “But I’m so tired, Diane.” She rubbed her face, trying not to cry.

  “You’re tired now.”

  They sat for a few moments as Diane’s phone rang but she let it go to voice mail.

  “You’ve got funding for summer?”

  She nodded.

/>   “From whom?”

  “Ocean Watch, Sea Life Conservation, a small grant from the Shedd, and a few others.”

  “Thought so.” Diane pointed a finger at her, opened the top desk drawer, and pulled out a brochure. “Now, before you say no, hear me out.”

  Amelia crossed her arms, sat back in the chair, and watched Diane set a brochure down on the desk.

  “There’s an opening for a director and animal care curator at Sea Life Aquarium in Minneapolis,” Diane said.

  Amelia recrossed her legs, not ready to listen.

  “I’m personal friends with the director who’s retiring. They’re the largest retail franchise of the Sea Life Conservation Foundation in North America.”

  “Sounds like Burger King.”

  Diane raised her brows again as if to cut off the smart-ass comments and squelched a laugh. “They’ve funded your summer dives for the last several years.”

  Amelia nodded in contrition, correcting her tone. “Yes, you’re right, they have.”

  “She mentioned a few others retiring along with her,” Diane said and tipped her head sideways, holding both hands up in conclusion. “I know you three musketeers are close.”

  “Minneapolis?”

  “Nothing wrong with Minneapolis, Amelia,” the woman said. “It’s in the Mall of America to be exact.”

  “A shopping mall.” Amelia leaned forward in the chair.

  “Biggest one in North America.”

  All sorts of thoughts rushed at once.

  “We’d have to relocate.”

  “Won’t kill you.”

  Amelia looked at her.

  “You’d be responsible for all the marine life,” Diane said. “You’d oversee the creation of new exhibits, some work with donors, and be in charge of the children’s education programs. It’s everything we do at Biomes but on a much larger scale. You’d also have a staff and interns to manage; but you’re good with people.”