Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  * * *

  Amelia stayed after her shift was over and by late afternoon the turtle had skipped the last two feedings. Closing the door to the holding area, she walked down the corridor to the Ocean Tunnel, pulling on her bottom lip, worried. She leaned against the Plexiglas wall, observing the two other turtles.

  A sudden disturbance in the Ocean Tunnel startled her. Loud voices, a crowd of kids were laughing and chasing each other. Reflexively, Amelia darted and grabbed an elbow to pull out one of the boys.

  “Whoa.” As she pulled him aside, the others stopped. “What’s going on?” she demanded before seeing a volunteer guide clapping to encourage the commotion.

  “It’s after-school fun,” the guide said but stopped laughing once she saw Amelia’s expression.

  “Really,” Amelia said. “Why don’t you stop by my office after the tour and we’ll talk.”

  The group stopped and huddled together with somber faces as they watched the showdown between Amelia and the guide.

  The woman turned her face away and didn’t answer, instead motioning for the group to follow. A few of the children slowly backed away from Amelia, one turned to glare at her like “meanie.”

  She believed aquariums were meant to be quiet, introspective places full of wonder where people took in marine life and not venues for playing tag or climbing on benches and squawking like they were on jungle gyms.

  * * *

  There was a memo on her chair early the next morning, asking that she meet the management team upstairs by 11 a.m. It was the same office where she’d had her initial interview. As she entered the conference room, the furniture had been changed. Three managers sat in armchairs in a U formation, close together like an alliance, with one empty one facing them that she presumed was meant for her.

  “Have a seat, Amelia, please,” offered Grace, the head of HR. “Can I get you anything? Fizzy water, coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” Just get it over with.

  “We’ve had a few reports from parents as well as from one of our staff volunteers who, by the way, is the wife of one of our platinum donors, as to how you’re handling conflict,” the woman said and folded her hands.

  She thought to the incident. The guide hadn’t come to her office for a discussion.

  “You mean complaints?”

  “More like areas for improvement.”

  The three of them looked on gravely. Her surge of anger was surprising.

  “It’s important that we stay in the good graces of our visitors,” the woman went on to explain. Grace’s manicured nails and sparkly rings shone as she gestured with a pen toward a paper file with handwritten notes sitting in her lap. Her power skirt hiked as she crossed her legs and smiled at Amelia. “Children are our wealth,” the woman said, lowering her voice and shaking her head as if Amelia knew nothing about raising children. “Everyone’s here to have fun as they learn. It’s our mission.”

  “I have some safety concerns,” Amelia said, feeling her anger flare. She tried to tamp it down. “About supervision. About running through exhibits. Our classes are not daycare.”

  “They’re just children,” the woman said in a soothing voice, nodding slowly as she explained. “It’s up to you to redirect. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe you need to think about how to engage them better.”

  The three managers focused on her.

  She had the feeling they were about to get to the point.

  “A few parents complained about your new curriculum—they said it’s like sitting through a university lecture, not a children’s program.”

  Another manager spoke up. “Court the parents; encourage them to donate and remember.…” The man paused, smiling in a measured way as if about to drop a gem of wisdom. “Once you have a child’s interest, you have that child.”

  All three managers nodded in agreement and sentenced her to watching an online series about conflict resolution and reading a book called Getting to Yes as a requirement of further employment and placed her on probation.

  “Perhaps in your work situations in the past,” Grace had gone on, “with crew and colleagues things were different, and you all had a certain work rhythm. Here we’re meeting with the public.”

  Apparently they’d believed she was unschooled in the protocol of how to ask “nicely” and HR sought to “expand her repertoire of appropriate responses in hypothetical situations,” just shy of requiring she take a class where she’d have to role-play a series of scenarios with other employees. She’d quit before that.

  She was used to working with professionals who took instruction, direction without getting hurt feelings. Likewise she couldn’t ever remember feeling wounded because someone hadn’t said “please” when ordering her belowdecks to check if a bilge pump was working. Now she’d been put on notice to second-guess and think twice before asking anyone to do anything.

  * * *

  Amelia hurried down four flights of stairs to the main floor, racing past the Ferris wheel, the SpongeBob tower, and toward the down escalators and Sea Life. Narragansett Bay was in her mind’s eye, the feel of the sun on her skin and the salty residue of the water on her shoulders. The ocean skies of many moods, the sound of water lapping against stones. Why had she come here? She missed her juvies and how she’d taught them to love the sea. They’d made no pretense about who they were, what they’d done to land in her custody for the summer but would fall in love with the underwater world, for some of them on the very beaches where they’d gotten busted.

  Maybe this whole thing was a mistake; maybe she’d panicked and should have waited it out for a different job. She’d dragged Bryce and Jen into it, encouraged them to dissolve their lives, the dutiful friends that they were. That much she hoped they still were.

  16

  It was standard practice for the Sea Life staff to pull nine water samples a day to test for water quality in all the various tanks—pH and oxygen levels, bacteria. Amelia was just finishing a special tour for Sea Life’s top brass who were visiting from California when one of them asked to see how the water was maintained.

  She used her security badge to open the heavy metal door. The entire room was humming.

  “Here’s our filtration system.” She propped open the door. “It’s for salt and fresh water and consists of sand filters, ozone, and protein skimmers, it fills the entire room, closed off to the public.”

  She looked around as people studied the pipes, some snapped photos with their phones.

  “Daily maintenance consists of backwashing the tank water by removing particles normally found in marine waters so it can look completely clear for the public. People like to see fish swimming in a glass of water as clean as if it was from the kitchen tap.”

  The visitors chuckled at her analogy.

  “Natural freshwater and seawater bodies are never clear,” she went on to explain. “But in public aquariums if the water is cloudy people think it’s dirty. So the system filters out many of the naturally occurring nutrients that in fact are beneficial to the marine life.”

  “Does it hurt the sea creatures?” an older man asked.

  Amelia thought for a moment before answering. These donors directly funded their summer dive in the Andamans.

  “Ah.” Amelia smiled at him. “Great question.” The man folded his arms and nodded once, pleased at being complimented. “It doesn’t directly hurt them because we add special nutrients that don’t cloud the water in order to make up for the absence of what nature adds in the wild in perfect balance.”

  * * *

  An hour later in the off-exhibit area, Amelia had been trying to coax a shark to eat when she heard someone enter the secure area. Standing on the platform above the tank with a pair of long tongs in her hand, she made clicking noises with a device to cue the shark to eat.

  “Now don’t fall in there.”

  She turned to look. The lighting was dim.

  Heat passed her through as she missed a breath, seeing the outline of his form agai
nst the open door.

  “Myles?”

  He bowed slightly. “I am he,” he said in a voice that joked but didn’t mock. His face was shadowed.

  “What are you doing here?” Krill was smeared in her hair and under her fingernails.

  “Attending a conference in St. Paul. Heard you’d moved here, thought I’d drop by.”

  A crush of emotion silenced her.

  “You didn’t call first because…”

  “I did.”

  True. Her personal phone was in her office.

  “Your voice mail picked up.”

  She stood on the platform, reluctant to move. The Sea Life cell phone was clipped to her dive belt, she’d been waiting for a call from her friend in the New York Aquarium about the shark. There were crates of juveniles that had just arrived from a Sea Life in Kansas City that needed to be examined and acclimated before being added to the exhibit.

  “Who let you in?”

  “Bryce.”

  Damn him.

  “Just a moment,” Amelia said.

  She stepped down from the platform in her wet suit as Myles approached.

  As they sized each other up, Myles had the unfair advantage as she stood there in the form-fitting neoprene wet suit; he in a long woolen coat, sweater, and trousers. She’d never known a man to change clothes so many times in a given day and have more outfits than any woman she’d known.

  “You look good.”

  She said nothing back.

  “Heard what happened in Rhode Island,” he said. “It’s great you picked up something so quickly.”

  She still said nothing.

  “Hey.” He paused. “Thought maybe we could have dinner.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I feel badly about how we left things.”

  “We?”

  “Okay, me,” he said.

  She was silent.

  “Is this not a good time?” He gestured in a joking way, looking around the empty rooms.

  There was no good time.

  “How about tonight. Dinner?” Myles asked. His voice was as seamless as ever.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m staying in the Grand Hotel.” She remembered their first dinner together in Providence. As he’d unfolded and smoothed the cloth dinner napkin across his lap, she’d felt like a condemned woman, seeing as he was from a much better family than she was.

  “Gorgeous place,” he said in a polished way. “Have you been?”

  Of course she hadn’t.

  “They have a wonderful world-class chef there,” he said. Her stomach tightened, remembering how all his inflections bordered on affectations.

  “Great.” Her voice was flat. She looked at her hands. Grime under her fingernails, reminding her of her father’s and how he’d sometimes come home from work after working a double shift with printer’s ink embedded into the calluses of his hands, making them look like swirling designs.

  One side of her watchband was split in half. She ached with what she hoped to be one of her last cycles of menstrual cramps.

  “Maybe tomorrow you can give our group a tour of Sea Life,” he said as if giving instructions to someone working in a car wash on how to better wipe the dashboard.

  And maybe you could just go fuck yourself too.

  “Dinner then?”

  She hesitated, ticking down the possibilities.

  “Okay.”

  “So tell me where you live so I can—”

  “I’ll meet you in the hotel lobby at eight thirty.”

  “I’d love to come pick you up.” His voice was as polished and lilting as ever. She remembered how his hands were so smooth, manicured fingernails, the dark hair that grew along the topsides always so neatly trimmed, pressed dress shirts from the cleaners, his gold watch. She also remembered how sheltered he’d made her feel. As if he’d unbuttoned his long cashmere topcoat and wrapped her in it, blanketing and protecting her from the outside world. She’d never felt like that before but remembered how good it felt.

  Acid from lunchtime’s turkey sandwich crept up into her esophagus.

  “I’ll see you later,” Myles said and took two steps back, then turned and left.

  * * *

  “Fucking Bryce,” she swore under her breath.

  She waited, listening for the sound of Myles’s shoes clicking down the long cement hallway and out the corridor, waiting for the thud of the door to ensure he was gone.

  Setting down the shark tongs, she stormed toward the laboratory where she’d find Bryce. Sliding her security card, she pushed open the door and spotted him hunched over a shallow tank where newly arrived starfish were under observation for a type of sea star wasting syndrome that was devastating populations all along the northwest coast. He’d been making slides and running tests to determine if this group was infected before releasing them into any of Sea Life’s other exhibits.

  Bryce looked more frightened than startled as the door flew open and in she stepped. She leaned against the black lab bench. Folding her arms, she glared at him.

  “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  He looked up from the microscope.

  “Shall we?” She could tell he knew he was in trouble.

  “Sure,” he said slowly.

  She smiled and waved to the other techs working at the lab benches. A few looked up.

  “Just a sec,” he said as she watched him transfer a specimen to a slide for examination. Her chest tightened.

  He stopped focusing through the microscope lenses and turned, looking at her through his safety goggles.

  Amelia thumbed like a hitchhiker.

  “In our office,” she said and left, marching down the hall as her feet squeaked, still wet with water from the tank.

  Bryce stepped in. Amelia closed the door and leaned against it.

  “How could you do that to me?” She raised her voice.

  “I didn’t do anything to you—”

  “Letting Myles in like that without asking, asshole.”

  He looked at her for a moment and then dropped down into his chair, crossed his leg, ankle on knee, and leaned his chin on his hand.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I apologize.”

  She was taken aback, not expecting him to concede so quickly, furious at the concession.

  “Imagine what that felt like.” She raised her voice as her hand hit the counter, shouting to make him feel it, though he already seemed contrite.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But why? Why would you do such a mean thing?”

  He only shrugged and shook his head as if it was all a mystery in which he’d found absolution.

  “Sometimes I just don’t get you.”

  She flung open the door and left, her damp feet squishing along as she headed toward the women’s locker room to change.

  * * *

  Something about Bryce bothered her. He’d never done anything like that before. Maybe he was angry for letting her talk him into moving to Minnesota. And for that matter, maybe Jen was too.

  She had nothing to wear.

  Pushing open the mall’s exit doors, the freshness of arctic air made her eyes tear as she headed toward the bus stop. The sun was low, the sky a sluggish orange and gray since the days were some of the shortest of the year. She hurried along the sidewalk around to the bus stop, lamenting how reciprocity in love was such a tough thing to find. She’d dragged half-conscious men through enough quasi-relationships to know better. But the reverse was no better either—trying to fall in love with a man who began talking about finding a larger house together after only a few dates. She’d awaken each morning, hopeful that some cosmic love switch had flipped on so that she could say “I love you” and mean it, but instead their hands felt more like chemical irritants on her skin. And for six years she’d given up, taken herself out of the game until meeting Myles. And maybe it was precisely that state of deprivation that had made her an easy mark for such a polished man.
>
  Hustling toward the bus stop, she spotted the long line. People stood motionless, thumbing through messages on their phones. Amelia slowed with relief, taking her place at the back of the line and burrowed behind the taller bodies for warmth. Each in their own thoughts, phones, although she was starting to recognize people on the same shifts.

  Fast-food workers, store clerks, some uniforms barely concealed beneath coats—layers of plastic IDs and security cards dangled round their necks in glassine holders, some from rhinestone cords. The air felt good after the suffocating warmth of the mall’s microclimate. Unzipping her coat, Amelia held on to both sides and fanned it.

  Overly made-up salesclerks teetered on heels. Some had downgraded to sneakers, which looked odd given their lace-patterned hose and skirts. Eye makeup had melted into splotches beneath their eyes after standing nine hours greeting customers.

  From walking around the mall, Amelia could spot some of the same women flagging down customers in Nordstrom, offering makeovers or cotton balls soaked in fragrance. If only they gave do-overs—nothing that the right product couldn’t cure except for maybe low wages and no social supports. Here and there stray clumps of finely dyed hair indicated that their coiffures were giving out too.

  She noticed the furrowed brows and clenched faces of the young “Mallers,” as Bryce called them all, and it brought her back to when she’d discovered she was pregnant.

  * * *

  At the time Amelia had been three and a half months along, just after finals during winter break when she’d worked up the gumption to tell the dean she was quitting school. Amelia had sat on a chair in the reception area, waiting.

  “Welcome, Amelia.” Dean Williams had stepped out of her office after the last appointment. “Please.” She’d graciously ushered Amelia into the office. “Have a seat.”

  As Amelia sat, so did the dean. The woman had been so helpful in the months following her parents’ deaths; Amelia cringed at having to deliver the news.

  She’d looked down at her fingers. Taking a ragged breath, she toyed with telling the truth but then decided against it.

  “Good to see you, Amelia.” The dean beamed a smile.

  She looked away.