by Ashley Ream
Tilda said none of this. She said nothing at all. They had agreed, in practice if not explicitly, never to speak of Becca. Violating that would be—Tilda didn’t know what it would be. “Fatal” was the word that sprang to mind. She looked down at their food, concentrating on it.
Harry continued staring. The woman, still on the phone, moved stiffly. She had her back to the water and was looking down at the sand by her feet, her headlamp turned off. When she looked up at Harry, he turned back to his plate, embarrassed at having been caught.
His shrimp were different. Under his nose, the tails had been sliced off and the meat divided into bite-size pieces, the way you would do for a child. He looked at Tilda, but her eyes were on her own plate. With his left hand, he picked up his fork, and no one said anything about it.
* * *
Rachel hung up the phone without saying “good-bye” only because it hadn’t occurred to her. The data she needed would be e-mailed shortly, and she headed back toward the tent, back toward the rest of her team, back, unfortunately, toward John.
The Artemia lucis’s bioluminescence was what was known as circadian. During the day, the bay looked as it would look any December, only to transform itself into a neon showpiece at night. For the next five days, they would all work in shifts. Three on days, three on nights. Rachel was assigned the night shift along with John. They would live as the arthropods lived, going dormant during the day and showing themselves only as the sun went down. Or at least everyone else would have the daylight hours off. Rachel had other plans.
That afternoon, back at the camp, Rachel had slipped two pilfered folding tables inside her cabin while the others had stopped to refill their mugs with coffee and eat cookies bought at the nearest gas station. After double-checking that the door was locked and secure, she’d set up three large aquariums like those that might hold goldfish at the local pet store, except these aquariums had been sterilized and outfitted with sensors and digital readouts to measure and track every variable that she could think of. She hooked up chillers, aerator tubing, UVA lights, and UVB lights, all to, as best as she could, reproduce a Pacific Northwest bay.
She’d first read of the Artemia lucis while finishing her doctorate. The mention, in a chapter devoted to animal bioluminescence, was brief but enough to lead her, after some months of digging, to the Olloo’et. Primary source material on the tribe was limited to the journals of nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries, who wrote down stories dictated by the Olloo’et, who had no written language of their own. When Rachel finally got her hands on the original diaries, she’d had to blow dust off the pages, and translating the papers, in even the most rudimentary way, took an entire summer. The priests were French, a language Rachel had gleefully abandoned after high school.
Buried in the minutia of land rights and the building of schools, which, among other things, instructed the Olloo’et people on European agricultural techniques, was a story of particular interest to Rachel. The Olloo’et man told the priest of the “lighted path from the land of the spirits.” Although sometimes it was written as the “lighted path to the land of the spirits.” Whether you were coming or going, the people reported that the arrival of the breeding was greeted with great ceremony. There would be dances and song and tents erected on the beach for the adult men of the tribe. It was the job of the shaman to walk out into the bay just as the glowing began and scoop up cups of water full of the creatures, not unlike what Rachel and the team were doing right then.
Details of the ceremonial preparation were vague, but the summary was they drank it. First the shaman and then the tribe’s leader, whom they did not refer to as chief even though later historians would, and then eventually all of the adult men would have their fill. The men would go into the seaside tents, which would have been much colder and less hospitable than the cedar longhouses that were their permanent residence. For six days, they continued to replenish themselves with more and more cups from the bay, which resulted in a near-constant state of hallucinogenic trance. They reported seeing vision after vision of their ancestors and of the spirits that lived in the water and in the forest that surrounded them. They reported a feeling of great physical pleasure. The lame walked, the sick were well, and those who were injured ceased their pain. For six solid days, all of the adult males (never any women) lived in what could be compared to a modern opium den. Occasionally, the priests reported that someone died, usually by walking out into the water and never coming back.
It was not, however, the reported hallucinogenic properties of the Artemia lucis that interested Rachel. The world had enough LSD. What had caught Rachel’s attention were the words “and those who were injured ceased their pain.”
An analgesic. It had to be an analgesic. Some compound within the arthropods was a painkiller.
To say that this had gotten Rachel’s attention would be understating it. Food, oxygen, sex—not that Rachel had ever had sex—nothing was more important to her than this.
It is impossible to describe what it’s like to be in pain every single moment of your life. To wake up several times each night to take more pills because your nervous system won’t stop reliving a single moment in time. To have exhausted every medical resource, to have death by overdose as your only way out. And then to find this. This vague, historic, impossible reference to a compound buried somewhere within the body of an ancient sea creature so small it was almost invisible. This hope—this tiny bit of hope—had kept her alive for the past two years.
And now she was here. She had the creatures in her hands, but still, the practical difficulties were almost insurmountable. Rachel needed to figure out how to keep the arthropod’s eggs from going dormant, and she needed to figure out how to keep the adults alive. Then she would need to breed them in captivity and trigger the eggs to hatch, a new batch emerging every six days. Only then could she isolate the compound. If she could isolate the compound, everything would be different. She would live to see her next birthday and the one after that.
Almost insurmountable was not the same as actually insurmountable, and no one would work harder for an answer. Still, what she did not know about these creatures dwarfed what she did, and she didn’t dare ask a question, not of anyone. Anything she did, the university owned. Anything she discovered, they could take away. They could take her lab, her specimens. And they would. She was sure they would if they knew. If there was something more valuable to the pharmaceutical industry than pain management, she didn’t know what it was. If they knew, she would lose all control, and most important, she would not, under any circumstances, be allowed to experiment on herself. And that was all she wanted to do. That was all she wanted, and she intended to start right then.
4.
Only when the leftovers were stored in the fridge and Shooby had been let out to pee and the doors were all locked, checked, and double-checked, did Tilda climb the stairs to her room. She passed the second-floor landing, afraid to let her eyes so much as glance over the closed door at the very top of the stairs. She knew the inside had been scrubbed clean, rendered impersonal if not downright generic. She had insisted on it when no one, including Harry, understood.
Two of her cousins had come and boxed up the small pairs of underpants and the complete Little House on the Prairie series with the broken spines. They took the box of found seashells off the closet shelf and the chipped ceramic bank shaped like a puppy with three Sacagawea dollars inside. All of it was gone, but her mind saw it as it had been more than two decades ago. She knew where each dress had hung, knew the collection of stuffed bears and the names of all of them. And she had to hold much tighter to the railing to get her feet, one step at a time, to move up to the next set of stairs and away.
Harry did not understand what it took out of her to be here for him now. He did not know, Tilda thought, how much she must love him to do this. He really did not.
* * *
“Juno.” Tilda hardened her voice in the way she would when dealing with an u
npleasant and persistent lobbyist. “This is not your decision to make. It’s mine, and I have made it.”
Tilda had gotten plenty of warnings about the early years, about the midnight feedings and the toddler tantrums, but no one had warned her about having adult children, this adult child in particular. It was true that Juno had been difficult since birth. He was sensitive where his own feelings were concerned but willfully ignorant of others’. Tilda blamed herself and Harry for this. Becca’s death had affected the parenting of their one surviving child. They had been overprotective and withdrawn, often at the same time. They had put Juno at the center of their world and then fell off the edge of it.
“I just think he’s taking advantage of you,” Juno said. “If Maggie was so much better, let Maggie come and take care of him.”
Tilda wanted to set the phone down and walk away from it. She was tired, and it had been a difficult day. But Juno wasn’t concerned about her feelings. He didn’t get along with his father, and therefore Juno didn’t want her to get along with him either.
“How’s Anna Beth?” Tilda asked.
Anna Beth was a bright girl with a master’s in architecture who made her living designing chain pizza restaurants but had greater artistic aspirations. Tilda had assumed she would tire of Juno. Instead she had gotten pregnant.
“She’s fine. The baby’s kicking.”
“Right now?” Tilda wasn’t immune to the lure of a new baby, as long as it wasn’t hers.
“No, in general,” Juno said. “Anna Beth is in the bathroom right now. She pees, like, twenty times a day.”
“I see.”
When the call ended, Tilda fell back onto the bed and tried to follow her yoga teacher’s instruction about positive intention. She had to do something. Tilda was sure, if she kept up these thoughts, she’d end up reincarnated as one of the bright yellow banana slugs that crept through the island’s leaf litter. She started by sending out good thoughts for Juno and Anna Beth’s relationship. Tilda tried to imagine them happy. When she couldn’t manage that, she tried to imagine them bathed in a warm light, but that reminded her of Chernobyl.
She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. If it weren’t so cold, she’d open the window. The room hadn’t been used in a while, and Harry’s housekeeper had kept the door shut to save on the heating bill. It had to have been the housekeeper. Harry, if he had time to have every thought in the world, would never have landed on “reduce fuel expenses.” And no one had thought to air out the space before Tilda’s arrival. It was stale.
It might have been the guest room, but Tilda thought of it as her room. She had slept there for the last six months of their marriage when neither of them had liked the other enough to want to share a bed. So when she carried her bags upstairs, Tilda’s feet guided her in without waiting for instruction, and she was relieved that much, if not quite all, of what she remembered about it remained the same.
It was a small room with a sloped ceiling tucked under an eave, which in another time might have been given over to some lower member of the household staff. It held a double bed, a tall dresser, and a small desk of the sort once used for ladies’ letter writing. A stool that Tilda remembered purchasing at a flea market before Juno was born held the phone and could serve as a nightstand if she needed someplace to balance a glass of water or leave a book. But there was nothing else, and nothing else would fit. She liked it that way. It was simple, and it seemed whenever she ended up in this room, she needed for things to get simple.
The guest room had been the first stop on the way to moving out of the house and out of her marriage for good. Like training wheels, the room had supported her until the idea of being middle-aged and alone wasn’t scary enough to make her topple over. In this room, she could try her aloneness on, and when she needed to, she could take it off until it fit well enough to wear out of the house and into the world.
Tilda wasn’t sure what new role she was trying on this time. It seemed the old ones had fallen away and left her adrift without a sense of identity. “Tilda Streatfield is—” she said to herself, and fished around for an ending. She didn’t have enough patience to stick with the exercise, and it concluded without success. Her new ventures in self-improvement still had a ways to go.
“I’m just tired,” she decided. “It’ll come to me tomorrow.”
5.
Day Two of the Miracle
Some five hours later, almost to the point when night can fairly be said to be morning, Harry was downstairs in the library. It was where he kept his piano, and so he thought of it more as his workroom than a proper library. Still, the room held hundreds, maybe thousands, of books, all in white built-in bookshelves that went from floor to ceiling on three walls, with one of those rolling ladders to access them all.
Most of the books had been Tilda’s. She’d taken only a few with her, leaving him with tangible reminders of her whims and interests. For quite some time, he wouldn’t have thanked her for that, but he had never brought himself to throw them out either. So there they stayed. Politics, Pacific Northwest gardening, historical novels, several biographies of FDR. There were books on primitive art, chaos theory (that one, come to think of it, was his), and a farmer’s almanac for every year they were married—Lord knew why. The books survived Maggie only because Harry was careful not to discuss their origins and because the library was understood to be his space and, therefore, off-limits.
When Harry was stuck on one composition or another, he would get up from the piano and walk over to a shelf, pick up a book at random, open it up, and read a page or two until sitting back down seemed the better option. The almanacs tended to hold his attention for longer. The historical novels were a sure path straight back to the keys.
It is something to be able to call yourself a professional composer without having to add any sort of hyphen to your business card. Harry did not also teach junior high band or clean offices at night. He made his living writing music, which was not nothing and was the thing, of all the things, he was most proud of. A lot of that music had gone into movie scores, and many of those movies had been horrible. But that wasn’t Harry’s fault, and the money came in just the same. Still, he did prefer the freedom of writing for musicians in concert halls—whole orchestras, when he could swing it—rather than trying to get the strings to come in just as the hero character crested the mountain with his army of warrior elves.
As Harry was dying, it seemed the right time to do the things he wanted while he still could, which was why he had agreed—promised, really—to compose for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s next season. It would be Harry’s fourth and last piano concerto. The promise had been extracted with not a lot of difficulty by Gerald, whose training at London’s Royal Academy of Music was far more impressive than Harry’s, which included leaving Juilliard without actually graduating. Gerald was the symphony’s music director, now in his ninth year, and in a position to put Harry’s concerto on the slate if he damn well felt like it. It was not clear to Harry if the four-night performance, which he might or might not live long enough to see, was something Gerald wanted or if it was a bone for a dying man. Harry didn’t want it to matter, but on bad nights, it fed his insecurity and slowed his progress, which was the last thing he needed.
The trouble was that doing this thing, which shouldn’t have been physically difficult at all, was turning out to be, and it was happening at a far faster rate than Harry had ever imagined. More often than not his fingers would not perform their digital ballet across the keys. It had even become difficult to hold the pencil he used to scribble notes onto blank scores as he worked.
Having a thought in his head that he couldn’t perform and couldn’t even get down properly onto paper for someone else to perform was the most frustrating thing that had ever happened to him. And while he would never tell Tilda, there had been nights before she came that the score sheets had been shoved off onto the floor, and his shoulders had shaken with sobs.
Harry knew h
is frustration was apparent in the music. It was only a question of whether he could consider that an artistic choice or an inevitability.
He looked down at Shooby, who was not the night owl Harry was and who had fallen asleep several hours before. The dog had long ago learned to sleep through Harry’s piano playing, no matter how erratically the notes came. Harry listened to the waves outside, which were always audible even with the windows closed, and watched Shooby’s chest rise and fall for a moment. The pup was on his side with his legs straight out, looking for all the world like he had fallen asleep standing up and had tipped over onto the rug. It reminded Harry that perhaps he, too, should try to rest.
One of the side effects of all the medications he was taking, of which there were many, was insomnia. When the pharmacist had first explained this, it didn’t seem so bad. More time to compose while he could. What Harry hadn’t realized was that induced insomnia didn’t mean you weren’t tired. Harry was tired all the time with the fuzzy-headed lack of concentration and clear thinking that came along with it. He simply couldn’t fall asleep.
This night, however, couldn’t be blamed entirely on the medication. Harry kept a small end table next to his bench. It was a landing place for the day’s flotsam—plates with dried-out sandwich crusts, stained coffee cups, junk mail. But it also held the only framed photo of Becca in the house. It was difficult to see unless you were sitting at the piano bench, and no one sat at the piano bench but Harry.
Becca was nine in the photo. It had been taken just a few months before her death. She was out on the beach. You could see by her hair that the wind was blowing, and it was cold. She wore a red coat and rain boots and had her hands shoved deep in her pockets, probably because she hadn’t taken her gloves, even though Tilda was always reminding her. Their old dog, the dog two dogs before Shooby, ran out in front of her, looking back to see if she was coming along. Harry had taken the photo himself, and Becca had looked up just as he did. The water, the sky, the beach, and the dog were all gray. Becca was the only thing that brought color to the scene.