Swishing in her wetsuit, Lucy marched over to Andrew and gave him a kiss. He patted her shoulder gently, though I noticed that he kept one finger planted in his book to mark his page.
“How was it?” Forest called from the table.
“Fine.” Lucy straightened up. “No problems. I saw the most wonderful bed of sea urchins. They were marching around in extreme slow motion. Inch by inch. The spines waving everywhere. I found an enormous clam, too. One of the biggest I’ve ever seen. I could probably fit inside it.” As she spoke, her hands flitted through the air, miming the shapes of anemones. “It was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. You can’t blink without seeing a stingray or a rockfish.”
“Any sharks?” Forest asked.
Lucy considered. “Not really. The only guys who got close to me were a couple harbor seals and a huge sea lion. He nosed me a little. Wanted to bite my air hose. I had to whack him with my basket.” She pursed her lips. “Well, I did see some of the Rat Pack at a distance. They were over by Mussel Flat, circling around and acting weird. They didn’t bother me.”
“No Sisters?” Galen asked.
“None.”
Then, to my surprise, Lucy turned to me.
“Come here, mouse girl,” she said.
She snapped her fingers impatiently, as though summoning a recalcitrant pet. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet. Lucy pointed into her bucket, yellow and plastic, filled almost to the brim.
I approached it cautiously. At the bottom of the pool, there was a lump of clay. I bent over, peering into it. Then the object twitched. I let out a gasp as it changed shape, like a flower opening its petals or a fist uncurling. A few brown tendrils snaked across the bucket’s floor. A gauzy sac ballooned upward — a wealth of tentacles.
I stepped back instinctively. Lucy laughed. She reached into the water and picked the tiny octopus up. Before my eyes, it changed color, its skin roughening, suffused with deep red. Its skinny arms braided themselves around her wrist in a death grip. The pouch of its body dangled like a bizarre ornament on a charm bracelet. Yellow eyes pivoted on stalks. Droplets rained onto the floor.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Lucy said.
8
IT IS OCTOBER, and most of the white sharks are gone. Like sightseers in Venice, they avoid the colder months. Galen and Forest have been tagging them for years, attaching an electric device to each creature. Stuck below the dorsal fin, these machines have relayed back the precise coordinates of the sharks’ winter breeding and hunting grounds. The animals travel south to balmier seas; they head west to harass the surfers in Hawaii. I thought I had missed my chance at an encounter.
Then, a week ago, Forest crashed into my room at six in the morning. Dawn was near, the eastern sky aglow.
“Get up,” he shouted. “There’s a big kill off Sugarloaf!” He kicked the edge of the bed. “And don’t forget your camera.”
I climbed wearily to my feet. I had not slept well. There was an octopus in the cabin now, and it was occupying my mind. Lucy had kept the tiny creature she had pulled out of the sea. Oliver the octopus — she had named him with cartoonish assonance. She had dug an old aquarium out of some closet, God knows where, and filled it with salt water, a lumpy rock, and a spray of seaweed rising from the pebbled floor like a column of steam. She had made a home for the animal on her bureau. The octopus lived in her bedroom now, directly below mine.
Somehow this made it difficult to sleep. Last night I had lain awake for hours, aware of that monster lurking in the darkness. Its alien intelligence. Its bizarre, oblong eyes. I had been having nightmares. Imagining I heard the octopus slithering in the hallway. The wiggle of his tentacles. The kiss of his suckers.
Twenty minutes later, I was on board the Janus for the first time. The sun had not yet risen as we skimmed across the water. A smoky layer of fog obscured the eastern horizon, rendering the light diffuse. The sea itself was as black as tar. We were heading north. The islets there were prehistoric — the sort of rugged, primal peaks that might have appeared behind a group of dinosaurs in a documentary. Even the mist seemed uncanny. Each island wore a belt of gauzy white.
I swear that I smelled the blood before I saw it. Tangy, oily. A group of seagulls was wheeling beside Sugarloaf — a bulbous promontory, aptly named. The birds were screaming. I watched three of them get into a swordfight of flashing beaks. Then a patch of mist moved aside, curtains parting at the theater, and the blood appeared. It was phosphorescent, spilled across the surface of the sea. It glowed against a landscape of gray. (I have since learned that a seal’s blood is so highly oxygenated that it just about fluoresces when exposed to open air.) The torn carcass was still visible, bobbing on the waves. The seal was human-sized. Purple strips of flesh. A tail as broad as a catcher’s mitt. It had no head. Whatever killed it had decapitated it cleanly. Blood was still fountaining from the raw wound where its neck had been. I leaned over the side of the boat, wondering if I was about to throw up.
I have learned too much about white sharks lately. I know that, as a species, they predate the existence of trees. I know that they have survived four global mass extinctions. I know that they are born live, not hatched out of eggs like most fish. The pups emerge fully formed, about four feet long, with their predatory instincts already buzzing. White sharks have their own sixth sense, used for detecting prey: they can pick up the electrical impulses generated by muscles in motion. They can also smell blood in the water from a mile away. Their odd manner of swimming, the snout swinging side to side like a pendulum, helps them to track exactly where the scent is coming from. To me, it seems reminiscent of the way human beings tilt their heads to locate the source of a distant sound.
I know that white sharks are warm-blooded. Unlike other members of their species, they do not start out each day sluggish and chilled, waiting for their nervous systems to fire up, gradually accumulating enough energy for the hunt. White sharks are always ready to hunt. They are unique in other ways, special and bizarre. They sometimes breach like whales, leaping clear of the sea. Nobody is sure exactly why they do this — to scope out the nearby surroundings, to shake off clinging remoras. Maybe they do it for fun. They have even been known to land on boats. Indeed, a few registered victims of shark attacks were killed outside the water, the accidental casualties of a two-ton fish leaping jubilantly but carelessly, unaware that its bulk was heading not for the open sea but for a hapless ship in the line of fire.
This morning, Forest was at the helm of the Janus. Galen had his binoculars in hand. The seagulls were busy, a mass of wings above the iridescent slick. I snapped photo after photo: mist-soaked islands, bloodthirsty birds, and a splotch of crimson burning like a bonfire.
Then Forest cut the engine, pointing into the ocean.
“Look there,” he said.
“What?” I said, stepping forward cautiously.
The surface of the water did seem strange. A bulge had appeared, different from the choppy waves. Moments later, a fin broke the surface. The shark was moving fast. I barely had time to take in the massive torso, the slick skin, before it had plunged again, disappearing from view. I gasped as another one skimmed past. It was difficult at first to pick out their silhouettes in the dark sea. Two sharks. Three sharks. None of them bothered to break the surface again. With my untrained eye, I wondered if they could all have been the Sisters.