For his part, Forest has become an automaton. His steely focus has increased by an order of magnitude. It is December, rainy and cold. There are only a few more weeks before the last of the sharks will depart for warmer climes. I have begun to hear Forest’s alarm clock going off at three in the morning. Mick, his roommate, will toss and turn, the squeal of bedsprings echoing down the hallway. Even before the sun is up, Forest wants to be in the lighthouse, on call.
And Galen — poor Galen — seems a little lost. For the first time, I can see that he is a man in his sixties, twice the age of anyone else here. He has become absent-minded. Sometimes he seems to be on the verge of asking me a question, but decides against it, averting his gaze. I have come across him wandering around the kitchen, looking everywhere for his reading glasses, unaware that they are perched on his brow. He trails off in the middle of telling stories, staring at me.
If I were a fanciful person, I would say that in those moments, he hears death speaking to him. More than ever before, death is with us on the Farallon Islands. In the past, it was like the sound of the sea caught in a shell’s curl — distant, vague, half-imagined. Now, however, death is front and center. It is there at the breakfast table. It appears amid the silences in an everyday conversation. It lingers outside the window in the evenings. Perhaps Galen is distracted by that cloaked figure, barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Another ghost in an already-crowded cabin.
The days are growing shorter. The constellations have pivoted, the autumn shapes dipping beneath the horizon, the winter stars shining with greater urgency. The sea seems different too. The islands sit on the edge of the coastal plateau. To the west, the ocean floor plummets into black depths. Storms blow in now from the deeper water. They do not last long; they are brief, vicious squalls that have stripped our two little trees of leaves. Rain has battered the cabin and soaked the porch. We have all taken to wearing ponchos around even when the sky is clear, just in case.
I am still expecting Lucy to leave. Indeed, I am amazed that she is not gone already — that she did not board the helicopter with the federal agents and flee without a backward glance. But instead she is hard at work. She is on a mission to tag more birds than anyone else on the planet ever has. She does not eat; she barely sleeps. Her hummingbird energy seems perilous now. The mechanism that drives her is clearly working beyond its capacities. I can just about smell the smoke from the overheated gears. Lucy continues, each evening, to scrub and mop the house; I have woken in the night to hear the vacuum cleaner running. She polishes the knives and wipes the countertops as though the grime and dust are the physical manifestations of her own sorrow. By eradicating mold, by making each countertop shine, she might wash her soul clean of suffering, leaving herself burnished and bright.
A FEW DAYS ago, I lay in bed, awake. I had been dreaming about the whales again — their slippery weight, their unearthly song. The sun was rising. My room brimmed with light like a wood stove. I had grown accustomed to perching in the bedroom like a spider on a web, determining where the others might be by the shake of floorboards, the chime of voices. Today there was someone in the kitchen. I caught the scrape of a chair. Someone was making coffee; that earthy odor wafted up the stairs. Forest and Galen were out on the grounds. I could hear them calling to one another.
Getting to my feet, I saw that a slip of paper had been pushed under my door. On one side, my name was printed in block letters. MELISSA—my name here. On the other side was written, Lucy Crayle would appreciate your attendance at a memorial service for Andrew Metzger. It will be held at sunset on Friday.
I read it twice. I could imagine Lucy cutting up a sheet of paper; there was a faint pencil mark where she had measured it out. She had evidently made formal invitations for each of us. I was aware that she would not be attending Andrew’s real funeral. His family was in Maine, and the trip would be too long, too expensive. This, apparently, was her solution. I stood there for a long while, holding the square of paper, a lump in my throat.
THERE WAS SOME excitement that afternoon. Mick, Forest, and I walked to the Tit — a rotund promontory on the northern shore — to get a look at a pod of gray whales that were frolicking there. The day was chilly. I positioned myself on the plateau with my tripod. The granite seemed especially loose, sliding and crunching beneath my shoes like melting ice. I leaned forward, eye to the viewfinder, and I experienced the mental shift I always feel in those moments — the physical falling away, my sensory organs dimming, aware of nothing but color and exposure and light.
The gray whales were in an obliging mood. There were ten or twelve of them in the group, and they seemed to be playing. I captured a flash of baleen slats, glistening inside a wide mouth. I caught an image of several tails cresting together, flinging a tsunami of droplets upward. The animals lived up to their name, deep gray, patched with white like a cloudy sky. For the first time, I was able to get what I wanted from the whales on film. The size of them. Their breath climbing in columns of steam. Their enormous flippers. Their elegance. Their mystery.
Mick and Forest were standing by the water’s edge. From what I could tell, they were arguing. Mick had the daily log in his hands. Forest had been deputized as his assistant and note-taker. This was the way of things on the islands. No one ever had time off. All the biologists had seasons in which they could focus on their areas of expertise (when their animals ruled the roost) and seasons when they were required to help the others (when their animals were absent). During the summer, Forest, the shark specialist, had been in command. He and Galen had given orders, and everyone else had jumped to obey. But autumn had brought the whales, and winter would give way to Seal Season, which would be followed by Bird Season. Each biologist had a moment in the sun. This was Mick’s time to shine.
Just then, one of the gray whales decided to “spy-hop.” It was a behavior Mick had described to me, but one I hadn’t expected to see in person. The creature poked his monstrous head out of the water. He rose vertically, perhaps ten feet in the air. Then he began to rotate. He pivoted on the spot like a barber pole. Camera in hand, I clicked gleefully away. I knew what he was doing — scouting the surrounding area — but there was such beauty and strangeness in the action that for a moment I felt that he was dancing for me. He was performing for the camera.
I heard a shout. Mick was waving in my direction. Forest appeared to be injured; he was bent double, holding his calf and grimacing.
“What happened?” I cried.
“He lost his balance,” Mick said. “He wasn’t listening to me.”
“Don’t start,” Forest said.
I hurried over, my camera bouncing on my chest. Forest’s pant leg was stained crimson. He had left smudges on the rocks, marking his path in blood.
Mick and I organized ourselves into makeshift crutches, one on either side of him. With my arm around Forest’s waist, I could feel his thinness. He was a surfboard of a man. His ropy musculature flexed beneath my fingers. His ribs were iron bars. He limped and winced, and we steadied him all the way home.
Back at the cabin, Mick stitched him up. First a shot of anesthetic, then the needle and thread. I knew the drill now. It had been the same for me. Forest sat at the table, reading a book, leg extended, as Mick worked away with reading glasses perched on his nose. Forest turned a page. Mick sewed in silence. I could not tell if Forest was genuinely uninterested in the progress of his injury — so accustomed to wounds, to stitches and scars, that he could not be bothered to attend — or whether he was keeping his mind occupied out of a dislike of syringes and blood.