“Plus eighty?”
“Eighty years out,” he explains. “Where we project the levels to be eighty years from now, anyway. It should give them plenty of time to adjust on their own. But if not, we can help them along again. Our command of this is only getting better.”
He passes me the shell. I touch the slug’s foot, feel it react to the stimulus, stiffen under my finger. I place the shell back in the water, lowering it to the bed of sand rather than dropping it. There are several tanks of this species. The digital thermometers against the glass show different temperatures, and notes are written in black wax right on the glass. I turn to ask Ness something and see Ryan dabbing Ness’s cheek with a rag, cleaning the wound I made. A pang of guilt laced with a twinge of jealousy courses through me.
“Why me?” I ask. And I realize that this is the question that has haunted me all week, from the guest house to the helicopter to the depths of the ocean floor to the beach. Why me? I wipe my wet hand on my shorts and close the distance between Ness and myself. “Why not show this to the scientific community? Publish a paper? Do a TV special on Discovery? Why would you show me?”
“We need to win public support before any legal campaigns start,” Ness says. “We need the whole world on our side.”
“Who would be against this?”
I know as soon as I ask. Ness answers anyway.
“The same people who were against me before,” he says. “The same people who burned one of my father’s oil platforms. The ones who see any tampering with nature as bad, who have given up, who won’t be happy until we’re the ones who go extinct. And they’ll have people they normally hate on their side, the people who don’t believe in playing God. And of course, there are those who love shell collecting for the money and not the shells. They won’t support this either. Neither will those who get paid to crack down on operations like this.”
He’s right, of course. He’s absolutely right. About all of it. It’s just what he told me on the beach an hour ago.
“So who will support this?” I ask. “Politicians?”
All three of them laugh, and I hear how ridiculous this sounds. The lobbying will be fierce. And when did reason ever stand a chance in that game?
“The people who love the sea are our only hope,” Ness says. “And they tend to love quietly. They love in the middle of the night with their flashlights. They keep their love from others. But we need them to be loud. We need to win this all at once or we don’t stand a chance.”
I shake my head. Making my way to the stairs, I lower myself to the treads and sit down. “No,” I tell him. “No.”
Ness sits beside me. I can sense his desire to put a hand on my knee, realize that somehow this sort of gesture has become natural between us, but he resists the urge.
“You never stood a chance,” I say. “Not with me. Oh, Ness, what did you think I’d be able to do? Work a miracle for you? Get people to agree on this? Help get policies written by force of will, by some lyrical appeal to nature and love and life?”
The way he’s looking at me, I can tell that he did believe this. And the way Stewart and Ryan look piteously upon this man I think I love, I can tell that they told him so, that this was a fool’s errand from the start, the errand of a hopeful, romantic fool.
“That’s your grandfather,” I say. “Your grandfather had the right words, and he lived in the right time. He could have convinced his generation to undo what they’d done—“
“The science wasn’t ready,” Ness says.
“Well the people of our time won’t be ready. You’ll have the majority of hearts, Ness, but you won’t have much else.”
“Write the story,” he tells me. “Write the truth, and the rest will come.”
“It won’t,” I promise him. “Ness, listen to them.” I indicate Stewart and Ryan. “They’re right. They aren’t hopeless romantics like us. They deal in the concrete, in the knowable—“
Ness leaps up and takes two angry steps away from me. His body is rigid, his fists clenched. I think for a moment that he’s angry with me, but consider that he might just be angry at the world. He must know that I’m right. Without realizing it, I’m behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other lacing between his knuckles, coaxing that angry fist into an open and then interlocked hand. My mind is whirring, with ways to soothe him, with ways to take the bubbling vats of wonder in that room and bring my childhood to life once more—with ways to heal what I’ve wounded, what all of us have wounded.
“There is another way,” I whisper, even as it comes to me, even as I realize what we have to do. I don’t want anyone but him to hear, so I say it with a whisper. “Ness, there is another way.”
41
The bow of the boat undulates with the sea, rising and falling, rising and falling, a hiss of foam forming along the fiberglass sides and then sighing back into the ocean with the rhythmic and hypnotic grace of a swell rolling toward the beach. I watch the spray, enjoying the small rainbows that materialize and disappear like a mirage, and consider this illegal cruise of ours.
My father used to take me on boat rides like this. Late in the day, after pinky-swearing that we would not be skunked, after snorkeling every shell-hole we knew and casting lead sinkers and plastic lures until our arms were tired, we would race off with the setting sun on our starboard side to shell from the rich.
Just south of our home inlet, past the private beaches, there was a resort with hundreds of blue lounge chairs and umbrellas, a place where you were chased off if you didn’t have on the right colored wristband, where the towels and foot showers and the very sand itself were only for the well-to-do. My father and I would anchor beyond the swim buoys after the sun had set and snorkel ashore to steal a shell or two that had been carefully set out by the night staff for the early risers to discover.
We didn’t keep these shells. Nor did we take them for any reason other than to not-be-skunked. We simply took those shells because they didn’t belong there. Because they were paid for, as much a part of the resort package as the slices of fruit on the buffet table, carefully parceled out at all times of the day so every guest got their allotment, but so that every guest secretly felt that maybe, due to their industriousness or skill, they got just a little more than their share.
Some were perhaps even clever enough to fool themselves into thinking the shells they discovered had washed up of their own accord.
Father and I would secret these shells away, disappearing into the foam, and kick and laugh and swim back to our anchored boat. The shells would be deposited on the public beach across the narrow strip of road from our boat ramp, for someone else to chance upon.
An illegal boat ride on the edge of day and into deep water. I wonder if my father would be proud of what I’m doing this morning, all these many years later. It’s a different sort of law I’m breaking, but the moral code feels the same. Only this time, the shells that could get me into trouble are already in the boat.
Ness kills the motor and lets the boat glide along, the last of the wake fizzing and becoming part of the rising and sinking Atlantic. I open one of the great plastic tubs that line the bow of the boat. The shells inside writhe and crinkle. The shells are alive.
I feel Ness’s hand against the small of my back. We rock together, knees bent, studying his work. I turn to Ness and wrap a hand around the back of his neck, pull him close for a moment, breathe in the sunscreen and sweat and salt sea. He kisses me on the top of my head. “You sure?” he asks.