The Line Tender Page 5

  “But later, one of the officers took a call from a guy who lives on Bearskin Neck. He was up in the night ’cause a storm surge made the tide come right into the lower level of the house.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live that close to the harbor,” I said.

  “No,” Dad said.

  “Anyway, the guy ran to the upper level to call his brother for help and he saw the shark swinging from the hoist. Said it was like a giant punching bag, knocking back and forth. And in one big gust, the straps snapped and the shark fell into the harbor.”

  My eyes bugged out. “Do you think it’s still in the harbor?”

  Dad shook his head. “That shark’s probably in Guam right now.”

  I felt the meatballs sitting in my stomach. “So it’s gone,” I said.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  “Does Sookie know?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he does.”

  I imagined Sookie’s blood vessels popping when he heard the news. The shark was headed to Guam, and the biologists would never get to look for whatever it was that they looked for inside of a dead shark. Fred would not be happy.

  “Why are you so quiet?” he asked, scraping the plate with his fork.

  “No reason,” I said.

  “Is it about the shark?”

  “Sort of.”

  11. Clasperhead!

  By the time Fred showed up that night, I had nearly eaten myself sick. I followed up a solid base of meatballs with a couple of packaged cupcakes and washed them down with a can of cream soda.

  “Are you okay?” he asked when I answered the door.

  I shrugged. “Stomachache.”

  He nodded. His sunglasses were on top of his head like a hair accessory. It was almost dark outside.

  I told him about the shark falling from the winch and possibly being whisked away to Guam in the rough seas. He frowned. “I guess it makes more sense than someone stealing it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You still want to put it in the field guide though, right?”

  He held up his backpack. “Yup. I brought everything over.”

  “You’ll have to show me where the shark books are,” I said, walking up the stairs. I had a vague idea of where they were in the office, but I didn’t know our library as well as Fred did. He borrowed our books all the time.

  I flipped the switch on the wall and track lighting illuminated three columns of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. These were mostly my mom’s books, but Dad opened them every once in a while to learn about the things he dredged up while scuba diving.

  Fred sprawled himself on the floor and began working on a new page in our field guide. He wrote “White Shark” at the top and “Date Sighted: July 9.” He recorded basic shark stats from one of my mom’s books and left a big space for me to draw an image of the great white. I needed to find a book that had a better picture of a great white to sketch than the headshot in Fred’s book.

  “Any recommendations?” I asked.

  “Try the bottom shelf.”

  One of the books was written by Cousteau and Cousteau, which looked interesting because I had at least heard of one of the Cousteaus. I cracked open my art box and dug for the turquoise pencils. We stretched out on the floor. Fred paged through the shark encyclopedia. I put my sketch pad so close to Fred that when I belly-flopped onto the rug, I could have knocked him out. With our feet touching, we set to work. Fred jotted down notes from one of the books on to his paper. I looked at photographs in Cousteau and Cousteau’s book, stopping at page thirty to look at a strange photograph.

  A sand shark was spread on the ground, cut cleanly down the middle. A woman with pigtails pried opened one of the flaps of skin and muscle, revealing the insides of the abdomen—orange organs; pink, fleshy walls; and stripes of blood. Her mouth was wide-open as she looked at more than a dozen baby sharks, pouring out of the hole in their mother.

  Among other things, the caption read, The mother shark, after giving birth, will not eat for days in the area where she gave birth, so as not to eat her babies by mistake.

  I had two thoughts. Do the father sharks ever eat the baby sharks? And was Sookie’s shark a female?

  “Listen to this,” Fred said, reading from his book. “‘White sharks are warm-blooded, but their hearts and gills keep the temperature of the water.’”

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “‘The elevated visceral temperature also helps the shark digest food and increase the developmental processes of the babies in a warm uterus.’”

  I put my head on his shoulder for a moment.

  “I love that you can just throw around ‘uterus.’ You are highly evolved.”

  I looked at the page Fred was reading. My eyes zeroed in on a sentence. My mom had always used anatomical names for private parts, but for some reason, seeing vagina in print while lying on the floor with Fred seemed indecent. “Oh my God. Some sharks have two vaginas,” I said.

  I turned and looked at him, my eyes open wide. Fred was smiling. His face was so close, I could smell his sunscreen.

  “And two penises. They’re called claspers,” Fred added, raising his eyebrows.

  “Clasper? What?! Why?” I asked.

  “Maybe to make sure everything works out,” he said. “They probably don’t have a lot of chances to get it right.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?!” I said, bumping his leg with my foot.

  “You never asked,” he said, turning his face back to the book.

  This was too weird for me. My cheeks were starting to feel warm. “Clasperhead!” I yelled at Fred.

  He caught on quick. “Clasperweed!”

  I disgusted him at clasperless, and research resumed. Though I kept calling out new ones as they came to me.

  He started unconsciously tapping his toe on my toe while he scrawled more notes onto the paper. Then this buzz radiated up my calves like a spark climbing a long fuse up my gangly legs, tripping off a series of flashes in my thighs and shoulders. Lately I was hypersensitive to touch and even someone else combing my hair or scratching my back felt like a transformer blowing up under my skin. Fred kept tapping. I didn’t move my foot. I let the waves ripple up the back of my neck. But he just read and scrawled notes on his pad.

  I rolled onto my back, put my knees up like I was ready to do sit-ups and sighed. “Clasperface.” Staring up at the ceiling, I asked, “Why sharks? Why’d she pick sharks?”

  “Who?”

  “My mom.”

  “Because they are sharks,” he said. Duh.

  “So?”

  “They have been here since the dinosaurs, but we know almost nothing about them—white sharks especially.” He rolled over. “Think how cool it would be if you were one of the people to make a big discovery. And maybe one of those discoveries could help protect the species.”

  “Do you think my mom made any discoveries?”

  “Yup. You should talk to your dad,” he said, taking his inhaler out of his pocket.

  Fred pulled himself off the rug and took a puff. He walked in an arc around the books and papers spread on the floor, before standing in front of the bookshelves. Maybe it was because his brain was cloudy from the lack of oxygen, but he stared a little too long at a row of cardboard file holders, labeled by year, containing folders and spiral-bound stacks of paper.

  He removed 1991, the most recent set. “Ever look in here?” he asked me, holding the file box for me to see.

  I shook my head. He put the box on the floor and flipped through the stack.

  “Your mom’s name is on every single one of them. They look like reports,” he said. “‘Reproductive Behavior and Social Organization of Dogfish.’ It’s from January 1991.”

  “Seriously?” I shrug. “Dogfish should stop reproducing.”

  “What?” He
looked at me like I was nuts. “What are the larger sharks going to eat if there are no dogfish?” he persisted.

  “People,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes and resumed looking through the stack, which made me feel worse. I wanted him to put the reports down. What was so interesting about dogfish? And who cared about their social lives?

  Fred was unmoved by my defensive behavior. He yanked out the last report in the set. “This one says, ‘Proposal for Cape Cod White Shark and Gray Seal Study.’”

  He opened the front cover, scanned the table of contents, and flipped through the pages.

  “What’s the date?” I asked.

  “May 1991.”

  My mom died in June 1991.

  She would have just finished pulling together the proposal, poking the holes on the left-hand side of the pages, and binding the paper with a black plastic spiral. I wondered if she had ever submitted the proposal. It was probably too soon to have heard back from anyone by the day she died.

  “Do you mind if I borrow this?” Fred asked, holding up the last research proposal she wrote.

  My brain was underwater. “What?” I asked.

  The 1991 box was like the kite on a snapped string, a loose piece of her that Fred had caught. It was her words, recorded at the point when she was as old as she was ever going to get. I felt like an outsider. He found a treasure. But why did he want her words? What did she say?

  I looked at Fred, hanging on to May 1991. I wanted to rip it out of his hands, but I said, “You have to give it back.”

  He must have heard desperation in my voice. Because he looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t worry. I will.”

  12. Circle of Willis

  One summer day, when I was seven, my mom drove to the Cape in the early morning, boarded a research boat in Chatham, and left shore with four other scientists and a boat captain. As usual, they were looking for sharks.

  Sometime after lunch, she developed a terrible headache and started vomiting. The scientists knew something was very wrong. They didn’t know an aneurysm had ruptured in the network of blood vessels at the bottom of her brain called the circle of Willis. It didn’t help her chance of survival that she was more than ten miles from the mainland when the captain signaled the Coast Guard and turned the boat around.

  I was at day camp, listening to the counselor read Julie of the Wolves.

  Dad was interviewing a robbery witness in Salem.

  It was a clear and breezy day.

  And then one of the scientists called my dad. He drove to the Cape alone, while Mr. Patterson picked me up from camp. We sat on his porch, while I looked at my house across the street. The old man was straight with me.

  “Something happened in her brain when she was on the boat, Lucy.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “The doctors think she was already gone before the medics arrived.”

  I looked at him, confused. Gone where?

  “She died,” he said. He rubbed my back with one hand and covered his eyes with the other. I felt like the air was stuck in my chest, half used.

  Sometimes I wonder why Mr. Patterson broke the news instead of my dad, but when my mom collapsed on the boat, things stopped happening in the usual way. She didn’t finish her research. She didn’t come home for a late dinner. She didn’t come home at all.

  13. The Quarry

  That Saturday night, Fred called me over to his house to continue working on the field guide. I packed my bag. Mr. Patterson sat on his porch, cleaning his French horn with a white cloth.

  “What’s in the bag?” he asked.

  “Books, art supplies, clothes.”

  “You running away?”

  “No. Just going to Fred’s.”

  “I knew my wife before we were in grammar school. She lived on the corner,” he said, pointing up the street. “We used to go clamming. Then one day, she looked different to me. I asked if I could escort her to a party. The rest is history.”

  “Yeah, I gotta go.” It was too weird of a conversation to be having with Mr. Patterson.

  “Life is a long time.”

  “Suppose so,” I said. Then I gestured to the horn. “You playing tomorrow night?”

  “Sunday, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Mr. Patterson played in a band every Sunday night of the summer, in the gazebo at the end of our street with the rest of the old American Legion guys. Fred and I stopped to listen every once in a while. And Fred always watched the brass players with a critical eye.

  “See ya around,” I said, heading up Fred’s walk.

  I knocked on the front door, but there was no answer, so I let myself in and pounded upstairs. If I knew what I was doing, I could have put together four complete outfits from all of the clothing and jewelry strewn on the hallway floor. I followed the music on the radio to the open bathroom door. Bridget sat on the toilet lid, lacquering her nails with ballet pink, the radio perched behind her on top of the tank. Fiona curled her eyelashes in the mirror. They were Irish twins, seventeen and sixteen.

  “Hi, Lu,” said Bridget, dipping her brush into the polish, blowing like an oscillating fan over her nails.

  Based on the amount of junk cluttering the counter—hairspray, plastic clips, cotton balls—it was either fixing to be a big night, or they were wasting a lot of time on preparation to just hang out and watch TV. Fiona pumped a couple of shots of hair gel into her hand and worked the blob into her wet hair. She reached for a plastic tray of cosmetics, the compacts clicking and bumping against each other as she dug for the right color.

  “Want me to do your makeup?” she asked, turning to face me. I wanted to tell her she could do anything to me that she pleased, as long as I came out looking remotely like her.

  “Uh, sure,” I said.

  “Sit here,” Bridget said as she rose from the toilet lid, flapping her hands before taking her spot in front of the mirror.

  Fiona hummed along with the radio as she looked me over.

  Fiona’s face was close. It made me feel awkward, like I didn’t know whether to track her eyes or stare off into space. I zeroed in on the linen cabinet behind her, which reminded me of the day when I got my first period. I had been home alone and of course there was nothing under our bathroom sink except a barf bowl and some Q-Tips. So I had wadded up half a roll of toilet paper, stuffed it between my legs, and went across the street to Fred’s.

  Fred had opened the door when I’d knocked. I’d asked him if any of the females in the house were available. Of course they weren’t, so I marched up to the bathroom without saying a word. The linen cabinet had been stuffed with feminine hygiene supplies, a city of boxes. I’d grabbed a few of each variety and stuffed them into my shorts, saving one pad to wear home.

  When I’d opened the door, Fred was standing there.

  “I got my period,” I’d told him.

  “Oh,” he’d said. And I was surprised by how unaffected he’d seemed, like I’d told him I’d replaced the toilet paper roll.

  He’d put his hand on my shoulder, to gently move me aside and started digging in the linen cabinet.

  “What are you doing?” I’d asked.

  “Here,” he’d said, handing me a bottle of Midol.

  “What’s this for?” I’d asked, though I’d seen it on TV.

  “It ‘relieves the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome’,” he read from the bottle.

  “But I think I have menstrual syndrome,” I’d said.

  He’d shook his head and pushed the bottle into my hand. “I think it’s all the same.”

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  Fiona swabbed my eyelids with a tiny foam brush rolled in apricot powder and drew on top of my lash line with a brown pencil.

  “Hold still.”

  Every time she mo
ved toward the tear ducts my eyeballs went spastic. When Fiona came near me with the mascara wand, it was like having a mini-blackout, this dark clot closing in before my eyes shut.

  “Shoot,” she said, licking her finger and wiping the gook off the side of my nose.

  She stepped back and looked at one eye, then the other, and back again before raising her brows.

  “Looks okay.”

  Fiona fumbled through the compacts again.

  “I have a lot of freckles,” I said apologetically.

  “I noticed,” she said, rubbing a cake of honey-colored blush with a soft brush. “I’m not going to cover them up.”

  “Isn’t that what makeup is for?” I asked.

  Fiona looked at me. “Why would you want to cover up your freckles?” she asked. “That’s who you are. They’re beautiful.”

  Fiona gently swept my cheeks with the powder. It felt like balls of dandelion seeds passing over my face and I shivered, which made Fiona stop.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, it feels nice.” I instantly worried that might be a weird thing to say. Fiona pressed on.

  Fred appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing to her?”

  “It’s just makeup, Fred,” I said, my voice a little distorted from my chin being pressed up into the air.

  “Yeah, but you look fine.” I could tell by the wrinkled brow and whiny tone that he was bothered by the fact that Fiona was doing my makeup. Maybe he was worried that it would make me one of them. I didn’t care that they were putting makeup on me. I just liked the attention.

  Fiona dialed up a half inch of coral lipstick from a black tube and said, “Go like this,” pushing her lips out into a pout. I did as she said and she dabbed it onto my mouth.

  “Now go like this.” She rubbed her lips together and opened and closed them like a goldfish.

  “I thought we were going to work on the field guide,” Fred said.

  “I will. I’ll be done in a minute,” I said.

  “She’s having fun, Freddy. Relax,” Bridget said, curling iron in hand, nearly frying her dirty-blond hair, elbow out like a salute. It smelled like hot hair, nail polish remover, and a soft perfume, which Bridget had sprayed on at least eight out of twenty pulse points.