Far From The Sea We Know (4 page)

Matthew was looking up at the hand-chamfered
ceiling beams when Margaret Bell swept in. She was tall, with long
flowing silver hair and the kind of beauty that never completely
fades. She moved like a dancer, though Matthew guessed she was in
her sixties.

She came to rest in front of him as still as
a windless night and took his hands. “Ah, Matthew, how good of you
to come all the way out here to see us. I’ve heard so much of you
over the last year from Martin that I feel I know you already. Do
come along. Everything is on the table and waiting.”

Surprising. Matthew had no idea that he
occupied that much of Bell’s attention. If true, the relative ease
with which he got his appointment today now made more sense.

“This is for you,” he said, handing her the
smoked salmon. “A friend prepares it himself, sends me some now and
then. Copper River.”

“Oh, thank you! As we’re having salmon
tonight, I hope you don’t mind if I save it for another time?”

“No. I mean, sure, it’ll keep. Sorry, I
should have asked.”

“Not at all. We absolutely adore smoked
salmon.” She gazed at him with her pale blue eyes as if he was her
favorite son, and it was hard to resist her graciousness. She led
the way, gliding as if on wings.

As he entered the dining room, a voice
chimed from behind, “Looks like this glass of wine is just the
right fit for your hand. Your lucky day.”

Matthew turned to face a woman in her late
twenties, who had come from nowhere or, more likely after he looked
around, the alcove off the dining room. Her fierce yet friendly
look temporarily stunned him.

“Sure. Yes. I’m sorry, I was…I’m Matthew
Amati. I’m studying marine science out at the Point.”

“I know,” she finally said, after a long
look and a glance down at the extra glass in her hand. “Do you want
this? Or is wine too light for you?”

“Ah,” Margaret said as she passed. “I see
you’ve met our daughter, Penny. Please sit down. Dinner’s still
hot, but won’t be much longer.”

“Oh,” Matthew said. “Your father called you
‘Pen,’ so I just assumed you were…”

“Male. Pen. Short for Penny, short for
Penelope. All sorted out now?”

“Yes.” He didn’t know what else to say and
now could only stand before her unblinking gaze as if immobilized.
To break the spell, he finally muttered, “I’m in a program at the
Point with your father.”

“I know. If you don’t drink…”

“What?”

Her eyes flickered down again toward the
extra glass she was still holding.

“Oh, the wine. Yes, of course.”

“Then here,” she said, letting go almost
before his hand could closed around the slender stem.

He took his place at the table and just
listened in silence to the table talk for a while as his
embarrassment began to subside. The wine slid down effortlessly and
that helped. The salmon, marinated in champagne and cherries from
the Bells’ own trees and slices of key lime, was delicious. At
first, he resisted looking at Penny, who was sitting at his side.
When he did turn, he found her broad smile waiting. She looked
relaxed, yet there was a hardness behind her green eyes that
matched her lean body. Her straight hair was scorched the color of
straw, which along with a freckled face and the random nicks on her
hands and forearms, painted the picture of someone who spent much
of their time outdoors.

“To strange bedfellows,” Bell said, making a
toast. “Odd, isn’t it? Here we have the fruit of the vine and the
fruit of the sea. How did it work out that they would go together
so well and form this perfect marriage now before us? God seems to
have good—taste.”

“You know,” Penny said to Matthew, “last
week, I tried a varietal from eastern Washington that was as good
as any, and this one may even be better.” She took a long sip and
gave him an expectant look. “Yes?”

“Well, I grew up more in the Kerouac
tradition of wine appreciation,” Matthew said, “but this does go
down easy. Are you in the marine sciences or—”

“Yes, I can imagine it. ‘Hints of ethanol
with a bold PVC finish.’ At least you still seem to have your
eyesight.”

“Ah…”

“Ethology,” she answered. “Animal behavior.
I like to watch.”

She swirled the wine in the glass, her eyes
steady yet obviously suppressing a laugh as she added, “Just a dumb
joke that we hear too often. But endlessly amusing, our fellow
animal travelers, aren’t they? Are you out in the field or stuck in
the lab?”

“I’m happiest when I’m out there.”

“Here’s to ‘out there,’ then. No wonder Dad
likes you.” She raised her glass and turned to her mother. “This
salmon is amazing!”

“I was happiest with the one you caught for
your fifteenth birthday.”

“Oh yes, the same day you caught me with
Billy Canaan.”

“Him!” Bell said. “A career rascal, if ever
there was one. Came to a bad end, I’m sure. But taking up my former
topic, from years ago as a young man, I still recall the
astonishment I felt about the origin of wine. The selfsame yeast
molds that convert the sugars of the grape to alcohol live on its
skin. How convenient, how elegant.”

“Also the yeasts that can turn it to
vinegar,” Penny said. “Billy runs a winery now, Dad. Married with
six kids and two mortgages. Saw him three summers ago in
Mendocino.”

“California,” Margaret Bell said without
looking up. “Too easy. I’m looking into starting a vineyard here,
by the way. No, it is possible with the right vines.
Six
kids? If he could get his grape yield on the sunny hills down there
to match his own, he could pay off at least one mortgage, I should
think.”

The meal was by far Matthew’s best in years.
He was not surprised, as Margaret Bell had long held a reputation
as a master cook. Penny, however, was a surprise. In spite of her
attitude—or maybe because of it—she had hit him where it really
hurts.

“More pie, Matthew?” Margaret Bell already
had it heading toward his plate, so he acquiesced.

“And some coffee to go with it, of course,”
she added. “My after-dinner blend.”

He looked out the window at the fading
sunset and tried to remember the last time he had felt the warmth
of a real home.

Penny, her piercing gaze directly on
Matthew, suddenly spoke. “Dad tells me you’ve seen a purple whale,
Mr. Amati. That must have been a treat.”

He glanced at her father who just said, “I
fancied it might be good to have someone in on this who could
provide us with an outside perspective and took the liberty of
giving Penny a brief rundown. A fresh eye, yes? I hope you don’t
mind, Matthew.”

Bell got up. His wife began to clear the
table and Matthew started to help.

“Please, go ahead,” Margaret Bell said. “No
arguments. I can take care of this in fifteen minutes, as most of
the cooking pans are already washed.” She looked at Matthew. “You
shouldn’t be on the road going home too late.”

She left no possibility of a rebuttal.
Matthew put down his dinner plate and trailed after the father and
daughter through open double doors. Penny must have inherited her
height and lankiness from her mother, as she was inches taller than
her father.

The room they entered was entirely paneled
in knotty pine that had been left to age into a pale amber grayness
while still retaining some of the warmth of the living wood. The
room was an elongated octagon capped by a cathedral ceiling that
peaked almost five meters above the floor. Bay windows looked along
the coast on one end and into the woods behind the house on the
other. The remaining walls had shelves carrying a multitude of
books, photographs, and paraphernalia from Bell’s journeys across
the seven seas. A sliding ladder gave access to the higher regions.
It seemed no one had made an effort to achieve a look, but the room
had the glow of a painting rich in detail and textures.

“I’ve seen bears from this window,” Bell
said, walking over to the bay on the forested side. “They rarely
come down this far anymore, however, since the state put in the
highway extension near Qiffe. The benefits of progress.”

Bell had already moved to a comfortable wing
chair, upholstered in faded green velvet. It faced a wide and
equally comfortable, matching sofa. An old sea chest between them
was strewn with scientific journals.

“Please be seated,” he said. He glanced at
the folder in Matthew’s hand. “Pen has already heard your story, in
brief, from me, and she’s seen Harold’s report. What did you make
of it?”

Matthew thumbed through the folder again as
if to glean some answer out of it by touch. “It doesn’t make sense,
Doctor Bell. From the coordinates and time, the whale you mentioned
today—Lefty—would certainly seem to have been in the grouping we
saw from the
Eva Shay
. Our sighting did occur at the same
time that Harold reported the garbled readings. But I don’t see how
your tagged whale could have gone north that fast. That leaves
instrument error of some kind as the most likely explanation,
either the transceiver, the satellite, or the reception station at
the Point. Most likely, the transceiver.”

Matthew had been speaking directly to Bell
and belatedly turned to Penny to keep her included in the
conversation. She was already there, however, centered in the flow
of words like a falcon in an updraft. The playful banter of just
moments before had fallen away.

“I’d like to hear more about just what you
saw when they disappeared,” she said.

“Your impressions,” Bell said. “Yes, please,
just as you had them. Do not edit anything. No grade on this.”

Matthew tried to smile, gave up and faced
Penny again.

“Well, as I told your father, we were
pulling up on the whales to get a closer look. Suddenly, they all
went under at the same time. I’ve seen something like this happen
before, but never so quick and coordinated. It’s difficult to
describe. I could swear that just for an instant, the water stopped
moving. And then there was this peculiar turbulence like water
suddenly rushing. It was enough to make the boat sway, but the
movement wasn’t quite right…there may have been a flash, or I may
have just…”

Matthew looked up at the space between the
ceiling rafters. He finally added, “It happened so fast.”

Penny looked into his eyes, waiting.

“There was something else.” The image from
his long moment on the
Eva Shay
that now seemed so brief
came back to him.

“Just before they went under, I felt I was
being watched…by the whale. She looked straight at me, her eye
seemed to—”

“You could you tell its sex?” Penny
asked.

“The female grays are substantially larger
than the males. This one looked even bigger than usual to me.”

“Go on.”

“I was upset. It was almost like, you know,
getting caught when you were kid. Red-handed.”

“Getting caught at what?”

“I don’t know, something you weren’t
supposed to do. Or see. I only bring it up because you asked. It
was just an instant, but it was so intense, yet somehow I couldn’t
remember very well later. I still can’t.”

The feeling had been clear last night, but
he had lost it again. He shook his head and looked out the window
into the darkness. If he were outside, he could probably still see
in the late twilight, but now he could only see the moths on the
other side of the glass attracted to the light of a false moon.
Melancholy seeped into his chest like the last embers of a winter
fire.

“What about what you first saw?” Penny said,
almost whispering. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, sorry. We were securing our gear. I
looked out and saw this whale swimming near the front of the grays.
These guys see whales all the time, you know, so they hardly look.
But this whale was purple. Not all over. Piebald with splotches of
a cold bright purple mixed in with the usual dark gray. Some
highlights of magenta and pink. Ridiculous, I know, but that’s the
way it was.”

“You do see a slight pinkish color in
ordinary dolphins sometimes,” Bell said. “It’s really blood vessels
showing through white skin, especially on the underside. There was
an albino dolphin in a lake in Louisiana once—came in from an
estuary—that was remarkably pink for the same reason. Extremely
rare. I don’t know how it survived so long with poor eyesight, not
to mention having no protection from the sun.”

“This was much darker than that. At first I
thought it was blood,” Matthew said. “A terrible accident of some
kind.”

“Not at all subtle, then,” Bell said.

“More like a sore thumb, forty tons’
worth.”

“Are you sure it
wasn’t
blood?” Penny
asked.

“No, I’m not sure, but she showed no signs
of distress and was covered head to flukes.”

“A pigment mutation that extreme seems
unlikely,” Penny said, “but I’m wondering if it could have been a
partial albino with perhaps a fungus or algae adding the
color.”

“The Romans extracted a purple dye from a
secretion of a certain mollusk,” Bell said. “Not that I see any way
to connect that here.”

Penny smiled. “Dad thinks out loud
sometimes.”

“True enough, and I’m known to meander far
afield, but that’s how my best work always seems to get done.”

“Well,” she said, “this may not be so far
afield, but what about a nutritional disorder of some kind?
Flamingoes are only pink because of what they pick up from the
shells of the shrimp they eat, right?”

“Yes,” Bell said, “the same as the pink
dolphin.”

“The one in the lake?”

“No, these are the pink river dolphins found
in Brazil. Where the Orinoco and the Amazon converge during the
rainy season, the rivers overrun their banks and form an inland
sea. It was eerie watching one swim through the flooded forests as
if, after millions of years, she had decided to pay a visit to her
former life on land.”