Positively Beautiful (23 page)

He sounds a little shy and I turn to look at him. He's watching me, his eyes dark and vulnerable. I get that he needs me to understand what he's saying, and how important this place is to him. It's important to him that I feel it too.

“I get it,” I say softly.

He twines his fingers in mine, and I hear a sound, and smell the fragrant odor of grass and mud and the faintly sour smell of digestion. Two cavernous nostrils poke up and gust out a wind of exhalation, and disappear. The casual flip of a tail splashes an expanding ring of moon-sparkles. A head pokes up, large, dark eyes curious and bulbous, a wrinkled face sporting friendly
whiskers and a permanently sad expression. Another one surfaces, and another.

“Manatees,” Jason says.

I look at the massive creatures, some as long as twelve feet and pushing two tons. I've heard of them, but never seen one. About all I know is that people are trying to save them from extinction.

“One of their closest relatives is actually the elephant,” Jason says quietly. “They're so big they have to eat constantly, sometimes up to one hundred pounds of grass a day.”

The manatees' skin even looks like an elephant's, except that it is spotted with barnacles. Ignoring us now, they begin turning over one another, splashing with their flat tails and churning the water.

“Look, they're playing!”

“They're mating. There's one female, and she's in heat. The males will follow her around for three weeks or so, and they mate constantly.”

Jason won't look at me as he says this, and when I look at him, even in the moonlight I can see his face is a little red.

My face feels hot. I watch the big sea creatures in silence. Though I cannot see any overtly sexual activity, somehow the knowledge I am watching a mating dance makes me fidgety, but I'm filled with moonlight and am content not to speak.

Time passes, I don't know how long. The angle of the moon's light has changed when the manatees subside, only appearing when they languidly surface for slow, briny breaths. I'm exhausted all of a sudden and shiver in the cool, wet air.

“Are you cold? Here.” Jason pulls off his jacket and helps
me put it on. He crouches down to zip it up, his face intent as he concentrates on fitting the zipper together and pulling it up to my chin as if I am a little kid.

“Why does it feel like I've known you forever?” I ask. “You don't feel like a guy. You feel like … I don't know.”

Safe. You feel safe.

“Thanks,” he says wryly. “Just the words every guy longs to hear. Believe me, though, I'm a guy.” His hands are on my knees, and he stares at me for a long moment, and suddenly I don't feel so safe. Suddenly I think he might kiss me, and I feel hot and cold and my skin sparks to the touch of his hands.

But he rises to his feet in one smooth movement and leads me back through the dark. The bushes rustle mysteriously and my nose is full of a spicy brew of secret green zest and salty mud.

We don't say anything else, but his hand on mine makes me forget that I should be scared.

The next day is better. I am numb, but I am no longer crying. Jason brings me a notebook and pen and I spend the day writing, pouring my thoughts and feelings out on paper. Something hard and cold has broken, like there's a whirlpool inside me, one of the great salty, warm maelstroms they found in the Arctic Ocean, dragging up life and muck from an unknowable depth and spinning it out into all that cold, ice-blocked surface water.

I am dreading the night, though. Even at home, my nights were full of dark, swirling thoughts that chased me into sleep. Here, it's like those demon thoughts take shape and crackle the bushes and shake the tent. I'm not sure which are more terrifying: the thoughts in my head or the unseen things that shudder and yowl in the night.

That afternoon, Jason comes to the island and I am fishing in the cove. He left me a pole, but I'm still not exactly sure how to use it.

“Getting the hang of it?” Jason calls as he pulls the boat up on shore.

“I caught a small one.” I reel in my line. “But getting it off the line was
not
fun.”

“We'll make a fishing ace out of you yet,” he says.

“No,
you're
the fishing ace,” I say.

Jason told me he is already working as a fishing guide on the weekends, and has even won some big fishing tournaments. This is what he plans to do when he graduates from high school. I envy his calm certainty of what his life will be like, his belief he can shape his future.

“Hey, I have an idea,” he says. “Do you want to go fish for something bigger?”

Honestly, I'm not happy about leaving the island. But he looks so excited to be showing me something new that I smile and agree.

“Look at the sun out there on the edge of the ocean.” I point at the sky, which is full of oranges, reds, and yellows, like the setting sun is a fiery paintball splattered across the horizon.

“The gulf.” Jason is concentrating on a bucket he is tying to the back of the boat, letting it trail behind as we drift.
Chum
he told me when I asked.

I look at him in surprise. “It's the gulf? Like the Gulf of Mexico?”

Now it is his turn to look at me in surprise. “Where did you think we were?”

I shrug. It doesn't really matter where I am. It matters where I'm not.

On the island, nestled like a green jewel in the clear, brown backwater, I'm safe. Out here, the vastness of the water weighs on me, crushes me into something small and insignificant.

Jason doesn't say anything else. A couple of other boats float in the pass, and men with thick poles scan the water. Some of them are drinking beer, but none of them seem to notice the slow destruction of the sun.

We are in a wide, watery pass between two islands. Colorful houses crowd the beach on one island, but the other beach is empty. Both islands are far prettier than my little island (it
feels
like mine now), with sugary beaches lapped by water the color of Jason's eyes. Even though these islands are prettier, I still prefer my secret haven.

Jason works on putting bait on a line and drops it down into the water. He hands me the pole and we sit in silence. I do not feel the need to speak.

“
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
” The line from one of Jason's books drifts through my mind. I'd never read Thoreau before I met Jason and I see why he likes him. Then I start thinking about whether I need to pump up the air mattress a little more tonight, and if we'll eat fish this evening. It's as if I am floating on the uncomplicated, lovely surface of the sea, and as long as I don't go too deep, I am fine. Monsters swim in the dark depths of my mind.

“Uh … hey! Hey! I got something,” I say as my pole jerks and the line starts zinging out. “It's heavy!”

“Pull back
slowly
,” Jason says, “and sit down.”

I sit abruptly, pulling back on the pole and reeling when the fish gets closer, holding on for dear life when it decides to go the other way. Jason motors the boat slowly in the direction the fish is going and coaches me to “Pull back, reel, no, don't yank! Slow and steady, pull back, reel” and it seems like forever I'm doing this. As the fish gets closer, Jason tells me I can stand up, and I do. I am concentrating so fiercely I'm surprised when Jason comes up behind me, his stomach against my back, his arms cradling mine.

“You're getting tired,” he says, “but this is where it's about to get fun.”

He helps me reel, and I see the shadow under the surface of the green water and it is
big.

“What
is
that?”

“You'll see,” he says, and the fish dives, trying to get under the boat. Jason's strong arms move against me, and I try not to notice the way his body feels against mine, but suddenly I'm aware of blood thrilling just under the surface of my skin. He pulls me firmly against him, and I cannot tell if it's because he needs to or because he wants to.

The fish breaks through the water beside the boat and I'm so stunned I almost drop the pole.

“It's a shark!”

“Yep.” Jason takes the pole from me, and maneuvers the shark so it's lying right beside the boat. It's about six feet long, brown, with a flat, wide head and a white underbelly.
Its eyes roll back at me and I realize that a
shark
is
looking
at me.

“What … what do you do now? Kill it?” I ask, though that feels wrong.

“No, of course not. She's a nurse shark, she doesn't hurt anyone. Here, feel her.”

He takes my hand and draws it along the back of the shark, from head to tail. It feels smooth and silky.

“Now the other way,” he says.

I rub my hand the other way and am surprised that now its skin feels like sandpaper.

“It's got little scales on its skin, kind of like teeth,” he says. “That's why it's prickly when you rub toward its head.”

“I can't believe I'm touching a shark,” I say and Jason grins.

“Not so bad, is it?”

Somehow this reminds me one of Mr. Jarad's silly sports analogies, and I smile.

With a gloved hand, Jason pulls the shark's head out of the water by the line, and its eye rolls toward me as it thrashes around, splashing water into the boat. It opens its mouth, revealing crooked, yellow teeth, masses of them, and Jason uses a metal pliers-looking tool to grasp the hook, which I can see lodged in the shark's mouth.

“Careful!” I say, because his hand is inches from those wicked-looking teeth.

He is focused on the shark, which is bending its body back and forth, trying to get away. Jason pulls the hook free and the shark drops into the water, splashing us one more time before it disappears beneath the waves.

I let a breath out I did not realize I was holding.

“Let's get back, it's getting late,” Jason says as if he didn't just have his hand practically
in
a shark's mouth. The sun is gone, the quiet water holding on to its memory in soft tangerines, pinks, and yellows glowing in the surface ripples.

On the way back he lets me drive the boat, and the feel of the boat dancing beneath me as we skim across the surface of the water, trailing a pod of leaping dolphins, feels like flying.

“Do you think,” I say later, after we have eaten and are sitting staring at the fire, “having this BRCA mutation makes us defective? I feel like something's wrong with me, do you?”

Jason stirs the fire with a stick. “Species wouldn't be able to survive and adapt without mutations. Mutations fuel evolution. When they're good, they get passed on so the entire species is stronger for it.”

“So, what? If the mutation is bad, we should do the species a favor and die off quickly?” I'm offended, though I know I was the one who asked the question.

He shakes his head. “It's hard to know whether a mutation is good or bad until generations later. The gene mutation causing sickle-cell anemia is both good and bad. People with one of the mutated genes have protection from malaria; people with two mutated genes have sickle-cell anemia. I read one study suggesting the BRCA mutation may encourage neural growth, so people with the BRCA mutation might actually be smarter because of the gene. What if it takes someone with
the BRCA gene mutation to figure out how to cure breast cancer? It's a stretch, but you never know. Not until it's over.”