The 100 Year Miracle (2 page)

Rachel took three from the orange stash and swallowed them while pulling on yesterday’s clothes, which she’d left on the floor the night before. Halfway into her pants, she stopped, debated with herself and then cursed, taking them off again. She found and put on a pair of clean underpants, pulled the jeans back on, grabbed her pre-packed duffel bag, and left without remembering to turn off the lights.

*   *   *

The underfunded, six-member team was to meet at the ferry that ran from Anacortes, a coastal town eighty miles north of Seattle, to Olloo’et Island, but when they arrived, hurriedly dressed and with to-go cups gone cold in their cup holders, there were seven of them. This made for some awkward shuffling of feet and discreet glances. It was like being halfway through a meal in a restaurant when a complete stranger decides to drag over a chair.

“This is John,” Hooper said, clapping the stranger on the back. “John is an expert on the area’s coastal ecosystem and comes highly recommended. He’ll be joining us. I hope you’ll all make him feel welcome.”

Rachel made a noise. It was only after she made the noise that she realized she’d made it and that people were looking at her.

“Did you have something to say?” Hooper asked.

Even Rachel, who did not always judge these things accurately, suspected it would be best not to answer.

Hooper raised an eyebrow, but he went on, and she stewed. They were all experts. They had all come highly recommended. It was hardly reason enough to bring him on board at the last minute. But to object would not only have been rude, it would’ve required her to provide some sort of justification, which she was not, under any circumstance, prepared to do.

Rachel knew one very important thing about the
Artemia lucis,
one thing that, up until that singular moment, she felt sure no one else on the team knew. She’d been secure in this one-upmanship, and now, in the space of one introduction, she didn’t feel sure anymore. If anyone else would know—could know—it would be John. She had never met him before, but she could read it on his face.

Rachel did not mean that as a figure of speech. Up his neck and ending just in front of his ear, John had the Olloo’et tattoo, the one hammered into the skin of all tribal men sometime after puberty but before taking a wife. Four rows of coal black dots. Eighty-eight dots in all.

The Olloo’et had always been small, much smaller than the better-known Snohomish whose national headquarters just off I-5 Rachel had passed on her drive. The Olloo’et were members of the southern Northwest Coast peoples, but they spoke neither Salishan nor Chemakuan nor Chinookan languages. They were culturally, linguistically, and geographically distinct. They lived on just the one island, the farthest populated island from the mainland. They were not known to other tribes as great diplomats like the Nimi’ipuu or great warriors like the Cayuses. In fact, the Olloo’et were hardly known at all.

Rachel had spent two years studying the handful of old photographs that still existed of these people, John’s ancestors, a people she had come to think of as no longer a part of the world, as extinct as the Spectacled Cormorant. Of course, that was ridiculous. Languages died out. Religions died out. People did not. They assimilated and interbred, and the next thing you knew, you were on a team with John.

The rest of the team stepped forward. There were two or three handshakes and some polite nods, but later Rachel would be the only one to remember his name. For the rest, excitement and nervousness overrode everything. It zipped from scientist to scientist like static electricity, making them double-check cartons of equipment, bounce on their toes, and fiddle with zippers. Rachel was nervous, too. She clenched and unclenched her fingers inside her coat pockets, both looking and trying not to look at John, who stayed next to Hooper, the two of them leaning close when they spoke.

The ferry, which was rolling in the choppy sound waters, docked. Vehicles returning to the mainland were driven off, and the team hurried back to their cars. John, who had the build of someone who played rugby, bent to pick up his duffel. When he did, he reached his other hand out for the backpack sitting at Rachel’s feet. She was on it before he could wrap his fingers around the straps.

“That’s mine,” she said, lifting the worn bag and shrugging it over a shoulder, well out of his reach.

“I thought I might help.”

“I don’t need help.” Too many seconds went by before she remembered. “Thank you.”

“Never?” he asked.

“Never what?”

“You never need help?”

Rachel directed her answer at his left ear. “Once. I electrocuted myself trying to rewire my bathroom light.”

The last vehicles drove off the ferry, and a gull landed near their feet, attracted by an empty potato chip bag.

“I can’t tell if you’re kidding,” John said.

“I had to get an EKG.”

John didn’t reply. Hooper called his name, and he peeled away from her without saying good-bye, which was fine, except that it was usually Dr. Bell who Hooper was calling for, and so she was left alone.

*   *   *

It was a two-hour ferry ride to Olloo’et Island. The seven-member team deployed workstations at both the water’s edge and at the off-season summer camp where they were lodging. They worked as quickly and efficiently as a MASH unit setting up field hospitals. Some would work in the day. Some would work at night. Hooper would supervise both, sleeping when he could. By sundown, they were all standing in the rocky sand by the bay watching the water begin to catch a green fire, just a little at first so that Rachel had to blink and squint to be sure she wasn’t imagining it.

Streaks and blooms of lime appeared along the water’s edge, as though hundreds, perhaps thousands, of glow sticks had been cracked open and poured into the bay. The spots of phosphorescent neon grew and spread and joined together.

Awed murmurs came from the gathered locals standing side-by-side up the bluff behind the yellow tape. Rachel hugged herself, grinned wider than she wanted, and had to bite her lip to keep from letting out a whoop. If she’d been alone, she might have run down the whole beach hollering like a child who’d just been given ten years’ worth of Christmas gifts all at once.

These tiny arthropods, related to brine shrimp, were some of the rarest living beings on earth.
Artemia
designated them as a member of their genus.
Lucis
is from the Latin
lux
for light. The lighted arthropod. Rachel loved the name. She always had.

As far as she knew, no one alive had ever seen one outside a specimen jar. They had segmented bodies, an exoskeleton, and twenty-two legs, which seemed an awful lot for something no more than eight millimeters long. With a life span of just six days, they hatched by the millions once a century and right away began to send out this bioluminescent signal. They thought—the biologists standing there at the shore—that it was for mating. (Almost everything is for mating in some way or another.) The light might be density dependent. It might be triggered by the movement of the water. They knew so little that it made Rachel’s breath catch. It excited her, made her skin tingle and her heart pound. It made her feel like an explorer, a discoverer. She was about to know things that no one else had known before. Not one person. Not ever.

“All right,” Hooper said to the six other scientists standing shoulder-to-shoulder on either side of him. He took a breath and seemed to be searching for something important to say. They all felt this and squared their shoulders in response, ready to absorb this fateful moment, even Rachel, who had never been one for speeches. But inspiration failed him, and they all had to settle for “You know what to do.”

Rachel moved forward toward the waiting kayak with a plankton net attached to a specimen jar. This was it, she thought. This was what she was waiting for, the thing that could and would save her life.

2.

Tilda pulled into the driveway of the home that hadn’t been hers for more than a decade. It was three stories with white trim and covered in weathered gray shingles. An interior designer would hire someone to “antique” shingles to look like these did. There was a porch around the front door, which was nothing compared to the multilevel decking on the back of the house that sloped right down to the narrow beach. Inside, almost every room had a bay view. It was the sort of house that people who went to wealth seminars pasted on “dream boards.” There was even an honest-to-God library with a ladder that rolled along a track. At least, there had been some years ago. She’d had it installed.

Tilda turned off the car’s engine and buttoned her coat. There were three newspapers in the driveway that had gone soggy in the rain, and she knew, if she opened it, she’d find a week’s worth of mail in the mailbox. She pulled her collar up to her chin, and with a bag in each hand, she walked to the front door.

In the window just to the left so no visitor could miss it was one of her posters. “Vote for Tilda. U.S. Senate.” It had faded, and the tape had come loose at one of the corners, which was as good a metaphor for her failed reelection campaign as anything. It was just like her ex-husband to leave it up months after it held any meaning.

She rang the bell. Shooby barked from the other side—just once to show he was on top of things.

It took Harry a very long time to answer.

She stood there, holding her bags, waiting. A car pulled up next door. She looked while trying not to look like she was looking. A man got out and didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t looking because he wasn’t. He left the car in the drive—probably the garage was full of crap—and let himself in through the front door.

Tilda went back to staring at her own ex-door. Up close it needed a new coat of paint. The red on the trim was cracking. Around her feet she noticed the green, fuzzy lichen that took root in the pervasive damp. It was growing around the edges of the porch and had started to colonize the bottom six inches of the house. It would take a good power washing to beat it back.

Tilda thought about ringing the bell again but didn’t. She thought about banging the brass knocker but didn’t. That would’ve given Shooby fits. She thought about the neighbor who hadn’t been the neighbor when she’d lived here. She wondered what happened to the old neighbors, the Feingolds. Were they the Feingolds? Maybe it was the Feinsteins. She couldn’t remember and blamed it on age, which didn’t make her feel any better about it. Whoever they were they’d had a cat with no tail that they’d let wander around outside until it got hit by a car. That she knew. The new neighbor was probably just as irresponsible.

He’d probably voted for the other guy.

He probably hadn’t voted at all.

Apathetic. You could tell.

She’d had these thoughts about strangers a lot in the past month. Given the election returns, she was right most of the time.

Harry finally opened the door with the dog at his feet. “Come in. Come in,” he said.

She hadn’t seen Harry in six months. Still, he had called and asked her to come. It had taken a lot for him to do that, Tilda knew. Harry was not the sort of person who asked for help. He was the sort of person who, fully engulfed in flames, might try to operate the fire hose himself. That was, more or less, what he’d been trying to do since his neurological disease had been diagnosed two years before.

Their son, who was living in Seattle, had told Tilda what to expect. She’d heard him, but it seemed she hadn’t listened. She did a poor job of hiding it.

“Harry,” she breathed.

Harry Streatfield had been—still was—a classical composer. He worked at a piano and had long, spidery fingers that bent the keys to his will. Except now those fingers were wrapped around the handle of a footed cane, one of those aluminum ones hospitals and retirement homes issued. He leaned into it. His right knee was buckled, and his foot turned at an odd angle. He was putting almost no weight on that side, and the leg looked, even covered with his brown pants and sensible brown shoes, like that of a cripple.

“No.” He lifted his hand off the cane and held it up between them like he was directing traffic. The other hand stayed on the door, holding him up. “If you’re going to do that bullshit, you can damn well go home right now.”

It was enough of Harry, even if he was trapped inside that mutilated body, to snap Tilda back into herself or the version of herself that she became with Harry.

“It’s almost hard to believe you ran off all the nurses,” she said.

“It was only two nurses, and they were both morons.”

One side of his face was drooping slightly, pulling down the corner of his mouth and eye. Tilda tried not to stare and was grateful that it had not yet affected—although it would—his speech.

“Is that so?” she asked.

“Apparently, they’re giving licenses to just anybody these days.”

Harry turned around, which was a multistep process like a car executing a six-point turn, and headed into the house. Tilda followed, closing the door behind them and trying not to get impatient at the time it took for the two of them—three counting Shooby—to make it to the kitchen table.

Shooby had never been her dog. Harry had adopted him years after Tilda had been gone, but she was still fond of the mutt. Full name Schubert, he most resembled some sort of hound, but his lineage was anyone’s guess. His legs were a little too long for his body, and his feet seemed like something he’d grow into, except he was as big as he was ever going to be. He was a medium brown all over but for a patch of white on his muzzle. His ears flapped when he ran and got wet when he drank. Adopted from the Humane Society, Shooby was as loyal as any dog could be. They’d met before, and he liked Tilda well enough. He liked everybody well enough—probably even that neighbor who didn’t park in his own garage. But he was devoted to Harry.

Tilda dropped her bags, and Shooby sniffed them to be sure nothing dangerous was hiding inside before flopping down at his master’s feet. Tilda was in the process of deciding to unload the rest of the car later and had yet to take off her coat or sit down when Harry said, “I’m hungry. What are you making for dinner?”