The Loop (8 page)

‘Hiya Trouble. How’re you doing? Get down now, get down.’

Buzz jumped into the car and waited in the passenger seat while Helen thanked Mrs Turner and chatted for a minute or two about the horrors of summer in the city. Then she and Buzz drove down the last quarter of a mile of bumps and potholes to the house.

It was a big old place, clad in rotting white clapboard that rattled when the wind blew, as it often did, from the west. It stood on its own like a beached liner at the water’s edge, overlooking a marshy inlet of the bay. It seemed yet more like a ship inside, its every wall, floor and ceiling paneled in narrow, darkly varnished tongue and groove. Upstairs, twin gable windows surveyed the bay like portholes. The bridge of the ship was a long bay window in the living room where at high water you could look out and imagine you were at last afloat and setting sail for the Massachusetts mainland.

Helen could happily stand at that window all day, if she let herself, watching the weather rearrange the shapes and colors of the bay like a restless, perfectionist painter. She loved the way the wind and clouds made traveling patterns through the marsh grass and how, when the tide slid out, the air filled with a salty, primordial tang and the mud flats hummed and scuttled with armies of fiddler crabs.

The time-switch light above the back door was on and a welcome-home party of bugs was whirring around it, casting shadows five times their size on the stoop. Helen dumped her bag outside the door She would take a quick walk along the shore to give Buzz a run She was tired, but the kind of tired you get from sitting in a plane and a car too long. It was also an excuse to delay going inside. The house seemed so big and silent now that it was only she and the dog who lived there.

She walked down the curve of broken boardwalk and then down the steps to the strip of sand that ran beside the marsh grass all the way to the end of the inlet.

The breeze felt good on her face and she took the salt air deep into her lungs. Across the bay she could see the lights of some small boat heading out on the tide. A waning moon was looking for gaps among the clouds, and when it found one, lit a path across the water. Buzz ran ahead, stopping now and then to pee or sniff the line of fresh debris that the tide had left.

When Joel was around, they had taken this walk every night before turning in. And early on, in the days when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other for five minutes, they would stop and find a hollow in the dunes and make love, while Buzz went off on his own, foraging for crabs in the marsh grass or chasing birds he’d sprung, then coming back sodden and making them shriek by shaking himself all over them.

About half a mile along the shore was the hull of an old yawl that someone had once perhaps intended to rebuild but that had now rotted beyond salvation. It had been hauled onto the shingle above the reach of all but the highest tides and lay tethered uselessly by moss-bearded ropes to two old trees. It was like the skeleton of some less ambitious Noah’s ark, abandoned by all but rats, to whom Buzz paid nightly visits. He was in there now, growling and scuffling in the dark. Helen sat on a driftwood log and lit a cigarette.

 

She and Buzz had first come to the Cape on vacation in early June the summer before last. Her sister had rented a house for the whole season, one of the million-dollar places set high above the water, with a stunning view over to Great Island and its own steep, wooden staircase down to the beach. She had invited Helen to stay.

Celia had married her college sweetheart, bright but boring Bryan, whose software company had just been bought out by a California computer giant for a mind-boggling amount of money. Even before that, they had been predictably happy and had produced, with no trouble at all, two perfect, blond children: a boy and a girl, Kyle and Carey. They lived in Boston, in a waterside development that, naturally, had won several design awards.

Helen had spent most of the previous five years roughing it in the wilds of Minnesota and it took her awhile to get used to the luxury. The ‘guest suite’ at Celia’s Cape Cod rental even had its own jacuzzi. She had planned to stay for a week, then go back to Minneapolis to work on her thesis, for which her supervisor was already nagging. But the week became a fortnight, then the fortnight a month.

Bryan would drive down each weekend from Boston to join them and once, for a few days, their mother and Ralphie came to stay, managing to break one of the beds. The rest of the time it was just Helen, Celia and the children. They got on well and it was good to have time to get to know the kids, though her sister remained the enigma she always had been.

Nothing seemed to faze Celia. Not even Buzz eating her best straw hat. Her clothes were always clean and pressed, her figure trim, her hair washed and neatly bobbed. On those rare occasions when Kyle or Carey howled or threw a tantrum, she would just smile and soothe and hug them until they felt better. She did charity work, played elegant tennis and cooked like a dream. She could lay on an impromptu banquet for ten at half an hour’s notice. She never had headaches or sleepless nights or got grouchy with her period and even in the privacy of her own bathroom, Helen surmised, seldom, if ever, broke wind.

Helen had long ago discovered there was little fun to be had in trying to shock her sister. It was impossible and anyway they were grown-ups now and you didn’t do that to someone who washed your underwear and brought you a cup of coffee in bed every morning. They talked to each other a lot, mainly about nothing, though just occasionally Helen would try to find out what Celia felt about the important things in life, or at least what she herself considered important.

One night after supper, when Bryan wasn’t there and the kids were in bed, Helen asked her about their parents’ divorce. They were sitting at the table under the trees, finishing the wine which Helen, as usual, had drunk most of, and watching the sun sink beyond the island into the black band of the Massachusetts coast. She wanted to know if the divorce had been as traumatic for Celia as it had been for her.

Celia shrugged. ‘Oh, I guess I always felt it was for the best.’

‘But doesn’t it ever make you angry?’

‘No. That’s just the way they were. They wanted to stay together till we were old enough not to be too upset by it.’

‘And you weren’t “too upset” by it?’ Helen asked incredulously.

‘Oh sure. I was mad at them for awhile. But you can’t let these things get to you. It’s their life after all.’

Helen had persisted, trying to find some crack in what she thought might only be a protective veneer, but she couldn’t. Maybe it was true that this same event that had torn her own guts apart and sent her, in her love life at least, spiraling almost out of control for years, had left her sister untouched. Whatever, there was no point talking about it. But how strange, she thought, for two people with the same genes to be so different. Perhaps one of them had been swapped at birth.

After a month of swimming, reading and playing with Kyle and Carey on the beach, Helen had grown restless. A friend of hers in Minneapolis had given her the number of a friend, called Bob, who was working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, farther down the Cape, and one evening Helen called him.

He sounded nice and asked her if she would like to come to a supper party he was holding that weekend. He and a few friends were going to be watching some ‘amazing footage’ that one of the Woods Hole guys had shot inside the womb of a sand tiger shark. It wasn’t exactly Helen’s idea of a great night out but what the hell, she thought, why not?

She noticed Joel Latimer as soon as she walked in.

He looked like one of those Californian surfbums from the sixties, tall and thin and tanned with a mop of sunbleached blond hair. He caught her staring at him while Bob was telling her about Woods Hole and he gave her such a direct smile she nearly spilled her wine.

It was a help-yourself-in-the-kitchen kind of dinner and Helen found herself at the vegetarian lasagne alongside him.

‘So you’re the woman who runs with the wolves,’ he said.

‘Actually it’s more of a flat-footed shuffle.’

He laughed. He had the bluest eyes and the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. She felt something contract in her stomach and told herself not to be ridiculous. He wasn’t even her type, though quite what was her type she’d never been quite sure. He helped her to some salad.

‘You’re on vacation here?’

‘Yes, I’m staying with my sister. Up at Wellfleet.’

‘Then we’re neighbors.’

Joel was from North Carolina and she could hear it in his accent. His father ran a fishing business. He told her he was doing a PhD on horseshoe crabs, which he said weren’t really crabs at all, but arachnids, distant cousins of the spider. They were a kind of living fossil, ancient even when dinosaurs roamed the earth; they had been around for about four hundred million years without changing.

‘Sounds like my supervisor,’ she said. He laughed. God, she felt witty. Normally in the presence of good-looking men she either lost the power of speech or babbled like a loon. She asked him what the crabs looked like.

‘You know those helmets the Nazis wore? Well, they’re like that, only brown. And inside it’s kind of like a scorpion.’

‘Definitely like my supervisor.’

‘And it has this spiked tail sticking out the back.’

‘He keeps his tucked away.’

He told her that horseshoe blood had all kinds of important medical applications, was even used to diagnose and treat cancer. But they were a species under pressure and one of the problems here on the Cape was that eel fishermen killed them for bait. His research was to find out how serious an impact this was having on the local horseshoe populations. He lived in a big old rented place, just south of Wellfleet. It looked like a ship, he said. She must come by and visit.

They took their food off to a corner and he told her who the other guests were and about the video they were going to see. She asked him how you got to shoot a movie inside the womb of a shark.

‘With great difficulty.’

‘I guess you have to find a really big shark—’

‘Or a really small cameraman.’

‘Right. Who’s also a gynecologist.’

Later, watching it, sitting crammed on the couch between Joel and someone else, she wondered if he was as aware of the press of their bodies as she was. His jeans were torn and she couldn’t stop herself sneaking looks at the patch of tanned thigh that showed through.

The guy who’d shot the video (who was of normal size) talked them through it, explaining that when a female sand tiger has mated, several fertilized egg capsules form in two separate wombs, developing rapidly into embryo sharks complete with teeth. In each womb, one shark fetus emerges as the strongest and then sets about murdering and devouring its brothers and sisters. Only these two are born, already well versed in the art of killing.

As he talked, the tiny endoscope camera traveled the glutinous pink caves and tunnels of the mother shark, like a Steadicam in a cheap horror movie. You could see a swilling soup of dead baby sharks but no sign of the infant from hell who’d killed them all. Then, at the far end of the womb, a yellow eye suddenly surfaced in the soup, looking right at the camera and a room full of case-hardened biologists screamed in unison. In the laughter that followed, Helen was embarrassed to find she had grabbed hold of Joel’s arm. She quickly let it go.

Afterward, Bob took her away to meet some other people and every so often she would glance across the room at Joel. And even though he was deep in conversation, he would see her and smile. When they said goodbye, he asked if she would like to meet some horseshoe crabs and, far too promptly, she said she would. He said how about tomorrow and she said fine.

Within a week they were lovers and a week later Joel asked her to come and live with him. He said he felt he had known her forever, that they were ‘soul mates’, that if she moved in, they could spend the winter side by side, writing their theses. Helen had never heard anything so romantic in all her life. But men weren’t supposed to go around making such rash offers of commitment. So she said no, it was out of the question, ridiculous in fact; and the next morning moved in.

It was as close to shocking Celia as she had ever come.

‘You’re going to
live
with him?’ she said, watching her pack.

‘Yep.’

‘After knowing him only two weeks?’

‘Sister, if a girl can’t find Mr Right, sometimes she’s got to settle for Mr Right Now.’

Since her parents’ divorce, she had stumbled from one bad affair to the next. Not that she’d been exactly promiscuous. Even if she’d wanted to be, that would have been tricky, living out in the wilds most of the year. It was just that she seemed to have this uncanny knack of picking the most unsuitable men available. There were exceptions, but mainly they were men that other women saw coming a hundred miles away, who had jerk or cheat or bastard written in neon letters on their foreheads, men she didn’t like or lust after but still somehow ended up with.

Quite why she chose so badly, Helen had never been able to figure out. Perhaps she set her sights low because, deep down, she was sure no good man could ever possibly see anything in her. Not that the bad ones seemed to see much either, for it was rarely Helen who ended the affair, except when she sensed she was about to be dumped and managed to beat him to it.

Normally, she stuck in there, even with the worst of them, trying to make it work, striving desperately for their approval, until they drifted off or started cheating on her or announced over a last, lousy dinner in a cheap restaurant, trying to break it gently, saying maybe, honey, we should call it a day.

She’d never lived permanently with any of them. And so when Joel made his proposal, she went into a spin of panic. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night with her heart pounding and an absolute certainty roaring in her head that tomorrow this gentle, golden man who lay warm and softly snoring beside her would tell her it had all been a mistake and would she please pack her bags, take her dog and get the hell out of his life.