The Shell Collector (13 page)

“Sounds delicious,” Ness says, studying the supplies. “You know how famished I get after a dive.”

“Of course,” Monique says. And to me: “Nice to meet you. Good shelling.”

I’d forgotten we were going after shells. The diving and the boat and the introductions have me scattered. I try to remember that this is going to be a perfect day.
Not
a day for dying. Or being murdered.

Vincent arrives with the gear, and I jump in the boat to take the tanks from him. The smell of the gas engine, the vinyl seats, the rot on the low-tide pilings, the gurgle of the idling outboards, all remind me of days out on the water with my dad. He kept our boat on the grass beside the driveway, and the salt water from the bilge kept a patch of the yard brown and lifeless.

Surprisingly, Ness’s boat isn’t much nicer than the one we grew up with. There’s a small cuddy cabin up front. A bait well in the floor. Dad kept our bait well full of closed cell foam for nestling the shells in. When the shelling was bad, we’d cast nets for bait and come home with fish instead. We weren’t allowed to come home empty-handed. It sometimes meant staying out after dark, which was when he taught me to recognize the lights of the boats on the water. Green over white for trawling. Red over white for fishing. All those twinkling, colorful constellations meant something to my father. The amount of time a buoy flashed—long, short, short—and he knew right where he was.

I miss him powerfully in that moment, standing aboard Ness’s boat, packing away the gear, all these things I did when I was eight that I do now at thirty-two. So much like Dad’s boat that I almost expect to turn and see him there, standing behind the wheel, telling me to cast off the lines, but it’s Ness saying it. He’s as old as my father was when he used to take me out. So young in retrospect, but Dad seemed impossibly ancient to me at the time. I thought I’d never be as old as he was, and yet here I am. And here he isn’t.

“You’re all clear,” I tell Ness, taking the last of the dock lines from Vincent. The mechanic pulls the dangling cigarette from his lips, smiles, and waves bon voyage. Pilings and the walls of the boathouse slide by, and then the low sun hits us again, and we are in the bay, pulling away. Monique and Vincent watch us with shielded eyes before they turn to tidy up.

“Sunscreen,” Ness reminds me. He hands me a bottle, and I start applying it to my face and neck. The wind picks up, and I lean with Ness against the wide bench seat behind the console. I watch him navigate the breakers, and I enjoy the thrum of the deck and the rise and fall of the bow as the sea reaches around the rocks and we race out to meet her head-on.

“That sandbar makes a nice break,” I say, raising my voice over the blat of the outboards and the hiss of the hull against the waves. I gesture toward the beach as we round the seawall; the backs of curling breakers can be seen as they topple and race toward the shore.

“You surf?” he asks.

I nod. “I took it up about ten years ago. It changed the way I shell.”

“Totally,” Ness says. “I’ve always said surfers make the best shellers. No one watches the sea and gets to know her rhythms like surfers do. When you study the breaks, you get to know what the world is like beneath all that water—”

“You can see where the pockets are,” I say, finishing his thought. “You can picture what the reef looks like. Where the crags are and how the shells tumble in and get caught up. If it were me, I’d snorkel right out behind that point—” I gesture toward the natural jetty to the south.

“It’s a good spot,” Ness says. “If we weren’t skipping snorkeling, I would’ve taken you there.” He leans back, steering with just two fingers on the wheel, the lightest of touches. “This is the progression of my journey, really. As shells get harder and harder to find, we have to chase them back to the source. We can’t rely on them to wash up the beach. This is the path that led me to your shells—”

“The murex?” I ask. “Is that where we’re going today?”

“No,” Ness says. “Today is about showing you a phase of my journey. Trust me. You want to write your piece in installments, allow me to do the same.”

I feel like he’s punishing me, drawing it out like this. Getting back at me for my series of planned articles about his family.

“Diving is different than snorkeling, anyway. It’s too deep to read the swell. So we rely on instruments.” He indicates the depth meter and fish finder. The latter reveals the depths in a jagged line that must mean more to him than it does to me. “Knowing where to dive is the hard part,” he says. “In a lot of places, the sand
moves
under there. It’s different every day. And each year, we have to go deeper and deeper to get the good shells before someone else does. We have to fight over what few shells remain.”

“Soon we’ll be finding the loves of our lives in grade school,” I say.

Ness turns and studies me, his brow wrinkled in confusion, and I realize that I spoke out loud.

“Do what?” he asks.

“It’s … I have this thing about shelling and relationships,” I say. I imagine Michael up at the bow, looking back at me and rolling his eyes. But the analogy is too good to leave be. “What you just said, about getting to the shells early, it made me think of another way that shelling is like love. Shelling along the beach, grabbing the remnants, that’s like dating people our age, you know? People in their thirties and forties. They’re all roughed up. Late catches.”

Ness laughs.
Really
laughs. He slaps the steering wheel. “So snorkeling would be like dating in college,” he says.

“Or maybe at work,” I offer. “Diving would be like dating in college. If you don’t find someone early, all the good ones are gone. Just like with shells.”

Ness nods. I make a mental note of this metaphor. Michael would absolutely loathe it. I’ll have to email it to him.

“Shelling is like relationships,” Ness says. He turns away from me and scans the beach, makes an adjustment with the wheel. “I can see that.” He nods to himself. “Yeah, I can totally see that.”

I watch the shore recede until it becomes a thin, dark line. Only the lighthouse remains distinct, a finger of black jutting up from an outcrop not far from Ness’s estate. There is a gentle undulation to the sea, a rhythmic swell. The outboards roar. We pass patches of drifting seagrass. In the distance, a handful of birds trace lazy circles against the sky, signs of sporadic life in this watery wilderness.

Finally, Ness throttles back and the bow dips. The boat slows. We are in a patch of sea that looks like any other on the surface, but I see Ness studying the GPS, which shows our boat as a small triangle on top of a classic symbol for a shipwreck: a curved hull with what might be a sail-less mast but looks more like a cemetery cross.

“I thought you said it was just offshore,” I say. Ness reverses the throttle briefly to kill our speed, then looks back toward land.

“Seven miles,” he says. “Practically on the beach.”

He goes forward to toss out the anchor. I slide over into his spot and study the GPS. The large screen shows the depth of the water in feet. Right by our position, the numbers range from 70 to 120. There’s a steep ridge here. The water is much deeper toward land before rising back up again. If all the oceans were stripped away, these would be rolling hills overlooking a majestic valley. Instead, it’s a world invisible, the contours seen only in a scattering of numbers and covered over by fathoms of blue dirt.

“You said earlier that I shouldn’t dive deeper than sixty feet,” I point out. Maybe it’s the shipwreck symbol or my bout of paranoia earlier, but I have a bad feeling about this plot of sea. Like something awful will happen here.

Ness throws out the anchor and watches as coil after coil of rope zips over the rail. When the line begins to slide away lazily, he cinches it off on a cleat. I remember helping my father do that. It was my job on the boat. Here, I’m an anxious spectator.

“It’s a little over eighty to the bottom,” he says. “You don’t have to go that far. The wreck sits up off the sea floor, so it’s less than sixty down to the conning tower. Besides, there’s not much good shelling this shallow unless you get pretty remote. It’s all been picked over. But you can see the wreck, and if you’re comfortable hanging out for a few minutes at depth, I can show you where I used to make my finds.”

“I thought you’d be with me the whole time.”

“I will. If you don’t feel comfortable, we can come right back up. Just give me this sign.” Ness points straight up. “Do it with both hands, if possible. If you don’t feel like you’re getting air for any reason, do this.” He makes a choking gesture.

“Comforting,” I say.

“And if everything is okay, give the okay sign. If you give me a thumbs-up, I won’t know if you’re doing great or you want to go up to the boat.”

“Sixty feet, ten minutes,” I tell him.

“It’s a guideline,” Ness says. “Don’t worry if you go a little below that or stay down fifteen minutes. It gives you a lot of leeway. We won’t be long, and we’ll come up nice and slow, maybe even make a couple safety stops just to make my dearly departed dive master happy.”

“Whatever’s the safest, that’s what I want to do.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be perfectly safe. Trust me.”

I try to. He and I drag our duffels to the stern of the boat and begin setting out the gear. There’s a small door on one side of the outboards and a narrow dive platform. I figure out how to work the door, and I kick the stainless steel ladder hinged to the platform into the water. Somehow, effecting my doom lessens the worry. Nerves are like carsickness: I get less nauseated if it’s
my
hands on the wheel.

Ness starts prepping his tank, and I do the same with mine, repeating the steps I learned just an hour or so ago. I appreciate that he lets me do it myself, but I make sure he’s keeping an eye on me. I assume he’ll tell me if I do anything wrong. When I crack the valve on the tank, there’s a brief sputter of air, and then the rubber gasket catches tight.

“Let’s get your weight belt on,” Ness says, “and then your tank. You can sit on the platform to do your fins and mask.”

I look at the platform. It’s only wide enough for one person at a time.

“I’m not going in first,” I say. This is a statement of fact. Not a complaint. Or question. Or suggestion. To my editor, I would say that this has been properly vetted. It is a
true thing
. I am not getting in this water, nearly out of sight of land, all alone.

“You’ll be fine. Ladies first, right? I’ll be in right after y—”

“No, not ‘ladies first,’ Ness Wilde. Not ladies first. I am not getting in this ocean before you do. Do you hear me? I’m dead serious.”

Ness studies me for a moment, and I can’t tell how this is going to go down, if we’ll have to take the boat back to the dock, if I’ll have to sit here while he dives alone, if I’ll end up snorkeling, which would be damn fine with me. But then he smiles, and it feels like the most genuine smile I’ve seen from him. The happiest I’ve seen him. Me telling him he’s dead wrong about this me-getting-in-the-water-first business that he’s suggesting.

“Okay. We’ll get you situated on the dive platform, and I’ll go over the side. We’ll make it work. I’ll be in the water waiting for you.”

I barely hear what he’s saying. It takes a moment to process. But my pulse eventually stops pounding in my ears, and the sun doesn’t beat down quite so hard. I realize I’m sweating inside my wetsuit, which is soaking up the summer morning heat. I finally nod and agree to his plan. He helps me cinch the heavy weight belt around my waist, then lifts my BC, and I get my arms through, do the buckles myself. Ness has me sit on the edge of the swim platform, my legs dangling in the water, and I put my fins on one at a time. I dip my mask in the water, and not wanting to take chances with it fogging, I say
screw it
and spit on the inside of the lens and rub it around, just like my mom taught me. I dunk the mask again to rinse it and put it on my forehead, then turn to see how Ness is going to get in around me.

He already has his BC on. Balancing on one leg at a time, Ness kicks on each of his fins standing up, the boat rocking gently beneath us. He grabs his mask, tests his air, and then sits on the side of the boat, his back to the water.

“See you in heaven,” he says. And then he rocks back, tipping dangerously, his tank and the back of his head flying toward the water, and I can’t see around the edge of the boat, but there’s a mighty splash, and I’m wondering what in the world he meant and if I can figure out how to crank the boat and get back to the dock by myself, when Ness bobs up by my feet, pulls his regulator out of his mouth, and flashes that famous smile.

“That seemed violent,” I say.

He holds the platform beside my thigh to steady himself. “Don’t try to go in slow,” he says. “You’ll hit your tank on the platform, or you’ll hit your head on the outboard. You want to fall forward. Tuck a little bit and hold your mask to your face with both hands so it doesn’t fall off. Look to the side if that makes you feel better.”

This feels dumb. Like the worst way to get in the water ever. I start to ask if I can’t just turn around and descend the ladder, but I’ve spent enough of my life in fins to understand how poorly that would work. I trust him. Maybe not with anything else, not with the fate of the world, or with the truth, but I trust him in this moment not to get me killed. I fully appreciate the insanity of this paradox, but I accept it anyway. And letting go of the boat, and a decade of fear, and all the thoughts and worries that plague me, and my concern for my mortal coil, and any connection I have with the world above the sea or with the cosmos that sustains me, I tip forward and crash into the Atlantic Ocean, and she wraps me in her soft embrace.

All I see are bubbles—both from the turbulence of my entry and my panicked exhalations. The regulator is half out of my mouth. I wrestle it back in. And then the buoyancy of my suit and my frantic kicking and remembering what Ness taught me by the dock about bubbles going
up
—and I break the surface, sputtering and cursing and spitting out my regulator to take in huge gulps of air.