The Shell Collector (22 page)

He opens it and waves me toward him. The flight crew folds the steps behind me and shuts the door, and the jet engines whine as they power up. “Ladies first,” Ness says, in what has become a little mantra of sorts, a private joke between us.

“What’s in there?” I ask.

“A bed.” And when he sees the look on my face, he quickly adds: “I’m not suggesting anything. Just thought you’d be more comfortable. If you wanted to get some rest. That’s all.”

I squeeze past him and into an opulent bedroom. Rich cherry veneer, a queen size bed, a lounging area, a closet, a pile of pillows. It reminds me of the master stateroom in a yacht I toured once for a shelling piece I wrote.

“Is this the same plane we flew in on?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Ness says.

“You mean you let me sleep in that chair on the way here instead of telling me about the bed?”

Ness bites his lip. He looks guilty. “I … didn’t want you out of my sight. And it’s not like I could’ve stayed in here with you. Not then. So yeah, it didn’t occur to me to send you back here.”

“You’re just saying that now to be sweet,” I say, a hand on his chest. “You didn’t think that at the time. Not yesterday.”

“I did. I thought it all day when I had to leave you on Wednesday, when I had to put that note in your door. If it hadn’t been an emergency, I wouldn’t have left you. I didn’t want to go.”

“I’m so confused.” I place a hand on my forehead. “Why is this happening?”

“Get some rest,” Ness says. “If you want, I can stay out here—”

“No, I want you in here with me. I’m not confused about that. Just about … life.”

The room sways as the plane begins to taxi. I lose my balance, but Ness steadies me and steers us both so that we collapse into the bed.

“Should we be buckled up?” I ask, scooting so that my head is on the pillows.

“Probably,” Ness says, but neither of us gets up. We just slide back in the silk sheets as the jet accelerates, clinging to one another and laughing, and I feel young, dangerously young, like new love feels when you have no idea where it might lead.

We are entwined and kissing before the plane leaves the tarmac. At one point, I have to pull away and pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. “Only you could be cute doing that,” Ness says. I crawl on top of him and stretch out, so our bodies are pressed together from head to toe. There’s no pressure for us to get naked, to move too fast, even though we both must know our time is limited, that there’s no way this can work, that it’s too ludicrous to contemplate.

And maybe this is what dooms his relationships. Maybe his fame and wealth and reputation never recede enough for two people to simply be a couple. Perhaps I’m the one who’s Icarus, destined to get burned.

Ness rolls me over and kisses my neck, my shoulder, my cheek, the crook of my arm. I try to imagine what this is like for him. I’m so caught up in the absurdity of making out with him that it doesn’t occur to me that he might be feeling the opposite. That I’m overly normal. And then I see everything in a new light, and I feel sorry for Ness. Whoever he’s ever been with, there’s the pressure he must feel to just be himself, not the CEO of anything, not the son of someone, not the great-grandson of someone, but just a man. Maybe he’s looking for normalcy. Maybe he’s trying to forget that he was named after a monster.

Not long after the plane levels off, Ness gets up and says he’ll be right back. I take the opportunity to use the en suite and freshen up. I have to dig my toiletry kit out of my bag. Ness’s bag is beside mine, and I feel a twinge of reporter curiosity that I have to wrestle away. I feel guilty for even thinking it.

Ness returns with a tray. There are two glasses of fizzing champagne and a bowl of strawberries and blackberries. He sets the tray on the bed, and I ask him about the tattoo on his shoulder. I noticed it on the dive trip and again in the sub. He lets me lift his sleeve to study it.

“It’s the Crux,” Ness says. “Also known as the Southern Cross.”

The tattoo is simply four stars arranged in a crooked pattern.

“It’s the closest thing this hemisphere has to a North Star. It isn’t over the South Pole really, but it points to it.”

“What’s the significance?” I ask. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”

“I have, but that’s not why I got it. Well, not really.” He hands me a glass of champagne.

I take a sip and grab a strawberry from the bowl. “This is going to sound snobby,” I say, “but I was totally meant to live like this.”

Ness laughs. “You would’ve made a fine Egyptian princess.”

“And died when I was twenty from an infected tooth and then had my brains slurped out my nose.” I feed him a blackberry. “So why’d you get the tattoo, then?”

“Because …” Ness takes a deep breath. And then a sip of champagne. “I guess I spent a long time searching for myself before I finally realized I was looking in all the wrong places. College, marriage, work, meetings. When I got into shelling, I realized there was half a world I wasn’t seeing. Like the other side of a coin. Options I never knew I had. It hit me in Australia, off the Barrier Reef. I think it was there that I realized what kind of process my grandfather went through.”

“You mean from reading his journal?”

Ness nods. I take a sip of champagne and enjoy the light airy fizz against my tongue.

“So what’s your background?” Ness asks. He’s rubbing my arm and studying it.

“Are you asking me what kind of breed I am?” I pull my arm away from his touch.

“No … God, no. Not that. I love your skin. Your complexion is amazing. I mean—of course I want to know where your parents are from. I want to know everything about you. What I meant was, what was your childhood like?”

“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. That’s just usually what people mean when they ask that, so I get testy about it. My childhood was basically me and my sister sticking up for one another, people picking on us, black kids and white kids. Meanness is just as immune to color as kindness, as it turns out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Must’ve been tough.”

“We got through.”

“What does your sister do?”

“She’s an investment banker. She would tell you she stares at charts all morning and PowerPoint slides all afternoon. She thinks I live this amazing life, of course.”

Ness smiles and makes a show of sweeping his arm at our surroundings.

“Touché.”

He laughs. “Okay, so now that all that’s out of the way, exactly what kind of mongrel are you?”

I grab a pillow from the bed and swing it at him, and Ness has to block it with one hand and save his champagne with the other. “If I spill this on my pants, they’ll have to come off,” he warns me, laughing.

“If you really must know, my mom was from Antigua and my dad was from Boston. They’re both … they passed away when I was younger. I mean, I was an adult, but it was years ago. So I’m able to talk about them without turning into goo.”

“Can I ask how they met?”

“Yeah, well, it’s almost as good as how your parents met. Just a bigger spot in the sea than an oil rig. My dad went to Antigua for a destination wedding. It was for one of his frat brothers, who got hitched right out of college. My mom was a server at the place where they had the reception dinner. One of the other frat guys had too much to drink and came on to my mom, and my dad rescued her. Or as he used to tell it, he stole her away and was only able to do so because of the favorable comparison he made to his drunk friend.”

“So you’ve got island blood in you,” Ness says.

“Yeah, and Boston is a sea town if ever there was one. I think that’s why I feel lost when I’m away from the water.”

Ness nods and smiles. “That explains so much.”

“Yeah? Glad it was that easy for you to know the entirety of me.”

“Not the entirety, but what drives you. Most of us have simple passions at the core of who we are. Those passions might change over time, but at any one moment, I feel like there’s a striving inside us that frames our decisions. The shame is that most people never ask themselves what their passions are, much less look deep into others. They just do whatever feels right at any one moment, bouncing from thing to thing.”

“So is redemption your passion? You mentioned that in the sub.”

“Maybe,” Ness says. “I have a lot of passions. Too many, perhaps.”

“Well, just so you know, I understand trying to atone for a father’s sins. I totally get that. My dad wasn’t perfect either.”

“Yeah? How so?” Ness brushes the hair off my face, then rests his hand on my shoulder. I see worry in his furrowed brow.

“Oh, he wasn’t bad to me,” I say, reassuring him. “Nothing like that. My dad and I were real close. He just had … he did some things that I later learned weren’t very good.”

I eat a strawberry and take another sip of champagne, feeling dangerously honest.

“What did your dad do?” Ness asks. “I mean for a living. You don’t have to tell me any of that other stuff if you don’t want.”

“It’s hard to tease those two apart, actually. I thought my dad was a spy when I was really young, some kind of superhero private investigator. But he mostly followed people around and took pictures of them without their crutches, or with other women, and then handed that info off to lawyers so they could rain hell down on people.”

“Sounds like they were the kind of people who deserved what they got,” Ness says. He pulls the comforter over my bare legs when he sees me rubbing the goose bumps away.

“Yeah, that part of his job I understood. I mean, I do now. But I used to sit with him in his car when he had me for the weekend, just like you have Holly sometimes—”

“So your parents were divorced?”

“It’s … complicated. They split up, but they stayed married. My dad moved back in with my mom when she got diagnosed with cancer. Anyway, when I was young, they lived apart, and my dad would take me on these jobs with him. Side jobs. He would have me sit in the passenger seat and run the laptop while he took pictures of people with this great big lens.” I shake my head, remembering.

“Jeez, now you
have
to tell me.”

“You have to promise not to tell.”

“I get confused,” Ness says. “Was that a teaser or a cliffhanger?” He laughs, but when he sees I’m dead serious, he raises one hand. “Off the record. I swear.”

I readjust myself on the bed, holding my champagne flute so it doesn’t spill. “Okay, so keep in mind that this was back when facial recognition software first got really good but before people
knew
it was getting good. You know what I mean? Well, Dad was one of the first in his trade to see the potential. So he would park outside brothels, strip clubs, seedy massage parlors, places like that, and shoot everyone who came out. I mean
everyone
. Then he’d run the pictures through the DMV database, which a friend on the force got him access to. That was my job, running the laptop and switching out the memory cards. I was better at it than he was. We’d get a name from the DMV, do a Google search, and see if anyone had a high profile, if they were worth anything—”

“Blackmail,” Ness whispers.

“Yeah. Basically, instead of waiting for someone to get suspicious and hire him, Dad started sampling the crowd to drum up more business for himself.”

I feel like shit admitting my role in it all. It took me years to come clean with Michael. I have no idea why I’m telling Ness.

“That’s fucked up,” he says.

“I know. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

Ness’s face lights up. “You know, I’ve heard about scams like this. There was a senator from Connecticut who got ruined by something like that. Claimed he thought it was a regular massage parlor—”

“Senator Hutchins,” I say. And then, sheepishly: “I was with Dad that weekend.”

Ness leans back to study me. “No. You’re kidding, right? That was your dad?”

I feel a flush of heat on my neck, remembering the weeks after the incident. “I thought I was going to go to jail or something. I was too sick to attend school, couldn’t even tell my mom. It was the first time in my life that I started reading the paper—the physical thing. Which probably led me down the path I took, career-wise. Not just from reading the paper, but seeing the difference between telling the truth in print and all the sneaking around my father did for a living.”

“You took down a United States senator,” Ness says. “Hell, I wish I could do that to a few of them.” He shakes his head. “You were more powerful in third grade than I am now.”

“And I don’t even know how many other people I helped ruin like that. For me, it was just a game. It felt like the kind of video game my sister liked to play on her computer. Maybe that’s why I don’t have the stomach for them.”

“You know, what you did is right up there with destroying the world’s oceans and wrecking a billion miles of shoreline,” Ness says.

I know he’s joking, but neither of us laugh.

“I don’t know why, but it feels good to tell someone without building up to it for years and years, without dreading the conversation. I haven’t told many people. Not sure why it feels safe to tell you. Maybe because you’ve shared things with me that I have to keep to myself. Like mutually assured destruction.”

Ness runs his hand down my arm. “I like you, Maya Walsh. I like that you challenge me, make me think. I like that you’re complex. I even like that you don’t like me.”

“You’re one of those guys who falls in love easily, aren’t you?” I ask. I don’t mean it to sound harsh, but as an honest question.

“Maybe,” he says. “Is that a bad thing?”

“It depends. Do you fall out of love just as quickly?”

Ness considers this. Looks sad for a moment. “I don’t think so. I love my work. I have a lot of passions in life. The people who’ve left me recently, they haven’t wanted to share me with those things.”

“As long as it’s not someone else, I can share. I get lost in my work as well. Michael used to have to stand in front of me and shout my name to pull me from whatever article I was working on. It drove him nuts. He couldn’t understand my ability to disappear like that.”