The Shell Collector (25 page)

“Where the hell have you been?” he asks.

“What is this?” I shout at him. “You promised me.”

“I’ve been trying to call you for two days.”

I think of the flights, being in the sub, the island, all the emails from him.

“You promised me,” I say. “I’m working on the story of a lifetime, Henry, and you’ve just fucked it up.”

“It wasn’t me,” he insists.

“You run the paper!”

“I don’t
own
it. Jesus, Maya, have you been following this? Your piece has gone nuts. The board’s been all over me wondering why the second story hadn’t run yet. I’ve been trying to buy you time—”

“Why not run the one on his father, then? How did they even
get
this one? How did they know about it?”

I hear Henry take a deep breath. I get out of bed and walk through the closet, try the door to the bathroom. It’s locked. I can hear the shower running. I go back to the bedroom as Henry explains.

“We sent the files off to the printer last week, remember? The story was running when you went home that night, which was when I got a call from Wilde’s agent and then you-know-who. So the story was in our system. Someone in the office must’ve tipped someone on the board to let them know it was here, that we already had it. I swear to you, Maya, I did everything I could. This was going to run yesterday. I stalled as long as possible. They were going to fire me and run it themselves if I refused.”

I cradle the phone with my shoulder while he’s talking and pull my shorts on. I don’t want Ness to see me naked. Whatever I thought I was doing with him, whatever the last two days were, it’s obviously over. I’ll be another picture on the wall. I wonder, idly, if maybe some of those women hurt him instead of the other way around, if I didn’t have that completely backwards as well.

“Maya, you’re not going to like this—”

“Jesus, Henry, what?”

“They’re making me run his father’s piece tomorrow, and the piece on Ness for the Monday edition.”

My thoughts go immediately to Holly. Those stories will always be out there. Forever. And I can tell from Henry’s voice that there’s no stopping them. It’s a done deal.

“What if I quit?” I ask. “Can they legally run them if I’m no longer at the
Times
?”

“Yes,” Henry says. It’s the first time he hasn’t doubted that I’d do it. “I’m guessing this puts a dent in whatever you’re working on up there?”

“Yeah, that’s toast.” I put him on speaker and pull my shirt on. I look at the rumpled bed. Was I even the one who slept in it? Was that me in a goddamn submarine? On a private jet? On an island? Nothing makes sense. A voice from New York has dragged me back into the real, and out of wherever I’ve been. I pick up the phone and take it off speaker just as the shower door slams shut in the bathroom. “Listen, Henry, I’ve got to go. I’ve gotta see if I can make this right.”

“One last thing,” Henry tells me. Ness steps out of the bathroom and gets dressed in the closet, doesn’t glance at me. I’m torn on whether I should run to him, throw myself on my knees, explain what happened, tell him it wasn’t my fault—or if I should let him cool off.

“Whatever this did to your current story,” Henry says, “you should know that this series is a big deal right now. I’ve got a dozen requests from major media who want to interview you, and book publishers want the rights to this. We have a few Hollywood studios talking to our legal department right now. You’ve got the book rights, but we might move ahead with the film stuff, while the iron is hot.”

“Please, Henry. Don’t do anything until I get back to the office.”

Ness looks at me as I say this. He’s pulling his running shoes back on, is wearing blue jeans and a button-up.

“It’s out of my hands,” Henry says.

I hang up in disgust. Ness strides from the closet and through the bedroom, into the breezeway.

“Let me explain,” I tell him.

He whirls around, points a finger at me, and tries to form the words; I can see in his eyes, in the twitch of his cheeks, in his furrowed brow, that he has legions to say. But all that comes out is: “You promised me.”

He heads toward the front door. I follow him, explaining anyway. “I told my boss not to run it, that I would quit if he did. The board pressured him.” How to explain all the politics of a multimedia conglomerate owned by a company that started out selling dish soap? “They already had the story, Ness. They were going to fire my boss, the editor in chief of the goddamn
Times
, and run it anyway. There was no stopping this.”

“Then why make the promise?” Ness asks. He hesitates at the top of the stairs, and I think for a moment that we’ll be able to talk through this. Then I hear him say, “I thought you were real.”

He opens the front door, leaves, and slams it behind him. I run up the stairs, fumble with the latch, and hurry out onto the porch. Ness is already around the low wall toward the garage; I hear the rapid
crunch crunch crunch
of shells from him running. By the time I get around the corner, the garage door is opening, and a bright red convertible with a white stripe down the middle is growling out in reverse. He doesn’t look my way as he roars by.

This is where I let him go, where I lose him, where I slink home to New York and never see him again, where our tryst is a memory, and whatever story I could write from this wreck of a week is left unfinished, with no resolution, with no way of piecing together his scattered clues.

But I say, “Fuck that.” I say it out loud. I turn to my car. And then I remember my keys are down in the guest house.

I take the boardwalks at a dangerous pace. I’m still barefoot. No bra on. My thoughts whirl. Surely he’ll understand. Once the adrenaline wears off. Once the sting of betrayal cools. I’ll write a retraction. An even bigger piece. When word gets out about how the
Times
ran this story, there’ll be mud on their faces.

Get real, Maya
, I think to myself. When was the last time a retraction ran anywhere but in a small inset on page twelve? The untruths go on the front page. Corrections are buried.

I’ll write the piece anyway. I’ll make it a book. I can fix this.

Fetching my keys, I run back up to the house, out the front door, and jump in my car. I speed across broken shells. I want to catch Ness, don’t want to sit at the house and wait for him to return. He might stay away until I have to leave, might have Monique or his guards throw me out. Approaching the first guard gate, I lay on my horn, and the gate comes up. A new guard comes out with his hand held up. I blow right by him, kicking up a cloud of dust.

I don’t see a trail from Ness’s car. Too far ahead of me. I get my car up to sixty on that gravel road, reach over my shoulder and grab my seat belt, click it in. Tall trees whiz past, trees that don’t belong here. I feel a kinship with them. These trees understand.

The second guard gate eventually comes into view. Ness has already passed through. A paved highway waits for me on the other side. This time, the gate doesn’t open. A guard steps out, hands raised, asking me to stop. The other guard probably called ahead. This one doesn’t look too happy. I roll down my window as I crunch to a stop.

“Hey, hey,” the guard says. “Take it easy. What the hell is going on?”

“Which way did he go?” I ask.

The guard scrunches up his face. “Who?”

“Ness. Mr. Wilde. Your boss. Which way did he turn? Where would he be going?”

The guard glances up the driveway and deep into the estate. “I haven’t seen him since an hour ago when he came to get the mail. Is everything okay?”

“That doesn’t make sense—” I say. But then it does. I throw the car into reverse and back into the empty parking space beside the guard gate, making a quick three-point turn.

“I’m going to ask you to wait here,” the guard says.

But I’m already gone, peppering the shack with bits of ground shells as I spin out.

I know where Ness went. I have no idea where it leads, but I know how I missed him.

Finding the turnoff isn’t easy. I remember about how far down the driveway I was, but I have to creep along with my window down and peer between the trees for the gate. I also look for tire treads veering to the side, or grass flattened on the shoulder. I’m feeling more and more certain that I’ve passed the spot, that I need to turn back and look for it again, when I see the gap between the trees and the black gate in the woods. I pull into the gap, hoping it’ll open automatically. Then I remember the keypad. I get out to study it.

There’s a small LCD screen. I punch in four numbers. The cursor is still blinking. I add two more numbers, and a red light flashes twice. A six-digit code. One of the only relevant numbers I know to try is Ness’s birthday. I try it twice, once with the day before the month and once the other way around. I get red lights both times. The guards are probably on their way. I listen for their jeeps. The hidden road seems to run through the woods to the south. Forgetting the car, and not knowing how far the drive goes or where it leads, I decide to go ahead on foot.

This is where shoes would’ve been a good idea. I stick to the sparse grass where I can, and I stay out of the deep tire treads full of rainwater. The trees only go a few hundred yards, and soon I can see the open field beyond: tall grass, a road cutting through it, the shoulders maintained. To my left, due east, the field runs a long distance before it becomes scrub brush and dunes that must slide down to the sea. Ahead of me, I can see where the road itself leads: to the lighthouse, with its white and black stripes. Maybe a mile away, out on a jut of coast. I start walking.

The hike gives me time to reflect, time to compose what I’ll say to Ness, what I’ll write in my piece, what I might be able to say to Henry to keep the rest of the story from running. I dream of storming into a board meeting and telling them what shortsighted and stupid idiots they are, that this is so much bigger than the tawdry gossip I’ve been compiling, that the last week might have had far greater implications than the last two
years
of my work.

The sun beats down. The ground is still soggy from the heavy rain the day before. My feet are covered in mud; it cakes up between my toes.

What will I tell my sister? When all this is over, and I have nothing but a destroyed family behind me and two days of perfect shelling and two days of perfect bliss, what will I say happened?

Henry’s news of book offers and film deals haunts me. I can see one way this turns out: with my wealth and notoriety increased, with the publication deals that have always eluded me, with the big-screen dramatizations my long-form colleagues at magazines often get, all at the expense of ruining what might in fact be a decent man.

The parallels to that future and Ness and his family are eerie. I think of how it must feel with all his wealth coming on the back of a broken and flooded world. Maybe he hates himself like I used to hate him, like everyone I know hates him. I may have the same life ahead of me, especially if our affair leaks out. There will be lights flashing, people asking me to sign my book for them, and the pain in my gut like I’ve been punched. Because of what made it all possible. Who I had to hurt. What I had to destroy.

I feel closer to Ness in this moment than I did in bed or on the beach. I feel so close to understanding him perfectly, to knowing his demons. That’s who you interview to get at a man: not his family, his friends, his coworkers, his competitors. You interview his skeletons and his demons. I feel like I’ve finally met them. I think of how he got his name, how we all need monsters to blame, but how those monsters are our own construction. I did that. I helped torture him. Because it made me feel better.

I damn myself as I reach the lighthouse. I think of all I will say to him. How I will pour my heart out. This is how it always works in the movies, right? Two people fall in love, there’s a massive misunderstanding, but it all works out in the end. I tell myself this: that it’ll all work out in the end. It has to. It can’t end with everyone broken. Who does that?

Beside the lighthouse are a number of vehicles: Ness’s red sports car, two sedans, a panel van, and a pickup truck, all splattered with mud from the drive out. Shielding my eyes, I gaze up at the top of the lighthouse. No sign of activity there. No other building attached. Just a tall black-and-white-banded tower of stone.

Trying the door, I find it unlocked. I let myself in and call for Ness. No answer. Off the small entry hall, there’s a set of spiral stairs running up. I take them two at a time and feel winded by the time I get to the top. There’s no one there, just a spectacular view. I didn’t pass any doors along the way, didn’t see or hear a single soul. I wonder if maybe there’s a trail that leads down to the beach, if there’s another building. I work my way back down and look for any door or passage I may have missed on the way up.

Nothing.

Back in the foyer, I poke around fruitlessly. A cardboard box with some light bulbs. An empty coat rack. A small table and chair. A scattering of tools.

I leave the lighthouse and walk around the building. Bingo. On the other side, there’s a set of stairs leading down. The door at the bottom of the stairs is locked. There’s a keypad by the door; it looks newer than anything else around the lighthouse. I bang my fist against the cool steel and shout Ness’s name, wait for an answer.

No one comes.

I could sit down and wait, see if the guards get to me first or if Ness comes out. Now that I have a pause to think, I wonder about all those cars, what they’re doing here, why the lighthouse is empty. My fight with Ness fades for a moment as I realize something fishy is going on, as the reporter in me resurfaces from beneath the damaged lover.

What code would he use? I try his birthday every way I can think of. And then I realize who will know. But I’ve got no way to get in touch with her. I pull out my phone. One measly bar. And the battery is low from getting in late last night. I leave the sunken stairwell and walk around the lighthouse until I have two bars and the data light comes on.

I search my email inbox until I find Henry’s instructions for driving up here. There’s a number for the guard gate and one for Ness’s house in case I’m running late. I try the house number. It rings eight times before I get voicemail. I hang up, count to ten, and try back.