The Shell Collector (27 page)

Ness curses and lets go of me. I try to kick away from him. He pins me down again.

“I’m the one mad at
you
, remember? What the hell are
you
upset about?”

“You’re a phony,” I spit at him. “Everything about you is fake.” I take deep breaths. “Your smile, your damn shells, the trees, everything!”

I get a hand free and swing the murex at his face. The sharp crenelations open a gash. Ness covers his cheek, and I wiggle away. I stagger a handful of steps, wait for him to tackle me again, but he just sits there. I head for the house. My legs are jelly. I can barely stand, but I resolve to get there, to get help. Looking back, I can see that Ness hasn’t moved, is just holding his wound, watching me.

I take advantage of this and pause to collect my breath. I rest my hands on my knees and eye him like a wounded mouse might eye a hawk.

“What did you think I was going to do, write you into some kind of hero?” I ask.

He stares at me.

“And then you dump your shells on the market, right? Or have you been doing that already? How many of your celebrated finds happened right up there in that lab?”

I stagger toward the house. Checking my phone, I see the battery is dead. I don’t care. I feel dead, too. Emotionless. Betrayed to the core.

“This is not a fake!” Ness roars behind me. I turn to see him holding the shell in one hand, his cheek in the other. He gets to his feet, and I steel myself to run again.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” He raises his voice above the crashing sea and the wind. “Skipped right to the end, and you still don’t understand.”

“Stay away from me,” I tell him.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ness says. “Not like you’ve hurt me.”

I don’t know if he means the story that ran that morning or the gash on his cheek. I no longer have the right to say it wasn’t my fault. Both wounds were. I know that. I made a promise I couldn’t keep.

“Let me off your property,” I plead. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but I know it isn’t legal. Let me go.”

“You think I would
hurt
you? Goddamnit, Maya, I think I’m in love with you.”

“Shut up!” I scream at him. “Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.” I cover my ears and jog toward the house. When I look back, Ness is running after me. It’s no use. My legs give out, and I tumble to the sand. Ness circles in front of me and falls to his knees. Tears are streaming down his face, blood down his cheek.

“Listen to me,” he begs. “Just listen.”

I bow my head, stay on my hands and knees, try to fill my lungs.

“No, it’s not legal what we’re doing. We’re trying to clear some hurdles, make it legal, but it hasn’t been easy.”

“You’re going to crash the market for shells,” I tell him.

“Yes, we are. I aim to. Because we’re going to bring them back. Don’t you see?” He shows me the murex. Its white shell is pink with his blood. Ness peers inside, touches the slug, and I see the creature move. Ness turns and hurls the shell into the sea. He sits back on his heels, wipes the blood from his cheek.

“I used to shell beaches as a little boy with my grandfather, and he told me once that we collect dead things. That the shells are worthless, but we collect them because they’re beautiful.” Looking up, he smiles at me, even though his eyes are still crying. “Another metaphor for your collection,” he says. “How shelling is like love. Collecting empty, pretty things.”

I don’t say anything. I conserve my energy.

“After he told me this, I started looking at the living creatures inside. I followed the shells with snorkels and then dive tanks. Grew up. Never forgot what he said. And one day, I went down in a Mir to oversee a geothermal installation, and I started thinking about the vents, where the water is toxic and warm. Acidic, like we’ve made the sea. But there was
life
there. Trapped. It couldn’t populate the rest of the sea because of the cold all around it. The animals there were boxed in, fit for a different world, for a world not of sunlight but of harsh chemistry. I wondered if we could bring them out, give nature a nudge, find something in their DNA that might help.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”

“We started with the trees because they were simple and we could grow them quickly. I hired the absolute best. From what we learned with the trees, we were able to get two dozen species of gastropods living in existing sea conditions. And more on the way. The FDA thinks we’re working on algae for biotic oil production, that our proposed bills to relax some regulations have to do with that. There are politicians on our side, but others who will shut us down if they find out, who will think we’re playing God, creating little Frankenstein fish, that we’ll cause more damage than we’ll repair. But we’re only doing what nature does best. She just needs our help. Because we took her by surprise.”

I don’t want to believe him. I don’t care how it all fits, how this makes more sense than the monster I made up in my mind. I want to believe in the monster. I
need
to believe in the monster. It’s simpler. I can wrap my head around that. It’s more difficult to think that Ness is out to save the world. It’s more difficult to think that he sees anything in me.

“The feds are onto you,” I say. I want him to know he won’t get away with this, that it’s too late.

Ness nods. “I know. I think they suspect. They don’t want this either. If the market for shells crashes, entire departments will get shuttered overnight. It’ll be like the end of prohibition. No more jobs for the people who track down crooks. No more retail. No sales tax. All gone overnight. No one wants this, don’t you see? It’d be like turning the loch back over to the monster. The circus would have to pack up and go home.”

I shake my head. Ness reaches out to me, and I flinch. I can see that this reaction hurts him worse than the blow I struck. He is only holding out his hand, hoping I’ll take it.

“Come with me,” Ness says. “Come with me, Maya, and I’ll show you.” He turns and looks back to the lighthouse. A handful of figures can be seen up there, little dots on the ridge. “This is where the story ends. Right up there. Where it always ended. I was going to take you today—it was the plan all along. I was going to show you the sample we took from the Mir, you and me. I was going to show you the progress we’ve made.”

He frowns. His cheek is bleeding badly. “And then I saw the story this morning, with your name on it, and I thought I was an idiot to fall for you, that you were running that piece all along, that you were probably going to write about what happened on the sub, on the island, that I was setting myself up for all that again. While I was running back to the house, all I could think was that I made a mistake taking you to my most special place, my true home, that you—”

“I’m sorry I hit you,” I say. “I’m sorry about the piece that ran today. But I … I don’t believe what you’re telling me—”

“Why not? I’m willing to believe
you
. Right now. I believe that you had nothing to do with that story. I believe that you’ll set it all straight if you have the chance. I believe this, even though I have a long history of watching people betray my trust. A long history. But I believe you, Maya. Now I really need you to believe me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Ness, this is just too much.”

“Is it? You’ve seen the shells. You’ve seen inside them. You know they’re real. I need you to look past everything you know about me and the years of mistakes I made. Stop judging me by my father and his grandfather. Judge me by this week. By our time together. If that’s all you had to go on, what would you believe?”

I rest my face in my palms. My shoulders quake as I let out a sob, an exhausted cry. I expect Ness to reach out and comfort me, but he seems to know not to. I can’t believe any of this is happening, that my life somehow got caught up in the nexus of whatever it is Ness is trying to do and whatever it is the feds are investigating. All for running that damn story, for wanting to get back at the man I blamed for taking my childhood away.

“What do you think of me, Maya? From this week. From yesterday. From the guy at the bottom of the sea. From the beach. Tell me this is just a shell. Say it. Say you don’t believe me.”

“I can’t,” I sob. I shake my head, try to compose myself. I no longer feel in danger of Ness harming me. The danger I feel is far graver than that.

“I need you,” Ness says.

“To write your story?”

“No. Screw the story. Someone else will write it. They’ll get the facts wrong, but I don’t care anymore. It’s the shells. The shells are going to come back. That’s all that matters. We’re so damn close, and I want you to be there when it happens. I want you by my side.”

“Why?” I ask.

“You know why.”

I look him in the eyes. I see him through a veil of tears. But I’ll know if he’s lying. I’ve seen this enough times to know. I’ve heard the words from those who didn’t mean it, who didn’t really mean it.

“Say it,” I say. “Say it, and make me believe it, damn you.”

Ness smiles. Blood trickles down his jawline. The sea crashes and roars beside us.

“Ladies first,” he says.

But I can’t say the words. This is how relationships are most like the things I collect: We build these hard exteriors. We pull ourselves inside, block off the only way in, don’t let anyone see our true selves. Ness waits for me to tell him that I love him, but I’m still scared. I still doubt. Nothing feels real. Because I won’t crawl out and feel the world for myself.

“Show me,” I tell him. “Prove what you’re saying is true, and then I’ll decide how I feel. I want to see what you’re doing up there. Make me believe you’re doing something good.”

This is the most I can give him, this opening, my willingness to have been wrong about him one last time. For the moment, with him wounded and bleeding and me untouched, I believe that I’m not in danger, that he isn’t out to hurt me. Not only is he the one bleeding, the anger is now mine alone. My own sins have been forgiven.

Whether Ness really meant to show me what lies beneath the lighthouse or not, the secret I’ve uncovered there puts all the rest into perspective. And I realize the truth of what he hinted at once, that the story he wants to tell will make a mockery of my pieces. Maybe the story that ran today, the one that will hurt Holly and perhaps no one else, enraged him because of my betrayal, not because of his desire for self-preservation. I allow myself to believe this as I follow him in the direction of the estate and toward a flight of stairs that winds up the bluff. I allow myself to consider that he was angry in the shower not for the damage I caused his family’s reputation, but because he feared I felt nothing for him, that I had been using him all along.

I nearly press him on this, but I choose to walk in silence.

We tread up creaking and salt-air-worn steps, palms on rough splinter-toothed rails, Ness climbing ahead of me. I remember following him into his house what seems like several years ago. A lifetime ago. I came here to write about the world he wanted to destroy, to hoard for himself, to spirit away—and now he says it’s a world he wishes to save, to protect. I feel a tug in every direction on the deepest parts of my soul, this compound wish to be with a man both dangerous and protective. A man who could wreck vengeance on my behalf, but never upon me.

My mother pointed this out to me on a shelling walk, before I went off to college. “You’ll love most the ones who can hurt you,” she warned me. It was a version of my father’s more pithy: “Men are pricks.” However stated, it’s a lesson that must tragically be learned, not told.

“You okay?” Ness asks as we reach the top of the stairs.

I nod, out of breath. He’s the one with twin trails of blood curving down his neck. He’s the one whose family name is besmirched in today’s paper. And he wants to know if a flight of stairs has wronged me. And in that question, and that steely gaze, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would burn the stairs into the sea if I hinted at any offense.

“I’m fine,” I say.

We follow the ridge toward the lighthouse. There’s a winding dirt path worn into the grasses right at the edge, and I realize that Ness must walk from the estate to his secret lair sometimes. Perhaps every day. This is where he’s been the last four years, watching the sun rise over the glittering sea to his left, then watching the sky redden and the planets and stars come out as he winds his way back home at dusk. All for what? I want to see. I want to meet the people in the white cloaks, these people who moments ago I feared. I see two of them far ahead, by the lighthouse. I see the jeep and the guards as well. They watch with hands shielding their eyes as we approach.

Fifty meters away, and the men get in the jeep as if to come out to us, but Ness waves them off. I see them hesitate for a moment, but then they drive sullenly away, disappointed perhaps at this tease of danger, this thrill of excitement, of actually being needed.

“Do you want to call someone and let them know where you are?” Ness asks.

I consider this. It surprises me. Not that he is aware of my trepidation, but that he considers I might want some way to allay those fears, some way to let my boss or my family or the authorities know where I am. “My phone is dead,” I tell him.

“You can use mine.” He offers it. I consider the wisdom of calling Agent Cooper, filling him in, but I wave the phone away. The gesture is enough. To actually make that call would do more harm than striking him, I sense. Trust must be met with trust. Ness puts the phone away.

“This is my lead scientist,” he tells me, indicating one of the women I saw in the laboratory beneath the lighthouse. She’s standing with her hands in her smock, looking worriedly at Ness’s wound, then suspiciously at me. “Ryan, this is Maya Walsh. Maya, Ryan.”

We shake hands. She has a firm grip; she does not smile at me.

“And this is Stewart, my chief geneticist.”

Stewart is smoking an old-fashioned cigarette. I wonder if this is a habit he picked up from Vincent or vice versa. He exhales a cloud of smoke, then shakes my hand. “The reporter, eh?”

“Not today,” Ness says. “Today she is only a friend. I want you to show her around.”