Fly by Night (10 page)

Swimming into the BCD vest, she clipped it on, slipped on her fins, and hooked one arm through the bottom rung of the ladder, treading water as she waited for Diane.

Amelia closed her eyes and lay back, floating in the cool water as it cradled her head, giving into weightlessness, trying to slow her mind as it was still speeding on the highway.

She pulled the face mask down over her nose and eyes and wiggled it into place so that it wouldn't leak and moved her fins ever so slightly to stay buoyant, imagining a jellyfish in reverse evolution.

Tears slipped out, down the sides of her head as she floated. So often she was alone except for Bryce and Jen. And now Alex seemed to have settled so far away. Alone except for when face-to-face with a bottle-nosed dolphin or when a wild sea horse wound its tail around her finger and she was one again claimed by the sea.

Her face mask quickly fogged. She flipped over and pulled it away ever so slightly to dip it in water and then set it back on her face. She looked at the time, wondering what was keeping Diane.

A stingray swam just beneath the surface and she watched its billowing form.

The scraping sound made by the metal security door made her tip upright. In came the singsong greeting from Diane.

“Hi, Amelia.” Diane's cheery voice laughed as it always did when entering the marine tank area. About the same height as Amelia, Diane wore thick glasses, had cropped gray hair, and was always more professionally dressed as if in meetings all day long. “You're such a doll for coming in given what's happened.”

She didn't think of herself as a doll. She could fast-talk her way onto any research vessel in the world, or out of trespassing violations in international waters when local authorities would threaten to arrest her team and take command of their ship.

“I'm so, so sorry,” Diane said.

“Yeah, well,” Amelia looked into the clear water. “What are you gonna do when you live in a shoe?” Amelia snorted, something she'd always say when in a jam. This was her last funded dive in the facility. The Biomes had just lost a grant that helped pay for Amelia to maintain and preserve their reefs and aquaria, though she'd promised to come work for free.

“I mean it, Diane,” she said in that nasally way through the dive mask. “This keeps me sane.”

Diane tried to catch her eye to smile.

Holding on to the ladder's bottom rung, Amelia watched as a puffer fish swam by, inflated as perfectly round as the planet Venus except for the two eyes, a beak for a mouth, and spikes that hurt like hell.

For a moment neither spoke.

Diane broke the silence. “I mentioned that Felice thinks the big reef's in decline.”

“Yep, I'll go take a look, let you know what I find.”

Amelia gave the OK sign, bit into the regulator, and slid beneath the gleam of the waterline. Her head rushed with the roar of her first breath, the feel of her lungs—she was one of them—an Aqua-Lung.

Water flooded the roots of Amelia's hair as long strands whooshed with the current, blending into the reef—heaven for a woman whose heart pumped seawater.

The two e-mails with her father's name came to mind. Why think of them now? It made her shiver, recalling the Arctic folktale of Sedna, the Inuit sea goddess whose father had thrown her overboard to appease the raven spirit he'd enraged. Sedna's hair was hundreds of fathoms long and was believed to get tangled up in the nets and propellers of Arctic fishermen even to this day. Ever since eighth grade the folktale had both fascinated and horrified her. As Sedna had grasped the side of her father's kayak, he'd axed off her fingers and shoved her under with his oar. Each of the young woman's severed digits was believed to have turned into all of the lobsters, crabs, sea urchins, and other marine animals that make up the ocean floor. Instead of perishing, Sedna had become goddess of the underwater Arctic.

Gliding toward the reef, Amelia tucked the tips of her fingers into her dive belt, imagining Sedna as she thought of her father's e-mail. Her dive fins and the gentle movements of her hips guided her forward. Silence blotted out time and urgency. She imagined it was quiet under the Arctic Ocean.

Stingrays and sea turtles billowed past as Amelia watched for unusual behavior. As she swam through their water currents, she spotted the reef in question. Like glittering jewels, clusters of green cabbage coral, honeycomb, and fuchsia clumps of mushroom corals had all grown together in gardens. Tiny colonies of marine invertebrates with saclike bodies swayed in the wake of her fins. Their calcified cone skeletons grew outside of their bodies, like residents in high-rise apartment buildings, thriving on only food, sunlight, and good water flow.

Amelia touched the leathery edge of a cabbage coral and lowered to get a better look. Instead of in decline it was a new colony of coral reef polyps—evidence of health and new life.

Then a pair of orange sea horses flitted toward her. She offered a finger. The female, the bolder of the two, wrapped its tail around her index finger. Turning its head sideways, it studied her with a black shiny bowling ball eye. Her mate's belly was swollen with a clutch of babies, looking as if he was about to give birth.

A sea horse's metamorphosis made them impossible to spot in the wild. Twenty-two years ago Amelia had spent an entire year swimming past coral reefs, seeing nothing until her eye had finally learned to spot them. The little buggers could mimic the exact details of coral reefs and underwater grasses, making them virtually indistinguishable.

This particular pair of orange sea horses had been bred in her tiny lab at the University of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay. The female held on to her finger with her prehensile, monkey-like tail, not letting go.

Gently unwinding the sea horse's tail, she placed the female back on a fan coral next to her mate. The two turned to face each other, undulating in the current of a disgruntled sea bass as it swam by.

Amelia then approached one of the largest natural clam shells growing in an American aquarium, one she'd secured out of harm's way by a proposed oil rig in the east Indian Ocean. She touched the outside of its shell. Bubbles escaped from its fanning lips as it sensed her presence as a disturbance in the current.

Approaching the surface, she saw Diane's face, distorted through the water's own fun-house mirror, looking like a worried Miss Piggy, scouring the tank for her. Bubbles careened up in time with each convulsive laugh into the regulator as Amelia chuckled, feeling bad that she found it so funny—but it was.

“The reef's fine, Diane,” Amelia called out after removing the regulator from her mouth, squelching a laugh, not sure the woman would find it as funny. Tucking the face mask under her chin, Amelia grabbed the ladder and stepped up. Amelia's chin dripped water as she pulled off her face mask and tossed it on top of the gear pile.

“Just a new colony—nothing to worry about,” Amelia said. Sliding off her lime-green dive fins, she set them up on the deck and slipped out of the buoyancy compensator vest. Rolling the air tank up onto the deck, water rushed down. As she climbed up the ladder, torrents of salt water streamed past her ankles. “Probably have to move some of the sponge coral, transplant the polyps.”

Amelia sniffled and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her wet suit. She squeezed water out of the long strands of her hair as if it was a wet towel.

“How 'bout you get changed and meet me in my office.” Diane crossed her arms and tilted her head to one side as the two women looked at each other.

*   *   *

Amelia pushed open the locker room door, hurrying to pile her fins and dive equipment into the gear bag. She grasped the zipper pull along the back of her wet suit and guided it down to the base of her spine. Wrestling out her arms, she pushed the neoprene form past her hips, pulling out one leg and then the other. Standing in her bathing suit on the cement floor, she held the wet suit as her hair dripped.

“Good enough.” She jammed the wet suit on top rather than artfully arranging it as she usually did and forced the zipper closed, the plastic teeth straining and pulling apart.

“Shit.” She left it.

She quickly rinsed off in the shower and then rushed to the hand dryers, hitting the metal button and leaning over as she fluffed her hair to make it dry faster.

Her jeans felt grubby as she wriggled them up over damp thighs, jumping to yank them up so she could button the top.

Since 1980 Amelia wore only blue jeans, black T-shirts or turtlenecks, fleeces, black one-piece bathing suits, clogs, or else just dive gear. Blending into the topside world was her adaptive niche.

Jen would encourage her to live large, coercing her into buying colorful T-shirts and sweaters though Amelia counted herself lucky if she could find two matching socks without holes. “Never buy anything that's for sale” was Amelia's policy as she raided the lost and found box, looking for items that had been in the lab for more than sixty days.

“Bet ya a new face mask you'd get more dates if you wore pink.”

“Bet ya there's a greater chance of a catastrophic asteroid collision with earth than there is of me finding a man even in pink,” Amelia shot back and made a sour face.

“Keep making that face and it's gonna stick,” Jen warned with her pointer finger.

Neither had she any jewelry nor did she want any. What could match the beauty of marine life? She'd seen an octopus disappear against a rocky cliff wall and watched sea horses change color faster than a human breath. Some grew filament tendrils like bridal veils to mimic the surrounding reef corals and grasses. Had she not seen all of this Amelia would have chalked it up to someone's fish tale.

She'd played tag as Galapagos dolphins chased her Zodiac under the blackest new-moon night as sea water phosphoresced a milky greenish blue that only single-cell plankton give off when disturbed—nature's burglar alarm. The grooves and arcs of the mammals' necks and tails were illuminated as they sliced through in hot pursuit.

On research vessels, sitting down in the darkness of marine labs, Amelia, Bryce, and Jen would be watching live feed from deep-water ROV submarine cameras. Seeing a creature new to science, a species with bioluminescence—animals that manufactured their own light in the midnight zone of the ocean—close to cracks in the earth's mantle where not one photon of light was anywhere to be found. With crazy, neon colors, oscillating in patterns in the blackness like some far-fetched sci-fi alien movie, but it was all real, all in their oceans that few would get to see. For Amelia, there was nothing more spectacular than this.

She buttoned the top of her jeans and then sat down on the wooden locker-room bench, plunging her arms into the sleeves of her black fleece jacket and zipping it up to her chin. She shoved her waterlogged hands into her pockets and thought of her father. He'd always say, “
the older you get the more like yourself you become
.”

“
If you are the Amelia Drakos Greek-American who grew up on Long Island … your father…”

“Dad,” she said and closed her eyes. It sounded unpracticed, strange. She'd not said it since 1978. She'd think of him especially if she'd smelled someone smoking Pall Mall king-size cigarettes.

“My father.” Her own voice sounded strange even saying it. Who would she tell? Why would she tell? There was no e-mail the year her father died. Too bad the dead couldn't drop a line now and then, check in, and catch up.

She buried her face in her fleece jacket as she sat on the wooden bench. Calm settled like a narcotic. It always did after a dive. She hunched over and let it wash through and claim her—a decompression necessary to gain her emotional sea legs.

After about a minute, she sat up and pulled out a metal barrette from her jeans pocket. Harnessing her damp hair into a ponytail, she could still feel the warmth from the hair dryer along her spine.

Tugging up her wool socks, she thought back to March just after the Java Conference. She'd warned Bryce and Jen that it might be a rough ride—researchers with more institutional clout than her worried about the fate of their labs. And while neither Bryce nor Jen believed her, she couldn't shake the uneasy pall that had accompanied her return from the conference.

After Java, Bryce had teased, even though ordinarily cautious and prudent to a fault.

“Amelia's like Chicken Little. This is her.” He'd blown up a latex glove and somehow managed to attach it to his head while dashing through the aisles of the lab calling out in a scratchy chicken voice, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Everybody laughed, including her.

“Funny, Bryce.” Amelia said without a laugh. “But things are different.”

“You know, Amelia,” Jen had affirmed, nodding in her big sister way. “You do say that every time—sorta like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Her Orange County golden hair shook like a mane. Tall and runway thin as Amelia used to call her, Jen's heavily made-up eyes had locked with Amelia's in trying to get her to concede the point—eyes that remained, to Amelia's amazement, always lined with makeup, even when out on dive projects.

She knocked on Diane's office door though it was open.

The woman motioned to come in and have a seat though she was on the phone, having a discussion about an invoice.

Amelia sat, pretending not to listen as her eyes drifted up to an image of a giant eyeball on a poster immediately above the woman's head. W
HO
A
M
I
?
asked the huge eyeball of the giant squid.

Amelia stared back at the eye, returning its intensity. “
No one knows the mind of a squid
,
”
her father used to say
.

Underneath were the words, I
AM GENUS
A
RCHITEUTHIS
,
with a long explanation comparing it with others of the same genus. I
AM A CEPHALOPOD.…
Off to the side of the desk were piles of colorful educational folders and brochures for the children's programs at the Biomes.