The heat was just starting to fade that October when the shark first
appeared off the coast. I noticed the change while biking home from the lab
at night, and when I undressed in my apartment by the river I saw that my
mosquito bites, which had swelled to the width of tapas plates, had finally
begun to shrink. The ping from the shark’s satellite tag had come in my
third month of graduate school, and there was great excitement—we were
marine biologists, or would be, and we’d all been following the tagging
experiments up north off the coast of Cape Cod. A sixteen-foot long female
white shark at least fifty years old, she surfaced a few miles off of the
fishing pier at the beach. The local news followed her excitedly—it was a
month past the end of tourist season, and the only people in the water were
the surfers, most of whom, when interviewed, treated the newscasters with
such distain that they had barely any usable clips. They’d had to resort to
shots of waves against spindly legs of the pier, pelicans flying in angular
groups overhead, looking threatening, prehistoric.
***
My lab studied a one-molecule ocean creature that had a long, hyphenated
name with words from three languages. We just called them Freddies. When I
had trouble falling asleep at night I would recite its hierarchy to myself:
Protozoa, Ciliophora, Ciliatea, Spirotricha, Oligotrichida, Tintinnina,
Ptychocylididae, Favella, Favella arcuata. It charmed me, that a level
would often repeat a syllable or two of the one before it, as if the list
were a poem. I’d wanted to study whales since I was young, but hadn’t every
marine biologist? By the time I was in my third year of college I knew I
would never be selected by those professors, for those research trips. I
began to aim lower, finding in the nooks of the department the experiments
that were mostly ignored—ignored, but funded. So here I was, in a small
city in a southern state I’d never visited before moving to it, with the
favella, a statue downtown commemorating the Virtues of Confederate
Manhood, and a group of labmates I referred to privately as the island of
misfit toys. I was determined to love this little ciliate. And sometimes I
did, when the structure under the microscope resembled a champagne flute,
when I watched them struggling to move in the bit of water on the slide,
propelled only by their tiny hairs.
***
I’d arrived in North Carolina that August, in a taxi from an airport I
found unnervingly close to the town—if I was outside when a plane came in
it always seemed as if I could reach upwards and touch its belly. My
grandmother had moved there a few months before. She’d bought a beach condo
suddenly that spring, found online, announcing she could no longer stand
Arizona, that she wanted to be by the water. Everyone in the family was
sure she’d been scammed, so when she and my father debarked the plane he
was still thinking of contingency plans. But when they arrived at the
complex, there was, in fact, a real estate agent waiting for them with two
sets of keys. “I got the feeling,” my father had said when he came back,
“that she’s been planning this a long time.” The real estate agent was a
man in his late twenties already sagging under the eyes and at the belly,
and as they toured the apartment my grandmother would compare features
disparagingly to the pictures he had sent her. It was clear which of them
had gotten the better of the other, my mother told me my father had said.
I knew that my father was hurt she hadn’t chosen the West Coast—my parents
lived in Santa Cruz, after all, they also had a beach. My mother asked him
why one evening, in her gentle way, and he’d sighed and said she’d said it
was cheaper, that she didn’t like the fog. I wondered, though, if it the
sudden need to leave Arizona had to do with my cousin Amy, who, we’d
recently discovered, lived in Tucson as well. “Listen,” my dad had said
when I’d answered the phone, mid-application season, after he’d returned
from helping my grandmother move in, “We’d never ask you to do anything,
but what if you applied to Wilmington as well?”
***
The shark pinged again three weeks later—this time she was only about five
miles up the coast. The built-in GPS attached to her dorsal fin was capable
of tracking her anywhere in the world, it would ping a satellite whenever
the device surfaced above water. When I looked at the online map of her
movements on my computer I saw she had been not far at all from the beach.
It was unusual for a shark to stay so close to the same area—these white
sharks were capable of traveling hundreds of miles in a single week. I had
read that she was named after the head biologist’s mother—he’d waited, he
said, for an appropriately formidable female. Mary Lee.
The day after the second ping, a Sunday, I arrived early for my regular
dinner at my grandmother’s condo, perhaps with the thought of helping her
cook or clean, unable to shake the idea that she was old and I should be
taking care of her, thinking of the tentative way my mother asked if I had
been checking in. “Your father worries,” she’d said. It was strange, having
never lived in the same place as my grandmother, to now be navigating a
relationship unmediated by my parents. I felt guilty for not spending more
time with her—my parents were helping with my tuition, part of the reason
I’d chosen UNCW, but the times I tried to make plans outside of our regular
Sunday dinners she acted awkwardly, would reschedule or change our plans at
the last minute. “You don’t need to spy on me for your father,” she’d said
once. My father sighed when I asked for advice. “She’ll do exactly what she
wants to do,” he had said. “Best not to try to change her mind.”
I was only a little surprised, then, to find she wasn’t home. I sat in the
outdoor stairwell waiting for her, looking over the railing at the water.
From my low angle, just a story up from ground level, the surfers sitting
atop their boards instead appeared to be standing in the water, stoically
facing me, their boards covered by the rise of closer waves. I shivered.
There was someone swimming beyond the surfers, parallel to the beach, out
past the break of the waves. I watched the yellow swim cap appear and
disappear in the swells. As the figure made its way out of the water I
realized that the swimmer was elderly. It took me longer than it should
have to recognize my grandmother.
“Are you okay?” I called as she walked across the sand below me, the water
gleaming off her calves, an enormous towel held loosely over her shoulders.
I followed as she climbed the stairs. “Don’t you need a wetsuit?”
She gave me a look that I read as disappointment. “It’s bathwater out there
right now,” she said. “It won’t be cold enough for that until January.”
I’d known she swum laps in Arizona—her body had always had a taut quality
that belied her age—but it had never occurred to me that she’d continued
here, in the ocean. “Why don’t you use the condo pool?” I asked.
She extracted a key from a hidden zippered pouch in her bathing suit and
unlocked the door. “That’s a kiddy pool,” she said. “I like to swim a full
mile.” The towel she was wrapped in was comically large on her small frame,
but I could see now that under it she was shivering. She went into the
bedroom, emerging a few minutes later in a robe.
“Don’t you know about the shark?” The words left my mouth before they’d
formed in my mind.
“Well that would be exciting, wouldn’t it?”
“It pinged again,” I said. “Yesterday.” She didn’t answer, and began
unloading the dishwasher in the open kitchen, her back to me, stacking and
unstacking glasses, trying to arrange them to fit into the small cabinets.
Her bones seemed suddenly as brittle as the glass in her hands.
“It’s my routine,” she said, after she’d finished. “It’s what I do. I’m not
going to change it because there’s the smallest chance. If I start making
excuses I’ll just get fat and die.”
I turned to look out at the view. My grandmother, I’d come to realize
throughout my youth, hated obese people with a strength of feeling I didn’t
understand. I dressed carefully when I visited her, terrified she would
notice the weight I’d gained since moving here, this city where a pint
Yuengling cost two dollars, where I’d first encountered pulled pork, new
forms of fried starch. It was one of the many topics I was learning to
avoid in conversation with her.
***
The shark began to appear more frequently. Sometimes she pinged twice in
one day, once within the same afternoon. The short red lines drawn between
her locations on the GPS map had the erratic angularity of children’s
stars. For a few days she’d wandered as far down as Myrtle Beach, but she
always came back. My grandmother continued to swim every afternoon. I was
starting to invent reasons to text her around dinnertime, just so I’d be
sure she’d returned. Still alive, she’d begun to respond.
In the lab that night, I spread a premade tuna mix onto a sheath of
crackers I’d brought from home. We were stimulating our tank of Freddies
with electricity, so that there was a pulse of light every three minutes,
making the dark lab illuminate as if it were a shock of lightening. Every
twenty-four minutes I recorded the results—so far, all signs were pointing
to inconclusive, but still we’d keep at it for another three months.
Sometimes the Freddies froze, found later as microscopic sediment on the
bottom of the tank, and sometimes they continued as if unaware. In between
the flashes of light, I watched twenty-two minute episodes of Cheers on my laptop, racing to record my observations so as not to
fall behind and have the episodes escape their confines. My eyes were
brought involuntarily to the tank every three minutes after the pulse,
landing only after it was dark, the speed of human muscle proven again and
again to be slower than the speed of light.
Sometimes during these nights in the lab I watched videos of bow whales
swimming underwater. I found it peaceful, how their large bodies undulated.
They were so huge that they didn’t need to make accommodations for
anything, just proceeded along their way, their forms thick and unelegant.
I could see why the humpback was more beautiful. But the bowheads were
powerful, capable of using their own bodies as battering rams to break
through arctic ice.
At eleven Arthur came in to relieve me. He was quiet and very tall, from
Minnesota. I often wondered if he was in love with our professor, who was
beautiful and had been born in Thailand and who would sometimes bring her
three young children into the lab to visit, but most of the other graduate
students assumed he was gay. He opened the door just as a blast of light
hit the tank, and I started. I’d been imagining the shark again, lifting
out of the water, nose breaking the waves. Sometimes they rolled on the
surface to show their girth, to intimidate their prey.
Arthur was usually working these overnight shifts; even though the students
assigned to the lab were supposed to rotate, somehow it was frequently him
being relieved at seven o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed from the
overnight. I’d made sure to make a fresh pot of coffee before he’d
arrived—though we weren’t close I felt silently protective of him, and the
half-wounded, half-bewildered expression he wore when he thought no one was
observing him.
We’d once had a conversation about how we admired the Freddies for their
simplicity of action. Everything was a preprogramed response, a reaction to
stimuli without thought or wavering. The Freddies nibbled on plant-like
molecules their own size, were eaten by other, slightly larger, forms of
life. How simple it must be, I still thought, to float along through an
ocean and have everything one encounters be either predator or prey.
***
We’d all found out about my cousin Amy the summer before I started college.
It was clear to me then that I was on some sort of borderline within the
family. They didn’t make sure I was out of the room before talking about
it, but neither did anyone tell me directly, so that everything I knew I’d
had to piece together from half-conversations I was not included in.
Amy had contacted the Catholic agency after her adoptive mother had died.
Her father, she had said, was in a nursing home—dementia. They were older,
closer to fifty than to forty when she’d become theirs. They’d never wanted
her to look, but what did it matter now? Amy was significantly older than
all of us cousins, with three girls of her own, all teenagers. When she’d
found out my Aunt Judy had passed away years before, she’d said, oh,
quietly, into the phone. My Uncle Steve had cleared his throat, and offered
the information, though, that he was her father.
Steve and Judy had eloped as soon as the baby was taken away, as soon as
the hospital had let Judy out. They had two more children, later. Amy had
two full siblings. I had also been raised an only child, and discovering I
had another family, a large family, one in which I had brothers and
sisters, was something I had often imagined in my childhood. I wondered if
she had, too. It was my grandmother who had put Judy in the home for the
duration of her pregnancy, who’d made her give the baby up. But that’s what
happened then, everyone said, now.
I asked my mother if my dad had known. With my friends it was an explosive
story, my secret cousin, but my family had always had a Midwestern
quietness about large events. It was only years after they had passed that
we would talk about them, like when my father had casually mentioned my
grandfather’s alcoholism, almost a decade after his death. I had been too
young to read any connection to liver failure when he’d died. My father had
been too young when it happened, my mother thought. “There were a few years
in his childhood when he didn’t see Judy and Steve. I guess now he knows
why.” She’d added after a pause, “Your grandmother has never compromised in
her Catholicism.” My mother would have known; she’d had to convert to marry
my father.
***
I’d been to the small town in Illinois my grandmother was from, about an
hour and a half drive from Chicago. We were on vacation in the Midwest, and
my father had said we might as well. We’d met with some great-aunt or
second cousin who’d served us pineapple upside down cake, syrupy and still
warm. My grandmother’s family was descended from immigrants who’d come from
the Catholic part of Germany to Illinois in the mid-1800s, and these
generations had passed on very little in the way of ethnic identity to the
generations I knew, except for what I observed as a rigid practicality. My
grandmother had raised two younger siblings after their parents had died
and her older brother had left for the war, had put herself through exactly
as much college as she thought she needed. The town had the smallest church
I’d ever seen, surrounded by fields of corn. Some of the older gravestones
were written in German. “This must have been where everyone was baptized,”
my father had said.
It was on this trip that we met Amy for the first time—it was in fact the
whole reason we were in the Midwest. My father and his two remaining
sisters, Steve, and most of the cousins of my generation had a reunion on
the shore of Lake Michigan with the rest of the family that had stayed
there. But I never, the whole weekend, heard anyone even mention my
grandmother—her absence, her role in the drama. It’s as if we all preferred
to think of the forced adoption—for that’s what it was, really—as some sort
of unstoppable event only attributable to nature, some kind of divine will.
A flash flood, perhaps, or an earthquake. How else to explain how suddenly
and irreversibly Amy had been taken from her parents.
I’d been only thirteen when Judy had died of leukemia, and hadn’t gotten to
the point where I thought of the adults in my life—the aunts and uncles I
saw as a group each summer—as individuals, with their own histories, their
own secrets. I respected Steve and Judy’s estrangement from my grandmother,
when I had found out. And I wondered what it had been like, raising their
first child together—their first child who was really their second.
***
I had once kissed Arthur impulsively at a party, both of us drunk. It came
less from a feeling of lust, we’d been far enough into graduate school to
have seen the first wave of single students pairing off, rather I thought
it sprung from a growing sense that the two of us were being left behind.
We were on a porch bench and the aggressive sound of the cicadas competed
with the music from inside. If we had been standing I would have had to
bend his face down to meet mine, but sitting next to each other I simply
leaned in quickly while he was describing summer thunderstorms by his
family’s lake house. It was brief, and when I pulled away he looped his arm
over my shoulder and squeezed me into his chest. After a moment he’d
gestured to the dome-shaped bites on my legs, and told me I must be
allergic.
***
My grandmother and I were taking a walk along the beach before dinner. She
had told me that when she’d moved in the beach had been in the process of
being ‘renourished,’ which entailed a giant tube spewing the sand currently
under our feet, dredged from the ocean floor. With each wave that had come
through the summer, a bit more sand had been reclaimed for the ocean, and
now it formed strange small cliffs parallel to the water. I was trying to
explain to my grandmother what the Freddies were. We had chosen to walk
below the small cliffs of sand, where it the beach was wet and easier to
walk on, but the waves were hard to avoid and the water was surprisingly
cold. My grandmother scanned the horizon as we walked, not paying attention
to the waves that threatened our feet.
“My older brother liked science,” she said. “He used to study the bugs in
the backyard. Once he found an anthill, and told me to guard it, to mark
the spot, while he ran back to the house for a magnifying glass. While he
was gone I was watching the ants walk all the way up their hill to the hole
at the top. It seemed so far, they were so tiny. So I tried to brush away
some of the dirt, to lower the slope so they wouldn’t have to walk as far.
But when my brother got back he was enraged that I had destroyed the hill,
he thought I’d done it out of maliciousness. Not even my mother would
believe that I was only trying to help the poor little ants.”
***
I was surprised when my grandmother accepted my invitation to the end of
the semester party for our lab—Professor Kittitanaphan had invited us all
to her home, romantic partners and families included. Though it was
December we’d had a sudden run of warm days, and it was decided at the last
minute to make it a barbecue, or, rather, a pig pull, a word I had just
learned. Mary Lee had surfaced the day before, but, ominously, I thought,
she hadn’t been above water long enough for the satellite to pin her
location. We stood on the lawn in our sweaters, the mosquitos finally gone.
A few of the boys had started a bonfire in a pit in the center of the yard,
and Professor Kittitanaphan’s children ran around it excitedly, her husband
calling one of their names occasionally, warning them not to get too close.
Her face was flushed as she talked to Arthur, glass of wine in her hand,
but I saw the glances she exchanged with her husband, how his voice,
repeating the names of the children, seemed to orient her. It occurred to
me that she was a woman born in a country half a world away who had
achieved everything she wanted while remaining kind. I wondered who had
first told her that it would be possible to have such a life.
“Why didn’t you come to meet Amy?” I turned to my grandmother, emboldened
by my second drink, the smell of smoke, the calls to the children. “You
should have met her. She—”
“It was wrong,” she said, cutting me off. “It was the right thing to do.
That baby went to a real family.” I looked down into my beer. I knew that I
would never repeat the question, that the courage that had welled up in
that moment was mysterious in origin and impermanent to my nature. My
grandmother would continue to swim in an ocean shaded by creatures of teeth
and bulk; my father would attempt to believe her interventions had not
destroyed his eldest sister. I thought instead of the Freddies, the
Freddies who would move in their slow way through the water as they always
had, indifferent to whether they were in lab tanks or oceans, finding them
both equally infinite.
“It wasn’t a bad life,” my grandmother said, and nodded, as if putting the
finishing touch on some work of art, some sculpture made of flint, or
steel.
