Before We Go Extinct (23 page)

“Yeah,” he says, slowly. “She does? She writes? Really? I didn't know that. She never said.” He stares out the window. A tugboat is pulling a barge laden with wood chips slowly through the pass. It honks three times. “I really love her,” he says. “I just really love her.”

“I know, Dad,” I say. Because I get it. I know he does. I know he loved Mom, too. But it was different. Because that's how it is. You can fall in love so hard with someone but it can be different from what you have with someone else. This is something I know: what I have with Daff is a supernova. Maybe it's destined to be a black hole. Maybe not. But what I have with Kelby? It's more like a meteor. Maybe it's the meteor I need to wipe the slate clean. But it's definitely a shooting-star kind of love. I swallow hard. I'm not going to cry.

But me and my dad, we're criers, I guess.

“I hope they come back,” he says. “What if they don't come back?”

“Me too,” I say. “They will, Dad.”

“I didn't see the boat go out,” he says. “Maybe she changed her mind.”

“She probably did,” I agree. “She wouldn't leave.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I'll walk up there in a while. I'll check.”

Then Darcy is suddenly there, looking frantic, and Dad is saying, “I thought you'd left?”

And she's yelling, “I can't find Charlie! Charlie's gone!”

“What?” I say. “Where is he?” I get up too fast, the room tilting a bit before righting itself. Dad's hand is on my arm.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“I'm fine, where is he?” I say again.

“If I knew
that
, he wouldn't be missing,” Darcy snaps. Then, “Sorry, I'm not mad at—anyway, we have to find him. Help me find him. Please, help me find him.”

Dad is already slipping on his shoes, already half out the door with the dogs, screaming, “CHARLIE CHARLIE CHARLIE!” I hear them thundering down the path toward the beach.

It takes me a few minutes to get my head straight enough to follow them. I try to think like Charlie. The first thing I think of is the hotel. I climb up the trail, not calling him, but listening instead. The sounds are so pronounced here, you'd notice any rustle in the bushes, anything that isn't right. But I don't hear anything, just the thump of my bare feet on the packed trail.

The skeleton of the building rises toward the sky but doesn't get above the tree line. It looks like a drawing, superimposed on the trees. I'm calling Charlie but I'm thinking about meteors. About how one could hit me right now, right here.

And it would be the end of everything. The end of anything. The end of the everyanything.

“Charlie,”
I shout, but his absence is palpable. Not here, not here, not here.

But where?

I think about the shark.

No, not that.

I walk slowly back to the cabin, listening.

I'm almost at the small beach in front of our place when I hear him.

He's crying.

I look up. He's perched out on the end of a branch of the tree, way too far. Like I was, the first time he saw me practicing, showing off.

“Hey, kid,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “What's up?”

“Oh hi,” he says back. “I'm going to do what you did, okay?”

I try to keep my voice controlled. “No,” I say. “It's a bit too far, buddy. It's too far to fall. You'll—” the word catches in my throat. “Hey, maybe back down to here a bit.” I point farther back down the tree. I can't really see him because of where the sun is shining, that's the problem. He's a silhouette above me. Too far. Twenty feet maybe. He'd die if he jumped from there.

I'm suddenly desperate.

“Don't jump,” I say. “Just wiggle backward, okay?”

“No,” he says.

There was this one time, in a parking garage. Me and The King had been drinking a bit. We never drank to get drunk. We drank to get brave. Braver. “The bravest,” he'd say, and raise his bottle, clinking it against mine. There was a gap between one parking garage and the next. And we were going to jump it. We were daring ourselves. We'd jumped way farther, both of us. We'd made it way farther than that. I don't know why it was so scary, but it was. Maybe twelve floors. Thirteen. I hadn't counted.

We skated for a while. To work up the nerve. A few beers. Some kind of fancy Canadian beer that his dad imported. He always had to have the best of whatever was available. This stuff tasted thick and bitter. Too strong. It was pretty disgusting.

The King went first and man, he really flew. His feet pulled up to his chest, he looked like someone in an action movie.

“That was tight,” I yelled.

When it was my turn, I don't know what happened. Maybe the beer was too strong. Or maybe I wasn't that into it. I had to go home and write a report for English on a famous novel written in the twentieth century, which really left the door so far open that I hadn't been able to pick. I was supposed to meet Daff on the corner to go with her to this dinner at her parents' house because she needed a date and The King had turned her down. I was thinking about too much stuff is really all it was. Anyway, when I took off, I knew I'd gone wrong. My legs were too heavy and in the gap between the buildings, they felt like an anchor I'd thrown overboard. I would probably have died but I somehow grabbed a pipe, a stupid rusty pipe, and held on. I dangled there until he ran out of that building and back into the one I was in. It took ages, my hands slipping, sweaty on the pipe. I thought I was going to fall for sure.

And I was tired of being about to fall.

When The King died, I'd been thinking of telling him it was enough.

I'd been thinking of asking him about that day, about why he didn't just jump back the way he'd gone, to get to me sooner.

It was like he almost hesitated. It was like he almost wondered what that would look like, if I fell.

I swallow hard. I won't cry. Now is not the time.

“You've got to come down,” I call to Charlie. “Slow, okay? No tricks.”

“It's not a trick, it's a skill, dog,” he says, quoting me back to me.

He looks like an angel silhouetted against the sun like that. And I do the only thing I can do, which is hold out my arms and catch him when he falls.

Which he does. Hard.

Both of us falling onto the rocks, but he's in my arms and he's alive and he's okay and he's crying and I'm crying, and the whole world is crying, wet drops of rain falling from the gray, almost-autumn sky, those goddamn trees starting to abscise their leaves all around us, the leaves falling like so much bright confetti against the dull veil of clouds.

 

46

I only have a few more days on the island when the tide brings in the body.

The adolescent great white shark—because that's what it is—comes in on the highest tide of the year. It happens in the middle of the night, so that when we go down to the beach in the morning for our swim, he's hidden at first by the rock where we sit and read and lie in the sun and sometimes make out but not anymore.

But the smell is unbelievable and unmistakable. What death smells like is instantly recognizable, even if you haven't ever smelled death before. Every cell in your body knows that odor and reacts to it with a recoiling that begins somewhere so deep inside you couldn't even guess which organ started the rush, but you want to run far and fast and get away from that.

Fight that instinct.

Stay.

It's Kelby who finds him first, climbing up onto the rock, looking down on the other side, gasping.

“Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” And then she's on her knees and I have to force my eyes to look where she's pointing, to see what she's seeing.

It's just that the shark is so big and so destroyed and so utterly completely dead that he couldn't be more dead if he'd fallen off a steel beam on the forty-second floor of a building that his dad was constructing on the corner of Eleventh and Fifty-Third. The body of the shark is splayed and awkwardly bent, broken in too many places. Most of his meat is missing, leaving behind a frame with some skin hanging, his flat eyes shielded by the second lid, like he knew what was coming and braced himself for it as best he could.

His fin is still attached.

I go down to the sand even though the smell is unbearable. To be so close. I reach over the falling-apart carcass and put my hand on his fin. It feels cool and firm and solid, like the trunk of an arbutus tree, like a human leg, like anything.

Like everything.

I hold tight to the fin, tears streaming down my face.

The thing is, I don't have anyone to blame. I want to blame someone.

“Oh my god,” I say, too, because what else is there to say really. Above us, circling, there are turkey vultures. At first only three, then four, then five. They are waiting for us to step away. They are ready to feast on this, what's left of it.

“NO,” I yell at them. “NO.”

“Calm down,” says Kelby. “Screaming isn't going to help.”

“Nothing is going to help,” I say. “Are you crazy? He's dead. It's dead. She. Whatever.”

“I'm not crazy,” she says, shaking her head. “I'm pretty normal.” She grins.

“Right,” I say. “Me too.”

She stares at me and man, I want to kiss her. What is wrong with me that I want to kiss her now?

“This guy stinks,” she says. “But he's something. Isn't he something?”

“Yeah,” I say. “No kidding.”

I'm still holding his fin. I don't know how to let go. The smell feels like it has moved through me and I don't know how to move my legs or arms and the fin is cool and slightly dry and yet also slippery in my hand and then Kelby is standing in front of me and then her arms are around me and then I'm kissing her again because she's there and nothing makes sense.

Eventually, I let go of the fin and then we're lying down in the sand and rotting flesh from the shark is beside us and on us and under us and I don't care.

I thought our story would end differently from this, that's the thing. When you meet a person and then you like a person and you start to notice stuff about a person, like their eyelashes or the way their ears kind of wiggle when they laugh or how they are always cupping their knees when they are sitting down and talking or how they always look up at just the right second to catch the shooting star, when that happens, you think your story is going to be super-romantic and end in some kind of super-romantic way. Not with you actually becoming related. Not with your parents getting married. Not like that.

But even while I'm lying there with Kelby, on Kelby, in Kelby, on the sand, by the shark, the dead shark, I know this is our ending and I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate it in a way that I've never hated anything before and I lean down and I kiss her forehead and I say, “I know it probably doesn't count but I love you.” And she says, “I love you, too,” and that's sort of better and sort of not because I get up and walk away, whistling for the dogs who are up behind the logs, staying far away from that death, decomposing and forgiveness back there below the tide line where the pebbles turn into sinking sand that soon will be covered up again with the cold green water from the strait.

I don't look back. I don't know how long she stayed. I don't know what she was waiting for, what else she needed from me, what else I could have said.

 

47

The shark was killed by orcas. That's what the fisheries guy says when he finally shows up. His body was torn apart by the whales. The shark was really young, probably only a few months old, and somehow off his migratory path. Maybe he was mixed up because of the climate change and the warm current, maybe he was exploring, figuring out a different route. Maybe his mom died and left him directionless. Maybe someone killed her for sport or maybe the ocean killed her, with everything in it that's broken.

Or maybe someone murdered her for her fins, leaving her body to sink slowly to the ocean floor. Leaving this baby to wonder what happened. To find his own way.

He found his way to
dead
.

I stood beside him in knee-deep water while the fisheries man explained everything and nothing. Darcy came down for a bit and listened and then she prayed on the rock, her back to us, kneeling to the sun. If I'd had my phone, that would have been the best Instagram shot of the year. The way the sun shone down, like it was shining a spotlight on her. I don't know about praying, but I know what's beautiful. So does Dad, I guess. He proposed.

She said, “Yes.” I don't know when it happened and Dad isn't talking, he's tight-lipped but smiling, and I get it, I do. But I'm still sad because, Mom. And because, everything.

The shark wasn't really that big, maybe nine feet from nose to tail. He looked so huge in the water. He looked like everything I've ever believed in and couldn't save.

I took a tooth. It wasn't easy. I had to wait until the fisheries guy was busy in his boat, organizing other fisheries guys to prepare nets to haul the shark away. I pried the tooth out of his mouth with Kelby's pocketknife. It was like trying to pull a table leg off a table, it was stuck so firm. I cut my finger really deeply. It started to bleed in a way that would have been scary a few months ago but now didn't mean anything. My finger. My blood. The tinny taste of it in my mouth.

“Sorry,”
I whispered, and that sorry stretched out so far between me and the shark that the invisible thread stretched to infinity and to heaven and to wherever the spirit of stuff goes when it dies because it has to go somewhere, and I think it got all the way to The King, that's how far it went. I cried, now waist deep in the rising tide, and the corpse of the shark was tethered to the fisheries boat, to be dragged somewhere for scientists to study and destroy and take pictures of for the local news.