Fly by Night (2 page)

“I'll wait,” he said.

She breathed deep. There was no coercing Bryce. Even ordering a beer was complex. He'd think it through; employ multiple sets of proofs before making the correct choice of microbrew.

“And so uhh … Jen around?” she asked, trying not to sound as if fishing for an easy mark.

“Nice try, Am,” he snorted. “Jen's got a thing planned.”

“Define ‘thing.'”

“Nothing big.”

“Oh for crying out loud, Bryce,” she gestured as if he could see. “A cop's setting down flares; we're down to one lane.”

She heard him snort with laughter.

Amelia raked her hair with her fingers out of frustration, picturing Bryce holding the envelope like the cat that ate the canary.

Well over six feet, burly, wearing his camouflage-patterned baseball cap with clear safety glasses resting against the bill, longish brown-blond hair peeking out from beneath the cap. Often Bryce wore shorts and flip-flops all winter long—“I don't like to feel constricted”—and as husky as he was, underwater he was dolphin-like. One of the most skilled and agile divers she'd known.

“Alright,” she relented, so aggravated she could kick the inside of her Jeep. “You guys suck.”

“You love us,” he said in a way that made her laugh.

“Right now I hate you both.”

“Au contraire, darlin'. Twenty says you don't.”

“You lose,” she chuckled.

“You're just a buzz kill, Ammy.”

She snorted, reeling from being trapped.

“So they say,” she said, thinking of her father's e-mail.

“That's my Little Miss Sunshine for ya.” He laughed as he said it.

“Betcha a lobster dinner back you'll never guess who e-mailed me,” she said.

“Nah.” His voice was thin with disinterest. “No more bets for now. We'll meet up later.”

“Where?”

He paused. “Give a call when you get back.”

“Who's coming?”

“Uhh—probably just us.” He ended the call.

Probably? I'll kill you, Hartley.
She hoped for the life of her that Jen hadn't invited Myles.

“Better be just us,” Amelia muttered and set down her phone, absorbing the bumper sticker on the back of a delivery truck that said
How's My Driving? Call 1-800-FukU
.

“Aww—call him,” Jen had encouraged just last week, trying to get the two of them back together. “Bet ya a dozen cherrystones at the Clam Bar the guy just got scared, he's probably embarrassed,” she'd said in her puppy dog voice.

“Think so?” Amelia had countered. “Bet ya my house on Benefit Street he's just a jerk.”

“Amelia, come on—” Jen had said. “Cut him some slack.”

But she'd cut Myles nothing but slack up until he'd walked out of her life like a person switches off a light when leaving a room.

“I guess I'm just a hopeless romantic,” Jen had said. Amelia and Bryce had shot each other side glances, both thinking of a different word. Jen gave men credit even when they didn't deserve it.

Two months had passed—the same amount of time they'd dated.

“God,” she fumed as she sat, inching up behind the delivery truck, thinking of Myles, hating that each time her phone buzzed her guts roiled—that die-hard ping of hope. Wishing she could unzip her feelings and step out of them like a wet suit. This after he'd goaded her into surrendering to his declarations of how he was “so falling for her” only to have him bolt like a frightened stray once she did.
God, when would she just give up—enough humiliation for a lifetime.

“How could I be so good at science yet suck at love,” she'd asked Bryce in the aftermath of Myles.

“You don't suck at love,” he'd challenged. Such words dissolved her self-indictment in seconds. His eyes had lingered as she'd felt him trying to gain an entry point to acknowledge, but she'd blocked his gaze with shade from a sweep of her eyelashes.

“I'll kill you, Jen.” Amelia swore an oath to the delivery truck's bumper.

Five years ago the last grant celebration had been classic: Jen drinking too many beers, crying and getting all snotty “I love you guys so much” and Bryce passed out cold in the back of her Jeep as she drove him home. Unable to rouse him, she'd driven back to the Revolution House, threw a blanket over him in her driveway, and let him sleep it off.

Amelia checked her e-mail again. No NSF e-mail. The electronic image of her father's name was emblazoned into her mind's eye. Amelia shook her head as if ridding her ears of the echo of water.

“This is too weird.”

*   *   *

She stopped dead in front of her mailbox slot at the marine biology department.

The box was empty.

“Damn it, Youngs.” She slapped her thigh.

The department still smelled like old card catalogues despite the perpetual hum of scientific instruments.

She texted Bryce in all caps. “WHERE IS IT?”

“Taken hostage,” he typed back. “Don't trust you.”

“Damn right you don't.” She jerked away. Her stomach was a clench of nerves, like a squid gathering the ganglion capacity to burst off with lightning speed down into the darkest midnight zone of the ocean.

“Fuck you,” she texted back.

“Ahh, Amelia, my sweet … always promises, promises,” he wrote. “But never dates, times, specifics…”

She could have laughed and cried at the same time, toeing the fine line of hysteria as she felt a bit of both seeping in. Her dark ponytail, beginning to tarnish with gray, swished over her shoulder like a horsetail as she rushed off to the lab, hoping to find them holed up at the deep saltwater tanks by the back door with the letter.

The narrow maple floorboards popped and squeaked as she clopped along in her quick-footed way. Everyone teased her about the bouncy adolescent walk and the excitement with which she'd show the new lab assistants how to perform even the most mundane lab work.

Bursting through the laboratory door to the familiar briny scent of salt water, she tiptoed back to the tanks, thinking she'd sneak up to snatch the envelope.

“Boo,” she said around the tank but no one was there. Her messenger bag dangled from her forearm.

A few researchers and lab techs sat working.

“Your people left,” one of them announced as she hurried toward her desk.

“Say where they were going?”

A few others looked up from their work but didn't answer.

“You hear yet?” the algae researcher turned to ask, a pipette in his hand. “Russell and Pam heard yesterday.”

She shot him a look but then softened. He meant no harm; she was tense. She often misinterpreted when tense.

“No, not yet.” She made her voice gentle.

Her fingers were still cold and clammy as she slipped off her jean jacket and bag, tossing them onto the stainless-steel specimen table beside her chair.

Sitting down at her desk, Amelia lifted the glass jar containing Tyrian purple snail shells gathered by her father from the seashore in Crete. She slowly turned the jar, watching as the shells changed configurations and clinked together, tiny grains of sand still stuck inside the glass. Studying the lavender-white ridges and spikes of their exoskeletal bodies, she remembered the feel of being a young woman, yearning and wanting everything though not knowing what everything is.

She set the jar down and sighed. Facing the darkened computer screen, her face was the image of her mother's. Pretty, though tired and puffy in the same places, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and jowls ever so slightly beginning to loosen as her mother's might have at this age.

“Screw it,” she muttered and hit the keyboard, vowing to open the NSF e-mail if it was there. Then play along with Bryce and Jen or else fake them out by marinating her eyeballs with saline to look as though she'd been crying.

But her stomach squeezed as the screen lit up.

“What?”

A second e-mail from her late father—her spine straightened as if independent from the rest of her body.

She opened it.
“Sorry to trouble you again, if you'd rather phone, I am in Wisconsin. Please call immediately…”

Immediately? What was so immediate about a man dead more than three decades? Was this a joke? A hacker parlaying a scam off NSF e-mail addresses?

She closed the e-mail and looked away. Staring past the tanks and out the back doors to Narragansett Bay, something felt wrong.

“Jesus,” she said, distracted from the NSF decision. She rested her elbows on the desk, leaning her chin in her palm.

“Amelia?”

She looked up.

“You okay?” It was the krill scientist from the other side of the bench.

“Uh—yeah.”

“Your people said to tell you they're down at the AA,” he said in his soft voice.

“Thanks.” She always mirrored the man's posture, hunching over a bit like him and speaking quietly.

The Ale Asylum, or AA, was a former psychiatric hospital circa 1920s turned brewery within walking distance of the university campus.

Just then her phone buzzed.

“Where are you?” Bryce texted.

“Where are YOU?” she shot back.

“AA. Pitchers and pizza! Waiting…”

“Leaving now,” she typed and was about to get up when Amelia turned to face the adjacent saltwater aquarium. It didn't take long to get lost in the lush corals that undulated in the wake of the water filtration system; such beauty was always a surprise. “Geek TV” Bryce called it. The soft din of the motors was soothing. She'd bred and transported countless pairs of sea horses to the overfished areas in Indonesia, Malaysia, and many other parts of the world as well as to the New York Aquarium, Chicago's Shedd. Sea horses were the proverbial canary in the coal mine, portending the health of ocean shorelines.

She tapped on the glass. A pair of bright yellow sea horses paused in their love dance to look up. They swam to her pressed finger.

“Hi, guys.” She leaned her forehead against the glass; its warmth from the aquarium lights felt safe, like she was all tucked in for the night and the world would never end. Their eyes moved independently as if deep in thought, dorsal and pectoral fins propelling them like hummingbird wings. They flitted away, resuming their intermingling and caressing of tails, once again more absorbed in courtship than fate—what it must be like to be so lost yet found.

Stuffing her phone into her pocket, she grabbed her jacket and bag and then dashed out the back doors toward the parking lot and her Jeep.

*   *   *

The music at the AA boomed in her chest wall. The host was about to shout a question when Amelia pointed toward the rear of the building where they always sat. The chairs were made of iron to discourage bar fights. “Had ‘em made special,” the owner had once told Jen. “By the time you pick up one of those suckers you're too tuckered to do any real damage.”

She spotted Bryce towering against the back wall, slowly waving the NSF letter like a surrender flag to catch her attention. Jen was almost as tall and stood alongside Bryce with her glass raised.

Amelia counted heads. Thank God no Myles. Relieved yet disappointed, she shook it off, spotting a pitcher of half-drunk beer, a partially eaten pizza, and an empty chair for her.

Amelia stopped just shy of the table and swiped the letter out of Bryce's fist before he had time to react.

She held it up in victory. Jen's sequin bag sparkled in flashes under the house lights from where it sat on the table. Bryce always teased that it more resembled a Las Vegas sign than a purse.

Jen and Bryce began play fighting, trying to grab the letter back.

Nervous laughter blurted out as Amelia then stuffed it in her bra. They'd been excited to the point of being giddy since the
Ocean Explorer
's discovery a month ago.

“Now don't make me have to go in there and get it,” Bryce called over the music, hands on his hips.

“It's Bryce's turn,” Jen said loudly in that big sister way she had.

“Yes, it is.” Amelia turned and looked at him through soft eyes. She pulled out the envelope and handed it over, a lump forming in her throat. Every five years, they took turns opening the NSF grant notification.

Bryce then ripped open the envelope with his teeth in a hungry, pirate way, pretending to chew and swallow part of the paper flap.

“Ew—you're sick,” Jen shouted over the music.

Yanking out the letter he then shot them both a goofy face before reading.

As he scanned, Amelia noticed his eyes stop. They drooped at the corners in such a way that she knew. Dive partners knew each other better than their spouses and their own dogs knew them. In emergencies they'd share dwindling air reserves with the commitment to surface together or not at all.

“No,” Amelia said quietly and sat down. It was like thirty-four years ago when the embassy phone call from Greece had come in to the dorm about her parents.

Bryce closed his eyes and passed the letter as he sat.

“Thank you for your application,” she read, “… however … given … we regret…” She stopped. The connecting ribs in her sternum felt like an assortment of mismatched bones that cracked as she took a breath.

She handed the letter to Jen.

“No way,” Jen mouthed, shaking her head as she too sat down to read. Then she closed her eyes, hunched over, and leaned toward Amelia, resting her head in Amelia's lap like an eight-year-old.

Amelia touched the side of Jen's blond hair.

“I'm sorry,” Amelia said.

The three of them sat lifeless, like a scene spliced into the wrong movie. Surrounded by gyrating crowds bursting with energy, people sang along with the deafening music.

An odd internal quiet lingered, one that often settles before the magnitude of something's about to hit. Like when a tide draws out, far out, exposing rocks, starfish, and shipwrecks as curious beachcombers stand in wonderment, sometimes following the quiet, puzzled by the ocean's strange behavior just before they spot a giant water wall blocking the horizon. As if nature's giving you the chance to rally and garner whatever strength you might need before an onslaught. Like when at nineteen years old Amelia had hung up the pay phone without speaking and chose to raise her son, Alex, alone. Just like then, there was hollowness where feelings should be. What a plucky girl she'd been—plucky yet so afraid of everything.