THREE

Three

Megan sat on the floor in Mike’s bookstore, her back against history, surrounded by ocean. It was a slow morning. The bell on the door had rung three times. Rain tapped against the windows, wandered off, came back, tapped again. She was aware of someone circling her now and then, but she refused to look up. No one came to Mike’s for history. The books she heaved onto her knees were massive, colorful, precise. They measured the mountains beneath the sea; they plumbed the abysmal waters. They told what the narwhal ate, how the male seahorse gave birth to its young, how the sea cucumber, which flung its inner organs at its enemies to confuse them, contained a chemical that might combat cancer, and that the homely hagfish had three hearts, and what orchestrated the beat of a hagfish’s hearts could also steady a human heart. They knew, from the great blue whales to the one celled algae, who ate what. They had counted the millions of eggs an oyster might lay in a year, and the number of rhymes in the song of the humpback whale.

But they hadn’t read the message in the bottle.

Nor, she decided, surfacing to the gray light, did they know that a sea hare could crawl out of the water and turn itself into ink. Or that an old woman could cast a line into a drawing of the tide and catch a human on her hook.

She leaned back against the shelves, drew her hair out of her face. She must have sighed: Mike, on his stool, lifted his unkempt head, to which air moss and air snails probably clung, and turned an eye her direction.

It was a question, his attention. He didn’t care that she was littering his floor with herself and his books, but that she hadn’t found what she wanted in them. No one turned a page or breathed among the stacks; the place was empty but for them.

She said wearily, hardly expecting Mike to offer much more than a crooked smile, “I keep finding odd things in the tide. But those books don’t say anything about them.” He was motionless, still listening, one finger marking the line he had read. She went on, talking to herself more than to him. “Yesterday I found a bottle with something in it. Something that shifted, something shining… When I broke it open, nothing was there. But there had been something. These books are full of such strange things. Did you know that they made cloth of gold out of a fiber secreted by sea pens, and that sea pens look like long, feathery underwater quills? Maybe you could write a message with them. But these books don’t say anything about what I need to know. They explain everything. They don’t see anything that’s maybe there and maybe not. It’s like Jonah wanting to look for a mystery under his hand lens. It won’t be there. But it was there.”

She stopped talking. Mike was looking at her with as much expression as an oyster, waiting patiently for her to quit making conversation so that he could get back to his book. Then his backbone straightened a little. He drew in air, a long tidal gathering through his nose. Expression, subtle as color in a kelp leaf, passed through his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, and Megan stared at him in astonishment. “I know.” He set his book down carefully and collapsed a little into his bulk to rummage under the counter. “I found one, too.”

“One what?” she whispered.

“One of those things. One of those things that don’t fit.” He lifted it gently off a shelf, set it on the counter, then stilled again, gazing at it, unblinking.

Megan got to her feet, not easy after being weighted with the cumulative knowledge of the sea. The thing on Mike’s counter looked like a broken roof tile. It was flat, black, square but for a corner bitten off. As she looked more closely, she saw it was latticed with fine and intricate lines that revolved, at the corners, around tiny scallop shells. Latticed, it wasn’t black, she realized, but blue so dark it melted toward black. Then all the lines flowed together; it was flat, black, solid. And then latticed again, the scallop shells a faintly paler blue. And then flat. A piece of black tile.

“What on earth—”

“Nothing,” Mike said simply. “That’s what I figure. Nothing on earth.” He touched it gently; lines flowed under his fingers. “I found it washed up in a pile of kelp. Moves like water. Like something opening and closing to water.”

“Yes,” she said, entranced. “It would, I guess, being underwater.”

“You figure—” He hesitated, then became expansive. “You look at it maybe from their point of view. For millions of years, the sea was like those books to them. Everything’s explicable, expected. Fishbones, kelp leaves, pearls, what-not. Then odd things start drifting down. They’ve seen wood floating, so they’re not surprised by ships, cloth of gold they can guess at, and pearls they know, and the little octopus can live in porcelain teacups. So they think: This is how humans live, floating on the water, coming apart now and then, and they learn to recognize clothes, and flesh, and then, after the fish feed, they recognize bone. But now… Think if you were living down there, finding beer cans. Barrels of chemicals. Styrofoam coolers. Flashlight batteries. Plastic baggies. Maybe TV sets off sunken fiberglass boats. Refrigerators. Old socks. Tangled-up fishing line. If you didn’t know, if you lived maybe inside a glint of light, what kind of bizarre world would you guess was falling apart and drifting out of the air down into the sea?” He turned his finding; the other side was pale and luminous as pearl. Megan stared at him, mute. “So I look at this and wonder what’s down there, breaking up, washing ashore.” He looked at Megan, shrugged his bulky shoulders a little. “Makes you wonder. At least it does me.” Someone pushed the door open; the bell rang. He slid the finding back under the counter. Megan opened her mouth, closed it. Mike gave her his crooked, one-sided smile, then went back to being a walrus on a stool reading a book.

Jonah, taking a day off, had driven the truck to a cove north of town, to putter along the cliffs. Worm tubes and the occasional crumbling fossil clam were all he expected to find, though that morning he thought vaguely of shark teeth, or the ancient tracks of rain. Except for a couple from a camper picking through the treasures along the tide line, the cove was empty. He walked around the south arm of the cove, close to the water, where tide pools formed in the sandstone, and the cliffs were sliding shard by shard into the sand. There he picked among the broken pieces, occasionally helping the cliff down by poking into its side. The sandstone yielded easily, revealed little except the unmistakable tracks of other fossil hunters. Still, he was content in the gray, damp winds, with the roiling sea at his back, and the seagulls crying overhead.

He and Megan had mumbled back into one another’s good graces; by midnight he had forgotten the color of the sea and remembered only Megan’s eyes, their intentness, their sudden smile. He had been cured of earrings; Adam Fin, from wherever, was not a barracuda but harmless as a harp seal. He crumbled mud around what looked like a brachiopod, whistling. The ghost of the brachiopod itself crumbled away, left him a handful of nothing. He let it fall, still whistling, and eyed the tide. It had moved farther out, giving him a chance to clamber along the edge of the cliff out where it dipped down into deep water, and then over to the other side, which was usually tide bound. He dropped his finds into his windbreaker pocket and began to climb.

Fifteen minutes later he was picking his way across what looked like giant ribs or backbones, partially submerged in sand, polished by the waves. There was a cave on this side of the cliff; with nothing much in it but the usual barnacles’ starfish, anemones, hanging like some kind of weird living wallpaper down from where the tide stopped rising. But farther back from the water, around the outside of the cave, he had once found a perfect bivalve half the size of his palm. He went back there.

He heard the whales sing then.

He recognized them from some old record of Megan’s: a flute player jamming with whales. It sounded more like whooping jungles to him, creaking timbers, demonic foghorns, than song. There were vast, deep notes that blew through him like breath trembling through a reed. I shouldn’t be hearing those notes, he thought, shaken. They move through the deep sea, the leviathan call across hundreds of miles.

His eyes fell on the backbones and ribs of rock he had walked across. They seemed to be arched in a dive through time, a sea mammoth caught and frozen like a little trilobite in the floor of the ocean. But this isn’t the floor, he thought, then: It was underwater once. I’m at the bottom of a fossil sea, hearing the ghosts of whales. They were all around him, the voices of the sea, whistling, scraping’ ratcheting, whooping, booming He stood stunned by noise, trembling in currents of sound. What is happening? he thought. Something is happening.

Then there was only one sound: a song so faint he could barely separate it from the gentle splash and sigh of water within the cave.

It was a human voice; it was the sea’s voice. It flicked away foam, wandered over stones, lingered in the anemone’s tendrils. It turned over a shell, scattered agates. For a moment, as the sea idled, it ranged free, sweet, deep, then impossibly clear and high. He recognized it.

He took a step toward the cave, feeling his heart beat in his throat, his lips. The cave emitted a breath of brine and guano, then cool, rainy wind. He took another step, another. A wave rolled over his footprint. The voice grew louder. His eyes stung with salt, with sweat. There was no language in his head, only the tide and the voice and the wind. He reached the mouth of the cave.

Water ran past him, lapped the mossy walls, almost reached the shadows in the back. A gentle note filled the cave; he breathed it like air. Something at the back of the cave moved a little. It was slick, glittering, a mass of green and black, that melted into shadow, into stone. The voice sighed through the cave; tide pushed him forward. Again he smelled brine, guano, salt, death. And then the sweet rain. The shadowy mass stirred; a pale stone took shape, then a long, straight fall of shadow. The tide ran around his knees. He tasted the song, felt it in his throat, in his blood. Water splashed among the stones; he heard a light laugh melting in the foam. The sea wrapped itself around his thighs.

A gull cried overhead. He blinked, found himself standing at the empty, shallow cave he recognized, one with no depth for shadows. The sand at his feet was barely damp; the tide was still working its way across the tide pools. He listened for the song. Then he realized he was listening, and tears broke like a bone in his chest because he had heard the sound of fossil rain, he had seen the mermaid’s hair.

A few miles to the south, Megan walked the tide line like a scavenger, head down, ignoring the sea, intent only on what the morning tide had pushed up on the beach. Other dedicated scavengers, who had found plastic bleach bottles or gallon milk jugs washed ashore, had cut holes in them to drop in whole sand dollars, blue agates, bright pieces of mother-of-pearl. Megan, frowning at the sand, narrowly avoided collisions. She had nearly walked into surf fishers’ lines a couple of times; she barely heard their warnings. Now and then she stopped, shifted kelp with her toe, nudged a jellyfish over to see what it might be hiding She was putting a magnifying glass to the mystery, she knew; if she looked at it directly, it would be somewhere else, behind her back, or where her shadow began. Like light flickering on water, it would never be where she had seen it last.

But still she searched for the pearl in the kelp, the bone made of coral. She filled her pockets as she walked, hardly seeing what she put into them, plastic, metal, cork, Styrofoam, tin, until her jacket swung bulkily at her hips and rattled when it hit her. She was absently trying to shove a wet towel into her bulging pocket when she ran into someone not quick enough to get out of her way.

It was Adam. He had his hands on her shoulders, steadying her as she raised her head and pulled her mind up from where the clams were blowing bubbles. She pushed her glasses up, and saw him from behind a brine-flecked mist. She pulled them off, began wiping them on the towel.

“Here,” he said. “Let me.” He took them, wiped them carefully on the underside of his sweatshirt Then he slid them back on her nose, gently adjusted the earpieces under her hair, an oddly intimate gesture that made her aware suddenly of the muscle beneath the sweatshirt, the height and weight of the body blocking the wind. She shifted her own weight a little, backing a half step. He dropped his hands, looked down at the torn, sandy towel she dragged.

“Going swimming?”

“No, I was just—I was—” She paused, drawing hair away from her eyes. What had she been just? Trying to stuff a towel into her pocket. His expression changed.

“Is something wrong?”

She shook her head, sighing. “No. I was beachcombing. I got a little carried away. There’s so much junk.”

“Most people,” he pointed out, “pick up shells.”

“I’m not looking for shells.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Secrets. Mysteries. Pearls and ambergris and black coral. But I keep finding garbage instead.”

He shrugged lightly. There was no expression on his face. “Just leave it. The tide will pick it up again. Anyway, you didn’t put it there.”

“Right,” she said dourly. “That’s toddler mentality in a nutshell. I didn’t put it there, and anyway, Mom will clean it up.”

He smiled. “Now you remind me of Dory. Never satisfied with the world. Grumbling and snorting and talking to yourself, trying to stuff all the garbage in the world into a grocery bag.”

She shook her head. “I’d use a leaf bag. Thirty nine gallons, made of recycled plastic. Drag it behind me down the tide line. Or a shopping cart. I’d wheel that along the wet sand and throw cans in it, and get snarled up in fishing lines and dead kelp.”

“And then you’ll get annoyed at the kelp. All those untidy piles the sea drags up and leaves lying around like laundry. You’ll throw that into your shopping cart.”

“And what about the dead jellyfish?” she demanded. “Talk about untidy. And the crab backs from molting crabs? Not to mention all those empty shells. I’ll have to buy a coat with pockets as big as the sea.”

“What have you got in your pockets?” He prodded one, marveling. “Anything good?”

“Actually,” she admitted, “I’m not sure. I was looking so hard for something I wasn’t paying attention to what I picked up.”

He made a dubious sound after a moment, his eyes still smiling a little, the opaque milky green of bottle glass tossed around in the sea for a century. “Then how do you know you haven’t picked up what you were looking for in the first place?”

She was silent, looking at him. “I don’t know,” she said at last, and laughed a little at the thought. “Maybe I did.”

“Maybe you should look.”

She went up to where the sand was dry and sat down. She realized then how far she had walked, almost beyond the boundaries of the town. Great jutting curves of cliff hid the harbor; the houses on them were sparsely scattered. She had left even the fishers and the beachcombers behind; they were alone but for flocks of gulls and sandpipers, and footprints wandering in and out of the tide. Adam sat beside her, watched her pull things out of her pockets. There were beer caps, a sardine tin, a Tinker Toy wheel, a baggie full of wet sand, a Styrofoam bait carton with a couple of dead worms in it, a fishing weight, a wool glove, a baby’s teething toy, a tennis shoe.

She stopped when she saw the shoe. Adam was stretched out on his side, leaning on one elbow. His eyes, flicking from her face to the shoe, found nothing wonderful in it. She said, her voice sounding oddly high, “There are still things in my pockets.”

“Take them out.”

“But there’s not room for a shoe in my pocket.”

“It was in there,” he said irrefutably. She reached into both pockets at once, pulled out an empty pickle jar, a film canister, a plastic glass with Ronald McDonald on it, the lid of a Ninja Turtle lunch box. She got to her knees, still pulling things out, her eyes wide, incredulous. Adam watched silently. She dropped a piece of a child’s chalk board, a length of picture wire, a diving mask, a bicycle chain, and a fan belt before she stood up. Adam didn’t move, except his head, lifting a little to see her face.

“What is this?” she breathed. “What is all this?” Still things came out: a jump-rope handle, a hairbrush without any bristles, the plastic nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. “This is not what I was looking for.”

“It’s what you found.”

She stared at him. Expression had finally surfaced in his eyes: a sorrow as deep and complete as if, she Thought, he were watching the world die.

And then she realized he was.

A wave fanned across the sand, spilled around him, began to tug the bottle caps, the Styrofoam back into the sea. It tugged at Adam, who lay in water as easily as on sand, indifferent as a seal to the turning of the tide.

She began to tremble, feeling the weight in her pockets and knowing that there was not time enough in the world to empty them. She whispered, “What are you?”

Jonah drifted back home at twilight. He moved, he felt, through the evening tide. It sang in the back of his mind, insistent, pervasive, the way the sound of the sea seemed ingrained in the floorboards of the apartment. No window could shut it out, no dream. He found Megan sitting idly on a kitchen stool, gazing at nothing, a peculiar, distant look in her eyes. He went to the refrigerator, got a beer, and glanced at her again.

“Did you draw?”

She shook her head. “No. I just walked.”

“Oh.”

“You?”

He nodded. “Same.” He added, making an effort, “I found a couple of things.”

“Oh.” She drew a breath, subsided. He glanced out the window over the sink. Twilight drew a thin line of sapphire above the sea. He watched it darken, forgetting the beer in his hand, following the pale, elusive frills of foam as the black waves broke. A star moved over the water toward the harbor: a trawler coming home. He drank finally, and remembered Megan, so silent he had forgotten she was there. She got that way sometimes, chewing over her work.

He moved, touched the cold stove. “I’ll cook.” She murmured something. “What?”

“Okay.” She added, after a moment, “I’m not very hungry.”

“I’ll cook that frozen tortellini.”

“Okay.”

He opened a cupboard, rattled a pot loose from a clutter of lids. He said without looking at her, “That Adam. The jewelry maker.” She made another noise. “Where does he live?”

“He does—he said—” He looked up then; she shook her hair over her face, finding words. “He said he was with some friends.”

“What friends? Where?”

“He didn’t say.”

He grunted, kicked the cupboard door closed. He set the pot in the sink, ran water into it. “Reason I ask,” he said to the water, “is Jenny thinks we should get a few more pieces from him.”

“Oh.”

He set the pot on the stove, turned on heat. “Did you buy sauce?”

“No.”

“You know how to make it?”

“Yeah. You get out the butter.”

He gazed into the water, stirred it aimlessly for a while with a wooden spoon. “Then what?” he asked, rousing. “After you get out the butter?”

“That’s it. You toss some butter and salt and pepper in the tortellini and it’ll be fine.”

He blinked, pulled earthward by a vague sense of incongruity. “Do we have butter?”

“No,” she said after a while.

He turned the water off, looked at her. She was hunched, her face a quarter moon within her hair. He couldn’t find an expression, let alone read it. He set the water aside, pulled a frying pan out of the stove drawer. “Eggs, then. Scrambled?”

“Fine.”

“Did he leave a number with you?”

“What?”

“Adam Fin. A phone number?”

She shook her head, straightening a little; he heard her sigh. “No.”

“Well, then how do I get in touch with him?”

“I guess you’ll have to wait until he finds a place to live.”

He cracked an egg against the pan with more force than necessary. “That’s it? Just wait until he wanders back in? It could be days!”

“It could be. So what?”

So, he wanted to shout, I have to wait days to find out if the woman singing in the bar he says is his sister, is the woman who sang to me in a cave, or if I just dreamed their voices were alike and that there was the shadow of her long black hair against the rock? His mouth felt dry. He dumped eggshells, knowing suddenly how an oyster felt, waking up to a grain of sand in its bed, trying to live around it, only to find it growing larger, luminous, more insistent the harder the oyster worked to ignore it.

“I think,” he said finally, “I just think it’s odd he left all that with us and not even a number where we can reach him. It’s expensive stuff.”

“I guess he trusts us,” she said wearily, and added after a moment, “I don’t know why. Anyway. You don’t even like him.”

He didn’t answer. He stirred eggs, pushed a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster. He found himself staring down into it, watching the flush of heat along the element. He looked up to find Megan watching him, her eyes speaking suddenly, but nothing he could decipher. Do you? they asked. Have you ever? Would you believe?

“Jonah?”

“Huh?” he said, and then, “Oh, shit, there’s no butter for the toast.”

“There’s some diet margarine.”

“I hate that stuff. Tastes like salad oil.” He got a couple of plates, spilled egg onto them, added dry toast. He handed a plate to Megan. She looked at it bewilderedly, as if wondering what he expected her to do with yellow lumps and a piece of cardboard. He lifted his own plate, eyed it, and set it down abruptly.

“I’m going out.”

He felt her watching him until he closed the door, but she did not even say his name.

His feet led him to the Ancient Mariner, where he bought a beer and hunched over it, listening, beneath the sounds of the jukebox and some weird woman haranguing the bartender, for an echo of the voice in his head. He upended the beer, drank half, and fell deeper into the music, chasing a spindrift song through the caves in his head. Finishing the beer in another burst of energy, he found the woman eyeing him.

She looked, he thought, like an oyster. Lumpy, gray, with a ruffled and colorless shell. The bartender, Sharon, who was married to Marty down the street who ran the arts and crafts gallery, lifted an eyebrow at Jonah.

“Another?”

“He’ll have one,” the older woman said. “I’m buying.”

“No, I have to—”

“Name’s Doris. You can call me Dory.” She brought herself and her glass over, sat down beside him. “If you can hear that much beneath the music.”

“I can hear,” he said, despite Aerosmith going at it from the jukebox. She fixed him with her oyster eye.

“Sing me what you hear.”

“I can’t sing.”

“You’ll have to, for her. You’ll have to wring music from your bones.” She shoved his beer at him. “Drink it.”

He could not, he thought, drinking with impolite haste, have heard what she said. He put the glass down, and smelled it suddenly, from the woman, from a crack in the wall: brine, guano, new rain falling in a new season. He closed his eyes, felt the sting of brine behind them. The woman was saying something else.

“There’s a price. Everything has its price.”

“Beer?” He reached into his pocket. “I’ve got it.”

“Money’s not worth much, down there. Gets old and crusty, hidden under kelp; coral grows around it. Coral likes money. It’s hard, you can build on coin. I’ve seen gold like eyes peering out of coral skeletons. No. The price wouldn’t be coin. You won’t want to buy what that coin makes, the way it ends up down there.”

“What?” he said, mildly buzzed and not having the foggiest notion what the old bivalve was talking about. “What ends up down where?”

She joggled his elbow crossly. “Down underwater. You should see what crawls out of those rusting barrels. It’s an army of ghosts that eats everything in sight. Eats coral, eats the little plankton, eats the chemicals drawing one fish to another, so they can’t breed, and if they do, it eats their eggs. You think you see everything, with your lenses, your this scopes and that scopes, your radars drawing pictures of sound. You don’t see what’s not there anymore. It makes things disappear.” She turned to Sharon, called in her rattly voice, “He’ll have another.”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to go.”

“He’ll have another.” Her hand clamped on his wrist; he saw her eye again, fierce and gray as a gale. “You’ll stay. I know what you want. I can hear the singing in your head.”

He stood still. His mouth was very dry. He reached for his bottle; it was empty. He waited while Sharon, looking amused, brought another.

“Where’s Megan?” she asked, throwing the name at him like a lifeline from another world. It was too short and too late.

He gulped beer. “Megan? Doing some drawing. Or thinking about it. I’m looking,” he said to both women, “for a man named Adam Fin. Tall, blond—” They were both nodding. “He left some jewelry with me,” he added, and saw the oyster eye narrow in a smile. “But no address, no phone.”

“And you want,” Dory said, chuckling, “a certain pair of earrings.”

He had to breathe twice before he could answer. “Yes. You know him.”

“I know him.” She drank her own drink, sea green and rimed with salt. “I know her. They’re mine, him and her. My first and greatest and most wild children.”