I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I googled “Larry M. Taylor” and “Crosskeys, Maryland.” Some people used social media as their personal ouroboros of anxiety and distraction; I searched for the mystery man to whom my father gifted a baseball. Across the city, Lucas was at home with his wife, who Katherine thought was cool. If only Katherine hadn’t seen us on the stoop at that exact moment, with her kale body and her hornet’s nest judgment. I never wanted to see her again.
My first search result was a page for the Maryland Birders’ Association. A thumbnail photo showed a man in profile, holding up a pair of binoculars. I zoomed in to see if this was the same Larry, the handsome face, the strong jaw, but instead of getting larger, the photo pixelated. “Larry Marcus Taylor has been an Osprey Watch volunteer for twenty-four years. He tracks threats to the osprey population nesting in and around the Chesapeake Bay, including exposure to pesticides, algal blooms, and other impacts of climate change.” At the bottom of the page was a different contact email: larry@marylandbirders.org.
Maybe I could work on my environmental reporting and find Larry at the same time. I opened my dump email, the account I used to sign up for discounts so I wouldn’t get spam in my real inbox. Every young person I knew had an account like this. No one from my parents’ generation did. When I’d tried to set one up for my father the previous year, he’d asked for the address iwillneverusethis@gmail.com.
The email I sent to larry@marylandbirders.org was brief. I wrote that I was a freelance reporter working on environmental stories and currently reporting an article about the plight of osprey in the Chesapeake Bay. I was hoping to accompany him on one of his bird-watching expeditions for the Osprey Watch project. I didn’t mention Apogee or anything that could identify me. I signed the email Alice Levy, using my grandmother’s maiden name. Who was Alice Levy? Not Lucas’s lover, his guilty pleasure. Not my father’s daughter. No resident of 1938 House with its windowsill dust and globs of toothpaste in the sink. Just an environmental reporter searching for a story.
It’s what would make me a good journalist, I thought—an uncompromising nose for the truth. If Larry was going to refuse to meet me, I would find another way.
That was how I found myself traveling east. Jane had signed off on my osprey-reporting trip. Larry had responded that he would be happy to show me around, his email appreciative that a reporter wanted to write about the Chesapeake Bay osprey. I was pretty sure he was L. M. Taylor, because in both of his emails—the one to me and the one to Alice Levy—he’d used Baskerville, which seemed retro, eighties, the kind of font my mother would use unironically.
I’d researched statistics about the Chesapeake Bay, how as the largest estuary in the country it was a harbinger of the effects of climate change on the nation’s waterways. The bay was in terrible shape. Environmental scientists at the University of Maryland had given it a grade of D+ the previous year. When I’d mentioned this to Mal the night before, over our sheet pan of “weeknight nachos,” she’d said, “If the Chesapeake Bay were a white kid, it still would have gotten into college.”
An effort to save the Chesapeake Bay had been ongoing since I was a child spending weekends at Dad and Barbara’s. There were years when the water was broccoli-green, choked with algae; years of angry environmentalists on the radio talking about the twin devastations of industrial agriculture and rampant construction that flooded the tender soil with excess phosphorus runoff. I remember being told by my dad and my friends’ parents that we couldn’t swim because of enterococci bacteria in the water. Language that confused and inflamed us, since the water was just as squishy and muddy as it always was, rippling in the sun, and couldn’t we see with our own eyes that there was nothing wrong with it, nothing wrong at all? The trouble was no one could see this stuff. Runoff. It was so dull-sounding. Invisible chemicals leaching into the groundwater, poisoning the wildlife, causing thousands of fish to die at once, bobbing to the surface like smelly bits of confetti.
There was an image in my head that I conjured while driving—the two of us, Dad and me, on the dock at the marina, a pile of rocks between us. The horizon was pink and blue, evening colors, and boats strained at their pilings. Someone at the marina had the radio on, commercials and pop songs offered up to the air. In my memory my father was wearing a child in a sling and couldn’t bend over, so I picked up the stones we’d collected for both of us. I didn’t remember which child it was who slept against his heart. We skipped our stones into the water, breaking the bay’s twilight skin, trying to force the fish back down where they belonged.
Google Maps suggested that I had arrived. I’d bought Adrian a little plastic blue crab with articulated claws as a thank-you present for letting me use his car, and he’d liked it so much he hung it from his rearview mirror. Now I studied larry@marylandbirders.org through the blue crab’s impressive claw span.
Larry came down the porch steps alone, pausing in front of a bed of flowers hemmed in by large gray stones. His dark hair was cut short, no longer loose and freewheeling as it had been in the yearbook photo. Glasses stuck out of the breast pocket of a polo shirt. Around his wrist was a bright-yellow Livestrong band, which I hadn’t seen on anyone since circa 2009.
I swung open the car door, the heat blew in, and then I was standing face-to-face with the man to whom my father had left his most important possession. He had a beautifully articulated jaw, the features of a minor movie star, but his head was angled down, suggesting shyness or perhaps an old-fashioned courtesy. With most men, I could tell from their eyes whether I was a woman to them or a daughter. But Larry’s face was unreadable to me. I was startled into silence. Larry held out his hand. “Larry Taylor. You’re…the writer?”
“Uh, yeah. Hi, I’m Alice.” I liked that he’d said writer and not journalist.
Larry tucked his hands under his armpits, looked down at his clean white sneakers. “Alice, how does this work?”
I was careful to talk only about birding and climate change, how with my article I hoped to raise awareness. Raising awareness was a tired term—it seemed to be a favorite in D.C.—but it was well-meaning and undefinable. It seemed to put Larry a little at ease.
Squinting at the sky, he said, “Looks like it might storm. But we’ll see some birds before the rain. Hop in.” He motioned to his truck.
There was a bottle of water in my bag, and to give myself something to do, I took it out and chugged it down. As Larry navigated the back roads, water sloshed in my stomach and hot gravel struck the undercarriage in sharp bursts. I drew a few unsteady breaths. “Have you lived here long?” I asked him.
“About seven years on this street.”
“It’s not so far from Washington, but it couldn’t be more different around here,” I said, but that remark did not lead to further conversation—Larry merely inclined his head in what might have been agreement or opposition. In D.C., reporters were used to talking to people who’d spent their lives talking to reporters. Larry was not one of these people.
The sky had darkened, clarified. We turned on to another road and I smelled the bay, sweeping over the scrubby trees.
“Did you grow up around here?” I tried again.
“Not far. Different county. Did you bring waders, Alice?”
“No. But I brought my inappropriate city footwear and soft hands.”
He smiled charitably as we parked in front of a many-winged house made of glass. A rich person’s house, elegant and modern.
“So this is your summer home?” I was trying to tease him lightly, establish a rapport.
“Not on my salary. It belongs to the head of the Chesapeake Bay Task Force. He lets me come check the osprey platforms in the back. And the osprey cam.”
Osprey cam, I scrawled in my notebook, wondering if Larry knew that sounded like a seabird sex tape.
He pulled rubber waders over his sneakers, and we went around the side of the house to the back lawn. Through a glass wall I caught sight of a gleaming grand piano and a white leather sofa. The lawn connected with the river over a field that turned to marsh grass near the water’s edge. On the other side of the narrow river inlet was a small island. There were seven osprey nests spread out over this island, built on wooden platforms that sat atop tall, skinny poles. “We build those nesting platforms so the osprey chicks are protected from rats,” he explained.
“Because a rat can’t shinny up those poles?”
“Correct.”
“I bet a D.C. rat could.”
“We’ve seen raccoons try. But the osprey are fairly protected way up there at the top.”
“Osprey skyscrapers,” I remarked, and he chuckled under his breath. So far Larry was quiet and considered, with none of my father’s charisma. I didn’t understand how they would have been friends, let alone how he would have left this man his baseball.
The water was muddy and cool in the shade of the high marsh grass. Larry put on a dorky khaki hat secured with a strap under his chin; I saw why when the wind picked up and blew my own cap into the water. He waded gallantly into the shallows to retrieve it just as an osprey lifted off a nearby platform.
“There’s one!” I cried. The bird rose smoothly, sifting the air with great wings the color of leather on a horse’s saddle.
“That’s Luna,” he said.
Luna was an enormous bird. Her wings were crooked like bent knees as she soared against the sky. She had a hooked beak and a fluffy white underbelly. From high in the air she issued two screeches.
“She’s warning us to stay away from her chicks.” He pointed downriver. “She was born right over there twenty-four years ago and comes back every year to mate.”
“She’s my age,” I said. I thought immediately how Lucas would love this.
“These birds normally make it to fourteen, maybe fifteen if they’re lucky.”
“Is she special?” I remembered Lucas saying, You’re not like other people. I heard my father say, You bring out the best in me, Ellie.
Larry explained that the Chesapeake Bay Task Force broadcast a live feed of Luna’s nest from a hidden camera. You could watch Luna groom her mate, feed her chicks, and repair her nest, all in real time. You could see live fish wriggle as they were pecked open, the sharp flashes of bones picked clean, and listen to the high cheeps of her chicks. You could tune in to the osprey nest from your mother’s basement or your cubicle. From Washington, D.C. From Sri Lanka. Larry, the volunteer osprey-cam manager, turned it on when Luna arrived with her mate in spring and kept the camera running through when her chicks fledged—left the nest for good—in August. Only when the birds began their long fall migration to South America did the feed go dark.
Luna had no knowledge of any of this. She was an osprey stuck in The Truman Show.
Larry snapped his binoculars to his eyes. “She’s heading out to do some fishing. See how she’s scanning the river? Her chicks are four weeks old, and when they’re that young, most female osprey stay in the nest while the males get food.”
We watched Luna make wide arcs over the river, looking for the shadows of schooling fish beneath the water.
“But Luna’s unusual in that she does more of the hunting than her mate. He does the nest maintenance, and she brings fish for the family.”
“A feminist osprey.”
Larry glanced at me. “I wouldn’t go that far. Nature is dividing its behaviors according to ability. Here she comes.” He pressed his binoculars back to his eyes, and I did the same with his extra pair.
Luna was coming up from the river, holding a silvery fish in her gnarled talons. The fish’s tail was deeply forked, and it shivered and thrashed, its black eyes open, as it took its final forced swim through the gray air. Luna landed on the edge of the platform, folded her wings, and dropped the fish into the nest.
My notebook was filling up with lots of colorful osprey factoids, but as Jane said, if I wanted readers to learn about the environment, I had to bury facts in a riveting story about an unforgettable person: “the human face of climate change.” How was I going to write a profile of this man? He was not forthcoming. Or he was shy. I knew it was wrong to conflate the two. Someone had written a whole book about introverts, about how they seemed to vibrate at a lower frequency than extroverts. There was the example of introverts recharging alone, but sometimes it seemed to me to be disguised pride or wanting to hold the best of themselves in reserve until they felt safe—when I thought about it, like Lucas or me. I didn’t know which it was with Larry. Had high school Larry been the cautious, considered introvert to my father’s defiant, self-confident extrovert? I had been that cautious, considered introvert to my father too.
Larry suggested we cross the channel to the island to get a closer look at Luna’s nest. He dragged a small rowboat into the water and paddled us the short distance across. On the opposite bank, he swung out of the boat with ease and moved briskly over the marsh. When he saw that I lagged, stepping unevenly in my city boots, he paused until I caught up, looking out at the chop on the river, one hand on his hip. I knew I was lying to this kind man. He was thoughtful and measured, so why had his email about my father been clipped and dismissive? What had made him refuse to see me? What was he thinking? Automatically I thought of one of my father’s favorite passages from Eliot’s The Waste Land: What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.
Larry unfolded a rusty ladder and pressed it against the platform where Luna’s nest perched high above. He climbed up quickly, and at the top he wiped the lens and checked the camera, which was protected from the elements by a plastic sheath. Two kayakers moved steadily along the far side of the river. Clouds puckered and light rain pecked holes into the sand. Overhead, Luna and her mate were circling the nest, screeching warning calls.
“The chicks aren’t cheeping anymore,” Larry called down. “They’re listening to their parents. There’s the remains of a meal here. Looks recent. A menhaden.”
“Men hating?”
“Menhaden,” he said from above. “It’s a type of forage fish. Packed with omega-3s. Osprey love it.”
He pulled something out of the nest and tossed it to the ground a few feet from where I stood. It landed in a patch of sand, a jumble of blood-slick bones. Its meat and eyes had been plucked out and only the gristle and fin remained.
The sky was soon white. The river paled and the kayakers were swallowed in mist. Everything lost its contrast, one thing disappearing into another.
“How long have you been involved with the Maryland Birders’ Association?” I called, hoping this might reveal an interesting story or anecdote. I noted with some amusement that the organization’s acronym was MBA. I shifted my arm, pimply from the cold rain. Nature was indifferent; people weren’t.
“It’s been almost twenty-five years now,” he yelled down. “I’ve been president for seven.”
“And you’re a volunteer? So I imagine you have a day job?”
“I work in banking,” Larry said when he reached the ground, which of course I already knew but had to pretend was new information: It was Ellie who knew, not Alice.
“Which bank?”
“I consult for a few.”
If Jane was beside me on this muddy bank, she’d know exactly how to get Larry to open up. She was an expert interviewer, somehow putting people at ease by asking curious, nonjudgmental questions that got them to reveal things that surprised everyone, even themselves.
I switched tacks, pressing Larry for a reason the osprey were disappearing, a concrete causal link. “What’s going on with them?” I asked.
But he said there wasn’t only one thing that was causing the osprey population to decline. The Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries were a complex system, he told me. Pollution from construction and agriculture had overfertilized the bay and the rivers that fed it, causing blooms of algae and fish kills. Larry said that it was taking Luna longer to find fish. “She uses up energy when she circles the river. Sometimes she has to fly many, many miles to feed her chicks.”
According to Larry, the island should have been festooned with young osprey testing their wings by this point in the summer. But many of the nest platforms were empty of their sentinels, their fishers and queens. I scanned the vacant sky and then the horizon, the vague shapes of buildings and houses across the water. Overfishing and rising water temperatures were tightening a slow noose around the osprey population, he said. Some years were better than others for pollution and fish availability, but the overall trend in the Chesapeake Bay was toward what Larry called a “climate-change-related catastrophe.” That was good, and quotable. I made a note on rain-splattered paper. Bad for the earth, good for the story.
When the mist cleared, Larry went to check on a nesting pair on the other side of the island, a male bird he seemed fond of called “Wegman.” I didn’t know why Luna got a pretty name and Wegman got a name reminiscent of a grocery chain, but I didn’t say anything. I sank down in the sharp grass. To watch Luna fish was a beautiful thing. She’d glide down as though on a slide in the air, flap her great wings just above the surface of the water, swivel her talons in front of her body, startle the fish between them. As she lifted out of the water, the caught fish was iridescent, gleaming. She used her talons—thick and curved like commas—to position the fish until its head faced forward rather than sideways, an aerodynamic arrangement to conserve her energy as she soared into the sky.
As I observed her, everything felt far away—Lucas, his wife, my roommates, Colette, my sisters, Van. My father. I’d spent weeks wishing my grief could be lifted off me. Now I thought that maybe my grief was showing me the ordinary pleasure of nature, the beauty of watching an osprey dive into the water and surface with a fish. My relationships with other people felt fraught and strained; observing Luna was pure. I watched her for a long time, until there was a sort of melting in my stomach, and I saw that though my father was gone, this bird was alive, this bird beat its wings on through time.
Through my borrowed binoculars, I saw her lift her wings and fly once around her nest in a low circle. She veered east, rising higher. My breath caught at the sight of her. She floated through the air like a toy plane, all sharp line and tilt. And then there was a convergence of elements so sudden and seamless, it felt as though it had been choreographed. I heard the drone of a lawnmower from across the water, and I scanned the far side of the river but saw nothing except a thick stand of trees and a drafty-looking gray house. When I looked back, Luna had curved again in the air, as though returning to her nest. There was a shift in the quality of light, a gray cloud batted up against the horizon; through it, the sun shone fiercely in streaks of orange and gold. A goose honked from somewhere close by, a single, plangent note that hung low over the river. As if in response to all these elements, Luna wavered, pausing flightless in the air. For a single vertiginous moment, she was performing a magic trick for me, showing off her ability to hover in one spot without flapping her wings. I laughed, delighted. I felt she was communing with me, showing off, but my laughter morphed into a gasp as I saw that Luna was falling.
Osprey don’t just fall from the sky, but that’s what Luna did—folded her wings and plummeted, letting the wind take her, beak over tail, into the black river. Where she fell, the water pocked and leveled, and then she was gone. I waited breathlessly for her to resurface. One second stretched to two. When I finally did run back across the island in my black boots, ignoring the scratch of beach grass against my bare legs, I didn’t know how much time had passed.
“Larry,” I screamed.
“Alice?” he called. “What’s wrong?”
I winced to hear him use the name I’d invented. As I ran toward him, I told him in a mess of words what had happened to Luna.
“We have to get her.” He lunged toward the rowboat. “Where’d she go?”
He slapped an oar into the water, drawing a brown stream along the paddle and then releasing it. I sat on a stack of musty life preservers and held on as the boat lurched into the inlet. It was a short ride across to a landing where part of the bank had eroded and a young tree, felled in a storm, stuck out perpendicularly from a sandy promontory. “Here,” I said.
“Don’t let the boat drift.” Larry leapt over the side in a single motion.
Something inside me compacted neatly, like a heel pressing a lit cigarette. This feeling resolved into the image of my father on the floor, hair at his temples mussed at odd angles, like when he ran his fingers through it after exertion. I hadn’t seen his body, so the little grotesqueries were my own: the blue-gray tint of his skin, the lips chapped, and inside them a blood-red tongue. By the time I’d gotten to the house, paramedics had already taken him away. Colette and I had stood in the bedroom near the spot where he’d fallen. I asked about going to the morgue to see his body. The sun shifted and lit up the carpet; Colette moved into the shade. She said no, I probably didn’t want to see him. “He’ll be cold,” she said. “But I’ll go with you if you need to go.”
I didn’t go. This was before the funeral, before I learned about the will, when my grief was pure and simple. Now I longed to return to that time, when my father’s love for me was sure.
There were three quick knocks on the side of the boat, as though a giant fish were thrashing its tail against the side. “Larry?” I cried into the muddy water.
He came up spluttering, holding in one hand what looked like a soggy brown ball. When he dropped it over the side of the boat, it released a fishy whiff of air.
“Are you okay?”
Larry heaved himself into the boat, and my words were lost in the rush of water that poured from his shoulders. He rubbed his fingers in his ears.
“Oh, Luna,” he said, gazing down at her. I wondered if he was crying. But within a few moments he had returned to brusque efficiency, wrapping Luna in a towel and treating her body like a body. It was only then that I understood: He wasn’t going to save her; he was going to recover her. Even now he was telling me about the biologists at the University of Maryland who could look in her stomach to see what she’d eaten and whether that had been fatal. They would autopsy her to assess her fitness. She could provide clues about the ecology and health of the bay. “In death, she can be useful,” he said.
I leaned down to feel the stiff ridge of her wing, folded and unmoving. Larry’s calm detachment cracked open my grief. At my feet was a dead animal, her life snuffed suddenly out. And for what? Why had my father died? The boat rocked, a spray of river water coated my neck, tears slid from my eyes. I pressed my cheek into her feathers, as though it were my father’s body I was embracing, my tears mixing with the oily sheen on her feathers.
When I sat up, Larry was staring at me. “I have something to tell you,” I said.
At his house, Larry pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. I’d told him everything, and we’d driven back in complete silence, anger radiating off him like steam. Through the cracked windows came the smell of exhaust mixed with the pale, fresh rain. Two teenagers were walking down Larry’s street, wet hair stringy against their faces. Luna, behind us, was a lumpy shape underneath the towel. If her wings were spread, she would be too wide for the back seat. Curled as she was, we’d made her small. Long minutes passed, while Larry’s silent discomfort spread across the space.
“Why were you dishonest?” he said finally. The wind picked up and one of the teenagers turned her back; the wind billowed her wet dress and then blew it back against her skin.
“I wasn’t totally. It’s true that I’m a reporter. I am working on a story about osprey.”
Larry flinched.
“But, yeah, I’m working on it because of you. I didn’t tell you who I really was. That was wrong. I’m sorry.” I fished the baseball out of my purse. “This is what my dad left you in his will.”
Larry reached for the ball. Our fingers brushed, and when he took the ball away from me, he was silent for a long time, looking down at it.
“I’m sorry—” I began again. Larry shook his head, but I went on anyway: “When you didn’t want to see me, I felt crazy. This baseball was like a talisman to my dad. He never wrote a poem without it. I thought he would leave it to me. I need to know why he left it to you instead.”
Larry straightened, deposited the ball into the cup holder next to him. He swung himself out of the car and came around the side to open my door. Wordlessly, he stepped back and waited until I got out. “My husband is waiting for me.” His movie-star jaw was clenched.
I stood in the driveway, disoriented, unsure of the direction of the sting, as though I were swimming through a sea of jellyfish.
The garage door rumbled to life. I watched as Larry got back in the car and drove inside, and then from an inner door another man emerged, also wearing a polo shirt, and walked toward him, angling sideways to fit between a lawnmower and a snowblower. I got only a glimpse before the garage door closed.
What was going on? Had my father been gay? It seemed impossible. The wives. The affair with Linda. It was becoming clear that I knew nothing—maybe my father had been married to three women and had a relationship with a man he’d known in high school. Rain pinged off the pavement, leaving a film of grit on my bare legs. What had I done? I had carried out my father’s wishes. I gave the baseball away. Back in Adrian’s car, I drove too fast, swerving on the wet streets, steeling myself against the pain, the disappointment, the loss of Luna, Lucas and his brilliant wife, Larry with his binoculars on a string.