Before dawn, December 1999. Some first guests were moving about—he could hear doors groaning and water traveling through pipes. He stood at the entrance to his shed and listened to the clamor of the birds. Venus shone a distant white above the shoulder of the hills to the south. The black of the sky blanched into a pale green, and three tiny clouds appeared—cumulus humilis—carrying a wilting pink in their undersides, drifting west.
He picked his way down the coral stone path to the beach. Bats, on their final hunts, swung overhead like black motes. Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it. He let himself into the kitchen, crossed the inn, over the glass floor, and climbed to the porch. There he drew open each of the louvered doors, and swept sand from the boards, and watched it sift and disappear into the water below.
The sun was fully up when he returned to his shed and found a blue folder leaning against the door. Inside was what appeared to be a lab report, or a draft of one. On the cover was a photograph of a shrimp, one of its claws lumpy and oversized. The handwritten title read “Social Structures of Sponge-Dwelling Snapping Shrimps.” And beneath that, a name: Naaliyah Orellana. Across the title page someone—Naaliyah herself?—-had scribbled: What do you think?
He brought the report into his shed and set it on the table and read it cover to cover.
It was Naaliyah’s work, he could tell right away. There were exclamation points after nearly every sentence: The shrimps feed on their host sponges almost exclusively, but never so much that they endanger the sponge—think of that! Symbiosis is everywhere! Did evolution select the shrimps with the most gastronomic restraint?
Apparently she had harvested exposed sponges from a variety of reefs and peered into their tunnels in search of tiny shrimp, no bigger than a grain of rice. She’d maintained a controlled environment somewhere—for two years, evidently—and according to her research, certain species of these crustaceans lived in eusocial groupings, like termites or bees, in service of a single reproducing queen.
It was an ambitious and marvelous and amateur effort all at once. She blamed discharge from cruise ships for population declines but never demonstrated that such pollution was in the water. And the report had no structure: no abstract, no introduction, no citations.
By candlelight he flipped through it again. There were astonishing observations: After feeding the dominant brooding female, a juvenile male will sometimes invert and lie on his back, flexing his telson. Like a submissive dog! I have seen the female climb on top of him and repeatedly tap his thorax delicately with her major cheliped. Is she asserting her dominance? Maybe she is teasing him!
In the past years he had kept up with science less and less, almost solely now out of coincidence—fog shoaled over the sea in the morning, the condensation of water vapor on plumbing pipes, the high mark of a spring tide on the lobby’s eastern wall. If a yachtie left an issue of Nature in the lobby, or if he overheard charter captains discussing fish stocks, he could not seem to muster the energy to be interested beyond a vague and stifled curiosity. As if he had a faraway brother who cared for such things. But now here was Naaliyah, writing like an adult, like a scientist, a piece of her delivered to his doorstep. Did Felix know? Did Soma?
He sat over her pages well into the evening, making notes in the margins with a pencil.
February came and went and he did not see her. He gathered what he could from Soma as she cleaned a henhouse, hacking apart waste caked onto the plywood floor: Naaliyah had completed secondary school on Barbados; she had found work with the Caribbean Institute of Oceanography, scrubbing aquariums, maintaining research boats. She’d crept into classes, read instructors’ texts. One of them had eventually allowed her to use a launch, in the mornings, to record her own observations. Now, after four years of this, she had moved to their satellite school on St. Vincent, where she was completing a degree.
Soma had seen her only once, glimpsing her from the post office package dock, as Naaliyah hurried up Back Street with a garden hose coiled over one shoulder. She looked older. Soma said. Different. But when pressed she could not explain what, exactly, had changed.
Vestiges of the dream he’d had, twenty-three years earlier, tugged at Winkler’s consciousness: Naaliyah’s ankle, a loop of chain.
“All this time so close,” Soma said.
The acrid, nitrous smell of waste saturated the air. Winkler blinked a few times.
In the hot shade Soma looked smaller than ever. “An angry daughter,” she said, dragging the blade of her shovel across the plywood, “is like an angry hen. The more you chase, the harder it is to catch her. You wait, and be patient, and hope that eventually she comes to you.”
He rubbed his eyes. Shadows of that old dream—an empty skiff, a taut anchor line—dragged through the bottom of his stomach. He watched the dust hanging inside the henhouse, three divergent sunbeams slanting through it, tiny coronets rotating in the light.
Was she in danger? If she was, wouldn’t the dream come back? He dreamed and woke and remembered hardly anything: the green paint on his high school locker, a wire and chrome hubcap he’d caught rain in as a child.
That dry season was very dry. No rain for thirty days, then forty. The wind carried dust devils out to sea, where they whirled and elongated like miniature red tornadoes and finally spun themselves out. His flowers wilted in their beds. “Damn,” Nanton would mutter, peering into the cement reservoir set behind the inn, stretching on his tiptoes, his curse echoing back. But the tourists still came, raving about the lack of cloud cover, and took their showers, and swam in the molasses-vat-turned-pool, and ran their faucets, and Winkler cringed to hear it: more water disappearing through pipes, flushing into the sea.
The shrimps live in twisting networks of canals within their host sponges—hundreds of crooked, scrambled tunnels, yet they always seem to know where they’re going. Duffy et al. argue that it is the sponge itself who pumps water through those tunnels, providing the shrimps with their steady supply of oxygen. As payback they defend the sponge from other colonizers. And they give their lives! They are little soldiers! They are lions!
In March he saw her. She was rounding the cape in a small motorized launch with navy blue markings, her hand flat above her eyes to block the sun. He was on the beach raking spent sparklers and plastic cups from a volleyball party the night before and leaned on his rake and raised a hand. She did not see him or else pretended not to. Stacked in the bow in front of her were what looked like traps made of rusted chicken wire. She sat in the stern with one hand on the tiller. A yellow T-shirt ruffled against her chest. Although she was far away and his eyesight was poor, he could see that her mother was right—she was older: something in the way she held her frame, in the confidence with which she piloted the boat. He remembered the feeling of her small weight on his shoulders, shifting as she ducked to avoid an overhanging branch.
How many times had she passed without his noticing? He lowered his hand and watched the boat as it passed the lagoon along the last line of coral and finally disappeared, just her wake coming in toward shore, and the whine of the motor fading into silence.