The Shark Club - Softcover

One

Tucking away a long strand of hair that floated in front of my scuba mask, I kicked through the blue-green waters of Bimini on the last day of my research term, keeping watch for Sylvia, a five-foot, four-year-old lemon shark I’d named for oceanographer Sylvia Earle. The shards of sunlight that pierced the water earlier had started to wane, leaving the surface brushed with shadows, and I glanced nervously at Nicholas, my dive partner, then checked my watch. We should have seen her by now. Just beyond her juvenile years, Sylvia had begun venturing outside the protective nursery mangroves where she was born, a habit that worried me, but one I also admired.

Back on the small island off southwest Florida where I lived and worked as a marine scientist, they called me Maeve, the shark whisperer. It implied I could somehow get close to these apex predators, even tame them, which was, of course, a fatal kind of lunacy. The nickname had caught on even here at the Marine Field Lab in Bimini, where I’d spent the last six months tagging lemon sharks with passive integrated transponders, then tracking, collecting DNA on, photographing, and cataloguing them morning, noon, and night. I’d monitored close to a hundred of them, but Sylvia was the one I’d grown fond of.

She had a funny habit of scooping up small bits of fish left behind after she’d bitten and gulped them down, as if she couldn’t stand for anything to go to waste. Her frugality not only amused me, it endeared her to me. I liked the way she rested on the bottom after the other lemons swam off, claiming a little extra lounge time for herself. Lazy girl. I could usually identify her before I found the scar on her second dorsal, shaped like an upside-down checkmark. She had often swum closer to me than was comfortable, though I knew that theoretically lemons were generally nonaggressive, and it was probably my imagination and not my science that gave me the odd feeling she recognized me as well.

“You two are simpatico,” Nicholas had once remarked. He was only half joking.

It was June 12, 2006, my thirtieth birthday. I should have been back in my small room packing or cooking one of those god-awful cake mixes in the communal kitchen to pass around to the other scientists after dinner to at least acknowledge the occasion, but I hadn’t wanted to leave Bimini without a farewell dive. Tomorrow morning, Nicholas and I would be on a short, chartered flight to Miami. From there, he would head to Sarasota and his stingrays. Originally from Twickenham, England, he’d come to the United States as a student fifteen years ago and, after a stint in London, ended up in Sarasota at the prestigious Southwest Florida Aquarium. He’d recently become their youngest director of Ray Research at thirty-five. He’d been here at the Field Lab for a ten-month sabbatical—longer than any of us; I could only imagine how eager the aquarium would be to have him back. Me, I would go back to the Gulf Marine Conservancy on Palermo and to my grandmother Perri’s hotel, perched beside the Gulf of Mexico.

The Hotel of the Muses, where I’d grown up and where I still lived, was not your typical hotel on Palermo. While the rest of them were predictably nautical—seascapes over the beds, captain’s wheels in the restaurants, aquariums in the lobbies—my grandmother’s highbrow resort was overrun with books. Her hotel held readings and book talks in the lobby and had its own lending-library system with a trolley that went room to room along with the housekeeping cart. Every one of the eighty-two rooms was dedicated to an author whose work Perri admired—Charlotte Brontė, Jane Austen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavio Paz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Henry David Thoreau . . . The Tampa Bay Times had called it “the real buried treasure on the Gulf coast, a library hotel on Ecstasy.” By summer’s end I would leave all that “ecstasy” once again for whale shark research in Mozambique.

Whenever my research terms ended, everything I’d put aside and ignored—especially Daniel—inevitably returned, rushing in like tidewater to retake the shore. Already I could feel the past washing up: the last, stubborn image of Daniel the day we’d said goodbye, his back framed by the glare of Miami sun on the window, and then all the silence that followed. The memory returned more mercilessly this time. Thirty. What was it about that age? All the clocks ticked louder.

Swimming farther from the cobalt-blue bottom of our boat, Nicholas and I came upon a shower of tiny silver minnows glinting like nickels as they darted in unison. Earlier, a redmouth grouper had found Nicholas and me to be objects of fascination, drawn by the bubbles drifting from our tanks, coming so close I could see the inside of its mouth glowing orange. Among fish, as among humans, there seemed to be two basic schools: the venturesome and the cautious.

Nicholas pointed to a pair of southern stingrays sailing by like a scene from Swan Lake. The vibration of their wings rushed toward me, reverberating the way all sounds did beneath the sea, blurred and muffled, a strange, slow-motion percussion. Nicholas felt about rays, especially spotted eagle and giant mantas, the way I felt about sharks, and he snapped a picture just before they vanished.

Holding up his palm, he motioned for me to stop, and I thought for a moment he’d spotted the lemons, but he shook his head and shrugged, a signal for “the sharks aren’t coming, our air is running out.” After working together the last six months, we’d become adept at one another’s body cues. I cocked my head to the side and held up five fingers. Another few minutes?

He gave me a thumbs-up and pointed to a crop of sea fans on the ocean floor. Okay, but let’s hang here.

I nodded. I was going to miss him, and that was a surprise. It was always a surprise to miss someone other than Daniel.

As I drifted over the waving garden of fuchsia and pink fans, I watched a green moray eel partially lured out of its rocky home, while a diligent cleaner shrimp worked its magic on the eel’s head. The eel looked ancient—wrinkled, scarred, and oddly serene. It was possible the two of us were the same age. Its mouth gaped open, then closed, over and over. “Ommms” only the sea creatures could hear.

When I used to imagine my life at thirty, I envisioned myself doing just what I was doing now, studying sharks. But I’d pictured myself as a mother, too, teaching my child to swim in the Gulf. Buckled up to his chin inside a life vest, my little boy would frogkick beneath clear, spearmint water. Sometimes the child was a girl, locks of wet, dark hair stuck to her cheeks. After swimming I imagined we would walk back to a small house with an orange tree in front, the branches drooping with fat, ripe fruit. I would shake the branches, then poke my thumb into the top of an orange like my dad had done for me. Sometimes he would carve out the top of it with his pocketknife, then etch an M for Maeve on the side. I always thought I would do the same for my little girl. She would drink from the orange like a cup. Daniel would be waiting for us in the kitchen, shuffling a pan of porcini mushrooms on the stove.

So far that dreamed-of future hadn’t arrived. Maybe it still would—it’s not like my thirties put me out of the running to be a mother. But at some point, if it was still just me and the sharks (thank God for the sharks), perhaps I would put the whole family thing to rest. I could be Aunt Maeve to any children my twin brother, Robin, might one day have, and I would marry the sea. A lot of people, including Robin, would say I already had.

If Sylvia was anywhere around she already knew Nicholas and I were here. In limited light, her eyes became stronger, and her sense of smell was ten thousand times better than mine. Rows of sensory cells running along each side of her body would already have detected changes in water pressure and sent the message to her brain. As she drew closer, she would use receptors around her head and snout to pick up the electrical field emitted from my heartbeat and brain activity, a kind of GPS that allowed sharks to cross oceans by following the Earth’s magnetic field. Whereas Nicholas and I were reduced to hand signals and air tanks, Sylvia was magnificently equipped.

Suddenly the eel withdrew into its nook, jerking quickly like a snapped rubber band. I tensed, alert to the fish darting frantically upward. I turned a slow pirouette, noticing Nicholas doing the same, aware of how small we seemed in the vastness of the Atlantic. Taking a few measured breaths, I listened to the crackle in my regulator and stared into the distance, where the water settled into a trio of shades like a Rothko painting—indigo, violet, and near the surface, pale green.

The shark emerged through the swathes of color, its tail waving back and forth with the hypnotic swing of a pocket watch. I placed a vertical hand atop my head, our signal for shark, doing so almost simultaneously with Nicholas.

As the shark neared, I spotted the scar on its second dorsal fin, the scuffed-up snout. Sylvia.

She wasn’t alone. A second, then a third shark appeared behind her—Captain and Jacques, two other lemons in my research.

Nicholas and I watched them without moving. How many times had I been suspended beneath the water just like this as a shark approached? But it always felt like the first time. Sylvia swam toward me, part ballerina, part stealth missile. My adrenaline spiked, and I caught myself holding my breath. It had only been for a second, but even rookies knew that departing from the steady rhythm of inhaling and exhaling was a bad idea and could cause a dangerous expansion of air pressure in the lungs while ascending. Unraveling the knot of air in my throat, I slowly exhaled and began to photograph her long, elegant body, her skin the color of sandpaper. As she passed me, though, the hand holding my camera fell to my side, and I did something I’d never done before. I swam alongside her.

Trailing a respectful distance beside her pectoral fins, I could feel the sheer force of her in the water. The sound her movement made was like thunder coming from far away, yet I felt it shuddering against me. I swam instinctively, not thinking, floating in a half-dreamed place, and what came to me was the quote stenciled on the wall in room 202 of my grandmother’s hotel—the Keats Room: “Love is my religion. I could die for that.” The sea, its creatures, its sharks—they were my religion. I could die for that.

Sylvia turned and seemed to regard me with interest, and observing her sudden awareness of me was like waking. Though I felt a kinship with her, I couldn’t forget for a second she could be provoked into aggression. I drew up, letting her swim away, flattening a hand over my breastbone as she was swallowed into the blue-gray gloom.

Electrified, I kicked my fins.

When I turned toward Nicholas, he was clasping the handles of his camera, and his face mirrored my own. The way his lips stretched into a smile around his regulator reflected my own exuberance.

Two

When people ask me why I love sharks I tell them it’s because I was bitten by one when I was twelve. Statistically speaking, the coconut palms around the hotel had posed more of a danger to me than the sharks cruising the Gulf. Coconuts dropped like torpedoes around there, so it was stranger than strange that I was not concussed by a coconut, but instead, bitten by a shark—a species over four hundred million years old, older than humans, dinosaurs, and trees. It was a blacktip, Carcharhinus limbatus, the shark known for breaching out of the water and spinning in midair while feeding on fish near the surface. The bite resulted in a thirteen-inch scar, thirty-three stitches, and an obsession with sharks.

Robin, responding in true twin fashion, became the counterbalance to my morbid fascination, developing a fear of sharks bordering on revilement. I didn’t begrudge Perri sending me back to Dr. Marion, a child psychiatrist over in Naples, I still don’t, but I did wonder how Robin’s hating sharks was viewed as perfectly normal and my loving them was considered detrimental.

If you were hit by a car, would you become a mechanic? Robin used to ask. If you were struck on the head with a rock, would you become a geologist? What about falling off a roof? Would that turn you into a roofer? If you were trampled by a horse, would you become a jockey? His list of catastrophes and careers became an ongoing joke, the kind that weren’t really jokes at all. He’d never gotten over almost losing me, and after what had happened to our parents, I couldn’t blame him.

I used to fantasize that if Mom and Dad had been alive, they would’ve downplayed Perri’s and Robin’s worries over my becoming a sharkophile.

My English professor father, Perri’s son through and through, had loved books more than Perri did, if such a thing was possible, and two small volumes of his poetry had been published. He had been the opposite of our sky-minded, engineer mother, whose head had been firmly planted in the clouds, while his had been perpetually bent over books by Keats, Shelley, and Byron.

Mom had had her private pilot’s license for two years when the accident happened. Surprising Dad with a weekend in Key West for his birthday, she’d chartered a 1980 Piper, filing a flight plan and arranging for Perri to pick up six-year-old Robin and me at our house in Jupiter, Florida. Their plane had crashed into the Everglades before we’d even arrived at the hotel, before we’d raced through the lobby, up the stairs, arguing over who got the bed by the window, before we’d yanked on our bathing suits and tore down to the beach, giddy over the hundreds of Florida fighting conchs that had washed ashore overnight, squealing whenever some gooey part of the snail oozed onto our palms.

It had taken an airboat to reach their bodies. The National Transportation Safety Board reported Mom had encountered a thunderstorm wind shear. For a while, the sight of a small plane droning overhead, even the mention of an airboat would summon the scene of my parents strapped in their seats, dead, stuck in the muck with the alligators. Gradually, the image stopped haunting me. I can picture them now as they’d been before the accident: Dad, reading poems to us at the kitchen table that were fathoms over our heads. And Mom, routinely dragging us outside on clear nights in a semifailed effort to teach us the constellations, lying beside us on the lanai by the pool calling out Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion’s Belt.

After their funerals, Perri had sold our Jupiter house with the lanai where we’d named Mom’s stars and the kitchen table where we’d listened to Dad’s poetry, and she’d brought us to Palermo to live with her in the Hotel of the Muses. Perri commandeered four rooms on the second floor, knocked out the walls, and reconstructed it into an apartment for the three of us. “It will be an adventure. Like the Swiss Family Robinson,” she’d said, rousing herself for the sake of two sad little kid...