The 100 Year Miracle (6 page)

“It would help you to know a little more about my people’s history and their relationship to the breeding.”

“It wouldn’t,” she said, stopping him before he could begin the next in what was sure to be a long line of sentences.

“It wouldn’t, what?”

“It wouldn’t be helpful.”

“How could it not be helpful?” he asked, his prepared speech derailed.

“It’s irrelevant.” She tugged on the collar of her jacket.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“When the arthropod’s primitive neural structure receives circadian inputs, oxygen combines with coelenterazine, a luciferin. Unlike other species, I believe the
Artemia lucis
synthesizes coelenterazine—”

John cut her off. “What is your point?”

“I’m explaining the mode of bioluminescence and why anthropology is irrelevant.”

“I can provide context,” John said.

Rachel ignored this. “You are free to study the
Artemia lucis
in whatever way you choose. Hooper has made that clear by bringing you on, but please do not interfere with my work.”

The day was warming, but she tugged at her collar for the third time, pulling it up near her ears.

John put his hands in his pockets. “You are a difficult woman to connect with, Dr. Bell.”

Rachel knew this was probably true, but it was also true that she did not wish to connect with him. It didn’t seem he had taken this into account.

“Is there anything else?” she asked.

“I don’t suppose I can help you unload something.”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re going to leave that out here?” he asked, nodding at the cooler.

“No, I just don’t need help,” she said.

“Right. I remember. You’re the one who never needs help.” His tone was sharp, which was fine with Rachel if it meant things were coming to a close. “But the offering and receiving of assistance is the basis of modern society.”

He caught her off guard.

“It’s what normal people do.” He was still finishing the last sentence when he reached into the bed of the truck, grabbed the cooler’s handle, and gave a tug. It barely moved.

Rachel seized his jacket and yanked his arm back. “Don’t touch that.”

John looked at his arm and then at her. “What’s in there?”

“Nothing. It’s empty.”

“It feels like there’s a body in there.”

“I said it’s empty.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t expect anything from you at all,” she said.

John took a step back. “Do you have some kind of disorder?”

Rachel felt herself redden. She knew who she was and how she came off, but his words were intended to be hurtful, and they were. “No, I just don’t feel well.”

“You should see a doctor,” John said before turning and walking away.

*   *   *

It was nine a.m. before Rachel, finally alone inside her cabin, could take a double dose of whites, emotionally relieved, as much as physically, to have them.

She’d brought in the cooler, which took up much of whatever floor space had been left. The whole building was no more than twenty feet by thirty feet and consisted of one main room and a small bathroom, which hadn’t been updated since the 1950s and gave nothing but lukewarm water. This hurt her more than the lack of sleep, and to add insult, the cabin’s heat barely functioned.

Cold shower. Cold room. Few things made her scars hurt more than cold. She hoped she’d brought enough pills.

The main room, which had floor-to-ceiling wood paneling and a linoleum floor, held two beds, but only one of them had sheets and blankets. The other mattress was bare and looked like something that might harbor lice. The windows had ill-fitting, pull-down shades, and at the end of the room were two collapsible tables. They were identical to the ones in the makeshift lab in the empty mess hall, which still bore construction paper decorations from the summer before along with a 1943 advertisement for campers. “A training in self-reliance is a Godsend in wartime.”

With the door locked—and after another fifteen jumping jacks to clear the slush from her brain—she opened the cooler and began removing container after container of bay water peppered with the tiny
Artemia lucis
.

8.

John was pressed up against Rachel’s cabin. Hers was the farthest from the camp’s entrance, which meant this eastern side had no neighbor. The foliage was dense here even in the winter, and with his dark green coat and brown pants, it was as if the trees had absorbed him and made him one of them. He had been out there for almost an hour, having walked away from Dr. Bell and her truck toward his cabin and then, once he was out of her view, right past it and into the woods.

He didn’t think it was possible to explain to someone else—someone who was not a member of his tribe—what the breeding meant. It had been the central event in tribal life, something anticipated, as well as feared. It transformed those who experienced it, and then inevitably, took some of their lives as payment. It was something every generation was responsible for, even those who would not themselves experience it. Those members were duty bound to prepare the next generation, who would pass on their knowledge, and so it had gone until there were so few Olloo’et left—maybe no more than fifty now—that they had become something closer to a myth than a people.

The breeding had, it was said, come before them, and it would continue on after. But his elders had not been ecologists. They had not been given front-row seats to every major environmental disaster in the last decade. They had not seen whole swaths of ocean, whole sections of waterfront, whole colonies of animals wiped off the face of the earth in less time than it took to smoke a cigarette. He did not have the faith of his ancestors. He knew the breeding would continue only if it were allowed to continue, and it made him watchful, and being watchful made him distrustful, and being around Dr. Bell made him paranoid.

John knew about the hallucinogenic effects. All members of the tribe knew, but the breeding had been too rare for the news to catch the public’s attention. If it became widely known, the effect would be devastating. And to become widely known, it only needed to be known by one wrong person.

Dr. Bell had recognized his tribe. She had known his tattoo, and she was, of all possible things, a chemist. So he stood there, and he watched.

The pull-down shades that were in each of the cabins, including hers, were at least thirty years old. They were ill-fitting, cracked, and torn and, in this state, provided him with perhaps three-quarters of an inch of clear glass to see through. The view was a small slice of the middle of the room, which was taken up by her camp bed. He could not see the door to his left or the back of the room to his right. It was not the best of eye lines, but it was the best that he could do.

He had seen her come in struggling to carry the cooler. It was clearly as heavy as he had thought, and his mind worried it like fingernails over a rough scab. Inside the cabin, she moved stiffly, something she had not done at the site, and he watched her do a few old-lady jumping jacks, which was odd but not interesting.

It was cold, and he was tired. The ground was wet. The trees were wet. The ferns that rubbed against his pant legs were wet. He wanted to go to bed, and then he saw it.

She crouched down by the cooler, and when she stood up, she was carrying specimen containers from the site, two large ones. She walked toward the back of the room, disappearing from view. Light from a source he couldn’t see—something not overhead—switched on. Then the sounds came, the low hum of mechanical equipment. Within a minute, she had returned. Again she crouched down and again came up with more containers, more and more, over and over. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of
Artemia lucis
passed through her hands.

John’s body went rigid. He knew it. He damn well knew it.

He pressed his face harder to the window desperate to see where she was taking the containers, what she was doing with them, but no matter how hard he tried, his three-quarters of an inch of glass did not get larger. He took a step back, his hands in fists. He would have to get inside.

*   *   *

Rachel tested the UVA and UVB lights, the fans, and the pumps. She made sure the chiller, which kept the tank water swirling around the flasks at forty-five degrees, was working, along with the probe thermometers. Each of those had an alarm that would beep if anything got too hot or too cold. She made small but different adjustments to each tank and placed the samples in. It was important that there not be too many creatures in each flask, or they would use up all their resources and die or cannibalize one another.

Once she was satisfied with the setup, Rachel made her notes, copious and exacting notes, which she kept in her bag at all times and the bag with her. It would be better if she could keep a closer eye on the tanks at night, if she could make measurements and adjustments. But the cabin was too far from the bay, and her absence would be impossible to explain.

She could not have carted all of this additional equipment unnoticed onto the ferry, and so she’d rented a box at the Olloo’et Mail-and-More that promised to accept and hold packages for as long as she continued to pay them. There was no limit on the size of the packages, and when she’d snuck off to retrieve everything shortly after arriving, the Mail-and-More manager was both relieved to be rid of her things and annoyed with her existence. She suspected that future box rental agreements would include more restrictive language.

Rachel stepped back and studied her makeshift lab. The room was not quiet. The fans, which she hoped would simulate breezes across the bay, hummed along with the pumps and chiller. The aerating lines gurgled. The two different light systems, one for each spectrum, shined. She wondered if the light was too bright and would kill the specimens. She wondered if the stress of relocating them to her lab would kill them. She wondered if the arthropods lived a symbiotic relationship with some other living thing in the bay that she had yet to guess at, and the lack of it would kill them. She wondered about all the things she hadn’t thought to wonder about yet.

Standing there, scrutinizing her work, Rachel became aware of her smell. It wasn’t a good one. She was still wearing the clothes she’d worked in all night. The layers of fleece and waterproof nylon, which kept her from freezing in the bay chill, held sweat to her skin, where it dried. What didn’t smell of sweat smelled of the bay, like salt and fish. Sand coated her jeans. It was only this degree of filth, an uncomfortable degree, that kept her from collapsing onto the one made bed in her cabin. The insides of her eyelids itched with tiredness, but still she dragged herself into the shower. The water was cold, far too cold, and she had to move carefully to keep it from touching her back. She did the minimum amount of soaping before pulling on two layers of sweats and surrendering to her four allotted hours of sleep, trusting the alarm on her phone to wake her in time to go back to the beach.

9.

Harry still hadn’t made an appearance when Tilda went downstairs to start the morning coffee. She’d showered and dressed and blow-dried and perfumed after coming home from the pool, but she could still smell chlorine if she put the back of her hand to her face. It was something she both loved and hated about swimming.

While the coffee perked, Tilda walked to the sliding glass door at the back of the house and looked out at the bay. The water was gray and choppy with no trace of the Miracle. It was like a tart who had returned home and washed herself clean of lipstick and eye shadow.

Tilda could see the waves lapping at the beach and the rocks, but when she slid the glass door open, the sounds hit her like a whoosh, washing over her and bringing with them the salty brine that sticks to your skin and gets in your nose. She breathed it in, and something in her loosened.

She stepped onto the deck. It was multitiered and as large as the great room inside the house. The wood was smooth under her bare feet, weathered and probably in need of some kind of sealant. Tilda padded across it, watching the scientists down by the water’s edge. They seemed less hurried during the daytime, less frantic. They clustered under the canopy, which in the early-morning gloom was lit. She could hear the growl of the generator along with the crash and hiss of breaking waves, one not so different from the other.

She took the stairs gingerly, her feet already picking up blown sand. At the bottom, careful of the rocks and broken bits of shell, she curled her toes into the beach and let them sink down into the wetter, colder layers below.

With one hand on the balustrade, Tilda swung around to walk south and didn’t make it a single step. Under the deck, up close to the house where the open area was more than a dozen feet high, stood a sailboat. It was a small sailboat. It couldn’t have held more than two people. The wooden hull was painted white on the bottom and red at the top. Four jacks, two on either side, held it upright so that the keel dug an inch or so into the sand. From the hull jutted an outrigger on two arms, and it had a mast that nearly touched the uppermost decking above.

She stared at the hulk of a thing as though it were some sort of leviathan that had come up from the waves and beached itself here under the house.

“Tilda!”

She heard Harry shouting and then the
clomp, clomp
of his cane on the deck above her.

“In a minute!” she yelled back.

She took a few steps forward. Inside the hull was the sail. It had been lowered and stuffed into a bag with a long length of rope wound around it. She wanted to unwrap it, see what kind of shape the material was in. She touched the wooden edge of the cockpit with the tips of her fingers.

“Tilda!” Harry shouted again.

She closed her eyes before she could bark back something short-tempered and regrettable. “I’m coming!” she said instead, giving the thing one last look. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.”

Tilda had climbed three-quarters of the deck stairs, her head not yet visible at the top, and already Harry was complaining. “You left the sliding glass door open.”