The Shell Collector (18 page)

Maybe it’s meeting Holly that’s made the article difficult to ponder. It’s easier to demonize a man than it is a father, especially one who begs for hugs and leaves lights burning even when she isn’t home to use them. Getting to know Ness as a person has been a mistake, rather than a boon for my piece. The issues I want to write about are larger than one man, larger than any of us; they concern the entire globe; they concern our environment, our politics, our collective choices. Tearing him down felt good before. Now it feels hollow. I imagine this is how Ahab might’ve felt if the book in my lap had turned out differently.

I drift off in my seat thinking of white whales, of ghosts who haunt us, of the destructive forces in our lives. I think how
we
are often that force, chasing what we should leave alone, what we should simply let go. But letting go is harder than destroying ourselves and those around us in a mad chase to feel … right with the world. Losing our child was this thing for Michael and me. We tried too hard to replace her. And when we couldn’t, there was nothing left to salvage. It was that white whale or nothing. There was no in-between where we might survive. Where we might not drown.

Turbulence wakes me. I find a blanket tucked around my shoulders, my book set aside. Ness glances up from his laptop. The cabin lights are dim, his face cast in a pale glow from the screen.

“Another couple of hours,” he says softly.

“Where are we going?” I murmur.

“Middle of nowhere,” Ness says. “The last place anyone thinks to look.”

I try to fall back asleep, thinking on this and other puzzles. Half the time when I crack my eyes, Ness is staring at his screen. The other half of the time, he’s staring at me. The darkness, the shuddering of the plane, the cabin to ourselves, my sleepy brain, a morning spent with his daughter, his pensive mood, all swim around me. An old memory returns—a collection of disjointed memories—all the impossibly long nights spent awake at summer camp, confiding to strangers in whispers for hour upon hour, never wanting to sleep, and falling for other girls my age with reckless speed, promising each other we’d be best friends forever.

“We had a daughter,” I say, out of nowhere. I leave my eyes closed. The darkness is a safe place.

Ness says nothing.

“She came premature, and they couldn’t save her.”

I dab at my eyes with the blanket, and Ness’s seat squeaks as he adjusts himself. I feel his hand on my foot. A friendly gesture. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s just that … I would love to have a daughter who hates me,” I say. And I find the courage to open my eyes. Tears stream down my neck. I wipe them away as quickly as they come. I’m trying to make him feel better, but I’m making us both feel worse.

“It’s just a phase kids go through,” Ness says. “Everyone assures me she’ll grow out of it.”

“You could wait for her to grow up, or you could meet her halfway,” I say.

“I try.” Ness closes his laptop, leaving us to the dim emergency lights. “I only get her every other weekend, and her mom often schedules camps and sports to fill those up. I’ve watched her grow up from the bleachers.”

“Does she take to strangers easily? Because she …”

I don’t know how to say what it felt like for her to bond with me so quickly, that it was part flattering and part sad.

“I saw the two of you napping in the guest house,” Ness says. “Does she do that sort of thing a lot? Maybe not that exactly, but she does like it when I’m seeing someone. And she’s always crushed when they don’t stick around.”

“They,” I say.

“People I’ve dated since my wife left me.”

“They don’t stick around, or you don’t have them back?”

Ness shrugs. “It’s complicated. What’s funny is that I think Holly just wants me to be happy. I think it’s selfless on her part, that she wants some fairy tale for me, not for her.”

“Why does she think you’re not happy?” I ask.

“You’re asking a lot of questions. Is this for your story?”

I consider this for a beat. He’s asking me if this is on the record or off the record. Do I want to know but not be able to report what I find? Or would I rather wait and find out by other means and be able to write what I discover? It’s the riddle of the non-disclosure agreement all over again.

“This is for me,” I finally say. Which feels dangerous. Like I just crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed—sliding from reporter to acquaintance. Maybe even friend. But I don’t see an oil magnate across from me right then; I don’t see the subject of any story. Just a man, a father, someone I’ve spent too much time around the past few days not to empathize with.

“I’m not an easy person to live with,” Ness tells me. “I try. Man, I try. I don’t want to be like my father, but we are who we are.” He shrugs. “I can’t sit still. I have so much I want to do, and I don’t feel like I have time for it all. I have a hard time delegating, an even harder time trusting people. Here’s the thing: Vicky cheated on me. Another parent she met at a PTA meeting. And when she left, I gave her everything she asked for, custody, the houses she wanted, the money she demanded, because I figured the affair was my fault for not being there. My fault for being a bad father.”

“Why do you think you’re a bad father?”

“Because it runs in the family.” Ness turns toward the window, where the moon bounces off the top of the clouds and lets in the faintest of ethereal glows. He’s little more than a silhouette, but I see him wipe his cheek. “Even my grandfather, who was a good man through and through, wasn’t a great father to my dad. I didn’t tell you the full truth about that the other day. It’s not that he was abusive, just absent. I think the same propensity to feel overwhelmed with guilt allowed him to let someone else raise his kid. Or maybe, like me, he was scared he’d screw it all up.”

“What is it you’re chasing?” I ask. “What’re you looking for?”

“Redemption,” Ness says. And the answer comes so fast, that I know he has asked himself this very question countless times. “I want to leave behind a better world than the one I was given. And like I told you the other day, I was given a world in a lot of pieces.”

“Your grandfather bought up shoreline and protected it to redeem himself. How will forging shells help anyone?”

Even in the dark, I can see Ness stiffen. I hate myself for saying it. I’m more curious about him than the stupid shells in that moment, but the conversation hemmed us in like a lee shore in a storm.

“Why does this no longer feel off the record?” Ness asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I lean forward and place a hand on his knee. “I really am. That wasn’t me being a reporter … just me being confused.”

“No, that’s okay.” Ness straightens himself in his seat, puts his laptop aside. I lean back in my own seat. “Of course they aren’t real,” he says. “The problem with those shells is that they’re too perfect. Maybe that’s why Arlov had to have them around. I don’t know.”

Before I can press him on this, Ness reminds me that we’re talking off the record. And then he flashes a mischievous smile brighter than the moon. “But if you want to get back
on
the record, I’ve got something you can print. A scoop just for you. Something I’ve never told another reporter.”

“What?” I ask.

“The story of my name.”

I try to hide my disappointment. “I know it,” I say. I can’t remember where I heard it, somewhere in all the hundreds of interviews and articles I’ve read about him. “Your middle name is Robert. Your father thought it would be cute, since you were born around the time he tried to make the company more green. What I’d much rather hear about—”

“No, the Wilderness thing? I don’t know who put that together, but it’s a coincidence. My grandfather on my mother’s side was named Robert. The real story is less interesting. Well, to most people, I imagine. But when my mother told me how I got my name, it led me on a trip where I discovered the single greatest thing she ever taught me about my father.”

I wait. And damn him, he has me curious.

“I was named after a monster,” Ness says.

“You were not,” I say. “You mean the loch?”

“Yes, precisely. Loch Ness. And my mom swears it’s the truth. The two of them spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Man, and they visited Scotland and the loch, and she said my father was taken with the lore of the place. But even more with the tourism. Have you ever been?”

“No.”

“I went. I wanted to find out what my father saw when he came up with this name. It seemed mysterious to me. It haunted me. All I had were a few hints from my mom, where they went, some things he said. So I went there by myself hoping to find out where I came from. Where I
really
came from, you know? Not my name, really, but to get to know my dad. And it hit me on my third day there. A woman in a cafe recognized me. You know what she did?”

“Ask for your autograph? Show you a shell from her collection?”

“She spit on me,” Ness says.

We fly along in silence.

“Why?” I finally ask.

“Oh, it wasn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s all the things you have planned for your story, I’m sure. My father rolling back the green initiatives when they ended up not being as profitable. All the oil exploration the company has done under my watch. Videos of flooded homes, of major cities underwater, the expense of the levees around New York, Miami, Boston. All the breakwalls going up around the world. Pick a reason.

“What was important for me was the timing of this incident. There I was, trying to find myself on the shore of my namesake, obsessing over this question of what my father saw in his unborn son. You see, I spent those days around the loch pretending to be my father. I tried to see the town through his eyes, tried to imagine I had a new wife whom I knew to be pregnant, and a future child that I knew was going to be a boy. I thought of what the place had been like back then, what my father might’ve seen, the world I was going to be born into.

“My father was taken with the lore of that place, but also the tourism. This was the hint I got from my mom. He told her that the people there hate what their community has become, but that they
need
it. They hate the signs everywhere, the glass boats on the water, the subs that take gawkers out on fruitless dives, the statues and the stuffed purple sea monster toys, but they can’t let go of it. They can’t stop. You see?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

“
We’re
the monsters,” Ness says. “The Wildes. My father was a monster. His father and his grandfather were monsters. And he knew I’d become one too—”

At this, whatever holds Ness together, whatever keeps his emotions at bay, cracks. And he bends forward and weeps in his hands. Five or six shuddering sobs before he gets himself together. I am too stunned by the breakdown to react, to lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, to offer him a shoulder to cry on. It is the most unexpected thing I’ve seen from a man full of surprises.

Just as suddenly, he sits up, presses at his eyes with his fists, and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t apologize or seek anything from me, just continues his line of thought as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t seen this small fissure in his otherwise perfect shell.

“Everyone needs what we provide.” He swallows and composes himself further. “This plane? All the jets out there? The people who fly on them? They need us. They need the oil. It doesn’t matter if we get it with greener methods these days, doesn’t matter that we haven’t had a major spill in forty years, that we’re investing in alternate forms of energy. My great-grandfather did none of those things, because nobody cared back then. By the time his son was born, everyone had their fuzzy picture of who we were, the ugly legend. And the more they needed us, the more they hated us. It kept them from having to blame themselves.

“My dad saw that at Loch Ness. He saw people blaming a monster for all the things wrong with the world at large. He saw how we do this all the time. You want to know what the worst of it is?”

“What’s that?” I ask, my voice a whisper.

“The people who live around that loch, their monster doesn’t even exist. They had to
create
it.”

I wake in the middle of the night to the soft bump of landing gear hitting some unknown tarmac. Ness has moved to another seat, one that faces forward, and is peering outside. My only sense of how long we’ve been in the air is the two meals we were served. It felt like an eight-hour flight, but it could’ve been four or it could’ve been twelve.

The air outside is humid. I imagine we’re in the Caribbean, where I know Ness owns several islands. It occurs to me that I don’t have my passport, which might get interesting. The mystery of our destination will soon be solved by the nationality of the jail I end up in. But we don’t head for a customs building or the small airport when we deplane. Our bags are moved directly from the jet to an idling helicopter, and our trip has now taken on the air of the absurd.

It only gets crazier.

The helicopter takes us up and out to sea. I’ve ridden on a lot of helicopters in my line of work, and the mix of exhilaration and terror never lessens. I gaze down at the airport and then the wider land for hints about our location. The sporadic dots of lights from homes and a few moving cars reveal the outline of a small island. Tiny, in fact. I’m not great with distances, and our altitude and the dark make it even trickier, but the entire island looks to be no bigger across than Manhattan is long.

“Bermuda?” I ask. I have to raise my voice over the noisy rotor. This helicopter isn’t as sturdy and well insulated as the one we took from Ness’s house.

“Tristan da Cunha,” Ness says, which doesn’t solve the mystery of where in the hell we are.

“Never heard of it,” I confess.

“It’s about as far from anywhere as you can get.” He leans close so we don’t have to shout. “About twelve hundred miles from Saint Helena and fifteen hundred from South Africa.”

“You brought me to the
Southern Hemisphere?
” I ask incredulously.

“You wanted to see what led me to those shells, right?”