Fly by Night (11 page)

Amelia turned as Diane ended the call.

“Okay, Amelia, sorry to keep you waiting.” She jotted down a few notes and then looked up. “You look tired, dear,” Diane's face softened in a motherly way as she cleared stacks of papers off the middle of her desk and then leaned on both elbows, resting her chin on each palm.

Understatement of the year.
Amelia nodded.

“I made a couple of calls last night,” Diane said. “You know how bad news always travels faster than good.” She looked straight on at Amelia. “So I did some checking.”

She waited. “This was a very political decision.” Diane's eyes narrowed.

Amelia furrowed her brows.
Aren't they all?

“Someone who worked in your lab…” Diane waited for Amelia to guess. “… took your theory of the winter sea horse migration in the northeast, added some other lines of inquiry to hide the intellectual theft, and submitted the grant as her own.”

Amelia sat thinking and then turned to her, almost laughing at the preposterousness of who it might be.

Amelia wrinkled her forehead and sat up. “Juney?”

Gauging by Diane's reaction she'd guessed right.

“You gotta be kidding me.” It felt like she'd smacked her head on the hull of a ship in the sudden wake of a storm. She laughed, shaking her head in disbelief.

“It certainly didn't hurt that a close personal relative with the same last name was on the funding committee.” Diane pursed her lips and rolled her eyes.

“But I hired her.” Amelia stood up and began to pace. “My God, Diane, I gave her a post-doc three years ago when no one else would take her seriously.” Juney Lowell had worked with them for two years until the post-doc ran out and Amelia hadn't renewed it.

And while she and Juney Lowell had never warmed up to each other, Amelia attributed it to both Juney and Bryce being from Rhode Island's old moneyed families. She could measure Juney's resentment at taking direction from her and Jen by her terse little movements around the lab as if considering them more fit to be running a string of nail salons rather than being principal investigators with the authority to call the shots.

Early on Juney and Bryce had also begun sleeping together for a short period of time until Amelia and Jen had arrived at the lab one morning to discover Bryce's clothing and toothbrush strewn on the laboratory floor along with a Fuck You note. Jen had commented, “Well, she looked like a rough ticket from the start. Guess she threw him out with all his shit.” It had made for some tense times in the lab, even more so seaside where they'd worked for weeks at a time out on the ocean.

The crew didn't have much use for Juney either. She was never around when the dive grips on the ROV needed to be replaced or when it was her turn to clean the latrines. She'd put Bryce up to it.

“Where's Juney?” the captain had asked.

“Probably cramps again,” Jen answered deadpan, hating how Bryce was “under her spell,” attributing it all to “the power of pussy.”

After Juney's uncle had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics she was insufferable, declaring that “… the roots of inquiry have always run deep in my family.”

Needless to say when awarded to a different scientist, Amelia and Jen were clinking glasses down at the AA and cackling up a storm.

“So.” Diane pushed a printed copy of Juney's grant application across the table followed by a memo listing names on the Appropriations Committee. “Remember…” Diane looked at her. “You never saw this.” Diane pointed but didn't speak as if there were people in the corners listening.

Amelia picked up the documents.

“Anything look redundant?” Diane asked.

She read Juney's abstract and then bowed her head. The sting made it difficult to speak.

“Diane.” Amelia looked up. “I took that girl on dives, shared all our information, and included her in everything. I taught her how to dive, how to use scuba equipment. She knew nothing, had no equipment, not even a face mask. I took her to the store, advised her what to buy.”

“Now look at the names of the award committee.” Diane pointed on the paper.

The name Lowell: Nobel Prize loser.

“See how it's been written as to make you redundant yet not be in violation.”

Amelia looked up and frowned, shaking her head and opening her hands, asking why.

“Because she could,” Diane said in a sad way as she sighed and raised her eyebrows into high arches.

Amelia closed her eyes, reeling with a tangle of thoughts and emotion.

“You brought something new to science; she maximized your discovery, your hard work, and used it against you. The grant was well written.”

Amelia laughed out loud. “By someone else. Not Juney, that's for sure. Juney can't write worth a shit,” she almost yelled. “I've corrected Juney's writing.”

The two women sat thinking. Amelia resolved to never tell Bryce or Jen.

“Shit.” Amelia covered her face with her hands, feeling bitter. “Too bad the
Ocean Explorer
's phone call hadn't come in January.”

Diane leaned over and touched Amelia's hand.

Amelia looked up.

“Amelia, don't get stuck here.”

Alex had said as much on the phone last night.

“Sometimes we need to get shook loose to get free,” Diane said.

Amelia looked down at her waterlogged hands, the skin on her fingers still prune-like.

“Don't know that I have that kind of resilience, Di.”

“Maybe not now, not today.” She looked at Amelia in such a way as to hold strength for her. “But you've raised your wonderful son, built a research lab from nothing and kept it going more than twenty-five years, discovered all sorts of new things. How many people have done that?”

“But I'm so tired, Diane.” She rubbed her face, trying not to cry.

“You're tired now.”

They sat for a few moments as Diane's phone rang but she let it go to voice mail.

“You've got funding for summer?”

She nodded.

“From whom?”

“Ocean Watch, Sea Life Conservation, a small grant from the Shedd, and a few others.”

“Thought so.” Diane pointed a finger at her, opened the top desk drawer, and pulled out a brochure. “Now, before you say no, hear me out.”

Amelia crossed her arms, sat back in the chair, and watched Diane set a brochure down on the desk.

“There's an opening for a director and animal care curator at Sea Life Aquarium in Minneapolis,” Diane said.

Amelia recrossed her legs, not ready to listen.

“I'm personal friends with the director who's retiring. They're the largest retail franchise of the Sea Life Conservation Foundation in North America.”

“Sounds like Burger King.”

Diane raised her brows again as if to cut off the smart-ass comments and squelched a laugh. “They've funded your summer dives for the last several years.”

Amelia nodded in contrition, correcting her tone. “Yes, you're right, they have.”

“She mentioned a few others retiring along with her,” Diane said and tipped her head sideways, holding both hands up in conclusion. “I know you three musketeers are close.”

“Minneapolis?”

“Nothing wrong with Minneapolis, Amelia,” the woman said. “It's in the Mall of America to be exact.”

“A shopping mall.” Amelia leaned forward in the chair.

“Biggest one in North America.”

All sorts of thoughts rushed at once.

“We'd have to relocate.”

“Won't kill you.”

Amelia looked at her.

“You'd be responsible for all the marine life,” Diane said. “You'd oversee the creation of new exhibits, some work with donors, and be in charge of the children's education programs. It's everything we do at Biomes but on a much larger scale. You'd also have a staff and interns to manage; but you're good with people.”

“Oh yeah, like Juney.” The words scorched as they came out.

Diane reached over and pressed her hand. “Be angry for a few days but don't get stuck, Amelia.”

Easy for you to say.

And while it was true that the Sea Life Conservation Fund was a major contributor to her work, Amelia had relied on their Habitat Action Grants and those of Ocean Watch to support many of their dives throughout the world and her breeding of sea horses in the lab.

Diane motioned to stacks of material on the floor.

“You're so good with those kids in your Teen Summers by the Sea program. It's a serious position, Amelia,” Diane said, shaking her head. “Hell, you could be my boss for Christ's sake.” Diane looked around as if it were obvious to everyone including the squid eyeball just above her head.

She could have laughed. Then her stomach rumbled.

“Did you know the NSF thing was coming?” Amelia asked.

Diane smiled in a sad way and paused as if carefully choosing her words.

“Let's say, Alfred heard things,” Diane said. “I'd kept hoping he'd heard wrong.”

It made her stomach flip yet there'd been nothing Diane could have done. Nothing anyone could have done.

“Think about Minneapolis,” Diane said and pushed the brochure toward Amelia. “Here.” She then pulled it back, grabbed a pen and jotted down a number on a yellow Post-it Note and pressed it to the brochure cover.

“It's a great city. Met Alfred there.” The woman smiled. Amelia felt her reading her reluctance.

“That's her number.” The woman moved it farther toward her. “I mentioned you to her this morning,” Diane said.

Amelia smiled. “Thanks.”

“I know you,” Diane said. “Before you say ‘no,' hop on their Web site, give it a look,” Diane said. “I told her you might call.”

Amelia's chest burned.
Don't get stuck.
Maybe it was too late. She felt mired.

Diane tilted her head to catch Amelia's eye.

“There is life after this, Amelia, I promise you.”

Diane came out from behind the desk, motioning for Amelia to stand up for a hug.

She stood and leaned in as Diane hugged her. Amelia rested her head on the woman's shoulder. Tears rolled out with no effort.

“Thanks, Di,” she said into the fabric of Diane's sweater. “You're a good friend.” She tried to imagine standing before a hiring committee after thirty years. Whatever would she wear? She had no understanding of clothing.

*   *   *

How she wished for the super powers of a cephalopod or octopus that through complete command of its central nervous system could change from purple to orange when afraid or stressed. If only she had the power to reconfigure the National Science Foundation's decision that had been meted out in black laser marks on the white skin of paper. But no one had those powers in topside life.

Yet maybe Diane was right.

Walking out to her Jeep in the parking lot, the cold air felt clean. Maybe this was the sharp knife needed to slice through the moorings that had kept her feeling bogged down for months, even years. In a strange way it was a relief.

Popping open the Jeep's back gate, she set her gear down and shut the door and then climbed in to start the engine.

“Come on.” She pressed the gas pedal, racing it to warm up faster as her fingers felt the air vents.

Her breath formed an icy skin inside the windshield; evidence of Rhode Island's advancing autumn. The defroster was fighting a losing battle. Her breath frosted up the inside windows and she wiped it with the side of her hand, hearing Alex's words scolding her, “
Don't, Mom, you only make it worse.
”
Ah yes, little Einstein.

Resting her forehead on the steering wheel she imagined her father. She was a good ten years older now than he was when he'd died, yet she still thought of him as having been an old man.

While driving away from the Biomes she heard her mother's voice, “
Any job's better than no job
.” Penelope's words churned in her stomach like a bad meal though she'd eaten nothing.

 

9

The next morning while sitting at his desk at GLIFWC's office in Bad River, TJ anguished while composing an e-mail before he lost the nerve. He'd erased to a blank screen several times. The first draft he'd explained what had happened during his childhood and that he had known about her but she not about him and then thought it creepy and deleted the whole thing.

The second version was much shorter but he lost his nerve before hitting the send key.

By the third time, his cell phone began ringing from one of the field biologists—a call that he needed to take, but such distraction had given him the strength to hit the send button without a second thought. He'd later sent a second with his personal phone number.

He'd waited a few days before telling Charlotte, but then after they'd gotten into bed one night, his arms slipping around her in the familiar way they had for more than thirty years, he'd said, “I did it.”

She turned to him. The sheets made swishing noises.

“Really?”

She turned to face him, searching his eyes in the darkness. “Did you hear back?”

“She says she has no idea what I'm talking about.”

“Of course not, call her.”

“No.”

“Why not?” Charlotte kissed his neck and slipped beside him in the space that was hers.

“I don't want to sound like some creep.”

“But you are a creep,” she said as he laughed. “But you're her brother too.”

He pushed her back and looked at her as if she was nuts.

“Uh—at best I'm nobody to her.”

“E-mail her again.” Charlotte ignored the comment. “Maybe you didn't explain it well.”

Of course he hadn't. Who just up and writes a letter like that after a lifetime to someone?