The Highest Tide (25 page)

So many people packed onto the spit that afternoon that five Olympia bicycle cops showed up to monitor the swarm, and lines to the Sanicans grew so long that men stood shoulder to shoulder behind the tavern as if the blackberry bushes were urinals. Almost everyone was there except my mother and Angie, who I feared had already left for North Carolina.

I saw plenty of Eleusinians, including Carolyn, who obviously wanted to hug me, but wanted it to be my idea. I saw Pansing shuffle past the specimen tables, hands respectfully behind his back, until I called his name and he smiled longer than I thought he could. I watched Judge Stegner greet everyone with firm, gracious handshakes, as if they’d come solely to show their support for him. And I watched astonished locals stare at sea life for the first time. Most of them had no idea what this was all building toward, but they saw the scientists’ excitement and they sensed the crescendo.

Word had already leaked about some of the discoveries, but after Professor Kramer stood on a picnic table to give the four-thirty P.M. status report, our findings became national news. Two hours later there was more to report. Divers found
Caleurpa
seaweed—“killer algae,” as the newspapers called it—along the bottom of Squaxin Cove across from Flapjack Bay where I’d first seen it. And the Chinese crabs that I’d noticed near Whiskey Point were caught tunneling in cliffs near Altman and Japhet creeks too. Then a boating team spotted what it assumed was a sick shark off Cooper Point. It had the signature dorsal fin, but divers swiftly confirmed it was something altogether different.

Mola molas look like ugly whales cut in half. And their behavior is just as bizarre: They like to munch on jellyfish while drifting on their sides out in the ocean. I boated out with Professor Kramer and two other biologists to see it ourselves. This time the freak was netted, weighed—672 pounds—and photographed, before being freed. Even then it clung to the side of the boat like some confused alien and smelled like it had already died.

Our census also turned up exotic litter, including two softball-sized glass floats Japanese fishermen once used to hold up nets, a forty-three-year-old sake bottle with a smeared message inside, two mannequin heads, a violin and three barnacled hockey gloves like the two I found in Skookumchuck.

And at dusk, a kayaking botanist noticed a flotilla of what she assumed were leaves surfing past Penrose Point. A closer look revealed shiny blue bodies with clear, saillike protrusions and dangling tentacles. She collected them in jars and paddled back to surprise the cnidaria team.

The five
Velellas
were an instant hit, examined beneath lamps and gawked at by people who’d never even heard of them. Strong westerlies often beached thousands of
Velellas
along Washington’s sandy coast. But these little jellies—which looked like miniature spinnaker-flying yachts—had apparently crossed the Pacific and sailed all the way to the very entrance of Skookumchuck Bay, making them navigational wonders.

Classmates who considered science the most boring subject of all lined up to see them. And kids I’d never spoken to, including the owner of Phelps’s favorite chest, surprised me with smiles, hand-slaps and big howdys. I’d never even seen Christy Decker’s lips move other than to chew gum in a lazy, sexy way before she swiveled up to me and spoke in clear English, like anyone else might, about how cool the little jellies were. She got close enough for me to smell her spearmint gum, then asked if we’d ever know the whole story behind that blurred message in the sake bottle.

I mumbled a few vague sentences that may have given the impression I was heading up the team looking into that mystery. It would have been hard enough to talk to her without Phelps waving his arms and air-sucking enormous imaginary breasts a few strides behind her, but I still managed to offer a few more nonsensical answers without once looking directly at her mouth-level cantaloupes concealed beneath a COUGARS sweatshirt and no doubt locked up behind some multiclipped bra that would have taken a safecracking genius to unhook.

As the evening cooled and the disheartening smell of autumn wafted past, Professor Kramer gave the last media briefing of the day just outside the main canopy.

He admitted right off how surprised and excited everyone was, but he didn’t need to speak. His tall, kinky hair, which he kept tugging higher, said as much. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “you don’t have to go to the Galipagos Islands to see exotic sea life.” People chuckled. “Just walk out on Chatham Cove,” he said, “and you might see something nobody else has. For example, despite all the biologists we have here, we still haven’t identified this tiny eel we accidentally netted near Whiskey Point.”

By the time the professor got around to describing the European green crab, people started twitching and murmuring then suddenly abandoned him. I assumed it was out of disbelief or boredom, but then I saw cameramen and others hustling toward the
Sanicans
to huddle around a stout bald man with restless eyes who sounded the way people sound on the news after a tornado spins through their trailer park.

“Like I said, I haven’t heard out of my left ear for seventeen years.” His scalp gleamed in the camera lights. “Ask my doctor if you want. I’ll give you his number here in a minute so you can call him yourselves. And you gotta understand that I’ve never tried anything like this before. Being a man of modest faith, I didn’t have high expectations about any so-called healing waters. But I heard some things were happening out here, so I drove up from Grants Pass to see for myself.”

He had a singsong way of talking that pulled you close then punched you back with a mild roar. “I used to fly-fish, so I had these waders in the back of my truck, and I was just up to my knees, out past Hal’s cabin, about twenty minutes ago, maybe twenty-five, when this big wind stopped, and I suddenly
heard
out of both ears.” He covered one ear, then the next. “And I still can!” His teeth were the color of rust.

He deflected questions with hairy hands, bobbing his head until everyone quieted, then said he’d already talked to people who swore the mud had cleared up their psoriasis. He also said a woman from Utah claimed the arthritis in her knee had vanished after wading for a half hour. He then confided, in his come-closer voice, that word was spreading—not that he necessarily believed it—that the bay’s healing powers were likely to peak at high tide the following day.

He kept talking beneath the lights long after the scientists lost interest and returned, snickering, to their monotonous tally.

Once darkness settled, the news crews left and rain fell hard and fast in marble-sized drops that made us stop counting to stare up at our thin plastic ceiling that had turned so noisy we had to shout species’ names to each other.

Soon camp thinned to a couple dozen bloodshot scientists and volunteers sorting and counting while night teams continued dropping crab pots, dragging plankton nets and shining massive flashlights into black water. I helped dizzy biologists keep track of what they’d already counted. Nobody needed to point me out anymore, which was nice. Even my father, whose cold had dropped into his chest, urged me to stay as long as I wanted and just reminded me to eat, which I hadn’t.

I took a break after eleven to call my mother. It’d been building in me for hours, this desire to share every last highlight of the day with her before she went to bed. I also intended to at least try to apologize for being ungrateful when she’d offered to help, knowing she’d hold on to that until I said something that helped her let it go.

My cousin complained about me calling so late, then informed me that my mother and Aunt Janet had flown to Chicago for the weekend.

Chicago.

It’d come up that spring when my mother abruptly pointed out to my father that she never traveled anymore, that she hadn’t even gone to New York, Chicago or any
real
city
since Miles was born.

My father shuffled out in boxers, a toothbrush in his mouth. If he noticed the phone shaking in my hand, he didn’t say anything.

“What’s their phone number in Chicago?” I asked my cousin.

“What?”

“I need their number.”

“You can’t call them
now.
It’s two hours later back there.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Yeah?”

My voice rose. “My father is real sick.”

Dad didn’t say anything as I dialed and told some lady my mother’s room number. It took a few rings until I heard Mom’s hushed voice and groggy Aunt Janet in the background demanding to know who was calling.

“It’s Miles,” Mom whispered away from the phone, then to me, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Dad said you were gonna be here today,” I said. “Everybody else was.”

There was a long pause in which I heard Aunt Janet’s muffled voice and Mom responding to her again, then to me: “That isn’t why you called at two in the morning, Miles.” There was worry in her voice. “You didn’t get hurt, did you? Is your father all right?”

“Even Alice McDonald and Annette Rankin were there,” I almost shouted. “There were like seventy-three scientists and maybe a hundred volunteers on the flats, in the water and at base camp. And Professor Kramer had me tell everyone where to find everything.”

After a pause, she whispered, “Tell me what happened, but
softly
. I’m right here.”

I listed off as much as I could remember. It must have taken five minutes. And I didn’t quiet down or apologize for anything. Every sentence rang like a pounded nail.

When I ran out of air, she said, “Sorry I missed it.” She wasn’t whispering anymore. “And sorry for leaving the way I did. It was something I had to do, Miles, but it wasn’t fair to you.”

I was so startled I wanted to ask her to repeat herself. I felt the way fish must feel when they jump from heavy water into ridiculously light air, but all that came out was: “Me too.” When she didn’t say anything, I added, “Dad’s got a bad cold. I think he needs your magic soup.”

By the time I returned to base camp, the scientists who weren’t insomniacs had already peeled away for naps. So there were just six of us at the end, counting to the rhythm of rain determined to make up for its two-month absence in a single night.

Olympia rain rarely calls for hats, much less umbrellas, but this was a waterfall. And by one forty-five in the morning I saw the auras of the remaining biologists, or maybe it was just backlit mist. What I do know is that I saw a blue light around every one of their heads. And Florence had taught me that people with blue auras are relaxed and ready for anything, which suited these people perfectly.

Professor Kramer ordered me home an hour later. I took the long way, splashing past our house and Angie’s dark window, through the deep puddles and all the way to Florence’s cabin.

I had to duck out of the rain beneath an eave to see her, mouth open, in her chair behind the curtains. It relieved me to see her chest rise. I thought about waking her and helping her to bed, but decided against it. I didn’t want to scare her, or lift her. Plus, I knew she preferred to sleep in her chair.

My boots felt so heavy climbing my stairs that I wondered what Florence’s feet felt like on a bad day. I tried to imagine her as a cartwheeling young woman resembling some beauty with a musical name like Sophia Loren. It was impossible.

I left my clothes in damp clumps and collapsed, but, of course, I couldn’t sleep.

Images of my mother played on my eyelids. I tried to see her in our house. I saw her frowning at her weedy garden. I saw her in Aunt Janet’s huge recliner. I marched her apology back through my head so many times I couldn’t remember the differences between what she’d said and what I’d hoped to hear. But I still couldn’t put her inside our little house. And I still couldn’t sleep.

So I read about the deepest canyons in the Pacific, about trenches so vast you could hide Mount Everest in them, about scalding vents on the floor of the abyss where, amazingly, life thrived.

Diagonal rain kept the crowd small for the closing ceremony the next morning when Professor Kramer rattled off the final species tallies: 314 invertebrates, 32 fish, 7 mammals and 186 plants for a total of 539 species of tidal and subtidal life. He also listed thirteen invasive species, another eleven rarely found so far north and mentioned that we still had no idea what to call a two-inch translucent eel with lime-green eyes.

About fifty scientists, volunteers and spectators applauded the findings, or maybe it was an ovation for life itself—or for the record-breaking rain, which continued falling so hard it knocked pinecones loose, ripped leaves off madrones and made it hard to hear the professor.

“As much as anything,” he told us, “this exercise serves as a reminder that we are just one of hundreds, and actually thousands, of species who call South Sound home. And I also hope it teaches us that we need to keep better track of invasives or risk further jeopardizing our waters.”

When his hooded eyes found me, he waved me forward until I sheepishly obeyed and climbed onto the table in my mother’s huge yellow raincoat. He then wrapped his long arm across my back and shouted, “None of this would have been possible if Miles O’Malley hadn’t put his love for sea life into action. If Miles hadn’t spent his summer trying to see what’s out here, there would have been no reason for us all to . . .”

His words didn’t sound or feel real. What the exercise had proved to me was that what went on that summer had nothing to do with me. Not a little.
Nothing
. What I’d seen was just a sliver of the new life bubbling in our waters, and the only reason I’d seen more than most was because I was the only one looking.

It was a huge relief, in a way, to know that I hadn’t actually been
selected
for anything, but I admit being disappointed to know, for certain, that I was as ordinary as I felt.

I was too tired to concentrate on the professor’s voice and the rain at the same time, so I just listened to rain until applause hammered me from all sides. Then either the professor bumped me or I mindlessly shuffled because I lost my footing on that wet tabletop and skated slightly, then somehow miraculously righted myself in mid-swoon and managed to smile, which sparked even more ridiculous applause.