The Body Farm, page 1
ALSO BY ABBY GENI
The Wildlands
The Lightkeepers
The Last Animal
For Patsy
Contents
The Rapture of the Deep
A Spell for Disappearing
Across, Beyond, Through
The First Rule of Natalie
Love in Florida
Porcupines in Trees
Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter
Childish
Starlike
Petrichor
The Body Farm
Acknowledgments
The Rapture of the Deep
Eloise hated and adored her scuba gear in equal measure. On the deck of the Aphrodite, she stripped it away like the plating of an exoskeleton—her monocular face mask, her breathing apparatus, and the sticky second skin of her wetsuit. Sunset stained the sky, reflected in choppy shards across the surface of the ocean. There would be no more diving today. The ship was chugging toward shore.
With a frown, Eloise stowed her gear below deck. The metamorphosis was complete: she had devolved once more from a splendid aquatic life-form into a boring land mammal. On the one hand, her scuba equipment was a remarkable gift, a marvel of science, allowing her to spend hours in the belly of the sea, moving in three dimensions and carrying a mini-atmosphere on her back. On the other hand, she suffered withdrawal at the end of every single dive. Her coworkers knew not to talk to her for the duration of the voyage back to shore. She needed that time to mourn, to accept the burden of gravity once more.
Back in her hotel room, she showered the salt off her skin. The evening air was filled with the roar of waves, the ocean breaking against the beach on the other side of the trees. Eloise wove her hair into a frowsy braid. Daily immersion in seawater had changed its consistency from limp ash-blond to spongy copper. Voices and laughter carried on the breeze from the hotel bar. Stefan and the others gathered there most nights to blow off steam and trade shark stories. Eloise rarely joined them, though her fish tale could have topped them all. She slipped a hand under her T-shirt and ran her fingers along the elaborate scar on the right side of her rib cage: the precise imprint of a tiger shark bite. Four hundred and sixty-seven stitches. A mottled red ribbon of teeth marks. Her torso no longer smooth but topographical. Her belly button torn away.
On the nightstand, her cell phone lit up and buzzed. Eloise picked it up, observing that she had missed thirty-four calls during today’s underwater sojourn. All from her brother. There were a few texts too: Call me back. And later: The ten-year anniversary is next week. Can you please get in touch so we can figure out what we’re going to do? And later still: I won’t pick a fight, I promise. Finally: You are such a goddamn brat.
Eloise considered several replies before turning her phone off and sticking it in a drawer.
○
In the morning, she led the way down the winding trail through the trees to the beach. The sun was just rising, and the sand glowed bronze between the trunks. Eloise brushed aside the low-hanging branches. Behind her, José tripped on a tree root and swore. Alana and Beth were murmuring together in low voices. At the back of the caravan, Stefan moved with a lithe, easy grace. As always, he carried the bag of gear slung across his shoulders, clanking faintly with each stride.
When Eloise reached the beach, she noted the dark patches by the horizon: moody, dangerous places where the waves prevented sunlight from reflecting. She observed the bite of the wind and the heavy clumps of seaweed tossed up on the beach. The air was filled with energy. A shiver tracked up her spine.
The marina lay half a mile down the shore. Alana and Beth set the pace, walking side by side on the firm, packed sand at the water’s edge. They had been best friends since joining the team a few months earlier, two marine biology grad students from different universities united by a summer of fieldwork on the sea. Eloise treated them with politeness and reserve; she never got attached to the interns who came and went, as ephemeral as mayflies.
José and Stefan, on the other hand, had been her colleagues for nearly a decade. The three of them had traveled the world together. They’d tagged sleeper sharks in Alaska, stealth predators with an eerie, silent glide. They’d braved the storms and wild surf off the Farallon Islands to track the diminishing number of great white sharks. And now they were in North Carolina to chart the astonishing migration of the Prionace glauca.
The shore was deserted. It was not yet hot enough for the tourists—reeking of sunblock, toting towels and small children—to collect there. Eloise noted the melting body of a medusa rolled ashore in a rubbery paste. Alana and Beth were so far ahead now that the rising sun reduced them to shadow puppets. José strolled in their wake, smoking his daily cigarette—one per morning, Eloise knew.
Stefan caught up to her, the gear clattering on his back. He was pale and dark, a slim reed of a man, exactly her height. Years in the United States had done little to erode the sharp edges of his Polish accent.
“Listen,” he said, nudging her with his elbow. She turned to him, expecting some detail about their plan for the day—coordinates, oxygen sats, timing.
“Your brother called me,” he said.
Eloise stepped into the sweep of a wave, as warm as bathwater.
“Did you hear me?” Stefan said. “Your brother called me last night.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
Stefan raised his eyebrows.
“How on earth did Noah even get your number?” Eloise asked.
“He didn’t say.”
A seagull soared overhead, making its lonely cry. Stefan was watching her steadily. They rarely ever talked about personal things. Their relationship had been forged in the silence of the deep ocean; they always dove together. Eloise knew that Stefan was left-handed, a quick thinker, and clearheaded in a crisis. But she did not know if he had any siblings. She’d never mentioned Noah to him before.
“What did you tell my brother?” she asked carefully.
Stefan averted his gaze. “He asked me to make you call him. He wanted to know where in Africa we were working right now.”
“Oh, hell.”
“He seemed to think we were tagging requiem sharks somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”
“That’s what I told him,” Eloise said, the words tumbling out. “Yes, I lied, but you have to understand that Noah is persistent. He lives in D.C., and I figured he would drive right down if he knew I was just a few hours away. He’s smart, so I had to make something up that he would actually believe, and he wouldn’t fall for just any—” She broke off, shaking her head. “I’m sorry you ended up getting involved.”
Stefan shifted the bag of gear from one shoulder to another. His expression was inscrutable.
“Did you tell Noah the truth?” Eloise asked, adding quickly, “It’s okay if you did. You don’t have to lie for me. I know he put you on the spot.”
“I didn’t tell him anything. I said I’d pass on the message, and I have.”
“Thank you.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.
“It isn’t my business,” he said, offering an answering squeeze. Then he dropped her hand, and they walked in silence to the Aphrodite.
○
Eloise had learned to scuba dive from her mother. Ada had been an adventurer, always outside, eager for new experiences, dazzled and elated by the natural world. She’d backpacked through the Amazon rainforest. She’d skied with expert daring along The Tunnel in Alpe d’Huez. She’d skydived at least once a month. The walls of Eloise’s childhood home were decorated with framed snapshots of Ada perched on rocky cliffs, scuba diving in caves, or free-climbing trees.
Eloise had spent her youth hiking up mountains and white water rafting. She and her mother were kindred spirits, excited to tackle a black-diamond trail, gasping in tandem at an eagle in flight, saying yes to every new experience. Eloise begged to skydive with her mother, but you had to be eighteen years old. Scuba diving, however, was legal at ten years of age, so that was when she learned. She spent the best days of her young life underwater at her mother’s side, kicking through clouds of sand in the chilly California surf off the coast where she grew up.
And then there was Noah. Eloise often wondered if her brother resembled their late father, who died before she was old enough to form memories of him. She’d only ever seen her father in pictures: a bearded, narrow face, eyes hidden behind Coke-bottle glasses. He left a sizable estate, which their mother used to care for her children and fund her adventures. Eloise had never missed having a father; her mother was enough, and they were so delightfully in sync, two peas in a pod.
But she did wonder where careful Noah had come from. An old man at the age of eight. He flatly refused to scuba dive or even snorkel, remaining on the shore. He would wait for the walk signal before crossing the street, even when there was not a car in sight. He saved every penny of his allowance, never wasting it, as Eloise did, on adventure comics or toy sharks. As soon as he was old enough to stay home alone, he let his mother and sister spelunk and backpack without him.
Eventually they both went to college—Noah for accounting, Eloise for marine biology. In their absence, their mother had decided to free-climb Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world. At the summit, 380 feet in the air, Ada took a selfie, beaming, her cheeks bronzed by wind and sun. Eloise sent back a heart emoji. Noah texted, Please come down from there.
A month later, Ada died while skydiving. Her parachute failed to open, a freak accident. There was nothing she could have done to save herself, despit
○
The canned air tasted sweet, like cinnamon. Weightless, Eloise pumped her powerful flippers, circling the interior of her cage. Stefan filmed it all from thirty feet away, the lens poking between the bars of his own cage. Eloise waved at the camera. Stefan waved back. She had the feeling that José, on the deck of the Aphrodite, watching the live feed on the snowy monitor, was waving also.
She shook her bag of chum, emptying bright scales and fish juice into the sea. She was calling the blue sharks to her—graceful creatures, sky-colored, with long, flowy tails. They filled the North Carolina waters in the summer. Eloise was here, fifty feet below the surface, to document the profundity of the blue sharks’ migratory path. The females, once pregnant, crossed the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean to give birth in the warm seas off Italy and Spain. Then they coasted on the Gulf Stream all the way back to the Yucatán. And then, as if that were not enough, they swam north along the eastern shore of Mexico and the United States to return to the icy depths near Massachusetts, where they mated and began the whole journey over again.
At this depth, the sunlight began to fail. There was no land in sight, the shore miles away, no seabed visible below, only water deepening into black. The blue sharks came in a group, six or seven, maybe—Eloise could not be sure in the erratic dappling of wave-broken glow. They emerged like clumps of cobalt coalescing from liquid to solid. By shark standards, they were skinny creatures, pencil-shaped, with sharpened conical snouts. Their oversized eyes, perfectly round, seemed surprised in sunlight and hollow in shadow. They swam toward Eloise with the classic Selachimorpha waggle, noses swinging back and forth, tracking the faint trails of blood from the chum.
Twenty feet from the cage, they stopped their forward progress and began to circle. They ignored Stefan’s cage completely; there was no intriguing smell coming from there. Sharks were mechanical creatures. They circled when they were interested and bit when they were curious. Most recorded shark attacks were not attacks at all, merely an inquisitive animal checking out a strange object in the best way it knew how, as innocent and guileless as a dog sticking its nose into a compelling pile of garbage. If startled, sharks voided their bellies in a cloudy explosion and swam off. When there was blood in the water and a throng of them gathered close, with a helpless figure at their center, they boiled gradually into a frenzy. And—Eloise’s favorite—when sharks were turned upside down, they went momentarily into a coma.
Clearly the blues did not like her cage, an unfamiliar object in their domain. Eloise knew that her body bewildered them too, roughly seal-sized but shaped wrong—gangly, almost amphibian. Still, the chum drew them inexorably toward her. By degrees, they narrowed their orbit around the cage. Stefan signaled to Eloise, and she opened up the second sack of chum, tossing a handful into the open water. The bloody pulp sank slowly, twirling in the light. A brave but undersized shark cut loose from the pack and swallowed the mess whole.
They were all around her now. Eloise readied her tagging pole and tossed more chum through the bars. She loved their dance, how they were always coming back to her, maws agape, never losing focus. They could actually feel her on their skin; the bow wave she made with the smallest motion registered to them like a caress. She threw a glob of chum into the open sea, and when a shark came rocketing to gobble it up, Eloise lifted the pole and struck. The telemetry tag flashed orange, clipped like an earring to the animal’s dorsal fin. The shark did not appear to register the impact. The flesh of the dorsal fin was impervious to sensation, lacking blood flow or nerve endings. And anyway, there was chum in the water, so nothing else mattered.
Another shark approached the bars. The blues had snub dorsals, scarcely bigger than a human palm, but Eloise’s aim was precise; she had not missed her mark in years. As the speed of the animals increased, the telemetry tags bobbed gaily from their backs. Each stroke of their scythe-shaped tails brought them a little closer. Not a muscle wasted. Eloise tagged another, and another, and soon the chum was gone, and the sharks glided away, dissolving into the blue.
○
As the boat chugged back to shore, Eloise stood alone at the prow. Alana and Beth were below deck, reviewing the footage from the day under Stefan’s tutelage. The team did not always film their efforts; it was a biweekly thing at most. Their sponsors at the Marine Environmental Laboratory, who controlled their funding, liked to see documentation every so often. Verification of their dollars at work.
Eloise was thinking about her mother. This was Noah’s fault, Noah and his calls, his texts, his insistence on marking the ten-year anniversary of her death, as though a memorial could ease the profundity of this grief.
Eloise and her mother had made so many plans. Skydive together for the first time, Eloise strapped to Ada’s belly like a kangaroo joey. Visit the Arctic during the season of the midnight sun. Scuba dive in the Great Blue Hole in Belize, an eerie, yawning abyss as round as a coin and more than three hundred meters deep, surrounded by a plateau of shallow, turquoise sea.
Ada had been there once as a young woman, and she described it to Eloise with glee—the way the sunlight disappeared and the pressure of the water did strange things to the mind. That far down, it was necessary to have a buddy or, better yet, a group, in case the dreaminess overtook you and you forgot to check your air. Divers had died in that crevasse, hundreds of them, lulled into soporific unconcern, eventually suffocating, their bodies entombed forever in the black water.
The rapture of the deep, it was called. Ada had experienced it too, she told Eloise. She dove the Great Blue Hole with four companions, all of them descending slowly to equalize the air pressure in their ears and sinuses. She had not felt the change coming until it was too late. Voices warbled around her, high and sweet. Mermaids? Sirens? Tiny lights flickered and shone in her peripheral vision. At first she’d thought they were bioluminescent organisms, but then she understood they were stars. This had not troubled her. She felt sure the water would only grow more euphoric the deeper she dove—more splintered with light and richer with melodies.
One of her fellow divers had tapped her shoulder then, and the group returned to the surface. Ever since, Ada had been itching to get back there and try again.
○
The next day, the sea was empty of sharks. Stefan and Eloise floated in the same cage, bumping elbows, each armed with a tagging pole. When he was not serving as cameraman, they usually worked side by side, while José remained on deck as their overseer and guardian angel. Stefan dumped a bag of chum into the sea. Eloise clapped her hands and yelled inside her mouthpiece. Sharks were attracted to the agitated movements of wounded fish. If the smell of blood was not enough to summon them, it often helped to add simulated death throes.
Minutes passed. Long columns of light shifted through the water. A few Atlantic spadefish, two feet long and striped like zebras, came to nibble the sinking chum. Stefan checked his watch and shrugged. At last he signaled to José, who winched their cage out of the ocean several hours earlier than planned. The Aphrodite was crowned by two long-necked derricks, a double-headed dragon. Each crane could easily lift and maneuver a midsize shark cage made of utilitarian aluminum (lighter than steel, noncorrosive in salt water, and foul-tasting to sharks).
As the ship motored back to shore, Alana and Beth unearthed a boom box from a cupboard and set it up on deck. A set of dusty CDs offered the greatest hits of eighties pop—no other choices. José swiveled his hips and snapped his fingers to the synthetic beat while Alana and Beth waltzed grandly with each other, giggling. Stefan joined the party, not exactly dancing, more swaying in place.
Eloise leaned over the bulwark, staring into the empty ocean. Quiet days left her unsettled. It had been the same on the fateful afternoon when she had been maimed by the tiger shark.
The team had been in the Gulf of Mexico then, tagging every shark they could get their hands on, regardless of species, as part of a worldwide study to determine how climate change was affecting fish populations. For a week, Eloise and Stefan tagged threshers, hammerheads, and makos. The creatures were greedy for chum, and the work was nonstop. Every night before bed, Eloise had to ice her biceps, sore from overuse.
