It was a quiet night. No birds, no bugs, even the surf seemed to have shut its mouth. Combined with the soft liquid afterglow of the sunset, and the whole world looked like it was ready for bedtime.
Not that Eliza would be sleeping anytime soon. It was rude to nap at a funeral, especially if you were half the guests and also responsible for taking a shift at the oars.
“Almost there?” she asked.
“Little bit,” said dad. He was chewing his pipe again. She’d still never seen him smoke. Maybe that was what this was about; he wanted to make sure there were no witnesses before he lit up. He was going to push her overboard to keep his secrets safe, just like the pirates of old.
“How little?”
“You’ve got air enough to row,” he said. His jaw flexed, and she wondered if he was just going to bite through the stem.
Eliza sighed and wheezed and bent back to her task, and once again let her eyes brush over the bundle tied in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in sailcloth and the strongest mooring-line the docks could offer.
If only her grandmother hadn’t been such a sturdy woman, this would be a lot easier.
***
“That’ll do,” dad said. “We’re in a good spot. Has to be five fathoms.”
“Really?” asked Eliza, rubbing her arms. “Why?”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know. This is a lot older than me, zizzy. Older than granny too.”
“How do you know about it then?”
He nodded at the bundle. “From when we sent off HER mama. Now sit tight and keep an eye out, best as you can. We don’t want to miss the start.”
“Start of what? Shouldn’t we be putting her over?” Not that she was in a rush or anything, but what was there to wait for?
“You’ll know it when you see it. Trust me.”
So she sat, and she watched, and the rubbing of her arms turned from soreness to shivers as the dark cold air came rolling in with the night. It was getting hard to see… whatever it was that she was looking for. Not that there was anything to look for at all. Smoky clouds, black sky, dark water, and a single little slice of something moving through the waves, rigid as a plank, intense and sure as a prowling mother.
Eliza pointed at the solitary shark-fin. “Is that it?”
Dad nodded. “Yep. Good eyes.”
“Now what?”
“Now,” said dad, as he took off his cap and settled just a little more firmly into his seat, “we watch.”
***
It was hard to see until it came alongside the boat, slow and steady as it was. Not much light left to work with, and the fish’s own countershading. But it circled slow and steady closer still and at last it was close enough to touch as it patrolled, ramrod-stiff, soldier-sure, a hand’s-span from the gunwhales.
It was an awfully big shark, Eliza thought. And they weren’t in a very large boat. But dad was relaxed – no, not relaxed, but not nervous – and if he wasn’t worried she wasn’t about to show it either.
And besides it wasn’t doing anything worrisome. No bumps, no nudges, no mouthing. Just a steady march, an endless spiral, each twist and turn of the ring coming with a barely-exaggerated roll of its sides to flash its milky underbelly into the night and show the strong curved line of its mouth, tight-shut.
Then she saw the second fin.
And the third.
And the fourth.
She stopped counting at six and looked at dad, just to be sure. He was still sitting, sucking his pipe, eyes wide but nostrils unflared.
“Dad?” she prodded, just to be sure.
“More than I remembered,” he said. “That’s all. Keep watching.”
She turned back to the waves and the circling half-moons and tried to count them again. This time she got up to sixteen before getting confused and second-guessing herself. Were more of them coming in that quickly or were they already there, rising and fall beneath the surface? Big and little and thick and slim, pointed-snouted and snub-nosed, there were so many of them, so many kinds. A fat tiger, a needle-faced blue, a little slip of a thing with black-smeared fins, a slow and swaggering white-tip and a surly broad-sided bull, and so many more, from the length of Eliza’s arm to twice her height and more, dancing and revolving and turning just out of reach of the oars.
However many there were, it doubled. Then doubled again. One more time.
And it was then, with the ocean more thick with sharks than water, that the singing began.
***
It was low and solemn and as weighty as a hammer-blow, and it pressed down with the force of a time that had nothing to do with clocks or calendars and everything to do with the grinding ache of geology, measured in accumulated drifts, in erosion, in speciation and extinction.
There were no words and there was also no sound that came from no throat, no vocal chords, no lungs, not even a tell-tale splash. Just waves and wind and darkness and the song, thick and heady and rich as blood in the water, swaying from side to side and vibrating up through the boat and into Eliza’s bones.
Dad’s pipe was quivering in his mouth. So was his mouth. So was his entire body.
Eliza’s palms were itching like mad. This wasn’t the first time, and she felt a moment’s deep regret for never asking granny about it before it was too late. She might’ve told her a few things.
Of course, she hadn’t ever told her about THIS, so.
Maybe it was because she’d never asked?
It was crawling deeper now, past the skin and muscle and calcium, up into the parts of her that watched. She’d never really felt her own nerves-as-nerves before, but now they were lighting up, reporting on a sensation she’d never really imagined before: something just for them. Living lightning, sparking and hissing from where her body moved, breathed, beat.
Her freckles felt like they were glowing.
Smell it. Touch it. Feel it. She’d never imagined a song that appealed to every sense but the ears, but it was shockingly good and she wondered how they all knew the words, even if there weren’t any. A lot of these animals – the ones she recognized – weren’t exactly social butterflies. But they were flank to flank, tail to snout, mouths swallowing the same water and in each other’s spaces and there were no arched backs, no gaping jaws, no exaggerated swings of the skulls, just a smooth dance. No personal space. No space at all.
There was no song. The emptiness in everything screamed wide so hard that Eliza almost yelled.
“Now,” said dad, and he sounded as loud and intrusive as a barking seal at a Sunday service. “Help me with her.”
So she did, clumsy though her body felt in the thinness of the empty world above the real one, and as the heavy mass of sailcloth and mooring-lines slipped free from her hands into the water she could’ve sworn it felt more supple and flexible than it had when she brought granny aboard back on land. But it was out of her hands now before she could think on it, and then it was sinking and the choir was in hot pursuit, mouths open wide now, jaws lunging from their bodies in lightning snaps, teeth aglitter with the very same last reflected scraps of light that made their eyes into little torchlights.
Down, down, down, as the scraps of cloth and shreds of rope came free, a spiral inside a spiral, and then at its conclusion a stillness that made Eliza’s brain jump and her body freeze.
Dad held up his hand.
***
It was too dark to see now, but the fin was unmistakable anyways. It poked up through the water almost shyly at first, hesitant, but then it built and built as the body beneath grew in strength and surety until it was full-sail, proud as a mainmast in full flight, steady as a drumbeat, alive as sure as anything that could be.
She circled the boat once, twice, three times – close, then far, then close again.
And then she was gone.
***
Dad lowered his hand. “NOW it’s done,” he said. And he threw his pipe overboard.
***
Eliza had the oars the whole way back, but she didn’t complain and didn’t groan under it. She was thinking.
At least now she thought she might have an inkling as to how granny had always brought back the best catches.
Or why dad had married someone who’d never so much as seen the sea before she came to town with him.
Or why he never swam himself, and had been so put out when she’d learned how, alongside all the other children – and such slow learners they’d been too.
And, maybe, just maybe, why granny had always told her not to speak of her wisdom teeth, all sharp sixteen of them.
She didn’t share any of her thoughts. Dad looked cross – although that might have been because of his pipe. His lips were still trying to chew on something that wasn’t there.
So they went back in silence – dull silence, not the kind they’d just lived through – and dad went inside and Eliza stowed the boat and the oars and stood up and bent over and without actually thinking it through crawled underneath it, inside it, and breathed in.
It was very dark and damp and it smelled of seawater and life and death.
Oh, it was right.
It was very right.
But she had a long ways to go before she could be there, so she sighed away the air in her lungs and stood up on her legs and walked indoors, to the light and the land and her warm family, and put away her thoughts for a while.
They would be there when she was ready.