For the last year, she has spent every morning listening to Galen spit elaborately into the sink. She has stood at the oven range with Charlene, giggling as the two of them doused a pan full of scrambled murre eggs with every spice in the larder, all in a futile effort to make their breakfast taste a little less fishy. Miranda has taken numerous walks with Mick, orbiting the coast. She has waited by the front door, watching Forest carefully lacing up his boots, taking ten minutes longer than everyone else, as though the fate of the world might depend on each precise knot. Miranda knows all their quirks. She knows the way Galen laughs, his eyes crinkling shut, his mouth so wide that you can see every filling. She knows the way Lucy hums in her sleep, hour after hour, clearly audible in the quiet cabin. She knows the smell of Andrew’s sweat, earthy and sharp. She knows the exact span of Mick’s white hands.
She will never see any of these people again. In a way, she is glad.
On the long boat ride, she removes her cap and does her best to brush her matted hair. She grapples with the scary marine toilet. She examines her photographic equipment. Some people name their cars — beloved objects, imbued with personality. Miranda is in the habit of naming her cameras. The best of her brood is Jewel. It is large-format, and it has enough dials to bamboozle both Galen and Forest, who were prone to picking it up and playing with it whenever Miranda’s back was turned. This is the monster that has, like an overactive queen bee, spawned a hundred cases of film, as yet undeveloped, waiting to hatch in the darkroom. The second camera is Charles, a period piece. Charles is at its best in the morning and the evening, when the sky is golden, the air thick with light. Charles imposes its own take on the world. And the remaining two (Gremlin and Fish Face) are digital SLR cameras: simple, flashy, wildly expensive. Miranda cares for each of them tenderly, a benevolent mother. She remembers their birthdays, the important date when she purchased each one.
Two of her babies have been lost over the past year. Casualties of the islands. Their names were Tomcat and Evildoer. Gone forever.
Now Miranda makes her way into the shelter of the deckhouse. She settles on a bench. Outside the window, the fog is undiminished, encasing the boat like a roll of cotton. The world beyond the hull is reduced to auditory impressions: a foghorn, the plash of waves, a gull crying. Distant now. A musical sound.
She reaches into her bag and removes a manila envelope. It is a bulky thing, swollen and rustling. She upends it into her lap, releasing a blizzard of paper. There are lined pages torn from notebooks. There is printer paper, covered front and back in Miranda’s own handwriting. There is graph paper, and tissue paper, and wax paper stolen from the kitchen. On every surface, Miranda’s cursive is unusually cramped, like ants marching in line. Paper in any form was scarce on the islands. She had to make the most of each piece. During the spare winter months, she ripped pages out of magazines and filled in the margins. She made do with old receipts, the original printing faded, the surface now marked with her script. She even wrote on toilet paper. The contents of the manila envelope represent a full year’s work.
Moving cautiously, Miranda spreads the papers across her lap. There is order here, of a kind, though it would not be discernible to anyone but herself. Some might see the scribbling of a madwoman. Or the poetry of this place. She finds a note from a sunny afternoon in September. That long, frantic letter in autumn, the handwriting almost too desperate to be legible. The pages from the wet week of Thanksgiving still bear the rumpled memory of the damp air. There are notes from December, March, the spring, the summer.
Maybe she will find no answer here. Maybe there will never be an explanation for everything that has happened to her. But this is her last chance to understand. The ferry’s engine thrums. A faraway gull keens like an infant in distress. Miranda sits for a moment with her head bowed. Then she begins to read.
SHARK SEASON
1
I WILL NEVER FORGET the first moments of my arrival. The Farallon Islands were not what I had been expecting. They were both smaller and stranger than I had pictured. A tiny, aquatic mountain range. It looked as though a single, powerful wave could wash the whole thing away. I stood on board the deck of the ferry. Waves smacked the hull while Captain Joe dropped anchor. The dizzy horizon danced as the boat swayed. I shaded my eyes with a hand, staring up at my new home.
Long ago, this place had been called the Islands of the Dead. Now I could see why. Southeast Farallon was less than one square mile across. The other islets were bare, bald, and broken. There were no sandy beaches. The shores were streaked with seaweed, the peaks fragmented and craggy. The islands were arranged by height, like wedding guests in a snapshot. There was a crudeness about their contours. God might have made the world, but he seemed to have deputized his underage stepson to fashion the Farallon Islands out of some lesser brand of clay.
At my side, Captain Joe was shouting into a walkie-talkie. A crackling voice responded. I had spent the past five hours on board the ferry. I was disoriented, in desperate need of a shower. The boat slid up one side of a wave and down the other. I squinted against the sunlight. We were moored alongside a sharp cliff. Rock against clouds. Something was descending over the edge.
It looked like a deflated birdcage. There was a heavy iron disc at the bottom. Ropes and netting swung against the sky. This, I knew, was the Billy Pugh. (The origin of the name is unknown. I asked and got no answer.) Captain Joe was giving instructions. Someone on the other end of the walkie-talkie replied, the voice garbled by static. The ocean was inky, capped with slimy bubbles.
I would be transported to shore by crane. There was no dock on the Farallon Islands. No marina. No semblance of normalcy. The ferry was twenty feet from the cliffs and could come no closer without being broken open on the reefs below the surface. The Billy Pugh landed on deck with a clatter. Without ceremony, Captain Joe guided me inside the network of ropes. He arranged my feet on the base: a metal circle, scratched and scarred. Above my head, the mesh was gathered and synched around a hook. Above that, a steel cable snaked upward. Somewhere at the top of the mechanism was a crane. A shadow against the clouds.
I turned to Captain Joe.
“This is safe, isn’t it?”
“I’ll send your luggage up after,” he said.
The ground lurched under me. I gasped, knotting my hands into the ropes. The Billy Pugh did not look secure enough to hold me. I was moving fast, rocketing upward. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. I could hear the whine of the steel cable. The disc shifted beneath my feet. I tried to keep my balance as the Billy Pugh swung like a pendulum. The ocean fell away, the ferry distorted, Captain Joe reduced to a foreshortened cartoon. I thought I saw a dorsal fin in the distance. I thought I saw three of them, moving in unison. I thought I would throw up.
There was a bang. The Billy Pugh had landed. I pushed my way through the gap in the ropes and collapsed onto the Farallon Islands.
What followed was a blur. I lay on my back. Proud that I’d passed my first test. Waiting for the nausea to subside. The granite was cold on my skin, uneven beneath my spine. I could see the crane better now — a rusted spar that lunged over the water. The Billy Pugh was descending again. Someone close by must be operating the thing. I did not know who had transported me to the islands, who was on the other end of Captain Joe’s walkie-talkie. There were six permanent residents here. Six biologists lived in isolation and wildness on the Islands of the Dead.