Bewere the Night

“You always say things like that!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore, it feels like a mantra. An incantation to protect her sister, and by extension herself.

She doesn’t even go back to her own apartment during their brief time onshore, but stays in a small hotel by the dock that normally cater to sport fisherman so that she can more easily oversee the resupply and the minor repairs that the storm made necessary. She knows she should update the blog, at least upload a few photos, but it’s a task that’s easy to procrastinate on so she does.

On Saturday night, at nine-thirty, Vivian calls again. The temptation to let it go to voicemail is very strong, but it might be an actual emergency.

“Hello?”

“Guess what?” The joy in Vivian’s voice tells Faith immediately that no one is in the hospital or dead.

“No idea.”

“Oh, come on, guess.”

“You got a new job?”

“No, silly. Why would I be calling about a job this late on the weekend?”

“You heard from…”

“Mark proposed!”

Faith opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. When she thinks of Mark, she always thinks of the day he came over, drank all her beer, and talked over her with stories about the thirty-foot fishing boat he’d played around on with his dad in Sarasota, before his dad decided that being a bull was better than being a banker and a husband and a dad.

“Tonight, at dinner. He had the waiter hide the ring in my dessert, it was so sweet, I started crying right there.” It sounds as though Vivian is crying again.

“Well, congratulations.” That’s okay. That sounds good.

“Look, I know you and Mark aren’t best buddies. But I love him, and he really is a good guy if you’ll give him a chance.”

“If he makes you happy…. I want you to be happy.” There. Something true and useful.

“I am! I’m so happy! Listen, here’s what he wants to do. We’re going to exchange skins. Instead of just him having mine, I’ll have his too.”

“That doesn’t actually make it any easier if you end up splitting up.”

“We’re not planning to split up!”

“No one plans to split up.”

“We won’t do that. We both know what it’s like, growing up with a parent who took their skin back and just took off. We wouldn’t do that to our kids.”

“Are you pregnant?” There’s no keeping the oh-shit out of her voice.

“No, of course not. I’m just saying, when we do have kids, we have to both be in it for the long haul. And Mark knows that.”

Don’t say, but what if. Don’t say it, don’t say it.

“I’d like you to be my maid of honor.”

Don’t say, but what if.

“We’re scheduling the wedding for July or August, you never go out then.”

“Of course. Of course I’ll be your maid of honor.”

Vivian makes a noise of pure delight, and for a moment Faith can feel the lure, the impulse that says, making this other happy would be easier than making yourself happy. Making this other happy would replace making yourself happy. But as soon as she feels the lure, she can’t help thinking of the hook and how much thrashing it takes to get off of it.

“When you get back, we can sit down and talk about dresses and reception venues and things.”

“Absolutely. When I get back.” This time, she doesn’t want to leave the silence hanging. “I know this is what you’ve been wanting. Congratulations.”

It’s the first trip she’s ever run where the passengers have complained about the lack of storms. The director says, over and over again, that he know he needs to wait for the right moment, that it’s no different than any other documentary, especially when you’re dealing with animals, that it’s fine. But she can feel his tension, the way he’s tallying the cost of each day in his head, and so can his crew. Unlike the birders, or the people she sometimes takes sport fishing, they’re not in tune with the kind of waiting the ocean requires. They’re antsy.

So when the bird appears on the horizon, the boat damn near explodes. Or at least, some of the passenger do. As it gets nearer, Faith can see that it’s not one of the normal Pacific birds she knows, and for a moment her heart rises up—but it’s no gannet either, too big, and one of the few birds too white: a gannet would have black wingtips.

It may be the biggest bird she’s ever seen. Its long neck splits the air ahead of it as it heads straight for them, its long legs trail out behind it. She’s seen the image in a thousand photos and paintings, but she’s never seen a real crane, alive and flying free, before.

Without considering, without circling, it drops for the deck and lands among them all. The director’s crew scramble to re-aim their cameras and get out of each other’s shots. The crane gives an unbirdlike little shrug, shakes its head. It’s impossible to see how the feathers start to drop, even if you’re watching for it; it’s just a sort of rippling motion and then Marika Mendel is standing there in the center of their circle with a slightly sweaty face and a coat of birdskin bunched around her feet. She’s wearing a pair of gray slacks and a black silk top, totally unsuitable for salt water, and sunglasses with huge green plastic frames, and the dangling feather earrings that have been her trademark ever since Faith first met her at age twelve. Probably she flew straight from the reading, or whatever kind of reception-type deal they had afterwards, or so Faith imagines.

“Well,” Marika says, glancing at the cameras as she scoops up her skin. “Looks like I came to the right place.”

Faith shakes her head. “This guy, he only wants birds who are in the wrong place.”

“Bummer.” Like all of them, she has the trick of folding her skin neatly without any apparent effort; it’s now a cube in her hands barely the size of a Kleenex box.

Faith shouldn’t stare at it. She should introduce Marika around. She should do a lot of things, and despite her surprise, she does—makes the introductions, shows Marika to an empty cabin and a head where she can wash up, gives her a quick overview of the ship’s layout and where the life jackets are and when dinner is served. All the while, she feels as though her brain is drifting somewhere a few feet behind her, still marvelling.

“So, you inherited the skin,” she says when her brain finally catches back up.

Marika nods. “And so did Vivian, I hear.”

“That’s right.”

“But … ”

“But not me.”

“Seems like it would have been better the other way around, though.”

Faith can’t help but smile. “You haven’t changed.”

“Sure I have. I’ve gotten taller, for one thing.”

“I just heard the Marika who told Dr. Kravitz that her dad was just … what was it? … just fucked off that he couldn’t go around with a Japanese chick on his arm anymore.”

“I stand by the accuracy of that.”

“How is your dad?”

“Still not talking to me. Somehow, since the book came out, not talking to me even harder.”

“Yeah, Vivian said you wrote a book. What’s up with that?”

“Half memoir, half cultural survey, all sexy. At least according to Publishers Weekly.”

“Are you allowed to write half a memoir these days?”

“Oh indeed. One of the girls in my workshop was working on a project that was simultaneously about global warming and how her mother died of lung cancer. It was pretty good.”

“But not as sexy as yours.”

“Nothing’s as sexy as mine.”