Epilogue — Noah
Not much. It was dark; there were extenuating factors.
Eighty-seven hatchlings came boiling up out of the sand like the ground itself had decided on the ocean, this churning little stampede of determined idiots the size of poker chips, all of them hauling for the surf line under a sky with no moon because Abby chose this beach for its lighting ordinance, which she wrote, which the county passed because it was cheaper than continuing the meetings.
She ran the whole hatch like a boat crew.
Delgado on the north flank with his personally purchased red headlamp, weeping openly, zero shame, exactly as forecast. Mrs. Pruitt in a lawn chair above the wrack line calling encouragement to individual turtles.
Marnie, Gus, Kayla in her cleats—right feet this time—the knee-replacement charter captain, half of Flamingo Bingo.
Every one of them recruited over one summer by one woman with a pamphlet supply and no concept of a stranger, all of them standing quiet in the dark, exactly where she put them, guarding a mile of open beach.
Turns out you can hold a mile with volunteers, if you’re her.
“Status?” she called.
“All hands away,” I said, and my voice did something on away, and Delgado blew his nose like a foghorn and ruined the moment, and she laughed the laugh, the full-tilt collapse, and came up the beach and into my chest, sandy, salt-smelling, mine.
Later, after the crowd dispersed and Mrs. Pruitt’s lawn chair was stowed and the beach was just beach again, the two of us walked the tide line alone, red lamps off, night vision earned.
She was quiet—her version of quiet, which is a lower word count, not an absence—and at the pier she stopped and looked back at the dark dune line, the empty crater of nest 41, sixty-some days of her summer emptied into the sea in thirty-eight minutes.
“They won’t remember any of it,” she said.
“That’s the part that gets me every season.
The lights, the volunteers, the ordinance, the—none of it.
They’ll just be out there for thirty years, and one night the females come back to this exact beach like it’s written in them, and they won’t know a single name of anybody who stood here in the dark making sure the door was open. ”
“That’s not a complaint,” I said, because I know her grammar now.
“No.” She leaned back into me, my chin finding the top of her head, the fit of us settled law by now. “It’s the whole point. Best things I’ll ever do, nobody’s going to remember either.” A pause, and then, because she can’t not: “Except the water tower. Gus says the mural guy comes Thursday.”
I’ve seen the sketch. There’s a turtle on it the size of a Buick. There is also, allegedly, a small figure on the pier that Gus swears is “generic maritime personnel” and is wearing, unmistakably, tactical pants.
That was three weeks ago. This morning, the last Saturday of summer, she’s on our porch at dawn—cottage lease renewed through the year; Mrs. Pruitt cried, then denied it, then made pie—wearing my sweatshirt and a t-shirt of unknown content underneath, drinking her coffee, watching the light come up over the dunes.
Her grant closed out yesterday. Final report filed: reef recovery documented, cache-dump damage assessed and already healing, one smuggling network entered into the permanent scientific record as anthropogenic disturbance, resolved.
The journal wants the coral paper by Christmas.
The court wants her twice next spring; the federal prosecutor calls her “our best witness” in the tone of a man who has learned to just let the staghorn testimony happen.
And the Gulf Coast Marine Conservation Alliance wants her as their new field research director, based out of a two-room office above the bait shop, starting October 1st.
She said yes Tuesday. She told me Wednesday, casual, mid-dinner, between the salad and an anecdote about Carl—“oh, also, I’m staying forever, can you pass the bread”—because she’d known for a month she was staying and assumed I’d worked it out from context.
From context. I’d spent August quietly pricing what it would cost to move a maritime security career to whatever coast her next grant landed on.
Had a folder. Had a spreadsheet, three tabs.
She found the spreadsheet Thursday. She’s framed the first tab. It’s in the hallway.
“You made a pivot table,” she says now, from the rocking chair, apropos of nothing, because she can read this memory happening on my face. It’s her favorite artifact in the house. “For love. A pivot table for love.”
“It was a relocation cost analysis.”
“Column F was titled ’Abby factors.’”
“Drink your coffee, Doc.”
She grins into her mug. Carl—a pelican, some pelican, the pelican, I’ve surrendered the taxonomy—planes in and takes up his post on the porch rail like he’s got the watch. She says he does, actually. Says he’s my relief.
Down the lane, the town’s waking up. Gus’s truck. The smell of Marnie’s first batch riding the offshore breeze. Somewhere out past the point, the reef is doing its patient work, polyp by polyp, conditions holding.
“So I’ve been thinking,” Abby says, in the exact tone she used before the porch light got rewired, before the county ordinance, before every single improvement to my life she’s ever perpetrated, “about your vacation.”
“My what?”
“Your vacation, Noah. Noun. From the Latin vacare, to be empty, which is fitting, because your entire leave balance is sitting there empty and Rafi says—direct quote—’if you can get him off this dock I’ll pay for the flights myself.
’” She sets down the mug, and out from under the rocking chair, where it has clearly been staged since before dawn, because I live with a tactician now, comes the small whiteboard.
The travel whiteboard. It has four colors of marker on it.
“You made a whiteboard.”
“I made an itinerary matrix.” She turns it around, thrumming with it, bare feet up on the rail next to a supervising pelican, hair escaping the pencil in the sunrise, the loudest, brightest, best thing on any coast of any ocean.
“Option one: Baja. Gray whale season, whale sharks if we time it right, there’s a research station that owes me a favor.
Option two: Bonaire, reef diving, extremely romantic, marred only slightly by the fact that I’d be low-key auditing their staghorn program the whole time—”
“Low-key.”
“Option three, and hear me out, because this one’s a wild card—” she taps the third column, where, in green marker, boxed, double-underlined, it says MICHIGAN?
??—“freshwater. October. Your mom’s birthday is in October; you mentioned it in June, one time, fifteen words, and yes, obviously I wrote it down. ”
The porch goes quiet, the good quiet, the kind with her in it. Carl shifts his weight. The sun clears the dune line and lays itself out gold across the boards, all the way to her bare feet.
Somewhere in my kit bag, in the pouch where the compass lives, there’s a sticky note that’s been riding along since June, and next to it, as of last Tuesday, there’s a ring box, and the plan was Baja, or Bonaire, or honestly the beach four hundred yards from this porch—the plan has nine contingencies and she hasn’t found the spreadsheet for it yet, and standing here in the sunrise watching her argue for my mother’s birthday, I nearly scrap all nine and go get it right now.
Not yet. She’s got a job to start and a paper to write, and I’ve got a question to ask on a dawn beach in October, in a state shaped like a mitten, with my mother in on the operation and a whiteboard of my own for once.
“You’re doing the face,” Abby says, watching me over the matrix. “The classified face. What’s classified?”
“Vacation request,” I say. “Submitting it Monday. Option three.”
She lights up like the harbor on the Fourth—and then immediately narrows her eyes, because she’s her. “That was too easy. You agreed in under ten words. What’s in Michigan?”
“Freshwater,” I say. “You’ll see.”
“NOAH FACTS, item eleven: withholds intel, smiles about it.” But she’s already re-capping the green marker, already planning, already talking—flights and field guides and whether Carl can be trusted to supervise Delgado’s watering of the fern, mile a minute, sunrise in her hair, forever, if the operation goes to plan.
I lean against the rail, coffee in hand, pelican at my post, and listen to my whole life talk.
I don’t say much. She’s got it covered.
But for the record—entered into evidence, dated, initialed, countersigned: I’m smiling. On purpose. Nobody had to write it on a protein bar or anything.