22. Atticus
ATTICUS
The jet banks north and slips past the old Spanish fort that guards San?Juan harbor.
Stone ramparts look soot-gray in the lowering light, and the sea glitters like hammered tin around them.
I watch the coastline unfold—a belt of hotels, billboards, and pastel suburbs—right up until the wheels kiss the runway.
Then the cabin jolts and the engines reverse, and the panorama shrinks to concrete and hangars.
Inside the terminal, tropical air rolls through the open doors and slides under my collar.
It smells like jet exhaust, asphalt, and something sweet I can’t name—maybe gardenias, maybe overripe fruit stacked somewhere behind the customs hall.
My linen shirt sticks to my spine in under a minute.
Atlanta humidity prepares a man for a lot, but not for Caribbean humidity that carries the same weight as a wet towel.
A car service picks me up. A silver SUV, air-conditioning already blasting away the unseasonable February heat wave.
The driver, a trim man in his fifties, has his hands at ten and two, eyes forward, no small talk.
I’m grateful. I’ve rehearsed what I will say to James and Cynthia Howard at least a dozen times, and every rehearsal ends with me staring at the windshield, speechless.
I’m not a tourist here. I’m a spy.
The ride east shows me suburbs that look half-familiar—chain stores, bus benches—but then the road cuts inland and the world turns wild.
Hills rise green and sudden, like damp velvet throw pillows tossed on a hardwood floor.
Storm clouds crouch over the ridgeline. Each time the sun slides under them, the light changes color—copper for half a mile, then raw pewter, then blinding gold.
I keep thinking, This is the light she grew up under . The colors, the vibrancy. How could she leave it behind for Atlanta?
Not that I don’t love my city. I do. But this is another world. Breathtaking, in all the right ways.
But I did my overdue research. I should have looked into it sooner. A hurricane wiped out the tiny, Puerto Rico–adjacent island she lived on. I don’t imagine it’s easy to get past that.
The Howards maintain a bare-bones field office in a rented cottage near Fajardo. The cottage sits back from a two-lane road at the edge of a mangrove inlet. Its siding, once white, is now the color of stale cream. A single porch light burns even though dusk is still an hour away.
I step from the SUV and crunch across the white shell gravel. The air smells of mud, salt, and mosquito coils. Something buzzes in the underbrush—cicadas, maybe, or frogs. When I lift my hand to knock, the door opens first.
Cynthia Howard stands framed by yellow lamplight.
She’s tall and spare, sun-bleached rosy hair pinned at the nape of her neck.
She wears a button-down shirt three shades lighter than her driftwood tan and a pair of hiking pants patched at the knee.
Her eyes are hazel, exactly like her daughter’s, and they study me without blinking.
“Mr. Copeland,” she says.
“Atticus, please. It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Howard.”
“Call me Cindy.” She smiles and steps back so I can enter.
The place is half living room, half laboratory.
Two tables sag under plastic tubs labeled reef rubble and clam spat.
A freezer, chest-high, solar-powered, throbs in the corner.
James Howard is bent over a microscope in the kitchenette, peering at a petri dish.
He rises and offers his right hand. His left arm is a thing of beauty—a prosthetist’s wet dream of titanium and creativity.
He gives me the firm handshake of a man who works primarily with bone and shell. “Thank you for coming,” he says. His voice hints at New England buried under years of Caribbean wind.
I set my duffel by the door. Inside are grant papers, a laptop, and two bottles of water I packed out of habit.
We sit on mismatched wooden chairs in what used to be a dining room.
The Howards pour room-temperature water into tin cups.
I can feel the house exhaling evening heat.
Somewhere behind the cottage, a generator coughs to life.
James speaks first. He explains the current state of their research—less than two hundred live clams in the refuge lagoon, only thirty of breeding size. A bacterial blight that scrapes calcium from the shells faster than they can lay it down has been ravaging the population.
Cindy explains, “The hurricane stripped the lagoon’s seagrass and dumped silt so deep the juvenile clams suffocated.
” She sighs deeply. “We restocked by hand, one specimen at a time. It’s slow going, obviously, but we’ve done all we can do at this point.
We need funding for a floating nursery cage, a bank of solar panels, and a cold-storage van to hold tissue samples before they reach the university lab across the island.
The foundation we originally worked for had to reallocate funds after Hurricane Becker. ”
He chimes in, “They believe our work, though valuable, is too risky to fund in perpetuity. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Places like this, species like this, they’re always going to be risky to support. High risk, high reward.”
Cindy sketches a diagram on the back of a shipping manifest. “The nursery would consist of three cages, each the size of a child’s wading pool, anchored at different depths so the clams can be moved as the seasons change.”
“How have you been funding the continued mission until now?”
They share a wan smile. He says, “Partially through donors like you, partially our own savings.”
Ouch.
I notice a row of photographs tacked to the wall above her shoulder.
One shows Thalassa at maybe ten, hair in a bun, crouched on a sandbar and grinning.
Another shows her at seventeen, lifting a basket of shells onto a dinghy.
That one stops me. Her face is open, fearless, unaware that in four months, a category-four storm will steal her map of the world.
I grip my tin cup tighter. The metal warms in my hand.
When they finish, silence swells, but the cicadas outside fill it. I reach into my messenger bag and extract a sealed envelope. The wax is still unbroken; the imprint is a stylized nautilus. I slide it across the table.
“I’d like to fund your next phase.”
James glances at Cynthia. She opens the envelope carefully, like it might hiss. The letter inside lays out an eighteen-month grant—eight hundred thousand dollars, renewable, no strings beyond quarterly reports and open access to the data. She reads it twice.
“This is a lot of money for such a small project.” When she looks up, her eyes glimmer but do not water. “Why us?”
I take a breath. The ceiling fan clicks overhead, beating warm air against my scalp.
“Because your work is important,” I say.
It is the truth. It’s not the whole truth.
The whole truth is a girl with hazel eyes and a voice that cracked when she asked if we would still be there even if she ended the pregnancy. But I can’t mention that yet.
I need to know who they are.
James folds the letter. The carbon-fiber fingers do not slip. “This changes everything,” he says. The words fall flat, not dramatic, more like an engineer noting a variable.
She adds, “We need to speak with our collaborators. Equipment orders can take months.”
I can’t tell if they’re happy or trepidatious. “Understood.”
She swallows, eyeing me carefully. “There are no stipulations about control on your end of the grant. What are your intentions with the island?”
“To preserve what’s there. Fragile ecosystems need protection. Your clam is a keystone species, providing food for seabirds and keeping the water clean. If we don’t protect those elements of every island, every shore, then the world will collapse.”
As I speak, James nods along, but Cindy appears unmoved. We sit in the whir of the fan for another minute. Then she rises. “Dinner?”
Dinner consists of rice, steamed plantains, and a pot of what they call bean soup but looks and tastes like survival distilled. Beans, garlic, some shredded leaf I can’t name. The salt clings to the wooden spoon. I eat two bowls, and I don’t even try to stop myself from asking for a third.
James laughs softly when I wipe the third empty bowl with a piece of plantain. “Works, doesn’t it?”
“It works,” I agree.
After I help wash the dishes, we move to the back porch. The air is cooler now. The mangrove inlet reflects gunmetal clouds lit orange at the edges by sunset. Mosquitoes swirl under the porch lamp, and James lights a coil.
The conversation turns lighter, and I’m still unsure if they want the grant money. James appears more open to it than Cindy, and I get the impression she’s in control of these things. But they’re both polite and friendly, and the night is beautiful.
The generator thumps again. The porch light flickers. Rain begins—slow drops the size of quarters that burst on the railings and leave soundless craters in the dust. I think of the pools back at the mansion and how Thalassa avoids them.
For her, water means memory, and memory can drown you.
I drive back to my motel—three rooms deep, rusted key hook, a window unit that coughs cold air. It was the best I could do on such short notice. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
The truth is, I wanted to see Puerto Rico from Thalassa’s viewpoint, not a billionaire’s who can afford anything he wants.
I sit on the bedspread and pull the shell fragment from my breast pocket. The lavender is deeper under the bedside lamp, almost bruise purple. I turn it over. The inside is pearl white, smooth except for a curl of calcium at the hinge.
I imagine handing it to her. Will she smile? Will she cry? Will she be angry at me for what I’ve done? Maybe is the only answer I can conjure.
The ceiling fan blades beat out of balance.
I lie back. The shell pools warmth in my palm.
When I close my eyes, heat lightning flashes behind the lids.
I remember the hurricane I watched on the news, safely inland, while Serena coughed out the last of her breath in a hospital bed. Storms everywhere.
I think love is a thing that rebuilds, if you let it. My mind drifts to the memories of those days with Serena in the hospital. How much I loved her. How falling for Thalassa shouldn’t feel like betrayal, even if it does in small ways. Sleep takes me like an undertow.
I wake before dawn. The air smells of wet dust and coffee drifting from somewhere beyond the parking lot. Dew beads on cars like sweat. I take a rideshare to the airport, watching the sea glitter in early morning light, a thin band of hammered silver.
On the plane, the seat belt buckle clicks. The engine spools. I reach into my pocket and curl my fingers around the shell shard. It feels lighter now, as if hope can affect mass.
The plane lifts. Through the window, Puerto?Rico shrinks to a pattern of green ridges and blue bays. Her home, once upon a time, when she was a princess of the sea. I hope she gets her fairy-tale ending.