“And if I weren’t a lady, I’d tell you how little I care about what you think.”
“Spoken like a Southern lady already,” Gibbes said as he ushered us out of the kitchen. “Before the end of the year you’ll probably be claiming that crabbing is a sport and that the season between summer and winter is football.”
I almost said that he wouldn’t know, since I doubted we’d still be seeing each other by then, but I didn’t. Not because I didn’t think it was true, but because he was looking at me in a different way than he’d done when we’d first met. Seeing me not as Cal’s unlikely wife, but somebody else. Anybody else.
We headed down Bay Street, crossing toward the water at the first light. The blue sky offered no respite from the relentless sun, and I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the heat. The long Maine winters seemed very far away, like a fading dream upon waking. Lying in bed at night, I sometimes imagined the icy taste of snow on my tongue. But then I’d hear the wind chimes and it would be gone, replaced with the tang of salt air.
“Did you know that if humans had the same metabolism as a hummingbird, we’d have to eat a hundred and fifty thousand calories a day?” Owen directed this at nobody in particular, but I thought it was probably meant for Maris.
She wore her blue sparkly sunglasses again, and with her pixie face she looked like an adorable bug when she turned to look at Owen. “We have hummingbird feeders off of our back porch and the little birds swarm all over them. You should come see it.”
He looked at me as if Maris had suddenly gone off script.
“Sounds like fun,” I interceded.
It was a weekday, so only a few boats were out on the water, the rest docked, bobbing up and down like babies rocked by the waves. I felt none of my fear there, the sun and heat making it easy to forget an icy storm and the freezing water beneath a bridge far away.
It was only when I felt my scar, or saw it when looking in a mirror, or when I found myself missing my mother, that I remembered. But each time the pain lessened, the scar tissue thickening. I’d overheard Loralee telling Owen that every time we remembered something, we weren’t remembering the event itself but the last time we’d remembered it. It was our way of creating filters between our past and present, creating what we chose to recall and what we’d rather forget. I hoped she was right. After knowing her for even such a short time, I’d begun to suspect that she was probably right about a lot of things.
It was ebb tide, the pluff mud exposed beyond the small seawall at the side of the marina’s parking lot. We walked along the edge, examining the mud and grass for signs of life.
At first glance it seemed still, the grass wilting in the direct onslaught of the sun, the puckered mud thirsting for water. Maris got down on her haunches, her tanned arms around her knees, and the rest of us followed. A flash of movement caught our attention as a tiny crab scrambled sideways from his hiding place by a rock to the thick forest of grass. One of his claws was more than twice the size of the other one, giving him a comic appearance. His lopsided appendages didn’t seem to hinder his movement, and he’d disappeared into the marsh within seconds.
“That’s a fiddler crab,” Maris announced. “Because his big claw makes him look like he’s playing a fiddle.”
Not to be outdone, Owen said, “Only the male fiddler crabs have the big claw, and if they lose the big one in a fight with another male, the smaller one swells up, and a little one grows where the big one used to be. They wave them around during mating season to attract females to their burrows so they can make baby fiddler crabs. That makes no sense to me, but that’s what it says in the science book I found in my room.” Owen pushed his glasses up on his nose.
Gibbes nudged me, but I didn’t dare look at him, because I was pretty sure I’d laugh hard enough to fall over into the mud. Instead we stayed where we were, looking for signs of life. “It’s amazing,” I said, watching the tiny crabs scuttle across the mud, their oddly shaped eyes watching us warily.
“What is?” asked Gibbes. “The fact that female fiddler crabs find oversize claws attractive?”
I pierced him with my “museum curator” look, which I’d once used on busloads of schoolchildren. Looking back at the mud, I said, “No. That something that seems so lifeless is actually teeming with life. If Owen hadn’t been telling me all that he’s learned about the marsh mud, I would have walked by without really looking.”
Gibbes stood, his eyes traveling across the water to the sound. “I didn’t figure that out until I got to med school.”
“What? That fiddler crabs have odd mating rituals?” I said it before I could think twice.