I descend the last set of stairs and find myself back on the beach I visited a few nights ago. I kick off my sandals. Ness and I both have our shelling bags, our hats pulled down tight against the breeze, the smell of sunscreen in the air. Scanning the beach, I see why the bay is so loud. The two jetties of rock—the natural one and the manmade one—funnel the sea up the beach. They also corral the noise, so you get the crash of the ocean as well as the echoes of those crashes. Sound waves pile up like sea waves, overlapping and amplifying. In an east swell, I imagine the break here is amazing. It makes me wish I’d brought my board.
“So did the sea take the homes that used to lie along here, or did you?” I ask Ness. It’s an honest question, but it sounds harsh now that it’s out in the air. As if I mean to say that, either way, his family had a part in clearing out whatever beach communities used to lie here, either by purchase or by environmental ruin.
“The sea took them,” Ness says. “We like to build on the edge, don’t we? Right on the edge of disaster. Because if we don’t, it leaves room for someone else to build between us and whatever it is we desire. We’re all like Icarus in that way.” Ness points toward the natural jetty to the south. “Let’s walk the shell line this way.”
“Icarus flew too close to the sun,” I point out. “That story is about ambition.”
“The story is about understanding nature’s limits,” Ness claims. “It’s about craving more than we can possess. It’s about ego. And don’t forget, it was the sea that killed him. Not the sun. Icarus drowned.”
A periwinkle catches my eye. I stoop to pick it up and add it to my bag.
“There’s a better one just over there,” Ness tells me. He points an impossible distance away. I can’t tell if he sees the shell or if he knows it’s there from being down on the beach earlier that day. I inspect my specimen. It’s the finest shell I’ve picked off a beach in years. The lip is cracked, the crown chipped, a hole straight through the apex, and the interior is dull from too much time in the sun. But it’s gorgeous. Rare. I slip it into the bag.
“A week from now, you’ll step right over that shell,” Ness tells me.
“I hope you’re wrong,” I say. “I don’t want to ever get like that.”
He shrugs. I see a nutmeg and an auger. Both worn. I wonder how long they’ve been bouncing along on this beach, no one here to pick them up, to rescue them.
“Are you old enough to remember when everyone had shelling stories?” Ness asks.
“I’m not much younger than you,” I say. “But thanks for asking.”
He turns and smiles at me. I have to remind myself that his family made their fortune by ruining the world. And while the rest of us agonized over the floods and the erosion and news of every sea life extinction, Ness was at a fancy college, rowing boats, getting into trouble, always smiling, always having a good time, not a care in the world. I am constantly reminding myself of this around him. My story is not going to change. I’m just here to write a second story, the story of the lace murexes.
“So, I have a theory on why we don’t hear shelling stories like we used to,” he says. “Why those stories suddenly stopped a few decades ago.”
“You mean because shells have become vanishingly rare? Because sea life is going extinct?” I stop myself from spelling out the ecological disaster that led to this. Or pointing out that most people don’t have gas-burning cars in their garages any more.
“Good shells have been hard to find for a long time, but when the fad hit, and the magazines for collectors came out, and the stupid shows hit cable TV—the Shell Hunters, Diving for Sand Dollars, all that nonsense—there was a flurry of boasts, but then everyone clammed up. No pun intended.”
“Lightning whelk,” I say, retrieving a half-buried shell and seeing that only the lip is chipped. A stunning specimen. I put it in the higher pocket of my shelling bag so it doesn’t rub against any of the others.
“Nice find,” Ness says. He seems sincere. I note he has yet to pick up a shell. The wind catches the end of his empty bag and twists it and flaps it around. “And then News Journal did their big piece about the value of shells, and within weeks, they all seemed to disappear.” Ness snaps his fingers. “Which isn’t possible. What really happened, I think, is that everyone shut up about their finds. Not just where they found them, but that they’d found anything at all. It was about this time that people started calling what you and I do the latest Dutch Tulip Craze.”
I notice that he lumps us together, me and him, as if our shelling is anything alike.
“People were getting up at four in the morning, three in the morning, two in the morning, and grabbing every shell they could scoop up. Shells kept rolling in, but someone would be there immediately to take them. Nobody trusted anyone else not to follow them to their favorite spot. You remember when just a handful of cars by a remote beach would cause rumors and then traffic jams?”