“I remember,” I say. “My dad used to wake us up in the middle of the night, say he got a tip from a friend, or just had a feeling, or that some storm had just hit the beach, and we’d get dressed, grab our bags and flashlights, and jump in the car. It was the only time he let me eat fast food. That’s what I remember the most, when I was young. Breakfast biscuits in the middle of the night.”
The memory is so clear: my mom and dad in the front seat, me and my sister leaning up between them, my mom telling us to buckle up. I pretend to study the sand, lowering myself to one knee, and wipe my eyes.
“It was twenty years before the shells really thinned out,” Ness says. “I mean, they were dying off before. The reefs were dying long before that. Have you ever been to the Great Barrier Reef?”
“No,” I say.
“You should go. Everyone should, as soon as they can. I went when the reefs were at ten percent of their former glory, and I remember thinking before I flew down there, ‘Why bother?’ But you should have seen the reefs then. And if you wait another ten years, you’ll kick yourself for not seeing them now.” Ness points toward something a dozen paces away. “Imperial venus. Still intact. But you’re more of a gastropod girl than a bivalve, aren’t you?”
I find the shell he’s referring to. The two halves are still joined by a sturdy hinge. Shades of pink slide into ivory white. I slide the gorgeous shell into the padded bivalve pouch along the lip of my bag. “I like both,” I say. “I’ve always loved shells. And I can see your point. My dad got real secretive about our favorite shelling spots. And I remember him and my mom arguing about whether it made more sense to stay up until one in the morning or go to sleep early and set alarms for two. It got crazy there for a few years.”
“Exactly. But even my grandfather had memories like that. Back in the eighties, people still got up early on vacation to beat their neighbors down to the beach. Shellers watched the tides. And my dad used to tell me about snorkelers beyond the breakers when he was a kid, swimmers trailing bags of finds behind them—”
“And now people use subs and cranes,” I say. “They mine for them like minerals. They use abandoned oil platforms. Takes the romance out of it, don’t you think?”
Ness inspects a shell on the beach, then places it back where he found it. “I think it can,” he admits. “But not always. One of the most romantic places I’ve ever seen was a gem mine. The way the walls sparkled in our flashlights. Water dripping everywhere. It was industrial, sure, but it was intensely beautiful.”
All I can imagine is it being intense. Overbearing. Then again, the sea is throwing up walls of foam right beside me, roaring like a great, incessant engine, churning up the waters and depositing small finds upon the beach. To me, nothing gets more romantic, more hauntingly lovely, than this setting right here, and yet the surf can be a dangerous and deadly place.
“I don’t want to skip ahead,” I say, “but I’m guessing the murexes didn’t wash up here.”
“This is the first stage of shelling,” Ness says. “Walking the tideline. Picking through whatever is deposited here. The history of what we’ve done to the sea can be told in where we do our shelling. It started on the beach, where a distant abundance of life allowed shells to leak out at the edges. There used to be so much life that it appeared where it was never meant to. You need to see this to understand how my journey started. Because it started with an idea.”
“What idea is that?” I ask.
Ness stops and turns to me. The wind toys with the brim of his hat. He holds up a shell for a moment before tossing it back to the beach. “You and me,” he says. “We collect dead things.”
16
I used to tell Michael until his ears bled all the ways that shelling is the greatest metaphor for relationships. I told him this a thousand times, back when we were married. He got sick of hearing it, but I have hundreds of examples, and now here’s one more: Be careful of the bounty you pine for.
This came to me after my first day of shelling with Ness, which was both the best day of shelling that I’ve ever had and also the most disappointing. Maybe disappointing is the wrong word. How about unsatisfying.
Just as with relationships, you think you know what you want, but once you have it, the hole you thought it would fill is that much bigger. The want is what exists, not the thing we lust after.