The Shell Thief

SHARON KIRSCH

Her father gathered shells on the Gulf Coast of Florida, not on Sanibel, like most everyone else, but near Sarasota, where his elder brother, a retired medical administrator, had bought a condominium overlooking the water. While the elder brother watched National Geographic shows about the marine environment, the younger scanned the beach for shells, rising early to squelch competitors. Some years during his annual visit, man o’ war infested the beach and he’d be forced to retreat indoors.

She’d never asked her father why he searched so relentlessly for shells. If she had, he might have rolled his eyes, countering with, “She sells seashells by the seashore.” He’d been an older father, fiftyfive when she was born, grey and balding from as early as she could remember. She’d lost him several years ago, when she was young. She still was young.

Her father’s gathering and hoarding of shells thrust temporarily onto the sand had seemed instinctive—how a grey jay collects and tucks seeds into the bark of a birch tree or a fox confides a limp weasel to its cache. But seashells didn’t rate as food, not in any ordinary understanding. By the time she was old enough to ponder her father’s motives, he was expelling peas from his nose, the effect of a neurological disease that played havoc with the muscles in his throat.

The prettiness of her father’s shell arrangements belied their origins as the hard parts of dead animals. He did not, in the way of some female collectors, glue scallop shells to the rims of mirrors or string pierced bivalves along fishing nylon to make bracelets or necklaces. Instead, he arranged his shells artfully in glass pasta jars and Perspex boxes. That he was colour-blind carried no deficit. The hues of his shells, from dusty charcoal to milky coffee to the sleek off-whiteness of a lychee fruit, were of lesser interest, the shape and feel more primary. Spikes, humps, cylinders, ridges, cones, globes, sinews—these formed the essence of his arrangements. Her aunt had once told her that her father was a sensual man.

That same winter of her aunt’s pronouncement, there’d been a power cut for several days. Her father had enfolded himself in a down sleeping

bag in the frozen house, resisting pleas from her aunt and mother to shelter with a cousin whose supply was running steadier at dips and sags. The young woman’s parents had been enjoined by birth to the forty-ninth parallel. Only a decade later, her mother remote, her father dead, had she discovered in herself a yearning to travel south.

She didn’t share her father’s commitment to shells and here in Central America had procured just one—a tulip shell no bigger than the tip of her smallest finger. She’d come across many such shells, always close to the tidemark and inhabited by flexible creatures whose movements left ever-vanishing lines in the sand. This one, unusually, was unoccupied. She removed the tulip from the deserted beach, where a great black hawk had settled on the tallest coconut palm, and emerald and black swallowtail moths hovered in numbers by trees that marked the abrupt start of the jungle. She’d been warned to watch her valuables.

She walked for nearly a half-hour through the jungle, startled only by the assertive rustling of howler monkeys in the canopy overhead. It was mid-morning and hot enough for lizards. High up where hidden orchids grew, a mother monkey leapt from one treetop to another, unfolding her infant from her back, then wrapping its soft limbs around a strangler fig. A woodcreeper, its feathers the brown of cocoa pods, probed a knothole in silence. The young woman fingered the tulip shell in her pocket—for her dead father, at once an offering and a tribute. She planned to transport the shell to her frozen country and lay it on her father’s grave.

The maids she found tidying her casita at the eco-lodge were older than she, more finely boned and redolent of orange blossom cleaner. “Hola,” she said, her throat dry from having spoken to no one since the night before.

“Bueno,” they replied, giggling a little but not unkindly, and before she could summon more Spanish, they’d gone, the wheels of their trolley striking hard against the pebbles on the path.

She was alone in Central America, and like so many her age, made anxious by a false start, fearful of a dead end. Her boyfriend had broken up with her (“too much gristle, not enough fat”). Her boss at the shawarma stand had fired her for inattention. She had a life sciences degree but no prospects and was in Central America courtesy of her mother, for whom wire transfers of money came easier than declarations of love.

After her father’s death, her mother had met another man, a geographer, and followed him to Australia, a country about which her

mother had produced a scrapbook while still a girl. Wallabies favour rough outcrops and stony ground, her mother had written in her best cursive hand. Rock wallabies are denizens of boulders, cliffs and rocky hills. The young woman’s father had been unwilling to travel to the South Pacific.

Within minutes of arriving back at the casita, she was obliged to question her own astuteness, for the tulip shell had begun to stink. A fetid, salty smell, akin to the guano of cormorants. She held up the shell between her thumb and pointer finger, searching the aperture for a foot, an operculum, tentacles—anything that could signal rot or vitality. No mollusk volunteered itself. On the outside, the shell’s linear pattern of concentric circles looked as though it could go on forever but near the apex became exploded and, finally, invisible.

Her father, too, had gathered his shells near the tide line. She’d always believed them to be empty until one day she surprised him in his underwear in the Florida kitchen boiling a whelk alive. He’d looked at her over his bare shoulder, not guilty, but angry. “What are you doing?” she asked, more a repudiation than a question.

“Christ, you’re nosy,” he said. “I’d never marry a woman like you.” Years later, when he lay dying, she’d realize his shoulder was the only part of him that hadn’t aged.

She rinsed out the shell and placed it on the stone patio in front of her casita. The next morning, after maid service, the tulip had migrated back indoors, arranged dead centre on a folded towel. Methodically, she restored the shell to its designated place on the patio, beside a pair of recently acquired sneakers that were as bright an orange as the beak of a keel-billed toucan. Then she boarded a bus to a neighbouring village, where the food promised to be more varied. She was tiring of the same fare night after night. Gallo pinto. Beans and rice.

At the new settlement, she claimed a rare empty table in an open-air cafe frequented by tourists and expatriates. Beside her, a middle-aged woman wearing a scarf emblazoned with posies and daggers reached for her cellphone.

“I must take this,” the woman said in French to her companions. “A buyer from Germany.” On the plate before her, non-pestilent flies began to light on the shrimp in lime reduction. “Guten abend,” she said, easing a plantain chip into her mouth. “Sicher, I think we can bargain them down.”

At another table, a pair of retirees berated their guacamole. “I’m schvitzing,” said the woman, “and these tomatoes are overripe.”

Her husband, too, appeared moist, except for his knees, mottled with the drying peel of psoriasis. “Just eat the goddamn thing,” he said. His hibiscus shirt was un-ironed.

“Your virgin Bloody Mary, Madam.” The server waved the misted glass in front of the realtor.

“Thank you.” The estate agent spoke English to the Spanish waitress, German to the prospect on Western European Time. “Wunderbar!”

She speared her Picholine olive with conviction. “Send me the SWIFT Code, ja? I’ll submit your offer today. Je vous promets.”

The young woman ordered a cheese sandwich, wondering whether she herself would ever bid on property, and if so, what entitlements came with ownership. The right of refusal? The privilege of being adversarial? The licence to destroy? All her life she’d wanted to say no,

but to what, she’d felt unsure.

Right this moment, she wanted to say no to the estate agent, whose too-loud voice and ambitions, surfeit of jewelry and withering décolleté, were absurdly linked to the cleared lots and proliferating foundations on the once-lush slope within view of the cafe. Instead, she reserved judgment for the cheese sandwich.

Yes, she’d take a bite.

She spent several more days at her jungle casita, feeding, like a white-crowned parrot, on guava, papaya, and banana. Each morning she placed the offending shell outside, each afternoon she recovered it back indoors.

A party of Frenchmen arrived. They were abundant and unselfconsciously loud in the way of animals that rank neither as predator nor prey. C’est quoi le nom de cet hôtel? Gerrard, peux-tu me faire une photo? Mon Dieu, que j’ai faim! They barely noticed her, these men, all of them indifferent to her narrow hips and hair the colour of pampas grass. Some had impertinently thrusting bellies they made no effort to camouflage. The young woman didn’t wish to feed amid this congregation of men, preferring to wait until they’d left the dining room. Then, instead of the neatly apportioned plate of salad followed by tilapia with gallo pinto, the two even scoops of coffee ice cream, she had to settle for a buffet made untidy by their voraciousness. She reflected on the irony that not they, but she, was the vulture, the one who must satisfy her-

self with the detritus. She understood now why her mother had abandoned biology for marriage.

Only the next day, when the Frenchmen had gone, did the manager point out to her the slaty-tailed trogon perched in a nearby tree. The dining area faced straight into the jungle, and what you saw or didn’t depended on how hard you were looking. The bird had its back to her, a trait common to trogons when they are being observed.

That night, her final one at the casita, the young woman lay on top of soaked sheets watching the shadows of salamanders on the teak ceiling. There were several, to her eye identical in size, and she wondered whether they were sister and brother, parent and child, or merely opportunists that shared a hunting ground. Her father’s shell lay silent outside. In spite of her father’s brusqueness, she’d never doubted his love for her. Her random appearance so late in his life had not been unlike the chance finding of a shell lodged in the sand. He’d guarded her fiercely, understanding his tenure would be short.

Before she was born, and before her father really died, he’d almost died. It was during the Second World War, when he’d landed with the Royal Winnipegs on Juno Beach and took a sliver of shrapnel in the leg. Shrapnel—not a shell, but a by-product of shelling. Her father retained two mementos from that day, a scar on his right shin and a medicine bottle filled with sand. She and her mother had acquired the sand while attending a D-Day re-enactment at Juno Beach. Her father himself had elected to stay home, giving by way of excuse the need to encourage his runner beans and to tend the neon tetras in his aquarium. When his daughter had presented him with the sand, he’d said only, “I hear it’s full of condominiums now. It wasn’t like that when I landed.”

A decade before his death, and at her mother’s urging, her father had drained the aquarium. In it, he’d arranged his largest and most splendid shell specimens side by side, like a Dutch still life painting in which narcissus and rose flower in unison. All those shells the young woman still had. She’d thought at length about reconstructing the dry arrangement—even the matchbook-sized “No Swimming” sign—but then on impulse donated the aquarium and its freshwater filter to Goodwill.

The desk clerk overseeing check-out from the lodge requested that everyone sign the guest book or, better still, post an accolade online.

Comments from other guests were made available for inspiration:

Awesome! Epiphytes on our pillows and a complimentary mango at turndown.

Great stay in the Heliconia cabin. Only downside, a nearby flower smelled like poo. They told us it was dracontium (?), good for attracting pollinator flies. LOL!

First rate, except for the scorpion in the shower.

The young woman was reticent by nature and, in withholding comment, favoured a stance more mollusk than human. Shells, she was aware, were a do-it-yourself venture, secreted by the mantle layer of the mollusk’s own body to shelter the visceral mass, including the heart and other organs. The inhabitants of shells forged their own hospitality. Praise would therefore amount to self-satisfaction, criticism to self-recrimination.

She didn’t look back as the mini-bus pulled away from the eco-lodge. Her bags had been tossed to the rear of the van while the tulip shell rested in her lap. The smell was less rank now, and at the next hotel, her last in Central America, she deposited this token for her father on the patio table. Soon after, she locked the door to her room and went for a walk on the grounds.

After she’d observed the black and white goats browsing in the orange grove, the young woman strolled through the botanic garden, bright with pink and red Heliconias, then made her way into the jungle. In a rare clearing, a blue morpho butterfly rose from the path in a jerky flight, its wingspan as wide as a white-throated sparrow’s, its blue iridescence as startling as the sudden reflection of sun off steel. She happened upon a secret waterfall emptying into a perfectly still pool, heard the territorial gurgle of the oropendola bird, discovered a dead swallowtail moth or butterfly, the spiked tips of its bifurcated tail intact, its eyes the black of nigella seeds. The papery wings were the palest celadon with a dark tracery interrupted by a single streak of crimson. Her tulip shell appeared drab in contrast.

She possessed many shells, all of them the legacy of her father. Some, the studied arrangements under glass or Perspex, she’d displayed in the bathroom or kitchen of her studio apartment; others, boxes of unsorted tulips, bivalves and whelks, she’d stashed away in drawers. After her father’s death, she gave several boxes of the more ordinary shells to a friend who taught primary school in a poor immigrant neighbourhood. Many of the children’s parents were littoral in

origin—from Southern India, Malaysia, Uruguay—but for their offspring, sitting in the sandbox with the borrowed shells would furnish the only experience of their parents’ birthright. The young woman’s friend shared some of the students’ names with her. “They are called Motoo Itani, Alejandro Putamente, Shiana Chungisiriariuk,” she said, delicately articulating each one as if it were breakable. She’d also entrusted the children with the young woman’s name: Sybil. At this, they’d laughed uproariously, astounded that an adult could have but one name and with so few embellishments. The young woman wasn’t present for the introduction. She’d inherited many shells but engaged with few.

When the first owl butterfly landed tentatively beside her orange sneakers, she understood that it would soon be dark. She climbed the slope back to the main path, found her room and unlocked it, thinking all the while how a butterfly larva was soft like a mollusk, but with a different outcome. Pleased with this insight, she slid open the glass doors to the patio. She was high up on a slope overlooking the remote lights of a capital city, so high that for an instant a soaring black vulture met her eye and she was confronted with the ridged grey of its orbital skin, like dried lava. A melodious blackbird, until recently a species of farther north, let loose its jaunty song. In the villa next door, separated from her own by a strip of grass, she overheard a family arguing in Spanish, the small boy’s loudening demands, Lo puedo ver? Lo puedo ver? His mother’s deeper-pitched denial, Silencio, está cerrado!

She was surprised to discover in the lee of the patio wall a clear plastic bag swollen with air, an item not there, she was certain, when she’d first stepped into this space. She remembered a similar bag from the film American Beauty, a symbol, she imagined, for something that could not be told. She glanced at the patio table. Her shell was gone.

Earlier on this extended trip, on a Caribbean island, she’d voluntarily surrendered the most exquisite shell she’d ever find—a champion for which she’d had no name, as delicately curled as a shaving of carrot, the nacre as changeable in colour as the skin of a rainbow trout. She’d touched it only once, to throw it back into the surf, a shell of such distinction that it deserved not to be owned. Even with its compact unbroken spines as curved and sharp as cats’ claws, it would have proved defenceless against thieves. But the more modest shell now in her possession, the tulip, she mustn’t lose. This shell belonged to

her dead father, and in all likelihood—and in spite of her honourable motives—she’d murdered its occupant.

She half-ran, half-walked to reception. “I’m missing something,” she told the barely-adult desk clerk. “From Room 28, Roosting Egret.”

The clerk, who’d been trimming her cuticles, became suddenly alert. She tightened her scrunchie. She pulled out the grounds plan, intent on locating the scene of the crime. “This is like Bond,” she said.

“Could anyone have been in my room just now? A maid? A repairman? Maybe a gardener?”

The clerk shook her head. “No Señorita, the room and grounds staff have all gone home for the day. But don’t worry, you can try to make a claim.” She slid a form over the counter.

The young woman glanced at the sheet of paper. What is the monetary worth of the object? Will its loss provoke financial hardship? If we find in your favour, to where should we wire remuneration (BLOCK LETTERS, por favor). She stuffed the form in her pocket. “Later,” she said.

She walked briskly back to her room. The missing shell was still missing.

No one could or would have surmounted the patio wall to pilfer the common tulip. Beyond the enclosure, the hawks and vultures were airborne, the blue-grey tanagers plucking flesh from the half-papayas that looked and smelled as though they’d been regurgitated when they hadn’t. Dropping down on all fours, she began to search for the tulip, relying more on touch than sight, her fingers probing every crevice between the flagstones. It never occurred to her to locate it by smell.

She’d read once that in some species of tulip, the male’s penis was located on the right, immediately behind the head—a fact worth remembering, but not now. As she prepared to get up, empty-handed, bereft, she happened upon something other than what she was looking for. Also a shell, but not, as a scientist might have said, a specimen. More of a whelk than a tulip, this one was equally small but less elegantly proportioned, dull white with a pale pink-brown tip like a nipple. The slope, when she ran her finger along it, felt rough and calloused. Unlike the tulip, this shell didn’t carry the lustre of water. She accepted the more ordinary shell, disdaining it all the while. This whelk couldn’t portend her future. There could be no doubt: her father’s shell had gone, and with it, what came next.