Drowning Instinct(25)
Author: Ilsa J. Bick

By the time I unlocked the door, the kissing knife was hidden, too: snugged right next to that pair of nail scissors behind my vanity.

Knowing the kissing knife was there? That I got away with it? That I could get at that knife—hold it, carry it, touch it whenever I wanted?

That I had a real piece of a memory—of Mr. Anderson caring about me, of a safe place—that wasn‘t all bad?

It was good, Bob.

It felt good.

Because it was mine, Bob. It was mine.

19: a

On the Wednesday before Mom‘s big party, Dewerman corralled me after class.

―Congratulations. Since you‘re the only student who hasn‘t chosen someone for a project, it‘s my pleasure to name you the lucky winner of Procrastinators Anonymous. First prize is one week in New Jersey and‖—he presented a note card with an elaborate flourish—―the only person no one else wanted. Be grateful. Second prize was two weeks in New Jersey.‖

I scanned the card. ―Alexis Depardieu? Like . . . the actor?‖

―No relation. This Depardieu was the Rachel Carson of marine mammology. She studied whales and dolphins, mainly, and wrote one book, Ladyfish, published posthumously the year after she died.‖

―Uhm . . .‖ As I remembered it, we‘d had to choose from people who‘d written novels or poetry or plays. Maybe that was why no one had chosen Depardieu. ―So why is she on the list? How did she kill herself?‖

Dewerman showed a thin smile. ―She didn‘t. Her ship collided with a whaling vessel off the coast of Japan in November 2000.‖

―An accident?‖

―That‘s one way of looking at it. Clearly, if she‘s on the list, maybe I have questions, right? So, go.‖ He made shooing motions. ―Learn. You‘ve got all next week to work on a proposal while we‘re on fall break. Now, git.‖

I gitted. As I went out the door, I saw Mr. Anderson coming down the hall to my right, so I peeled off to the left. When I looked back, Dewerman was gesturing with his mammoth coffee mug and Mr. Anderson‘s hands were in his pockets. Neither man looked my way. That was fine.

b

The library didn‘t have Depardieu‘s book, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan and then did a Google search. The Wikipedia entry was pretty dry. Here‘s the SparkNotes version, Bobby: Alexis Depardieu was French-Canadian and an only child whose father had died when his swordfish boat went down in a gale in the North Sea. Alexis was nine when her mom remarried a well-to-do lawyer; went to boarding school when she was twelve; was premed at McGill but switched to marine bio. Cambridge for a PhD and then she moved around a lot: Quebec, New Zealand, California. Taught at Berkeley, Stanford; started publishing on dolphin behavior and communications, blah, blah, blah.

In the late 1980s, Alexis connected with another marine biologist named Stephen Wright, a professor and a member of the Sea Stewards, this radical environmental group.

Alexis and Wright got arrested a bunch of times trying to free dolphins from aquariums and stuff. Got themselves fired from Berkeley and then joined up full-time with the Stewards, who were kind of Greenpeace-y, into harassing whaling ships, things like that.

Then, in 1997, off the coast of Antarctica, Stephen Wright was washed overboard as he piloted his Zodiac between a Japanese whaler and a humpback. This didn‘t stop Alexis for long. A year or so later, she was back with the Stewards aboard their flagship, Mystic Dreamer.

Then it was late 2000 and depending on whom you believe, Mystic Dreamer either accidentally collided with a Japanese whaling vessel or deliberately rammed it. Mystic Dreamer foundered. According to the survivors, Alexis ordered the crew into life rafts but stayed at the helm and radio where she continued to broadcast a Mayday. (The Japanese steamed off. I guess they figured the Dreamer‘s crew got whatever they deserved.) The last person to see her alive was the first mate. Mystic Dreamer went down and then it was au revoir, Alexis. The rest of the crew was rescued sixteen hours later by an Australian ship responding to Dreamer‘s Mayday. The end.

There wasn‘t much else, some links to follow-up articles about how pissed the Japanese got, lawsuits, and stuff like that. There were links to some essays, a couple unauthorized biographies, blah, blah, blah.

I hadn‘t a clue where to go with this. So I logged out and decided not to think about it.

20: a

Mom‘s big Oktoberfest gig was on a Saturday, and it was a good thing I had the whole next week of fall break to rest and recover. The party was my crazy Grandma Stephie‘s idea way back when. They started out serious, the Wisconsin equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table— only instead of famous writers and literary critics and actors meeting for lunch in some swank New York restaurant, snarking about their friends and drinking themselves into a stupor, Grandma cultivated Milwaukee beer barons, shipping magnates, and guys who owned brownstone quarries. Basically, anyone loaded enough to make the trip up to Lake Superior got a weekend of drinking, gorging, schmoozing, and general debauching with New York and Chicago writer-types. In exchange, the fat cats all coughed up a tidy sum for books at their full retail price. A pretty good deal, all the way around.

When Mom took over the store, the parties continued but scaled down and moved south: first to our old house and now to the McMansion. She invited mainly regional authors, some famous but most not. Mom supplied the books and invited a bunch of book clubs and other, mostly pretentious and preferably wealthy, people who liked (or pretended to like) and discussed (or pretended to discuss) books. But mostly they hankered for free food and free booze.

The only problem was the bookstore had been losing money on the parties for years now, mostly because people came to drink and eat and didn‘t cart books away in wheelbarrows the way they used to. So, like clockwork, my parents spent the morning after arguing about how much more money Mom had lost and how cost-ineffective the parties were and blah, blah, blah. Dad always threatened to pull his support until Mom groveled enough and the issue got tabled for another year.

My job was always the same: meet and greet, trudge upstairs to Mom and Dad‘s room with coats, trudge back, circulate between the house and the patio where Dad had the fire pit going and, in general, be charming. I had my stock answers down pat: fine, working hard, thinking of a place out East, maybe a doctor but I don’t really know yet. Most of the guests were people I‘d known for years, so I didn‘t mind and I really did like listening to some of the writers.

Well, most of them.

b

Nate Bartholomew was even more handsome than the picture on his dust jacket.