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  He took his cell phone out of the zippered pocket of his windbreaker and dialed Josefa. She opened the upstairs window, and even though they were only twenty feet apart they continued to talk on the phone. “Mrs. Delaney called to say you were on the way,” she said. “So did Mr. Potts.”

  “And then you locked the gate?”

  “Oops,” she said. “No … forgot. They won’t leave us alone.”

  “They?”

  “Kelp’s fans … dear souls. Money’s pouring in through the website. If this keeps up … I’m going to have my dream. A proper seagull rescue home.” She looked wistfully down at the yard. A blinding white cockatiel came up behind her with a flurry of wings and settled on the windowsill. Josefa did not believe in cages in the house, and even the ferret ran free.

  “I have money for you, too,” said Duncan. “Does that let me in?”

  “Goody,” she said, and she clicked off the phone. She brushed the cockatiel back into the house with her arm and closed the window.

  As he waited for her to come down, he examined the yard. A few gulls were in cages, but most of the others were just limping around, dragging a wing or two behind them, trying to maneuver around the piles of flotsam Josefa had assembled over the years. It was a maze of buoys and lobster pots, tangles of driftwood and buckets of sea glass. There was a mountain of seine nets—ghost nets, she called them, the ones that floated loose to entangle porpoises and diving gulls. She took what she could off the beaches so they could not be washed back out again, then found homes for them during tomato season as trellises.

  The door to the house opened in an explosion of dogs who stormed the gate. Two little ones still clung on as Duncan stepped inside, his arms full of cases of sardines. Josefa pushed the dogs back with her foot as she latched the gate again. “What are you wearing?” asked Duncan.

  She pulled the bottom edge of her baby-blue sweatshirt out so Duncan could admire the words Go Kelp! superimposed over a soaring gull.

  “Nice advertising for both of us,” said Duncan. “I’ll sponsor the next batch.”

  “Look who’s talking money,” said Josefa.

  “It’s nice having money again. I just hope it stays this way. You’re doing pretty well yourself.” He set down the sardines and pulled a wad of envelopes out of his pocket, filled with checks.

  Josefa took the envelopes and splayed them out like a hand of cards before putting them in her back pocket. “My daughter, Lavinia … the architect? Wants to come home … make her name by designing my ‘facility,’ as she calls it. She sees a white building with arched wings to create shade for the outdoor cages.”

  “Seems like a lot of design for a place gulls will come to die.”

  “You’ll be glad for good design … when your time comes. Maybe it’ll be all that matters.” She pushed the dogs back into the house so she and Duncan could move the supplies in from the truck without them running away. “We’ll even have a crematorium. No more chute funerals.”

  “It’s all about disposal, isn’t it?” He carried the sardines through the yard to the storage shed while Josefa brought bags in from the truck. He put the boxes down and picked up a sign—Wooden buoys, $10.00. “Since when have you started to sell your collection?”

  “When people started to buy it,” she said, pawing through a bag of stuffed animals. “Selling eel, too.” She pointed to a white five-gallon bucket up on a cage, out of reach of the dogs. Scrawled on the bucket were the words Eel puppets—as seen on TV, 2 for $5.00.

  “Gross,” said Duncan, peeking in. “Old, dried-up eel heads.”

  “You made them a hot commodity. I get them for free down at the dock … dry them out in the sun. Kids love them. The heads don’t hardly smell after a while.” She picked one up and gave it a good sniff, but there was no trusting a nose that lived with that many animals. She put it down and showed him a box of white and gray feathers. “Their favorite is still seagull feathers.” She lowered her voice. “I say they’re all from Kelp.”

  “How is my boy?”

  “Oh … he’s fine.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Duncan, when you’ve seen one seagull … you’ve seen them all.”

  This was not like Josefa. Usually she bombarded him with the minute differences between individuals. He looked over by the fence, and in the finest of her cages was a gull and a thickly lettered sign reading Kelp.

  “There he is,” he said, and walked toward him.

  “Oh … Duncan,” she said, then turned to busy herself with creating order in the shed.

  Duncan squatted next to the cage and greeted the bird, which stood in profile, looking rather noble with its blunt beak. He thought of the bird’s beginning, its dramatic break out of its isolating shell to discover itself in a cozy nest with other young gulls, with doting parents who brought food, and, in time, independence, showing it how to lift its wings and leave that nest, off to lead the life of a bird, floating over land and sea, swooping like an angel. To think that a creature so intricate and grand could be brought down by a lowly piece of plastic.

  “Hi, Kelp,” he said. The bird looked at him with its yellow eye, turning its head from side to side to bring him into its vision, appraising him with no recognition. Some gratitude. It moved a step closer to the wire and tilted its head with a look that read: Food? When it saw that Duncan had none, it turned its back. Its feathers were dirty, and the injured wing still hung limp by its side. There was not much that could be done for these injured birds. If they weren’t already in shock when they were picked up, aggressive treatment might stress them into it, a point from which very few returned. Sometimes the only thing to do was to give them a quiet place to wait it out and hope they would heal themselves, which seemed to be the ticket for Kelp’s head. The area around the beak where the six-pack holder had dug in was completely healed over. In fact, the feathers had even grown in … Duncan considered the wing hanging by its side and thought back to when he held the bird under his arm. He was sure the bad wing had been on the left. This gull’s injured wing was the right. He stood up and turned to Josefa.

  “That’s not the gull I saved.”

  “Isn’t it?” she asked, continuing to stack boxes.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not. Unless he healed one wing and then broke the other.”

  She put her finger to her lips, leaving her work to join him by the cage. She looked around and spoke in a whisper. “I have something to tell you, Duncan. It didn’t heal … Kelp died.”

  Duncan looked at the bird and felt a silly twinge of sadness. Even though he knew the chances were slim, they were chances nonetheless, and now they were gone. “Then who’s that under the sign that says ‘Kelp’?”

  “Let’s call him … Kelp the Second. You have to swear, Duncan … not a word. People will lose enthusiasm. I won’t ever get the new place.”

  “You’re lying?” Duncan asked. “About a stupid seagull?”

  “People have gotten very attached … no one can know.” She reached her hand through the cage, and the gull pecked at it. “I’m on the alert for gulls that look like Kelp … or can be made to look like Kelp. I’m going to need one in a few weeks that’s only a little injured … so I can tidy him up and set him free. I’ve talked to the mayor about calling it Kelp Day. A national TV station wants to cover it.”

  “Josefa, I’m sort of surprised.”

  “Why? A little lie … to benefit an entire species? It’s not like I’m taking the money to go live in Aruba. Keeping Kelp ‘alive’ is going to help everyone. New clean housing, medicine, veterinary care … a flight cage … all the things I could never afford. Hard to be in a position to want to help … only to have your hands tied by lack of money. We’ll bring seagull rescue to a new level. I have a crew of volunteers now who search the beaches and help … feed and clean. I’ve been swimming hard to keep up with the tide … now I want to float in with it.”

  Duncan put his hands in his pockets and made fists. Of all th
e people he knew, Josefa had seemed the most honest and trustworthy. What did it say about the human species if even she could be tempted by money and fame? “It’s the thin edge of the wedge, Josefa.”

  “Think about the greater good … speaking of which.” She turned away, back to the storage bin, and took out a lumpy trash bag. A webbed claw broke through the plastic. “Could you dump this at Seacrest’s?”

  “No!” Duncan said. “With all those tourists hanging around waiting for me to rescue another gull, you want me to dispose of one?”

  “Two,” she said. “It was a bad day. That’s why I put the ‘closed’ sign up … so I could move bodies around. Go ahead. Do it after closing. Who’s to know?”

  “I’ll know. And lately everything that I know, the world soon knows. I couldn’t even drive here today without a constant report on my progress. I can’t do it.”

  And yet he followed Josefa out of the yard and through the gate to his pickup, where she dropped the bag in the cargo area. “Duncan, I’ve never seen a man fret so much over the silliest things … it’s a couple of dead gulls. Give them a useful afterlife.”

  “Josefa, I’m worried enough about what’s going in the mix as it is. It’s not all coffee grinds, eggshells, and apple peels. Annuncia says the nitrogen is spiking like a slaughterhouse floor, and a few chicken bones wouldn’t cause that.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “I worry, you know, it being Osbert, that there are things that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Such … as?” she asked.

  “What if he’s looking for a place to dispose of bodies? Think of Marsilio. How does a simple drowning pull a man apart like that?”

  “Oh, Duncan … you are a suspicious bugger. Marsilio probably just met his end with a clean chop of the boat propeller. You go from oblivion to paranoia … don’t you have any middle ground?”

  “Something is going on. This night delivery thing, for one. If it were all above board, it wouldn’t have to be done in the dark.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Osbert’s company gathers garbage during the day and disposes of it at night. Simple.” She turned to go back inside, then stopped. “How are you … and Cora doing?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  “Winter’s coming … time to hunker down with your mate.”

  Duncan looked down at his feet, and they seemed a long way off. “I’m not sure she wants to hear from me. We haven’t talked in a while. I think … I think there’s someone else.” He looked at Josefa to watch her reaction, and he thought he saw a flash of knowledge cross her face.

  “If you don’t ask, you won’t know.”

  “That’s it. I don’t want to know. ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ as Uncle Torkle used to say.”

  His wife, Aunt Bert, had cherished her yellow parakeet, Tim, and because of this, Uncle Torkle checked its cage every morning before Aunt Bert woke up. Once every couple of years, he’d find it on its back with the little feet sticking up. Then he’d just pick up the cage, say he was bringing the bird to the office for the day, and come home with a new yellow parakeet. He did this throughout their entire thirty-eight years of marriage. Aunt Bert believed she had the world’s longest-lived parakeet, but Torkle intercepted her letters to Guinness. Tim finally died for good soon after Torkle died, there being no one to keep up the pretense. Aunt Bert bought herself a green parakeet to replace them both.

  When Duncan told this story to Cora years before, thinking it was a touching example of a loving marriage, she only shook her head. “Enabling is practically a genetic trait in your family, isn’t it?” she’d said, and he still didn’t know exactly what she meant.

  Josefa sucked her lips in concentration. “If you won’t talk to her … write a letter. A love letter.”

  “I don’t think she wants to hear from me.”

  One of the seagulls squawked, and they both turned to look at it. “Good-bye, Duncan … do what I say.”

  The mist changed to spitting rain, and he put his hood up. Josefa went back into the house, joyfully welcomed by the dogs, with their muddy paws and muzzles caked with seagull dung. She loved them anyway, and her love for them would find them homes. He heard the door lock, and he looked over the yard to the cage that held the false gull. Poor Kelp. After all that effort to save him, he’d died anyway. But Duncan knew that going into it. It was hard to pin too many hopes on life, considering its competition. He stood for a moment as the wind funneled up the hill from the harbor. Then he picked up the bag of dead birds and threw it in the back of the truck.

  ten

  It wasn’t until the next day that Duncan was able to get back to the office and write to Cora. After he left Josefa and her seagulls, he’d spent the afternoon with Slocum gathering jellyfish on the beach, then labored through the night at Manavilins, boiling them up in industrial stockpots as Slocum added fistfuls of what he called his “proprietary ingredients,” the dusty roots and stems he gathered along the roadside over the course of the year. Rather than, oh, say, open a book and find out what a plant was useful for, or not, he liked to just play with them in the kitchen. “Nothing worse than preconceived notions to botch creativity,” he claimed. It would be up to the lab to sort it all out and identify the plasticizing elements. Duncan’s head still hurt from breathing in the fumes, no doubt the cause of his disturbing dreams before dawn. He was underwater, slithering armless along the trashy sea bottom, moving in and out of shopping carts and oil drums, nudging bits of plastic with his nose to see if they were edible. On the shore, a repellent sea creature sat on a pier looking down at him, like an unformed turtle without its shell. He came across a small overturned hull, its shiplapped planks undulating with algae. An octopus sat on top of it and acted as a hinge, bending itself back to reveal the insides of the broken boat, and there was his father, serene and confident as always, huddled in the ribs of the vessel like a soft-bodied clam, and then the dream ended. Duncan lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the sound of mice tunneling through the eelgrass insulation in his bedroom walls.

  He sat down at the desk and clicked on Playlist #24, a collection of love songs, to put him in the mood. Marvin Gaye. Bonnie Raitt. Dave Matthews and even, God help him, Barry White. From a sheaf of creamy paper tied with a blue satin ribbon, he pulled out a piece of stationery as thick as leather, with his name embossed in navy at the top of the page. It was Aunt Ned’s college graduation present. “For serious business,” she’d said, but this was the first time he’d used it. Had his life been so frivolous before this moment?

  Dearest Cora,

  Phone talk has been difficult with us, so I am writing you a letter and maybe that will help bridge whatever problem we’ve been having. What is this problem? I don’t know. I was wrong, whatever it was. I’m sorry. Let’s not live apart anymore. You are my boat, the water beneath, the stars above to guide me and the very air that moves me forward.

  I think it’s all been a misunderstanding due, no doubt, as you have so often said, to my total lack of communication skills. We are so different in this regard. But isn’t that why we are attracted to one another? Loving opposites! I can see how you might need a break from me but maybe you’re ready to have me back. I won’t be morbid anymore. I will embrace life. I will embrace more counseling! I will embrace you if you will let me and I will embrace …

  Then, just as he was about to write the words our baby, he stopped with his pen in midair and put it down. He ran his fingertips across the dry linen fibers, and for an instant the words became distant and unreal. He rested his forehead on the linen paper and imagined he could smell papyrus and see a basket hidden in the reeds. Was he hesitant to bring another generation into the world shackled to the business of dehydrated fish scraps? Was he subconsciously fighting the transformation from son to father? Or was he just being a selfish, self-absorbed jerk? Somewhere in all these questions he heard Cora’s voice. But above them all was the shrill warning in his brain
that any child of his would run the risk of madness.