The two men shook hands and congratulated each other. Both were out of breath, and Leo actually dropped right to the ground.
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Leo said to Ryder. “I tried to deal with her myself, but she fought me. She really wanted to bite me.”
“I was glad to help,” Ryder said. “Beth, did you get it all on video?”
She double-checked. “I did!”
“Great,” Ryder told her. “We’ll get it up on Facebook and Instagram right away.”
“Send me a copy,” Leo said. “We’ll post it on our marine mammal rescue site.”
“So,” Ryder said as they got back into his SUV, “first thing, get a Facebook and an Instagram account. Claim a domain and start building our website. We need to get this up fast.”
“I can design the website but I’ll need someone else to build it.”
“Fine. Get someone right away.”
His Bluetooth phone buzzed, the number flashing on the dashboard panel. As they drove back to town, Ryder talked with his secretary in Boston and there was no way Beth could not overhear the conversation. Ryder had a lot of meetings scheduled, including one with the governor. She was impressed, and she was glad that this new organization she was starting to work for was gaining support. It made her even more excited and eager to do her job.
They reached Easy Street, Ryder pulling into a parking space near the small grassy park that overlooked the harbor.
As Beth started to open her door, Ryder put his hand lightly on her arm. She turned back to look at him.
“Beth, what we did today was important. We were only three people, and we can’t save the entire ocean. But think how that seal feels now, free of that plastic noose. We’re starting a grassroots movement—” He stopped and corrected himself. “An eelgrass movement,” he continued with a smile. “That seal was lucky, but so were we. We’ve got the perfect iconic video for what’s happening out there in the ocean and how people can help. Think about that when you design the website.”
Beth blinked as Ryder spoke, so passionately, a fire in his eyes and his hand so warm and restraining on her arm. As if he might draw her closer.
God! she thought, what was she even thinking? He was old! But he didn’t look old and he didn’t seem old. He was energetic, fiery, strong. She wanted to throw herself into his embrace and kiss him. Her heart was racing. She hoped he couldn’t feel it through her arm. It was so many things at once, the excitement of doing something significant, the attraction of this frighteningly brilliant man, the opportunity to use her own skills and intelligence…and the chance of humiliation if she failed.
Beth said, “You know, different groups are already doing research here, on the loss of eelgrass, on water quality.”
“Good,” Ryder said absentmindedly, glancing at his watch. He lifted his hand from Beth’s arm, and straightened in his seat. “I’ve got a meeting. Keep working on this. This seal did us a great favor. Email me.”
“Sure,” Beth said, smiling, and stepped down from the SUV.
Back in the office, Beth was energized. She sat down in her comfortable executive chair, pulled up a pad of lined yellow paper, and started a list. She studied her video of the men with the seal and decided it was really pretty awesome. For an hour she worked in a kind of cool-minded, emotion-hot intensity, until she paused, emotionally punched by the realization that her home, her island, was a kind of canary in the mine for the future of the coasts. Suddenly, this was very personal.
It was odd, difficult, to read the daily weather reports and mix that news with her memories of growing up on the island. She’d been so very happy, and sometimes she felt guilty about that happiness, because she had lost her mother, so shouldn’t she always be sad? But the loss had happened when she was so young, she hadn’t known what was normal, she didn’t comprehend what she had lost. Her father had been her world, and she was his.
Her father loved the island. On weekends Mack took her hiking around the wild, lonely barrier beach called Coskata-Coatue that protected the Nantucket Harbor from the more savage waters of Nantucket Sound. He woke her early Sunday mornings to go to uninhabited island preserves to join the group of bird-watchers; he drove through a snowstorm to Coskata so she could see the snowy owl perched majestically on an evergreen. He taught her how to handle a Boston Whaler, how to fish, how to gut and dress the fish. He explained how the Wampanoag tribes had hunted whales from a canoe and gathered wild blueberries and beach plums from the moors to keep them healthy through the winters. He’d taken her with friends to spend the night on the nearby lonely island, Tuckernuck, and he’d shown her all the exquisite Main Street homes once built by the whaling captains. He’d impressed on her that this environment was fragile, the history of the island was unique, the beauty of the island unsurpassed.
Beth grew up knowing, deep in her heart where words could not go, that she was part of the island. She belonged to it.
And now, with the arrival of Ocean Matters and Ryder Hastings, she glimpsed an opportunity to help it. She had not been able to help her mother, and although Beth took as many chemistry and science courses as she could tolerate, she knew that she would never be the person to cure cancer, not the kind of cancer that had taken her mother. She’d never obsessed about that, she couldn’t control the past. But when Atticus died, Beth had carried a kind of guilt with her that weighed heavily on her heart. She had not loved him enough to make him love his life. No one blamed Beth for this, and she never spoke with anyone about it, because she knew with the rational part of her mind that she couldn’t have saved Atticus, even if she’d stayed by his side every moment of every day. But she was determined to do something life-affirming, something that helped, that mattered.
And working for Ocean Matters made her believe she could do that. Would do that.
I am doing that, she thought as she looked at the work she’d done, as she saw more and more comments about the seal landing on the Facebook page. She was getting the word out. In her own small way, she was part of something larger, this island and the waters around it.
But what she’d done was only the beginning. She’d created a Facebook page and an Instagram page, but she needed help in order to build a website. She’d gone as far as she could go without technical help. Leaning back in her chair, she wondered what her next step should be.
fifteen
Juliet woke early, her mental alarm clock set to work time. For a while she allowed herself to look around her room, her childhood room. She’d been away for so long, first college, then her job with Kazaam. When she’d returned home for Christmas, for a week in the summer, she hadn’t paid attention to her bedroom, but now she was almost twenty-eight, which in her mind meant she was almost thirty, and here she was, in bed alone, gazing at a poster of Ashton Kutcher on the wall.