Doug nodded. “In the mangroves. The West Indian Wh… Wh…Whistling Duck. I can’t believe it. D…d…ducks are my specialty, and it’s the la…la…last one on my Life List.” He stood taller and looked at Fiona as he almost shouted, “Dendrocygna aborea.”
She wanted to clap for him. “Cool,” she said. “A Life List.”
Doug stepped closer to her. He reached a gloved hand for her hair, then stopped before touching her. “Your hair is b…b…beautiful. Ducks don’t come that color.”
Nathan looked from Doug to Fiona. “He’s from Arizona. Completely landlocked.”
“I…did C…Cornell for grad school.” Doug looked out toward the horizon. “New York for my surgery. Bu…but I’ve never seen the s…s…ocean before.”
Fiona smiled. She had a comrade, someone else new to boats and ocean life. “Can you swim?” she asked.
“Before the op…operation, like a fish.”
“I’m sure he still can,” Nathan said. “His brain stem was not involved.”
Doug stretched his arms out wide, his hands in the huge knit gloves. The empty fingertips fluttered in the breeze. “It’s so v…vast.”
“Oh God, thy sea is so great and my boat so small.” Nathan threw his cigarette into the water. “Breton Fisherman’s Prayer. My wife is from Brittany.”
Fiona didn’t know where that was, or if it was slang for Great Britain. She would ask Luc about it. Where was he?
“The na…name of the boat,” Doug said. “Is that Breton t…t…also?”
“Yes, it’s her name for me.” Nathan thumped his chest proudly. “Bleiz A Mor, Sea Wolf. Isn’t that perfect? I am the Sea Wolf.”
He looked more bear-like to Fiona, round and lumbering. She was glad Doug had asked about the boat’s name. She had seen it in fancy script across the back—stern—but not wanted to ask in case everybody else knew what it meant.
“Dendrocygna arborea,” Doug said again. “I’m going t… to write about them…for Au…Audubon.” He took off one glove and ran his finger back and forth across his awful scar. Back and forth. Back and forth. Then he saw her watching and put his hand in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a… ha… habit.”
“I get it. I used to wiggle a loose tooth incessantly. Drove my mom crazy. You can’t help it.”
He smiled at her then and leaned gently toward her. She saw something in that smile and that lean. But he hadn’t met Luc yet.
The seagulls squawked. “So you’re a bird expert, right?” she asked him. “Why are seagulls so noisy?”
“D…d…demanding. Always hungry. I’ve seen them… pluck a chicken bone right out of a… man’s hand.”
“Isn’t that cannibalism?”
Nathan piped up. “They’re disgusting. Scavengers. Eat anything.”
“Let’s try it,” Fiona said to Doug. “Think they’d take a pretzel out of your hand?” She reached into one of the grocery sacks for a bag of pretzel rods. She ripped it open, handed Doug one, and watched as he broke it into pieces.
“First, let them…kno…know there’s food.”
His stutter was kind of endearing. It proved how badly he had suffered. He threw a piece of pretzel out toward the birds. It fell into the water and one flew down and scooped it up. Instantly, the entire flock was clustering and cawing overhead. He threw another piece up and two gulls vied for it, one of them snatching it out of the beak of the other.
“It’s like telepathy,” she said. “One eats, and they all know there’s food.”
“Bird communication is actually quite complex.” Doug paused before each word. “It seems like… telepathy, but birds communicate on a… high level…not always visible to us.” The more he spoke, the less he stuttered. “Tiny movements of feathers and wings. They can even transmit and receive information simultaneously.”
“Like when you’re talking to one person, but actually listening to another conversation?”
He nodded. “Better th…than we can.”
“I’ll never call anyone a bird brain again—unless he’s a genius.” Fiona broke up another pretzel and threw the pieces into the air. A breeze blew the pieces back toward her and she squealed and ducked as the gulls came at her. Laughing, she turned to Doug and he put his bare hand on her shoulder.
“Where is… your boyfriend?”
She didn’t want to say she didn’t know. She stepped out from under his hand, shrugged, leaned over the railing to look at the rainbow stain of oil floating on the water.
Nathan threw his cigarette into the water. “I sent him on an errand. A long time ago.”
“Where? To do what?” she asked. “Did he take the car?”
Doug took a pretzel rod from the bag. He held it in the air. “Shhhh,” he said to both of them. “Watch.” He waved the pretzel a little. A gull investigated and hovered, checking him out, turning its head this way and that. He whispered, “It will be a sign. If it takes the pretzel out of my hand, then we will have a wonderful trip.”
“Scientists don’t look for signs,” Nathan said.
The bird swooped down, plucked the pretzel from between Doug’s fingers, and careened away.
“Oh!” Fiona said. “Wow.”
“Yes.” Doug appeared to swell, his face grew even broader, and at the same time he exhaled and relaxed. His eyes were shining and she couldn’t help but smile back at his smile. “Yes,” he said again. “This is going to be a very good voyage.”
The gull soared, the pretzel in its beak longer than its body. Fiona cheered.
Nathan looked at her. “Put all this stuff away.” He gestured to the bags and boxes. “Stop feeding the rats. Then we’ll go find your boyfriend.”
Approximately two thousand five hundred years ago, Hippocrates wrote that an excess of black bile in the body was what caused cancer. He called it karkinos, the Greek word for crab, because the tumors—when they eventually erupted through the skin oozing black fluid—appeared to have many claws. His recommendation was to leave a tumor alone; in his time, surgery killed more than it saved. Cut it out, he said, and it would just reappear somewhere else. He wrote almost nothing about cancer of the breast. His only mention of it is a woman in the town of Abdera having a bloody discharge from one nipple. Did they not have as much breast cancer in ancient Greece? Is it a modern illness brought on by environment, toxics, a stressful lifestyle? As a child, I rode my bicycle behind the DDT trucks that drove through my neighborhood spraying for mosquitoes. I called it flying in the clouds. Now the same company that manufactured that DDT makes the drugs used in chemotherapy. I couldn’t help wondering why me, but was there a why? Why me? Why not. I had already lived longer than many people. My child was well on his way to being an adult. My husband and I loved each other and had settled into a comfortable companionship and okay, maybe now it was rocky, the waters turbulent, but if I died tomorrow he would remember mostly good.
I could have sat in front of Venus forever. I didn’t want to move, go home, think about what I would do next. I would have happily become a statue: the Los Angeles Fiona, American, circa A.D. 2009, a decent example of postmodern middle-aged life, the spread in the hips and thighs, the rounded perimenopausal belly, unfortunately one breast destroyed, but arms, legs, nose intact. My skin was white enough to be marble, if not as smooth