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Fly by Night

Tom Doherty Associates

Traffic was at a standstill and she was not happy about it.

"Great." Amelia Drakos exhaled. Exasperated, she braced her arm against the window frame and leaned. "Like this has to happen now."

The fifty-four-year-old grabbed her phone off the dashboard and checked her university e-mail for the millionth time that afternoon, searching for a grant notification from the National Science Foundation.

Instead her late father's name lit up the top of the queue.

"Wh-a-at?" she'd murmured and scrunched up her face.

A sharp beep and she looked up in the rearview mirror. The truck in front had moved up an entire car length.

"Like that's gonna get you there any faster, moron," she grumbled and then smiled at her own hypocracy as she'd done the same thing a few exits back.

Her father had been dead more than thirty-four years.

She pulled up to close the gap and then stopped.

Her green eyes, which she'd always considered freakishly large given the size of her face — like a greenfish, a creepy-looking deep-sea creature — widened and then shut for an instant. At five feet tall people often mistook Amelia for a teenager until she spoke. Yet as small as she was, it was not the type of tiny that inspired protectiveness in others.

She clicked on his name.

"If you are the Amelia Drakos who was born in New York ... loose ends regarding ..." She memorized each word and then reread it aloud just to be sure.

Amelia glanced up at the overpass, confused. "You Suck" was scrawled across the concrete span in bright purple letters.

Was it a new iteration of the same old Nigerian prince or unclaimed money scam that had circulated a while back?

Strange. She stared back at her father's name on the screen. Certainly gave new meaning to Dead Letter File — she cringed thinking it funny though at the same time unholy and a bit unloving. Maybe mention it to Bryce Youngs, her fellow research scientist, to whom she'd confess all. No matter how horrific, pathetic, or shameful, Bryce seemed to guess before she'd say a thing. But this he never would. The same went for Jennifer Hartley, another co-investigator who completed their Troika.

What loose ends could there be? Her mind ticked back to that time. She set the phone back down on the dash, remembering her father's warmth; she could feel it as if he'd breathed across her cheek. Remembering how he'd always let her row one of the oars out to where their motorboat was moored in the Long Island Sound even though it took twice as long. Seagulls would be squawking like someone getting shortchanged in a paycheck as he'd throw pieces of bread to them, hollering at them in Greek to shut up.

Wrinkling up the space between her brows, she rubbed it without realizing. Feelings gushed in like water through the breached hull of a ship.

She reached again for the phone. It rang as she touched it. The screen lit. She fumbled it, flipping it into the air like a breathless fish that's still alive but then caught it before falling into that unretrievable gap between the seats.

Bryce's name was superimposed over a photo she'd taken last summer of him giving her the finger on the bow of a research vessel in the South China Sea.

"Jesus Christ," she answered.

"I am not he," Bryce said.

"Too bad," she said. "I've got a lotta questions."

"You owe me."

There was pause.

"Really?" she said in surprise, all traces of irony gone as she paused. "It's there?"

"Um-hum."

They'd had a bet going on which would arrive first: The NSF e-mail or letter. A lobster dinner and unlimited alcohol was riding on it.

"You open it?" Her stomach was a flock of butterflies set on fire.

"'Course not." He scolded.

But she wondered if he actually had.

"You sure?" She drew out her voice.

"Amelia," he raised his voice.

"Bryce, just open it."

"No. I'll wait."

"For what?"

"For you. For later when we're all together."

"Don't be such a putz." She snorted in frustration and tapped the steering wheel with her free hand. "Just fucking open it."

"No."

"Traffic's at a standstill — a parking lot." She looked at her diver's watch. "Plus it's rush hour to boot."

"That's okay."

Amelia rolled the window all the way down and pushed up, leaning out to spot the bottleneck. Flashing blue and red lights of police cars, fire trucks, she then waved her hand as if he could see.

"Shit. There's an accident." She sat back down, watching as a police officer directed them to merge. "You've gotta be kidding, it'll take forever 'til I'm even near the turnpike."

"I'll wait," he said.

She breathed deep. There was no coercing Bryce. Even ordering a beer was complex. He'd think it through; employ multiple sets of proofs before making the correct choice of microbrew.

"And so uhh ... Jen around?" she asked, trying not to sound as if fishing for an easy mark.

"Nice try, Am," he snorted. "Jen's got a thing planned."

"Define 'thing.'"

"Nothing big."

"Oh for crying out loud, Bryce," she gestured as if he could see. "A cop's setting down flares; we're down to one lane."

She heard him snort with laughter.

Amelia raked her hair with her fingers out of frustration, picturing Bryce holding the envelope like the cat that ate the canary.

Well over six feet, burly, wearing his camouflage-patterned baseball cap with clear safety glasses resting against the bill, longish brown-blond hair peeking out from beneath the cap. Often Bryce wore shorts and flip-flops all winter long — "I don't like to feel constricted" — and as husky as he was, underwater he was dolphin-like. One of the most skilled and agile divers she'd known.

"Alright," she relented, so aggravated she could kick the inside of her Jeep. "You guys suck."

"You love us," he said in a way that made her laugh.

"Right now I hate you both."

"Au contraire, darlin'. Twenty says you don't."

"You lose," she chuckled.

"You're just a buzz kill, Ammy."

She snorted, reeling from being trapped.

"So they say," she said, thinking of her father's e-mail.

"That's my Little Miss Sunshine for ya." He laughed as he said it.

"Betcha a lobster dinner back you'll never guess who e-mailed me," she said.

"Nah." His voice was thin with disinterest. "No more bets for now. We'll meet up later."

"Where?"

He paused. "Give a call when you get back."

"Who's coming?"

"Uhh — probably just us." He ended the call.

Probably? I'll kill you, Hartley. She hoped for the life of her that Jen hadn't invited Myles.

"Better be just us," Amelia muttered and set down her phone, absorbing the bumper sticker on the back of a delivery truck that said How's My Driving? Call 1-800-FukU.

"Aww — call him," Jen had encouraged just last week, trying to get the two of them back together. "Bet ya a dozen cherrystones at the Clam Bar the guy just got scared, he's probably embarrassed," she'd said in her puppy dog voice.

"Think so?" Amelia had countered. "Bet ya my house on Benefit Street he's just a jerk."

"Amelia, come on —" Jen had said. "Cut him some slack."

But she'd cut Myles nothing but slack up until he'd walked out of her life like a person switches off a light when leaving a room.

"I guess I'm just a hopeless romantic," Jen had said. Amelia and Bryce had shot each other side glances, both thinking of a different word. Jen gave men credit even when they didn't deserve it.

Two months had passed — the same amount of time they'd dated.

"God," she fumed as she sat, inching up behind the delivery truck, thinking of Myles, hating that each time her phone buzzed her guts roiled — that die-hard ping of hope. Wishing she could unzip her feelings and step out of them like a wet suit. This after he'd goaded her into surrendering to his declarations of how he was "so falling for her" only to have him bolt like a frightened stray once she did. God, when would she just give up — enough humiliation for a lifetime.

"How could I be so good at science yet suck at love," she'd asked Bryce in the aftermath of Myles.

"You don't suck at love," he'd challenged. Such words dissolved her self-indictment in seconds. His eyes had lingered as she'd felt him trying to gain an entry point to acknowledge, but she'd blocked his gaze with shade from a sweep of her eyelashes.

"I'll kill you, Jen." Amelia swore an oath to the delivery truck's bumper.

Five years ago the last grant celebration had been classic: Jen drinking too many beers, crying and getting all snotty "I love you guys so much" and Bryce passed out cold in the back of her Jeep as she drove him home. Unable to rouse him, she'd driven back to the Revolution House, threw a blanket over him in her driveway, and let him sleep it off.

Amelia checked her e-mail again. No NSF e-mail. The electronic image of her father's name was emblazoned into her mind's eye. Amelia shook her head as if ridding her ears of the echo of water.

"This is too weird."

* * *

She stopped dead in front of her mailbox slot at the marine biology department.

The box was empty.

"Damn it, Youngs." She slapped her thigh.

The department still smelled like old card catalogues despite the perpetual hum of scientific instruments.

She texted Bryce in all caps. "WHERE IS IT?"

"Taken hostage," he typed back. "Don't trust you."

"Damn right you don't." She jerked away. Her stomach was a clench of nerves, like a squid gathering the ganglion capacity to burst off with lightning speed down into the darkest midnight zone of the ocean.

"Fuck you," she texted back.

"Ahh, Amelia, my sweet ... always promises, promises," he wrote. "But never dates, times, specifics ..."

She could have laughed and cried at the same time, toeing the fine line of hysteria as she felt a bit of both seeping in. Her dark ponytail, beginning to tarnish with gray, swished over her shoulder like a horsetail as she rushed off to the lab, hoping to find them holed up at the deep saltwater tanks by the back door with the letter.

The narrow maple floorboards popped and squeaked as she clopped along in her quick-footed way. Everyone teased her about the bouncy adolescent walk and the excitement with which she'd show the new lab assistants how to perform even the most mundane lab work.

Bursting through the laboratory door to the familiar briny scent of salt water, she tiptoed back to the tanks, thinking she'd sneak up to snatch the envelope.

"Boo," she said around the tank but no one was there. Her messenger bag dangled from her forearm.

A few researchers and lab techs sat working.

"Your people left," one of them announced as she hurried toward her desk.

"Say where they were going?"

A few others looked up from their work but didn't answer.

"You hear yet?" the algae researcher turned to ask, a pipette in his hand. "Russell and Pam heard yesterday."

She shot him a look but then softened. He meant no harm; she was tense. She often misinterpreted when tense.

"No, not yet." She made her voice gentle.

Her fingers were still cold and clammy as she slipped off her jean jacket and bag, tossing them onto the stainless-steel specimen table beside her chair.

Sitting down at her desk, Amelia lifted the glass jar containing Tyrian purple snail shells gathered by her father from the seashore in Crete. She slowly turned the jar, watching as the shells changed configurations and clinked together, tiny grains of sand still stuck inside the glass. Studying the lavender-white ridges and spikes of their exoskeletal bodies, she remembered the feel of being a young woman, yearning and wanting everything though not knowing what everything is.

She set the jar down and sighed. Facing the darkened computer screen, her face was the image of her mother's. Pretty, though tired and puffy in the same places, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and jowls ever so slightly beginning to loosen as her mother's might have at this age.

"Screw it," she muttered and hit the keyboard, vowing to open the NSF e-mail if it was there. Then play along with Bryce and Jen or else fake them out by marinating her eyeballs with saline to look as though she'd been crying.

But her stomach squeezed as the screen lit up.

"What?"

A second e-mail from her late father — her spine straightened as if independent from the rest of her body.

She opened it. "Sorry to trouble you again, if you'd rather phone, I am in Wisconsin. Please call immediately ..."

Immediately? What was so immediate about a man dead more than three decades? Was this a joke? A hacker parlaying a scam off NSF e-mail addresses?

She closed the e-mail and looked away. Staring past the tanks and out the back doors to Narragansett Bay, something felt wrong.

"Jesus," she said, distracted from the NSF decision. She rested her elbows on the desk, leaning her chin in her palm.

"Amelia?"

She looked up.

"You okay?" It was the krill scientist from the other side of the bench.

"Uh — yeah."

"Your people said to tell you they're down at the AA," he said in his soft voice.

"Thanks." She always mirrored the man's posture, hunching over a bit like him and speaking quietly.

The Ale Asylum, or AA, was a former psychiatric hospital circa 1920s turned brewery within walking distance of the university campus.

Just then her phone buzzed.

"Where are you?" Bryce texted.

"Where are YOU?" she shot back.

"AA. Pitchers and pizza! Waiting ..."

"Leaving now," she typed and was about to get up when Amelia turned to face the adjacent saltwater aquarium. It didn't take long to get lost in the lush corals that undulated in the wake of the water filtration system; such beauty was always a surprise. "Geek TV" Bryce called it. The soft din of the motors was soothing. She'd bred and transported countless pairs of sea horses to the overfished areas in Indonesia, Malaysia, and many other parts of the world as well as to the New York Aquarium, Chicago's Shedd. Sea horses were the proverbial canary in the coal mine, portending the health of ocean shorelines.

She tapped on the glass. A pair of bright yellow sea horses paused in their love dance to look up. They swam to her pressed finger.

"Hi, guys." She leaned her forehead against the glass; its warmth from the aquarium lights felt safe, like she was all tucked in for the night and the world would never end. Their eyes moved independently as if deep in thought, dorsal and pectoral fins propelling them like hummingbird wings. They flitted away, resuming their intermingling and caressing of tails, once again more absorbed in courtship than fate — what it must be like to be so lost yet found.

Stuffing her phone into her pocket, she grabbed her jacket and bag and then dashed out the back doors toward the parking lot and her Jeep.

* * *

The music at the AA boomed in her chest wall. The host was about to shout a question when Amelia pointed toward the rear of the building where they always sat. The chairs were made of iron to discourage bar fights. "Had 'em made special," the owner had once told Jen. "By the time you pick up one of those suckers you're too tuckered to do any real damage."

She spotted Bryce towering against the back wall, slowly waving the NSF letter like a surrender flag to catch her attention. Jen was almost as tall and stood alongside Bryce with her glass raised.

Amelia counted heads. Thank God no Myles. Relieved yet disappointed, she shook it off, spotting a pitcher of half-drunk beer, a partially eaten pizza, and an empty chair for her.

Amelia stopped just shy of the table and swiped the letter out of Bryce's fist before he had time to react.

She held it up in victory. Jen's sequin bag sparkled in flashes under the house lights from where it sat on the table. Bryce always teased that it more resembled a Las Vegas sign than a purse.

Jen and Bryce began play fighting, trying to grab the letter back.

Nervous laughter blurted out as Amelia then stuffed it in her bra. They'd been excited to the point of being giddy since the Ocean Explorer's discovery a month ago.

"Now don't make me have to go in there and get it," Bryce called over the music, hands on his hips.

"It's Bryce's turn," Jen said loudly in that big sister way she had.

"Yes, it is." Amelia turned and looked at him through soft eyes. She pulled out the envelope and handed it over, a lump forming in her throat. Every five years, they took turns opening the NSF grant notification.

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Excerpted from Fly by Night by Andrea Thalasinos. Copyright © 2016 Andrea Thalasinos. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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