The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 5

Also, if you didn’t let yourself talk about something, it stayed a little unreal. It stayed an arm’s length away. Once it was mentioned there was a kind of concreteness to it.

“This was the numbers on ocean pH and shellfish?” prodded Jax.

“I don’t—it kind of went over my head. They said ‘CO2’ a lot, but that’s all I know.”

“Dad was talking to me about that project on the drive home that day,” said Jax, nodding as he made the connection. “But he didn’t say anything about information theft or hackers….”

“Let’s go,” said Cara, because the light was blinking DON’T WALK already.

“I’m tired of being treated like an infant,” said Jax suddenly, more loudly than usual. “I don’t deserve it. Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t you?”

She looked at him, then at the DON’T WALK sign again. Jax wasn’t budging.

The sign froze and cars started speeding by them again.

“I guess—”

“What? You have to tell me everything. We’re in this together!”

“Then you have to promise not to ping me again without asking. Ever,” she said, with a loudness that matched his own. “Or else I can’t trust you either!”

They looked at each other.

“OK,” said Jax, more quietly. “I promise if you do. I’ll always ask before I read you.”

“And I’ll tell you what I know,” she said.

They stood there for another minute, waiting for the light to change back, and finally crossed, a little awkward, with Rufus loping beside them.

“She was supposed to go to Washington and tell Congress what her study said,” she added, when they reached the opposite sidewalk. “Maybe so they could pass a new law about it or something? And then…” she trailed off. “And then she disappeared, Jaxy.”

“But ocean acidification is common knowledge,” said Jax. “At least, in the scientific community. I mean, it’s not like she’s cornered the market on marine pH dropping. Lots of people are studying it.”

There was the general store, with a bakery beside it and the small post office. A few feet behind the row of shops, past a thin screen of trees, the bike path ran almost the whole length of the Outer Cape—along the edge of the strip of forest that gave way to cliffs and dune grass and sand, and then the surging Atlantic.

She wished she could just ride again, the way she used to—coast along the smooth path, warmed by the sun…it was what she’d always loved to do, every summer since she first started taking off by herself. She coasted with her hands free, the seashore on her right with its pine and oak-tree woods, creeks with frogs splashing and silver fish flashing through them, marshes with herons, ponds with water lilies. There were the soft-looking deer that ambled through the patchwork shade of the trees, where the old dirt roads wound through the cool forest and came out on the bright cliffs in the sun with their wild roses trembling as the breeze swept over them…on her left side were the distant sounds of a steady river of traffic, the long row of shabby, cozy motels on Route 6. There were the seafood restaurants with their ocean themes, round windows like portholes and old rusty-orange life preservers hanging in nets on the walls

And where there weren’t restaurants there were the friendly neighborhoods where kids played, their wind-worn saltbox houses covered in climbing roses, and behind them, next to the path, the rambling, overgrown green backyards….