Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

“Please, Henry. Don’t do anything until I get back to the office.”

Ness looks at me as I say this. He’s pulling his running shoes back on, is wearing blue jeans and a button-up.

“It’s out of my hands,” Henry says.

I hang up in disgust. Ness strides from the closet and through the bedroom, into the breezeway.

“Let me explain,” I tell him.

He whirls around, points a finger at me, and tries to form the words; I can see in his eyes, in the twitch of his cheeks, in his furrowed brow, that he has legions to say. But all that comes out is: “You promised me.”

He heads toward the front door. I follow him, explaining anyway. “I told my boss not to run it, that I would quit if he did. The board pressured him.” How to explain all the politics of a multimedia conglomerate owned by a company that started out selling dish soap? “They already had the story, Ness. They were going to fire my boss, the editor in chief of the goddamn Times , and run it anyway. There was no stopping this.”

“Then why make the promise?” Ness asks. He hesitates at the top of the stairs, and I think for a moment that we’ll be able to talk through this. Then I hear him say, “I thought you were real.”

He opens the front door, leaves, and slams it behind him. I run up the stairs, fumble with the latch, and hurry out onto the porch. Ness is already around the low wall toward the garage; I hear the rapid crunch crunch crunch of shells from him running. By the time I get around the corner, the garage door is opening, and a bright red convertible with a white stripe down the middle is growling out in reverse. He doesn’t look my way as he roars by.

This is where I let him go, where I lose him, where I slink home to New York and never see him again, where our tryst is a memory, and whatever story I could write from this wreck of a week is left unfinished, with no resolution, with no way of piecing together his scattered clues.

But I say, “Fuck that.” I say it out loud. I turn to my car. And then I remember my keys are down in the guest house.

I take the boardwalks at a dangerous pace. I’m still barefoot. No bra on. My thoughts whirl. Surely he’ll understand. Once the adrenaline wears off. Once the sting of betrayal cools. I’ll write a retraction. An even bigger piece. When word gets out about how the Times ran this story, there’ll be mud on their faces.

Get real, Maya , I think to myself. When was the last time a retraction ran anywhere but in a small inset on page twelve? The untruths go on the front page. Corrections are buried.

I’ll write the piece anyway. I’ll make it a book. I can fix this.

Fetching my keys, I run back up to the house, out the front door, and jump in my car. I speed across broken shells. I want to catch Ness, don’t want to sit at the house and wait for him to return. He might stay away until I have to leave, might have Monique or his guards throw me out. Approaching the first guard gate, I lay on my horn, and the gate comes up. A new guard comes out with his hand held up. I blow right by him, kicking up a cloud of dust.

I don’t see a trail from Ness’s car. Too far ahead of me. I get my car up to sixty on that gravel road, reach over my shoulder and grab my seat belt, click it in. Tall trees whiz past, trees that don’t belong here. I feel a kinship with them. These trees understand.

The second guard gate eventually comes into view. Ness has already passed through. A paved highway waits for me on the other side. This time, the gate doesn’t open. A guard steps out, hands raised, asking me to stop. The other guard probably called ahead. This one doesn’t look too happy. I roll down my window as I crunch to a stop.

“Hey, hey,” the guard says. “Take it easy. What the hell is going on?”

“Which way did he go?” I ask.

The guard scrunches up his face. “Who?”

“Ness. Mr. Wilde. Your boss. Which way did he turn? Where would he be going?”

The guard glances up the driveway and deep into the estate. “I haven’t seen him since an hour ago when he came to get the mail. Is everything okay?”

“That doesn’t make sense—” I say. But then it does. I throw the car into reverse and back into the empty parking space beside the guard gate, making a quick three-point turn.

“I’m going to ask you to wait here,” the guard says.

But I’m already gone, peppering the shack with bits of ground shells as I spin out.

I know where Ness went. I have no idea where it leads, but I know how I missed him.

Finding the turnoff isn’t easy. I remember about how far down the driveway I was, but I have to creep along with my window down and peer between the trees for the gate. I also look for tire treads veering to the side, or grass flattened on the shoulder. I’m feeling more and more certain that I’ve passed the spot, that I need to turn back and look for it again, when I see the gap between the trees and the black gate in the woods. I pull into the gap, hoping it’ll open automatically. Then I remember the keypad. I get out to study it.

There’s a small LCD screen. I punch in four numbers. The cursor is still blinking. I add two more numbers, and a red light flashes twice. A six-digit code. One of the only relevant numbers I know to try is Ness’s birthday. I try it twice, once with the day before the month and once the other way around. I get red lights both times. The guards are probably on their way. I listen for their jeeps. The hidden road seems to run through the woods to the south. Forgetting the car, and not knowing how far the drive goes or where it leads, I decide to go ahead on foot.

This is where shoes would’ve been a good idea. I stick to the sparse grass where I can, and I stay out of the deep tire treads full of rainwater. The trees only go a few hundred yards, and soon I can see the open field beyond: tall grass, a road cutting through it, the shoulders maintained. To my left, due east, the field runs a long distance before it becomes scrub brush and dunes that must slide down to the sea. Ahead of me, I can see where the road itself leads: to the lighthouse, with its white and black stripes. Maybe a mile away, out on a jut of coast. I start walking.

The hike gives me time to reflect, time to compose what I’ll say to Ness, what I’ll write in my piece, what I might be able to say to Henry to keep the rest of the story from running. I dream of storming into a board meeting and telling them what shortsighted and stupid idiots they are, that this is so much bigger than the tawdry gossip I’ve been compiling, that the last week might have had far greater implications than the last two years of my work.

The sun beats down. The ground is still soggy from the heavy rain the day before. My feet are covered in mud; it cakes up between my toes.

What will I tell my sister? When all this is over, and I have nothing but a destroyed family behind me and two days of perfect shelling and two days of perfect bliss, what will I say happened?

Henry’s news of book offers and film deals haunts me. I can see one way this turns out: with my wealth and notoriety increased, with the publication deals that have always eluded me, with the big-screen dramatizations my long-form colleagues at magazines often get, all at the expense of ruining what might in fact be a decent man.

The parallels to that future and Ness and his family are eerie. I think of how it must feel with all his wealth coming on the back of a broken and flooded world. Maybe he hates himself like I used to hate him, like everyone I know hates him. I may have the same life ahead of me, especially if our affair leaks out. There will be lights flashing, people asking me to sign my book for them, and the pain in my gut like I’ve been punched. Because of what made it all possible. Who I had to hurt. What I had to destroy.