Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“ IS MONIQUE still reading that e-mail?”

It was night on the Expedition ’s stern. Craig, Darryl, and Phil were crouched at the back wall, eyeing the monitors. Lisa was jotting something in her notebook. So no one answered Jason as he looked up from the laptop. “Darryl? Is Monique still reading that e-mail?”

“Oh.” Darryl thought about it. “She must be.” When he’d gone down earlier, she hadn’t even looked at him, just read page after page of information. “Hey, turn that up a little, will ya, Sloppy Joe?”

“You like this, Big Dog?” Craig increased the volume on his enormous boom box, playing a soulful female singer.

“Love it.”

Jason put the laptop down. “I like it, too.”

Craig was surprised. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Jason had just finished typing his notes for the Species Council report and, despite his curiosity about what Monique had found, actually felt like relaxing a little. He looked up at the sky. It was gorgeous, no clouds and a trillion stars.

“Jason.”

“Yeah.”

It was Darryl, at the stairs with Craig and Phil. “Phil’s gonna show us a new video game. Wanna come?”

“Oh, thanks, but I’m not really into video games, guys.”

They disappeared, and Jason looked back up at the sky. It was just stunning. He exhaled and tapped his feet to the music, wondering who the singer was. Then he noticed Lisa, still jotting in her notebook, and saw her feet were also tapping. He realized the two of them were alone.

“Nice night, huh?” She was looking up now too.

“Beautiful.”

She turned back to her notebook. And right there, Jason summoned up the courage to do something he’d been thinking about for quite a while. “Lisa.”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like to dance?”

She paused when Darryl and the guys started coming back up, but Darryl overhead and turned them around.

“I’d love to dance.”

They went to the middle of the deck.

Lisa raised an eyebrow when he put an arm around her waist.

“You probably had no idea I was such a smooth lothario,” he joked.

She laughed, maybe too hard, and he immediately felt self-conscious. “Or maybe you just thought I was some controlling, insecure marine biologist.”

She smiled. “You guessed it.”

“So the music’s pretty good, huh?”

“Changing the subject?”

“Not at all. What do you want to talk about?”

“Why you’re so controlling, of course.” She was still smiling. “Seriously, why do you micromanage everything, Jason? Why can’t you trust anybody?”

“Maybe I’m just wired that way.”

“I don’t buy that. It’s more than that.”

He looked around, at the gorgeous sky, the moon. “Come on, I thought we could try to relax here.”

“I didn’t think you could ever relax.”

“This isn’t helping.”

“Why can’t you trust anyone?”

He turned to the glistening ocean. “I’ve honestly never thought about it.”

“Tell me.” She gently turned his chin. “Please.”

He looked at her. “Maybe it started with all the Manta World problems.”

“OK.”

He looked at the stars. “You’ve got to understand, Lisa, people I’d known for years, people I’d trusted… They all suddenly stopped calling. Meetings got canceled, my tables at conferences ended up empty….” He looked her in the eye. “They abandoned me and they never came back.” He shrugged. “After a while, you start to lose trust in people.”

“I see.” This was a real answer, and she almost hadn’t been expecting it. “I’m very sorry.”

“To be honest, for a long time, I felt you were letting me down too. You were so totally focused on your own research. Often at the expense of what the rest of us were trying to accomplish. I think I really resented that. It might be why we fought so much.”

She swallowed this bitter pill silently. “Do you still feel like that?”

He paused. “I haven’t felt that way for a while. About you, about anyone on the boat. It’s really been a great turnaround.”

“Then how come you still can’t trust us?”

“I can trust you.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Really, I—”

“Good things happen when you trust us, Jason. Look at what happened when you went to Princeton to talk to that Ban… Bar… Bardan…”

“Bandar Vishakeratne.”

“Look at what we did, what we found while you were away with him.”

“That’s because I trusted you. You just proved it.”

“You didn’t trust anybody, Jason You left because you had to. It’s not the same thing.”

He smiled. “It isn’t?”

“Jesus Christ, no, it isn—”

“You’re very pretty, Lisa. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that, but I’ve noticed. I’ve noticed every single day. Wrinkled clothes or not, you are beautiful.”

She hesitated. “Changing the subject again?”

They kept dancing, maybe a little closer.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“Thank you. I’ll think about what you said.”

As they continued he held her tighter… and it felt a little strange. On the one hand, physically holding Lisa Barton after all this time was odd, definitely odd, but on the other hand, it was also natural.

It was the same for Lisa, strange but natural, too.

The song ended, and they heard something…. It was the guys, starting up the stairs. Darryl poked his head up meekly, as if asking if it was OK to return. Jason waved him forward.

They walked up, and the grin on Phil’s face was bigger than the boat. “So what’s goin’ on, guys?”

Lisa was casual. “Just giving Jason some dance lessons. He only stepped on my feet three times.”

Craig nodded, not missing a beat. “The over-under was four.”

Darryl smiled softly. Before they’d left Baja, he never would have guessed it. Lisa and Jason. Seeing them together made him think of families, kids, and life beyond the Expedition. The Hollises had been discussing those subjects a great deal recently. Issues like which towns had the best public nursery schools and day cares, the possibility of buying a place, which banks offered the cheapest mortgages. It all depended on Monique getting pregnant, of course, but they hoped that would happen in the near future.

Just then Monique appeared on deck. Right away, Darryl saw she wasn’t in a romantic mood. She held a map of Northern California and a printout of the massive e-mail she’d been reading.

Jason couldn’t help but notice how serious she looked. “What’s up, Monique?”

“Every species that ever transitioned from one environment to another did it through a conduit. A specific place where the species was physically comfortable. The very first penguin left the air for the sea via a particular hole in an iceberg. The very first whales entered the ocean by way of a submerged tunnel. Archaeopteryxes, crocodiles, dolphins—every species that’s ever changed environments did it via their own special conduit. These rays are looking for theirs.”

Jason eyed the map. “Can we figure out where that is?”

“I already did.”

“ THIS IS where the virus-free island is….”

In the living room below deck, Monique pointed to an open map on the table. “And this… is Redwood Inlet.”

On the map, it was a wide spoke of blue, flowing from deep in the green forest right into the ocean.

“It’s nearly a quarter of a mile wide and the perfect conduit to the land. It could give the rays direct access without ever having to leave the water.”