Peter's Shell by Peter Andrews

A three hundred foot-tall lighthouse with a red barbershop stripe made no sense in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but Wendy wanted it, so it was there. Lighthouses were one of her obsessions, and the distance between her home and the sea made no difference to her.

I parked my car and saw that, as usual, the front door to her home was wide open. When we both lived in New York and were still just breaking in, I as an astrobiologist and she as a writer, this had led to numerous robberies. But we didn't have much then, so we couldn't lose much.

I didn't have to guess which building to enter. The door to the lighthouse was wide open. Wendy's head poked out a window just above me.

"This way, Peter."

I stepped inside and took a second to let my eyes adjust to the dim light. She was already headed up the winding staircase. At the top, it narrowed down to nothing, but is was as wide as a bus at the base. She kept taking the spiral around and lapped me a few times, rising higher and higher, before I began to follow her.

"Come on. I'm headed for the top!" she called down to me.

"Stop! Talk!" I said.

She laughed and continued climbing.

I started up the staircase. Everything we had to say could have been covered over the phone, but that wasn't her way.

After only a few steps, I passed a Funny Buck. This was the currency of a madcap story of a desperate carpet salesman, the main character in the first work that got her recognition. The artifact itself was from the television series. Its presence, as an inset souvenir, was a classic Wendy gesture.

"Stop gawking like a tourist," she said. Teasing me. I'd spent my whole life chasing Wendy. Often, I wasn't completely sure that I wanted to catch her.

I took two steps at a time, which isn't easy when they are wedge-shaped and shrinking with each turn. The next little shrine held one of her Oscars. I zipped by, gaining a bit on her. With no apparent effort, she picked up her pace.

"Slow down!" I called.

"Speed up!"

I was almost forty and out of shape. My traitorous heart started to pound. I had to pause.

I gasped out the question that brought me to her. "Was it true?"

"All my stories are true."

An artist's answer. But I'm a scientist.

"Is it factual? Did you really find such an artifact?"

Wendy laughed. That crazy-making laugh. It made me want to head in the other direction. But I had traveled over thousand miles for my answer. Things about her story lined up with my data. And I had an intuition that it was this she had been hiding from me for many years.

Wendy put down the puppet that had been amusing her. It was of a crocodile, similar to the one Miss Jerome had used in the counting game. But Wendy already knew how to count all the way to one hundred.

Her mother was still busy looking through fabric samples. She dragged her hand along a shelf full of plastic army men, and then she looked at the dust that had blackened her fingers. Disgusting. She wiped it off on her dress.

A pile of shells caught her attention. Shiny. Almost the color of a nickel. She took one, and the pile rattled.

"Wendy, we look with our eyes, not with our hands," her mother said.

But her mother hadn't looked down. She was still absorbed in her fabric shopping.

The shell was cold to the touch. It rolled in Wendy's hand to reveal a crevice, and then it settled into her palm for an exact fit.

Wendy fit her little finger into the crevice. There was a rille inside. She dragged her fingernail across it to hear the rasp.

Eeeee...

Bad music. A wail of pain in the middle of her head. She pulled her finger out as if it had been burned.

She started to put the shell back, but hesitated. It rolled back into her palm. It felt perfect.

"Can I get this, Mommy?"

"What?" Her mother looked up. "It's ugly. Here, let's buy this one instead."

Wendy closed her fist around the shell and shook her head.

I started up the stairs again. There is a mystery in our galaxy. Over two hundred planets have been found circling stars other than our own. Some have atmospheres. None have even a trace of water.

The other planets are all far from the sea. Very far, if ours is the only one. But life can exist far away, and you can build a lighthouse wherever you want.

Wendy laughed. "Come on!"

I made another revolution. Orbits within orbits. The music of the spheres. But I couldn't hear a thing over the beating of my heart, my angry heart.

And there in a niche was a souvenir I knew well, because I had made it for Wendy.

I am left-brain dysfunctional. Numbers are more real to me than colors. I'll take an instruction manual over poetry any day. I can lose myself in lines of code the way an artist will be transported by a Sonoran sunset.

Wendy recognized this, and she enrolled me in a sculpture class. The tuition was nonrefundable, she used the rent money, and she had to work double shifts to make up the loss. In other words, I was obliged to take the bloody course.

For three months, I trekked down to the Fashion District, sat in a store window, and molded, chipped and carved. I had the idea that I would make a dog. (It had worked in second grade.) I ended up with something like a lemur.

I worked on an abstract piece that Wendy said looked like a flashlight with a hard-on. Then I made a marble incisor. One good enough to fool the tooth fairy. It stopped my teacher cold. After weeks of faux praise, she didn't have anything to say at all. This didn't bother me. I just liked the feel of it in my hand. I liked it so much that I made another tooth. And another. It was my dental period. I made a full set, fit them into ludicrous blue-green clay and presented them to Wendy.

And here they were. Dentures for Michelangelo's David, if he ever got hit by periodontal disease. Wendy wrote a full-length play dedicated to these teeth, and it won a Drama Desk Award - Outstanding New Play. She never had to do double shifts again. And about the time she finished the play, I had my Ph.D. The world lost a sculptor and gained an astrobiologist. Here, twelve years later, I was still looking for answers.

"Is it true?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't have enough data."

She shook her head. "Data. Data. Everything is there, in the story!"

And she began to run again.

The lady in the store gave Wendy the shell for free. She held it tightly in her hand, occasionally peeking at it through her fingers as she went home. On impulse, she ran her tongue across the crevice. It tasted of smoke.

"Wendy, it's not clean!" her mother said.

"Oh."

Once they got home, she ran into her room. She knew what she wanted to do. On her bookshelf, between the Barrel O' Monkeys and Wooly Willy was a canister of Pick-Up Sticks. She extracted one and gently ran it across the rille. The rasp became a voice speaking in a language she'd never heard. She did it again, and almost felt that she could understand it.

That's when Alan came in.

"Mom says you have to share."

Wendy looked up. Her twin brother had a runny nose and his hands were grimy.

"This is my room," she said.

"Mom said..."

"Get out, or I'll kill you."

Alan raced away. "Mom!"

Wendy stuffed the shell under her mattress and walked out to join the screaming.

I noticed that the humidity had dropped as I'd climbed the lighthouse. It was as if I'd ascended above some weather system, leaving the clouds behind. Round and round, up and up, I'd gone. It seemed as if I'd gotten closer to Wendy, but the lighthouse had narrowed so much that it was hard to tell. Was she nearer, but higher? For the first time, I realized how narrow the staircase had gotten. I could still get both feet on each of the wedge-shaped steps, but just barely. In a few more turns, I'd need to slow down, make sure of my footing. I started to sweat.

A laugh came from above.

I looked up as she looked down.

"You don't know anything, do you?" I said.

"Sour. Grapes," she said, up there, beyond my grasp.

My hand discovered another memento on the next turn. Instead of a well-lit niche, this time there was just a missing brick, an unfinished bit of wall. Something told me to look in. I couldn't see a thing. Putting my foot on the stair above, I shifted my weight and angled my head so I could give enough space for light to enter as I peered in. An empty bottle of Amontillado.

We had toasted each other when I'd been appointed a professor at the University of Arizona. My seven years in the desert about to begin. Steward Observatory. The Mars Lander and ice. Methane in the sky of an extrasolar planet. Tantalizing evidence of peptides in space. Beginnings.

And endings. My life with Wendy had less than a day left. I would get on a plane, and it would be over. She would not, could not join me in a desert, far from her Atlantic Ocean. We would talk on the phone. We would visit. We would communicate through friends, by rumor and via a shared popular media that would find us from time to time. Expose us. But we would never be together as a couple again.

"You're running out of room," I said. And a trick of the eye seemed to stretch the lighthouse until it reached infinity. It hit me right in the stomach, and I pressed my face against the cold brick until nerves, eyes, and heart found a new equilibrium.

Wendy shouted, "You've come this far, don't quit now."

"I haven't quit," I said. I glimpsed her through slitted eyes, not daring to look too far up or too far down.

"And for Peter's sake, don't fall!"

She resumed her climb, and I edged my way upward.

Even before she got the shell, Wendy had had a special relationship with the material world. Walk through the backyard, and you'd find dandelion clocks, captured in a pill bottle and nestled in the crook of a tree. Ribbons and beads were tied to the forsythia. Birthday cards, cut into spirals, were woven into the chains of her swing set.

In a sense, the shell completed her collection, bringing the many totems and holy relics to life. Wendy's favorite place to be was sitting on a flat stone, hidden by a spray of daisies, shaded by the branches of a generation oak.

There, she was surrounded. There, she was alone. There, she found silence and a conversation wherever he eyes fell. Sitting in the backyard, under the oak, amid the daisies, on the flat stone, she held the shell in her hand and made it rasp.

No pain now. Only a small bite, now and again. The conversations with the cards were about coming into being. The conversations with ribbons and beads were about light and darkness. The conversations with the dandelion clocks were about being everywhere and nowhere. But the conversations with the shell were about other worlds. Dry. Too cold. Too hot. Filled with poisons. Alive. Teeming with life. Energy itself.

Pictures filled Wendy's head. An adult could not have held them. A child who had never lost herself in nature would have been destroyed. But Wendy did not try to hold them, and the world she shared was almost big enough.

For seven days, she played in the backyard. For seven days, she was shaded by the branches of the oak. For seven days, she hid among the daisies and sat on the flat rock. She made the shell rasp. She was small as a child and big as the universe.

I am the pickpocket's best friend. Watch me for more than a few minutes and my hand will go to my wallet, to my passport, to my keys. I had, as I climbed to the top of the lighthouse (if there was a top), a three-by-five index card in my pocket. On it, I had three equations, a list of seven words that were used repeatedly in the plays, movies, novels and short stories of Wendy Llewelyn. And I had an exploded view of a bio-ansible - an organism that spoke across light years, that connected worlds, that carried the messages of gods. It only existed in theory. It looked very much like a shell.

My right hand let go of the railing and found that card. I began to fall backward. My left hand clutched, held tight to the railing. My arm stretched and I heard my shoulder pop. My eyes looked upward, and I saw stars. It was mid-day, and I saw a starry sky.

"Don't try to fly, Peter. You'll fall."

I looked from the sky to Wendy. She was close enough for me to see the blue of her eyes.

"Just a little bit further. But you have to do it on your own."

"For what? Just stop! Stop and talk to me!"

Wendy laughed. That crazy-making laugh.

On day eight, the shell disappeared. It was not in the yard. It was not hidden under her mattress. It wasn't in the Snoopy lunchbox, rolled in a sock, in the bag of marbles or in any of Alan's dozen other hiding places. It was well and truly lost for three days. No place. No place at all.

But a Pick-Up Stick was missing. And then Wendy noticed that the nutpick, which she and Alan weren't allowed to touch, was gone from its pouch next to the nutcracker. Gone for a reason, she guessed, and she felt sick.

She had her school shoes on, and they never quite grabbed the wooden floor of the hallway, so Wendy didn't run to Alan's room. She walked deliberately though quickly. The hallway was long and before she got to the end she heard a rasp and a scream.

Turning into Alan's room, she found him on the floor, shaking. The shell was next to him with the nutpick jammed into it.

She crouched next to him. She put her hand on his head, running it over his hair. A ribbon of blood tricked from his ear.

Wendy reached out for the shell. She reached out, not with her hand, but with her mind, with her heart. The nutpick clattered away. The tokens and holy relics in the yard sang their songs. Together they were as small as a child and as large as the universe. Together, they held onto the life of a little boy. Who opened his eyes again.

Wendy sat on the step in front of me. I was tired and dizzy. The dots in front of my eyes seemed to be galaxies whirling about her head. I eased myself closer and I felt, but didn't see, a niche in the wall. I slipped my hand in.

My fingers touched a rille. They found an unhealed crack. And then they slipped around to hold a shell that fit perfectly in the palm of my hand.

"Welcome," Wendy said. "Please. Join the conversation."