the pencil lines of their backs showing as they surfaced, and then just the vapor of their twin breaths.
The ship began to move again. The captain, out on the bridge wing, waved his cap and called to them, “I have never seen whales that fucking good, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years!”
After that night’s dinner, Tina organized two teams for charades. Book and movie titles were popular, as were marine themes. Silent Spring was easy. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was hard. Cinda was surprisingly good at acting, and Colin made up new rules. The artist, Annabel—Helen had finally learned her name—contributed titles and song lyrics that no one else knew and was very loud and random in shouting out her guesses. She had a laugh like a goose cackle and kept, for some reason, repeating “caudal peduncle.” Ray joined them, but when the clue from Alex was “jumping jacks,” he went from “jacks” to “jack to “Jackson Oakley” and made a snide comment about “our missing colleague who was too important to be here.”
Helen covered her discomfort by getting a glass of water. She understood why Ray would be unhappy with Jackson, but she didn’t think it was very professional for one professor to criticize another in front of students. She’d never heard Jackson say anything bad about Ray. He didn’t talk about him at all.
The correct answer was Jacques Cousteau, which someone guessed after Alex pretended to be a pigeon, cooing.
After that they played Cinda’s game, which wasn’t really a game. Helen knew it from cultural training sessions, where it was called “values clarification.” If you were a color, what color would you be? The group was mostly shades of green, and Aurora was purple. If you were a bird, what bird would you be? Arctic tern, chickadee, harlequin duck, sandhill crane, peregrine falcon. Helen said she’d be the blue of glacier ice and a golden plover. She was glad she wasn’t a psychologist, because even to a non-psychologist the immediate and rather flippant associations the group tossed out seemed to tell more about each of them than they knew. Including herself—was she really like ice? Ray, of course, had to be especially flippant. If he was a bird, he’d be an Eskimo curlew because, “then the Eskimo curlew wouldn’t be extinct, which it seems to be, or else, I guess, I’d be extinct.”
Ray offered up the next category: “If you were a pteropod, which would you be, Limacina or Clione, shelled or naked?” Most of them wanted to identify with Limacina, the “sea butterfly,” because the shell was so jewel-like, as well as protective, and to “fly” through the sea with its winged foot was pretty cool. Only Ray and Colin chose the carnivorous Clione—for its own exotic beauty, they said.
“It eats the other ones,” Aurora complained.
“We all have to eat,” Marybeth said.
“Circle of life,” Tina intoned. “Circle of life.”
When everyone had gone off to prepare for the night shift or to watch a movie or sleep, Helen settled into a corner of the galley with licorice from the candy drawer and began reading her advanced organic chemistry text, the section on aliphatic nucleophilic substitution. She was still on the first page when Annabel returned—wrapped now in a pink woven shawl pinned at her chest with a green papier-mâché brooch the size of a fist. “I don’t want to bother you,” she said. “I can see you’re studying. But I’m told you’re the one I should talk to about ocean acidification. I need to understand the chemistry. Can we talk sometime?”
Helen closed her book on a scrap of napkin. “We could do it right now if you want.” She’d heard this at a conference: never pass up an opportunity to educate.
Annabel nodded vigorously, hair beads jangling. “Formidable!” she shouted in a French accent. “Tout de suite I’ll be back.”
And she was, as though she had flown to her cabin. She thumped onto the bench across from Helen and opened her drawing pad to a clean sheet. “Pretend I’m a third-grader,” she said. “I’m that stupid.”
“I doubt you’re stupid,” Helen had to say. “But stop me if I start getting too detailed for your purposes. The basic chemistry isn’t too complicated. And, by the way, you’ll be hearing us shorthand ‘ocean acidification’; we call it OA.”
She talked, and Annabel, several rings sparkling on each hand, made chicken-scratch notes in green ink.
She wanted to make sure Annabel understood that the ocean wasn’t turning to acid, only becoming more acidic, while still being on the alkaline side of the pH scale. “Sea life evolved in a very stable pH situation. We’re asking creatures to live in a different environment now, very suddenly. This is the hard part—we don’t know exactly how individual species will respond—are responding. We know that corals are having a very hard time. And you heard Ray talking about pteropods, the marine snails. They’re very vulnerable. Anything with a carbonate shell is affected.”
She drew a carbon dioxide molecule on Annabel’s paper, then a water molecule and one for carbonic acid. “This is the thing,” she said. “In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide stays carbon dioxide. The carbon and oxygen atoms stay bonded. In the ocean, CO2 reacts with seawater. It forms carbonic acid, which releases these hydrogen ions and reduces the pH. The hydrogen ions combine with carbonate ions to form bicarbonates. Then there are fewer carbonate ions left to make calcium carbonate, the major building blocks needed by shell builders.”
Annabel was studying her crude drawing. Helen hesitated to get into the aragonite versus calcite distinction or to be specific about saturation horizons. She knew how easy it was to pile on too much, to let her passion for the subject overtake another person’s tolerance for it. Keep it simple, Jackson was always saying.
Annabel looked up. “So you could say that reduced carbonate ions lower the saturation state.”
Helen tried not to be surprised by the non-third-grade reference. “That’s exactly what we say. We say the water is undersaturated with aragonite, one of the main forms of calcium carbonate.”
Annabel said, “Ray showed me some pictures. His little animals have to work harder to form the calcium carbonate for their shells, and if it gets too bad, their shells actually start to dissolve.”
“That’s exactly right. In the Arctic we’re already seeing corrosive water.”
“We really are fucked.”
Colin, who’d been noisily poking through the candy drawer, came and stood by them while he unwrapped a Sugar Daddy. “Such language,” he said. He glanced at Annabel’s pad. “What kind of art do you do?”
Annabel extracted a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on. “Just about everything. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, fiber, constructions of various kinds, some printmaking, installations. Sometimes it’s ephemeral. Usually there’s an element of healing.”
Colin did a funny thing with his eyebrows.
Helen said, “I imagine you have a particular project with us?”
“I brought materials,” Annabel said. “Colored pencils, paper, some clay, wire. I have to see what presents itself. I don’t impose anything. Very possibly there’ll be an element of light. I’ll leave you to your studies.” She started to get up. “Sugar Daddy!”
Colin jumped aside, as though in fear of having his candy ripped from his hands.
“I would love
