pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

and cats to kill.”

      Aurora frowned at him but was already through the door, a fairy princess in an oversized hoodie that reached almost to her knees.

      They climbed the ladder behind the pilothouse—Aurora as fearless as a monkey, Ray spotting from below. Topside, she took a seat on the padded bench where biologists on survey cruises sat to record their marine mammal and bird sightings.

      Ray’s boyhood fascination with birds had never worn off, even as he’d learned that his eyesight and temperament were better suited to small things he could capture and control. That was like so much in his life, starting off large and getting smaller—dinosaurs, then gorillas and bears, hawks and owls and the wood ducks of his Michigan youth, down to passerines he could hold in his hand, dragonflies and beetles, the nearly invisible world of microorganisms. Not that there was anything inherently “better” about the larger and more charismatic species, but he had seemed to know at an early age that he himself would not be large—in the sense of attainment—or charismatic. He’d recalibrated his ambitions several times along the way, through school and in the romance department, where he’d somehow lucked out with a wife who exceeded his expectations—but who also knew this and sometimes reminded him.

      He raised his binoculars now, setting on a single kittiwake that winged lazily across the bow. Off to one side, three glaucous-winged gulls, two of them juveniles with muddy-looking feathers, rode a half-submerged log.

      “Where’s the porpoises?” Aurora bounced on the bench.

      “You know what to look for?”

      “What?”

      “Rooster tails. Water will be spraying from their backs when they break the surface. It’ll be just quick splashes, they swim so fast. Here.” He handed her the binoculars, placing the strap around her neck. “Look at those gulls on the log. Oh, and look! There’s a puffin, a horned puffin.” The football-shaped bird with its white front beat past; he could just make out the orange bill with his bare eye.

      She was slow to track the bird, to lift the glasses and aim them in the right direction. He could tell she was only pretending to see it, for his benefit. It was too far away now.

      A retired bird biologist had told Ray, just a couple weeks earlier, that he used to do surveys along the coast behind them, and that the numbers of birds today were mere fractions of what he’d observed in the 1970s. Especially murres. They used to be as thick as flies, he’d said. Now tourists saw a few murres and puffins, maybe a red-faced cormorant, and thought they were looking at abundance because they didn’t have anything to compare with. They couldn’t begin to imagine the thickly packed and cacophonous cliff colonies, the huge rafts of seabirds covering the nearshore waters, the darkened skies when they flew. Ray had also heard from a tour guide that the guides never said anything to their customers about diminution. If they saw just one puffin or one orca, they exclaimed over it: You’re so lucky to see that! The tourists went away thinking they’d just had an amazing nature experience in a pristine, undisturbed, Serengeti landscape. Because really, the guide had said to Ray, these people paid a lot of money to go on their tours and cruises and you wanted them to think they were having the best wildlife experience ever. Why would you want to depress them by mentioning climate change or that there was oil under the beach sand or that the reason a group of birds was resting on the water in the middle of summer was because they’d had a complete reproductive failure?

      And now, on top of all those other insults, an acidifying ocean.

      A picture of Jackson Oakley crowded back into his mind—that shiny smooth face that reminded him of the smiley faces people sometimes used, annoyingly, in their e-mails. Who was the man consulting with? What was he saying in his apparently many speeches? Was it all about his precious calibrating instruments and the need to study, study, study more ocean chemistry?

      Ray looked at his daughter, her uncombed hair blowing back in the breeze as she held tightly to the binoculars aimed at the sky, at feathers of clouds farther out over the Gulf. The Gulf stretched to the horizon, an achingly beautiful scene if you didn’t know better. He was the cup-half-empty guy, the realist, but he knew he ought to let others—children at least—enjoy some innocence. He would bite his tongue. He would not say, “You should have seen this place when …”

      He did the best he could under the circumstances, which was to say nothing.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Helen was ravenous after working on the back deck all morning, sampling and hauling plastic totes of glass bottles to safe storage. By the time the cruise was over, she’d have roughly six hundred filled bottles to take back to the university lab. She was facing months of measuring alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon. As unreasonable as it seemed, even to her, this anticipation thrilled her.

      In the galley, most of the others had already helped themselves and were sitting around the three tables. She served herself a bowl of chowder and a humungous roast beef sandwich oozing caramelized onions. There was pie for dessert.

      She slid in where she could, next to their leader. She liked Ray Berringer—a man devoted to his “bugs”—although beyond the cruises she didn’t see much of him. Biology did its thing, chemistry did its. This division of departments had always seemed peculiar to her. What they were now calling “Western science” was just beginning to grasp that everything was connected, something Alaska Natives had known forever.

      Ray, mouth full, nodded to her. His Sealife Center cap sat a little askew on his head, and graying neck hair merged with his untrimmed beard above a frayed T-shirt collar. She knew he loved the cruises, was clearly more comfortable as a salty sailor than a tweedy professor. Every year different faculty and students came on the cruises, but Ray was a fixture. He was the one who made sure the research happened, who wrote the grants and filed the reports.

      She was still not entirely sure why Professor Oakley—Jackson, as she now knew him—had left. He had work he couldn’t do from the ship. He and Ray didn’t get along, for whatever reason—two alpha dogs, she suspected. But he’d also told her he was finding the whole thing “awkward.”

      “The whole thing” she understood to include her. In recent weeks their relationship had passed from advisor and student to something she hesitated to call “love,” but included spending nonacademic time together and, yes, sex. “Chemistry,” they had joked. They had good chemistry, were drawn together by—what? It wasn’t just physical attraction; they interested one another. Perhaps it was their differences. In any case they were both adults—she had taken her time getting through school—and they had been discrete. She had felt confident that they could continue to be adult, discrete, and professional on the ship. Apparently he hadn’t shared her confidence. Or something.

      She played the scene over in her head. Their few minutes in the ship’s lab, where he’d found her labeling jars. “I’m not staying.” Her confusion; they were already halfway down the bay. “You know this work better than I do.” Her protests. “I already told Berringer. It’s done.” Her questions. His answers, his excuses. “It’s not about you,” he said at one point. The whole thing, he said, was awkward.

      At the end, he’d reached out and cupped the side of her face, and she had felt the heat. He said, “You’ll do a great job.”

      Now, squeezing in among her colleagues, she tried being cheerful. “Unbelievable weather.”

      Ray swallowed. “It will be interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such stratification so late in the year.”

      Across from them, Tina and Robert were trading Sven and Ole jokes. In Tina’s joke Ole was doing a striptease in front of a tractor. Helen guessed it was OK to tell bigoted jokes about Minnesotan farmers. They were not a protected minority, not that she knew of. People were more careful about telling Eskimo jokes these days; at least they didn’t tell them so much in her presence. Her own sense of humor tended to be less hah-hah, quieter, culture-based. The small teasings and subtle ironies of the Iñupiat weren’t always obvious to others, but Arctic cultures wouldn’t