Free The Loop by Nicholas Evans

their parents’ divorce. They were sitting at the table under the trees, finishing the wine which Helen, as usual, had drunk most of, and watching the sun sink beyond the island into the black band of the Massachusetts coast. She wanted to know if the divorce had been as traumatic for Celia as it had been for her.
    Celia shrugged. ‘Oh, I guess I always felt it was for the best.’
    ‘But doesn’t it ever make you angry?’
    ‘No. That’s just the way they were. They wanted to stay together till we were old enough not to be too upset by it.’
    ‘And you weren’t “too upset” by it?’ Helen asked incredulously.
    ‘Oh sure. I was mad at them for awhile. But you can’t let these things get to you. It’s their life after all.’
    Helen had persisted, trying to find some crack in what she thought might only be a protective veneer, but she couldn’t. Maybe it was true that this same event that had torn her own guts apart and sent her, in her love life at least, spiraling almost out of control for years, had left her sister untouched. Whatever, there was no point talking about it. But how strange, she thought, for two people with the same genes to be so different. Perhaps one of them had been swapped at birth.
    After a month of swimming, reading and playing with Kyle and Carey on the beach, Helen had grown restless. A friend of hers in Minneapolis had given her the number of a friend, called Bob, who was working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, farther down the Cape, and one evening Helen called him.
    He sounded nice and asked her if she would like to come to a supper party he was holding that weekend. He and a few friends were going to be watching some ‘amazing footage’ that one of the Woods Hole guys had shot inside the womb of a sand tiger shark. It wasn’t exactly Helen’s idea of a great night out but what the hell, she thought, why not?
    She noticed Joel Latimer as soon as she walked in.
    He looked like one of those Californian surfbums from the sixties, tall and thin and tanned with a mop of sunbleached blond hair. He caught her staring at him while Bob was telling her about Woods Hole and he gave her such a direct smile she nearly spilled her wine.
    It was a help-yourself-in-the-kitchen kind of dinner and Helen found herself at the vegetarian lasagne alongside him.
    ‘So you’re the woman who runs with the wolves,’ he said.
    ‘Actually it’s more of a flat-footed shuffle.’
    He laughed. He had the bluest eyes and the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. She felt something contract in her stomach and told herself not to be ridiculous. He wasn’t even her type, though quite what was her type she’d never been quite sure. He helped her to some salad.
    ‘You’re on vacation here?’
    ‘Yes, I’m staying with my sister. Up at Wellfleet.’
    ‘Then we’re neighbors.’
    Joel was from North Carolina and she could hear it in his accent. His father ran a fishing business. He told her he was doing a PhD on horseshoe crabs, which he said weren’t really crabs at all, but arachnids, distant cousins of the spider. They were a kind of living fossil, ancient even when dinosaurs roamed the earth; they had been around for about four hundred million years without changing.
    ‘Sounds like my supervisor,’ she said. He laughed. God, she felt witty. Normally in the presence of good-looking men she either lost the power of speech or babbled like a loon. She asked him what the crabs looked like.
    ‘You know those helmets the Nazis wore? Well, they’re like that, only brown. And inside it’s kind of like a scorpion.’
    ‘Definitely like my supervisor.’
    ‘And it has this spiked tail sticking out the back.’
    ‘He keeps his tucked away.’
    He told her that horseshoe blood had all kinds of important medical applications, was even used to diagnose and treat cancer. But they were a species under pressure and one of the problems here on the Cape was that eel fishermen killed them for bait.