"Marina Fitch - Sarah at the Tide Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fitch Marina)

SARAH AT THE TIDE POOL
By Marina Fitch
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SARAH CROUCHES BESIDE THE tide pool, her water bottle beside her knee.
She tugs the brim of her straw hat, tucking a lock of her brown hair under its band,
and smooths the sleeves of her cotton blouse in hopes they will help protect her
from the sun. An hour’s exposure, wearing a forty-two sun block, is considered an
acceptable risk for people in their twenties; Sarah is thirty-seven. She glances over
her shoulder at the expanse of yellow sand stretching behind her, at her footprints
wandering in and out of the surf. No one in sight. Only fools risk the late May sun at
noon — fools and desperate people.

She hesitates, then dips her hand beneath the surface of the tide pool, bracing
herself against the chill. But there is no chill, just the coolness of the water as it
chums briefly with the runoff of a wave. She makes a mental note to record this
observation when she returns to her lab, then remembers. She may never see the lab
at MediChem again.

She squints down the beach. Where is he?

She turns back to the pool. Framed by algae and rock, the tidal world
shimmers below her. A hermit crab, startled by Sarah’s shadow and her hand,
scuttles into a protective niche between two green anemones. The pool drains.
Exposed to the air, the anemones squeeze shut so that they look like plastic tubes
with tufts of yam sticking out. A decorator crab heads for a fissure, its shell drably
ornamented with barnacles, a tiny anemone and a fringe of algae. Mussels and
starfish cling to the rock. Sarah smiles wistfully. She hadn’t really expected to see a
nudibranch in the narrow pool.

On a Sunday morning in February, Sarah unlocked.her lab and found a
stranger waiting for her, bent over the aquarium. He straightened, towering over her
five feet. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

The tall man tapped the aquarium wall. The security badge clipped to his
collar jiggled. “Are these the nudibranchs? They look like slugs.”

“Please don’t tap the glass,” Sarah said, grasping his hand between her thumb
and her index finger. She guided his hand away from the glass, then dropped it.

The man folded his lean body into a crouch. The shadows of the aquarium
bubbles played across his features, across the broad cheeks and the nose flattened
as if pressed against invisible glass. “I can’t believe how many requisitions you’ve
put in for these things.”

Sarah fisted her hands and scratched her palms with her fingernails. “I use
them in my research.”

The man turned, watching her for a second. “I make you nervous.”