The Jade Notebook Read Free Page A

witnessing something extraordinary. “Is it alive?”
    He studies it. “I think it’s coming ashore.”
    The ghostly form emerges from the surf, impossibly slowly. I take a step closer, make out its heart-shaped body, wide flippers like wings, tiny slits of eyes, glinting. Now I grasp the size of this beast. It’s as big as a car.
    “A sea turtle, Zeeta,” Wendell whispers. “It’s so huge, it must be a leatherback. Endangered for years, hunted nearly to extinction.”
    I watch the creature’s arduous trek from the surf, letting the magic wash over me. There’s something ancient about this animal, something that humbles me, mesmerizes me.And I feel the presence of my father. Whenever Layla talks about their one-night stand nearly eighteen years ago in Greece, she tells how he emerged from the sea like a creature from another world. Despite my eye-rolling, I started to think of him that way, somewhere out there, living his own deep-sea life. Then, last year in France, he began to emerge, only to retreat again before I even saw his real face. He worked as a mime, part of a troupe of street performers appropriately called Illusion. I’d met my father at last, met him without knowing it was him. Briefly, an image flashes in my mind—my father lost in dark waters, swimming in circles, aimless.
    Disturbing. I shake off the thought, just as Wendell says, “Look, Z!,” gesturing up the beach.
    There are more turtles ahead, although none quite as big as the first one. About seven or eight of them, most in various stages of dragging themselves from the surf. A couple have already started digging their nests, their flippers alternating, right, left, right, flinging sand.
    “These leatherbacks migrate thousands of miles to feed,” Wendell says, his soft voice growing animated. “Down to South America. Every couple of years they swim all the way back to the same little stretch of beach here to nest. They’ll lay a few clutches of eggs throughout the nesting season, then head back to the waters off the coast of Chile, or Peru, or Ecuador. Isn’t that
padre
?”
    I nod, grateful to focus on sea turtle factoids instead of that strange, underwater image of my father.
    As we tiptoe around the leatherbacks, Wendell spouts off more facts, and I find myself becoming surprisingly absorbed. He’s always been most interested in the art form of photography. But something happened over the fall, as he was preparing for this internship, reading books and articles and watching videos back in Colorado. He apparently developed a fondness for sea turtles. More than a fondness. A passion.
    Eventually, we reach the rocks at the end of the beach, then turn around, passing by the six turtles and stopping at the largest one, the one we first spotted.
    “It’s instinctual,” Wendell is saying, “finding their nesting place—something to do with magnetic particles in their brains. After sea turtles hatch, they spend over a decade wandering, but they’re drawn to come back to the beach where they were born, where their mothers and grandmothers nested. They’ve been doing this for over a hundred million years.”
    I take this in. “Maybe my dad is a merman after all.” I’m attempting to joke, but my words end up sounding almost grave. “A turtle merman.”
    “A turtle merman?” Wendell looks at me, skeptically at first, then tenderly. “You think he’s really somewhere around here?”
    I shrug, trying to figure out what I think, how to put the underwater image of my father into words. Back in France, I’d been certain this was where my father had gone, to his home town of Mazunte. But now that we’re here, and there’sno sign of him, I don’t know what to think. In fact, I’ve been trying
not
to think about him, and to focus instead on the perfection of this beach town. But tonight I can’t shake this picture of my father, lost in a dark place.
    “Hey,” Wendell says, “we’ll find him.” He studies my face, trying to