A shark had eaten my mother
It's 2006
In the hot Internet café of the Mexican coastal town of Zihuatanejo on the Pacific Ocean, where I have been spending my winters for several years, I received an e-mail from my old aunt Lili.
The subject was my phone number. She had written the message as if she were writing me a letter, saluting me, Dear Teddy, and signing your Aunt Lili.
She must be eighty by now, but she is up-to-date enough to get an email address and occasionally sends me messages about her whereabouts.
Why she sent me her phone number wasn't immediately clear to me. Could she have moved and had a new number? However, a move didn't seem likely to me because I had helped her move to what she called her last address this summer: a home for the elderly at the harbor of Huizen. The email stated that a shark had eaten my mother. She wrote that a video had been made of it on YouTube and gave the link. She did write that she didn't recommend that I click on it because it was horrifying, but I ignored her warning and clicked on it.
My mother was standing on a wooden scaffold in a white dress; she didn't look quite different from when she left us; she was skinnier, and her curly hair was still dark with some gray patches, but her skin was browner than when she lived in Amsterdam. Now, she lived in a country where the sun shone more often, making her skin darker, and she was happier. In the Netherlands, in the winter, she had been depressed and had sought comfort from me. In the YouTube video, she had something bloody in her hand that she held about a meter above the surface of the water. She called out a name, Sharky, looked into the camera, and smiled happily. A blue shark's head came up, its mouth open, its large teeth sharp and white. My mother teasingly moved the bloody piece of meat in front of its mouth and pulled it up. Instead of that head snatching the gore out of my mother's hand, he gasped at her leg and pulled her into the water. I heard her scream, saw her fall into the water, and clicked the image away.
With a pounding heart I read Aunt Lili's email again.
Dear Teddy
It is with great regret that I must inform you that your mother was pulled into the water by a shark off the coast of Chile on 24 November. Authorities assume she was eaten. She didn't come back up. If you want to know more, you can call me on +31354329034. I don't know where you are, and I'm sorry to inform you in an email.
A video has been made that you can see on YouTube.
I don't recommend looking at it. It's too gruesome. Your mother worked in a shark sanctuary and did a lot to prevent the extinction of the great blue shark. Unfortunately, one of these sharks ended her life.
Your aunt Lily
I wrote the number on my hand and shut down my laptop. Outside, I sat down on the Fruitbar terrace and ordered a papaya, mango, and pineapple smoothie. It was already hot at nine o'clock. In the Netherlands, it was four o'clock in the afternoon, a suitable time to call Aunt Lili, but I stayed where I was and didn't call anyone. The waitress brought me another smoothie, which I drank slowly, and I ordered fried eggs with bacon and toast. I turned off my laptop, turned it back on, and went to my Inbox. There was still a message with the subject: My phone number. I clicked the message open and reread the message. I never wanted to see the video on YouTube again, but I clicked on the link anyway. The circle twisted and turned until a message appeared that the video was no longer viewable. There were several reasons; one was that it could have been removed because it was too gruesome. I clicked refresh, but the video could not be seen.
I messaged Lili back and asked if she had Skype and if she would write back to me as soon as possible. I reread the message and kept clicking on Lili's YouTube link.
Juan Carlos, a local who had built a house of branches and leaves in the woods, sat beside me. He looked at me glassy. He must have already smoked a joint of the weed he grew somewhere deep in the forest, in a secret place.
‘Hey Teddy, what's wrong? You look like you saw a ghost, ' he giggled.
‘I just got a message my mother died. A shark ate her.’
Juan Carlos changed color, choked, and started coughing. After this, he started laughing—ridiculously hard, so hard that he almost choked on it.
I slammed my laptop, yelled at the waitress that Juan Carlos was paying and that she should give him those eggs, and jumped on my scooter. I was going away from here to the beach, water, the surf, and swimming.
I swam across the bay from right to left, just behind the surf, the water was about ten meters deep here, sailboats were anchored. To my right, more than a mile away, I estimated, was the Pacific Ocean. My mother had met her end hundreds, maybe thousands of miles south in the same Pacific Ocean. For a moment, the thought of swimming towards the ocean crept up on me; for that mile, I didn't need to think twice; I would swim and swim and swim on until I couldn't go on anymore. Death by drowning would strike me. Or I was found before by a shark, a whale, or an orca like you sometimes see here, and I would serve as fish food.
~~
These are the first pages of my fictional story of Teddy’s trip to Chile, what she will find there, and what has happened. There is more written, so there will be more to come.