The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  “Is that what you’ve been doing on your patio?” Caroline leaned back away from him. “Absorbing vitamin D?”

  David ignored her. “You’ve been here what? A week?”

  Alex nodded. “Pretty close, yeah.”

  “Then I saved you just in time. Another three or four days, and you’ll be standing on the side of a bridge, thinking your best career path is to jump.

  “The more depleted you get, the worse things seem. Tired, sweaty, depressed. The list of troubles from vitamin D deficiency sound like cocaine withdrawal at a Betty Ford clinic. Nasty stuff.” He shook his head and made a face, and showed her the bottle in his hand. “You’ll want to get a bottle of this as soon as you leave here today. Or maybe a case.”

  Alex swallowed her gelcaps and nodded. “Thanks, David.”

  “This will help, too,” Grace said, clicking the parts of a small spinning wheel into place. “Spinning is almost as good as meditating. It’s my happy place. All my troubles just slide away.”

  David stopped his own spinning wheel and pulled his glasses down, sending Grace a hard look over the tops. “Don’t lie, Grace. It doesn’t become you.”

  “All right, maybe it isn’t a happy place right at the beginning.”

  “Or maybe even the first six months,” David added. He turned to look at Alex. “But once you get the hang of it . . . ahhh. Peace is yours. Along with way too much handspun yarn.”

  “Peace sounds nice,” Alex murmured. “I wouldn’t know what to do with the yarn, though.”

  Grace looked at Alex for a moment, searching her face.

  “Don’t worry,” David said, leaning forward and tapping her knee. “We can help with that, too.”

  Grace went through a whirlwind description of the parts of the spinning wheel. “So this is roving,” she began, handing Alex a pile of white fluff, a substance that was cleaner and fluffier than when attached to the sheep, but not quite to the stage of yarn. “You’re going to hold this in your left hand, loosely, like you’re holding a baby bird.”

  David was spinning away in the chair on Alex’s left side. It sounded almost like music, the rhythm of his feet on the treadles, the soft song of the wheel turning. Alex watched him for a moment. He made it look easy. The sound of the wheel was soothing.

  “And with your right hand, you’re going to draft—pull a few of the fibers loose from the bunch. You treadle the wheel, let those fibers build up twist, and then you feed them onto the bobbin.”

  Caroline sat forward. “And all while you are treadling with both feet. It’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach as you dance across the living room. Don’t let these old ladies fool you, Alex. Spinning is nothing but an exercise in creative cursing.”

  David smiled. “Absolutely true, at the beginning. You will spit out curse words that you never knew you had even heard before. But most of us”—he gave Caroline a pointed look—“can graduate from the cussing stage to the ‘oh my God, I’ve got it’ stage. And then . . . the wonders of handspun are at your fingertips.” He sat back and raised his eyebrows.

  Caroline pursed her lips and leaned forward, as if sharing a dark secret. “The only reason David likes spinning is because it gives him an excuse to whack his wool.”

  Alex felt her lower jaw drop. “Excuse me?”

  “Caroline! Must you always be so crude?” Grace looked at Alex and shook her head. “I believe it is Caroline’s mission in life to shock people. She feeds on it.”

  “That’s right,” David chimed in. He leaned forward slightly in his chair. “And you are nowhere near being ready to whack your wool, just yet.”

  Grace sighed. “The two of them are like teenagers, aren’t they? But whacking the wool is part of the process. First, you spin a bobbin of yarn; that’s called a single ply. And then you spin another. Ply them together. Then you’ll take that two-ply yarn and soak it in hot water. Take that skein of wool, still slightly wet, and whack it hard several times. Against the floor or a kitchen counter. It helps to strengthen the plies and straighten everything out.”

  “Oh,” Alex breathed, sitting back a little.

  “Just be sure to take your glasses off first,” Grace added, looking at Alex over the tops of her purple frames. She shuddered, and then continued her spinning.

  “Yes, exactly,” David continued. “You have to whack it really hard.” He sat back and started his own wheel again. “So Grace, where do you whack your wool?”

  She looked at him and scowled. After a moment, spinning away on her own wheel, she murmured, “I like the kitchen counter.”

  David nodded sagely. “I like to whack mine on the patio. But it does tend to be hard on the patio furniture,” he continued.

  “Man, your patio sees a lot of action, doesn’t it?” Caroline said.

  Grace said, “Hush, and let her learn. She doesn’t have to worry about whacking anything just yet. Here, Alex. Start by using just the foot treadles. See if you can make the wheel stop, and then start turning again, the same direction.”

  Alex started practicing, moving the treadles with her feet. It was harder than it looked, controlling the direction of the wheel, making it stop and start without going backward, but she could feel, almost immediately, that it was a distraction from her troubles, something that required all her concentration. After fifteen minutes or so, just messing with the foot treadles, Grace gave her a small pile of roving, and Alex tried doing all the maneuvers at the same time. “Damn it!” she spat, within a minute of beginning. “I broke it already.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” Caroline laughed. “Come on, Alex. Show us what you’ve got. A couple of fricking frick frick fricks are in order when you start to spin. Or a son of a stinking sailor.” Caroline waited a moment, while Alex tried again to get the fiber to spin and feed onto the bobbin. “Besides, you work for Maggie. You need a whole arsenal of curse words.”

  Alex started the wheel again. “Ahhh . . . ,” she gasped. “I did it, for like three seconds.”

  Grace touched her hand softly. “No need to put the death grip on that roving, Alex.”

  David laughed again. “Like learning to water ski, no? You drink a whole lot of lake at first, for those few seconds when you can actually stand up and feel the water beneath you. But . . . the fact that you’ve managed three seconds of spinning? That puts you way ahead of our little redheaded waitress over here.”

  Caroline scowled at him.

  For a few moments, the only sounds were those of the spinning wheels and the clack of knitting needles in Caroline’s hands. Occasional bursts of frustration exploded from Alex’s corner. Fifteen minutes later, she stopped, exhausted. “This is harder than it looks—trying to coordinate all those different things at the same time.”

  “Told you,” Caroline quipped. “So how is Mad Maggie the last few days?”

  Alex took her feet off the wheel and rested her back against the chair. “She took me out to see orcas this morning.”

  Grace leaned forward, her mouth in an O. “Wow. You haven’t been here a whole week and already you’ve seen the orcas? In winter?”

  Alex nodded. “One swam under the boat, and it turned and looked right at me. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. They seem so . . . intelligent. Aware.”

  “Did Maggie give you her orca speech?” David asked.

  “Speech? As in singular?” Caroline interjected. “She’s got a Navy sonar speech, and the dangers of salmon farming speech, and an oh my God all the shipping speech. Watch out, Alex. You could get speechified working there.”

  “Did she tell you they can read minds?” David asked, his spinning stopped, his voice dropped to a murmur.

  Alex looked at him and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “She told me about their sonar—about being able to see what’s inside things by bouncing sound waves off different objects. Like ultrasound or something.”

  David shook his head. “No, it goes further than that, although I don’t imagine Maggie would b
e the one to tell you about it. She only values what she considers ‘real’ science. Anything that’s been verified by scientific procedures.”

  “So what makes you think they can read minds?”

  David leaned forward in the chair, looking around as if making sure that there was no one to overhear him. “You know about the captures? All those killer whales that were captured in the late sixties and early seventies? They were taking orcas to all these marine parks around the country—teaching them to do tricks for the audience. Quite a moneymaker.

  “Well, there was one orca lady—she lives up in BC now, but she had started studying orcas a few years before that. She would go into these marine parks after hours and record the sounds the captive orcas were making, and take notes about what they were doing when they made the sounds. Trying to figure out which sounds went with which activities. And one day, she’s standing there, talking to one of the trainers, and the trainer asks her if she has any other ideas for tricks they could teach the orcas for the shows. Maybe something she had seen orcas do in the wild.

  “She told the trainer that she had seen orcas out in these waters kind of roll onto their sides as they’re swimming by, and then flap their pectoral fin. Just like they were doing the royal wave.” David held his arm close to his chest and demonstrated. “The trainer really liked that idea and said she would start working on how to teach them to do that. And the two women turn around, and there in the tank, right in front of them, the orca turns on its side and swims around the perimeter, waving its pectoral fin.”

  “Huh. Could the fish have understood what the women were saying? The language?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe. Orcas and dolphins have both shown an ability to understand lots of words—even to pick up on subtle changes in sentence structure.” David leaned forward again, as if he were talking about something very secretive. “But that seems to me to be more than understanding a few words.

  “And there’s another story. One of my favorites. I actually wrote about it for the paper. It was in all the papers around here—even the Seattle Times.”

  “Cut to the chase, Mr. Hill. You don’t have to start with Genesis,” Caroline advised.

  “The Suquamish Tribe? They’re down close to Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle. It happened in October 2013. The Seattle Museum had given them back a lot of their ancestral materials, including some rare tribal artifacts. Several of the elders took the Bainbridge ferry over to Seattle, to pick up all this stuff and bring it back to their own museum, on the tribal lands. It was a really big deal to the tribe. Some of those things had been taken from them a hundred years before. So here they are on the ferry, heading back to Bainbridge Island, with this cargo of precious artifacts, and the ferry has to stop, completely stop, right in the middle of the Sound. It was surrounded by a pod of orcas, swimming and breaching and flipping their tails. Like they were happy. Celebrating. That route has two ferries, running every forty-five minutes—one headed toward Seattle, the other headed the other way. Only one ferry that had to stop that whole day, because of the orcas. The one carrying all those tribal artifacts. A ferry sometimes has to stop to let a pod of orcas swim past. But jumping and playing? Explain that to me.”

  “Wow,” Alex said. She sat back in her chair.

  David continued, “Come on, Grace, help me out here. You’re best friends with the animal energy guru. Are they reading minds or what?”

  Grace let out a long sigh, her own spinning abandoned, her hands resting in her lap. “I don’t know. And I don’t know what Emmie would say about it. But I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of animals over the years that know a whole lot more than we think they do.

  “And I have another orca story, although you may not believe it. My husband and I were out on our boat, several years ago, and when we came back to the dock, there was a man there, frantic. He’d gone out in his kayak and told his dog to stay on the beach. He’d done this kind of thing before, and the dog usually stayed put. But this time, when he came back, the dog was gone.

  “We helped him look. My husband went back out in the boat, looking for the dog out in the water. I helped that man look up and down the beach. Nothing.” Grace looked up at the people around her. “And then a small group of orcas came up, and one of them had the dog, riding on his back. They swam as close as they could, and the dog jumped off and swam in to shore.”

  “You’re making that up,” Caroline said.

  Grace shook her head. “It was like the orcas knew that the dog was in trouble. Picked up on it somehow. Even though it was a completely different species. And then they figured out where the dog belonged. As if they could sense all the fear and emotion in the owner.”

  Grace stared into the fire for a moment. “Did they pick up on some thought? Or some other form of energy? Some emotion?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. But they picked up on something.” Grace turned and looked at Caroline. “And apparently it has happened more than once. Some of those stories are published.”

  Grace continued, “There are stories about people in London, in World War II, who could tell by the way their pets were acting if an air strike was coming, even before the air-raid sirens went off. And another story about a herd of water buffalo, grazing near the beach before that tsunami in 2004. They raised their heads, as if they could hear or sense something out in the water, half an hour before anything actually happened. And whatever it was they sensed sent them stampeding up the hill, away from the beach.

  “I believe animals are a lot more sensitive, a lot more intelligent, than we have ever imagined.” Grace picked up her roving, but she did not start spinning again. “But I think there are people who can do that, too. Like Emmie. I don’t know how she does what she does. I don’t know if she picks up on thoughts from the animal or if she picks up on some other clues. But somehow, she figures out where the animal is hurting.

  “I’ve watched her several times over the years. It makes me think of the way detectives are trained to tell if a person is lying or not. Maybe they can’t read the criminal’s mind, but they can pick up on those subtle signs in body language. Like looking away, or touching their face, or waiting too long to answer. They say that some women blush when they lie. I would imagine that there is a lot more to this energy sensitivity thing than any of us really understand, at the moment.”

  Grace looked up.

  David raised his eyebrows, as if to say, I told you so, and leaned back in his chair. He picked up his roving and started his wheel again, his eyes on the yarn that was spinning from his hand to the wheel. “So that orca looked you right in the eye this morning?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Well then, watch out, Alexandra. Whatever secrets you thought you were keeping? All the Southern Resident orcas know them by now.”

  SIXTEEN

  Alex sat down at her desk in Maggie’s cabin the next morning. She had a cup of coffee next to her, and she turned on the computer, waiting for the antiquated machine to fire up. Outside, the branches of the cedars, heavy with drops of water, caught the sunlight, looking as if they were decked out in their finest jewels. She stared for a moment, caught by the way the light made everything sparkle.

  Alex reached inside the box she’d been working through and grabbed another pile of papers and articles. When she lifted it from the box, a small photograph slipped loose and fluttered down to the floor. Alex stooped and picked it up.

  It was a picture of Maggie’s boat, the same one Alex had been on the day before, and three people, smiling broadly. The woman in the middle had dark hair and glasses, but was much younger than the doctor of marine biology who sat across the room. Alex stood and walked over to Maggie’s desk. “Is this you?” she asked, holding the photograph out for Maggie.

  The woman peered through her glasses. “Yes, it is. Before my hair went gray. That must have been taken . . . oh, I don’t know. Late eighties, maybe.”

  “Is that your son?” Alex asked, indicating the bright-eyed young man stan
ding at the wheel of the boat. He was tall and muscular and smiling broadly in the photo. Alex glanced at the photographs of a young man that stood on the shelves at the back of the room. There were numerous framed photographs of him.

  Maggie nodded. “Yes, that’s Brian. He worked with me in the summers during high school and a few of his college breaks.”

  Alex looked at mother and son in the photograph. They were strikingly similar, with strong jawlines and body height. “And the girl? Is that his girlfriend?”

  Maggie glanced at the photo, readjusting her glasses. “Hmm. Some intern, I think. I’ve had so many, I can’t remember all their names.”

  “She’s very pretty,” Alex murmured.

  Maggie shrugged and turned away. “If you say so.” She returned to the papers on her desk.

  “Do you want me to scan this?” Alex asked, holding up the photo. “I know it’s not related to the science, but there may come a day when someone will want to have archival photos of you at your work.”

  Maggie looked over the tops of her glasses. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Alex returned to her desk, laid the photo to the side, and began work on the first scientific paper in her stack. She was just starting to find her rhythm, to let her mind get lost in the information, when she was interrupted.

  Maggie stood and walked over to her desk, holding a newspaper in front of her. “Have you seen this?” she asked.

  Alex swallowed. She felt a flush rising to her face, and she shook her head. “I haven’t really been keeping up with the news.” Her heart slammed against her rib cage, the sound so loud she thought sure Maggie would notice. Her years with Daniel had made her afraid of everything, always expecting the worst.