by Spencer Hyde
My sweatshirt said Silently Correcting Your Grammar. I liked that it fit with Fitz’s choice. I imagined that both shirts had been donated by the same couple—a couple who had also worn them ironically. I already had good sweats on.
“At least your shirt fits your personality,” he said.
“Yours is lame, but at least it has a cute roll on it,” I said, smiling.
I saw Fitz pause and stare over my shoulder. When I turned, I saw that he was looking at a toy model airplane. It was this really cool looking 1920s biplane that was covered in this gorgeous yellow with bright green lines, kind of like what the water looks like when those phytoplankton make it all neon and alive at night, all that light cruising through the waves. That kind of light I can get behind. That kind of light is worth watching for. That made me think of blue whales eating nine thousand pounds of krill in one day.
“Sometimes we’d grab coat hangers and pretend to fly around the apartment and use these bogus pilot codes and jump off the couch and knock into one another and make fake radio static in our arms and get spit all over the floor and laugh about it,” said Fitz.
I was the only person near him, but it didn’t seem like he was talking to me.
“Who?”
“Quentin,” he said. “Let’s hurry!”
He grabbed my arm, and I realized he was not interested in talking about Quentin at the moment. Quentin. I couldn’t get away from that name. I wanted to know more.
After paying for the clothes, I saw that we probably only had enough for the ferry ride and maybe a couple more meals, as long as it was fast food or something reasonably cheap. Thinking of food made me double over near the store entrance. My mouth was sweating, and I felt like I was about to throw up. It never happened, the actual throwing-up part, but I was on edge the rest of the morning, my stomach twisting and rolling like waves near the breakers.
A breeze rolled in, heavy with salt and carrying a strong chill.
“You know we can’t get cold?” I said, thinking back to something Mrs. Peddle had once told me.
“What do you mean? I got this sweater because I plan on things getting cold.”
His eyes looked amazing in the sun. Like, the gray had these small bursts of bright blue speckled throughout, and he looked noticeably happier, shining, like his soul was trying to step out of his body or something.
“No. You can never really get cold, you just lose heat. Our bodies lose heat.”
“That’s pretty awesome,” said Fitz, still clearly mulling it over.
I looked down at my feet as we hurriedly walked past the passersby. I realized I would likely never wear these bright-pink flip-flops outside of this odd and beautiful time of my life when I was free of the psych ward with Fitz. I stared at the flower between my toes.
When we arrived at the ferry docks, I looked into the muddled light where the water met the sky. I kept my head down and looked over Fitz’s shoulder, expecting to see cops walking around and talking into the radios on their shoulders, reporting to someone that they’d found the missing inpatients wandering the docks. I curled up the sweater sleeves in my hands, and we kept walking.
We finally boarded the ferry, and I watched the shifting waters roll out beyond our sight. It was majestic.
I heard the sea terns making their swooping calls. The sun hung in a corner of the sky, reaching its long fingers of fire into my hair and onto my face and chest and arms and legs. I held my arms out, and Fitz started laughing.
“Sit down, you weirdo,” he said. “Not today, Willy!” he yelled over his shoulder while simultaneously reaching his hand out to me, offering me a seat. “Sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” I said. “I’m sorry you have to deal with it. Is it worse since you only took half of your regular dose?”
“A little,” he said. “But I think clearer. It’s like, I get more annoyed by the disturbances, but those moments between those disturbances are so clear that it makes it worth it for the short periods of clarity. It’s worth it for today. Maybe not for the long haul, but at least for today.”
I sat down in one of the cheap plastic seats on the top deck of the ferry. It was remarkably bright out for a November day, the sun booming overhead, and I wondered what kind of weather we were in for later in the day. I rolled up my sweater in my hands again and began tapping my leg as the breeze continued to kick off the water. Fitz wiped away more sweat from his forehead.
“Speaking of today,” I said. “Time for some answers, Fitz.”
“You know, sometimes finback whales make calls to their family, and their calls can be heard from over three hundred miles away. That’s the truth. Three hundred miles. Imagine that,” he said.
“Don’t deflect,” I said. “I read Leah’s book, too. It’s amazing. But you need to be honest with me right now.”
“I’m not deflecting. I’m getting to it. Just let me do it my way,” he said.
I slouched and tilted my head back onto the shoulder rest, my face looking straight up into the cornflower-blue sky.
“Okay,” I said, sighing.
“I read that it was because of how dense the water is when you get super deep in the ocean, and the channels fix the sound to some crazy range, and because sound moves much faster in that kind of environment.”
“That’s pretty cool,” I said. “So would sound move faster during a rainstorm?”
“I don’t know,” said Fitz. “I guess when I think of Quentin and San Juan Island, I think that maybe if I say ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ or something like that, somehow it will eventually reach him wherever he is now. I know it sounds weird,” he said, looking down at his hands.
“Not weird,” I said. “It sounds really cool.”
He pulled his bandana off and rolled it around his hands. “Look, Addie, can we talk about this on the island?”
“Of course,” I said. “All we need to do right now is to calmly enjoy the ride.”
“And not mention split infinitives,” he said, motioning to my sweatshirt.
“Ugh. Grammar Nazis are obnoxious, if.”
“If what?” said Fitz.
“Oh. Nothing. Just thought I’d end my sentence on a preposition.”
“So you have a proposition for me? Are you proposing, Addie?”
“I said preposition.”
“I know,” he said, smiling. “Just messing with you. Something my old Grammar taught me.” He pointed at the cinnamon-roll guy on his sweatshirt.
I laughed, instantly thankful to have conversations with somebody who was able to keep up. He didn’t stall for one moment between his replies, and I realized that I had possibly met my match.
Possibly. Maybe. Hopefully.
We stepped inside to get something to drink. The overhead speakers burbled as the ferry guide from the top deck started to talk about the interesting sights to see and the wildlife in the area.
The boat was pretty warm inside, but I was worried if we stayed too long we’d get used to it and not go back outside to watch for whales or other wildlife. I mean, it’d be easy to sit inside and look out a window, and we could’ve just turned on the TV to some animal show if we were really going to be lazy. So I told Fitz we should go back outside and watch from there.
The guide was spouting out all these facts about the islands of the Pacific Northwest and telling us about the different types of birds and animals we might see and how to tell which species they were.
“To your left you’ll see Steller sea lions,” said the guide.
We looked over to see these little bodies undulate below the surface of the water.
“If you look closely, you can see a couple western grebe out beyond the rocks on your right,” the guide said.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I saw two birds out there that looked like ducks but with red eyes. I think our
guide expected tips or something because he seemed way too cheery for that early in the morning.
A few minutes later, Fitz and I were standing at the railing, at the bidding of our new friend, the guide.
“The common name is ‘killer whale,’ but they are also known as orcas. A group that size is called a pod. It’s pretty rare to see them because the ferry makes so much noise,” the guide said.
The guide kept talking, but we weren’t really listening. I watched the massive creatures slide through the water and spray into the air and dip and swerve and glide. It was beautiful—a group of slippery, black bodies moving through dark sheets of blue.
Their bodies were just small dots after a few minutes, like a sentence written on the horizon, oddly punctuated with ellipses every few words. They were moving up and down, like black buoys floating away, like Morse code but in the water. Long. Long. Short. Short. Short. And then there was just this odd quiet and stillness, a flat line of ocean, a sentence deleted.
“There are breeding bald eagles every mile or so, and you can likely see a few nests of peregrine falcons—they can reach more than two hundred miles per hour in a dive. You also are quite likely to see trumpeter swans, depending on your destination on the island,” said the guide.
I wanted the guide to stop talking so everyone could look at all the amazing scenery. Although, I guess some of the things he said were pretty cool. I mean, two hundred miles per hour? It was something I couldn’t quite grasp without seeing it. Then again, a lot of my life was ungraspable.
“Will we see any blue whales?” I asked.
I figured it probably wasn’t likely, but thought I’d check.
“There’s an extremely small chance you’ll see a great blue whale,” the guide said. “Probably one in five hundred thousand or so. Not good odds. But I can tell you a little about the blue whale. It can grow to be over one hundred feet long.” And then the guide said something I’d read about before, but hadn’t registered until that moment: “In the right conditions, the blue whale can communicate with other blue whales up to one thousand miles away.”
“Whoa,” said Fitz.
“No way Quentin is that far away,” I said, looking at Fitz.
“Yeah,” he said, his gaze far away. “Yeah, I bet he can hear me. I hope he can hear us.”
I told Fitz everything I knew about whale hearts, and then about hummingbird hearts and how they’re as small as the tip of my pinky, and how they beat crazy fast against their super-thin skin, and how they never really slow down because it makes them too cold and too weak.
He told me more about the sound channel deep in the ocean, and I let his voice mingle with the call of the terns. I drifted off into some trancelike state where I heard nothing but the breeze and felt the hopeful strength of the day.
We arrived at San Juan Island and stepped onto the dock that was covered with oil-wet slicks. The slicks were all spotted, and the pencil-thin beams of sun wrote rainbows over the weather-beaten wooden dock.
I looked at Fitz. He was smiling and walking my way. It was one of those moments that I wanted to stick, so I took a mental picture to keep rolled up and stored away in a safe place in my mind. I mean, the museum of my memory had rooms galore, and tons I hadn’t ever visited in my entire life, but I wanted to store that memory in a place I could visit often. A room I knew well, where I could set up some comfortable chairs and visit whenever I was feeling down.
“We made it!” I yelled, jumping into his arms. “We made it to the island!”
Fitz spun me around and laughed at my enthusiasm. I wasn’t sure exactly what the island meant to him, but I was thrilled that our plan had actually worked.
“This way,” Fitz said, grabbing my hand, still smiling.
I still wasn’t used to his touch, but I wasn’t about to stop him from holding my hand. C’mon.
We walked near the shoreline for a while, passing these gorgeous Pacific madrone trees. I kept looking up at the birds, their wings swishing in the air, their calls sounding out into the clear sky.
“Can’t you tell me about these birds?” I said. “As our resident ornithologist, I mean.”
“Hah. Hah,” said Fitz in a mocking tone as we continued our stroll through the trees and the tall grasses sighing in the wind.
We walked along the coast for a long while and came upon a copse. Fitz led me up a small rise and around another grouping of trees and then said, “Wait here.”
I did, shifting my weight from side to side, and tapping my legs.
“Follow my voice!” he yelled after a few minutes.
I stepped around a tree and walked over another small hill and saw the ocean and a small piece of land jutting out in the distance, but nothing else.
“Where are you?” I said.
“Step forward,” he said, then yelled, “Holy C-SPAN!”
I laughed. “Did you bring Didi with us?”
“I thought it was better than cursing,” he said. “Wait till you see this.”
He sounded surprised. I was right on top of his voice but couldn’t see him over the ledge of grass at my feet.
“Sit down right there. That’s where I slid down. You’ll be safe,” he said. “Yes, she will, Lyle!”
I heard him cuss under his breath at some other voice. His outbursts were getting more frequent, his sweating more copious, and I saw him shiver and hold himself tightly. He seemed more distracted than usual. But I had also been blinking a lot because I was nervous and anxious and imagining the police were on the lookout for us or something. Whatever.
It didn’t look like we were too high up or anything, so I did what he said and sat down and scooted forward. It got my butt wet, but it’s not like that was a big deal or anything. I slid down just fine.
Fitz caught me in his arms and then spun me around before putting me down on my feet.
We were in this amazing alcove totally empty of any people as far as I could see. Instead, there was this massive skeleton. I wondered if it had once been a blue whale because the head alone was as big as the entire game room in the hospital. I mean, the length was unbelievable, and the bones were bleach-white and strewn all over, moldering on the ground.
“No way,” I said, walking to the bones.
“I know. That’s what surprised me,” he said.
I went and lay down in the chest cavity and rested my hands on my chest and looked up through the bones at the blue sky and the thin clouds passing over. I thought about my heart, and Dad’s heart, and Mom’s heart, and Fitz’s heart, and wondered at their different sizes. I bet mine was smallest, but I wanted it to be more, to be bigger, to house more people and more love and more hope.
“You know, certain yoga positions open up the heart more,” said Fitz.
“You’re full of it,” I said.
“It’s true. Those shirts are not just for show.”
He sounded sincere, but I wasn’t convinced by his confident tone.
“Only, I don’t want to be in a position where my heart is more open because I don’t want anybody to see what’s in there,” he said. “Or what isn’t in there, I guess. I don’t like the idea of being vulnerable like that.”
“The V-word? Are you okay, Fitz?”
“It’s not like we’re in a play or onstage now, Addie. Nobody’s watching us, you know?”
“And?”
“I could fit thousands of my own heart inside that whale’s chest, but it wouldn’t matter. I am the one still living, and my heart is the one still churning in my chest, sloshing around all my shame,” he said.
“What?”
Fitz kicked sand into the air and yelled something at Willy, then turned back to me. His face was pale and rigid and unblinking. He held his stomach and looked like he might hurl. He coughed, then composed himself and stared into the sky.
“Quentin,” he said
.
I looked out at the massive bay of gorgeous water. There were tons of birds doing this amazing thing where they circled above the swells and then, when they spotted a fish, they dive-bombed into the water at this incredible speed. It made me want to watch from beneath the water, to see their bodies shoot through the blue, leaving a trail of bubbles.
I hesitated, then said what I was thinking. I was tired of being left out, tired of feeling like he was hiding something. “What happened to your brother, Fitz?”
“It’s just, I haven’t been able to really say goodbye to Quentin,” he said, looking at his feet. “I mean, they let me go to the funeral and everything, but it was so rigid, so structured, with the program and all. So freaking structured. I never really got to say a proper goodbye. And this is our place.”
He looked out at the endlessly restless water.
“And I’m sorry, Quentin. I know it’s a stupid adage, but I often think about bad things happening to good people. Sorry it’s not more colorful than that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This month marks the anniversary of his death,” said Fitz. “That’s why I tried to break out earlier. I wanted to come here because it’s the year Quentin would have been old enough to join the San Juan Islands Birders Club. He wanted that vest and those binoculars with the logo on them and that little pin so much. It came with a book and a checklist and everything. Sounds silly, but it means a lot to me because it meant a lot to him.”
“That doesn’t sound silly at all,” I said.
Fitz walked over and sat next to me in the chest cavity of the whale bones. He rested his head in the sand, and we both stared into the sky.
“Mom took us to San Juan Island every few months to run around and explore the coastline. Quentin always brought this little notepad and these really cheap binoculars. He liked looking for birds. He knew everything about them. Quentin’s favorite bird was the Kirtland’s warbler. He said it was like the LeBron James of birds—everybody wanted to get a picture of it. At the time, I didn’t think about the fact that it was kind of an odd hobby for someone so young. At the time, we only cared about having fun.
