by Karen Rivers
Nat smiled at Hugh. “Gracias,” she said, pointing, as though Hugh himself were responsible for this whale. She liked him better all of a sudden. She felt like they were friends.
The whale was so close that Nat could taste the air it just exhaled. It tasted like rotten fish and rubber tires.
“This is real,” shouted Harry.
“I know!” Nat said. “Don’t shout. You’ll scare it.”
The whale was enormous.
It started to sink down next to them. Nat couldn’t see its tail unless she turned her head. The whale was about four times longer than the boat.
“It’s a humpback!” she said. She had been expecting gray whales. All the humpbacks were in South Africa. Well, not in South Africa, but off the coast. Last time she talked to the Bird, before they left for Mexico, the Bird told her that for some reason, the whole world’s population of humpback whales seemed to be gathering there, and nobody knew why.
“It’s a mystery,” she’d said.
“But you’re an expert,” Nat had said. “Why do you think they are going there?”
“I think it’s probably a message,” said the Bird. “I think they are trying to tell us something.”
“But what?” Nat asked. “What could the whales want to tell us?”
“I hope they aren’t telling us that it’s the end of the world,” the Bird chirped, and then she laughed.
“That isn’t very funny,” Nat said.
“I know it isn’t, my little prank caller, my Baleine,” the Bird said, softly. “I just think maybe it is.”
“The end of the world?” Nat asked. Her mouth tasted funny, tinny and strange. “You think the world is ending?” Her head was whirling. What if the world was ending? She didn’t know who her mother was! She couldn’t die before she knew!
Then the Bird laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m sorry, I was joking. It didn’t come across like a joke, did it? No one knows why they are gathering there. It’s probably just a party though. A whale party.”
“Whales don’t have parties!” Nat said. She was so dépit, she wanted to cry. “Why can’t you answer seriously?”
“I’m sorry, my little friend,” the Bird said. “The truth is that no one knows. Humpbacks mostly travel alone. This is very unusual. Who knows what it could mean? Maybe we aren’t meant to know. We don’t always need to have answers to our questions, you know.”
“We don’t?” said Nat. “Yes, we do.” She thought about all of her own questions. She had a lot of them.
She wanted to know everything. She wanted all of the answers.
“Ah, but that’s not how it works, is it? Sometimes we live our whole lives and never know.”
“Do you have a question you want to know the answer to?” Nat asked. She was holding her breath, waiting for the Bird to answer. She felt like the answer the Bird needed was going to be the answer she needed, too.
“I suppose I just want to know the point of it all,” the Bird said. She sounded sad.
“Oh,” said Nat. Her heart beat in a wobbly way that reminded her of a water balloon. She didn’t like how that felt. “I have to go now.”
Then Nat had hung up.
That was the last time she’d talked to the Bird.
Tears welled up in Nat’s eyes. The whale blew again.
“It’s huge!” said Harry. “I know that’s an obvious thing to say, but look at it!”
“Ballena jorobada!” said Hugh.
“Ballena!” said Nat. “Si!”
The boat rocked and rolled. The whale surfaced again and huffed another huge cloud of misty water. Its skin was covered with deep grooves and scratches and barnacles that looked like a beautiful and intentional pattern, like someone had drawn them on. Like how Solly had drawn the hearts on her shoes.
You’re beautiful, Nat told the whale, telepathically. Can you slap your tail?
The whale dove down. All three of them leaned to one side of the boat to watch. The boat tipped to that side precipitously.
“Ten cuidado!” Hugh shouted, pushing Nat backward.
“Hey,” she said.
The whale was surfacing again.
Then it did it.
It slapped its tail.
A huge rainbow rose up in the splash.
Then Hugh reached into a cooler that he had near his feet. When he opened it up, Nat saw a camera.
It looked expensive.
It looked like a paparazzi camera.
“Hey,” she said, “that . . .”
Hugh did not take a photo of the whale. He took a photo of Nat.
“Harry,” said Nat. Her voice wasn’t coming out right.
It was more like a whisper.
“Paparazzi,” she said.
Harry didn’t answer.
Nat turned back to the whale. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t exactly jump off the side of the boat and swim to safety.
But she wanted the whale to flip the boat.
She wanted the whale to toss “Hugh” into the water.
The whale started to swim away. Then it slapped its tail again, harder, like it was angry. The wave was so big that the boat nearly tipped again.
Click-click-click, she heard from behind her.
The whale turned back toward them and slapped its front fins, rolling slightly from side to side. A wave sluiced over the edge of the boat, cold and salty and startling. Nat reached over the side and she touched the whale’s head. The whale’s skin was smooth and cool and rubbery. The whale’s gigantic eye stared into Nat’s much smaller one. I love you, Nat thought.
The whale slowly lowered its eyelid and opened it again.
“That whale winked at me!” Nat said. The skin on the back of her neck was prickling. She knew the camera was there, but she didn’t want to think about how it was there. The camera was ruining everything.
She wanted Harry to save her.
She wanted her dad to be there, so he could throw the camera into the water.
But she was on her own.
Harry was still looking away from her. He was following the whale with his eyes.
It seemed to be moving away again, its back making a slow arch in the water.
It felt holy, the slow rise of it and then the disappearing.
Spiritual.
Nat had never liked church very much, but suddenly she had the same feeling that she knew she was supposed to get in church.
She felt connected.
She held out her hands toward the departing whale.
She closed her eyes.
“I can’t believe that happened!” said Harry, swinging around again, his eyes shining. “We didn’t bring a camera! Why didn’t we bring a camera? Oh, good, Hugh has one!”
He didn’t see Hugh for what Hugh was because he was Harry and he didn’t know. But Nat still felt furious with him.
“Pose!” said Harry. He put his arm around her and gave Hugh a thumbs-up.
Click-click-click.
“That’s a nice camera,” said Harry.
“No,” Nat shook her head. “He’s a—” she started to say, but then suddenly—SUDDENLY—the whale reappeared.
It was swimming fast and upward from below.
Nat could see it, below the surface, the idea of a whale more than the whale itself. It was a blur.
And then it was breaching.
The whale breached all the way out of the water.
Harry made a sound in his throat like gargling. His eyes were wide.
That’s weird, Nat thought. He seems scared.
The only other time she’d heard the sound Harry just made was when her dad threw the Lion’s camera into the waves.
That morning.
Which felt like a lifetime ago.
“I—” Nat didn’t have time to finish her sentence.
The whale began to unbreach, which was to say, what goes up, must come down. It landed abruptly and directly on top of the boat, all hugeness and slippery rough skin and splinters and sounds and water water water everywhere and Nat was screaming “Ayúdeme!” and Harry was yelling “Help!” and Hugh was just shouting in general, mostly in Spanish, mostly words that Nat and Harry would probably never be allowed to use.
And then Nat and Hugh and Harry were all in the ocean feeling like they came apart in a million pieces and were glued back together to form themselves again, and their seats weren’t flotation devices like on airplanes, they were just wooden benches. They were swimming or treading water or floating and the bits of the boat were all around them, and Nat thought loudly to the whale, What did you do that for? and the whale didn’t say anything back at all.
In the Water
Nat would have thought she’d be more scared.
She was a little bit scared, but she was also calm.
She reached out and touched the skin of the whale, which was still there, still with them. It was like touching a feeling. That feeling was love.
She thought about what the Bird had said, the thing about wanting to know the point.
Love was obviously the point.
“Duh,” she said out loud.
“What?” Harry said. He seemed dazed. “Are we going to die?”
Nat shook her head. She wished that she’d been able to reach the Bird this morning. She wished she’d known then the answer to the question “What is the point?”
She would have said, “Thank you for everything. I love you.”
She would have said, “Goodbye,” and meant it.
Then maybe she wouldn’t need the Bird anymore, at least not in the same way.
Anyway, if today had gone as it was meant to go, by the end of it she would know who her real mother was.
But today was not going how it was meant to go. Nat kicked her legs in the water. Her jeans felt heavy. Her legs felt too slow.
The whale was swimming around them in tight circles—or as tight as a twenty-foot-long whale could circle—while they clutched broken pieces of the wooden boat. The swimming was creating a whirlpool, which was making it easier for them to float.
Nat didn’t want to die on her thirteenth birthday.
She thought of all the things that were going to happen next, now that she was thirteen.
She was going to get bigger boobs. She was going to get her period. She was probably going to start having crushes on boys. Maybe she’d even kiss one.
She didn’t really want all that stuff. All of it made her want to cry. But she didn’t want to miss them either.
“We can’t die,” said Nat, out loud. “It’s my birthday.” It seemed strange to be talking to Harry normally, their legs kicking to keep them afloat, amid the wreckage of the boat, a paparazzo, and a whale.
“Dude,” he said. “I don’t think that’s how it works.” He looked like he was going to cry. “I haven’t even had my real life yet. I’ve just had the hard part. That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t really fair,” Nat said.
“Don’t say stuff like that,” he said. “Not now.”
His sunglasses had fallen off. Nat reached for his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then she leaned as close to him as she could and kissed him right on the lips. His lips felt like whale skin: smooth and bumpy at the same time.
“Hey!” Harry yelped. He spit in the water. “Gross.”
“Sorry,” she said, and then she was crying for real, the snotty kind of crying with tears.
“Forget it,” said Harry. “I’ll just pretend you were giving me CPR.”
And then, suddenly, they were both laughing. “I can’t laugh and float at the same time,” gasped Nat.
Hugh was lying down on a bigger piece of the side of the boat. Nat hoped he was regretting his life choices. Mostly, he was probably regretting dropping the camera. Nat wondered how many expensive cameras were at the bottom of the sea, held down by seaweed and coral, little fish swimming around their useless lenses.
The whale was still making slow circles.
“What is going to happen?” Nat wondered out loud. “Is someone going to rescue us?”
“I think we’re going to die,” said Harry. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” said Nat. “Not in that way, though.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Duh. I didn’t mean that.”
Then suddenly, Nat wasn’t floating. She was under the water looking up at the surface, which was like glass flecked with pieces of wood, big and small. She could see that Harry was still floating, holding on to a long red board. His feet were above her, and she was sinking and sinking. She felt happy that he was floating. She felt mostly confused about why she was not.
Weird, Nat thought, but she didn’t do anything about it.
She started to count. Four and a half minutes was the same as two hundred and seventy seconds and she knew she could hold her breath for that long. It was her record. She had two hundred and seventy seconds to figure out how to get back to the surface. She tried kicking her legs but they were really seriously too heavy in her jeans. She kicked off her sneakers. The surface looked really far away. She could see Harry’s legs kicking frantically.
It’s OK, Harry, she told him telepathically. Don’t panic. Stop kicking.
Harry stopped kicking.
Nat peeled off her jeans. It was hard. She sank even more. Deeper and deeper. Impossibly deep.
Then Nat was kicking, bare-legged, rising up again, like a whale. She thought she would make it to the surface.
But she couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t reach it.
Then Hugh was diving toward her. He was reaching for her. She let him grab her hand.
And then—SUDDENLY—the whale was underneath them.
The whale was underneath them, pushing them to the surface.
They were on the whale.
It couldn’t be true, but it was true.
Sometimes things are like that.
Some things happen that are unbelievable.
“Unbelievable” was another perfect English word. If you rearranged some of the letters, Nat realized, you could spell “be alive.” Which seemed like a crazy thing to be thinking at that moment, but there it was: Be alive.
They burst through the surface, gasping.
The sky was clear of clouds now—blown clean by the collective breath of all of them, maybe—and relentlessly, postcard-perfect blue. The sun was huge and fierce on her face.
Nat wanted to ask, “Did that really just happen?”
But she knew that it did.
The whale groaned audibly and then sank down again.
That was when Nat saw the other whales.
There were whales all around them.
They were swimming in a huge circle around the remains of the boat, around Harry and Nat, around Hugh.
Hugh had saved her.
Well, she thought.
There were bubbles everywhere.
All three of them were floating on their backs now, clinging to the boards like monkeys, arms and legs wrapped around them. Stick monkey, thought Nat. Monkey umbrellas. She was strangely sleepy. She closed her eyes and dreamed about a postcard.
Dear Mom, she wrote. Why didn’t you want me? What did I do wrong?
It’s not that I didn’t want you, a woman’s voice said. It’s that he wanted you more.
“Te amo,” Nat said out loud. “You sound like Dad.”
Te amo, you too, said her mom.
“I can speak Spanish?” Nat said.
“You speak a little bit of everything,” said Harry. “Remember? Your wei
rd word collection?”
“I was dreaming,” said Nat. She closed her eyes again, but the dream was gone.
“Don’t fall asleep!” Harry said. “Then you’ll drown! I’m tired, too. But, like, we can’t. We’ll die.”
“Me, too.” Nat couldn’t feel her arms and legs, but she could see them. “Tired.”
Hugh was still muttering.
Harry and Nat were holding hands.
Then Harry and Nat’s hands were suddenly not holding each other.
There was red in the water.
The red was blood.
Nat considered fainting. Her vision dimmed, but then it brightened again. She stopped herself. If she fainted, she would drown for sure.
Then, suddenly, between them, rising out of the depths, was the whale.
And a baby.
The whale had had a baby.
“Wow,” said Nat.
“Look,” said Harry, at the same time.
“Bebé,” mumbled Hugh.
The mother whale was so close that Nat could see the white paper folds of the skin under her chin. She could see her baleen.
Te amo, said the whale in the Bird’s voice. Baleine.
Then Nat heard a sound like a helicopter. Was it her heart? It was scaring her. It was like a vibration in the water but it was moving her, and then the whales were gone—all of them were gone—and something orange appeared.
Something huge and loud and orange.
The orange thing was a boat.
WHALE EXPERIENCE FACTORY was painted on the side of the boat in big letters. Nat wanted to laugh, but she was too tired, and then she was being scooped out of the water and so were Harry and, she supposed, Hugh, but she was too tired to make sure.
Nat was pretty sure that it was ironic to be rescued by the Whale Experience Factory, though.
She smiled.
Changes
Nat woke up the next morning with a stomachache and a headache. It was almost a headache but not quite a headache. It was a feeling that was mirroring the feeling in her stomach. She pictured something gray and fuzzy pushing at her from all directions.
Her room in the house was the same, but it felt completely different from before. Everything looked different. She held up her hand and looked at it.
That looked the same.
