“This restaurant started in the 1930s as a fresh fish market. Pretty soon the owners installed a few stools for people to eat, and now it’s one of the biggest seafood restaurants around,” Daddy said.
In the waiting room, black-and-white photographs from decades ago covered the walls. There were two big rooms, each lined with long wooden tables. They served all kinds of fried seafood, hush puppies, and coleslaw, and they had a gift shop with their famous saltwater taffy in the front. Through the window beside our table, we could see boats moored to the dock outside. Even though it was dark, an occasional boat with lights went by.
The server brought a basket of steaming hush puppies. It seemed that visiting the hospital had left us starved. We grabbed for them. Before I knew it, I had eaten three.
“I wish Grammy could be here with us,” Daddy said. “She loves this place!”
“She can’t even eat real food yet,” I said.
Diana, quiet, watched a boat with lights slide by, creating shifting flashes on the choppy dark water as it passed. I knew she was thinking about the whale.
“We’ll bring her next time,” Lynn said. “Meanwhile, here’s a toast to Grammy’s health!”
We toasted with our water glasses.
After all the worry over Grammy, we all felt tired and giddy. I ordered a fried-shrimp basket, which is what I always got when we went there. Diana didn’t feel like eating anything but a salad. Daddy and Lynn split a broiled flounder platter. When our food came, we ate like we hadn’t eaten in days.
When we arrived back at Grammy’s apartment, Jelly didn’t come to the door to greet us. Calling him, we headed down the hall to Grammy’s bedroom and found him wedged under the bed with his nose nestled between his front paws, his brown eyes glinting with distrust there in the dark.
“Jelly, what are you doing under there?” Lynn said, peeking under the bed skirt. She sat back on her heels. “Do you think dogs can get depressed?”
“Of course,” Diana said.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” said Daddy.
Later that night, Diana and I lay in the twin beds with the lights off. She had been terribly quiet since the whale died. I was so happy about Grammy that I felt forgiving toward Diana for how she had acted and felt like opening up to her again.
“Are you okay?” I asked. A band of light from the living room outlined the door, and we could hear the rise and fall of Daddy and Lynn’s voices as they discussed how long we could stay after Grammy got home from the hospital. Lynn was worried about taking too many days off work.
“Have you seen many things die?” Diana asked.
“No,” I said honestly. “Have you?”
“One time, when I was about eight, I was out in the yard of our old house, and I heard these birds making a really loud racket. They were dive-bombing one of the bushes beside the house. It was all kinds of birds—robins and bluebirds and brown ones and one with a black head. They were all squawking and flying at this bush.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. So I went over to the bush to see what was there, and I saw a black snake curled around a bird’s nest with baby birds in it. It was eating the baby birds.”
I gasped. “That’s awful!”
“I know. I got so scared. It was kind of dark in the bush, and I could just barely see the outline of the snake. Meanwhile the birds kept flying around, dive-bombing the snake and squawking at it. I thought, Those birds are so small compared to the snake, but they’re attacking it. And I’m so much bigger than the snake. I went inside and got a broom and tried to sweep the snake out of the bush, but it was wrapped too tightly around the branches.”
“I can’t believe you tried to sweep that snake out of the bush! What if the snake had bitten you, Diana? I would have gotten out of there as fast as I could.”
“But I thought I should try to be as brave as the birds. They were trying to fight the snake. Then Mom came out and made me put the broom away and go inside. The next day I saw the empty nest, and I cried for like an hour, I was so mad. Those poor little baby birds. Sometimes I have dreams about that scene.”
I shuddered. “I would too. That sounds horrible.”
“Seeing Nick die today was like that. A scene I won’t ever forget. I felt so helpless. The way his breathing just got shallower and shallower, and then it stopped, and he stopped moving. I don’t understand why he stranded himself, I don’t understand why he died. I don’t know. It makes me think that the world is a terrible place when things like that can happen. I mean, how could God let Nick die? How could God let those baby birds die?”
I didn’t know how to answer Diana’s question. “I don’t know, Diana. But with the baby birds … Isn’t it like a miracle that the birds all banded together to fight the snake, even though they were so much smaller? And with Nick … you and the other people were around Nick to comfort him when he died. Like Jeremy said, he had a good death.”
Diana was quiet for a minute. “Oh,” she finally said. “You’re saying that the bad things happening inspired other living things to help.”
“Yeah, I guess. And I guess I think of that as being where God comes in.”
She was silent for a minute or so. She turned over in her bed to face me, pulling her covers to her chin. “That guy Jeremy, the high school kid, came and sat with me and talked to me for a while after it happened. He tried to comfort me. He was nice.”
“He did seem nice,” I said. “Cool red hair.”
I wanted, then, to talk to Diana about praying for Grammy not to die, and wondering if God had answered my prayer. But I didn’t say anything. She probably wouldn’t believe me. She would probably say Grammy just got better because of the doctors. Maybe it was just something that I had to search my heart about.
While we were having breakfast the next morning, Diana asked Lynn if she could have her phone back. “Dr. Leland said I could call today to see if they found out what caused Nick to die. Can I have my phone back so I can call him?”
Lynn looked at Diana thoughtfully, glanced at Daddy, then reached in her purse and handed Diana the phone her dad had given her. “I guess I’ve made my point,” Lynn said.
Diana pulled a scrap of paper out of her pocket and tapped in the numbers, walking away from us. “Hi, Dr. Leland?” she said, looking out the window at the golf cart. “This is Diana from the beach yesterday. You said I could call you today to see if you found out why the whale died.” She listened for a few seconds, then said, “Okay, I’ll call back later. Thanks.” She hung up and held the phone in her lap. “He said they’re getting ready to do the necropsy now. He says to call back in a few hours.”
Since Grammy was doing so much better, Lynn talked Daddy into skipping morning visiting hours and going to downtown Beaufort. Beaufort was a historic waterfront town more than two hundred years old. Daddy said he’d heard that the town hadn’t changed much since it was built in the 1700s. It was said, he added, that the brutal pirate Blackbeard was a frequent visitor in Beaufort when he needed to resupply. We walked down Front Street, where small, white clapboard houses with columned porches and historical markers by their front doors looked out on the water. A few blocks down, in between a waterfront restaurant and a line of shops, was a marina where gleaming yachts and slim sailboats with shiny teak decks and neatly furled sails bobbed by the docks.
A block farther down and across the street was the Maritime Museum. It was a small, nautical-looking building with gray cedar shingles and painted white trim. I had been there once before with Grammy but couldn’t remember very much about it. We walked in and who should we see but Jeremy, Diana’s friend from yesterday.
“Jeremy!” Diana went over to him. He was wearing khakis and a black T-shirt with a white whale skeleton on the front, and he had a nametag that said Volunteer.
“Hey!” he said. I know Diana would say that I was reading too much into things, but I promise that his face lit up when he saw her. “Diana, right?”
<
br /> “Yeah. And you remember my stepsister, Stephanie?”
I headed over, and we said “Hi” to each other.
Diana pointed at Jeremy’s nametag. “So you’re a volunteer?”
“Yeah. I helped put together that whale skeleton.” The skeleton, enormous and gleaming white with a pointed-looking jaw, hung from the ceiling, arching over the rest of the whale exhibit. “It’s over thirty-three feet long. Guess how much its heart weighed?”
“How much?” Diana asked.
“One hundred and fifteen pounds.”
“Wow.”
“The whale stranded itself on Cape Lookout a couple of years ago, out near where the lighthouse is. After it died, the museum staff buried the whale and waited a few years, then dug it up and reassembled the skeleton.”
We were all silent, thinking about Nick. Diana blinked a few times, then asked, “Why did that whale die?”
Jeremy shrugged. “It was a total mystery. They did a necropsy but never found out.”
“They’re doing a necropsy on Nick today.”
“Yeah, I wanted to go but couldn’t, because I had already committed to work here today. It will be good to find out what was wrong with him.”
“So you volunteer for both the Marine Mammal Stranding Network and for the museum?” I said.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “I’m going to apply to go to UNC Wilmington in their marine sciences department.”
“What year in school are you?” Diana asked.
“I’m a sophomore.”
“We’re freshmen.”
Just then Daddy and Lynn, who had been signing the guest book and making a donation, came over. Diana introduced them.
“Hey, listen, do you want me to show you around?” Jeremy asked.
He took us straight to a big display on whaling in the center of the museum. He described how, a hundred or so years ago, on the coast of North Carolina, men would camp on the shore with a lookout who spotted migrating whales that were passing by. They would follow the whales in small boats and fire at them with harpoons or whale guns. Jeremy explained that they hunted the whales for their oil to use in oil lamps and also for their baleen.
“What’s baleen?” Diana asked.
“Baleen is flexible strands of keratin that a lot of whales have instead of teeth,” Jeremy explained. “It’s the same stuff as your fingernails. They use it to filter tiny fish, like krill.”
“Did Nick have baleen?” I asked.
“No, he had teeth,” Diana said. “I saw them.”
“Right,” said Jeremy. “Pilot whales have teeth.”
“What was the baleen used for?” Daddy asked.
“It was used to make something for women’s clothing,” said Jeremy.
“This display says it was used for stays in women’s corsets,” Lynn said. “And—can you believe it—it says whale hunting basically stopped when corsets went out of style. That’s amazing. I thought it was all about the oil. But it was about fashion!”
“And you know how we were talking yesterday about why researchers don’t name the whales and dolphins that they study?” Jeremy said to Diana. “Well, one thing that was unusual about the North Carolina whalers was that they did name their whales. There was a famous whale named Mayflower that dragged one boat eight miles out to sea before it finally died.”
“Eight miles!” Diana said.
“And back here, it’s really cool,” said Jeremy. “We’ve got artifacts from Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge! People had been looking for that ship for years, and they finally found it not very far from here, in really shallow water in Bogue Banks. The water was only about twenty-five feet deep. There’s also a great video about the excavation of the site.”
Jeremy and Diana got ahead of the rest of us. I could tell by the way Jeremy was focusing on her as he talked that he was into her. I couldn’t wait to talk to her about it. She probably didn’t even realize it! I watched them as they strolled by the things on display that the pirates had used—bottles, pieces of stoneware, and glass beads used for trading. Pieces of the ship, like rigging hooks, a bilge pump sieve, and pieces of sailcloth, were also displayed.
I hung back with Daddy and Lynn. She was interested in the physicians’ tools that were on display. But most of what was displayed was weapons and ammunition. There were cannons, cannonballs, rifles, swords, pistols and knives by the dozens.
“Looks like all these pirates did was fight,” Daddy said, as we filed past the glass cases holding the lavish weapons display.
“Blackbeard had a gruesome reputation,” Lynn said. Drawings of Blackbeard portrayed him as a fierce-looking man with burning candles embedded in his long black beard.
At the back of the museum, we watched an interesting video showing how divers worked on different quadrants of the Queen Anne’s Revenge wreck site to recover artifacts.
As we headed back to the front, passing by the different examples of fishing boats, like flatbottom skiffs and sharpies, and displays about the lighthouses on the North Carolina coast, I glanced over at Diana and Jeremy. She was laughing at something he’d said.
“Look at this,” Daddy said. “The lighthouse keepers’ wife and children usually lived on the mainland during the winter so they could go to school, and they would just join their father at the lighthouse during the summer.”
Lynn poked me with her elbow. “Are you checking that out?” she said quietly, inclining her head toward Diana and Jeremy.
“Yep,” I said. “Sure am.”
We smiled at each other.
“What are you two smiling about?” Daddy said, as he joined us back at the entrance.
“Oh, nothing,” Lynn teased. “Men are so oblivious, aren’t they, Stephanie?” She reached over and pinched Daddy’s cheek.
Daddy knitted his brows and looked from Lynn to me and back to Lynn.
“What’s taking Diana so long?”
“That’s what we’re smiling about,” I said.
13
DIANA
I could see Stephanie, Mom, and Norm standing outside the museum waiting for me. “Well,” I said to Jeremy. “Thanks for showing us around. It was great running into you.”
“Hey,” said Jeremy. “Don’t leave yet. Let’s call Dr. Leland now.” He got out his cell phone and tapped in the number. He held the phone close to my ear so we could both listen when Dr. Leland answered.
His curly red hair tickled my temple, and I got a slight tingle down my spine. When Dr. Leland answered, Jeremy’s hand, which was on the phone, touched my ear. My heart thudded. I felt funny, standing so close. I usually like my space.
“Yes, Jeremy,” came Dr. Leland’s voice. “We did finish the necropsy a few minutes ago. That pilot whale had unfortunately swallowed several plastic bags and other pieces of plastic that had abraded its stomach. The plastic bags were preventing it from getting nutrition. It starved to death.”
“Starved to death?” I drew in my breath and tears started to my eyes. I told myself not to cry in front of Jeremy. Poor Nick!
“Yes,” Dr. Leland continued, “it’s a very unfortunate result of people throwing trash into the ocean. To a young whale, a plastic bag looks a lot like a squid, its favorite food.”
Jeremy talked to Dr. Leland for a minute more, then thanked him and hung up. I rubbed my coat sleeve across my cheek. That poor whale! I thought again about being out there on the beach, with the sound of the wind and the waves, listening to Nick breathe his last. My heart pounded. I didn’t want Nick to have died for no reason. I wanted to do something to help.
“Hey,” Jeremy said, peering at me closely. “Are you okay?”
“I’m just thinking again about him dying, that’s all.”
“I know. Since I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. In fact, there’s only been one dolphin that was in good enough shape to send to rehab. It’s terrible, but most of the time they don’t make it.”
“I just didn’t kno
w. It’s so sad.”
Jeremy put his phone in his pocket. “Well, you know, I’ve learned that animals strand themselves for a reason. Maybe we don’t know that something’s wrong, but they do. Anyway, you seem like you need cheering up. I’m off from the museum in fifteen minutes. Want to walk around Beaufort and hang out on the docks?”
I stared at Jeremy and all his freckles. I held back an impulse to turn around and see if he was talking to someone standing behind me. Did Jeremy like me or something? I didn’t get it. He was really being nice. Hanging out on the docks would be pretty cool. After a second I said, “Let me ask.” I ran outside to where Mom and Norm and Stephanie were waiting. “Jeremy invited me to hang out and walk around Beaufort this afternoon,” I said.
I scanned Mom’s and Norm’s faces. Did I want them to say yes? Then again, maybe they’d say no. Part of me was scared to be with Jeremy all afternoon. Maybe it would be better if they said no.
“Well—” Mom said. She looked like she was considering it.
Norm checked his watch. “Visiting hours start at four.”
I knew it! He was going to say no! My heart was beating a tattoo on the inside of my ribs. I didn’t know what I wanted them to say!
Mom put her hand on Norm’s arm. “Norm, let’s talk about this.” She walked away from us and beckoned to him. They stood together, whispering to each other, their backs to us. But I clearly heard Mom say, “You and I need a little time together.”
“Looks like Lynn is trying to talk Daddy into it,” Stephanie said, poking me with her elbow and raising her eyebrows. “You know Jeremy is into you, don’t you, Diana?
“If they say yes, come with us,” I said impulsively. “I want to hang out with him but not by myself.”
Stephanie glanced at Jeremy through the museum door.
“Don’t look at him! He’ll know we’re talking about him!”
He waved at us, smiling. Stephanie waved back.
“Oh, I’m so embarrassed!” I said. I could feel my face turning hot.
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