In the Eye (2/3)

Within the hour, I had trucks full of volunteer marine biologists lined up in the sandy berm along the road in front of my Granddad’s beach house. I put another pot of coffee on and pulled half a rotisserie chicken I’d only picked at on the kitchen island with a loaf of bread that had been in my freezer for a month and a jar of mayonnaise. I sipped the cold morning coffee from the thermos, wondering what was the polite way to host stranded marine life rescue teams.

Dad would have sent out for pizzas and mom would have stopped everything and started making pizzas. Two of the head rescuers sat in the living room on the wicker loveseats Gran had layered with upholstered cushions featuring gulls and waves with perfectly-white crests. I leaned against the counter, bitter coffee staining my teeth, and listened to them go back and forth on how to get a crane out to the beach.

I walked to the sink and dumped the rest of my thermos coffee down the drain. The windows above the sink were cloudy with dust and sand. It looked out on part of the horizon that was just beach grass and big sky, the boardwalk hidden just to the right of the frame. I imagined these biologists driving a crane through Granddad’s work and almost wished I hadn’t called them, hadn’t gone down to the beach that day, hadn’t gotten out of bed at all.

If I’d just waited, I probably would have found it dead and stinking – or as a mess of whale parts exploded over the pebbled beach. I grimaced and poured myself a fresh cup of coffee. It bothered me that I couldn’t say which version of a whale on my Granddad’s beach I preferred.

“Hey, Georgia,” one of the lead rescuers, a marine biologist from the state university called Hank, poked his head into the kitchen. He had a clipboard tucked under his arm and a faded baseball cap pulled over a headful of tight curls. He was young enough, maybe five or six years older than me, and my mother would have nudged me at the absence of a wedding ring on his finger.

“Hi, Hank,” I said, trying for a smile. Even the attempt felt sad. “Uh, want a sandwich or something?” The cold chicken carcass and freezer-burnt wheat bread looked even less appealing than it had a minute ago.

“Sure,” he said and dropped his clipboard on the island beside the bread. “This is great, thanks.” He glanced up as he layered hunks of chicken on the slice of bread balanced in his palm. “I’m running on a slice of cold pizza that I just realized is two days older than I thought it was.” He shook his head. “God bless the diner my kid waitresses in,” he said with a laugh and took a bite out of his sandwich. “At least someone feeds her.”

“How old’s your kid?” I asked. I took a fork from the silverware drawer and picked at one of the discarded drumsticks.

“Fifteen,” he said and rolled his eyes. “Like I said, god bless that diner and every other teenager in town who works one of the tourist spots, or else I don’t know what Janie’d do with herself.”

The other lead rescuer, and older woman called Marisol, stepped into the kitchen. “Hey folks, the crew needs us down at the beach,” she said.

Hank stuffed the last of his sandwich in his mouth. “Any luck with the calls?”

Marisol shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “No one knows the place, but they know the area. Say it’s all dunes and grass until the shore. Even where it looks flat the grade is ridiculous, apparently.”

Hank stuck a clipboard under his arm. “Well, might as well take a look at things again ourselves.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and gestured for me to follow. “Come on down to the beach,” he said. “You really ought to see this.”

With an animal this big, Hank had explained when they first showed up, even with a calf like this there’s really no moving her without equipment. You’d need thirty good hands to get her back in the water, and even that’s risky.

Hank and Marisol’s team of ten volunteer biologists left their cars parked along the beach road in front of Granddad’s house and carried all the supplies they could muscle down the boardwalk. I’d watched them from the window, lugging tarps and buckets and rope, but watching hadn’t prepared me for what it all looked like on Granddad’s little private beach.

The whale was there, still, but buried under what looked like a wedding tent stitched out of camping tarp with a line of volunteers dousing it’s back with buckets full of seawater. They wore dark blue polo shirts and thick rubber boots and every single one of them, whale included, looked hot and comfortable.

I stood on the peak of the boardwalk stairs and watched Marisol take a bucket from a volunteer and join the line working to keep the whale alive. Hank walked the line of dune and beach grass that bordered the beach, hands on his hips, fingertips tapping the scratched surface of his flip-phone. I crossed my ankles and my arms, as if I could wrap myself tightly enough in my own body that I could vanish. My shoulders went clammy, the cool spreading to my elbows and my fingertips. The wind shifted and the beach grass crested against the boardwalk. It smelled like earth and salt and again I wished that no one would have to drive a crane through my granddad’s place. It was a guilty thought.

Hank’s phone rang on his belt – ringtone: the Indiana Jones theme, which seemed both pleasantly charming and outdated – and I walked down the boardwalk stairs to the sand. I kicked my sandals off and walked to the whale. A volunteer handed me a bucket half-full of water and I held it in front of me, water sloshing against the sand-stained sides.

The whale’s eye rolled, focused on my face. I could see my reflection in the glassy pupil, my hair frayed out of my ponytail and the clouds on the horizon behind me swelled a dark grey.

I wanted to climb on her back and rest my head against her spine and listen to the sound of her breathing, the smack of her blowhole closing against buckets full of seawater. The skin around her eyes was dry, cracked like my Gran’s crow’s feet caked in makeup at her funeral. I hoisted the bucket up and slopped the water over the side of her face.

Behind me, Hank sighed. “Bring it in, folks,” he called. The biologists drenched the whale with water and dropped their buckets in the sand. “I know we all hate to hear this,” he said. “But I just got a call. The storm’s changed course.”

Biologists protested; we’ve got time, they said. This isn’t fair, to any of us. We haven’t even tried.

Hank only shook his head. “It’s picking up speed. By the time it makes landfall, it’ll be just south of here full hurricane,” he explained. “Weather Service won’t called an evacuation yet, but they’re suggesting it. We’re going to have to call it on this one.”

“How long until the storm hits?” Marisol asked, hope or something close to it tight in her throat. “Do we have time for…” she trailed off, looked back at the whale. She didn’t need to finish, not for the biologists who had done this before or for me who had never been so close to a marine mammal in my life. It wasn’t just or poetic. It was real. Did we have time to pump the whale full of chemicals, put her down nicely, before she could be battered by the storm.

Hank looked run through. “Weather Service says eight hours until the storm hits. It’ll take ten for the techs to get enough together to euthanize an animal this big. There’s just nothing we can do. I’m sorry.”

The volunteer biologists hovered, shoulders low. They looked as if they’d been expecting the news since I’d called them out there that morning, as if they’d just needed someone to give them an excuse to give up. Then, they went to pack up their supplies and carry it back to the road.

“We’ll have everything torn down and out of your way in an hour,” Hank said, the two of us left standing in the patch of sand torn up by the anxious disappointment of the volunteers’ footprints. “Give us a call if she’s still out here after the storm, and we’ll get someone out to take care of her.” He looked back at the whale. She sighed through her blowhole, splattered stray seawater from a volunteer’s bucket on the underside of the tarp tent that had blocked the sun from her body. Already, the sky was going grey. “It’s a damn shame,” he said.

The wind picked up stray strands of his hair and I wanted to take them in my fingertips, press the curls back into place. It seemed like the right thing to do would have been to link my hand with his and watch the biologists pull back from the whale, see her off to her fate like a kid at her freshman dorm. All I could do was stand there, whale at my back, and wonder what you did when something didn’t make you as sad as it should.

The clouds rolled overhead, casting the road in muggy shadow while the biologists packed tarps into their trunks and double-checked weather apps on their phones. I sat on the front porch of the beach house, emptying tap water out of an old plastic water bottle into the potted plants that lined the wooden steps.

All the lights in the house were off, and the wind that picked up from the water rattled the open windows in their frames. The chimes in the window over the kitchen sink banged against the cabinets. Ten minutes earlier, I’d listened as a pot slid from a windowsill in my bedroom upstairs and shattered on the floor.

I leaned forward, arms crossed on my knees, and watched the headlights glowing dully on the beach grass. The volunteers stood by their cars, doors open, engines running. No one seemed to want to be the first to climb in and drive away. No one wanted to be the first to really give up. They were all still there, lingering, when a kid dropped her bike in front of my Granddad’s front porch.

“Hey,” she called up at me. “My dad here?”

“Who?” I started to ask, but Hank saw her before I could fully form the syllable.

“Janie, what the hell are you doing out here?” He jogged over from his truck – white with the state college’s marine wildlife department logo plastered over the door – where Marisol had just hoisted herself into the cab. Down the road, one of their volunteers pulled their car out of the line, headlights sweeping the porch. I stood, as if it were part of my duty to greet her.

“Helen sent me home,” the girl explained. “Did it work? Is the whale okay?”

“Jesus, Janie,” Hank said, a shadow of frustration lingering behind his words. Mostly, he sounded tired. “You shouldn’t have come all the way out here. There’s a storm coming in.”

“You’re not just going to leave her out there are you?” Janie asked. She threw a hand toward me, but I knew she meant the whale, half a mile behind me on the sand. The gesture went straight through me, as if I and the house and the beach grass tangled in the headwinds of the storm hadn’t been there at all.

Hank hauled his daughter’s bike up from the ground. “There’s not anything we can do,” he said. “I have to protect my team.”

“But she’ll die,” Janie insisted.

“Maybe she won’t,” I heard myself saying before I had thought it through. I swallowed, pushed back the stammer that crept into my mouth. “The tide comes in with the storm, right? Storm surge. The water could get high enough for her to make it back to sea.”

Hank smiled weakly at me, like you would a kid who announced they wanted to be an astronaut and President when they grew up. “Right, she might still stand a chance,” he said. The air tightened around the beach house. It smelled thick and hot, like rain. Hank put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder and steered her toward his truck.

“You ought to think about heading into town too,” he said to me. “They still don’t know how bad this one will be when she hits land. It’s not safe.”

I looked up at the sky as a fat raindrop shattered on the bottom stair. “I’ve seen worse.”

“Well,” he said, “be careful.”

I watched him lead Janie to his truck, watched Marisol greet her as she climbed into the middle seat in the cab, watched Hank pull a bungee cord over the bike and the rest of his rescue supplies piled in the back of his truck. I was still on the porch when the last of the headlights disappeared into the beach grass. The wind snatched my hair away from my face and dried the sweat and sand into my skin. The storm was coming, and I was alone. I turned and went inside.