A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  Oh boy, she thought.

  The bird lady made a laughing, chirpy noise. “This is the strangest conversation I’ve ever had with a prank caller,” she said. “You’re very funny. Uncle Bill!”

  “Uncle Bill,” Nat repeated. “Remember when he fell out of his chair at that wedding?”

  “It was very funny,” the voice agreed. “So funny. The way he fell right into the cake. But why was the cake on the floor? That cake was awful. No one should ever put raisins in cake.”

  Nat laughed. “Raisins are gross,” she agreed. Then she didn’t know what to say. The sun was very bright and hurting her eyes. “Um,” she said.

  “Should I hang up?” the lady said. “Is this prank call over?”

  Solly made a face at her and rolled her eyes, so Nat rolled her eyes, too. The eye rolling was starting to be a thing. Having a thing was good, but she wouldn’t have picked eye rolling necessarily. Eye rolling made her think of cows. Cows with flies buzzing around their eyes.

  “Hello?” said the lady. “Goodbye!”

  “No, don’t go! I just, well, is there anything else you just have to know, Mom? You know how you are, how you like to know all the dumb details. Ha ha.” She said those words, “ha” and “ha,” separated like that. Who did that? Who was she turning into? A liar who ha and ha’d? She cleared her throat.

  “I definitely know how I am,” the bird lady said. “Dumb details are my favorite things. I’m glad you called me. This is odd but it’s making my day. I do wonder why you are calling me, a stranger, and not your actual mother though.”

  “I don’t have one,” said Nat. “At least, if I do, I don’t know her.”

  “What?” Solly mouthed. “Who?”

  Nat made a gesture that was somewhere between a shrug and wave, then she turned it into a point. She pointed somewhere behind Solly.

  Solly turned around. “What?” Solly said. “Is there something there? Is it those dumb boys? Like they own this basketball court.”

  “I should go,” said Nat. “I’m on a basketball court. I told you that, right?”

  “I didn’t know my mother either,” said the bird lady. “She died when I was born. Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure,” said Nat.

  “When I was little, I thought that everyone’s mom died when they were born, and then I went to school and I found out other people had living moms. I somehow hadn’t noticed all the moms before. I guess my dad kept me mostly at home. I felt so ripped off when I realized. When I came home from school, I punched my dad right in the nose. He got a nosebleed! After that, he always called me Muhammad Ali. He was a boxer. Not my dad, but Muhammad Ali.”

  “That’s terrible!” said Nat. “About, you know.” She glanced at Solly. “The first part,” she whispered.

  “I know,” the bird lady whispered back. Then, in a normal voice, she added, “But it might be worse to not know who she was. I have to think about that. If you prank call me again, ask me, and I’ll have thought of an answer. I like to think about my answers. I have lots of time for thinking. I think about my mother a lot.”

  “I do, too,” said Nat. “Mine, I mean.”

  “This call is taking forever,” said Solly. “You and your mom have totally weird convos.” She put her hand on the pole and twirled around it a couple of times, her purple hair streaming behind her in the sun like an ad for hair dye. Nat had a monkey on a stick toy that spun around just like that until it landed at the bottom. Then you turned it over and it raced back up to the top. It was the one toy her dad had let her keep from when she was little. It lived in the box she kept under her bunk in the trailer. In general, he didn’t believe in “things”—he was a minimalist—but he kept his Oscar, so she was allowed to keep Stick Monkey.

  “I kind of do have to go now,” said Nat to the bird-voiced lady. “Thank you. It was really nice of you to . . .” She squinted directly at the sun. Her eyes were watering. It was probably because the sun was so bright. “I love you, Mom. Have fun in LA.” She had never said the words “I love you, Mom” out loud before. Her throat had a huge lump in it now. The lump was the size of a basketball. She swallowed.

  The bird lady laughed. “Love is a big deal,” she said. “And you’re welcome.”

  Nat hung up the call and saved the number.

  She wrote “Bird” in the blank that asked for the name. Then, in parentheses, she wrote “(Mom).” She tilted the screen so that Solly couldn’t read it. “Glitchy,” she said to Solly. “It keeps deleting it. I keep putting it in.”

  “Huh,” said Solly. “Those phones are junk.”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s your mom like?” said Solly. “My mom is a freak.”

  “Oh. My mom is . . . pretty. She’s nice. I don’t know. She’s a mom. A normal mom. You know, chirpy.” Nat was really growing the lie now. After all, what kind of normal mother would abandon their purple-faced baby? Even in nature, when animals were faced with actual danger, mother animals stuck by their babies. Usually. Not always. Nat and her dad once found a baby harbor seal on the beach, and when they called the Ocean Rescue Center, the guy who came said it happened all the time. “I think some of them are just really dumb,” he said. “I think they just forget they even have a baby.”

  But Nat’s mother wasn’t a harbor seal, so she had no excuse.

  “Hellllooooooooo. I said, ‘Where are you going now?’” Solly asked. “What are you doing?”

  “Home,” said Nat. “Do you want to come over? I’m not doing anything.” She didn’t really think about it before she asked, but she regretted it immediately. If Solly came over, she would know Nat’s dad was XAN GALLAGHER, and then everyone would know. Not that a secret could last very long in a city like San Francisco, which Nat had thought was a terrible choice from the get-go. Her dad had insisted on it because of his great friendship with the director of his last movie, whose backyard the Airstream was currently parked in. Her dad did that. He became GREAT FRIENDS with everyone. It was like the whole world—everyone he met—got swept up into his XAN GALLAGHER embrace, which was a world of its own. The director wasn’t even there. He was in the desert somewhere filming a movie about Mars. They’d probably never see him again. The movie would take months to make. But that’s how her dad’s friendships worked: They were super intense and then they just faded away to nothing, like an Etch A Sketch that was shaken clear, leaving only a faint trace of what had been there, a memory of a friend. If her dad saw the director again, they’d hug and stuff, but it would never be the same as when they were on set, when they were soul mates.

  Anyway, her dad had already been recognized in Rite Aid buying ChapStick, so it probably didn’t matter that much. He really liked to keep his lips moisturized, much to the detriment of their plan to stay “under the radar.”

  “Sure,” said Solly. “I’ll come over. I’ll just text my mom.” She typed something rapidly on her iPhone with her thumbs. Her phone beeped in response. She laughed and typed again. “LOL,” she said out loud. Then she looked up. “My mom is super famous. You can be famous and poor, you know.”

  “Sure,” said Nat.

  “You didn’t ask me who she is,” said Solly. “I’m deciding if that’s weird.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Gracie,” said Solly, triumphantly.

  Nat tried to arrange her face in a happily surprised way that she hoped wouldn’t let on that she had never heard of Gracie. “Cool!” she said.

  “You’ve never heard of her,” said Solly.

  “Not really,” admitted Nat.

  “Forget it,” said Solly. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll Google her!”

  “Don’t bother. Seriously. I’m so tired of people being friends with me for having a famous mom. It’s so tiresome.”

  “My dad is a little famous, too,” offered Nat.
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br />   “I already know that, stupid,” said Solly. “You’re Natalia Rose. Your dad is XAN GALLAGHER. Duh. He’s overrated. That ‘yep yep’ thing is lame. But he was funny in that movie with the spiders. Did he really used to wrestle? I love wrestling.”

  “Yeah, that spider movie is a good one,” Nat lied. “He doesn’t wrestle anymore.”

  She hated that movie. Spiders were her one big fear. But it was true that her dad no longer wrestled. She was stacking truths against the lies to justify them. This is going to end badly, she thought. She didn’t even understand where all these lies were coming from. It was like she’d rejected the truth now and had forgotten how to get it back.

  Nat forged ahead. “He was a wrestler a really long time ago. He’s still friends with some of those guys. Sometimes we go for dinner with them, and they’re all, like, ENORMOUS.” She did not respond to the part where Solly had said her dad was overrated. Maybe it was a good thing. If Solly thought he was overrated, she wouldn’t narc them out to the Lion.

  The “yep yep” part was just mean.

  The hair on the back of Nat’s neck prickled.

  She reached up and rubbed it with her hand.

  Solly had turned her into a huge liar.

  It wasn’t Nat’s fault.

  Solly laughed. “I might be a wrestler when I grow up, but I don’t want to get fake boobs. Like all the girl wrestlers seem to have those.” She looked down at her chest and then put her fists under the flaps of her blazer. “Nope,” she said. She took her hands out again. “I want regular ones though. Like, yesterday.”

  “I would never do that,” said Nat. “Get fake ones. That’s gross.”

  “My mom did it,” said Solly. “It looks ridic. Like her boobs have nothing to do with her body, they are just stuck on there.” She puffed out her cheeks.

  They both giggled.

  The phone stayed where it was, still just the right heaviness, in Nat’s blazer pocket. When she got home, she put it under her pillow and then attached the charger to the outlet where her lamp was plugged in—a place her dad would have to crawl onto her bed to see.

  Eventually, Nat sort of forgot that the phone wasn’t hers in the first place. It became hers, de facto, which is a Latin phrase that means “whether it is right or wrong.”

  It was wrong, and she knew it.

  But the person who owned it would have replaced it by then probably. And no one needed the phone more than she did.

  It was meant to be.

  The Itch

  On the beach, Nat put the pebbles back in her shoe.

  She was holding her breath.

  She stood up, slowly. She felt as though if she were to move too quickly, this thing that was happening would stop happening.

  “This thing that was happening” was whales.

  Whales were happening.

  Rising out of the water, only about twenty feet offshore, there was an impossibly tall black dorsal fin. She didn’t know how tall it was, but it was definitely taller than her.

  “Oh!” Nat said.

  The orca surfaced and exhaled loudly, slowly blowing a misty spray of water. She could tell it was an orca because of its huge fin and distinctive black-and-white markings. She had seen orcas before, in Alaska, but that was different. That was from a boat.

  The whale’s exhalation made a rainbow between Nat and the sun that hung in the air like something magical was happening. Nat sat back down on the pebbly stones, and then she stood up again. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.

  “OMG,” she said.

  A wave of energy, like electricity, passed through her. She jumped up and down a couple of times, her feet rattling the pebbles. She felt like she might explode. “Wow.” The whale was in only about three feet of water. He was so close to her. She stepped closer to the shoreline. The water was really clear. She could see the big white patch on his face. She could see his eye.

  Then a second fin appeared a few feet behind the first fin.

  It was smaller.

  Then, farther out, a third one, even smaller than that.

  She could hardly breathe.

  Papa, Mama, and baby, like the three bears: a family.

  The fins were all lined up now, aiming right at the shore, as though they were going to beach themselves and then maybe grow legs and walk right out of there. Which would actually be terrifying, come to think of it, Nat thought. Her heart was going to beat right out of her chest any second. She wondered if the whales would eat her.

  Were they hunting her?

  Calm down, she told herself. The whales were just bobbing there now, huffing, like they were making a plan.

  Nat thought about nature documentaries that she’d seen where orcas chased seals up onto the beach and then hurled themselves after them, only to drag the seals back into the water and eat them. But there was no seal here. She certainly hoped they didn’t think she was one.

  What if they did?

  “I am not a seal!” she called. “Person, not seal. I’m Nat.”

  She looked around. There was still no one else there, nowhere in sight. A seagull flew across the horizon, but that was it as far as signs of life were concerned.

  It was only her.

  And the whales were right there. Right in front of her!

  She wondered if she should run back up into the trees, in case they were confused and hunting her. But she couldn’t stop looking at them. “This is crazy! This is totally crazy. What are you doing? What is happening? I mean, don’t eat me! You’re amazing. You are so amazing.”

  The wind took her words and whipped them up into the trees behind her. It was really picking up, blowing her hair all around her face and into her mouth, and pushing the salt spray toward her. She thought she could even smell the whales’ terrible breath. Whales had bad breath. That was just a fact. Everyone knew that.

  The huffing sound was so loud, it vibrated in the air. She kept looking over her shoulder, as though maybe somebody else would (should) materialize there, and then she could say, “Can you believe this? Look at this! Look at these whales!”

  She turned around and picked up her phone from the log. She would call her dad to come down here, but he still stubbornly refused to have a phone. “DAD!” she yelled instead, just so she could say that she tried to call him. He would be super disappointed to miss out on this.

  She wished her phone weren’t a burner phone. She wished it had a camera.

  This was unbelievable.

  “Unbelievable!” she shouted.

  Probably, afterward, no one would actually believe her. But she didn’t care.

  It was real.

  It was happening.

  Maybe it was even some kind of a sign, though of what, Nat didn’t know.

  She took three big steps closer to the whales, who were swishing around in the shallow water. Her ankles twisted precariously on the uneven ground, and the stones slid noisily toward the water, because the beach was very sloped. She got as close as she dared. Then the big whale made a whistling sound and did a wiggle that sent sprays of water everywhere.

  It looked almost exactly like he was scratching his belly.

  “Are you itchy?” Nat said. “Is that what you’re doing? Scratching?” Just saying the word “itchy” made her own belly itch. She scratched and watched, watched and scratched.

  All three whales were wriggling now, bellies against the rocks and pebbles. It made an amazing noise, a rattle and grind and splash all at once, the rocks all rubbing against each other. It was beautiful and terrible at the same time.

  Nat crouched down. She wanted to tell the whales about how they were connected: Nat and her mysterious mother and those three whales and this place, French Beach, but she couldn’t find the words. She just held her hands out, fingers spread. Maybe they would know what that meant. She
had no idea.

  “Baleine,” she whispered.

  The whales slid back into the sea and then heaved themselves up again, all in a row. Then the little one swished away and swam back and forth, parallel to the shore, as if he were bored. He was probably saying, “Mom, Dad, let’s gooooooooooooo,” in whale language.

  The baby slapped his tail against the water. It made a sound as loud as a thunderclap. “Can you be done already?” he seemed to be asking. You didn’t need to understand whale to understand what he meant.

  Or she.

  It’s not like you could tell if a whale was a he or she just by looking.

  Nat got a boy-vibe though. At least, she thought she did.

  Her heart was slowing down now. She sat on the log. The beach was still deserted. The gulls were still playing in the wind. The two larger whales were still rubbing; the rocks were still rattling.

  Nat hoped the tide didn’t go out and leave them beached.

  They were huge. There was no way she’d be able to push them back out to sea. Not alone. Her dad probably couldn’t even do it. The fin on the biggest one was taller than even he was, she was sure of it. She felt tiny, like a marble in a bin of basketballs.

  The whales flicked their mighty tails and then shifted back into the deeper water again. This time, they didn’t heave themselves back in her direction. They hesitated there, a few feet offshore. Nat wasn’t sure if they could see her or not, but she waved anyway. Then all three sank and rose in unison, exhaling in loud puffs. They swam out a little way and then back, like they were saying goodbye or like they didn’t want to go.

  Nat kept her hand raised, as though she were saluting them. “Goodbye,” she said. “Thank you!” She felt weird talking to them, but she also felt like she had to say something. It wasn’t enough to just let them swim away.