A Possibility of Whales

by Karen Rivers

  “I am still me,” she said. “I look like myself.”

  Nat got up to go to the bathroom. She felt a little dizzy.

  She used the toilet, same as usual.

  “Hola, fish,” she said, same as usual. “What’s new?”

  The fish in the tank swam around behind the plants, avoiding her, same as usual.

  “Be that way,” Nat told them. “But I would have told you a really good story if you’d wanted to hear it.”

  Her head was buzzing with everything that had happened. It was so surreal. She suddenly liked the word “surreal.” English actually had a lot to offer, if you looked at it closely.

  She got off the toilet and went to flush, and then she saw it.

  Blood.

  She sat down. She looked in her underwear.

  Definitely blood.

  Stars floated down around her.

  Her vision tunneled.

  “Uh-oh,” Nat said. She put her head between her knees so that she wouldn’t faint. She had to think. Thinking was hard, because she didn’t feel well. What should she do?

  She looked in the cabinet under the sink, but there was nothing in there except toilet paper rolls. She took a bunch of toilet paper and folded it and folded it and folded it. Then she put that in her underwear and stood up. She had to deal with this. She didn’t have a choice.

  Nat went back into her room and put on some clean jeans. It was freezing in there. She felt too hot and too cold at the same time, which was impossible but also true. She remembered kicking off her shoes and jeans under the water. Her heart sneakers were now at the bottom of the sea. She thought about that for a second. It was like poking a bruise, but it hurt less than she would have thought. She could get new sneakers. She could draw hearts on them. But maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she could ask Harry to draw orcas.

  “Tattorca,” she said out loud, and she laughed.

  The tattorca seemed like forever ago. Like it happened in a completely different life.

  Nat picked up the phone from the desk. She pressed it against her cheek. It felt cool and solid. She looked at the display: 9:19 a.m., it said. There was a picture of a sun. For some reason, the sun had a smiley face on it. She’d never noticed that before. She flipped the phone open and closed a few times. It made a satisfying snap snap snap sound.

  She sat down on the unmade bed. She dialed the Bird’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Where were you yesterday?” said Nat. “I was calling!”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this? Oh! I know who you are. You’re the prank caller, right?”

  “You aren’t the Bird,” said Nat. Her voice sounded funny. Maybe it was just the echo in this big room.

  “Is that what you call her? The Bird? That’s so . . . well, it’s so accurate. She did look like a bird, didn’t she?”

  “Did she?” said Nat. There was something in her stomach that was hard as a rock. It hurt so badly. Something terrible was happening inside her. It wasn’t just her period. It was something else. Something more terrible than she had ever imagined.

  “Hang on, Prank Caller. She left a letter. She wanted me to read it to you.”

  “OK,” said Nat. She tried to rearrange the person’s voice so they were not saying what she knew they were saying. “Something has happened to the Bird,” she whispered to the origami bra frog that was on her bedside table. “I think the Bird is dead.”

  “Are you still there?” said the voice.

  “Yes,” said Nat, although she wondered if it were true.

  She felt like she was floating upward, separating into layers.

  She felt like she was on the ceiling looking down at herself, cross-legged on the bed, talking on the phone.

  “OK, I’m just going to read it.” The person cleared her throat. “Sorry, I’m a bit emotional. I don’t want to cry.”

  “It’s OK,” said Nat.

  “I’m reading it now. This is what it says.” The person took a big breath in and let it out. It sounded like a gust of wind. “‘Dear one,’” she read. Her voice was as wavy as the sea. “‘I’ve been meaning to tell you that I think we put so much importance on mothers because mothers are our first loves. But they aren’t everything. You love your father. I loved my father, too. And then I loved my stepmother. And I love my own daughter. I said I’d tell you which situation was worse, yours or mine, and then I realized that both of them were the same and neither of them were terrible. They just shone a light on . . .’” The woman’s voice cracked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She was my mom.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Nat. She was crying, too, but the eye-leaking kind of crying, not the noisy kind.

  “I’ll read the end, I just have to . . .” Nat heard the person blowing her nose. “‘They just shone a light on love for us. They made us look for it more and better than we would have if it had just been handed to us. That’s what I think, anyway. Thank you for prank calling me. I love you. Goodbye, little Baleine.’”

  The voice pronounced Baleine wrong.

  Maybe no one would ever get it right again.

  “Oh no,” said Nat. She was still on the ceiling. She was on the ceiling but she could feel her heart beating in her body. It was beating really hard. Her face was soaking wet. “Thank you. I’m really sorry about your mom.” She swallowed. She watched herself lie back on the pillows. “She was great. She was the best. She was . . .” Nat didn’t know what to say. “The Bird,” she finished. “She was my Bird.”

  “Me, too,” said the woman. “I’m sorry, too. But she was sick for a long time. She’d been really sick. She had been in bed for a year. A whole year. Can you imagine?”

  Nat could imagine. Nat imagined the Bird, lying on a perfectly made bed, her ankles crossed, her phone beside her. She imagined the Bird looking out the window while she spoke to Nat, while she made everything OK for Nat, every time she called.

  “Peanut butter sandwich,” Nat said, desperately.

  Then she pressed the “end” button on the phone.

  It was too late to ask what the Bird’s name was.

  It was too late to know who she really was.

  Nat felt something terrible. That something was anger.

  How dare the Bird leave without saying goodbye? She wouldn’t do that! But she did do that. How could she not tell Nat she was dying? How could she let Nat believe that she’d just always be there for her, on the other end of the phone? How could she die without knowing what happened to Nat and Harry with the whale?

  But maybe, Nat thought, the whale was the Bird, coming to say goodbye.

  She liked that idea, so she decided to keep it.

  Nat wasn’t sure she understood the love parts of what the Bird had said in her note, so she quickly wrote down the words she remembered so she could look at it later.

  Missing mothers make us look harder for love, she wrote. Then she crossed out harder and changed it to better. She remembered the better.

  Then she also remembered that she was bleeding.

  “This is so complicated,” Nat said.

  Quinceañera

  Nat had two choices.

  Her choices were Harry. Or her dad.

  Would Harry want to talk about periods?

  She was pretty sure not.

  On the other hand, she’d rather die than talk to her dad again about periods.

  But her dad could drive.

  And she had to go to the store.

  And the last thing Harry wanted to talk about, she knew, was girl stuff.

  “This is not that complicated,” she said out loud. “I can do this.” She wasn’t really sure what she meant by “this,” but whatever it was, she could handle it.

  After the previous day, she could handle anything.<
br />
  Nothing felt quite right. It was all like a dream. A terrible dream in which the Bird was dead. Her heart shuffled strangely.

  Do not think about that right now, she told herself firmly. Just don’t.

  Nat went to put on her shoes, but they weren’t there. They were at the bottom of the ocean. “Surreal,” she said out loud. “Surreal” was a word that made her think of seals and of round rubber inner tubes floating in the current.

  She stepped out into the hallway barefoot. “DAD!” she yelled. “I need a ride to the SUPERMARKET mercado!”

  “Where are you going?” said Harry, popping his head out of his door. “I want to come, too. Do you feel terrible? I feel terrible. Like I have the flu.”

  “You don’t have the flu,” said Nat. “You just have an I-almost-died-but-didn’t feeling. It’s good, not bad.”

  “Why are you so happy?”

  “I’m not happy. I’m sad. I just found out that . . . and I got . . . Never mind. I’m not just one thing. People can be more than one thing, you know.”

  “Can you get me some Fruity Pebbles?” he said. “If you won’t let me come?”

  “Sure,” said Nat. “Whatever.”

  “Sheesh,” he said. Then, under his breath, “Testy.”

  “I am not!” said Nat. “I’m happy, sad, and testy, all at once.”

  “Crazy,” he mouthed.

  “What?” said Nat, and laughed.

  Harry laughed, too.

  “Bye then,” he said. “Hasta la vista.”

  “Hasta la vista yourself,” she said.

  “What’s the emergency?” said her dad, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. He bounded up them two at a time. “Man, I’m glad you two are alive. Come here.” He lifted them both straight off the ground in a hug. He smelled terrible, like armpit sweat. He must have found a gym, or created one. It didn’t matter where they were, he could find a way to work out. He was probably bench-pressing the furniture. Doing chin-ups on the plumbing. Carrying Mr. Brasch up and down the hill while doing lunges. Nat giggled.

  “I love you, Dad,” she said.

  “Yeah, you DO!” he shouted.

  “Put me down!” yelled Harry.

  “Dad,” said Nat, remembering. She wriggled free. “No time for this. We have to go to the store. It’s an emergency.”

  Then she winked.

  “Ohhhh,” said her dad. “I like mysteries. Can we guess?” He was still holding Harry. It looked weird, like Santa carrying an elf. Like you knew it was possible, you just couldn’t imagine why it would ever happen.

  “Put him down, Dad!” Nat said. “Don’t guess. I mean, it’s private. Really private.”

  “What could be so private that you can’t tell your dad and your bestie?”

  “Dad.”

  “You tell us everything, right?” Nat’s dad put Harry down and then gave him a fist bump. “My man,” he said.

  “It’s a girl thing,” said Nat. She gave him a look. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, she shouted telepathically.

  She watched her dad receive her message. His eyes shut and then opened and then shut again.

  “Dad,” she said. “Stop blinking.”

  “Natters! Is it? Did you? Are you?”

  “Dad,” she said.

  “I’m getting the keys,” he said.

  • • •

  Where the road curved closer to the sea, Nat could see the surf curling in, the water blue and perfect and calm, like nothing dramatic had ever happened there, like it had already forgotten the day before.

  Did the sea remember things?

  Was that how it worked?

  The whale would remember—she was sure of that.

  “A lot of opposite things can happen at the same time,” she said to her dad. He’d probably get it.

  “Yep yep,” he said. “Coexistence of Opposites. That’s a thing. Man, that would be a great title for something. Maybe a song.”

  “Sure,” Nat agreed.

  Her dad looked over at her and smiled his too-toothy smile.

  “So many teeth!” she said.

  There was a song playing on the radio. It was Gracie.

  “Whoa,” said her dad. “What is this? It’s fantastic!” He started thumping the wheel in time to the music. “I love this song!”

  “Dad!” said Nat. “It’s Gracie. Solly’s mom.”

  “It is? Man, she’s really good! I love this! Good for her!”

  “It’s OK, I guess,” said Nat. She couldn’t explain how the song made her think about the Cigarette Incident. She didn’t want to say that now that Solly and her mom weren’t desperate for money anymore, maybe they wouldn’t sell photo ops to paparazzi. She sort of wanted to scream. Instead, she just reached over and turned it off.

  “Hey!” said her dad. But then he seemed to remember. “Nah,” he said. “You know what? It’s not that great.”

  “Nope nope,” said Nat.

  “I’m really proud of you,” he added. “Is that the right thing to say? Congratulations? Should we have a cake?”

  “We had a cake yesterday! Please don’t make this a big deal. Just, shhhh.”

  “Want me to come in with you?”

  “Dad! No! I’ll do it.”

  They were nearly at the turnoff for the SUPERMARKET mercado when Nat spotted a dog lying on the side of the road. She knew before she really understood what she was seeing. “TUFTY!” she screamed. “Dad! Stop! Someone has run over Tufty!”

  “That dog from yesterday? Again?” he said. “That dog has a death wish!”

  But he slammed on the brakes, and even before the car stopped, Nat was opening the door and getting out. “Tufty!” she yelled. “Tufty!”

  “This is like déjà vu,” her dad was saying. “How many times can this dog get run over?”

  The dust was stinging Nat’s eyes. Don’t you dare be dead, she said, using telepathy. She flat-out couldn’t handle anyone else being dead, even though the Bird being dead felt mostly like a dream.

  The Bird wasn’t anything but a voice, she thought. But that wasn’t true. The Bird was so much more than that.

  She was a mom.

  She just wasn’t Nat’s mom.

  Nat heard a whimper and then she was on her knees, gathering the dog into her arms. He was all fur and bones. He licked her hand frantically.

  “OMG!” she said. “He’s hurt this time! He’s really hurt, Dad!”

  She stood up, still holding tightly to the dog. He was loose and floppy in her arms.

  “Oh man.” Nat’s dad was beside her now. “Poor little guy.”

  He gently lifted the dog from Nat’s arms. In her dad’s gigantic hands, Tufty looked tiny, like a toy. “Don’t hurt him, Dad!”

  “I’m not hurting him.” He lifted the dog closer to his face and whispered something into his ear. Tufty tilted his head to the side, as though he were listening. Then he made a small yipping sound.

  “See?” said her dad. “He’s not dead. He’s not even dying.”

  He whispered something else. Then he raised his eyebrow at Nat. “You didn’t know I was the dog whisperer, did you? I might be your dad, but there’s lots of stuff about me that you don’t know.”

  He put the dog carefully down on the road. Tufty sneezed once, twice, three times. He shook himself vigorously, like her dad emerging from the surf.

  Tufty barked and ran off up the hill.

  “Aw,” said Nat. “I hoped we could keep him.”

  “We don’t do pets, remember? We’re minimalists! We want to be able to fly away on a moment’s notice! We might need to go to Peru! Or New Zealand! Or Detroit!”

  Nat laughed. “I know, I know. Forget it. But you have to teach me how to be a dog whisperer, too.”

  “Oh, you already know.” He made a gesture
with his fingers, pointing at her, then at his own eyes. “I see you.”

  Nat grinned.

  “To the SUPERMARKET mercado?” he said.

  “To the SUPERMARKET mercado,” she agreed.

  It already felt like a hundred years since she rode the green bike to the SUPERMARKET mercado with Harry. She was a different person then. She was a person who rode a tiny green bike and had never kissed a boy and didn’t have her period and hadn’t been nearly drowned in the Sea of Cortez and hadn’t forgiven Solly and hadn’t lost one Bird (Mom) and maybe found (one day) another.

  “Wait here,” Nat said. She got out.

  Things were feeling less than good, down there. She needed something, stat. She took a deep breath in and held it.

  Nat counted to twenty-nine before she got to the door. She pushed it open. The cold air rushed over her like water.

  The bored-looking girl was behind the counter. She was still reading, but it was a different book. “Air-conditioner is fixed,” she said. She was wearing another Imagine Unicorns shirt. This one was neon green. The unicorn had one rainbow-colored eye.

  Nat cleared her throat.

  The girl looked up. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Um, do you sell . . .” Nat started. Then she stopped.

  The girl looked back at her book.

  Nat opened her mouth and then closed it again. Why was it so hard to say “pads” out loud? Or “tampons”? Not that she thought she wanted to try those. She definitely didn’t feel ready for that. “I like your shirt,” she said instead.

  The cashier looked down at her shirt. “Oh, hey, thanks. It’s my band,” she said. “I play the guitar.”

  “Cool,” said Nat. “I like guitars. I don’t play one though.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the girl. She looked down at her book, then back at Nat. She sighed. “Are you sure I can’t help you find something?”

  “I . . .” started Nat. Then she burst into tears. The tears surprised even her. She didn’t know why she was crying. “The Bird died!” she said.

  “What bird?” said the girl. She put the book down on the counter. She came around the counter to where Nat was standing and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “Are you OK?”

  “Not a bird,” said Nat. “A person named the Bird. And that’s not even her name! I don’t even know her name! And then the whale had a baby!” She was crying really hard now. It was embarrassing, but she couldn’t stop.