Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  “I mean the ocean temp goes up a degree in one place and down a degree in another, how the hell you gonna get Joe Cool to lift an eyebrow? That’s why we need you.”

  “Mind if I have another beer?” Neffler wasn’t trying to be rude. Like the others, he was probably just a bit disappointed.

  Gale rolled her eyes.“Help yourself.”

  “You’ve taken on a big job,” Gullett told her to bolster her spirits. He liked her immensely and it wasn’t just the tan and the body. He had wrestled with really important stories throughout his career that never got the coverage they deserved. There always had to be a hook. An easy hook. Kid hit by a drunk driver. Politician caught with his pants down. If it was really deadly and dumped in a river, it wasn’t even of interest unless someone who was rich and famous rolled into the hospital on a gurney as a result. But he knew the real stories were in the big picture, in the number crunching and the research.

  Neffler popped the cap on the beer, as did PBS. Gale looked directly at them and continued. “Global warming — now there’s a dull thud for the public, I know. Fossil fuels. Cars. Cities. All to blame. The ice cap is melting and it’s still a big yawn. Water’s colder off Nova Scotia from the melt, warmer farther south. Fish could have bounced back once the moratorium came into effect but they didn’t. They lost a generation — teenage cod, so to speak. There’s the lead, boys and girls. ‘Teenage cod lose their way.’ Can’t teach the younger ones where to go and when. Same with other fish. And as a result of the warming trend, the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current have shifted ever so slightly. It’s like someone screwed around big time with an Interstate highway and you never know for sure which lane is going which way.

  “The beauty of it is — if I can stretch the meaning of that word — that it’s happening in our own backyard. The North Atlantic. Nobody can get excited about the death of the poor old tommy cod anymore. But now we have whales in the picture.”

  Brian cleared his throat, set his half-empty beer down. “They were a no-show all along the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia this year. Any connection?”

  “Give the man a cigar.”

  “Don’t tell me the automobile killed the right whale?”

  “Not quite. Just confused him as much as the codfish. The right whales aren’t off Peggy’s Cove this summer and nobody’s seeing them off Cape Cod, that’s for sure, but they’re out there. Mind you, the entire North Atlantic population is down to less than three hundred. We lose a dozen more each year that get tangled in nets or plowed into by container ships. But I’m going to take you to see some of the survivors.” She was all fired up, but Brian could tell his media chums were looking at what they thought was a real waste of their time.

  “So who’s out there killing them this time? The Icelanders?” Neffler was still sure there was a kicker in here. The Sea Guardian didn’t get its rep from backroom nerds on computers studying tide charts and water temperature. They kicked ass.

  “No, don’t you see? We are. They’re confused about where to be and when. If they can’t adapt to the changes, and I’m not sure they can, they die. Same thing might happen to us in the long run if we don’t get this problem nailed down.”

  Gullett had swallowed hook, line, and sinker, but the rest were less than thrilled. Gale registered the lack of interest.“Well, folks, we got you here now. Unless you want to foot the bill for your own helicopter flight back to Boston, I’m hoping you’ll want to find the sexiest angle you can possibly spin on this. We’ve got people here to help you. Please,” she said. She was almost pleading now. “It’s damn important.” Then she let out a big sigh.“Don’t worry. We’ll feed you good. There’s lots of beer. Movies if you need ’em.”

  She left, not fully certain she had done her job. Was this just going to end up being a very expensive whale-watching cruise or what?

  Brian tried to get eye contact with her but she was gone. Neffler sat shaking his head. “I had Knicks tickets, too.” But Brian was taking the whole thing very seriously.

  On the third day out, boredom settled in among the press gallery like an unwanted companion. Neffler had already wired a very negative story back to the Times about how the Sea Guardian had lost its edge. He didn’t seem to mind that he’d be treated like an enemy on board ship. PBS was holding off on airing anything yet. Nothing but a calm sea to show. No whales, no nothing but grey sky and a gunmetal sea, flat as piss on a plate. Mary Soucoup had tried to muster some enthusiasm and at least some feminist support for Gale and her cause but all she ended up with was a half column buried in the back of the Sunday paper with the headline, “Environmental Group Studies Problem With North Atlantic.” With a headline like that it would never get read.

  Brian was at the rail around twelve-thirty in the afternoon when he put some borrowed binoculars to his eyes. He saw the little boat first and then realized it was surrounded by a pod of whales. It was a long, long way from shore. The boat looked empty.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The PBS cameraman, Corey Giles, propped his Betacam on his shoulder and began to film. A pod of seven right whales surrounding a dory in the middle of the ocean. Curious. Intriguing visual image.

  The engine of the Belize was cut and the big metal ship drifted towards the whales. As they came closer to the boat, Brian suddenly realized there was something in the bottom of it — a person. Looked like a woman, and she was lying there unconscious. He shouted to the crew.“In the boat! There’s somebody there!”

  A rush of adrenaline shot through him. He was breathing hard and he could hear his heart pumping blood. PBS was still filming. Brian could see her more clearly now, saw the woman curled up on the floor of the boat.“Somebody, do something!” he shouted. The crew was preparing to lower an inflatable over the side, but there was a slow, studied way about it that seemed all wrong to him. It didn’t even occur to Brian that maybe whoever was in the dory was dead.

  Brian Gullett had been an observer all his life, had turned the skill into a profession as a reporter. Other people’s problems, other families’ tragedies. That’s what he wrote about. What went wrong and how people reacted. But he’d been bloody tired of just putting words on paper and trying to make people listen. Tired of it for a long time.

  His hands gripped the railing and he squeezed the metal as if he could break it. Then he nearly scared Corey Giles to death by yelling a single, loud syllable as he leaped over the side of the Belize. Brian felt something let go inside of him, some linchpin in his brain, some key device that always before had kept him cool and sane. It was a short, gravity-driven trip down through the air and a terrifying crash into the sea. He went under, flapped his arms, and slowly bobbed up to the surface, spitting sea water and shocked at the cold. Not the world’s best swimmer, he wallowed, wet clothes impeding him, towards the dory.

  He could hear people yelling at him from up above. Floundering in the water, it was both frightening and energizing, like he suddenly had become some other person. He felt the first whale, a young one, slide under him, perceived the compelling wake of even a small whale tugging at him. The little one was followed by its mother, much larger and more brazen. Taking a heavy, clumsy stroke, Brian felt his hand land on the back of the whale, and it slid across the wet, leathery skin. Brian wondered why he was not fearful in the slightest.

  Several more heavy strokes and his hand found the gunwale of the dory. He steadied himself, watched the whales circling about him now, felt his sodden shoe accidentally kick against the back of the small one going beneath him. He peered into the boat and saw her again, lying dead or unconscious on the wooden slats of the flooring. A woman. An old lady. A very old lady. Had he expected to be saving some beautiful young woman in distress? Brian wiped the saltwater out of his eyes and carefully, so as not to upset the boat, heaved himself up, then into the dory. Got his bearings. Huffing and trying to make his lungs work normally again. He heard somebody on the Belize yelling to him to avoid getting too close to the big ship, saw them still
having trouble getting the inflatable lowered down to the waterline.

  Gently he touched her shoulder. Nothing. “Come on lady, don’t do this to me,” he said out loud. And then he wondered, do what to him? Something vaguely familiar about this scene, like it had already happened before in a dream.

  He knelt beside her and lifted her body. She felt lifeless, but he prayed it to be otherwise. He wanted it so bad he could taste it like something in the back of his mouth. “I’m not going to let you…” and he almost said it again,do this to me.

  He closed his eyes for a brief instant. Get a lock on yourself. Get your bearings. Is she breathing? He cradled her against him. An old woman, old, beautiful face. Peaceful. What the hell was she doing way out here? He leaned over and put his ear up to her mouth, tried to concentrate. He heard a whale sliding up out of the water nearby, heard another breaking the surface then diving again.

  Concentrate. All he could hear was his own ragged breath. He tried again. Felt it before he heard anything. Warm air upon his cheek. She was alive.

  He shifted position, sat down on the planks, lifted her body and cradled her like a little child in his arms. Saw a dry blanket behind the seat and pulled it up and around both of them. He hugged her to him and studied her face. Yes, he had seen her before. He somehow knew her. Who was she?

  He held her to him as if she were someone he had known all his life, as if she were the most important person in the world to him. His heart began to come back to normal. She was not conscious. Something was wrong, very wrong, but he had no way of knowing what. Two men from the Belize had the inflatable in the water now and paddled to them, nearly getting dumped by the surfacing whales. One of the Sea Guardian men decided it was best to tow the dory to the ship, told Brian not to move, to keep her warm. Alongside of the Belize, a sling was attached to both of them and they were raised up on board. The ship’s cook, who doubled as a medic, took her into a room below deck and examined her.

  Brian followed.“Is she going to be all right?”

  “She’s had a stroke. That’s all I can tell. I think there’s some paralysis on the right side of her body. With something like this, it’s hard to know if she has brain damage or what. We’ve got a Coast Guard helicopter coming.”

  “I want to go ashore with her.”

  “Sure. Your call. You jumped in. Guess she’s yours.”

  Gullett knew now where he had met her before. But it didn’t make any sense. The island. Ragged Island. She had been selling cookies and bread outside the Aetna Café. She had smiled at him. An angelic smile. A lovely old woman with lines etched in her tanned face. He’d not said a word to her, but walked on to that damn junkyard to get his story. In the end, he knew he had brought the wrath of the bloody government against those folks who didn’t deserve it. He’d heard the news about the cancelled ferry. And he knew all about the failed whale-watching business. What else? Threads here. All loose ends. And he was one of them. Like it should all make sense but didn’t.

  An old woman at sea surrounded by a pod of right whales — creatures on the verge of extinction. He felt goosebumps. Up to now he had believed he had a good understanding of the way the world worked, thought he understood people, the order of things, events, calamities, disasters, crimes, corruption. He was so sure he had it wired. The Gull’s instinct. He’d sniff out a story and get right to the bottom of things. Sniff it out and pounce. That was exactly what he’d done to the island. He was a predator and he got his prey.

  Gale Jardine and Corey Giles came in. “Watch her,” the medic said. “I’ve got to get on the horn to the hospital and see if there’s something more I should do to prep her for the flight.” Then he turned to Brian.“You all right?”

  “Yeah. Go. I’m okay.” Dazed, confused, in shock, he supposed. Brian wrapped the blanket more tightly around himself, focussed on the unconscious woman. All he did was jump into the middle of the Jesus ocean, swim through a pack of whales to find an old woman in a dory. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully like a child, but there was a good chance she was dying. A stroke robbed your brain of blood and oxygen. Left you speechless or paralyzed or both. Turned a normal human being into a vegetable. Whatever came next, Brian knew that she was somehow his responsibility. And he would not take that lightly.

  Corey Giles sent the video footage to Halifax along with Sylvie and the mysterious Brian Gullett. The Gull saw her safely to the Queen Elizabeth II hospital, and, once she was settled into intensive care, he refused to leave her room. When someone from CBC arrived asking for the tape, Brian said no. He knew better than to trust the media.

  It was a producer named Susan from CBC TV news. “PBS asked me to take a look at Corey’s stuff, and feed some footage to New York. He said we could use it too, if we were willing to pay. So far I’m not sure there’s even a story here. All I know is that a woman tried to kill herself by setting off to sea.”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.” Gullett felt his throat tighten. He knew that the Sea Guardian people were chomping at the bit to make some kind of story — anything that would grab the public — out of their painstaking but oh-so-boring research. Global warming, dead fish, missing whales. Now they had an old lady in a boat, far at sea,“protected” by a clan of right whales. Nice touch. But how was it going to affect his friend here — unconscious, paralyzed? Did she want to be part of some media circus?

  “Brian, I’ve read your work. I know where you’re coming from. I’ve got a hunch something good is going to come out of this. You’re part of this story yourself, you know. I hear you jumped into the water and got to her first. He’s got you on that tape swimming among the whales. Then in the boat, holding her. Maybe you saved her life. Somebody’ll give you the Order of Canada.”

  “I don’t want the Order of Canada. And I don’t think I saved her life.”

  “Yeah, but you acted. And you had compassion. Works well for the camera.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But what do you have to lose? I can get a lawyer in here and take the tape.”

  “I can shred it before that.”

  “But you won’t. Look. Let the Sea Guardian people run with this thing. I think they have a point. They may be bang on. A big pile of boring statistics is all they had, but now they have the tools to tug the heartstrings. Come on, Brian, I don’t want to have to run back-to-back clips of Preston Manning arguing with the Bloc Quebecois, or news about some hockey player caught with steroids in him. Give.”

  But Brian didn’t want to give. He saw that look in her eyes. He’d lived with it, seen it in the mirror. Hot to trot for a story. And a story was all that mattered. Three good minutes of TV news that didn’t make people turn the channel and you could stake a career on it. A dog on a rooftop during a flood in the Midwest. Unknown man swimming people to shore after a plane crash in the Potomac. Brian had a brief, shuddering fear that this whole thing was a hoax somehow staged by the Sea Guardian Society. Maybe he was the ultimate dupe.

  But he was tired. He let his guard down and suddenly hoped to hell she wasn’t bullshitting him. If she didn’t screw it up, three good minutes of TV news could do some good. It was a gamble.“Run with it,” he said, handing her the Betacam tape.“If you turn it all to shit, I’ll come back to haunt you.”

  Susan smiled. Victory at sea. When she left, he leaned over close to the woman who now had a name. Sylvie Young. They’d phoned the island and discovered Brian was right. Their eyes had met that once. Hers had been soft and welcoming. His had been shrewd and guarded. Big lesson, there, bud.

  He leaned close and listened to Sylvie breathe. Eighty years old, she was. Born around the time of the Russian Revolution, the Halifax Explosion, the First World War. He wanted desperately for her to return to consciousness. He needed her to live. He craved to hear the whole story from her. Let the media skew her persona in all the usual ways, but if he had his chance, he’d learn to understa
nd who she really was. He closed his eyes, listened to her shallow breathing, and said a sizeable, sincere prayer to a God that he almost never believed in.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Sylvie woke up she was not at sea. She was in a hospital bed and she had a tube running up her nose. She could not feel her right hand or her right leg and wondered if some horrible accident happened and they had been cut off. But there was no pain. A fog, yes, like a heavy spring cloud settled upon the island. She tried to move her mouth to form words. Questions. How did she end up here? All she remembered was sky and sea. A peacefulness beyond anything she had felt in her life. She wondered, naturally, if she were dead but ruled that out as soon as she turned her head and saw a man, a young man — well, a man of perhaps forty years of age. He was asleep. He had not shaved in a number of days.

  She had seen him before. On the island. He was the reporter, someone who had brought trouble to the island. Why was he here? There was a haphazard array of images in her head. It was like her memory had been cut up into many fragments where once it had been a whole, complete picture. A big puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces seemed to fit together. All the images, all the fragments were there, but in a great jumble. She wondered who could help her begin to fit the pieces back together again. The confusion cascaded into fear. Her eyes darted back and forth, and then, as if someone had just swept a cosmic hand through the chaos to dispel her frenzy, she experienced a feeling of order again. Calm at least. She would discover a way to fit the pieces together.

  She remembered going to sea. But she wasn’t clear on why. It would come back to her. Give it time. Sylvie knew who she was and where she was. Her identity was her anchor now. Location was not significant. She understood she was not on the island. That much was obvious. Hospitals and Halifax, she knew, went hand in hand.