The Beautiful Lost

by Luanne Rice

  “Why don’t we stay on my boat tonight?” she asked.

  “Funny, that’s what Atik said when I showed him on the chart—he invited us to sleep on his,” I said. “I guess your place really is a long way from here.”

  “Yes, very,” she said. Then she turned and spoke to the bartender in a low voice so I couldn’t hear, and she gestured at the door as if indicating someone about to walk through it. For a second I wondered if she’d been planning to meet a friend here, but when she turned around she said, “Let’s go.”

  “I have to pay,” Billy said.

  “I took care of it,” she said.

  That’s what she’d been speaking to the bartender about! I grinned at Billy. See? I wanted to say to him. It’s going to be great with her, she cares, she likes you already.

  Mom walked down the dock to the Wolf with Billy and me, so we could get our things and say good-bye to Atik. He was still in the wheelhouse, leaning back in the chair, feet propped up on the wheel, still talking to his girlfriend.

  “Hey, Atik,” Billy called.

  “Hey,” Atik said, lowering the phone.

  “This is Maia’s mother,” Billy said.

  “Gillian Symonds,” my mother said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I recognize the boat,” my mother said. “You’re related to George and François?”

  “Yes,” Atik said. “François is my brother and George is my uncle.”

  “Well, it’s a small world,” my mother said. “Especially for people who work on the river.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Atik said.

  “Thank you for bringing us here,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “I’m going to stay for a few days and fish with my uncle. So I’ll probably see you around.”

  “Good,” Billy said. The floating dock had started to rise with the incoming tide, so he easily hoisted our bags onto the dock and jumped up after them.

  I walked toward my mother, but she took a cell phone from her pocket and gestured for us to go on ahead. I hadn’t known she had a phone—it shocked me to see and made me feel weird; she’d been so totally out of touch with me. But then I told myself the reason she hadn’t called was that she had no reception in the cabin. And she probably didn’t come to town often. Still, I felt strange.

  Billy and I kept walking. I heard Mom on the phone. Her voice carried, quiet but urgent. Was she phoning my dad? I stared at her, trying to tell, but couldn’t.

  Billy and I had reached the half-moon beach, so I turned to look. Waves lapped at the lower part of the circle he’d drawn. Our initials and the sand dollar markings were still there.

  “I don’t want it to disappear,” I said.

  “It’s okay. If the tide takes it away, I’ll draw it again,” he said.

  I looked up at him and saw resolution in his eyes: our promise. We hugged tightly, but let go fast when we heard my mom approaching. I felt like the biggest dork for not wanting her to see me holding him. But she had left when I was thirteen. I needed a little time to let years and the way I’d changed catch up with how we were now.

  “What are you looking at?” Mom asked, following my gaze down to the beach.

  “Something Billy drew for me,” I said.

  My mother stared for a long moment, then shook her head. “I’ll have to look in the morning. It’s too dark now,” she said briskly.

  But it wasn’t too dark. The streetlights were shining right on the spot, and Billy had drawn our initials and the sand dollar circle so clearly. They were deeply scored into the sand. Why had she pretended she couldn’t see it?

  “It’s a sand dollar,” I said.

  “What an interesting thing to draw,” she said.

  “Did you call Dad?” I asked. “Just now?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. You just got here, Maia. We’ll sleep tonight and talk about everything tomorrow.”

  I felt a combination of relieved and strange. But if it wasn’t my dad, who had been on the phone?

  The three of us headed away from the fishing and whale-watching boats, toward the opposite side of the bay’s curve, at the far end of the harbor. The houses got bigger here. We stopped directly in front of one of the largest and most austere, a white mansion that looked like it might have been built by a sea captain.

  My mother glanced at the front door. Were the people who lived there friends of hers? A shadow moved behind a curtain in one of the tall downstairs windows. My stomach flipped—was someone watching us?

  “Come on,” my mother said, leading us down white steps onto a private dock jutting into the bay. There was no beach here, just deep water. Black and still, it glistened under the harbor lights. We passed a Zodiac inflatable and a sleek, small white sailing dinghy both tied to the dock.

  “Whose are these?” I asked. But then we reached Narwhal, my mother’s research boat. I would have recognized it anywhere, from all the photos she had sent. The vessel was named for the arctic whale with a long tusk, and when I was little she had told me that the myth of the unicorn had started the first time a human encountered a narwhal.

  We crossed the deck and climbed down a companionway into the cabin. Mom turned on lights—it was so cozy, with warm wood everywhere, framed watercolors, and red plaid cushions on the settees.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “No, we’re fine,” Billy said.

  “We just ate at the café,” I said, my words turning into a gigantic yawn.

  “But you’re tired,” she said, laughing.

  I nodded. I felt exhausted, as if I had been holding the entire world up for three years, making it spin all by myself, never letting go for a second until the minute I would see my mother again. And here she was; we were together.

  She opened her arms, and I tumbled against her. She stroked my hair, just the way she had through my whole childhood. Billy looked around the cabin. He was standing in front of a big poster of whales—the exact one that had been in my mother’s whale room at home—and he studied the different species.

  “Well, you’ve had quite a journey,” my mother said. “So let’s get you to bed.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s stay up, there’s so much I want to ask you …”

  “I know,” she said, interrupting me in the middle of another massive yawn—I couldn’t stop myself. “But we’ll get up early tomorrow and there’ll be lots of time to catch up.”

  “Will we see whales?” I asked.

  “Definitely. We’ll head out first thing in the morning.”

  “I saw my first beluga today,” Billy said. “It was beyond anything I expected.”

  “Ahh,” Mom said. “And there’ll be many more tomorrow. Okay, Maia. You take the forward stateroom. Billy, you take the aft.”

  “But where will you sleep?” I asked. There were only two separate cabins on the boat.

  “Here, on the settee. It pulls out into a bed,” she said.

  I wanted her to sleep up front, on the wide berth, with me. We’d sometimes fallen asleep reading together side by side when she’d lived at home. But that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  “Sweet dreams,” my mother said, just as she had every night of my life before she’d left.

  “My mother used to say that,” Billy said.

  “It’s in the mother handbook,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Then my mother hugged me and gave me a little pat on the back, pointing me toward the forward cabin.

  Billy stood still, watching me. It really hit me: For the first time since Billy and I had left on our road trip, we wouldn’t be sleeping within a few feet of each other. I wanted to go to him, hug him, but everything felt so stilted. We managed to brush fingertips as we walked past each other, but that was it.

  And then all three of us went to bed in different parts of the boat.

  I tossed around for a while, then slept hard until eight a.m. The wake of a passing boat woke me, sloshing against Narwha
l’s hull. Groggy and disoriented, I got up and walked into the main cabin. I found Billy at the table, eating cereal. My mother was gone.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She left this.”

  I panicked a minute before reading her note: Hello you two. Have breakfast, and I’ll see you soon. XXOO

  Billy stood, his spoon clattering onto the table, and put his arms around me. We were both sweaty from boat-sleep in small cabins, and our T-shirts stuck to each other. Billy leaned down and I tilted up, and we kissed, and it was day two of being so close that kissing each other seemed almost normal. But it still sent shivery goose bumps over my skin.

  By the time we’d sat back down and finished our bowls of granola, my mother was back. This was typical of her—up early, ready to face the day full-blast, no dawdling. Billy and I heard her hurrying around on deck above our heads. We quickly washed our bowls in the small sink and went up to meet her.

  “Hi there,” she said, hugging me. “How did you sleep?”

  “Great, Mom,” I said. Because I’m with you.

  I’d been right the night before: This was a deep-water dock. Looking down at least twenty feet, the water was so clear I could see the rock-strewn bottom. A starfish seemed to be skipping along. It matched the way I felt—incredibly happy.

  Billy and I loosened the bow and stern lines, and my mother drove us into the bay. Morning sun threw diamonds on the water. We rounded the headland, and suddenly we were in the Saguenay Fjord. My heart caught in my throat. Yes, it was spectacularly beautiful, rock walls rising on either side of the dark-blue river, but I barely noticed because this was the spot I’d so long dreamed of seeing my mother again. This was the place of my dreams.

  And here she was. Here we were.

  I stood next to her at the wheel. She gave me a big squeeze. Her smell was so familiar, and so was the pressure of her arm around me. When I was a baby she had carried me around in a blue denim sling, and apparently I’d never wanted her to put me down. I loved her so much, had never wanted to be an inch away. I had cried when I first went to school. It had gotten easier, of course. But being here now, so close, made me remember those early times, and how much I’d missed her, as if part of myself had been torn away, these last few years.

  I must have grown since the last time we were together because our shoulders were nearly even. I was almost as tall as she was. I held a secret smile, waiting for her to notice, but she was busy adjusting instruments, peering around.

  “Do you see them?” she asked.

  “So many!” Billy said.

  I’d been so focused on Mom, I hadn’t seen: Whales were everywhere.

  Belugas swam in clusters down below, the adults as white and glossy as ivory, the smaller juveniles pale gray, almost silver. They came up for air, rolling on their backs, curving their bodies and raising their tails.

  Humpbacks, forty-foot gentle giants with long white flippers, were feeding in bubble rings, forcing food—krill, plankton, copepods, small fish—to the surface by the great big bubbles they blew underwater. They swam close to our boat, spy-hopping—lifting their heads clear out of the water to look at us.

  I felt ecstatic, overwhelmed. Belugas swam by, white streaks beneath the surface. Reaching overboard I actually touched the head of a female—smaller than the males—knowing she had come to welcome us, to say hello, and I felt the magical connection I’d imagined with whales all these years. They were so emotional and intelligent, and I gazed into this one’s deeply beautiful dark eyes, communing with her.

  One humpback breached—threw itself totally out of the water—landing with such a huge splash it hit us with a blast of spray.

  “Wow, that’s amazing!” Billy said. “Why does it do that?”

  “She’s playing. Feeling exuberant,” my mother said.

  Another humpback did the same thing, fifty yards away. Three more poked their heads up above the surface, nose-up like tall mountains rising from the sea, all around our boat, gazing at us.

  “That’s spy-hopping,” I told Billy. “They’re checking us out.”

  “You remember the term,” my mother said, sounding proud.

  “I told you, I remember everything,” I said.

  We kept going, and every time a whale breached Billy exclaimed, and I felt joy. The belugas were the best, swimming so close, rising straight to the surface as if wanting us to lean out of the boat and pat their heads. Which Billy and I did. He beamed, and I could see he was as full of delight and wonder as I was.

  “This is a whale sanctuary,” my mother said, “and boats are supposed to stay four hundred meters from any whale. Belugas are endangered, so it’s really important to protect them. But the whales know me, and they refuse to stay away! I never feed them, of course, but they are such social creatures. I’m sure they’re coming over to meet you.”

  “That’s what I was thinking!” I said, totally blown away by it all.

  “How many different kinds are here?” Billy asked.

  “Belugas, minkes, humpbacks, fin whales, North Atlantic right whales, sperm whales, the occasional rare blue,” Mom explained. “Some species are endangered, and others are vulnerable. The North Atlantic gray whale is now extinct. There used to be bowheads here, but no sightings since I arrived.”

  “What happened to them?” Billy asked.

  “Humans,” she said bluntly. “The north is the first place to feel climate change. Melting sea ice alters salinity, causes algae blooms in some places, and kills food sources. Whales starve.” It broke my heart to think of them suffering, not having enough food.

  “Nature needs protecting,” I said.

  Her eyes twinkled as if she was proud of me for saying it.

  She idled the engine and more and more belugas came up to see us, heads out of the water nearly levitating until she touched each one. Mom beckoned me over, indicated I should hold out my hand, and sure enough—whale after whale rose up to touch my hand.

  “That’s Blue, and that’s Crescent, and that’s Euphotic—he takes the deepest dives …” Mom glanced at me to see if I remembered what the aphotic zone was, and I did: six hundred and sixty feet below the water’s surface, where no light could penetrate. “And that’s Phyto, for phytoplankton, and that’s Polaris, and that’s Preemie, because she was born so early.”

  She had always named whales, even on our family trips, and I’d loved the way she recognized them as individuals, noticed little differences in their appearances: a deeper V in one’s tail, a bite taken out of a flipper by a predator, a scar on the top of one’s head from a close encounter with a ship’s propeller.

  “I’m looking for Persephone,” Mom added. “One of my regular belugas. I’ve known her since she was still with her mother, and now we’re waiting for her to deliver a calf. She has the most beautiful song of any whale I’ve ever heard, and I’m missing her. I’m hoping the next time I see her she has her baby.”

  “Maybe we’ll see her today,” I said, wondering why my mother’s words sounded familiar, as if they’d swum up from a dream, and made me feel dizzy, the deck tilting under my feet.

  “Does Persephone have a favorite spot?” Billy asked.

  “No, she could be anywhere. But I’m sending out my own song to her, and I hope she hears it and comes to find me.”

  “I did that,” I said. “I heard your song and came to find you.”

  My mother stood at the wheel, and I was surprised to see she had a grave expression in her eyes—it seemed so odd for the wonderful time we were having. “Daughters do that,” she said.

  We cruised farther north, up the fjord. Whales still surrounded us, but there was no sign of Persephone. The morning passed quickly, and at noon we anchored in a deep inlet on the fjord’s western shore.

  My mother had packed us a beach picnic. The wicker basket was filled with my favorites, almost as if she’d expected me: Granny Smith apples, carrot sticks and hummus, and pan bagnat—the most delicious
sandwiches ever and a tradition for our family to have on the water: a crusty baguette stuffed with really good tuna, the kind from France packed in olive oil, and chopped artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes, basil, and lemon juice.

  She’d even left out the red onion because she knew I didn’t like it.

  “This is delicious, Mrs.—I mean, Gillian,” Billy said.

  “I’m glad you like it,” she said. “I wanted Maia to have her favorite boat picnic food.”

  “I love it,” I said. “Mom, tell me the truth—did you know I was coming?”

  “How could I have?”

  “Because this picnic … it’s the best.”

  “I’m so glad you like it, sweetheart,” she said. “I ran out while you were sleeping to fill the basket.”

  “The grocery store in Tadoussac must open early,” I said.

  “I didn’t go to a store,” my mother said.

  “Where, then?”

  “You know me, Maia. I’m resourceful.”

  She used a big bread knife to cut the last section of pan bagnat in half and gave them each to Billy and me. Then, without asking for help, she went forward and started to raise the anchor.

  “Let me do that!” Billy called, heading toward the bow.

  She gave him a long, steady look, and even from the cockpit I could see the steel in her eyes. I should have warned him: He’d made the cardinal error.

  “I know you mean well,” she said. “But I can handle the anchor, Billy. I’m not the biggest fan of chivalry.”

  He walked back toward me, and I could see his freckles standing out against his skin, bright red, as if he’d been slapped.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “She was like that with my dad, too.”

  She started the engine, and we continued north. I knew Billy’s feelings were hurt, but he was incredibly great about it. He just shook it off, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to the rail.

  “We have company,” Billy said, looking overboard. I saw the great shadowy shape of a humpback—its black back and those unmistakable white flippers that had always reminded me of wings—following us. A smaller whale seemed nearly attached to her side.