Friday's Harbor (14 page)

They agreed to meet in Anacortes the next day at noon for the return drive to Bladenham, and Libertine walked onto the interisland ferry to Orcas Island with a sense of vast relief. Once home, she petted her walls and gave the refrigerator a light kiss on its old white door. In all the world, this was the one place where she was perfectly herself. She had just put on the teakettle—hoping green tea might flush out any lingering toxic remnants of Ivy’s whiskey—when her old wall phone rang. Libertine picked it up before she had time to think better, and heard the unwelcome voice of animal activist Trina Beemer.

“Oh, good! I’ve been trying to reach you—you’ve become quite the hero around here. How did you manage to infiltrate that place?”

“Pardon me?” Libertine said disingenuously. Trina would have to work for whatever she was after.

“The
zoo
! The Biedelbaum or whatever. They had that poor, sweet elephant—and now this. We’ve always had them on our radar, of course, what with their building that new porpoise pool, but a killer whale! It’s so much worse. I can’t tell you how happy we are that one of us is on the inside!”

“What do you mean,
worse
?” Libertine said, ignoring the
one of us
reference and banging around in her cupboards for some honey for her tea.

“Well, I mean, at least the elephant was a terrestrial animal. Keeping a killer whale in captivity, never mind alone, is no different than putting any one of us in lifetime solitary confinement.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s a difference,” Libertine said, turning off the burner and pouring scalding water into her mug.

She could feel the woman hesitate. Then Trina said, in her oddly atonal delivery, “We’re hoping you’d be able to work for us from the inside. You
are
still on our side, right?”

“I’m not really on anyone’s side,” Libertine said. “Well, I’m on Friday’s side.”

“You know, a lot of people are saying the whole rehab story is just a cover-up for the fact that they’re bringing in a show animal. Is that true?”

“No,” said Libertine.

“No?”

Libertine sighed. “Look, he was dying, pure and simple. Go back and watch the TV footage.”

“He was wild-caught, you know.”

“He’s nineteen years old. That was a long, long time ago.” She had no intention of fueling Trina’s fire.

“Not that long ago,” Trina said. “Killer whales have excellent memories. And they know when they’re incarcerated.”

“You know, it’s funny,” Libertine said. “He’s never once indicated that, at least not to me. Not once.
Sick,
yes. A prisoner, no.”

“That just means he’s given up hope. They do, you know.”

“Really,” said Libertine neutrally, taking her tea into her little living room and settling into a perfectly lovely chintz chair she’d found once by the side of the road.

“Really,” said Trina grimly. “I’m surprised you don’t know that, given that they talk to you and everything.”

“It’s not exactly talking,” Libertine began, and then decided,
Oh, to hell with it
.

“You know, we’d love to have you as a speaker at our January meeting,” said Trina, evidently deciding to try another tack. “Would you be able to do that?”

“No,” said Libertine. “Probably not.”

“Really?”

“Really. But listen, if you’re willing to keep an open mind and want to go down there sometime and see what we’re doing, I can probably arrange it.” And then, just like that, she hung up and had the most seditious thought:
Wait until I tell Gabriel!

O
N THE DRIVE
down to Bladenham, Libertine told Ivy about the call from Trina.

“Hah!” Ivy crowed. “I knew it would work.”

“What would work?”

“Inviting you to be part of the project.” When Libertine turned in her seat to face her, Ivy patted her hand. “It’s nothing Machiavellian. I just thought if you could see for yourself what was involved in caring for our boy, you might feel less black-and-white about his being in captivity. So to speak.”

“So it was your idea to make me a volunteer?” Libertine asked, startled. The thought had never occurred to her before. She’d always assumed it was Truman’s, but Ivy must have planted it.

“It was. Of course, Truman and Gabriel had to agree.”

Libertine looked out her window at the flooded pasturelands while she collected herself. As a longtime loner, she wasn’t used to having other people direct her life, and though in this case she knew she should be grateful—
was
grateful—there was still something high-handed about Ivy’s pulling the strings. “I don’t know how I should feel about that,” she finally said.

Ivy glanced over at her. “You shouldn’t feel any way about it. We invited you and you accepted and now you know how much work and thought is involved in his rehabilitation. And if you happen to spread that word, it wouldn’t do any harm, either.”

“And what if I hadn’t ended up feeling that way?”

Ivy just smiled complacently. “I had faith.”

“This is making me really uncomfortable,” Libertine said, looking hard out of the passenger-side window.

Ivy glanced over, surprised. “Really?”

“I feel manipulated.”

“You shouldn’t. If anything, it was a vote of confidence in you. You know, your profession doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.” Libertine’s jaws clenched, but Ivy, apparently oblivious, went on. “Anyway, I wanted to give you a chance to have firsthand access to the whale. To help him, if he needed you.”

“And to help you, if he didn’t.”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” said Libertine doubtfully, “I guess I can’t fault your logic.”

“Of course not,” said Ivy.

But Libertine had moved on. “And Gabriel—what does he think of me now?”

“As far as I know, he’s accepted you as a member of the team.”

Is that all?
Libertine thought but didn’t say. She could feel Ivy looking over at her, trying to get a read on her state of mind.

“No, more than that,” Ivy amended. “I know he’s glad you’re there. You’re providing a valuable extra pair of hands, and you don’t get in the way.”

“He told you that?”

“He did.”

At least it was better than
Who?

T
HEY REACHED
B
LADENHAM
in a driving rain. After waving good-bye to Ivy, Libertine pulled up her hood and reached into her raincoat pocket for the keys she was sure she’d put there. No keys. She scrabbled in her purse, with the same result. Getting wetter by the second, she was relieved to see lights on in Johnson Johnson’s house. He’d have an extra key. She dodged the puddles and knocked at the kitchen door. When there was no answer she gently pushed the door open and called out.

Johnson Johnson appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. “Have you ever walked on the ceiling?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Walked on the ceiling.”

“Metaphorically, you mean?” She tried and failed to dampen a rising sense of impatience.

Johnson Johnson offered her the little square mirror he’d been holding and she declined.

“I’m sorry—I don’t know what—”

He demonstrated, holding the mirror against the bridge of his nose and looking down into it. “You have to be real careful not to step on the lights or kick them. Sometimes I trip over the door jambs, so you have to watch out for them, too.”

Helplessly Libertine watched him weave and giant-step his way around the kitchen and wondered if there was someone she should call.

“Here,” he said, holding out the mirror to her. “Now you.”

“I don’t really think—”

He held the little mirror to her face helpfully. She flinched, but he said, “Now look down.”

She looked down—and instantly understood. Reflected back to her was the kitchen ceiling, giving the illusion that this, not the floor, was where her feet were firmly planted. “Now walk,” Johnson Johnson said excitedly. “Go ’head.”

Sure enough, Libertine found herself circling the light fixture, which appeared to be growing vertically at her feet, its chain magically transformed into a stem, the glass shade a mushroom top. She laughed out loud. When she lowered the mirror after completing a thorough circuit of the kitchen, Johnson Johnson was beaming, his hands clasped to his chest in delight. “See?” he said, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “
See?
”

“I really was walking on the ceiling,” she marveled, handing the mirror back. “I felt like I could sit right on the light and it would hold me.”

“I like to jump from the kitchen into the living room and back. You have to jump pretty high, though, because it’s a long way from the ceiling to the archway. Sometimes I don’t even make it.”

Libertine high-stepped over the doorway and almost immediately caught sight of the upside-down living room wall beyond. Lowering the mirror, she saw that the entire wall was covered by a fun-house array of carpeted shelves and ramps and tubes and hammocks. Several holes in the ceiling led to upstairs rooms. In the very center, Kitty was peacefully snoring in a suspended faux-fur hammock. Libertine stood motionless in the doorway, transfixed. “Oh!” she cried. “Neva described this to me, but I had no idea it was so wonderful!”

“The hammock is heated, so Kitty can sleep there in the winter,” Johnson Johnson said. “He has arthritis.”

“He’s told me,” Libertine said. “I guess on an especially damp day even the small bones in his tail hurt. So I can imagine how much he appreciates this.”

“I
know,
” said Johnson Johnson.

Libertine checked her watch and saw that it was nearly six o’clock. “Hey, shouldn’t you be at the Oat Maiden?”

“Truman says I have to take at least one evening off every week.”

“Well, that’s smart. So you don’t burn out.”

Johnson Johnson nodded soberly.

“Just out of curiosity, what do you do on your days off?” Libertine asked.

“I make treats for the bears.”

“Bears?”

“At the zoo.”

“What kind of treats?”

“They really like fruit bars.”

“They do?”

“With apricots. And raisins.”

“Sounds like a busman’s holiday.” She suddenly became aware of her rain-damp jeans and the leaking seams of her jacket, and set down on the counter the small mirror she still held in her hand. “I almost forgot why I came over,” she said. “I’ve lost my key.”

He looked grave. “But then you can’t get in.”

“Exactly. If you can unlock the door, I’ll find my key eventually, or I can have a copy made tomorrow if I don’t.”

“Course.”

So she followed him into the rain, pulling up her hood and concentrating on his Doc Martin–booted feet splashing ahead of her down the little path to her apartment.

“I’m so glad you were home,” she said when he’d unlocked the door.

“Me, too,” he said, and she wondered whether he meant he was glad to have been home because he so seldom was, or that he was glad he’d been there to help her—nuance was not his strong suit. In any event she watched him until he’d reached his back door and ducked into the warmth and light without looking back. For the merest fraction of a second, she felt his presence in her head, the first human she’d ever perceived, as sweet and light as a whisper.

T
HE NEXT
F
RIDAY,
on one of Libertine’s days off, the phone woke her from a sound sleep. Neva was on the other end.

“Hey, we just stopped at the Oat Maiden on the way to work to pick up a muffin and it wasn’t open. No sign, no explanation, nothing. We called Delilah and she said she’d waited for half an hour and then she went back home. She tried calling Johnson Johnson, and then she tried calling you, but no one answered.”

When she wasn’t working late Libertine had fallen into the habit of having a mug of milk and a chocolate chip cookie at the Oat Maiden just before closing. Once the door was locked, she helped Johnson Johnson and sometimes Delilah clean up the kitchen and restock condiments, top off the soda dispenser, and wipe down and set the tables for the following morning.

“Maybe he’s sick. But I saw him yesterday and he was fine,” Libertine said.

“He worked a few months ago with a temperature of a hundred and four,” Neva said. “So he’s not sick. Can you check on him?”

That woke her up. She pulled on jeans and a Biedelman Zoo sweatshirt and ducked out into the rainy morning. When Johnson Johnson failed to answer her knock she tried the kitchen door, pushing it open when he didn’t answer; and saw him sitting on the kitchen floor cradling a dying cat in his arms, his cheeks streaming with tears.

“Oh, no—oh, honey, not Kitty.” Libertine squatted down beside him, her knees going off like gunshots.

Johnson Johnson looked at her, brokenhearted. “He always comes to eat. He likes tuna, which is what we have on Friday mornings, but he didn’t come. I found him in his favorite basket, the one in the bathroom where all the clean towels are.”

“And he was like this?” Libertine sat on the floor. “May I see?”

Johnson Johnson nodded miserably. Libertine gently lifted the old tomcat in her arms, smoothed his fur, listened to him breathe; and then, returning him to Johnson Johnson’s arms, she sat down on the floor. “He’s in no pain,” she said softly. “And he isn’t frightened.”

They sat together for five, then ten more minutes before the old cat drew a few deep breaths, pressed a little more heavily into Johnson Johnson’s arms, and was gone. Johnson Johnson gave an involuntary cry.

“I’m so sorry,” Libertine said. “He was a wonderful cat and you gave him the best home in the world. He knew how much you loved him, and that you were with him at the end.” She plucked a paper towel off the roll and gently blotted his face.

“Can you hear him?” he whispered.

“No.”

“I’m going to miss him so much,” Johnson Johnson said.

“I know you will,” Libertine said.

“Do Chocolate and Chip know?”

“I’m sure they do. Animals can sense when death is near.” Libertine was quiet for a long beat, and then said, “Neva and Truman stopped by the Oat Maiden a little while ago. They’re worried about you. I want to call so they know you’re all right.”