Friday's Harbor (25 page)

Truman looked in. Neva thought he looked grim. “So did she say anything?” she asked. “Trina Beemer?”

“Not really,” said Truman. “She kept crying and babbling about how she’d ruined the whale’s one real chance to escape this earthly hell. Those were her exact words—‘escape this earthly hell.’ ”

“Some ninja warrior, huh?” said Neva.

T
HAT EVENING THEY
all gathered for dinner at the Oat Maiden: Neva, Truman, Gabriel, Libertine, Ivy—everyone but Sam, who volunteered to take the evening watch at Friday’s pool. They’d agreed that someone should be with him around the clock until the medical crisis had passed: as soon as he had deposited Libertine on the pool deck, Friday had gone back to his corner, winded and exhausted. A security guard would also be stationed at the pool all night, every night, from now on.

“So how much time do you think she’ll get?” Ivy asked Truman. She was disappointed that she hadn’t been on the pool top to see Trina Beemer apprehended.

“You’d have to ask my father. It should be a watertight case, though.” He smiled wanly. “So to speak. We have eyewitnesses, plus Martin’s photos, plus my hidden video camera. I doubt it’ll even go to trial. I think she’ll plea-bargain.”

“Maybe she’ll rat out the rest of the FAS people,” Neva said.

“Doubtful,” said Gabriel.

“Why?”

“They don’t do that. They martyr themselves. It’s part of the creed.”

Libertine brought a tray of drinks to the table and joined them. Johnson Johnson followed with two pizzas.

“What creed?” Ivy asked.

“Better dead than captive,” Libertine, Neva, Gabriel, and Truman all said as one.

While Neva handed around pizza slices, Ivy considered Truman for a long beat.

“What?” said Truman.

“What if there was a third alternative?” Ivy asked. “Besides dead and captive, I mean. What if we really do release him?”

That got everyone’s attention. “Oh, boy,” Gabriel said.

“Wait, wait, let me talk,” Ivy said. “Clearly captivity’s been no great shakes. He’s been hit, bullied, parboiled, starved, and now poisoned, and he’s hung on through it all. Obviously here it’s better, but what if there’s an even better choice? He was wild once.”

“As a calf,” Neva pointed out. “He was collected right out of the crib, so to speak.”

“Why do you all say ‘collected’?” Ivy said irritably. “He was
captured
. Call a spade a spade. He was separated from everything he knew—and yes, including his mother. He spent a year in a small holding pool in Norway, getting some basic training—open your mouth, swim, eat this dead fish.” She turned to Gabriel. “All of which is stuff that would help you, right?”

“You’re starting to sound like one of the animal activists,” said Neva, staring at her. “And not in a good way.”

“Look, I’m just reviewing the facts,” said Ivy. “Have I gotten anything wrong yet? No.” She turned to Gabriel and said, “How old was he when he was caught?”

“One. Give or take a few months.”

“Do you know that?” Neva asked in surprise.

Gabriel nodded.

Ivy said to Neva, “Ask him how he knows. Go on—ask him.” When Gabriel sent her a look she said, “Oh, come on—let’s not be coy.”

Neva said, “What are you talking about?”

“Gabriel was the one who ‘collected’ our little boy in the first place,” Ivy said.

“Who?” Neva said.

“
Friday,
” Ivy said impatiently. “Gabriel was the one who caught him.”

Gabriel stared at her.

“One of the board members at the Whale Museum put it all together last week.” She turned to address the rest of the table. “They went out with a fishing boat with a bunch of nets and they separated him from his pod and brought him back to a tank in a little town on a fjord in Norway and started training him up, so he’d know a few things by the time he was bought and taken to whatever zoo or theme park was willing to pay the most. That’s how Gabriel knows he’s a North Atlantic whale. That’s why he went to see him every few years. And that’s why Friday recognized that signal Neva accidentally gave him. Gabriel was the one who taught it to him in the first place.”

Stunned, they turned to Gabriel as one.

“Is that true?” Libertine finally asked.

“Yep,” he said, unfazed, reaching for another piece of pizza. He looked up, saw everyone looking at him, and stopped with the pizza halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“But you’ve never said a word,” Libertine said. “Why haven’t you ever told us?”

“Would it have made any difference if I had?” he asked, taking a big bite. “No, it wouldn’t. And that sort of information in the wrong hands can be dangerous.”

“Oh, come on,” Ivy said. “That’s a little hole-and-corner, don’t you think?”

“Is it? I traveled under assumed names with fake passports for years because there’d been death threats made against me. Threat
s
, plural.”

“But didn’t it just rip you up to take him like that?” Libertine asked incredulously.

“No.”

“
Really?
” she said. “I can’t believe that.”

Gabriel sighed, lowered his pizza slice, and looked at them all. “Look, for one thing you’re being anthropomorphic—this is an animal, not a child. Second, I’m not a heartless bastard and I didn’t do it for financial gain. It all comes down to conservation. There’s a huge need for zoos and parks to educate people. You don’t save animals and habitats you’ve never seen before and know nothing about. If there’d never been Shamu, people wouldn’t give a damn about killer whales. Now they do.”

“Blah blah blah,” Ivy broke in. “I’m sorry, but all of that is just so much mealymouthed hokum. Let me ask you a question. What if we let him go back there, to where you caught him?”

Truman stared at her. “What?”

Gabriel put his head in his hands.

“What if we let him go?” Ivy said. “I’m serious. Tell me why we can’t.”

“I’m not saying we can’t. I’m saying we shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“You may not believe in captivity,” Gabriel said, “but he’s spent nearly his whole life being cared for by humans. Yes, the conditions were miserable, and yes, he’s been a victim. But there’s captivity and then there’s
captivity
. Here, he’s healthy—well, you know what I mean, except for the poisoning thing—and challenged. He has great food, people to watch, games to play, and people to swim with. He’s safe. Yes, we failed him by allowing him to fall into the wrong hands, but that’s over now.”

Ivy shook her head.

“Look,” Gabriel said. “You can’t compensate for past harm by turning him loose, even if he were allowed to be, which, by the way, would never happen—partly because if it ever came down to it, I’d do everything in my power to prevent it. He doesn’t have even a slim chance of surviving on his own. Do you know how long ago he last caught and ate a live fish? Eighteen years.”

Libertine said to Ivy, “Is it his being alone that bothers you?”

Ivy regarded her. “Well, it does give being captive an extra layer of awful. It would be like landing on another planet and having no way to ever go home or even see another member of your species again. It gives me goose bumps. I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, and now I can’t stop.”

“You have to,” said Gabriel. “You’re reacting purely on emotions, and that’s exactly when bad decisions get made.”

Julio Iglesias, who had been curled up in Libertine’s lap, suddenly sat up, chucking her under the chin with his hard little skull. “Ow,” she said. He turned his face up and licked her chin.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Ivy snapped at Libertine. “You might as well just take him—he clearly prefers you. He seems to prefer all of you. And to think of everything I’ve done for him over the years.” Then, turning back to Gabriel, she said, “Is it possible to teach survival skills to an animal that’s been in captivity as long as he has?”

Before Gabriel could answer, Johnson Johnson approached the table with a platter of cookies.

“Yum!” Truman said, trying to lighten the mood. “Sugar, the brain food of champions.”

But Gabriel ignored him. “It was actually tried at a facility on the Oregon coast in the late nineties, with debatable success. That killer whale was also caught in the North Atlantic as a calf, spent twenty-three years in captivity, and then got released off Iceland.”

“And?” said Ivy.

“I know this story,” Neva interjected. “He swam across the ocean to a fjord in Norway—which is where he might actually have been from—and died of pneumonia. The whole project was underwritten by a billionaire, nearly ruined the institution that took him in, and in the end, at least in my opinion, it was pure folly. Everyone hoped he’d hook up with a pod, but he never did. He went where the people were. The fjord he chose had a little town on it, and people came down all the time to see him. You could argue that that was why he stayed there.”

“There was a little more to it than that,” said Gabriel.

“Politically and diplomatically there was a lot more to it,” agreed Neva, “but the outcome was still death.”

Gabriel conceded the point, but said, “Look, people, snap out of it. We’ve been through something heinous, but Friday’s going to be fine. We’ll be much more vigilant, and nothing like this will ever happen again. We’ll do everything we can to make sure his life is the best we can possibly give him. Is that really so bad?”

“No,” said Ivy. “It’s just not what I’d have chosen for him.”

“Actually, you did choose it for him,” Truman pointed out.

“Well, then I wouldn’t choose it now,” Ivy conceded.

Gabriel leaned way over the table and spoke so quietly that some of them had to lean in, too, to hear. “Look. You want him to have all the skills of a wild whale, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t, in years and years and years. No matter what you might want for him, you can’t change that. He’s smart, funny, resilient, adaptable, and he’s managed to stay alive and sane through more years than anyone would have given him credit for. Let him be what he is, not what you or anyone else out there thinks he should be.”

“Then I propose a toast,” Truman said firmly. “To Friday. May only good things be in his future, and may that future be long and happy.”

“To Friday,” they echoed.

But on the drive back to Matthew and Lavinia’s house, Ivy found herself thinking something over and over: Would it have been so bad if he’d died rather than face more years of isolation? Not a horrible and protracted death, of course, but something swift and painless?

Would it really have been so bad?

Chapter 14

I
T TOOK
F
RIDAY
more than two weeks to fully recover, and the whale team was never quite the same. Ivy spent more and more time back in Friday Harbor, and talked Libertine into taking Julio Iglesias, at least on a trial basis. Her exact words were, “He may be an asshole, but he deserves to be a happy asshole.”

In turn, Libertine got Truman’s permission to bring him to the pool every day as, of all things, a therapy dog. Gabriel jury-rigged a set of steps so the dog could climb into the deep-silled office window looking into the pool and snooze on his very own fleece, where Friday could watch him. Whenever someone went upstairs to work with the whale, Julio Iglesias liked to noodle around the concrete deck in a little orange flotation vest, peeing on his regular stations—the two big coolers, the railing uprights, the ozone tower—and any pile of new gear he might find up there.

Libertine had watched the dog and Friday play the same game of Follow Me that the whale had first developed with six-year-old Nicolle on Christmas Day. But one day she called Gabriel, Truman, and Neva on the radio and told them breathlessly to drop whatever they were doing and come to the pool top immediately—and bring the video camera. Gabriel and Neva were just downstairs and raced up with snorkels and swim fins as well as the camera; impressively, Truman arrived from his office in less than five minutes.

There, riding on one of Friday’s pectoral flippers, was Julio Iglesias.

“I’ll be damned!” hooted Gabriel. “Julio, you
dog,
you!”

Julio Iglesias looked back with his enigmatic Garbo eyes.

Libertine appointed herself videographer, saying, “Ivy would never believe me.” On the camera screen she saw Julio Iglesias sit down on the smooth, shiny, six-foot-long black flipper, neatly tucking his tail over the tops of his front paws. Even when Friday set sail across the pool, the dog seemed entirely untroubled. Libertine filmed for nine full minutes before Friday swam to the side and the dog daintily disembarked. With Truman’s permission, Libertine uploaded the video to YouTube, giving it the title
Friendship, Big and Small.
By the next morning it had gone viral, receiving 1,442,337 hits, and that day the zoo saw more visitors than any other single day in its history.

Thinking that Friday might like to watch more animals, Truman requested from Netflix a year’s worth of
Flipper
episodes, but, disappointingly, neither Julio Iglesias nor the whale turned out to be interested.

“He probably doesn’t like it because it’s fake,” said Johnson Johnson, who, once the Oat Maiden was closed for the night, had come back to the pool with Libertine.

“What do you mean?” Gabriel said.

“Well, it’s a
movie,
” said Johnson Johnson.

Gabriel looked at Libertine for elaboration, as happened more and more often.

“The characters aren’t real,” Libertine explained. “So the story isn’t real. Julio Iglesias is real.”

“He certainly is,” said Gabriel. The dog was sound asleep on the windowsill, snoring.

A
S
L
IBERTINE AND
Johnson Johnson drove home, she was newly aware of a tiny but persistent presence that had been in her head intermittently since morning. Something was in trouble. “I need to make a detour,” she told Johnson Johnson. “I keep sensing something. Do you?”

“No.”

She tracked the presence all the way to their block, and then coasted along slowly. Three houses down from Johnson Johnson’s, she pulled over to the curb and stopped. “It’s right here somewhere. Help me look.” She fished a flashlight out of her glove compartment.

Together they peered into bushes and up trees. “It’s right
here,
” Libertine said in frustration, and then Johnson Johnson knelt down and, with infinite care, parted the lower branches of a dripping rhododendron.

“What is it?”

“Look,” breathed Johnson Johnson. “Oh,
look
!” He reached for a kitten that Libertine estimated was no more than four weeks old. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

It was not beautiful. It was soaking wet and filthy and one eye was stuck shut. Johnson Johnson placed it very carefully in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “Do you think we can take it home?”

“I’m sure we can,” said Libertine. “It’s been in distress all day, and clearly no one’s claimed it. Though how it got stuck in a bush I can’t imagine.”

“Let’s call it Winken,” said Johnson Johnson, pulling up his shirttails and packing them around his pocket to further warm the kitten.

Libertine smiled. “That’s a very good name.”

“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson. “That way, when we get another one we can call it Blinken. Well, or Nod.”

As soon as they got home, he carried the kitten into the kitchen like a precious gem while Libertine rounded up several clean dish towels. Together they unwrapped her—the kitten turned out to be a girl—and set her on a dish towel on the counter. She was even younger than they’d guessed in the dark, no more than three weeks and quite possibly less. They buffed her dry and Johnson Johnson warmed some milk while Libertine went out to her apartment and found an eyedropper.

“Sit,” she said, pouring the warm milk into a mug and bringing Johnson Johnson and the kitten into the living room, where Chocolate and Chip were out cold on a couple of wall shelves. Once he’d sat down, Libertine pulled up a little milk in the eyedropper, put the thinnest dish towel over the end, and let the milk soak it before she put the eyedropper near the kitten’s mouth. The kitten latched on immediately, pulling the milk down until it was gone.

“She’s hungry. I bet she was in that bush all day,” Johnson Johnson said, and his voice caught. “Someone should get in trouble for doing that.”

“I agree,” said Libertine. “But the good thing is, she’s very strong. She was in my mind for hours and hours before we found her. That means if we take good care of her, she’ll be just fine.”

Johnson Johnson nodded soberly: Libertine had learned that he liked things to be just fine. Impulsively, she kissed him on the top of his head and went back to the kitchen to rewarm the milk.

B
EING BACK IN
Friday Harbor had been even harder than Ivy had expected it to be. She felt cut off, cranky, and unmoored, and she missed Julio Iglesias, incredible as that seemed. She also missed Friday; even more than that, she missed Gabriel. But at the same time, something in her had uncoupled during that last night they’d all been together at the Oat Maiden. It came down to this: she’d given Gabriel godlike abilities to heal the sick and bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between two species; but he’d turned out to be a mercenary, not a savior. She simply could not reconcile his gift for making animals well with his equal and opposite willingness to capture their babies, selling them to the highest bidder without so much as a flicker of conscience.

So she busied herself with giving the house a thorough cleaning, washing the screens that she installed in the windows every spring. She donated several thousand dollars to the Whale Museum, which reinstated her as an educational docent, who would talk to giddy tourists and groups of middle school students about the cetaceans living in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound. She had over to dinner the young couple who’d recently moved into the house two doors down from hers; she played bridge. It was all shallow busywork, of course, but gradually she regained her equilibrium, going so far as to begin planning a trip to Cairo.

But in late April she got a call from Libertine, who said, “I miss you. I don’t understand why you feel like you have to be in exile.”

“I’m not in exile,” said Ivy. “Look, that was never my life.”

“We miss you—all of us do. It’s hard to know what to tell Julio Iglesias. He doesn’t understand.”

Ivy snorted. “Of all the people who don’t miss me, Julio Iglesias would top the list.”

“You don’t understand love,” said Libertine. “You don’t understand it at all. It’s staring you right in the face and you can’t see it.”

“Oh, so Julio Iglesias loves me now?”

“I wasn’t talking about Julio Iglesias.”

“No?” said Ivy.

“No.”

“You?”

“Yes, me,” said Libertine. “You’re funny and you’re brave and you’re not afraid to make people angry when you defend an opinion. I love that about you.”

“You know you just defined the word
blabbermouth,
right?”

Sounding exasperated, Libertine said, “And you say
I
can’t take a compliment.”

Ivy felt a warm wave sweeping up from her toes to her noggin-top. She said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, I do. Say you’ll come back and stay sometimes.”

“You all have jobs,” Ivy protested. “You have a place to go, and work to do. I just write checks. I can do that from anywhere.”

“Not as well as from here.”

“Liar,” said Ivy.

“Curmudgeon,” replied Libertine. “Look, maybe this isn’t the time to say it, but I have a plan.”

“Here we go,” said Ivy.

“I know you don’t like staying with your brother and sister-in-law, so when you come down you can have my apartment.”

“And where will you go?”

“I’ll just stay at the house.”

“With Johnson Johnson?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding!” Ivy said, beginning to grin. “And you’ve been keeping this to yourself? I
have
stayed away too long.”

“Stop,” said Libertine. “He’s a good man who can use a little company from time to time.”

“And that company would be you?”

“Not usually, no—just every now and then.”

“Well, he’s a lucky man.”

“Anyway, come down. Please?” A long beat went by. “You aren’t going to, are you.”

“Nope,” said Ivy.

“Did something happen? I haven’t done something, have I? Sometimes I do and I don’t even know.”

“Honey, you’re perfect in every way. I just need to live my own life for a little while. I love being in the thick of that group, but it’s not real. This is real—up here.”

“We seem pretty real to me,” Libertine said.

“You know what I mean.”

O
N
J
UNE 24,
the zoo celebrated the first anniversary of Friday’s arrival at the zoo. In celebration, Truman ordered half a dozen enormous sheet cakes with Friday’s image sculpted in the frosting, and put the cakes in the zoo lobby for the visitors to share. Attendance continued to climb. One month earlier, Truman had released Ivy from any financial obligation to subsidize Friday, since the extra revenue he had brought in was more than enough to maintain him.

“So are you coming down for the black-and-white gala, at least?” Truman asked Ivy, who’d declined to be present for a series of anniversary-related educational activities at the zoo. The gala was a fund-raiser that would benefit the board-adopted Greater Good Fund. After a long beat he said, “You’re not coming, are you?”

“No,” said Ivy, “but I was thinking about something else. How about the next weekend you all come up here and stay overnight? We’ll have our own anniversary celebration! I’ve already talked to Sam about whether he and Corinna and Reginald will come, but he said Corinna doesn’t travel. Coming up here isn’t exactly my idea of traveling, but if they prefer to stay home anyway, I asked Sam if he’d mind feeding Friday so everyone else can come. He said he’d be happy to do it.”

So at the agreed-upon time, Ivy met the ferry and picked up Gabriel, Truman, Neva, Winslow, Libertine, Johnson Johnson, and Julio Iglesias. It was a brilliantly sunny day and from Ivy’s living room Haro Strait looked like hammered silver, lively and bright. A pod of killer whales had been working the water just off the island all morning. Ivy gave Winslow her grandfather’s binoculars and pointed them out.

“Whoa!” Winslow said. “I wonder what Friday would say, if he could see them?”

“I can’t imagine,” said Ivy. “Sometimes seeing them out there makes me sad for him.”

“Don’t be,” said Gabriel, who must have overheard her. “He wasn’t even from here, and if you ever went through a North Atlantic storm, you’d think again.”

“Yeah, but don’t they stay underwater?” said Winslow.

“Sure, most of the time. But they need to breathe. In a force-five storm, the wind picks up water and flings it.”

“Cool,” said Winslow.

“Not if you’re out in it. Not if you’re on a boat,” said Gabriel.

“Really?” Winslow said enthusiastically. “Do you get seasick?”

“No, but everybody else I know does.”

“I bet I would,” said Winslow.

“I bet you would, too,” said Truman, taking up the binoculars Winslow had set down and looking out over the water.

“I threw up on the up-and-over ride at the state fair last year,” Winslow admitted ruefully.

“Is it just me, or is talking about throwing up before a wonderful meal a bad idea?” asked Neva. “Come on, let’s see if Ivy needs any help.”

So Winslow set the table and everyone else ferried heaping bowls of fresh steamer clams, crabs, fish stew, salads, rolls, and a whole, glorious grilled salmon. Julio Iglesias, who’d been closely watching the parade of delicacies from the living room, caught Ivy’s eye, and unleashed a mighty pee on the carpet.

“Oh, you little
bastard
!” she cried, going to the kitchen to get a wad of paper towels. Julio Iglesias hooded his eyes and trotted over to Libertine, hopping into her lap as soon as she sat down at the table.

“He just trying to get your attention,” said Libertine.

“Oh, he’s got it, all right,” said Ivy grimly, brandishing a wooden mixing spoon at him. “He’ll have it all the way to the laundry room.” But she failed to make good on her threat, instead fixing him a plate with bits of fish, wheat roll, pasta salad, and freshly steamed asparagus with hollandaise sauce, which caused the dog to leave Libertine immediately for the spot in the kitchen formerly reserved for his supper dish. When Ivy came back alone, she said, “His bed’s still in there, too. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll eat himself into a stupor and take a nap.”

Once all the dishes had been passed and plates were heaping, Ivy said, “So catch me up! What’s the news? And speaking of that, how’s dear Martin?”