Friday's Harbor (4 page)

“Nevertheless.”

“Oh, all right.”

In fifteen minutes more, Matthew directed Ivy to sign there, there, there, there, and there, and the ship of Ivy’s impulsivity set sail.

Chapter 2

Á
NDALE!
 SHOUTED A
beautiful young Colombian trainer as Viernes labored around his small pool one last time. Twenty thousand people had come to the park and the surrounding streets to say good-bye to their national treasure. The trainer made the sweeping gesture she had used to cue him in a thousand shows. “
Ándale, Viernes!
” Sleek and showy in a short-sleeved black and purple wet suit, her long hair flying behind her, she clapped extravagantly as a TV crew edged closer.

After the show Gabriel and Truman stood side by side watching Viernes hang inert in the water. Truman asked the Colombian trainer if, for Viernes, this torpor was normal. The trainer laughed musically and dismissed the question with a coquettish roll of her eyes. “Of course,” she said. “That is because he is lazy.”

Truman could feel Gabriel stiffen, but he said nothing as the trainer left the pool. Once she was gone Truman asked him, “Is she right? Is he lazy?”

“He’s in an advanced state of starvation.”

“Don’t they realize?”

“No. In all fairness, they’ve never worked with a healthy killer whale, so they don’t have anything to compare him with.”

Truman nodded. He’d quickly come to rely on not only Gabriel’s wealth of knowledge, but also the pragmatic remove he was able to maintain. Especially when compared with what Truman was coming to understand as his and Ivy’s rampant anthropomorphizing, Gabriel’s was a cool, dispassionate eye.

The next morning came early. Truman reported to Viernes’s pool at three o’clock to find Gabriel and the beautiful young trainer already busy smearing the whale’s back and dorsal fin with zinc oxide to protect them from drying out during the trip to Bladenham. Then they guided him into a custom-made canvas sling with cutouts that allowed his pectoral flippers to poke through. A construction crane lifted the whole apparatus out of the pool and lowered it into a huge fiberglass box until he was three-quarters submerged in icy freshwater. Once the box was secured on the flatbed, the truck heaved into motion, airport-bound.

Standing beside the box on the flatbed, Truman was stunned to find the streets packed with throngs of noisy well-wishers who’d come to say good-bye to their beloved whale. They cheered and wept along the entire six-mile route; what would ordinarily have been a ten-minute drive took an hour and a half.

For the next twelve hours Truman silently chanted what was fast becoming his mantra:
please don’t let him die.

O
N
O
RCAS
I
SLAND,
one ferry stop away from Ivy Levy’s San Juan Island home, animal communicator Libertine Adagio was trying to sort out a new animal presence in her head. Animals never understood the concept of
here
or
me;
they simply
were;
so pinning down a location or even identifying the species always took time—sometimes a lot of time. Right now she sensed that the newcomer was male, captive, and ill, but that was all.

She padded around her kitchen in an old Friends of Animals of the Sea T-shirt, a pair of sweat socks flapping off the ends of her feet like clown shoes. At forty-seven she was small, frail, and mousy-headed. She loved her tiny cabin, covered as it was with rose trellises, garden art, and ferns, its seven-hundred square feet cozy and warm, furnished and decorated over the years with bright colors, gay rugs, and art in every medium. From her front window she was able to watch the ferries come and go, carrying commuters, food, dry goods, construction materials, walk-on visitors, and produce distributors. She knew most of the small island’s other year-round residents, but the nature of her work and unpredictable travel schedule meant that she kept mostly to herself. This little house was the one place where she never minded her isolation.

She had only arrived home the night before from two weeks in Las Vegas. Initially she’d gone there to visit an elderly aunt, but she’d stayed on behalf of a small troupe of white tigers in an animal show that her aunt had insisted, with the single-mindedness of early-stage dementia, that Libertine take her to see. Despite a dislike of captive animal exploitation that bordered on horror, Libertine had given in, and the first tiger on stage had conveyed to her that the troupe wasn’t being well cared for. With a sinking heart Libertine had taken her aunt home, tucked her into bed with a shot of neat whiskey, and gone back to the casino in time to attend the last show of the evening. The tigers had been belligerent and disorganized until Libertine had finally conveyed that if they couldn’t straighten up and focus, she was going home. They had fallen into line, of course (in her experience tigers were twitchy, emotional creatures with surprisingly low self-esteem and a tendency to bully and then fold under pressure), but the casino’s management hadn’t been at all interested in what they—that is, she—had had to say. In the end a public protest was the only option. Knowing she was an abysmal protester—like the tigers, she tended to fold under pressure—she’d tried to convince a local, terrestrial animal offshoot of animal rights group Friends of Animals of the Sea to commit people and resources, but the few people who’d responded had milled around in a lackluster way for a week or so and then drifted off. After the eighth day Libertine had been alone on the sidewalk, brandishing a different sign each morning—
STOP THE DOLPHIN EXPLOITATION NOW!
and
IT’S NOT ENTERTAINMENT, IT’S ENSLAVEMENT!
and the satisfyingly cryptic
IT’S JUST WRONG!
Her face burning with every step, she’d made herself stay in Las Vegas for the entire endless week as penance, pilloried for her failure to incite zeal.

While her lack of finesse with people was well-established, her understanding of animals was effortless and keen. She’d never intended to become an animal communicator but she’d heard animals in her head for almost as long as she could remember—particularly captive animals, and especially captive marine mammals. Her earliest marine mammal memory was during a visit to a dank little aquarium in Seaside, Oregon. An old, blind harbor seal had sought her out to communicate that some of the animals were on the brink of death because of substandard living conditions, and she asked if she could do something about it. She was only six; there was, of course, nothing she could do. But the old cow, who called herself Auntie, had stayed with her off and on until her death six years later. It had been Auntie who had taught Libertine to quiet her own thoughts so she could hear the thoughts of others: not only whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, and walruses, but also more prosaic, terrestrial animals—cats, big and small, dogs, cows, and the occasional rodent (though if truth be told she’d never enjoyed the company of rats or mice very much: they focused almost entirely on their babies—babies, babies, babies; always too many and always too often).

While Libertine drank a cup of tea she listened to the morning news on NPR—including a spot about a sick killer whale’s journey that day from a facility in Colombia to the Max L. Biedelman Zoo in Bladenham. As though on cue, the animal presence from the day before stirred in her consciousness. Though it was a long shot, Libertine thought with a sinking heart that this animal might be the one that had come to her last night. She pulled on jeans, the single clean shirt left in her closet, and her warmest sweater, a beautiful Fair Isle given to her several years ago by a grateful alpaca breeder for settling a rebellion in the herd that had been caused by the sire, who was a narcissist and a troublemaker.

Exhausted but resolved, she threw an armload of dirty clothes into the suitcase she’d just unpacked the night before—surely there were Laundromats in Bladenham. Then, before she had time to think better of it, she fired up her Dodge Dart, a car of significant age and mechanical infirmity, and headed out to the accompaniment of an alarming new chatter in the engine.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON,
Truman found his prayer had been answered: the killer whale was still very much alive. Truman wasn’t able to see him, but he could hear Viernes exhale two or three times a minute. As they had in Bogotá, hundreds of people lined the streets of downtown Bladenham, watching the truck creep by. Viernes seemed to sense that the trip’s end was near and squirmed in his canvas cradle, sloshing water up and over the side and giving a mighty exhale that blew spray high above the box’s walls. A collective cheer went up and people waggled signs saying T
HANK
G
OD
I
T’S
V
IERNES
and W
E
♥ K
ILLER
W
HALES!

As the truck made its final turn through the zoo gates Truman saw a half-dozen television trucks lined up along the curb, their satellite dishes raised and ready to broadcast. His head swam as momentary déjà vu took him back to Hannah’s final day, when the zoo grounds swarmed with reporters and cameramen, and transmissions were carried unedited and live like wartime news from the front. He recognized not only most of the reporters and camerapeople, but the engineers and technicians who made such live transmissions possible. As he waved from the truck with what he hoped was a modest greeting, Harriet Saul’s dismissive voice played over and over in his head:
oh please
.

In Bogotá he and Gabriel had handled the crush of press together at Viernes’s small pool, and Truman had been relieved to find that Gabriel handled the media very capably. He’d told Truman in private that he didn’t have much use for reporters, especially television talent, but he’d given no hint of that this morning and, presumably, would give no hint of it now. As during most of the trip, he was sitting above Truman on one corner of the whale’s box, listening to Viernes breathe. Twice—before takeoff and again after landing—he’d dumped a half-dozen blocks of ice into the water, explaining to Truman that the icier the water, the more comfortable the whale: if the canvas sling chafed, he’d be less likely to feel it. And despite the fact that Viernes had been parboiling in Bogotá for years, he was a North Atlantic–caught whale, and there the water ran cold.

W
HILE
G
ABRIEL AND
Truman were moving the whale, Ivy Levy was driving south to Bladenham from Friday Harbor. The journey hadn’t had an auspicious start: she’d missed the 9:05 ferry because she’d had to stop at the vet’s office to pick up a fresh tube of steroidal cream for Julio Iglesias, whose nervous eczema was flaring up.

Long car trips, in Ivy’s experience, were like sensitively wired bombs. One minute you were driving along admiring the scenery in perfect tranquility, and the next,
bam,
you were revisiting a bruising litany of failures and humiliations dating all the way back to grade school. Halfway to Bladenham she found herself juggling the unexploded mines that was her history of poorly chosen life companions, of whom Julio Iglesias was only the latest example. When she was just four she’d insisted the family take in a tough old feral tomcat named Socks Afire. He’d had one eye, six teeth, a stumpy tail, and body odor, but in her eyes he’d been perfect. In retrospect she had extracted him from what had probably been a blissful old age spent mousing and whoring, consigning him to living out his waning days in a gingham-lined laundry basket in the pantry. He’d died a year to the day after his incarceration, his spirit utterly broken by her acts of love.

Despite the fact that none of her family members shared her wide-open if misguided heart, Socks Afire was followed by a long procession of strays and indigents that had included, besides the raccoon Truman remembered, dogs, cats, bunnies, and birds. Her mother referred to these animals serially as Your Latest Victim. Even her brother Matthew, who had been a loving boy before he grew up to be a lawyer, didn’t share her enthusiastic embrace of Nature’s down-and-out. Unfortunately, Ivy’s poor early-life choices in the animal kingdom had been later destined to repeat themselves among men, yielding an unbroken stream of sad sacks, sponges, creeps, and leeches. Matthew’s wife, the cool and elegant Lavinia—she of the delicate bones, tidy hips, flawless pearls, and Yankee pedigree—occasionally hinted that Ivy herself might be at fault, which at least partially explained why Ivy had, from the minute they’d first met fifty-some-odd years ago, thoroughly and secretly disliked her sister-in-law.

But she was extraordinarily fond of her nephew Truman, in whom Ivy’s genetic legacy had bloomed three years ago when he’d first acquired Miles, and secondly saved Hannah. He was an even-tempered man with the capacity to love simply, openly, honestly, and deeply. His awful ex-wife, Rhonda, whom Ivy had loathed, had had a gift for wielding criticism like a scalpel. Ivy was much fonder of Truman’s girlfriend, Neva Wilson, who was practical, matter-of-fact, and clearly and fiercely loved both Truman and his son, Winslow.

In order to interrupt the downward flow of thoughts Ivy switched on the car radio, set to the local public broadcasting station. To her astonishment she caught the last of a story about Viernes’s journey to Bladenham. She pushed her speed to just under eighty and sped south on the final stretch of highway like an avenging angel, reaching Bladenham forty-five minutes before Viernes did. When the whale and entourage finally pulled up to the facility, Ivy was waiting on the open pool top in a light drizzle, wearing a rain slicker, scarves, boots, hand- and foot-warmers, and holding a half-filled thermos of hot coffee and brandy. Julio Iglesias glowered from a Snugli strapped to her chest.

T
HE PORPOISE POOL
was built on the footprint of Hannah’s old elephant barn and yard, at the bottom of a gentle slope. Most of the forty-foot-deep pool was above ground, supported by a cement block casing. The public side had an underwater viewing gallery with four huge acrylic panes that looked into a deep-sea landscape of realistic rocky hills and valleys. On the opposite side were an equipment bay, food preparation area, locker room, huge shower and toilet, and an office with an oversized window looking into the pool.