Red Clocks(31)

“But—”

“An embryo is a living being.”

“So is a dandelion.”

“Well, I can’t imagine the world without you, pigeon, and neither can your mother.”

She doesn’t want them to imagine the world without her.

Ash offers a ride home, but the daughter says no, her dad is coming; retirement means he’s so bored he can pick her up anytime. It is cold, dim skied, the grass on the soccer field stiff and silver. The team has an away game today. She hasn’t told Ephraim. What if he’s like “Is it even mine?” Or “You made your bed; now lie in it.” They passed each other last week in the cafeteria, and Ephraim in the old-school hat she once adored said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey, how are you?” but he kept moving and her non-rhetorical question was rhetorical. He was probably on his way to put his hand up Nouri Withers’s shirt.

Her bio mother could have been young too. She could have been headed to medical school, then to a neurochemistry doctorate program, then to her own research lab in California. (What if she’s close, at this very moment, to finding a cure for paralysis?) Keeping the daughter would have meant forfeiting her med-school scholarship.

She doesn’t want the kid to wonder why he wasn’t kept.

And she doesn’t want to wonder what happened to him. Was he given to parents like hers or parents who scream and are bigots and don’t take him to the doctor enough?

She jumps at the tsunami siren—will never get used to that nerve-scraping howl.

“Only a test, my love,” says Dad.

She turns up the car radio.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Finished the academy application yet?”

“Almost.”

“Mom’s making fish tacos.”

She swallows down a little spurt of vomit. “Awesome.”

“Earlier today,” goes the radio, “twelve sperm whales ran aground a half mile south of Gunakadeit Point. The cause of the beaching has not yet been determined.”

“Oh my God.” She turns it up.

“Eleven of the whales are dead, says the sheriff’s office, though it remains unclear—”

“Remember the stranding of ’79?” says Dad. “Forty-one sperms on the beach near Florence. My pop drove out to photograph them up close. He said they made—”

“Little clicking sounds while they died.” She knows the gruesome details, because Dad likes to repeat them. He’s told her many times that a whale can be killed by the pressure of its own flesh. Out of water, the animal’s bulk is too heavy for its rib cage—the ribs break; the internal organs are crushed. And heat hurts whales. Greenpeacers brought in bedsheets to soak with seawater and throw over them; it didn’t help.

But that was 1979. Hasn’t somebody by now figured out a way to get them back into the ocean?

“Can we go down there, Dad?”

“They don’t need the public meddling in—”

“But one is still alive.”

“Are you going to roll it back down to the water yourself? Don’t turn this into a morbid preoccupation.”

“The heart of a sperm whale weighs almost three hundred pounds.”

“How do—?”

“Me and Yasmine once made a list of how much different animals’ hearts weigh.”

“Yasmine and I.” Dad gets tense at the mention of her. “Don’t worry too much about the whales, okay, pigeon? Otherwise those lovely eyebrows might get tangled up in one another, never to untangle.”

“They’re not lovely, they’re thick.”

“Which is what makes them lovely!”

“You’re not objective.” She wants a cigarette but will content herself with a licorice nib, for now.

Ash isn’t into the idea. So tired, etc. But she is convincible. The daughter crawls out her bedroom window onto the roof, rappels down the trellis, stands still a full minute in the porch shadow in case any noises were heard. A block away is the blue mailbox, their meeting place, where she smokes and waits.

Yasmine once asked her why white people are so obsessed with saving whales.

The beach is crowded with people shouting, dogs yapping, cameras popping, rain raining. A TV crew has aimed screeching lights on the whales, a row of twelve, their pewter-gray hides slashed with chalky white. They look like stone buses. The one at the very end is slowly lifting and dropping its flukes. Each time a fluke hits the sand, the daughter’s thighs tremble.

Humans pose for photos in front of the dead.

A guy has clambered onto a massive gray tail. “Snap me!” he shouts. “Snap me!”

“Get the hell down.”

“Move back, folks!”

“Did the dead man’s fingers have anything to do with this?”

“Who do I talk to about reserving some of the teeth? For scrimshaw?”

“Sir, get down from there immediately.”

“Were they poisoned by the seaweed?”

“Move aside, move aside.”

A woman with gloves and a long knife—a scientist?—squats by the first whale in the row. Will she carve off a slice of blubber to test for disease? A madness, maybe, has infected their spines and driven them onto land, all twelve fevered with death wish. Maybe the infection can pass to humans. Newville will be quarantined.