day. For all this human kindness to amount to something. For somebody on this beach to get a happy ending.
Even if it was a fish.
Clay would later correct me with an eye roll and explain, again, that you can’t call a marine mammal a fish. “It’s insulting.”
But nomenclature aside, my praying worked.
Fine. Maybe I should give a little credit to the rescuers who actually cut the net away. Or the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Or the nine-year-old boy who started it all.
Just as I was starting to give up hope, the last piece of net came free.
There was no time to lose. The rescuers pushed a little bit on the whale’s tail to turn him, and get him facing back out to sea, and then they gathered behind him, and, on the count of three, they gave a shove from behind.
They might not have been able to do it on their own, but—on three, just as they pushed, as if it was following the count, too—the whale lifted its flukes, pumped them down, and launched itself off toward the open water and disappeared beneath the surface.
We all stopped singing.
We all stood in awe—alone now, with just the shh of the waves.
An officer and a firefighter got knocked over, but they bobbed back up, laughing
And then, with nothing left to do, the whole beach erupted into cheers. Babette and I hugged. Clay and I hugged. Even Tina and I hugged. The teachers all hugged. The officers all hugged—and then they came to grab Clay and raise him up on their shoulders.
All the noise we’d been holding back all that time came erupting out, and we cheered, and jumped around, and waved our arms—completely exhausted and absolutely wired at the same time.
And then, just as we were winding down, Clay called out, “Look!” and we saw a set of flukes rise up out of the water, off near the brightening horizon.
And then we saw another set of flukes.
And then two more.
“It’s a pod of them,” Babette said.
“They were waiting for him,” Tina said.
“They’re waving at us,” Alice said then, waving back. Then we all waved, too.
“Do you think they’re saying thank you?” I asked.
But Clay shook his head, still on the shoulders of one of the medics. “Nah,” he said. “I think they’re saying goodbye.”
twenty-seven
Tina took Clay home after that, with plans to sleep for a week.
The police headed off, too—except for one car, waiting for Duncan to come back and wrap up the paperwork.
Before he left, he came to find me.
I was standing under the pier, pausing to gaze out at the water, waiting for my brain to catch up with everything that had happened.
He walked up to me with his hands in his pockets.
He swallowed when he saw me.
“You should go home, Duncan. Go to bed.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Crazy night.”
“Yep.”
“I just … had a question.”
“What?”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The usual. We found a missing kid. We sent the chairman of the board to the clink. We rescued a whale. Pretty ordinary night.”
“But are you … angry at me?”
“No!” I said. “No.” Then I added, “It’s fine. I get it. I really do.”
There was no point in talking about it now. It was what it was.
“What’s fine?”
I tried to keep my voice light, like it was all vaguely amusing. “You. You know. Leaving. Earlier. I get it. I mean, I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. But you were so busy arguing with me, you kind of missed your chance to escape. That’s on you.”
But Duncan was really frowning now. “What are you talking about?”
“Earlier,” I said, gesturing back toward town, “I had a seizure, and you finally saw what I’d been warning you about, and you freaked out, and you took off. And it’s fine. Told ya so.”
Duncan shook his head. “Is that what you think happened?”
I gave a little shrug. “Well, I woke up alone in my bed in the pitch-black in an empty place, so … yeah.”
“How do you think you got to your bed?”
So he’d dragged me over there before he left. “Thank you.”
I really was too tired for this. My whole body felt shaky. I felt a tightness in my throat like I might be about to cry and blow my cover.
“Sam,” Duncan said. “I didn’t run away. I stayed.”
“The me-waking-up-alone part contradicts you.”
He gave a frustrated head shake, then he said, “You did have a seizure—and it absolutely was a little scary to witness only because it was new,