On Sunday, we spend the day waiting for night. My mother and I can easily avoid the shame of our hangovers, the rottenness, the uneasiness of Liam’s missing boat, and the very dead whale. A few local vendors stop in with wedding things, and I direct them around Ferry Lands. My mother bakes a cake and says it’s a groom’s cake. It’s the shape of an odd fish, and she says it’s kind of the shape of Winter Island. I nap in a hammock. The dogs bark at the trucks that go up and down the driveway. Someone sets up rows of chairs. We play Monopoly. My mother combs my hair. We eat whatever we can find and force ourselves to drink a lot of water. We check the clocks, hoping for the quickness of dark, before our courage escapes, before we can’t do any of it, before my mother wants to leave. We say nothing. We must sleep as much as we can, before the darkest of night calls.
My mother finds me on the lawn, with the dogs, reading a book, and waiting. She tells me there was a phone call, that a few boats are returning today and tomorrow, no reports of any damage. There is no one missing. I want to cry, leap into her arms, tell her that I’m happy that Liam will come back to me. I want to tell her that I was worried he’d leave me forever. Exactly the way she did. Exactly the way everything does. It’s science, I want to say.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?” I say.
“For everything,” she says.
She says we should walk, because it will make us feel better. She starts to explain all the reasons she’s left—something about the wind, and that urge for going—and I tell her to stop. That I know she’s sorry and that I don’t want to talk about it. I tell her there’s no need to do it anymore. That there’s not much left anyway, and I want to enjoy the wedding. And her. And my life.
“I don’t even smell that whale anymore,” I say.
She nods.
The whale’s rolled onto her side, and she’s propped up on a low-tide sandbar. There are scabs exposed, and birds, and the body looks like it’s not a body at all, but a gray mountain emerging from the sea. She asks why it won’t recede. Why nature just won’t take care of the whale on its own. Why the Sea Institute hasn’t come to deal with the mess.
“They can’t get a tow in time,” I say.
We examine the hump of whale blubber from the shore, and the dogs follow as we walk down the beach. I say I’m worried about sharks. About sea lions. My mother holds my hand, and I pull away. I remember my heart, and the water that surrounds it.
“I can really smell it now,” she says.
We dip our feet into a thick carpet of ocean foam and sink our hands into holes filled with water. We touch the roughness of red and orange sea stars, and my mother gently pokes the center of an anemone with a stick. She collects shells and puts them in her pockets. The dogs are wet and shaking water onto our pants, and I can’t help but gaze past the rotted whale to the line of fishing boats that are far away but close enough to really see them.
We keep waiting for darkness.
My mother is sleeping on the porch swing, and her face is in the sun. A breeze rocks the swing. There is a smile on her face, or a squint. I creep into the space next to her, and she knows I’m there and leans in closer, and I lay my head next to hers, and we keep rocking. I whisper to her that the boats are coming in. That we should eat a big dinner, because I’ll need her to swim tonight.
“I’m not swimming with that fucking whale,” she says.
“It’s the only way,” I say.
I say I don’t want to cook, that I don’t want to dirty any more dishes before the guests arrive tomorrow. That I can see a squall on the horizon—there are clouds thick with darkness—and that I can’t look out there anymore, that I need to get away, that I need to waste time, that we need to get dinner somewhere else.
The dogs get a bowl of dry food, and we drive to get a pizza from a restaurant at the harbor. The whole town is lined with tourists, wasted on weekend getaways. My mother parks in front of a bar with a big patio and a live band. She eats a slice right from the box and grabs a roll of paper towels she’s stashed in her purse. She tells me that most women wouldn’t eat pizza before their wedding night, but that we aren’t most women.
“That drummer really liked you last night,” she says, staring at the bar band.
I laugh and keep eating.
“You can have anything you want,” she says.
My mother gets like this: worried that she’s fucked me up so bad that I can’t love the right way. And for once, I say something I really mean: I have what I want.
Then the darkness comes in waves of violet, and the streetlamps are lit. She asks me about the whales. About my work. About the years of research. She says she’s sorry for missing my lectures, awards, and readings on the mainland. Says she never had anything to say to the people at the Sea Institute. She talks of my father, and Rook, and Liam, and then, of all the other people that we’ve lost to the sea and the sky.
Nothing else matters anymore. We smoke a joint and drive slowly, dodging gangs of drunk tourists, and we reach the edge of Ferry Lands, where the lighthouse strobe bounces off the statue of Saint Francis of Paola, and my mother says, It’s impossible not to love this place. We are high on the new pot that comes from labs on the mainland, pizza, and what we think must be forgiveness. We waste time. She reads aloud. She sips wine; I sip wedding champagne. We drift off, and wake up, and tell ourselves we need the sleep.
She wakes me at four, and it’s the darkest part of the early morning night. There is just enough time. My mother borrows an old wet suit and a blue hooded raincoat. We are both zipped up in rubber, waterproofed. Our hair is pulled back. At night, we could be the same woman with a sleek ponytail. We are thankful for the almost-full moon, its light that will guide us out to sea and back again.
We take the dinghy out, with oars only in the closeness of the bay, because the motor could wake any distant neighbor. Island neighbors are nosy when we break laws. We avoid the light and are quiet as we push it into the water, the hull cutting wet sand like a dull knife. We row in unison, my mother quietly following my lead, and we glide toward the body of the whale. At first, I count the times I dig my oar into the sea, like I would count the steps up a staircase, and then I lose count, because it’s dark, it’s quiet, and the paddle out feels never-ending.
When we are close enough, I place my oar in the water, pushing backward to break our momentum. My mother carefully lowers the anchor into the water, and we wait for the tug that tells us it’s hit bottom. She feeds it slowly, making as little noise as a chain-link rope can make while diving into the dark sea against a tin boat. It’s almost impossible to be quiet in a boat with water lapping and sloshing all around. Perhaps now, she whispers, we are far enough from land.
We are moving now without words, using only gestures, and it’s the silence, more than the rancid smell, that is most alarming. Perhaps we have never been this still, this efficient, this careful, together. I keep my mouth shut.
We slip into the sea, and I am overcome by the deep darkness below. Its nothingness and everythingness all under my feet is a cocoon for our bodies. We swim around the whale, the waves in the distance sounding like other whales, and we reach her massive nicked fluke. We kick our legs with vigor underwater, but ease cautiously with our arms and hands, like spoons. She’s rotted now, her eyes pecked out. She has open sores. Still, no creature has halved her body or taken her whole, so there is the rigorous process of tying rope to the smallest part of her fluke. We are careful, as if she is alive. We quietly agree that beneath leftover moonlight, we will do this with stillness. With dignity.
We touch her. We have already forgotten the stench. She creaks and rocks, and we get the rope fastened to her tail. I keep my mouth closed.
My mother swims to the boat first. I am slower, tugging the rope back like a leash. We sketched it out the night before on napkins at the bar, after we fought for hours about the best way to get rid of a rotting whale, and this plan, the one we agreed upon, was all that was left. We weighed the risks—sharks and more—but this creature was begging for her freedom. And I know the way of water.
My mother helps me back into the boat, and the whale is pulling away with the tide. We’d planned to have many extra feet for give, but when the wind picks up, there’s not as much as we’d hoped. I hold the whale like a dead dog on a leash while my mother is whispering, Hurryhurryhurry.
In the boat, we breathe heavily and we try to rest. Our rubber suits keep our hearts warm, but our wet hair, helmets of cold, grows colder as the minutes pass. I tug the rope to make sure we’re still attached, and my mother hands me an oar. I lift the anchor. We row. She’s keeping track of time, and my mother keeps saying we need to go harder, faster, if we want to get this whale out with the help of the tide.
With some momentum, we are slowly dragging this thing out to sea. When we pass the wide mouth of the bay, the jetty, when our arms are burning, my mother says it’s time for the motor.
“This is how all women should spend the night before their wedding,” she whispers.
With the motor, our wet hair, and the wind in our aching ears, we speed out toward the horizon. We go until we think we’ve gone too far. The sun could be coming soon, she says, looking at her watch. The whale is not far behind.
When we stop, we are panting and we must try to breathe. We move slowly still, just in case, and we get her so far out there. I’m the one who cuts the rope. We watch her slowly float away. She’ll be devoured by daylight, we say. Or sunk. But not gone.
My mother opens a canvas bag full of roses. She has picked every color, and she hands them to me by their long stems. In the almost-light, we cannot see the thorns and our hands are too cold to feel them. We quickly pull the petals and pile them in the base of the hull, and we are silent and we are peaceful. Then we take them by the handful and sprinkle them onto the sea, and they float toward the whale until they all begin to separate and move and go their own way. We are letting go of everything.
Our boat is tossed around, and we rush back into the safety of the bay with our motor, cut it, row back over the sandbars, and then, there is the shore. Altogether, it could have been a few minutes or one full lifetime.
We unzip one another and rinse thoroughly in the outside shower. The water is nearly warm, and the sun, nearly awake. I ask my mother if she wants coffee, while we shiver under the same trickle of water, whale smell all over.
“You should really get some sleep,” she says.
She offers to pull in the boat, wash it down, prepare for the rest of the day. She says she has floral arrangements to make.
For a moment, we stare at the horizon and try to find our whale, but already she’s too far gone and we can no longer smell anything foul over the morning dew on flowers and this rising tide.