Emory
I believed in miracles the same way I believed that cardinals could flap and fly and rain could pour like the devil’s pitchforks. I had to. If you don’t believe in miracles, how are you supposed to believe your ma loves you from a far-off place you don’t know nothing about? Or that the child growing in you won’t claw you to death from the inside? Or that somebody you know you shouldn’t love might love you back? I was a believer in miracles, and that’s how I knew I could save the orca.
I walked the beach at dawn, fresh air lulling Kai back into sleep. Normally I didn’t walk this far east where the tide rose higher and the waves crashed more menacing than over west. But today I walked on anyway, led by the sparkle of pearly shells and the sun bobbing in the distance, and that’s how I found her. Body a fighting clash of white and black, massive and half-buried in the sand.
Here’s the thing about killer whales: contrary to popular belief, they won’t kill you and they’re not even whales. That’s what happens to someone when the world decides something about you, grabs hold and morphs you into an illusion of yourself: suddenly even your name isn’t your own. I understood that, and seeing the orca there, half-buried in the sand, I was sure it was some kind of tragic miracle, a sign just for me.
No killer whales were supposed to be anywhere this close to shore, let alone this close to Florida, especially without their roaming group of mothers prepared to mar and mutilate in the name of their young. There wasn’t no reason she should’ve been real. Except the closer I got, the larger she loomed, and I knew, like a bee knows the hive it came from, I had to get her out of that sand and back to sea.
The first thing I did was call Simone. Then I called Jayden ’cause he had the shovels. That’s how the three of us and our kids ended up on the beach at six in the morning, digging up a killer whale with the fierce desperation of time already running from us. Orcas couldn’t survive long on land, the weight of their own bodies slowly killing them.
“This crazier than all get-out, Emory. It’s dead.” Simone threw down her shovel. “Can’t you see that?”
“She’s not. She just needs some water so she doesn’t get too hot.” I could see the white of her underbelly peeking out from the cleared sand, but she was still at least a foot deep all around.
I needed to keep her alive. Forget getting her back into the sea, maybe she was sick. If I could get her cool enough, then I could call the NOAA to come treat her and get her back out in the water in no time.
I threw my shovel to the side and waded in, dipped my cupped hands into the ocean, caught a handful of water, and threw it on the orca’s body. “C’mon, help me!” I looked back to Jayden, standing a few feet away where the twins crouched beside him wide-eyed and thrilled, Kai strapped to Jay’s chest. Simone, beside him, stared at me, but didn’t move.
I kept dipping my hands into the ocean and throwing them in the direction of my orca, but not enough water stayed in the cup of my palms before it leaked back into the ocean. The water that did land on the orca’s body slid off and the rest sprayed back into the sea. I picked my shovel back up and began shoveling water on her, covering every bare spot. Except, whenever I watered one spot, by the time I’d moved to the next, the sun had already turned it to vapor.
“Help!” I screamed, and I could feel tears scorching down my throat.
I heard Jay splash toward me, his hand meeting my wrist, gently pulling it. He took the shovel from my grip before I could tell him not to and I shook my head, I tried to say no, but my mouth was gummy with tears and spit.
“Emmy, you gotta stop,” he said, his tone a soft purr like he was talking to a child. “It’s dead. Look.”
I looked at the orca and all I saw was how she should be swimming. How she was half-buried in the sand, but she didn’t have to be. She could dive. She could sing. She could grow up and find somebody to love.
“No, no, I can fix it,” I said. “I can bring her back to life.”
I knew I was blubbering, but I also knew that Jesus brought Lazarus back from the tomb and that miracles only work in the absence of doubt and that Simone and Jay were destroying my orca’s only chance. My only chance.
“Help me,” I wheezed, my throat dry and cracking.
Jay pulled me back toward the shore, pulled me in the direction of Simone’s truck, and when I looked to Simone to get her to see that I wasn’t being crazy, I was responsible for a miracle, she just shrugged.
Neither of them understood. When I twisted around to look over my shoulder and saw the orca laying there, I knew too much time had passed. She could’ve lived, I thought. If someone had just believed me, she could’ve lived.
But they hadn’t and they wouldn’t and I didn’t wanna sit in the truck bed and listen to them lecture me. I didn’t wanna watch Simone glance at me like I was unraveling. So when Jay finally let go of my wrist, I ran. And when they called after me, I did what they had when I’d asked them to help. I ignored, didn’t even bother meeting their eyes. If I was crazy, so were they.
Adela walked belly-first toward where I sat by the bayou shore, on a boulder big enough for the both of us. She was wearing a sweatshirt, but even through it I could see the faint outline of her bump. She was finally really showing.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Adela sat beside me and only near the warmth of her skin did I realize I was freezing. All my clothes were soaked from the water and I’d run right here, not remembering until I got here that I’d left my son and my diaper bag and my house keys with Simone.
“Your lips are purple. Here.” Adela pulled her sweatshirt off and handed it to me. For a moment, I believed in miracles again. Beneath her sweatshirt, Adela was wearing a cropped tank top. I’d never seen her in so little clothes before when we weren’t swimming. She was, like, twenty weeks now, but she looked as big as I had when I was only fourteen weeks along and I had to admit I was a little jealous.
“I put on the first thing I saw when you called,” she said. “Tell me. What happened?”
“I…there was…” I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t want her to call my miracle a failed fantasy either. There were some secrets you held for safekeeping and others you kept curled up in your fist ’cause you already knew they’d erupt as soon as the light hit them, like pavement smoking from the gaze of pure heat.
I knew if I gave Adela the story of my orca, she’d set it on fire, and I didn’t want to know the way her eyes could burn through the softest parts of me. So instead of what I was really thinking, what slipped from my mouth was “Sometimes I regret what we did. At the hurricane party.”
“With Simone?”
I shrugged. I’d meant the Truth or Dare, the Stanford application, but now that she said it, maybe Simone too. “Yeah.”
We watched the water. Each glimpse of water I looked to appeared a different shade of copper, bronze, gold, shit brown. An ever-changing thing. Beautiful and then repulsive.
“Yeah,” Adela said. “Me too.”
“What if that’s not how it was supposed to go? What if we played God when we weren’t supposed to? She could have, like, died.”
“It’s her choice, though,” Adela said, readjusting on the boulder so her shoulder was leaning into mine.
I missed being this close to her. Sometimes it felt like her confession, that she was in love, hadn’t happened. I’d tried cajoling her to tell me, getting us alone, but nothing happened. And then she’d gotten extra busy. She always said it was just family stuff with the holidays or that she was training but even I knew there was no way Adela was spending all that time in some pool, pregnant as she was. Especially since the town hadn’t caught word that she was big yet. I knew ’cause they were all still calling her Mrs. Woods’s smart granddaughter, taking senior classes at only sixteen.
I kept trying to distract myself from her absence. I’d gotten into two colleges already and spent my afternoons researching apartments and daycares for Kai in their towns, which only made the whole thing feel more unfeasible. I was trying to give her space, to let her come to me, but it wasn’t working.
“Just like it’s your right to apply to whatever college you want,” she added.
“Sometimes wanting things isn’t worth it,” I said. I hoped she’d argue, tell me she wanted me. But instead she just let me talk. “It doesn’t always work out the way you want it to and sometimes you’re worse off for trying. Sometimes the possible miracle’s not worth the risk. Try to walk on water and you might drown, you know?”
“Don’t say that.” Adela shook her head. My breath hitched. “Just because things don’t always work out doesn’t mean some things don’t. Simone’s fine. Happy even. And so are you.”
I turned to her and stared her right in the eyes, squinted. “Am I?” I asked. Her brows knit. Didn’t she know I loved her? It was driving me kind of crazy, thinking about her, worrying myself into a coil about all it meant. My whole life I’d been with boys. I liked boys. But I loved Adela.
I wasn’t a lesbian or nothing though, so don’t start thinking I’d ever be dyeing my hair rainbow or joining some kind of parade. It was just Adela. She was different. I couldn’t help but love her.
I sighed. “Sometimes happiness feels like a snake in the grass.”
When I turned my head away from hers to look back out at the bayou water, I saw it. A snake, head stuck up out of the water and bobbing like a dog as the length of him slithered and slashed across the shoreline. Adela saw it next, screamed, pulled her legs up onto the boulder with us. I wanted to tell her not to worry, that it was here for me, that it was a sign I needed to keep my mouth shut. The orca and now the snake.
But I couldn’t tell her anything ’cause all my words ceased their ties to sound and I couldn’t speak, think, breathe. There was a time I would’ve sprinted into that water, clothes and all, and tried catching the snake in the clench of my fingers, a time I would’ve risked venom and leeches just for a chance to touch it. But I’d learned my lesson a long time ago, so I stayed on my boulder beside Adela and didn’t say a word.
When I was five and Ma dropped me off at Grammy and Pawpaw’s house in an opioid-fueled haze and never turned back, Grammy started sending me over to my auntie’s house during the summer days so her and Pawpaw could still go to work. This was only a couple months before Pawpaw was laid off and we had to move across the highway into my auntie’s house for good, but at that point I was just excited ’cause my cousins Timothy and Ron were the only kids I ever got to see, since I wasn’t starting school till September.
Ron had recently gotten a pet and I’d never had a pet before, so naturally I followed Ron around, asking if I could hold Matilda the snake, and Ron kept saying no, that I was too young to hold her, which made me cry. But Ron didn’t care if I cried, didn’t hand over Matilda or nothing, so eventually I stopped crying and just watched red-eyed as Ron looped Matilda around his shoulders and fed her dead roaches.
That summer when I was five, I fell in love with Matilda the corn snake. Her orange length nearing four feet, her tail tapering off as she slithered around the corner to the kitchen. My auntie’s rule was that Ron wasn’t allowed to let the snake into her room or touch her stuff and so most of the time, we played with her outside, me and Ron and Timothy. Until halfway through the summer when Timothy got his Nintendo and then he spent all his time on the top bunk bed in what would end up being my room but was then Timothy and Ron’s.
Us kids were alone most of the time, while my auntie worked, and since there was no school for Ron, who was in fifth grade, or Timothy, who was in third, it was like they weren’t older than me at all that summer. Except I didn’t get to touch Matilda and nothing had ever made me angrier.
It was the hottest day of the summer so far and Ron and me decided to turn on the hose out in the backyard. Even though the water had turned warm in the pipes, it was still cooler than the air. We stripped down, ran through the brush, Ron chasing me with the hose until it pulled taut at the edge of the property. Matilda was inside the house, in her tank where we could keep the temperature to a cool eighty. But I was dreaming of her, as always. Her scales bright orange like the center of a nectarine.
I was done playing with the hose but Ron wasn’t, so he stayed outside and I slipped my dress back on and went in. Timothy was still in the bunk bed and nobody else was home, so I tiptoed to Matilda’s tank and opened the top and I was just about to reach in and grab her when Ron called, “Hey!”
He was dripping wet in the hallway, still only wearing his soggy boxers, and I leaped back just in time for him to tackle me to the carpet of the living room.
“You not allowed to touch her! I told you that!”
I started sobbing and Ron got off me and shut Matilda’s tank and then he sat there guarding it, watching me lay on the floor crying a damp river on the front of my dress. Eventually, I quieted down and that’s when Ron’s mouth knotted up and he said, “You really wanna hold her?”
I sat up quick, nodded, eyes wide and hoping.
He smirked. “Alright. You git to hold her if you do somethin’ for me.”
“What?”
That’s when Ron showed me how he had a special hole in his boxers and the hole was for his penis, see? And he snaked this small fleshy thing through his boxers. You gotta understand, I’d spent my whole life up until that point with Ma and I’d never seen one of those before, so I didn’t know the rules when he asked me to touch it. I was just thinking that Matilda would like to curl up under my hair like a blanket.
So I touched Ron’s little thingy and it got kind of wet at the tip and the veins started showing and it grew just a little, kind of like a worm, and I laughed and pulled my hand back, but he told me that I had to keep touching it, petting it like a dog, if I wanted to hold Matilda. And so I did, until we heard Timothy hop down from the bunk bed ladder and Ron rushed to put the thing back through the hole. Timothy slunk in a heat across the hall to the kitchen, where he grabbed a handful of cheese puffs, and I stood to go to the tank, but Ron yanked my hand back before I could open the top.
“Don’t touch that,” he said.
“But you said—you said I could hold her now,” I stammered, reaching out again.
He swatted my hand and shrugged. “I changed my mind.”
I never got to hold Matilda.
But I dreamed about her and I loved her and I wanted her to be mine more than anything. Almost as much as I wanted Grammy to have done something different than what she did, when I finally told her the promise Ron made me before he snatched my dream and crushed it in his fist.