BY THE TIME Libertine arrived in Bladenham—a town she’d never even heard of before that morning—the zoo was closed, but brilliant lights shot into the rainy sky from that direction. The streets that were closest were barricaded, so she pulled into a side street and parked, then dug around in the backseat until she came up with a jacket that had once been waterproof, and struck out on foot. By trial and error, she found herself in front of a barricade just a block away from the huge, bunkerlike facility and pool. There she joined a small crowd trying to catch a glimpse of the whale.
At first Libertine found it hard to concentrate with so many people around, but when the crane lifted Viernes higher and higher, still in his sling, all sound ceased. As he dangled in the air, dripping, his high, keening call sliced through the air and her heart like a razor.
And then, as he was swung over the pool and out of view, a great cheer went up from the people both inside and outside the fence, indicating that he’d made it safely into the water. When she looked around, nearly all the faces were wet with tears.
AS SOON AS Viernes was safely installed, Truman trotted back to Havenside, once Max Biedelman’s mansion and now the zoo’s administrative center, riding the crest of a clamorous wave of reporters, videographers, beta cameras, boom microphones, and sound engineers from all the local and regional media outlets, plus Reuters, the Associated Press, Northwest Cable News, and CNN.
Truman invited everyone into the ballroom, a vast space that had hitherto been used only for charitable events, the annual zoo volunteers’ banquet, and the occasional wedding. He’d had the foresight to have a podium and microphone set up ahead of time, and though Gabriel hadn’t arrived yet, Truman self-consciously moved to the front of the room and introduced himself. Knowing the last news deadline of the night was fast approaching, he gave what he hoped was a fast-paced but thorough review of the zoo’s facility, Viernes’s history, and the zoo’s hopes for a total rehabilitation that would give the whale an infinitely better, never mind longer, life. He was just about to take questions from the media when the crowd parted enough to allow Gabriel through, still wearing his wet suit.
“Ah,” Truman said. “Here’s the man of the hour. Let me introduce Gabriel Jump, who’s pulled this rescue together in record time, and who will be in charge of Viernes’s rehabilitation. He’ll give you a status report on the whale’s condition first, and then he can answer your questions.”
Over the course of the endless trip north, Truman had developed a deepening respect for Gabriel. Hour after numbingly cold hour he had radiated a profound, even shamanlike inner calm. Now, he briefed the gathering with an enviably easy informality and humor. As soon as he wrapped up his remarks the room burst into furious action: cell phones came out, laptops bloomed, TV crews and engineers scrambled to edit B-roll, and both Truman and Gabriel were assaulted by reporters eager for exclusive quotes and sound bites. But what they wanted most was access to the top of the pool so they could get close-ups of Viernes, which Gabriel had been adamant about denying for at least twelve hours, or until he felt Viernes was stable and settled in. Truman offered instead to open the underwater viewing gallery to the media. Though the pool’s depths were dark, the TV lights might lure him to the enormous windows, where the photographers and videographers would have a chance to see him up close.
SATISFIED THAT THIS whale was the animal that had summoned her, Libertine checked into the town’s cheapest motel, the Slumber Inn Motor Lodge. The room was damp, cheaply paneled, and poorly lit, and from its uncomfortable straight chair she looked bleakly at the bank balance on her laptop. Even at twenty-eight dollars a night, she didn’t know how long she’d be able to stay. She fervently wished that the people who doubted her abilities—which was to say, nearly everyone—realized what it cost her to follow her calling. She had to forego health insurance, a working dishwasher, nice clothes, and lasting friendships, living—barely—on a miniscule amount of money from her mother’s life insurance policy and the rare stipend paid her by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or comparable state agencies when she was able to convince errant seals and sea lions to move on from public docks and fish ladders. She wore thrift-store clothes and offered up her hair, naturally a dull shade of brown shot with gray, to the students at a beauty college in Anacortes, which explained why she often had hair in innovative colors and styles. The students loved her because it was widely known that they could try out anything and she wouldn’t bitch or cry, not even when the processing went haywire—which, given the students’ lack of experience, it often did. Libby—they’d say, handing her from student to student like a favorite if well-worn doll—you’re the best.
People tended to assume that Libertine had always been single, but it wasn’t true. When she was just eighteen she’d married Larry Adagio, her life’s love and an earnest plumber who had taken great pride in his work. Libertine thought if he’d known a heart attack would kill him at twenty-seven, he’d at least have taken comfort from the fact that it happened while he was on the job, in a client’s bathroom, at the base of a new quiet-flush toilet.
In her dreams she and Larry were together again, and neither of them had aged a day. They were usually running errands, earnestly debating whether Mini Wheats would hold him until his midmorning break. He’d had the metabolism of a chipmunk; every workday she’d sent him off with a stack of sandwiches like playing cards: peanut butter and jelly, baloney and American cheese, liverwurst and Swiss, cutting little hearts into each top piece of bread with a doll-sized cookie cutter she’d found once at a garage sale. It was still one of her most precious possessions and she wore it sometimes on a chain like a necklace.
He’d been the one and only man who’d found her beautiful. When he died she’d begged to have his corneas transplanted in place of hers so for the rest of her life she would always see the world through his eyes—he’d been an organ donor, it would have been be completely legal—but the doctors had refused and the corneas had ended up going to someone else. She’d thought she would die of grief, and the thought had brought her comfort, but instead her mother had come down to Salem, packed up their apartment, and brought her and their little dachshund, Nelson, back to Libertine’s childhood home, a tiny post-war house in Portland, Oregon. She’d stayed in bed for three weeks, until finally her mother had lost her temper and said, This poor dog misses Larry, too, but you don’t see him moping. Get up and take him for a walk. She’d gotten up.
She shut her laptop and rubbed her face and eyes. It dawned on her that she hadn’t eaten a real meal since yesterday. She remembered seeing a café as she came into town, so she packed up her computer, pulled on rubber boots and a rain poncho, and by backtracking found it five blocks away: the Oat Maiden.
The minute she ducked inside she was enveloped in the aromas of childhood: pizza and chocolate chip cookies. The look of the place was playful—boldly painted tables with mismatched, whimsically painted chairs. It was empty except for a young couple huddled over a computer.
A tall, thin man in his early forties with wild hair and a wistful overbite appeared with a menu. “It’s just starting to get dark out,” he said helpfully, “so, you know, you might want the celestial table.”
Libertine followed him to a round table beneath the streaming plate-glass window and said, “Oh, it’s beautiful!” And it was: a midnight-colored sky was painted with extraordinarily detailed stars and an aurora borealis spanning the whole table. The man smiled shyly. “Did you paint this?”
He nodded, nervously rolling the paper menu into a tube. “You don’t have to sit here if you don’t want to.” He gestured vaguely around the room.
Impulsively, and because she had a quick premonition that she’d be here often, she said, “How about I sit here this time, and then every time I come in I’ll sit at a different table until I’ve been at all of them.”
“Okay,” he said, and bolted back to the kitchen, apparently having scared himself with his forwardness.
Libertine reviewed the menu, which consisted of thirty different pizza combinations and fifteen different types of chocolate chip cookies. Though she hoped the man who’d first helped her would come back—it was a rarity to meet someone even more socially awkward than she was—a young woman came to take her order instead.
“Are you here for the whale?” she asked Libertine.
“Pardon me?”
“A killer whale came here today from South America. Colombia—is that South America or Central America?”
“South America,” Libertine said. “I think I just saw him arrive. Can you tell me anything about him?”
“Well, for starters they say he’s dying, but how bad can he be, if they’re bringing him all the way here?”
“Didn’t this zoo used to have an elephant?” She remembered a flap a few years ago about a lone captive elephant at a small Washington zoo she’d never heard of before.
“Yep,” the waitress said ruefully. “That’s us.”
By the time Libertine was finished with her meal—and it always amazed her, even after all these years, how little time it took to eat when you were by yourself—she was exhausted enough that even the prospect of her awful motel room didn’t seem so bad. Without another sign from the whale that had brought her so far from home, she fell into bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.
ONCE THE LAST of the media were outside the perimeter fence and tucked into their satellite trucks for the night, and Neva and Sam had gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, Gabriel brought a bucket of fish to the pool top and put Viernes through a few familiar behaviors. The physical exertion would help him shake out any lingering muscle kinks and fully exercise his lungs, both important after remaining motionless for so long during transport. It would also give Gabriel a chance to better assess his condition.
As he watched, Viernes plowed through the water, cheating on his speed-swim by shaving the corners and riding the wave he’d created with his own initial momentum. He was slower than any killer whale Gabriel had ever seen except for the very old or dying. He was winded after a single lap around the pool, and his body jiggled when he exerted himself, even as emaciated as he was; he had almost no muscle tone. When he exhaled, he blew gobs of dirty snot. After Gabriel had given him the last of the fish—nutrient-rich fresh herring of a quality he might not have tasted since his capture off the coast of Norway eighteen years ago—Viernes swam to the far end of the pool, put his head in the corner, and closed his eyes.
Gabriel folded his arms across his chest. Viernes’s recovery would be a long, long road.