SHE WAS A YOUNG BOTTLENOSE, MAYBE FIVE YEARS OLD. ON an unseasonably cool morning in April, Eddie Cavazos, a park employee on sea turtle patrol, had found her stranded near Mile Marker 18 on the Padre Island National Seashore. He believed the dolphin was dead until he stepped closer and she slapped her tail on the sand. He jumped. He looked around for help, but the beach was deserted. He knew not to push her back into the water, knew she’d either drown or strand herself farther up the coast, but his knowledge of beached dolphins ended there. He radioed the ranger station, and the dispatcher paged Marine Lab. Eddie waited. He kept hearing phantom trucks that never approached. He called the station again, then again. Two hours passed, endless and harrowing hours in which he continually doused the dolphin with water, stroked her sides and pectoral fins, even sang songs his grandmother used to sing because the melodies seemed to calm the animal’s breathing. Then the crew arrived, trucked her to the converted warehouse, lowered her into a four-foot-deep, forty-thousand-gallon aboveground pool. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, severe dehydration, an intestinal infection. And, most distressingly, she wouldn’t swim. Unassisted, she would sink to the bottom of the rehab tank, water folding over her like thick cloth. She weighed almost three hundred pounds, so keeping her afloat took four, sometimes five, volunteers. They wore wet suits and surgical masks while cradling her in the water. When she refused to eat, they gave her fish gruel through gastric tubes. No one expected her to live.
Then, a week later, in the middle of an overnight shift—murder shifts, they were called—the dolphin bucked and broke free from the volunteers’ arms and went slicing around the pool. She swam along the bottom, breached for air, dove low again. The volunteers—including Laura Campbell—vacated the tank, then stood watching from the observation deck. Swimming on her own, the dolphin looked sleek and ethereal, like the shadow of a cloud gliding on the water. Within days she was eating solid food, fatty herring and capelin injected with antibiotics. She gained weight. She played with balls, a hula hoop, even an inflatable alligator that Laura had found wadded up in her garage. The dolphin clapped her jaw and chuffed when angry, and skyhopped when she wanted attention, extending her head from the water like a periscope. Laura had a picture of her magneted on the fridge among coupons and Eric’s summer teaching schedule and the postcard from California. In the photo, the dolphin peered out of the water with her mouth open. Her teeth looked like a string of small, perfect pearls.
Pinning down why she’d stranded was impossible. Blood work ruled out morbillivirus and meningitis. Maybe an algae bloom or red tide was floating somewhere in the Gulf, or maybe she’d been fleeing a shark. Or she may have just gotten lost, exhausted. Her body mass was too small for a far offshore pod, but some of the barnacles she’d brought in were found only in deep water. The barnacles would, in fact, make returning her to open water a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare—Fish and Wildlife would require a battery of tests to determine where she’d come from and where she might safely be released—but those were distant, possibly moot concerns. She’d stay at Marine Lab for six months, maybe a year, depending on her progress. More pressing was the need for extra volunteers, donations, a name. The tradition at Marine Lab was that naming rights fell to whoever found the animal, so once the rescue director felt confident the dolphin would live, he tracked down Eddie Cavazos. Eddie’s first instinct was to name her after his daughter, but he quickly reconsidered: If the dolphin took a turn for the worse, the name might seem an omen. Instead, he chose Alice. It was his grandmother’s name, the name of a sturdy and stubborn woman who’d died in her sleep twenty years before.
Volunteering at Marine Lab consisted mostly of taking notes. Some twelve volunteers a day systematically logged how many breaths Alice took, when and what she ate, what direction she swam in, when she vocalized or played with a toy or moved her bowels. It was tedious work—“Your job is to pay attention,” Paul Perez, the rescue director, always told new volunteers—but the monotony comforted Laura. Before she started volunteering, she could feel too pent-up and find herself doing things she’d never imagined. Once, she’d been detained for pocketing some nail polish at the drugstore in Southport. Both the police officer and the store manager knew her—meaning, they knew about Justin—so they let her off with a warning. How to explain she’d never actually wanted the nail polish and that not being arrested had been a disappointment? That it had left her livid? Over the years, she’d purposely slammed her fingers in a desk drawer; she’d thrown sweet tea in a fat woman’s face at the Castaway after the woman said, I’m still just so broken up about your boy. And then there were the times when she locked the bathroom door and sat in the empty bathtub, watching the day succumb to night. Twice she’d come so unglued in public that someone had to call Eric at school to come get her. “Maybe we should think about seeing someone,” he’d said, and she’d nodded to appease him, thinking, Maybe the world is too much for me. Maybe I’m too small for this place now.
But the hours at Marine Lab calmed her, stoked her optimism in ways that nothing else did—certainly not the church-basement support groups: Beyond Grief. Comforting Other Parents Who Have Experienced Sorrow (COPES). Anger Management. Bereaved Families. Work could occasionally prove distracting if a customer brought in a challenging stain, a blotch that would take time and ingenuity to remove, some soiling that seemed impossibly permanent, but she mostly saw shirts that needed laundering, slacks that required pressing. Only Marine Lab brought her any peace. Eric, she knew, believed she volunteered to clear her mind, but it was the opposite: She went to nourish herself, to absorb and metabolize that which would sustain her outside the warehouse. “Like blubber,” she’d once said, trying to make him understand, or at least laugh. He did neither. Occasionally, she’d felt obligated to invite him to volunteer with her—maybe it would help to repair the countless fissures in their marriage—and yet she was always shamefully pleased when he declined. It was like getting away with something. In the warehouse, no one knew who she was. When she first filled out her volunteer paperwork, she used her maiden name.
ON THE LAST WEDNESDAY IN JUNE, LAURA STOOD BESIDE THE pool and watched Alice swim in silent, lazy circles. Her shift had ended twenty minutes earlier, but she’d lingered after the next volunteer arrived. The air in the warehouse was clammy, salted; much of the space lay in shadows with only a grainy, diffused light canting through random fiberglass panels on the roof. Marine Lab was just over the Harbor Bridge and the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, an hour’s drive from Southport. If she left right away, she’d get home by six-thirty or seven, depending on traffic. She wasn’t ready to head out, though. Alice had been running a fever the last few days, and the vet was due to stop by with an update. Five more minutes, she thought. Her back ached from sitting on the pool’s wooden observation deck, and her veins thrummed with exhaustion. She hadn’t slept well the night before—she rarely did, unless she allowed herself an Ambien—and then she’d worked the early shift at the dry cleaner’s. Thinking of it made her yawn. She snapped a rubber band off her wrist and pulled her long hair into a loose ponytail. A sparrow bounced around the warehouse rafters, then landed on a beam and started chirping. Laura wondered if Alice could hear the bird underwater, if she was whistling back. Last night, when Laura couldn’t sleep, she’d done the dishes and then stayed up reading about dolphins’ acoustic signatures.
She was about to leave when she saw that the current volunteer had missed something crucial. He’d been texting. On principle, Laura always left her phone in the car, and it riled her when volunteers checked messages or took calls on the observation deck. It happened a lot. What, she sometimes wondered, had volunteers been too distracted to see when they’d been looking for Justin? No way to know. The police rarely allowed her or Eric to participate; the parents of the missing child were themselves a distraction. This volunteer looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was Mexican with a thick neck and arms. He reminded Laura of an army recruiter.
“Excuse me,” Laura said. “We’re supposed to make a note of that.”
“Of what?”
She pointed toward the loose black swirl dispersing in the water. The volunteer looked, but didn’t see.
Laura said, “She pooped.”
“Crap,” he said.
The man checked his watch, then jotted the note on his data sheet. Overhead, the sparrow started batting around again, knocking into walls. Alice swam counterclockwise. Laura hoped she’d roll onto her side and make eye contact as she passed, but she stayed beneath the surface.
“I’m covering for my wife. She’s sick today,” the man said, his gaze following Alice. “She just texted. She wants jalapeño corn bread and a milk shake. She’s pregnant.”
Oh, Laura thought. She peered into the drab, cloudy water; the pool needed more chlorine. She said, “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” He sounded sheepish, like he hadn’t yet cottoned to the idea of fatherhood.
Alice rubbed her back and dorsal fin on the stiff orange rope stretched across the water. She glided against it slowly, then turned around to work her other side. The volunteer made a note. By the end of his shift, the log sheet would be dark with thatches marking how many times she’d gone to the rope.
Laura glanced at the clock above the grease board that outlined Alice’s med schedule. Maybe the vet had gotten delayed at his clinic, but more likely he was stuck on the Harbor Bridge. Traffic always backed up in June, so no telling when he’d finally pull into the parking lot. Now, suddenly, she just wanted to get the drive home behind her. She thought to stop at the grocery store and see if a new skateboard magazine was on the newsstand. Griff had been having a hard week. Girl trouble. Her gentle, radiant son. They called him Lobster, a nickname they loved more than he did. When he entered a room, her heart rose, like a sweet old dog, to greet him.
She was stepping away from the pool when the volunteer said, “My wife has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle.”
“Cute,” Laura said.
“She got it in Cancún on our honeymoon. We went swimming with a few dolphins in a little cove, then next thing I know we’re at a tattoo parlor. I almost passed out. I’m a tough hombre, but needles get to me.”
Laura could’ve told him about the dolphin pendant Eric and Griff had given her, but she didn’t. She knew she should wear it more often, knew they worried they’d picked out the wrong gift. She actually loved it. She just preferred to look at it in her jewelry box. Jewelry had lost its appeal; anything that drew attention had.
Alice made another pass, hugging the side of the pool, then returned to the rope. Small waves rippled the surface, catching and throwing the overhead light, then petered out. Tonight Laura would tell Eric about meeting the volunteer, about the couple’s honeymoon. It felt refreshing to have something to share. He’d get quietly excited about Cancún, start imagining a vacation. Maybe she’d wear the necklace. Her husband, so beautifully and intimidatingly stalwart in his dreams. When he entered a room, something inside her receded.
“Man,” the volunteer said, “she really loves that rope.”
“She’s exfoliating,” Laura said.
In the back office, Paul Perez was on the phone, negotiating for more bags of salt to be donated. His voice rose and fell, rose again.
The volunteer swiped his brow with his forearm. He said, “We hit a hundred today and still didn’t break the rec—”
“Was your wife pregnant on your honeymoon?” Laura asked.
“Depends on who’s asking,” he said, then laughed.
Overhead, a wispy commotion: the sparrow darting around, bonking into corners, looking for a way out.
“Well,” Laura said, “the dolphins in the cove knew. They would’ve been doing sonograms while you were swimming. They like pregnant women, and people with metal in their bodies. They see through us.”
“Wait, I know this: the clicking stuff?”
“Bingo,” she said. Probably his wife had told him about echolocation. Maybe her nightstand, like Laura’s, was cluttered with overdue library books on cetaceans. Some of Laura’s books had been checked out for over a year and never renewed. She had yet to receive a late-return notice, though. When the librarians saw the books had been borrowed by Justin Campbell’s mother, a woman who used to be pretty and capable, they likely just marked them LOST.
The pool pump chugged, a quick deviation in its rhythm that reminded Laura she’d been hearing it all afternoon. Her mind was dull, gummed up, and she had a sense of being on a precipice, precariously balancing between reason and collapse. Time to go, she thought. Eric was frying shrimp tonight. Laura couldn’t remember if she’d eaten anything since breakfast. Actually, she couldn’t remember if she’d eaten anything since yesterday.
The sparrow flew to another rafter, started chirping. Alice exhaled a mist that hung in the air, a silvery cloud. The volunteer marked the breath, and Laura realized that he’d been talking.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“I asked how long you’d been working here.”
“I’m just a volunteer,” she said, flattered. Then she added, “And a mother. That’s all I am.”
BEFORE LEAVING THE WAREHOUSE, LAURA SIGNED UP FOR TWO more shifts over the weekend. She also left a note on the grease board about the chlorine—Are the tablets fully dissolving?—and put a bag of frozen herring in the sink to thaw, ran warm water over it. She washed her hands and dried her palms on her shirt, one of Eric’s old button-ups she kept in her car to wear at Marine Lab. The shirt had come from the dry cleaner’s. She’d brought it home after the customer failed to pick up his order. She got a lot of Eric’s clothes that way. Hers, too. Alice exhaled, and Laura watched the volunteer mark the breath on his sheet. She waved goodbye to Paul in the office—he was still on the phone and made a show of rolling his eyes at the conversation—then stepped out of the warehouse and into the brilliant sun.
The sky was alabaster, the sun swamping and wet-wool-heavy on her skin. She shelved her hand over her eyes, and the depth of her fatigue hit her. She stood still, mindful of her body’s emptiness. The feeling wasn’t unpleasant. When she and Eric first started dating, he used to take her floundering at midnight. She never actually fished, but she loved pulling on the waders and walking into the brackish, moonlit water, then feeling herself sink a little as the sand slipped beneath her heels. They wouldn’t come home until dawn, her skin tight with dried salt water, her hair matted with sand, her every cell vibrating with fatigue. He would fry flounder for breakfast while she showered. They ate it with lemon and Tabasco sauce. When they finally went to bed, the waves were still rolling in her stomach.
She heard a car pull into the driveway from the road. The driveway, a long stretch of caliche that ran alongside Marine Lab’s redfish hatchery, was on the opposite side of the warehouse, and although she couldn’t see the car, she knew it was Dr. Frye. A pair of seagulls banked around the building, scared from their perches when the vet steered into the lot. Pebbles pinged against the car’s undercarriage. He was going faster than she liked. Bad news, she thought. Maybe there were signs of infection in Alice’s blood, or another intestinal parasite. Now that he was here, she couldn’t leave without hearing what he had found. Five more minutes, she thought again, and turned back toward the warehouse. One of the gulls landed in the blond grass edging the parking lot, the other on the dumpster where volunteers disposed of unused capelin. A raised 4×4 truck was parked near the dumpster, probably the volunteer’s. A breeze kicked up, pulling in the soily smell of the ship channel, and gently lifting and spreading the branches of a nearby red mulberry.
Maybe Laura recognized the sound of her husband’s truck as he pulled up beside her, but maybe not. She would never be sure. Even when he was upon her, when she was looking into his wild eyes and he seemed to be saying, Get to Corpus. We need to get to Corpus, she wasn’t positive that she understood whom she was seeing. She knew only that nothing good could come of it. Light was narrowing, dimming; it was as if the sun were being hastily put away. He was lowering his window, or it was already down. His face was flushed and bloated, the way it sometimes was when he came in from the garage and refused to admit his sadness. Seeing him—seeing him there—dizzied her. She dropped her keys. She heard a garage door in the warehouse rolling up: A pallet of salt bags would be delivered soon. Inexplicably, she remembered Griffin dressing as a sheep one Halloween, a costume they’d made by gluing pillow stuffing to a wet suit his grandfather had brought over from the pawnshop. The garage door rose, the chains clattering. The tickle of dust in her nose, the slow and distinct feeling of her knees buckling, her ankles going to mud. Her stomach turned. The truck was idling. She wanted to speak, but her mouth might as well have been full of sand. She knew no words. Language itself had atrophied. She was suddenly—fiercely, wholly—grateful that her own parents were dead, grateful that they wouldn’t have to live through this, wouldn’t have to watch their daughter live through it.
Eric opened his door, came toward her, called her name as her vision was smearing and blurring and exploding into countless specks of light. Had she been thinking clearly, she might have recalled the sick beauty of those early night searches for Justin in the dunes, all of the flashlights playing over the sand like a single fluid body, bright as a bloom of luminescent algae. Or she might have thought of the night sky, how she sometimes sought in vain the dolphin-shaped constellation Delphinus. But there was no clarity to her thoughts. Nothing made sense. She was detaching from herself, rising and rising until she was peering down on everything. She saw a man gathering his wife in his arms, the glint of dropped keys in the sun, the water in the ship channel as gray and still as a lithograph. Then, just before the world went black, she saw a tiny sparrow swoop through the warehouse’s garage door, a flutter of wings that caught a current of wind and was carried skyward.