I could see Stephanie, Mom, and Norm standing outside the museum waiting for me. “Well,” I said to Jeremy. “Thanks for showing us around. It was great running into you.”
“Hey,” said Jeremy. “Don’t leave yet. Let’s call Dr. Leland now.” He got out his cell phone and tapped in the number. He held the phone close to my ear so we could both listen when Dr. Leland answered.
His curly red hair tickled my temple, and I got a slight tingle down my spine. When Dr. Leland answered, Jeremy’s hand, which was on the phone, touched my ear. My heart thudded. I felt funny, standing so close. I usually like my space.
“Yes, Jeremy,” came Dr. Leland’s voice. “We did finish the necropsy a few minutes ago. That pilot whale had unfortunately swallowed several plastic bags and other pieces of plastic that had abraded its stomach. The plastic bags were preventing it from getting nutrition. It starved to death.”
“Starved to death?” I drew in my breath and tears started to my eyes. I told myself not to cry in front of Jeremy. Poor Nick!
“Yes,” Dr. Leland continued, “it’s a very unfortunate result of people throwing trash into the ocean. To a young whale, a plastic bag looks a lot like a squid, its favorite food.”
Jeremy talked to Dr. Leland for a minute more, then thanked him and hung up. I rubbed my coat sleeve across my cheek. That poor whale! I thought again about being out there on the beach, with the sound of the wind and the waves, listening to Nick breathe his last. My heart pounded. I didn’t want Nick to have died for no reason. I wanted to do something to help.
“Hey,” Jeremy said, peering at me closely. “Are you okay?”
“I’m just thinking again about him dying, that’s all.”
“I know. Since I’ve been a volunteer, I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. In fact, there’s only been one dolphin that was in good enough shape to send to rehab. It’s terrible, but most of the time they don’t make it.”
“I just didn’t know. It’s so sad.”
Jeremy put his phone in his pocket. “Well, you know, I’ve learned that animals strand themselves for a reason. Maybe we don’t know that something’s wrong, but they do. Anyway, you seem like you need cheering up. I’m off from the museum in fifteen minutes. Want to walk around Beaufort and hang out on the docks?”
I stared at Jeremy and all his freckles. I held back an impulse to turn around and see if he was talking to someone standing behind me. Did Jeremy like me or something? I didn’t get it. He was really being nice. Hanging out on the docks would be pretty cool. After a second I said, “Let me ask.” I ran outside to where Mom and Norm and Stephanie were waiting. “Jeremy invited me to hang out and walk around Beaufort this afternoon,” I said.
I scanned Mom’s and Norm’s faces. Did I want them to say yes? Then again, maybe they’d say no. Part of me was scared to be with Jeremy all afternoon. Maybe it would be better if they said no.
“Well—” Mom said. She looked like she was considering it.
Norm checked his watch. “Visiting hours start at four.”
I knew it! He was going to say no! My heart was beating a tattoo on the inside of my ribs. I didn’t know what I wanted them to say!
Mom put her hand on Norm’s arm. “Norm, let’s talk about this.” She walked away from us and beckoned to him. They stood together, whispering to each other, their backs to us. But I clearly heard Mom say, “You and I need a little time together.”
“Looks like Lynn is trying to talk Daddy into it,” Stephanie said, poking me with her elbow and raising her eyebrows. “You know Jeremy is into you, don’t you, Diana?
“If they say yes, come with us,” I said impulsively. “I want to hang out with him but not by myself.”
Stephanie glanced at Jeremy through the museum door.
“Don’t look at him! He’ll know we’re talking about him!”
He waved at us, smiling. Stephanie waved back.
“Oh, I’m so embarrassed!” I said. I could feel my face turning hot.
Meanwhile, Mom and Norm rejoined us.
“Diana, your mom and I have discussed this.”
There they went again. Mom letting Norm decide and then announce it like he’s in charge.
“Wait,” I said. “If I go, Stephanie’s coming too. It’s not just me.” That might fit in with them needing a little time together too.
Norm and Mom exchanged a look, and Mom nodded at him. “Jeremy seems like a nice young man,” he said. “You girls are welcome to go get some lunch and walk around Beaufort with him and look at the shops and boats at the marina while the two of us go to lunch together. We’ll meet you back at the car in three hours, in time to go to the hospital for visiting hours this afternoon. Sound fair?”
Stephanie and I looked at each other in surprise, laughing.
“Sounds great!” Stephanie said.
Norm put his arm around Mom, grinning. “Hey, we get to have a romantic lunch together. We’ve had a lot of togetherness in Grammy’s little apartment. So we’re getting something out of this too!”
“Well, Diana?” Stephanie said, giving me a little shove. “Don’t just stand there. Go tell him we can go!”
Ten minutes later, we were walking along the marina with Jeremy. I looked at his fluffy red hair and cute freckles and pinched myself. A boy liked me, not Stephanie! Here we were on a sunny winter day, walking along a boat dock, not down a hospital corridor. The water slapped soothingly and lazily against the dock pilings. There was no wind today, and in the sun, it was almost warm.
“The marina’s pretty empty now, but you should see some of the boats that tie up here in the spring and summer,” Jeremy was saying. He was skipping along backward, talking to us. “Fifty-foot yachts. People coming from the Bahamas and the Caribbean. People having drinks on the deck. A lot of decks made of teak,” Jeremy said.
“Cool,” said Stephanie.
We passed a small shopping area, a wooden boat works, a restaurant, and a dock area with signs advertising ferry rides.
“This place is hopping during the summer. Ferries run here most of the year,” Jeremy explained.
“Where do the ferries go?” Stephanie asked.
“Oh … out to where they found Blackbeard’s ship. To the Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Or Shackleford Banks to see the wild horses.”
My mouth dropped open. “Wild horses? I didn’t know there were wild horses here!”
“Oh, yeah. They have their own little island,” Jeremy said. “The only way you can see them is by boat.”
I stood stock still. “You’re kidding! I want to see the wild horses!”
Jeremy gave a shrug. “Well, there are no ferries running in the winter. But we could take our boat.”
“What boat?” I caught my breath.
“My dad has a boat that we keep docked around the corner here,” he said. “It’s about twenty years old, and we’ve had to be towed in more than once, but I’ll show you.” He headed down the block, still talking. “We never did winterize it this year, because it’s been so warm. I could take you to see the lighthouse, and then we could come back by Shackleford Banks.”
A few blocks down, Jeremy led us to a small blue-and-white motorboat with a faded and patched boat cover. After Jeremy removed the cover, we saw that several of the seats had strips of silver duct tape covering small rips.
He jumped into the boat, pulled out a key with a little plastic floatie on it from his pocket, and turned on the motor. Then he plugged in his iPod. It was amazingly loud, coming from that broken-down boat. An oldie, “Listen to the Music,” by the Doobie Brothers, came on with these opening guitar licks that made anybody listening want to dance.
“Hop in!” he said. He gave me his hand, and I hopped down into the boat, then turned to help Stephanie, who was standing on the dock with her arms crossed.
“C’mon!” I said. “We don’t have to be back for three hours!”
“Daddy and Lynn didn’t say anything about going out on a boat!” Stephanie said.
“They didn’t say we couldn’t!” I said. “It’s wild horses, Steph! And a lighthouse!”
Stephanie didn’t move. I realized she was scared of boats.
“Stephanie! Jeremy’s a good boat driver, aren’t you, Jeremy?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “My dad made me take the boat safety course.”
Stephanie just stood on the dock, looking down at us with a doubtful expression on her face. “They thought we’d be walking around the town, not going out on a boat,” Stephanie repeated. “I don’t think we should go.”
“Oh, Steph, come on,” I said. As if she could tell that I was really starting to get irritated, she very slowly clambered down into the boat. It started rocking, and she grabbed my shoulder when she almost lost her balance. “We’re going to get in trouble. I know it,” she whispered to me.
“All right! We’re all aboard! Diana, can you untie us?” Jeremy, at the wheel, pointed at the lines tied around the cleats at the dock.
“Sure.” I unlooped the ropes from the cleats and dropped them into the boat.
Stephanie sat in the back, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her neck. “It’s going to be freezing out on the water.”
Jeremy, sitting on top of the driver’s seat back, one foot on the floor and the other propped in the seat, slowly backed away from the dock. A few ducks scattered away from us. Then Jeremy engaged the throttle, the boat angled up in the water, and we headed out, the wind snatching phrases of the Doobie Brothers and carrying them across the water.
Jeremy and I sang along. Riding the waves in the boat felt fantastic, just like a horse cantering, and I went to the front, even though the wind was numbing, and sat on the bench-like seat that lined the bow. A small island was just to our right, and the Front Street houses, with their upstairs and downstairs porches, slid by on our left as Jeremy sped up, angling away from the coast.
“That’s Carrot Island,” Jeremy shouted over the wind, pointing at the island to our right.
“Wow! How long does it take to get to the lighthouse?” I shouted.
“About an hour,” he shouted back. He cut across a wave, and we crashed into the trough and spray flew up in my face. “Ha-ha! Sorry about that!” he said.
I sat with my legs stretched out along the bench as we cruised over the water, thinking how much this felt like riding a horse. Every day, the water was a slightly different color, and today it was greenish, with flashing sparkles from the sun. The sky was bright, but clouds were piling up against the horizon, and the winter sun shone with a grayish-yellow cast around the edges of the clouds. The driving beat from Fun.’s “We Are Young,” talking about setting the world on fire, carried over the water. My cheeks were frozen, my hair whipped in the wind, and I plunged my hands into my coat pockets. Could I be any happier? I loved riding in boats! The faster the better!
I glanced back at Jeremy, his hands on the wheel, his red curls slicked back in the wind, and gave Stephanie, in the back, a thumbs-up. She gave me a shivering pantomime to show me how cold she was. Oh, she was driving me crazy.
We rode along and suddenly in the water I saw a dolphin, looping and swimming and diving beside us.
“Look!” I shouted at Jeremy, and pointed at the dolphin. His fin rose up and water shone on his rounded back.
“Yeah!” Jeremy shouted back. Breathless, I leaned over and held my arm down toward the water to see if I could touch the dolphin. Freezing spray coated my arm. How deep was that water? I thought of Nick, about how this water had been his home.
A minute later, the dolphin peeled away from us and disappeared.
After awhile, I saw land on either side of us. We seemed to be heading up a channel. On a spit of land to our left rose a lighthouse.
“There’s Cape Lookout!” Jeremy said, pointing ahead. “This is the most southern point of the Outer Banks.”
As we approached the lighthouse, Jeremy slowed the boat. The wind died, and I stopped shivering. He tied up at one of several docks, and he and I clambered up onto the wooden slats.
“I don’t think we should be doing this, but I’m not staying here by myself,” Stephanie said as I reached down to help her climb up.
Just past a dune stood the lighthouse, painted in a black diamond pattern.
“Want to see if we can climb to the top?” Jeremy said. “Hey, did you know that each of the North Carolina lighthouses has a different pattern painted on it? Cape Lookout is black diamonds, Cape Hatteras has a black-and-white spiral. I forget the others.”
We followed a wooden path over the sand past a visitors’ center and the lightkeeper’s house to the lighthouse. A sign said the lighthouse was closed for the winter, but there was a park ranger there and when Jeremy told him he worked for the Maritime Museum, he told us we could go up for fifteen minutes.
We went inside the dark lighthouse and started climbing the spiral stairs. They were steep, with tight curves, and a landing with a small window every couple of flights. Our voices and footsteps on the metal stairs echoed in the enclosed space. I quickly became warm from climbing and took my coat off.
“Y’all, don’t leave me behind.” Stephanie lagged far behind Jeremy and me. But we didn’t wait.
We climbed and climbed from one landing to the next. The last flight of stairs was so steep it was like climbing a ladder. We were both panting when we finally reached the top. As I stepped out onto the metal catwalk, my heart pounded, my mouth went dry, and I got goose bumps. We were nearly two hundred feet in the air. Cold wind blew and buffeted against the supporting beams. There was a scrap of land far below us with some green vegetation, and a long thin strip of land to the north. To the south, the dunes tapered to a point. And in every other direction there was water, glittering, as far as we could see. Looking around at the view from the lighthouse, it almost seemed I could see far enough to see the curvature of the earth.
“See, there,” said Jeremy, touching my shoulder. “That’s Shackleford Banks, the island where the horses live. That’s where we’ll go next.”
Shackleford Banks was off to the west, just past a short span of water, a pie-shaped tip attached to a long strip of land. Along the edge of the water, looking like toys, stood a group of tiny brown horses.
“Look!” I said to Jeremy.
“Yeah, so cool, right?”
“Y’all? Help!” We heard a small voice on the other side of the lighthouse. We followed the catwalk around and Stephanie was standing just outside the doorway on the catwalk, frozen, hanging onto the railing for dear life. “I can’t move.”
“What’s the matter?” I said.
She could barely move her head to glance at me, and the look on her face showed sheer terror. “I can’t look down. I can’t move.” Her face was white.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Jeremy asked.
“Apparently,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I said. I went over and took her hand. “Want me to take you back inside?”
She nodded, her eyes wide. Her fingers in mine were sweaty and shaking. I turned her around and led her over the ledge back through the door inside. She grabbed the railing with a gasp and almost collapsed.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
She nodded wordlessly.
Jeremy and I skipped back to ground level, but I thought it was going to take Stephanie a half an hour to climb down, gripping the railing all the way. We thanked the park ranger and headed back to the dock.
“Shouldn’t we go back now?” Stephanie said as she stepped carefully from the dock to the boat. But Jeremy and I ignored her.
“I can’t wait to see the horses!” I yelled, as I jumped back into the boat. In a few minutes we were headed along the coast of Shackleford Banks.
“Shackleford Banks is nine miles long, and we’ve got to get to the other end, so we’ll be riding along beside it for awhile,” Jeremy yelled.
After awhile we finally reached the landing area. From the landing area point, the right side of the island looked like a sandy beach with breakers, the center of the island was grassy and treed, and the left side looked more like a bay, with its tide pools and vegetation. Standing right at the edge of the water on the bay side were about seven horses, bay and black, with long manes and tails and heavy winter coats, just like the ones I’d seen on the Outer Banks!
I stood up. “There they are!” I shouted.
“Sit down!” Jeremy shouted back, slowing the boat. “Don’t stand up in the boat!”
Obediently, I sat back down but kept my eyes on the horses. As we approached, the horses raised their heads and pricked their ears at us, then began to run away, their tails sailing in the cold wind.