Nicky woke to the pitter-patter of rain, and the murmur of the family in the next tent over. She lay there in the half-light with her eyes shut, feeling the shake of the engine along her spine, smelling the salted, piney air. Ocean sloshed against the steel hull.

She turned onto her side and shut her eyes. When she couldn’t sleep, she opened them again, and saw just a few leafy strands of hair emerging from the top of her sister’s sleeping bag. Nicky pulled herself up and cinched her sweatshirt hood tight against the cold morning air.

The walls of the tent lightened. She checked her father’s phone: 5:15 a.m. A text from Aunt Mall. Y’all make it on the ferry? We’ll be there with bells on at the terminal.

Strange to think of her father having an older sister, with a son of her own. Aunt Mall and Uncle Cliff had visited Danville once, she knew, when Grandpa had died. Nicky was young, and could only recall snippets. Her mother’s laugh from across the yard, late at night as her father played guitar and they sang “If I Were a Carpenter” together. The thwack of Uncle Cliff’s hammer during the day as he helped build the workshop. Her father over her mother, kissing the top of her head when the roof went up. Even at a young age, Nicky knew this shop was her mother’s gift to her father for supporting her all those years as she went through medical school.

Nicky turned to find her father, to see the reassuring shock of his red hair. Her heart flip-flopped when she saw his bag empty. Where had he gone? Then the tent unzipped. Her dad’s shaggy, unshaven head burst in. His cheeks glistened with rain.

“Girls! There’s a humpback whale!”

A muffled moan came from Josie’s corner. Nicky kicked off her sleeping bag, jammed on her flip-flops, and followed him to the railing on the other side of the ferry.

“There!” he shouted, pointing over the water. She focused on the mottled surface of the ocean. The land was closer than it had been last night. Along the dark line of woods she could just make out a dun-colored strip of beach. In front of it, she saw a cone of vapor tear apart in the dim morning light.

“That was the whale breathing. Did you see him?”

“Her,” corrected the white-whiskered man she had met the night before, in his wide-brimmed yellow hat. “It’s a cow with her calf.”

“Oh yeah?” her father said, glancing up.

Nicky met the man’s eyes. He winked at her, then directed her gaze back to the ocean with a long, gnarled finger. “There she blows!” he bellowed. “Two of ’em.”

Creases of waves rose and flattened out. Nicky knitted her brow, focusing. She was about to look away when the exact spot where he had pointed seemed to unzip. A ridge of muscle emerged, exhaling a burst of misty air. A moment later another ridge broke through the water, narrower and smoother. She sniffed the rich, decaying scent of oily fish and rotting hay, and something else she couldn’t identify, insistent and prehistoric—stream banks and turned-over fields and the bottoms of rocks and gardens just before a rain.

“Will you look at all the barnacles on that cow?” the yellow-hatted man shouted.

The sea closed up again, just a gentle boil where the creatures had been. How had the man known where the whales would surface? As the sea filled back in, Nicky thought of the whale and her calf plunging farther and farther into the dark ocean, eyes blinking as salmon and octopus and jellyfish and so many unfamiliar organisms flashed by. She gripped the railing and closed her eyes. So much wildness in the cold beneath her.

Flip-flops slapped the wet deck behind her. “What’s up?” Josie said, yawning and stretching her arms above her head. “You look like you just touched an electric fence. They’re opening the car deck soon. It’s your turn to feed Watermelon.”

Nicky tried to form words. She wanted to share with her sister every detail of what she had seen and felt. A mom and her calf. But Josie’s pinched, bored expression stopped her.

“We just saw whales,” Nicky stammered. “Two of them.”

Josie peered out over the wavelets. “I guess I missed the show. I’m going down for breakfast. Meet me in the cafeteria. We can play Uno.”

“I’ll come with you, J,” their father filled in, setting a hand on Josie’s shoulder. “I guess if we’re up, we’re up. I wouldn’t mind some Uno. Nick, I’ll make you an oatmeal.”

Then they were gone. The rest of the crowd dispersed, leaving only the man with the soggy yellow hat. He peeked down the length of the railing and gave her a nod.

“Top o’ the morning to you, sailor,” he said.

“Good morning. Where’s your cat?” Nicky asked.

“Rooster? She don’t like mornings, despite her name. Left her in the pickup. Snoozing. She gets a little seasick, too. Hey, sailor?”

“Yeah?” she said.

“Chin up.”

Then he slipped between the tents, his long brown boots making not a whisper as he vanished into the sea of fabric.