Delta Girls (12 page)

I bent my knees softly and focused on moving from my center of gravity, which kept shifting as I added more pears to the bag.
Your belly supports your arms
, I told myself.
Your movement comes from your belly, not your shoulders
. I tried to keep my breathing deep and regular as my arms gained speed. Nowhere near the speed of the other pickers, but it took me a lot less time to fill the fifty-pound bag than it had before.

I lugged the pears over to the tractor trailer, waddling like a pregnant woman, one hand on my lower back. I opened the bag at the bottom, dumping the fruit into one of the plastic bins.

“Hey!” Mr. Vieira saw me. I had been hoping he wouldn’t. He strode over, looking pissed off. “That’s not your job.”

“You don’t have to pay me for this,” I told him. “I’m practicing. I just want to be able to help out.”

He looked embarrassed, as if I had offered to bathe him. “Just don’t let the other pickers see you,” he said.

“At least I don’t have metal hands,” I said.

“At least.” He rubbed the scruff on his chin.

“Who was that guy, anyway?” I stretched one arm across my chest, pulling it closer to me with my other hand. In the short period of picking, I could already feel the strain in my back. The empty bag hung from my torso like a slack kangaroo’s pouch.

“Roberts?” he said. “He owns the orchard across the slough.”

“The one with all the dead trees?” I asked, stretching my other arm across my body. He looked at me funny, so I dropped both arms to my sides.

“That’s the one,” he said. “He has plenty of live trees, too. More acres than me.”

“He’s not organic though, right?”

“Nah,” said Mr. Vieira. “We’re the first in the Delta for that. But he’ll follow, mark my word. He’ll do whatever he can to show me up.”

“Like the robot?” I asked.

“Like the stupid bastard robot,” he said.

Quinn laughed. “I still want to see it,” she said.

“He loves it when I have a bad year,” he said. “He don’t want to be shown up by no
Portagee.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Kind of sad what a farm does to you.” He shook his head. “Makes you want your neighbor to die.”

A BARGE GLIDED
across the alfalfa fields before us as we drove toward the levee. I knew it was actually in the slough behind the farm, but its rusty bulk appeared to be charging over the land. After the whale, I wasn’t sure I could trust my own eyes anymore.

Quinn grabbed her math book and I grabbed an iced tea and we sat on the deck of the houseboat to feel the Delta breezes
begin to pick up. The water still churned a bit from the passage of the barge, now long out of our sight, making the houseboat pitch. I stared at Roberts’s levee across the slough to keep myself oriented; it resembled a heap of crumbled gravestones. Every once in a while, I could hear rocks plink down the side of it, plop into the water. No trees were planted along its edge, making it look barren, forsaken. A place where a robot would feel at home.

The levee on our side had trees and tule grass and wildflowers mixed in with the stone. Mr. Vieira had been able to get a thirty-year waiver; the state couldn’t touch the land, even though they yearned to strip it bare. The state is stupid, Mr. Vieira had told me. The levees become more vulnerable when you cut down the plants, not less. The roots hold the stones in place, keep the two-story mound together. They make it an ecosystem, a tightly woven web, less of a potential rockslide.

I had asked Mr. Vieira if all the dead wood on Roberts’s land was cut from the levee, but he said no, Roberts had lost a portion of his orchard to fire blight the year before. “Didn’t jump the water,” Mr. Vieira told me, eyes twinkling. “My pears were fine.”

The birds definitely preferred our side of the slough—more places to perch, more bugs to munch. Egrets, barn swallows, the occasional duck, a constant teeming. Real life everywhere you turned. Even the posts that stuck out of the water next to our pier were sprouting green shoots at the top, like Chia Heads.

“I hope the boat didn’t hurt the whale, Eema,” said Quinn. “I hope there was enough room for both of them in the water.”

“I hope so, too, sweetheart,” I said.

Then, as if on cue, we saw the spray. Quinn dropped her book and ran to the railing.

“There are two, Eema,” Quinn said. “Look!” The boat started to rock even more.

She was right. There was a second plume of water, a second dark back arcing up, slipping under. This one smaller than the other. Their tails perfect as drawings of whale tails, the edges
lightly serrated as if they had been cut by those scissors people use to scallop the sides of invitations.

“It’s probably a mother and child,” I said.

“Like us,” said Quinn.

“Like us.” I wrapped my arm around her, and a pang went through my ribs as I thought of my own mother. She was never my partner the way Quinn was my partner, but that moment, I missed her terribly. I squeezed Quinn a bit tighter and brought myself back to the deck, to the whales. The water looked velvety as it cascaded over their backs, as it closed over them when they disappeared into its depths. I wondered how it felt, sheeting off their skin, surrounding them. It looked as if it would feel delicious, but if they were used to salt water, maybe the fresh water was unpleasant. Maybe it was harder to swim through it, no salt to buoy them up. I hoped they didn’t have to strain too hard. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much a strained whale muscle would ache. It must feel like grief. It must feel as if the whole world is throbbing.

A
SIMPLE FLU BUG,” HER DOCTOR SAID DURING A
house call, “but they’re bad this year. Rest, water, you know the drill.”

“She has Sectionals coming up.” Deena paced around the room. “She doesn’t have time to rest.”

“If she doesn’t rest,” said the doctor, “she won’t be well enough to compete.”

Every fiber of Karen’s muscles ached and she threw up anything she tried to swallow, but it felt wonderful to lie down all day, to do nothing but let her body sink into the mattress.

Her mother tried to get her to do Pilates in bed.

“At least some core work, sweetie,” urged Deena. “You don’t want to lose your core strength.”

Karen closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. Maybe she would never get up. Maybe she would become an invalid. Knowing her mom, though, she’d find some way to turn that into a competition, too. She’d coach Karen to be the sickest girl ever. To have the worst blood tests on record, the most gruesome X-rays,
the symptoms that only the most highly specialized doctor could diagnose. She was already a little famous for being sick—pictures of her throwing up, of Nathan holding her as they got their medals, had been picked up by different news sources, had rippled out into the national media. But Karen knew that wasn’t enough. If she was going to be bedridden, her mom, with the best of intentions, would want her to be like Lydwina, the patron saint of both skaters and the infirm. Lydwina was paralyzed in a skating accident at sixteen; she performed miracles from her bed until her death four decades later.

Karen knew she wasn’t capable of miracles. She was capable, at best, of hard work. She knew she’d get back on the ice much too soon, with a throbbing head and wobbly limbs. She knew she’d let her mom push her to exhaustion. But for now, she let herself close her eyes; she let herself drift into true sweet slumber.

DEENA RENTED MORE
ice time after Karen’s fever broke.

It was 3 a.m. Karen still felt woozy, off balance as she took to the ice; she wanted to ease back into skating, but Deena was impatient. Nathan was, too. Karen told herself to skate well for him, but she couldn’t land her triple loop, missed his hand during a run of footwork. Then Nathan’s blade nicked the back of her neck during a flying camel. The shock of pain sent her crashing to the ice.

“You could have decapitated me,” she said, holding her hand to the cut.

“I didn’t,” he said.

She felt the blood seep against her palm.

“I could be dead right now,” she said.

“Don’t worry.” He did a backwards pivot next to her. “Your hair will cover the scar.”

———

DEENA DROVE HER
to the emergency room, paper towels pressed to the gash. Karen needed five stitches, like a zipper across the back of her neck. She had to take yet another day off of training, a numbing bag of ice like a bolster beneath her. Her neck was tender, stiff, for days—she found herself holding her head up when she should give in to gravity, holding her breath when she should be filling her lungs. She found herself dizzy after every spin and jump.

“You need to pull yourself together, sweetheart,” her mother said when she did a double toe instead of a triple. “Sectionals are a week away.”

“Don’t be a baby,” chided Nathan when she begged off on the death spiral, but later he examined her stitches with such tenderness, and looked at her with such concern, it was almost worth the pain.

W
HALES ARE BIG,” SAID QUINN IN BED THAT NIGHT
.

“This is a fact,” I said.

“Much bigger than us,” she said.

“So true.” I loved the smell of her at night, her just-brushed teeth, her earthy warmth.

“But when I start to worry about how big they are, I just remember that story about Hymir and Thor.”

“The one where they go fishing?” I asked.

“Yeah, and Hymir catches two whales and he’s all excited, but then Thor catches the serpent whose tail can go around the whole world, and it makes the whales seem dinky.”

“Small potatoes,” I said.

“Hymir’s embarrassed,” she said, her eyes closed, her voice starting to drift. “All he could catch is two whales.”

I hoped we’d have a chance to get back to the library soon. Maybe we could have them special order a book about whales. Maybe they’d even let us get a library card—some libraries allowed
that for seasonal farmworkers and their families. I was eager to learn more about our new humpback friends.

Quinn breathed steadily next to me now. I gazed out into the dark water, unable to sleep. The surface barely stirred, but I could feel the whales out there, moving low and large and slow, like dreams simmering in the subconscious, waiting to breach up into the brain.

The large one, the mother, raised her head, just a few inches above the surface, a dark curve barely discernible in the darkness; I hadn’t realized how many layers of darkness existed—the darkness of the night, of the river, of her body, all different shades, like the blue of the sky, the sea, blending but distinct. Like the old blank polar-bear-in-a-snowstorm page, but inverse. I knew the bottoms of her fins and tail were white, but they were hidden underwater.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

An eye, dark in dark in dark, looked toward me, full and indifferent. I wanted her to look at me with hope, with confusion; I wanted her to say “Help me” or “Follow me” or “I’ll help you” with that one sloe liquid eye, but she didn’t. Her spray briefly caught the moonlight before misting back down.

T
HE EASTERN SECTIONALS WERE BEING HELD IN
Oldsmar, Florida. Deena, in a fit of indulgence, bought all three of them first-class plane tickets.