Friday's Harbor (28 page)

And then, abruptly, Friday turned around and left.

“What’s he doing? Hey! Don’t leave,” Neva called, dismayed.

Both Gabriel and Libertine were smiling. “Just wait,” said Gabriel. “Watch him.”

Friday swam all the way across the pool, where he rounded up his blue ball. Then he pushed it back until it bumped up against the gate.

“Is he bringing it to Juan?” Neva asked Gabriel.

“Can’t we let the little one into the main pool?” Libertine asked.

“Not yet,” said Gabriel. “We have all the time in the world. I don’t want to go too fast and have to net the calf to get him back into the med pool.”

“Why would you have to do that?” Neva asked.

“Look, he’s not a puppy. You’re assuming these two will get along, but it’s also plausible that Friday will look at him as a competitor for the pool’s resources—for food, attention, toys, or anything else Friday values.”

“But he brought him his blue ball, for god’s sake!” said Ivy. “His most coveted possession!”

“You’re seeing it as a generous gesture. It’s equally possible that he’s showing it to the calf to make sure he knows he’s got dibs on it.”

“So you think Friday might actually be aggressive toward him? There’s no reason to think he’d hurt him, is there?” Neva asked.

“No—if there were, we wouldn’t have brought him down here,” said Gabriel, “but it’s within the realm of possibility. Anytime you get two animals together, there’s some risk, especially when it’s two males. All I’m saying is, let’s not hurry. Let’s give them a chance to get used to each other gradually. You don’t want Friday to be alone anymore, and I get that, but he’s already not. They can see each other. They can hear each other.”

Ivy huffed impatiently, but she didn’t challenge him.

F
OR TWO DAYS
and nights Friday rarely left the gate that separated him from the calf. He vocalized continuously through all his waking hours. Even a screening of
The Day After Tomorrow,
a movie he loved, failed to tear him away. A hydrophone in the pool recorded not only Friday’s vocalizations, but also the calf’s. By the morning of the third day, some of the vocalizations synched up. The calf was learning Friday’s calls.

It was time to remove the gate.

As Gabriel choreographed it, they would let the two whales meet right after the gallery closed for the day, so they’d have as much time as possible to interact without visitors looking on. No one expected it to go badly, but YouTube was full of animal encounters gone wrong, and Truman had expressed a certain amount of concern that the two killer whales might join their ranks. So at seven fifteen that evening, Ivy, Gabriel, Libertine, Neva, Truman, Sam, Winslow, and Reginald all gathered on the pool top. There was an air of barely controlled expectation. Gabriel brought up two full buckets of fish, sent Neva to the opposite side of the pool with one bucket, and kept the other at the gate between the two pools.

On his signal, Libertine started the hydraulics that lifted the gate.

No one spoke as the gate started to move. The only sounds were the creaking equipment and the whales’ breathing. Even Julio Iglesias stayed stock still in Ivy’s arms.

Friday took a deep breath and sank below the waterline.

Sam, positioned in the gallery, transmitted, “Friday’s going into the med pool. I can only see half his body.”

“He’s just rubbed his head along the calf’s side,” Neva announced from her radio beside the med pool. “He’s moving really slowly, like he doesn’t want to hurt him or scare him or anything.”

Then they all heard it, even in the gallery: a high, thin, sustained duet. Ivy, standing beside Gabriel at the near end of the pool, grasped his arm tightly and whispered, “Oh my god.”

With infinite gentleness, Friday backed out of the med pool, drawing the calf out with him until they were through. Once they were in the deep water, Juan slipped below and just off of Friday’s right side—what would normally be his swimming position beside an adult female. Friday swam very slowly, very deliberately, barely moving his flukes. Despite his injuries, the calf was able to keep up.

“What are they doing?” Ivy asked Gabriel.

“Watch,” Gabriel said. “Friday is showing him the pool.”

Once the big whale had taken the calf around the pool’s perimeter, he brought him to the bottom, where they swam around the rock work and along the gallery windows. “You got to see this,” Sam transmitted. “It’s like they’re attached. Friday’s going real slow, too, so the little one can look around.”

Together, the whales continued their explorations until the calf began to flag and a thin trail of blood seeped into the water from his damaged flukes. Friday brought him to his favorite corner of the pool, leaving him there while he swam to his blue ball, which had fetched up onto the broad slide-out area of the wet walk. By creating turbulence with his pectoral flipper, he coaxed the ball closer and closer until it was near enough for him to move it with his nose. As the entire staff watched, Friday swam the ball across the pool to the calf, placing it by his cheek. Then he began to sing, the notes rising into the air, sweet, joyful, and pure. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Truman over the security radio, after having to clear his throat twice, “I believe it’s time to alert the media.”

Epilogue

I
T WOULD BE
early the next fall before the zoo was clear of film crews, reporters, VIPs, and journalists. Juan became an overnight golden child, faithfully attended by Friday, his constant companion, protector, and teacher, and thrilling visitors and media around the world. Within the calf’s first two months at the zoo, photographs of him and Friday were on the front page of magazines and newspapers around the world, and went viral on the Internet. Visitors came back time after time, many from considerable distances. In elaborate games of Simon Says, Friday taught Juan not only his repertoire of behaviors, but how to play and pose in front of the gallery windows, to the mutual delight of whales and visitors.

Gabriel backed off Friday’s training schedule; each whale had the other for companionship, and Gabriel told Truman he didn’t see the need for training anymore, beyond keeping basic medical and husbandry behaviors sharp so the keepers could draw blood and weigh and examine them as needed. The staff continued to conduct innovative sessions—you can do anything you want, but you can’t do the same behavior twice—because the whales seemed to enjoy them so much. Friday and Juan often played the game as a team, each riffing on what the other dreamed up, sillier and sillier and sillier.

Truman often visited the pool. One day, Gabriel called him on the radio and asked him to come over, meeting him with a pair of XtraTufs, a dog whistle, and a bucket of fish.

“Go ahead,” he told Truman, clanking the handle on the bucket of fish to summon the whales.

“What?”

“Go ahead—take the session,” Gabriel said. “Ask them to do something.” When Truman hesitated, he said, “Come on, you’ve watched, what, about a thousand of these sessions by now. Ask him something—you know all the signals.”

And so Truman drew his guns, feeling ridiculous until the whales responded to the command for innovative behavior, Friday with a tongue loll, the calf with a vertical spin. They came up with new behaviors for ten minutes straight.

“Feed them the whole bucket,” Gabriel instructed him. “You want to reward them for working for you, especially since it’s your first time.”

Truman fed them fish after fish. When the bucket was empty, Gabriel said, “Okay. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Uh-oh,” said Truman. “Here it comes.”

Gabriel nodded. “It’s time. I’d planned to leave months ago, but then Juan came along.”

“I assume I can’t talk you out of it,” said Truman.

“No—it’s time for me to move on.”

Truman felt his stomach tighten, though he’d known for months that this day would come. “What will you do?”

“I haven’t decided yet. There are a couple of projects I’m interested in, in the wild,” Gabriel said.

“Had enough of the zoo life?”

“I’ve never been the go-to-the-office-every-morning kind of guy. This is the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere.”

Truman regarded this man, whom he’d come to deeply respect, and who had kept them from running up on the shoals of their own inexperience and naïveté time after time. “We’ll miss you. You know you have a place here anytime. What’s your time frame?”

“I’d like to be gone in a couple of weeks. The staff’s ready—they don’t need me anymore. You’ll want to hire one more person, and for what it’s worth, I’d promote Neva to senior killer whale keeper. She’s got all the right skills, and I trust her intuition.”

“And Libertine?”

Gabriel grinned. “She’s great, especially for a kookaboo. Keep her as long as you can.”

“She’d be very proud to know you said that,” said Truman.

He gave Neva the news that night. “I have to admit it makes me nervous,” he said. “I don’t know how we’d have gotten to this point without him.”

“We wouldn’t have,” said Neva. “But we’ll be fine. And if we’re not, we know his phone number.”

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER
Ivy made one last trip to Bladenham on her way to Cairo. She took Libertine to the Oat Maiden for lunch. “How’s that kitten—what’s his name again?”

“Winken,” said Libertine. “We bring him in sometimes. We’re just hoping that the health inspector doesn’t make a surprise visit. If he does, our plan is to pop him into the dirty-linen hamper.”

“Does Julio Iglesias torment him?” The dog lived with Libertine full time now, after one last stay with Ivy, during which he peed on her new down sofa and ottoman, turned a small hole in the vinyl kitchen floor into a much bigger hole, and bit the Achilles tendon of a gardener who’d come to take care of Ivy’s yard.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Libertine said. “The two of them are thick as thieves. They sleep together almost every night. Plus naps. We got them a bed big enough for them both to curl up in. Who would have guessed it’d take a cat to gentle him? He’s a different dog now.”

“You’re kidding,” Ivy said flatly.

“He even goes through the cat-tube to the house if I give him a boost onto the counter first. Johnson Johnson’s going to build him some stairs.”

Ivy looked hard at Libertine until she blushed. “What?”

“You like him a lot, don’t you?”

“Winken?”

“Johnson Johnson.”

Libertine pinked up. “He’s a very good man.”

“To say nothing of unusual,” Ivy said, grinning.

Libertine smiled, too. “He is. But then I’m not exactly mainstream.” She stirred her cold coffee for a long beat. “Are you looking forward to this trip?”

“Yes and no. It’s time to get away.”

“And you do have friends there?”

Ivy reached across the table to pat Libertine’s hand. “You worry too much. I’ll be fine. Egypt is like a second home to me; I’m not going into exile. Is that what you’re worrying about?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t.”

Libertine nodded and then said softly, “Do you think we’ll ever see Gabriel again?”

“I have to say, you’re in a peculiar state of mind.”

“I don’t do well with change,” Libertine admitted. “Or loss.”

“Who are you losing?”

Libertine pointed across the table at Ivy. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “So much.”

“Find me in your head.”

Libertine smiled tearily. “I think we’ll have to rely on Skype.”

Ivy patted her hand. “Then we’ll Skype. Maybe you can come over sometime.”

“Maybe.” They both knew she wouldn’t. Libertine’s life and work were here in Bladenham now, and tickets overseas were expensive.

And then it was time to go.

They parted at Ivy’s car with one last, hard hug. Just as she pulled away from the curb, Ivy opened the passenger side window and called, “Hey!”

Libertine turned back.

“We did fall in love, you know. In case you missed it.”

And then she was gone.

A
S
L
IBERTINE WENT
back inside the Oat Maiden, she fervently wished for Ivy a life as rich and filled with purpose as her own had become. She couldn’t imagine going back to her old life before Friday. In the past few months she’d begun diving regularly to help keep Friday’s pool clean. She’d gotten a raise. Neva was teaching her signals and how to run Friday’s workout sessions—she was inordinately proud that she had her own whistle now, which she used to signal Friday or Juan that they’d followed an instruction correctly. She worked alongside Johnson Johnson at the café in the evenings as well as on her days off, and often stayed in his house overnight. Now she paused in the café’s kitchen doorway for a moment, taking in Winken curled up beneath the pizza oven where the bricks were warm; taking in Johnson Johnson, whose back was to the door, spooning freshly made cookie dough onto industrial-sized cookie sheets. And standing there, surrounded by aromas, flavors, and things she loved, she contemplated the meaning of blessings—the gifts that come to us when we have given up expecting them; the elasticity and courage of the soul. Friday had not found her because he needed her. He had found her because she needed him.

And somehow, though she hadn’t made a sound, Johnson Johnson must have sensed that she was there because he came to her, cupping his warm hands over her ears until the only thing she could hear was the sound of her own heart.