Invasive Species (14 page)

Marco Island, Florida

KAIT HAD BEEN
watching for days.

As soon as school ended each afternoon, she'd leave Mrs. Warren's fourth-grade class at Tommie Barfield Elementary and hurry home. Once there, she'd barely pause for a snack before heading out the kitchen door and down to the boat slip.

“You give it a name yet?” Ma had asked one time, when she had Kait's attention for more than thirty seconds.

Kait had just shaken her head. Inside, though, she'd thought: That was stupid. You didn't name wild creatures.

They had their own names, she was sure of it, names they used for each other. Names you'd never know. You could decide to give them any name you wanted, but it wouldn't mean anything.

Now that she thought of it, maybe that was true for your pets, too. Their two dogs, for instance. Their setter, Fire (named by Da because in some lights his coat looked almost like flames), and their mutt, Chester (Ma had named him because she said he looked like a Chester). Maybe they called each other something completely different and wondered why people used such strange sounds to call them.

Anyway, when Kait went down to their boat slip and looked at the dolphin, she decided not to give it a name. It was just the dolphin. Her dolphin.

If it felt like telling her its true name, it would.

It had first come to the slip two years before, when Kait was eight. Almost every day, the dolphin had been there, lazing in the warm water near Da's boat. Sometimes it would dive for something to eat, but mostly it would just lie on the surface, its breath coming through the hole in its head like little explosions, surprising Kait every time.

She would sit there for hours after school, watching the dolphin until dinnertime. Watching and drawing. That was what Kait did best, draw. She didn't like to talk that much, but she loved to draw what she saw.

Often the dolphin would look at her with its bright eye. She wondered what it thought when it saw her.

“Is it sick?” she'd asked Ma and Da.

They'd smiled at each other, who knew why, and Da had said, “No, it's not sick.”

“Then why is it always there?”

Ma had given her a hug. “Keep watching, sweetie, and you'll see.”

And just a few days later, she
had
seen. She walked down to the slip early one Sunday morning and saw that now there were two dolphins, hers and a tiny little one, no bigger than some of her stuffed animals, lying in the water beside it.

*   *   *

NOW, ALMOST EXACTLY
two years later, it was back. The mama dolphin. Alone again, but looking just the same and acting just as she had the first time. Lolling around in the calm blue-green water between their boat slip and the one next to it. Looking as happy as any creature on God's green earth. (As Grandma Mary put it.)

“Is she going to have another baby?” Kait had grown a lot in the past two years, and had a better idea what kinds of questions to ask. Actually, it was hard to believe how little she'd known, back when she was eight.

“Sure looks that way to me,” Da said.

So Kait spent every moment she could down there, by the slip, hoping to see the birth. Over the years she'd witnessed her share of rabbits and hamsters being born, chicks hatching from eggs, and even, once, a garter snake delivering itself of a mass of squirmy black-and-yellow babies that formed themselves into a knot before heading their separate ways.

But never a dolphin. Kait wondered how many people in the whole world had seen a baby dolphin being born. Especially in the wild. Ones in aquariums or SeaWorld didn't count. She didn't think you should ever keep dolphins in a big tank of water, or orcas, either.

But a wild one? Maybe she'd be the first ever.

So, sitting on the edge of the dock, her legs dangling over the water, she watched and watched. And drew, of course. She might have changed a lot in two years, but she hadn't lost her love of drawing.

Sometimes other kids would come and stay for a little while, but Kait didn't have that many friends and didn't care when Amanda or Isabelle would drift away to do something they thought was more fun. Watching a lazy dolphin wasn't their idea of how to spend a warm spring Saturday, and that was fine with her.

She kept it company after dinner every night till dark, when Ma called her for bedtime. Then she'd pretend not to hear until Da came down, hoisted her up—laughing and complaining at the same time—and carried her back to the house. (She was ten now, and much too big to be carried. That was her opinion, at least, but Da didn't share it.)

She'd always known that she wouldn't be able to watch every minute—even if her parents had let her camp out on the dock, she would've had to sleep sometimes. So she wasn't especially surprised when she ran down to the water one morning before school and saw, floating at the mama dolphin's side, a new baby, even smaller and more perfect than the one from two years earlier.

With a rush of emotion that squeezed her heart, Kait instantly fell in love with the rubbery, gray creature, with its tiny beak and bright eyes. If she'd spent a lot of time at the slip before it was born, now she was there every single possible minute.

Watching and drawing.

*   *   *

FOR THE FIRST
week, the baby grew in leaps and bounds. Every day it seemed stronger, more active, following its mother farther from the shore and dock, diving a little deeper. Still it stayed mostly at the surface, happy, comfortable, the water rolling off its shiny skin.

Then, one morning, something was different.

No one else noticed, not the neighbors who stopped by to take a look every day, not the sea kayakers who put slip 173 on their regular route, not even Ma and Da.

Only Kait saw. The baby dolphin stopped growing. It spent more time sleeping. Its dives were less deep, and it no longer ventured as far as it had just a few days earlier.

The mama dolphin pushed it with her nose, urging it away from the dock. She looked around for the baby as she dived, rocketing to the surface out in the channel as if trying to capture its attention.

But the baby just drifted.

“Is it sick?” Kait asked Da as they sat side by side on the edge of the dock late one afternoon.

“I'm sure it's not,” he told her, though the look on his face said something else.

*   *   *

THE NEXT DAY
Kait noticed the swelling. A bump on the baby dolphin's back, a few inches from its blowhole. There was a round black mark in the middle of the bump, like a second, tiny blowhole.

“Huh,” Da said when she called him to see. “Maybe it's got an infection.”

“Call the doctor.” Kait hated how her voice almost squeaked over the words. If ever she had wanted to be bigger, stronger, it was now. So Da would listen to her.

“Please,” she said.

Da listened. He called. But it didn't make a difference.

“Bunny,” he said, “they won't come. If it was abandoned, maybe, but not if the mother is still with it.”

“But it's sick.”

Da looked unhappy. “They say dolphins aren't endangered. They say it's just the cycle of life.”

Kait heard: the circle of life. She'd seen that movie,
The Lion King
, on the Disney Channel. She understood what it meant. Despite what the movie said, it didn't seem very noble to her.

“So he'll die,” she said. “Fish will eat him.”

“Maybe you should stop watching,” Da said.

Kait felt her chin lift. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared into her father's eyes.

He knew that expression of hers and didn't argue.

*   *   *

THE SWELLING GOT
bigger. The baby dolphin grew weaker. It was spending all its time on the surface now. It didn't nurse as often, or for as long.

Its mother stopped trying so hard to teach it. Kait thought she was giving up.

Nobody else came to watch now. The neighbors were busy, and the kayakers paddled right on past.

Kait didn't sleep well at night. She picked at her food at breakfast and dinner and gave away most of her sack lunch at school. Her parents looked at her, and frowned at each other, and suggested movies, dinner out, a trip across the state to see Harry Potter at Universal Studios.

But they didn't push. They knew Kait had to see this through.

*   *   *

EARLY ONE MORNING
the baby dolphin wasn't floating anymore. It was half pulled up on the flat wooden platform that bobbed off the end of the dock. Da had built this platform when Kait was littler so she could step from it straight into their canoe to go paddling with him.

The baby looked as if it had been on the platform for hours. Its skin was all dry except for its tail, which hung unmoving in the water. The one eye she could see was a strange silver-white color.

At first Kait thought it was already dead. Then it gave a long, slow breath through its blowhole.

Kait looked down at the swelling on its back and saw movement beneath the baby dolphin's skin.

She ran to get Da.

*   *   *

SOMETHING WAS COMING
out of the black hole in the swelling.

Da said, “What the hell?”

He scrambled down the wooden steps to the floating platform. Kait followed.

The baby dolphin flinched a little at their footsteps, but made no effort to push off, swim away. Right then, Kait realized that its mother was gone. She'd abandoned her baby.

The thing was about halfway out of the hole now. Kait saw red wings, a head that looked to be too big for the black, wormlike body. Everything about it was droopy, wet. Drops of some liquid ran off it and speckled the baby dolphin's back.

Kait's hands covered her eyes, but then she spread her fingers. She had to look.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The damnedest thing.” Da squatted down. “Some kind of bee? No, a wasp. One heck of a big wasp.”

Kait had watched plenty of yellow jackets and cicada killers, even caught some in her butterfly net. She knew what a wasp looked like. This wasn't a wasp. Or . . . it wasn't
only
a wasp. It was also something else, some other kind of thing.

She could see its mouth parts moving. A whitish drop formed; with a twitch of its big head, it flung the drop away.

“Shit,” Da said, forgetting that Kait was there, speaking to the wasp-thing instead. “Where the hell did
you
come from?”

The baby dolphin breathed. The wasp-thing dragged itself farther out of the hole. With one last pull, it was free.

The baby dolphin's body quivered, all the way up and down. Its blowhole gaped open, and its sad little droopy beak twitched. Then it was still, and Kait knew it was dead.

The wasp-thing raised its heavy body high on its skinny black legs. It stood still for a moment, and then a stream of the whitish liquid began to pump out of its rear end. It turned its big triangle head and looked at them, at Kait and Da.

It's deciding what it wants to do to us, Kait thought.

Da made a funny gulping sound. His hand whipped out, faster than Kait could follow, and the next thing she knew the wasp-thing was flying through the air. It landed on its back in the water beside the dock.

Kait watched it struggle, its legs waving around, its wet wings twitching. A mackerel came to look at it, but swam away again.

Just a few seconds later it was dead, bumping against the pilings alongside some seaweed and a bit of newspaper.

Kait looked back at the baby dolphin. Already its eyes were glazed over, like the dead fish you saw at the market.

Everything was dead.

Da put his hand on top of Kait's head for a second, just like he'd done when she was little. “I'm sorry, Bunny,” he said. “I wish we hadn't seen that.”

Kait didn't say anything.

*   *   *

GRANDMA MARY WAS
at the house. Ma must have called her while Da and Kait were down at the slip.

Da went upstairs to take a shower.

“You and me, we're going out for breakfast,” Grandma told Kait.

“I have school,” Kait pointed out. The first words she'd spoken in a while.

“Hang school!” Grandma talked like that. She wasn't that much bigger than Kait, but she could be a lot louder.

Ma said, “I already called to tell them you'd be late.”

“I'm not hungry,” Kait said.

Grandma gave a big shrug. “Okay, fine, you can watch me eat, and after that we can do a little shopping.”

Grandma Mary loved shopping.

“Go,” Ma said.

So Kait went. They ate at Breakfast Plus (Kait ended up getting French toast, and even eating some of it), then went off to Marco Walk, where they visited every store. At Richard's Reef, Grandma insisted she buy some earrings. Kait was quiet, but Grandma didn't make her talk.

By the time they got back home, it was almost noon. “We'll make sandwiches,” Grandma said. “And then, if you feel up to it, I'll take you to school.”

Kait didn't say anything, but she thought she might be able to manage school.

While Grandma went in the front door, Kait squatted down beside the front step to watch a small lizard that was sunning itself. An anole. When it saw her looking, it puffed out a pretty red pouch under its throat.

“You don't scare me,” Kait said.

That was when she heard it. At first she thought it was the sound of a bird, a gull or maybe even an eagle. But then she realized it was coming from inside the house, a high sound unlike any she'd heard before.

And then she figured out what it was: someone screaming. A kind of scream she'd never heard before.

Grandma Mary.

*   *   *

MEN. DOZENS OF
men. Maybe hundreds. A couple of women, too, big women with fake smiles, at least one of them sitting with her at all times.