| Rescue by Diane Hopkins |
| "See that streak
of dark water? That's where he's feeding--just about halfway between
those two boats." Beh-oats, Liz repeated in her head. Tew beh-oats. Had to be the same guy she'd heard Sunday--down-east plaintive or else Canadian. "You'll see his back, you'll see him surface four, five times. Then he'll dive and you won't see him for a while." She came on up the path, toward the group of whale watchers, who stood well back from the edge of the cliff. "You watch real close, you might see a fin." The late, low sun was blinding; she brought her hand up to shade her eyes. Somewhere, out there between those two boats...One of these days, she'd bring the binoculars. Sunday, watching the tourists sitting on the outcrop opposite the island, she had thought how well-equipped they seemed--with cameras, binoculars, so many visible signs of being ready for anything, although there had been that one moment, no more than an instant, when they looked to her like a tribe of something--monkeys, baboons; it was the way they perched there on the rocks. "...right where those gulls are," the pleasant tenor voice had said, floating to her through the wind from somewhere below, behind the rocks; perhaps there was a ledge. She had found the gulls, or were they just whitecaps? Gulls, because then the two decorous puffs, like mist, already drifting across the water, and the two dark slivers, barely surfacing, then submerged, the drift of spray vanishing. A pair of finbacks, the voice had said; they could have been shadows cast by the streaky clouds. "You'll see a humpback's tail, you won't see a finback's." A man with binoculars had claimed to see a fin. "You'll see a humpback's tail...," said the man in the yellow T-shirt; Liz was close enough now to see his lips move, see how several of the women glanced his way. She was pleased with herself--a little wave of pride, as if she had identified a bird. "He's there every time I go over to the island," she tells Molly, who couldn't care less and doesn't want to listen. Why should she? Her baby's down for his morning nap; this time is precious. Stolen. Liz can remember what that was like--it's only been a quarter-century. She'd like to tell Molly she has all her sympathy, but the fact is, Molly has only some of it. When she pulled into the driveway, Molly was down on her hands and knees, weeding around the 3-foot tall poppies her garden is full of, deep pink double poppies, annuals that self-seed, becoming weeds themselves. Molly's head was almost hidden by the sage-colored, tattery leaves she must have thought camou-flaged the rest of her. "I see you," Liz said, softly; she rolled down the car window and called, "Can I get you anything in town?" Reassuring them both by not getting out of the car. Molly backed out of the foliage like some reluctant woodland creature. "I'm going to run in the market, maybe hit the hardware store..." Molly got to her feet. "Gee, Liz, that's nice of you." Two polite steps across the unmowed lawn. "But there's nothing I need right now, not that I can think of." Something fawnlike about her: the long legs, the delicate brown of her hair. "Thanks anyway, though." Another two steps, one to the side, one backward. Not an offer to thank anybody for. Liz is pretty sure Molly knows that. Two months alone, and it's as if the whole world has X-ray vision, her every nerve and cell exposed, except nobody is looking. Liz knows that too; she's at her own mercy. "I think I'd better come up and save you from yourself," a friend down in Boston suggested a few weeks ago. And he did come, but it was too late already. She didn't want to be saved. Now, how did she allow herself to get out of the car, invade the lawn, Molly's territory, examining the poppies--their doubleness, their tripleness? And how did she manage to start talking about this man over on the island who's always there, no matter when she goes over, telling people about the whales that are feeding and mating out in the icy bay? She wasn't invited. Two summers ago, when she first rented the cottage across the meadow for a week, she and Molly never even met, but the next summer, when Liz rented for a whole month, they had coffee together several times, and even this June, glad to see each other again, they'd exchanged visits, Liz being asked in to see the room Molly had fixed up for the baby she was about to have. Now it's August, and Liz is lonely enough to pack up and go home, but the couple she sublet her apartment to in Cambridge won't be moving out till just before Labor Day. Exile--that's what it feels like: exile. She can't go home again, at least not yet. A mistake to commit herself to stay here for so long, expecting to get so much done that she couldn't do at home: reading, writing, sorting out her head. Two more weeks; then she'll go stay with friends. Only, which friends? She'd thought she might stay with George. "At first I thought this guy was a tour guide," Liz explains, and Molly's pale brown eyes gaze past her, hopelessly. "There was a tour bus down in the parking area--you know, where you park for the lighthouse." "I don't remember," Molly says. "I haven't been over there in years." The lighthouse on the island is only twelve miles away, and you can drive to it over a bridge. Molly has lived in this little Maine town her entire short life, a case of cultivating her own garden, Liz decides. The island is in Canada, a foreign country. "Then I thought he was someone hired by the Canadian government..." The fan that cools the VW's engine comes on; to reassure Molly, she left the motor running. "But now..." Molly's attention has contracted to a pinpoint, about the diameter of her pupils. She's tired, she wants to get back to her weeding. Liz knows she should let her off the hook. Instead, she gets reckless, was already reckless, reckless and perverse. "I think he's there all day, every day," she says. There, like the lighthouse, even on days when she herself is not, when she is mowing her own vast lawn (part of the rental agreement). "Granted," Liz continues, "I came to this conclusion on the basis of only two sightings..." She's about to explain that the first time, she didn't actually see the man, merely overheard him, but that is when sympathy finally wins and she almost cries, "Oh, Molly, forgive me, I'm not really like this. I'll be myself again as soon as I get back to Boston." For Molly is gazing in despair at the muddy toes of her sneakers. "What do you suppose would make a man want to do that?" Liz finishes, and Molly comes to life again after only a very short silence, which nevertheless is not a decent interval. "Oh," she says, "I found that clipping for you. I finally got around to clearing off the dining table, and that's where it was." And she bounds off across the lawn on tan young legs and disappears into her house. Liz goes back to the car and switches the ignition off, to ensure that Molly will come back out. It's a long wait. Maybe the baby woke up or Molly got a phone call. Liz wanders around the yard, examining the piles of weeds and the flowering plants: the poppies, hollyhocks. In early July there were lupines, swatches of purple, of white, of pink growing wild here and on the island. There were irises in Molly's garden, deeper violet than the lupines, with a bright yellow beard that reminded Liz of a caterpillar, the way it cleaved fuzzily to the petal, nosing toward the blossom's heart. Molly thrust a bouquet of those irises into Liz's arms. But that was July. And then Timmy was born. Molly has been in the house for so long that all Liz's courage has drained away, leaving her prey to gravity, as if she might sink down upon the lawn, sink down to her knees. She should go away, mind her own business, or else offer something genuine--baby-sitting, the use of her car. Cut her lawn? She's got a husband. Empty gestures, since not from the heart. Week before last, when they met at the mailboxes that are twinned together at the roadside on one pole--careless, not thinking, altogether on impulse, Liz said the fatal words: "Come have coffee." Dismay struck Molly's face like an instant frost. "I mean, when you have time..." Molly's features had thawed as swiftly as they'd frozen, but Liz doesn't forget. She isn't to be bought with a radiant smile. "I just don't have any time," Molly apologized, but Liz couldn't forgive her for that, either. "I never knew a baby was going to take up so much time." Liz could have persisted, said to bring Timmy along, but she wasn't that cruel, nor so kind as to make the only offers that would count. As she strode back down the driveway with the one letter she'd received from the larger world, she had remem-bered her own mother--in her late middle-age, ten years older than Liz was now--saying, "Come visit me, dear, when you're not too busy," her voice quavery, lonely. Liz remembered her own outrage. "For God's sake, don't put it like that. I want to see you!" But from then on, not wanting to in quite the same way and never quite forgiving her: the sweet milk curdled. "Here," Molly says, behind Liz, suddenly, and the poppy cupped in Liz's hand breaks off. Of course. "Look what I did!" Liz cries. "I'm so sorry!" Molly's flourishing the article, neatly trimmed around the edges. Maybe she was in the house for so long because she was trying to find the scissors. "You can float it in a bowl," Molly says. "Here, listen to this." It's the article she told Liz about at the beginning of the summer, a short account of how some people, heedless of the sign warning in both English and French about strong currents and swiftly rising tides, had tried to wade back across the sand bar from the lighthouse and been swept off their feet, out into the bay, "’from which it was their good fortune to be rescued by a passing pleasure boat,’" says Molly, and Liz wonders why she is reading this to her, then knows:It is so Liz will take in that phrase, take it to town on her tongue: "a passing pleasure" and "a passing pleasure...boat." She can hear it already, how it will come at odd moments, like a line of poetry, Coleridge or someone, not even anybody she would read, except to teach: how it will drift through her mind when no better words will come, be one of those phrases she says aloud when she is alone too much, like "Defense de fumer" from the Paris Metro. Molly hands her the clipping. "Let me pick you some of those. They don't last very long, but I've got so many...." Her hand-pruners materialize from beneath a pile of weeds and she goes around the garden, snipping poppies and more poppies, forgetting, Liz guesses, that Liz was on her way to town. The hawk tucked in its fierce brown-striped head as it banked--a marsh hawk, Liz thought it was, a small hawk; she would look it up in the Audubon guide. She trusted photos more than drawings. She always brought the bird guide with her, even though she wasn't the kind of bird-watcher who sought out new sightings. There were ospreys and eagles. In Florida, in the Keys, she had seen ospreys nesting atop the concrete utility poles, but here she had yet to see a nest. Remote birds, keeping to themselves. The hawk dived, leveled out, skimmed across the meadow, barely clearing the pink spears of fireweed--pale, this year, not the strong magenta they had been last year and the year before that. Yesterday she had tracked a great blue heron that flew up over the alders from the pond to roost in a dead tree on Molly's and Nick's land. Ungainly birds, lumbering into the air with such a flapping, the long, awkward legs still dangling, not yet retracted. She had almost hit the one that erupted from the marsh as she drove into town with George. A month ago already. The long legs had barely cleared the hood of the car. The hawk was spiraling up now over Molly's house, circling her front yard. Molly was out weeding again. Every spare moment. She and Nick had planted apple trees. She was not weeding. She was simply kneeling there, her face red and bloated from weeping. "La plage est exposée seulement à la marée basse..." The sign is red, as a warning sign should be. The warning in French takes eleven more words than the terse English version and not just because of all the articles and reflexive verbs, either. "...vous pourriez vous retrouver coincé..." It is more complicated to be stranded in French, somehow less passive, more personal--something really happening to you, a hint of being cornered. All summer Liz has been meaning to climb down the red metal ladder attached to the cliff and go across to the second island, maybe even to the third with its lighthouse straight off a postcard, white with red trim, the same red as the ladder zigzagging its way up the opposite cliff. If she wanted to, she could do it today. The lower rungs are still free of the swirling green water; the narrow connecting beach is still getting wider. He's here again, the whale expert, sitting on the knoll above, on grass as bright as moss after rain; it looks as soft; the listeners are grouped below him like disciples. There seems something not quite relaxed about him, though he sits forward in apparent ease, with grace, his arms loosely hugging his shins (blue jeans, green T-shirt today). But it is conscious ease and grace, a posture; his face is too impassive. She could be wrong. She may just imagine it. She caught him out of the corner of her eye just before she took the path toward the sign. He has sandy hair, is of medium build, a man in the youth of his middle age, his face sun-weathered like a fisherman's. "Vous circulez à vôtre risque," the sign ends. It begins: "Hazard Extrême." "They winter off the coast of South America," he's saying, just as he did the last time. Her toe stubs against something on the path, a tree root growing across. Hurts more than she would've thought. "They follow the Gulf Stream..." Swimming all that way singly or in pods? She stands before the sign. A long journey for a lone whale, thousands of miles. On Sunday, a young man sitting below her on the outcrop said he was in the Navy, on a submarine. He'd heard whales on the sonar, their bleeps and whistling. Their singing. There were tapes of whales, but she would never buy a tape--it wouldn't be the same as hearing them in person, though if she ever mentioned it to George, next thing she knew he'd be getting her one. He's a good man, and she ought to be nicer to him. She doesn't want to be nice to anybody. "I've been in the Navy for seventeen years," the young man had gone on, and she remembers the odd, sudden pang--like pity. He was not as young as she'd thought, though his profile was youthful. Everybody is beginning to look young to her. Just this summer. Something draining out of her--judgment, stature. Something replacing it--feeling limited, unsure, mortal, like losing a language, not knowing it any longer, which is different from never knowing, different from before you learned. Isolation is dissolving all her attributes, and it hasn't been worth it; she has nothing to show for it; she is not even sure that she has endured. "Se retrouver"--to find oneself again, to find each other again, to find one's way. She had liked that and then, in sudden irritation, thought: Why one word and not another? "He was right down there `bout noontime," the whale expert says. That would have been at high tide. Almost low tide now. A man and a woman are climbing down the ladder, the last few rungs, coming across. The man stops to skip a few stones, the woman waits. Then they proceed across the isthmus, are lost to sight. Their voices rise from below. The ladder rattles. "There!" she hears, from behind her, and turns around to see where he's pointing. "There he is!" The tourists, as a group, raise their binoculars. When her husband gave her the binoculars, that last Christmas, he made a big point of what good ones they were. Zeiss. He didn't tell her she was still going to be paying for them at Easter, after he'd left. They were supposed to help her watch birds. Supposed to distract her from watching him, was more like it, though he'd overestimated her attention, overestimated her persistence in following moving objects. Looking out at the bay from the cottage's upstairs window, trying to see some waterfowl, she always gets first the alders below the window, then the town across the cove (hill of white houses where she knows not a soul, though the produce man in the market calls her "dear"). Today she saw a woman in her backyard hanging out laundry--sheets, towels, jeans that looked like men's. She could even see the clothespins in her quick hands, their pinch and spread, like opening beaks. But as for the ducks, or whatever they were--cormorants, maybe loons?--they were too small. They bobbed, they eddied. She kept losing them as soon as she found them, heard them better than she could see them, their wings beating the water as they bathed: cards slowly shuffled. She had not taken George over to the island. She had taken him down to the beach, her beach, a cobble beach. There was a way of walking on a cobble beach, and he didn't have the knack of it. You had to walk lightly, swiftly, a fluid distribution of weight--heel, toe--as if you walked not on the stones but on the pockets of air between them. He had stumbled and fallen, rolling like a bear. "Sugar!" He would utter no obscenity. Of course it made her swear more than she normally would. She knelt beside him, asking if he was hurt, but it was an act consid-ered, and the delay was not lost on him. "My ankle--I think it's sprained." She helped him get to his feet, saying, "Lean on my shoulder." She never meant so heavily. He always seemed to take her more than literally, and she knew she never meant to give as much as she offered, so there was always this discrepancy. Anyway, he was a huge man. "I need a stick," he had said, and on his face, as he looked around, up and down the beach, as if conjuring a stick for her to fetch him, was the same expression of distaste, even disdain, that she had seen the evening before, when at dusk he arrived. The sun had been setting, the clouds purple and magenta, the darker clouds mimicking the shapes of the islands, their edges lit a coppery cerise. She had led him inside, for him to see, from every window, a view of a different portion of the sky. And had surprised on his face that look: nose wrinkling, nostrils all but vellicating. "It smells damp in here," he said. "Is there water in the basement?" Later on, he said, "For this cabin, you sublet your apartment till when?" There was no stick, only the skeleton of a spruce tree, someone's Christmas tree, the branches stubbed off, protruding like spokes. It was half-buried in the stones, festooned with dry kelp. She could imagine him using it as a cane, stumping along, and a nasty little snicker caught in her throat. She stooped suddenly to pick up a rosy scallop shell for her collection, and he lost his balance, nearly went down again, crying, "Damn you! Why did you do that?" As if he didn't know. "If you're going to do it again, next time warn me!" She should have warned him not to come up here. Well, she had; he came anyway. In the car, as she drove him to the medical center, his hand rested on her thigh, so that when the heron erupted from the marsh, for an instant it was as if the heaviness of his hand were in the air, in the long, heavy legs that folded themselves up only at the last minute as they cleared the hood. When she leans into the raspberries that grow along the road where everybody parks when the cul-de-sac is full, the binoculars swing forward into the canes, as if there were a magnet hidden in the thorns. The berries are filmed with dust; they taste of earth and then, when you get past that flavor, tartly sweet. A woman walking up the road with her husband stops. "What are you picking? My husband said blueberries, but I said, no, blueberries up here grow down low." The husband is walking on, a stately retreat. "Raspberries," Liz says, not smiling because her teeth might be red or have seeds stuck between them. "Try one." She squeezes between the cars' bumpers, offering the berry on her palm as on a plate. The hand is red-stained, even slightly muddy. She has on old jeans, as usual, a T-shirt a neighbor in Cambridge gave her that says "M.I.T." Her hair is growing out salt and pepper brown, though there isn't a distinct line where the dye ends. Why dye? This lady looks very crisp, not to mention clean, like somebody who goes to the hairdresser every week, if not more often; hair is not naturally that shade of red this late in life, if ever. So--a female of another species altogether. Still, shouldn't she be able to control that recoil, that involuntary step backward as Liz emerges from between the cars? The way she picks up the berry: as if her fingers were tweezers. "Thank you." She hurries up the road, calling, "Jerry, wait! I've got something for you." "A berry for Jerry," Liz hears herself muse. She's supposed to be a poet. Today he has no disciples. He stands a little back from the cliff's edge, his arms folded. Stands, looking out across the water as if he already saw something--Nova Scotia? It's his stillness. People stop. They don't know what he's looking at. Paying no attention to them, he begins. "Look over there to the right of that rock, there, with the cormorant on it, you'll see three whales." Everybody looks, Liz included. Someone asks, "How do you know where they'll be?" He replies, preposterously, "I hear 'em." She doesn't want him to be a charlatan. "I hear them when they spout." That makes her feel better instantly, just as when the young sailor, the one who'd heard the whales from his submarine, said, "This is the wife." She was glad he had a wife. He had swiveled around so his back was to the drop-off, and she'd wished his wife would tell him not to sit like that, but the wife, invisible behind the rocks, said nothing; she must have been sitting down there with the whale expert. It would be a long way to fall--thirty, forty feet. "She drove up to meet me in Halifax," the sailor had continued. "Four months ago, she met me in Bethesda." Every time he had a week or so in port, she would come to meet him if she could. "So it isn't true, what you hear about sailors--how they've got a girl in every port." And the wife's laughter rose, joining his. "He's got the same girl," she said. "Keeps me busy traveling around, I can tell you." "Sort of like a whoosh," the whale expert says. "Different sounds for different kinds of whales." The blowholes are different shapes, he says, as if that explains the different sounds. Liz has seen enough of him by now to know that he always uses the same words, the same phrases. He is not a guide, so what is he? Does he come here for the same reason she does? He must have a home but evidently doesn't want to be in it. She would like to ask him: Is this a penance? The three whales are finbacks. Again. "If you look real close, you'll see the fin." Liz gets the binoculars focused, sees a fin--quite far back on the body, near the tail, which you don't see. These are big whales, the biggest--sixty, seventy feet, though they look miniature, the size of porpoises, the bay is so vast. There are boats out there again too, boats full of whale watchers. Pleasure boats. The whales seem to have no fear of them but surface at will, a smooth, rolling glide, the dive implicit as they break through the water, spouting. Those plumes that appear so delicate must be as powerful as geysers, gallons of water raining back into the ocean. Liz is waiting for one of the whales to come up under a boat, waiting for something to happen. Gone, George had infested her dreams for a month, weighing upon her conscience, like Molly's weeping. Not an isolated occurrence, that splotchy face, but what was to be done about it? Liz wanted to watch marsh hawks, not know these things. She must offer to baby-sit. Years, decades since she'd held a baby. Like riding a bike, she told herself; you didn't forget. Molly and Nick must get out--go to dinner, go to Calais or Milbridge and see a movie. She must offer. They might not take her up on it. Looking through the binoculars makes her feel off-balance, and she can't help wishing she had someone to place a hand on her arm, to steady her. She had to go sit down on the grass after a child bumped into her, ran into her, chased by his sister, the mother calling, "Christopher and Hilary, stop that running." But no apology. "You're going to fall over the cliff," the mother yelled at them, and Liz said, not all that quietly, "Good," though she was also admiring their recklessness, their energy, their high color, their cheeks reddened by wind and running. Their coloration seems almost too brilliant, too rich--their glossy dark hair, olive complexions--unnatural, almost, like the colors of flowers that grow here along the coast, ordinary flowers--phlox, petunias, Molly's poppies, her irises. It's the salt in the air that makes the flowers glow like that, Molly told her, back in June, before she turned into Molly's nemesis. She avoids Molly, making it a point not to go out to the mailbox if she sees Molly working in her front yard. Forwarded bills. Magazines that, without her requesting a change in address, have nevertheless gone ahead and made the change, no forwarding necessary. The occasional postcard--that's all Liz gets anyhow, nothing interesting, though sometimes the postcards have been interesting:she got two from her daughter, who did a medical rotation in Florence, of all places; the postcards arrived six weeks after they were mailed, like light from stars. And yesterday there was a note from George, saying the ankle was just about as good as new and he hoped she was being careful, if she was still walking on that treacherous beach, because if she should fall and break a leg down there, it might be days before anyone found her. He added that this concern was strictly for her welfare and cautioned her against any misinterpretation as wish fulfillment, which would be so like her. He concluded with the hope that she'd gotten somebody in to have a look at the cellar, to see if she had a lake down there. This can't go on. She sits bolt upright in the rocker, feet planted on the hooked rug that Molly made, back when she had time to do things like that, crafts and hobbies. Nick and Molly have been gone for at least five minutes, and Liz is still afraid to move. The baby lies across her thighs, where Molly placed him. What a strangely inert weight--so warm; heavy little head the size of a grapefruit; either his neck is sweating or it's her own hand. She has never sat in this rocking chair before and doesn't trust it. If she lost her center of gravity, she might rock backwards and Timmy roll out of her lap, up and over her chest and shoulders, yes, if her feet lost contact for so much as a second. "Christ!" she says, wishing it were over already. The baby stiffens at the sound of her voice. But he's a lively body now, not that dead weight, and her hand automatically finds a more natural way to support the head. She begins to relax, hoping Molly hadn't seen the panic (though would she have cared? So eager to be gone, the two of them, going to meet friends for dinner). In the refrigerator is a bottle half-full of breast milk for Timmy. Queer-looking bottle, not glass. Soft plastic. She bends forward and in a burst of courage hoists Timmy up against her shoulder. The burp position, her mother's generation called it, but already, in her own, you set the baby on your lap, your hand against the midriff, and rubbed the back. She hasn't forgotten. "Don't spit up," she tells Timmy, not ready for that yet. Not yet. "Wait till I've calmed down a little more and had my dinner, OK?" The peanut butter sandwich in her purse has one bite taken out of it. She got back from the island late. Things she knows by now: he has a red pickup truck with a canopy; he drives faster than the speed limit, stirring up great clouds of dust. She lost him just as they reached the village, he speeding on, probably turning off somewhere, she creeping along at the sedate 50 kilometers prescribed by the signs. The oblivious dog that had been there earlier, sleeping in the road when she drove past, was still there, in the shade cast by a rowan tree. Some day someone would run over him, thinking he was already dead. Both times, he raised his head to look, then laid his chin on his paws again. If she lived here, she would have to have a dog, though even a dog, even someone of your own, a mate, a husband, a family might not be enough. What a coward she has turned out to be. She rocks back, resting her head against Timmy's, wondering whether, if she put him back in his crib, he would start crying again. "Two females and a male," the whale expert announces, and a stout woman near where Liz is sitting laughs and says loudly, "Wouldn't you know!" She wears brown-tinted glasses and a red bandana, tied under her chin the way hardly anybody does anymore. "Those kids," she goes on. "They got my dog all excited, running around like that. "Max!" she bellows. "I mean, hell, I've raised my kids and I don't want to have to put up with someone else's, right?" They're different kids, not the ones who were here the other day. "Right," Liz murmurs, looking around for the dog, which comes scrabbling down from the outcrop. An old dog, brown and white water spaniel. His wet nose is cold against her ankle. "Max, sit!" He settles briefly on the toe of Liz's sneaker, thumping his tail against the grass. Five, six thumps. Liz pats his neck; he gets up and wanders off. The woman seems not to notice. "It's not that I've got anything against kids per se, but I believe in discipline. Mine always minded. Didn't yours?" "Oh, always." "Right. I'd tell 'em, `Cut that out.' hey did or they got what-for." Liz watches Max sniff at the tree root that grows across the path, then trot back and over to the sign, against one of whose posts he relieves himself. "When I hear all this on TV about not spanking," the woman goes on, "and you get it in the magazines too, I have just one comment: What a bunch of b.s." Liz tips her head back, massages the back of her neck, where it still aches, as if she's been wearing a yoke, though she took off the binoculars at least half an hour ago. She doesn't have to say anything. This woman wants to talk; she has that eagerness as if she hasn't spoken to anybody except maybe Max for the last month, and Liz figures she owes her, owes somebody, owes the world; maybe it all evens out. She lets the woman tell her where she's from (St. Andrews), asks if she's on vacation (she is), questions that keep her from asking Liz anything, not that she would. Finally Liz asks if this is the first time she's been here to watch the whales. She says yes, so Liz tells her about the lone whale that was here, last time, and the woman says, "Well, they need a dating service, don't they?" Liz, on her best behavior, laughs. Then she's had enough. She offers the binoculars. "Would you like to try these?" "They're no use to me. I'm blind in one eye." Liz blurts, "I think I always close one eye anyway." "Where'd my dog go?" the woman says, suddenly. "Where's Max?" "Maybe with the children..." Liz begins, but she's gone, heading down the path to the parking area, though Liz is sure Max never went past them. She watches the whale expert. His blue T-shirt flutters in the wind, his sandy hair blows straight back. She's never going to know what his story is, why he comes here, where he goes. It's a while before she hears the dog barking, faintly: bursts of sound that gust with the wind. She doesn't even know where it's coming from until someone she can't see calls, "There's a dog down there!" The groups of whale watchers look toward the lighthouse, one motion, like a school of fish turning, and then they're running over, beyond the sign, beyond where the red ladder goes down. Liz ambles over to the edge of the crowd and asks someone what kind of dog is down there. "Is it a spaniel?" It is. "Is he hurt?" Doesn't seem to be. The trouble is, the tide's coming in. People are whistling and calling, "Here, boy!" Liz edges in, so she can see what's going on. It's Max, all right. He's running back and forth in the middle of the beach between the islands, now an island in itself. Just the crown is still dry, over by the island; the rest is awash with water that looks shallow, but it laps together, the strong currents crossing each other and angling out in a visible riptide. "That's Max," Liz says. "How'd he get down there? Doesn't look like he fell." "Well, you'd better go get him before he gets swept out," a man says. "Me!" Liz yelps. The dog's real owner pushes in beside Liz, panting and puffing, crying, "Oh, my God!" She goes down on her hands and knees, calling Max, who whines and wags his tail, barking. "He's going to drown," she wails. Liz tells her, "Nonsense!" A whole cliff-full of people isn't going to let a dog drown. "But he hates water," the woman says. "He's a water spaniel, but he can't stand water." "Look," Liz says, "he must've climbed down there somehow..." "Over there," someone says. "Over by the ladder." They go over to look. First there's a path, then the ladder, built out from the cliff, clearing boulders the last ice age must have sliced away, sharp rocks covered with kelp to the high-water mark, halfway up the cliff. The lowest are under water already; seaweed undulates on the surface. "If you can get him over here," a man tells the dog's owner, "then he can climb up the rest of the way." "Oh, no, he's an old dog. He can't climb." "He might've gotten down that way," Liz tells the man, "but he'd never make it up. His legs are too short." "Oh," cries the owner, "he can't even swim. He almost drowned once in a lake." Liz hears the tinge of hysteria as she shouts, "Doesn't anybody have a boat?" People look uncomfortable. They don't have a boat. They don't want to go down there and get Max. Liz doesn't see the whale expert, wonders where he went. "Someone," she says, "will have to climb down." "I can't climb," the owner says. No one else seems willing, either. Liz thinks: Am I really going to have to do this--climb down those rungs, get my feet soaked, get swept out to sea with a 40-pound dog? She turns to the owner and says, "Where's his leash? Give me his leash. You've got a leash?" "It's in the car." "Well, go get it." The owner whispers, "All right," and hurries down the path, tripping on the tree root, catching herself. God knows how far away she had to park, somewhere down the road behind Liz. "You're going to go down after him?" a woman asks, in amazment. "I was hoping some man would volunteer." And a man has volunteered, for here comes the whale expert, up from the parking lot with a coil of rope. Max's owner trots along behind him as he heads for the dirt path, starts down the ladder. A cheer goes up, and there's a little light clapping, about what you'd hear at a tennis match. He's down the ladder in no time at all, climbing across rocks, slipping on seaweed. From the set of his shoulders as he strode through the crowd, Liz knows he didn't want to do this. Now the crowd swarms over to the cliff's other side and stands there, waiting for him to reappear. The sand bar has shrunk to maybe 3 feet wide, 6 feet long. You can see the water rising on the opposite cliff; it must be a couple of feet deep at the foot. "Max, darling, go with the man." Max sits down on his sand bar and howls. People laugh. The whale expert is wading through water that's halfway up his shins, but his jeans are wet above the knees. As he approaches Max, the dog gets up and starts forward, tail wagging; then he veers. He's down at the water's edge, lapping up seawater. A child says, "He's drinking the ocean." The whale expert collars him and ties on the rope, gives him a pat, tries to get him to come on. But Max isn't leaving dry land. The collar is pulling off over his head. People groan. The man backtracks, pushes down the collar, grabs the dog around the middle. Max squirms free; he runs into the water, the rope playing out. "Damn fool," Liz says. He is swimming in the shallow water, but you see the current. The whale expert plays him like a fish, reeling him in, dragging him forward. Then he's close enough; the man splashes in and grabs the dog. More cheering. Liz wishes she could see the expression on the whale expert's face. But she left the binoculars up on the grass. Now he's carrying the dog through the frigid water. Liz loses sight of him as he reaches the cliff. "I thought he was going to drown," says the owner. She dabs a tissue up under her glasses. People are laughing now--the relief--and they start to chat, to talk to one another. They are telling each other what they had thought was going to happen. Liz has seen this phenomenon before; she's remembering the first time, when she was a child. A couple of cars collided out in front of the house, nothing major, nobody hurt. It happened at dinner time; the whole street came out, and people didn't go back in when the cars drove off. They stood around on the sidewalk and the lawn for another quarter of an hour, telling each other what they'd feared had happened. They told it again and again, even though nobody was listening to anybody else. Even Liz's mother. She kept saying excitedly, "I'd just finished making the carrot salad, I was just about to put it on the table," until Liz's father, behind the two of them, his voice low and deadly, said, "If anybody cares..." and that stopped her mother short, shut her up; for that moment Liz despised her as a babbling fool. But then her mother said, "Well, all right for you, bub," and Liz marveled at her, at her resilience. Her father's voice hadn't quelled her; it had only insinuated itself into Liz's ear, vicious as a ferret, and gone in and killed her loyalty for one long instant. She moves off to find the binoculars. They're still there; Liz almost wishes they'd been stolen. From the knoll, she watches the frantic reunion, the dog who was saved in spite of himself. It's so easy for a dog, Liz thinks, as people clap the hero on the back. He walks on, immune to acclaim. His clothes are soaked and muddy, his arms are scratched. Going home to change--at last he has a reason. He lopes by, water squishing in his sneakers. A glance. The first time he's ever looked at her, and she doesn't even feel seen. Her heart lifts anyway; she finds that miraculous. A shamefaced look, eyes averted instantly. Still, it included her, if only as a witness.
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