The wind pushed in ahead of her when she opened the door, its monotone roar filling the silence of the empty bar. It was a winter weekday and almost closing time. Her hair was blown sideways, and she flattened it with her palms and sat down.
“How are you,” he said. She said nothing, just tilted her head and smiled that old small smile. He felt stupid immediately and remembered how conversations with his older sister had left him feeling stupid his entire life. “Get you a drink?”
She was quiet still, in what seemed a new and separate silence. He wondered if she was pondering how many people he’d asked that question to over the years. She finally nodded then opened her mouth slowly, as if her lips had been glued, and said, “Gin and tonic. If you had to ask.”
He almost made a smart-assed remark about how people could change but stopped himself. Instead, he nodded back and went to work. Glass, ice, quick pour of gin, press the tonic button, slide the drink across the wood. She lifted it, swirled it gently, then drank about half in one long pull.
“I came in to talk, Gerard,” she said. “This seemed the right day. Anniversary of Mom and Dad’s deaths, you know.” He wanted to tell her that of course he knew that but thought she’d use the comment to insult him somehow. They hadn’t spoken since the funeral a year ago. She finished the rest of her drink and tapped the rim. He refilled it, this time with no ice, no soda, just gin to the brim. She shifted in her seat, not yet ready.
“I miss you,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I did. But that’s something you say to an ex-lover, not your brother.”
“I’m serious. We’re the closest blood we got left.” She drank. “You ever stop and really think about it?”
“Think about what?”
“About how you sit here, filling drinks in a Nantucket bar, how I sit in a cubicle in Boston. We go about our days. Like humans all over. Just living. But stretch back and think about our ancestors.”
He knew what she was referring to.
“So what? People used to club mammoths, too, Nicky. What’s it matter?”
“No. It’s different. This was practically yesterday. You’re worried about this. I’m worried about that. The earth is dying, flooding all the time. The fish are fewer. But our ancestors used to bounce over the chop of the wave beside something that was as great a beast as you can imagine.” She paused, letting her head drop a little. “At least that’s how they saw it then. Now we know it’s fragile, just another mammal. Needs air and clear water, like us. Even needs peace and quiet, too. Did you know that? That noise bothers whales?” Gerard just stared at her. “No? Well, anyway, our ancestors risked life and limb to kill them, then rendered them down to light their homes. And now we worry about our electric bill and our retirement and our car payment and our kids’ college fund.”
“Neither of us have kids.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s sad?”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know.”
He knew Nicky had always wanted kids, but she was forty-nine now. “What was it you came to talk about?”
She took a moment to respond. He wondered if she was thinking about the kids comment.
“Well. I’m not bringing up whales for no reason. You remember that day when we were kids? We never really talked about it.”
He did. It wasn’t true that they had never talked about it, that day out in their flat-bottomed rowboat, when the water was oddly calm and the whale lifted them on its back and then set them back down. Of course, they told their parents and they told their friends. What they didn’t really talk about was what they had seen in the eye of the whale.
When the boat was in the air, after the whale surfaced, Gerard and Nicky leaned over the side together. The eye was visible above the water. Whales rarely blink, but this one did, slowly. And when the eye re-opened, it was different—thinly veiled by a viscous substance. Within it, they both saw the same thing. A glimmer. A hazy hint and then a clear scene, a memory. There in the eye of the whale.
“I remember,” he said. “It’s not really possible, though.”
“What isn’t?”
“That we could see the same memory. Or any memory, really.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? I’ve looked into the eye of quite a few creatures and I’ve never seen a memory.”
“Those weren’t whale eyes, and it wasn’t like this.”
They’d both seen sperm whales growing up, but this wasn’t a sperm whale. The week after they saw it, they found a whale book in the library and learned that it was a Bowhead. Bowheads live to an unknown age, possibly longer than two centuries. And they weren’t even supposed to be near Nantucket. They live in the Arctic, and they have a thick skull they use to break sea ice.
“You saw it too. That whale had a memory, showed it to us somehow. We both saw it.”
He didn’t reply at first but she just kept staring at him.
“Alright,” he said.
“I’ve thought about it for the last thirty years. What he was trying to tell us.”
“He?”
She ignored him.
“What was that whale doing there?”
“How should I know?”
“I think he was there because of us.”
“What?”
“That whale may have been over two hundred years old. We saw him in, what, 1986? I think he was there in the early 1800s. I think that whale knew the truth about why Marvin went missing.”
Marvin was their grandfather’s grandfather and had gone missing at sea sometime in the mid-1800s. Gerard knew that much. The family thought at first that he was lost at sea, as the rest of his crew had disappeared, but then they heard rumors from another sailor who said he’d seen someone who looked like Marvin at a port in South America. The family legend was that Marvin abandoned them. It was a common thing for sailors then. But they didn’t know for sure whether Marvin was dead or if he’d run away. As a kid, Gerard thought that Marvin disappearing into South America was romantic. He thought that Marvin dying at sea seemed weak. He felt differently as he grew older.
He shook his head. “You think the whale knew Marvin.”
“Is that so crazy? Maybe the whale was… I don’t know, apologizing? Or trying to explain something…” She looked down into her drink. A surge of wind rattled the door, as if someone outside were trying to get in. “I know it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t really matter what happened to Marvin, doesn’t really matter what we saw. I’m not trying to convince you to do a fucking interview with the local paper, not trying to say we have a real-life Moby Dick story. I’m not concerned about who knows. It’s enough that I do. And I know you do too.” She paused. “That’s why I’m here. We’re the only two who know, Gerard. Just us. You said that day that you saw what I saw but then you wouldn’t really talk about it. I need to know. I need to know that you saw it. Tell me, Gerry. Tell me.”
She was struggling. She’d been more than half drunk when she came in and now she was all the way there. She blinked slowly, as if she were on the verge of sleep, and slumped forward onto her elbows. He wondered if she were about to cry.
Of a sudden she slammed the glass down on the bar. It cracked, and the last bit of gin seeped out through the thin seam. He reached for the rag to wipe it, and she grabbed his wrist.
“Goddammit.”
“Okay,” he said. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
He told her. In the whale’s eye he saw Marvin’s body, lying flat on what was left of the wreckage of a ship. The sea was still, and the boards Marvin floated on were half submerged so that it appeared he was held up by surface tension alone. Almost hovering. The whale had shown them as clear as if he’d spoken.
“How could that whale have shown us that, Nicky? Don’t you think it was just because we were out at sea and in shock? Maybe his disappearance had just been on both of our minds that day for some reason. Besides, we didn’t even know what Marvin looked like and somehow we both thought it was him?”
She was crying now.
“Why do you do this, Gerard?”
“Do what?”
“You’ve never trusted what your own eyes tell you. You spent your life more afraid of that than the ocean. Afraid of the ocean and your own eyes and you never leave this island.”
Her hand still gripped his wrist. He looked down at it for a moment and then pulled away.
“You think that just because a tragedy happened we gotta talk about it,” he said. “Why does everyone want to show their tragedy to the world? Used to be that pretty much all cruelty went by unrecorded. Even now, the bulk of it still slips by. Despite all the stories you see in the news. You think yours, ours is special? That we need to add it to the mix? Why?”
He had been looking at her but turned his face down while he spoke. When he finished, he lifted his chin and tried to hold her gaze.
“You don’t think it matters?” she finally said. “We thought something about him, our parents did, everyone did. Our family was bold until he disappeared, we crossed oceans and were hunters, adventurers, and then we shriveled up and spent a century drunk, barely hanging on. If we’d known the truth about Marvin, or if you and I had told the truth after that day, then things could have been different with Mom and Dad, too. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have always been so goddamn paranoid that Dad would leave if her family story wasn’t that a man did that? Maybe she and Dad would have stayed together? Or hell, maybe she would’ve picked someone else, someone better. All sorts of things might’ve been different, and you think it doesn’t matter? Or that I’m just trying to bring up a tragedy? A fucking whale tried to bring us peace and we ignored it. But whatever.”
She lurched up, knocking the metal stool over behind her. It crashed against the oak floor, like a blunt axe bouncing off firewood. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I just needed to know,” she said. “Needed to know. I won’t bring it up again.”
“Wait,” Gerard said. “Hold on.”
She waved a hand at him but didn’t turn, wobbling through the door and out into the rain. The wind was roaring now, and the rain was big and sideways. As a child, he had always been the one to stay inside during storms, and now he watched her go, unable to move.