Page 148 of What You Wish For

I’m not even a praying person, but I prayed for the whale. I stood right there, ankle-deep in the waves, and I just prayed like hell for something good to come out of this day. For all this human kindness to amount to something. For somebody on this beach to get a happy ending.

Even if it was a fish.

Clay would later correct me with an eye roll and explain, again, that you can’t call a marine mammal a fish. “It’s insulting.”

But nomenclature aside, my praying worked.

Fine. Maybe I should give a little credit to the rescuers who actually cut the net away. Or the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Or the nine-year-old boy who started it all.

Just as I was starting to give up hope, the last piece of net came free.

There was no time to lose. The rescuers pushed a little bit on the whale’s tail to turn him, and get him facing back out to sea, and then they gathered behind him, and, on the count of three, they gave a shove from behind.

They might not have been able to do it on their own, but—onthree, just as they pushed, as if it was following the count, too—the whale lifted its flukes, pumped them down, and launched itself off toward the open water and disappeared beneath the surface.

We all stopped singing.

We all stood in awe—alone now, with just theshhof the waves.

An officer and a firefighter got knocked over, but they bobbed back up, laughing

And then, with nothing left to do, the whole beach erupted into cheers. Babette and I hugged. Clay and I hugged. Even Tina and I hugged. The teachers all hugged. The officers all hugged—and then they came to grab Clay and raise him up on their shoulders.

All the noise we’d been holding back all that time came erupting out, and we cheered, and jumped around, and waved our arms—completely exhausted and absolutely wired at the same time.

And then, just as we were winding down, Clay called out, “Look!” and we saw a set of flukes rise up out of the water, off near the brightening horizon.

And then we saw another set of flukes.

And then two more.

“It’s a pod of them,” Babette said.

“They were waiting for him,” Tina said.

“They’re waving at us,” Alice said then, waving back. Then we all waved, too.

“Do you think they’re saying thank you?” I asked.

But Clay shook his head, still on the shoulders of one of the medics. “Nah,” he said. “I think they’re saying goodbye.”

twenty-seven

Tina took Clay home after that, with plans to sleep for a week.

The police headed off, too—except for one car, waiting for Duncan to come back and wrap up the paperwork.

Before he left, he came to find me.

I was standing under the pier, pausing to gaze out at the water, waiting for my brain to catch up with everything that had happened.

He walked up to me with his hands in his pockets.

He swallowed when he saw me.

“You should go home, Duncan. Go to bed.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Crazy night.”

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