Page 47 of The Captain
“Keep people back. Don’t pour water. Don’t roll her. Hands on, gentle, keep her upright and the blowhole clear. I’m inbound.” I glanced at the skiff’s wake, then at my father. “Tamika’s with the calf. Becca and Miguel are standing by at thefacility. Can you ride with me to the bridge and then peel off to the pen?”
“I can,” Papa said, already moving. We jogged up the sand, wet shorts slapping, hearts thudding in the same old family meter.
At the truck, I shoved the short sling and blowhole shields back into the bin and grabbed what we had left: towels, an extra IV line, a soft kit that felt like the wrong size for what waited. Team thin. Everyone doing two jobs. I hated the arithmetic of it—the way need outnumbered bodies.
“Eli can pull the truck and go sit by your pen,” Papa said as I climbed behind the wheel. “I will follow the skiff.”
Eli wasn’t stranding-trained—his certs were welds and hoists, not whales—but he knew our place like his own hands and he loved being given a job. I wasn’t in a position to turn down an extra pair of eyes and a steady radio voice. He could sit a watch, count breaths, and call the second anything slid sideways.
“Call me if she dips,” I said. He knew which she I meant.
We split at the causeway. The drive to Kiawah ate time I didn’t have. Cycles of red lights and slow tourists in rented Jeeps. The kind of heat that makes asphalt smell like old anger. I ran the siren just long enough to make space, then killed it because I couldn’t stand adding noise to a day already loud with it.
“Seven–Delta, Allard,” I said into the mic. “Soft perimeter at Boardwalk 18, Kiawah. Keep drones down. I want phones low and bodies lower.”
Ryker’s answer came back fast. “Copy. Local PD already staged. We’ll float the line wider.”
“Thank you,” I said, because he’d earned it today.
Kiawah opened to me the way she always did—long, elegant, a little too careful with her pretty. The access lot was a snarl ofminivans and bikes and a lone golf cart. I left the truck crooked, flashers on, and ran the boardwalk with the sling over one shoulder, towels under my arm. People turned. Cameras dipped. The sea drew me forward by the scruff of my neck.
She was there in the swash. Adult bottlenose, big, skin rubbed raw on the flanks where the surf had taught her a lesson she didn’t need. No obvious prop scars. Old rake marks on the peduncle. Fresh abrasions around the jaw from bad hands trying to be helpful. The crowd had arranged itself into a ring of worry and ignorance. A firefighter in too much gear stood chest-deep and did his best to be a post.
“Thank you,” I told him as I waded in. “Stay with me.”
“Dr. Allard?” A woman in a straw hat at the line had tears on her face. “I follow you on socials.”
I wanted to be kind. I wanted to scream. I settled for, “Thank you for standing back.”
The surf hit mid-thigh like a slap that wanted to turn me. I took the energy, bent it under the animal’s belly. “Hi,” I said to her, nonsense voice, French, the only thing I could make gentle on a day like this. “Bonjour, ma belle. On va y arriver.”
Her eye was open and too still. My palm slid along her side. Warm under sand. The musk of breath at the blowhole when the next wheeze came. Respiration too fast. Pectoral tone low. The math in my head tried to be clinical. My chest tried to split.
“Get me an umbrella,” I called, and two men I would not have trusted with my groceries moved with useful hands, planting shade over her flanks. The firefighter adjusted his stance on the other side and we made a cradle out of ourselves and stubbornness.
“Rate is … high,” he said, eyes wide, counting out of habit.
“We’re going to keep her upright and keep the blowhole clear,” I said. “That’s what we are going to do.”
I slid the sling under her on the lift of the next wave, canvas whispering against skin. She flinched, then stilled. Her jaw trembled, just once. A dolphin who had nursed babies. The ridge of a mammary slit along the belly was tender, rubbed raw. My throat went tight with the knowledge that her calf was out there somewhere, calling into a water column I couldn’t fix. Or not out there at all.
A little boy on the sand asked if this was the same kind we saw jumping behind boats. His mother hushed him. I swallowed bile and said without looking up, “She’s tired, kiddo. We’re helping her rest.”
I was supposed to call for the long sling and a crew. I was supposed to triage with clear steps and a voice that calmed a crowd. Instead, I looked at her mouth, the line of it pulled wrong by effort, and I felt the whole machine in my brain hiccup.
How many times had we done this? How many times had we stood in a ring of noise and sun and tried to talk the ocean out of a decision it already made? How many times had I driven home shaking, scrubbed salt out of my hair in a shower that smelled like bleach and defeat, written a report with words like “likely cause” and “mitigating factor” while my clothes dripped on the tile?
I kept my hands moving because hands know what to do when hearts stall. “Up on the next lift,” I told the firefighter. “Let the water do the work. Don’t twist.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
We lifted with the wave and took the weight in that breathless beat before it fell. The world narrowed to sling, muscle, the slick weight of a life I could not promise anything to. I felt the edge of her pectoral vibrate under my fingers.
Tremor. Exhaustion. Pain.
“Breathe,” I told her, which was a stupid thing to say to a dolphin and an even stupider thing to hear in his voice. It cracked something open in me, anyway.
We kept her upright through three sets. Four. Six. The crowd’s noise faded to a low hum. A gull landed stupidly close and I wanted to snap its neck. I am not a violent person. Today I wanted to be.
