Page 78 of The Captain
“Politely,” she said.
“With form,” I said.
“With flourish,” she agreed. “I will use my nice words first.”
I smiled, small and mean. It helped.
Miguel’s voice floated in from the pen aisle. “She’s rolling her left eye. Good sign. I’m easing the shade another foot.”
“Ease,” I called back.
Look at us. Eating minutes.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Not McGuire. Ryker:We’re working it.
I stared at the words like they had personally wronged me. Then I put the phone face down on the counter and covered it with my palm.
The bottlenose in the big pen exhaled, a wet sigh like a storm giving up. The sound reached through concrete and peeled me open. Grief tried to ride on the back of relief.
I didn’t let it. Not yet.
If the radio stayed silent, the shape of my next hours was already written. I’d keep these animals alive because I promised them I would, and I would do all the ridiculous domestic things that keep a human from pulling herself apart in public. I would tuck towels into neat stacks. I would rearrange the electrolytecooler by label color. I would wipe down the whiteboard. I would not go to the conference room. I would not ask the gray suit for a single thing.
And if—No. When.
When the call came back, if it came back wrong, I knew the exact way guilt would try to colonize me.
“Don’t,” I told the thought, out loud. “Not now.”
The Kogia’s eye slid closed and opened again, slow, like a sleepy child deciding to try. I rubbed that crescent of skin behind it. “Good,” I said. “Stay with me.”
Then: “Dammit, Jacob,” I said into the calf’s skin, quiet enough to pass for prayer. “Respire. You promised.”
My hands wanted to lift and shake things you can’t shake: the ocean. The Navy. The Russian shadow with edges wrong. The person in me who signed yes after yes.
“Camille,” Becca said, soft in the doorway. She didn’t come in. She held up a printout instead—the lactate trending down from the hour I had missed. “Thought you’d want to see.”
I took it. I did want to see. The tiny decimals steadied me more than any general ever would.
“Merci,” I said. She stood a second longer, then went, leaving the door ajar.
I bent, put my cheek against the calf’s side, and let the temperature of another life remind me mine was still being lived. The skin gave a fraction, the way a body yields to a trusted weight. It’s a dangerous thing, that giving. It teaches you to stay when everything else tells you to run.
My mind made a loop of what I would say to Jacob when he walked back through whatever door men like him use to return. I would sayI’m not asking you to stop being what you are. I’m asking you to tell the water my name before you go in.
It was torture, what I was going through. Pure torture.
The gray suit could have the conference room. The Navy could have the screen glow and the words that don’t say what they mean. The ocean could have its secrets for one more hour.
These two bodies in my care were going to keep breathing, and the man who put a charger behind my nightstand was going to come back and complain about my coffee, and when he did, I was going to kiss him in the doorway and tell him I was still mad.
I leaned close to the blowhole and let the mist collect on my wrist. “Breathe,” I said again, softer. “Encore.”
The calf answered the only way she could. She took a breath.
I did, too.
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