“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” says a voice nearby and I jump.
It’s Tal, Dad’s boss. He’s standing to my left, peering out at the water from under a bright blue cap with the compass logo of Seattle’s baseball team. He rocks back and forth on his heels, his hands in the pockets of his hiker shorts. The binoculars hanging around his neck bounce up and down with each move.
“I’d say there’s close to fifty boats out there and that’s just as far as I can see,” he continues, as if I’d answered. “Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s three times that number on up to Silverdale.” He takes off his cap, scratches his almost-bald head, then sets it right again. “What they ought to do is get a National Fisheries patrol boat out here. Keep people in line.”
I can’t tell if he sees me or he’s just talking out loud to himself. Either way, he doesn’t seem to care that I don’t answer.
“This keeps up, there’s gonna be trouble. Couple of years ago, up in the San Juans, I saw a guy try to smack a gray whale with an oar. And another bozo tried bouncing over the back of an orca on a water sled.”
Finally, he looks at me and squints.
“I’m flummoxed, so what would that make me?”
“Umm, confused? Or … worse than confused. Kind of like, unsure what to do next,” I say, glad this one was easy but also grateful for the distraction.
“Sentence?”
“Okay,” I pause. “She was flummoxed by her friend’s questions.”
“Marisa, Marisa, Marisa,” Tal says with a grin. “I’m seriously going to have to ramp up the level of difficulty.”
Just then, a big gray and white dog ambles down from the row of houses above the beach. He greets Tal like he knows him, his curved tail wagging.
“Is this your dog?” I ask, surprised. I’ve never seen Tal bring a dog with him down at Mud Bay.
“Yep, this is Mut,” he says. “He’s quite old. And yes, he’s a mutt, but we spell it with one ‘t’ like the Germans do. Not that you’ll be writing him any letters.” He bends down and tugs at Mut’s wiry little beard. “Are you trying to finagle something from me, you silly dog?” Tal looks up at me questioningly, but I frown. “One to look up,” he says, smiling.
“I always wanted a dog, but my mom is allergic.” I bend down to scratch Mut behind his soft ears. “I had a great cat though. Her name was Blackberry. But she got lost when we moved. Or ran away. We’re not sure. My dad thinks maybe she got scared and then couldn’t find her way back to a new place. Or she might’ve snuck into somebody’s garage and couldn’t get out when they closed it.”
I’m doing that thing when you’re nervous and you talk too much.
“We put up signs. I looked for her for a long time. Now sometimes I forget what it was like having her around at all.…”
My voice trails off and an awkward silence settles between us. Why am I telling him all this? It’s not even what I’m really feeling, which is that if Mom hadn’t left, we’d never have moved and Blackberry would still be around.
“I know what that’s like,” Tal says, his voice low.
I brush the sand off my jeans and straighten up, surprised. He’s listening, taking me seriously. And suddenly, I have an urge to tell Tal everything—about Mom leaving, about how I’m so angry at Dad for not stopping her, how I feel so lost, and how nobody else seems to think any of it is strange. It makes no sense.
“Can I walk Mut sometime?” I ask on a whim.
“Anytime you like,” he says. “He needs more walks than he gets.”
He cocks his head backwards, toward the row of houses facing the inlet. “We live up there in that monstrosity.” I turn to look, and there’s no mistaking which house he means.
Rising high up from the sandy beach road is a large three-story Victorian house with two circular turrets, its roof covered in colored shingles, gables facing in all directions. Everybody in town knows this house, not so much for the style but because it’s painted purple and white, with a little bit of lilac thrown in for good measure.
“I’ve seen houses like that,” I tell him, which is a pretty lame thing to say.
“Me too!” he laughs, “but they’re in San Francisco or Switzerland. It sticks out like a sore thumb here.” Tal sighs. “Never would’ve guessed my wife would want to live in an old Victorian. But you pick your battles.”
Looking at the house, I remember the summer we helped our landlord build a fence in front of our house on East Sixteenth Street. When we finished, Mom and Dad told me I could pick the paint color. I spent hours poring over paint chips and finally picked purple. Somehow, our landlord approved and sure enough, we painted the fence purple. I wonder now if it was because I’d seen this house.
“Fact of the Day,” Tal says, turning to me. “The Boeing Aircraft Factory in Everett, Washington, is the largest building in the world, measured in volume. Number one in the world!”
I bend down to offer one last pet to Mut. His grayish fur feels warm from the sun.
“Well, goodness, Marisa, don’t you want to know how many cubic feet?”
“Sure, Mr. Reese,” I grin, “how many?”
“Four hundred and seventy-two million cubic feet of useable space.” He shakes his head in awe. “Right in our own backyard.”
Finagle. I have to remember to look that one up. And for the first time in a long while, I feel myself smile.
––––
I hurry home along the eastern perimeter of the inlet, skirting Lions Field to avoid the crowds, and taking the residential streets instead. Just past the park, I head down toward the water again. The wind has picked up and big puffy clouds blow across the sky. Scenes and conversations from this morning keep coming back to me. I run through them, again and again, like when you’re watching a movie and you hit rewind a couple of times to try to figure out what exactly happened in the scene. In my replay, insulting Harris and running from Lena feel wrong now and I have this sudden urge to make them both right.
I’m not really looking where I’m going when I suddenly feel something brush against my leg. I stop, just catching myself from tripping over a rope somebody has strung across the beach road, stretching all the way from the water’s edge up to the house that faces the beach. Without thinking much about it, I lift the rope and bend down to scoot under.
“Hey!” a loud voice yells. “Can’t you read the sign?”
I look up. It’s Grace, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap with the word Cruiser, the name of her father’s boat, on it. Her family owns and rents out this whole row of houses. When she sees it’s me, she sprints down the front steps of the porch.
“Beach access. Five dollars,” she demands, pointing to a handwritten cardboard sign swinging from the rope divider.
I stare at her, not understanding. “What?”
“Five dollars.” she repeats. “To cross our beach if you want to see the whales.”