Both Olivia and Steven put their arms around Bindy and raised her to her feet. “It’s all right,” they were telling her. “You’re with us now. Let’s get back to the motel. It’s late, and we have to check on a dead whale tomorrow.” To the officer, Steven said, “I guess it’s all right for us to take her with us, isn’t it, since she’s not being charged with anything.”
“You have to sign some papers,” Officer Bartlett answered, “and then she can go. Technically, we could charge her with theft, but we’ll let it go—at least this time.”
“Theft!” Steven exclaimed.
“I needed money for the pay phone, so I borrowed a bunch of quarters off a table,” Bindy cried. “I had three dollars in my pocket—I was going to put the bills back on the table to replace the quarters. Honest!” When Olivia looked skeptical, Bindy added quickly, “I just didn’t have time before I was arrested.”
The ride back to the motel was silent, except for Bindy’s sniffles. Jack couldn’t tell if she was still crying or if she was pretending. With Bindy, the actress, it was hard to separate truth from fiction. Yet her tears in the police station, when she’d sobbed that nobody wanted her, had seemed real enough.
Jack was ready to agree with his mother. Bindy Callister might be more than the Landons could handle.
Everyone in the rental car stayed quiet. They’d had less than five hours’ sleep from the time they got back from the police station until the alarm clocks buzzed in both their motel rooms at 7:30 a.m.
That is, everyone but Bindy, who chattered just as much as usual. “…so when I found out they were shooting the movie in New Zealand, I thought maybe I could get a role as a hobbit, just to get away from my aunt. After all, kids at school kept telling me I looked like a hobbit—short and wide. One guy even asked me to take off my shoes so he could see if I had hairy feet. So I did. I took off one shoe and hit him over the head with it. Too bad it wasn’t a spike heel….” And on and on.
If Bindy hadn’t yapped so much, Jack could have enjoyed the scenery more. The park covered 35,000 acres of much larger Mount Desert Island, named by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who landed there in 1604. They hadn’t reached the park boundary yet; instead, they drove on a winding two-lane road through hills bedecked with greenery—beautiful but impossible to appreciate because Bindy the Blabber showed no signs of winding down.
Finally, to shut her up, Jack asked, “Mom, what about these marine mammals that are stranding?”
Before Olivia had a chance to reply, Bindy said, “Mammals. That must be where the word ‘mamma’ comes from. Mammals, mamma. Mamma, mammals.”
Olivia answered, “Those words aren’t connected, Bindy. ‘Ma’ is one of the easiest sounds for a baby to make. Proud mothers tell you, ‘Oh, she’s so smart. She’s only four months old, and she’s already saying ‘Mamma,’ but it’s only baby babble. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Bindy smacked her forehead and cried dramatically, “Oh dear! Another illusion smashed!”
Sheesh! Tired and cranky, Jack decided he’d had enough of Bindy’s theatrics. “Will you please keep quiet long enough for my mother to answer my question about the strandings?” he demanded.
“I do talk a lot, don’t I. When I was making movies—”
“Just—shut—up!”
“Jack!” his father warned, frowning at him in the rear view mirror—the three kids were in the back seat of the rented Ford Taurus, crowded tight because of Bindy’s width.
“Sorry,” Jack mumbled. “Mom, please tell us about the strandings.”
His mother twisted around from the front seat to face him. “First, Jack, I don’t like you being rude to Bindy. Second, I want to finish what I was explaining. The word ‘mammal’ comes from the Latin word—”
Oh, crud! Jack knew where the word “mammal” came from, and he knew exactly what the Latin word meant—it had to do with how female animals fed their babies. It would be so embarrassing to listen to an explanation of mammary glands while he was jammed thigh to thigh beside Bindy. “Let her look it up in the dictionary,” he muttered, but his mother ignored him. He covered his ears with his hands and started making soft na-na-na noises inside his throat until Olivia finished her lecture, but he could still feel his cheeks growing hot.
“You are such a dork, Jack,” Ashley told him, reaching across Bindy to smack him on the knee. “You just acted like you were about three years old.”
For once, Bindy said nothing, but Jack could see that she looked a little embarrassed, too.
“Now about strandings,” Olivia went on. “As you know, Bindy—or maybe you don’t know—marine mammals like whales and dolphins and porpoises and seals live in the water, but they have to breathe air.
They stay submerged for a while, then every so often they surface to take a breath. If they didn’t, they’d suffocate, just as you or I would drown underwater if we couldn’t breathe.”
Sitting twisted around like that must have made Olivia uncomfortable, because she turned to face forward again. Since she never missed a chance to teach something to kids, she pulled down the car’s sun visor and spoke into its mirror, looking at the kids’ reflections while she talked.
“To answer your question about the strandings, Jack, marine mammals strand for a variety of reasons—injury or disease or harassment from humans or pollution in the water or getting tangled in nets. And if baby whales become separated from their mothers, they’ll often strand because they can’t find food by themselves.”
Steven added, “Sometimes stranded marine mammals are already dead when they wash ashore. Other times they wash ashore first. And then they die.”
“Do they always have to die? Can’t anyone save them?” Ashley pleaded.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.