At low tide, Scylla is a silent, blue mound rising from the beach. Ollie and JJ follow you closer, dragging their sneakers in the sand, bickering with each other. You have brought them here to see the whale. That they are not amazed, amazes you. You cannot take your eyes off the massive, dead creature, you reach out your hand to touch the inverted cereal bowl of her nearly closed eye, peer into the slit to see a cloudy pupil.
“Can you believe this?” you say, running your finger along the ridge of her mouth.
Ollie, your youngest, approaches, worry lines on his forehead. “Why didn’t they push her back in,” he says, his tone flat as if it is not a question, the same tone he uses to ask when you are coming back home.
JJ coughs twice, wedging the word moron in between. The cough- insult-cough schtick is new; last weekend it was plead the fifth, which was his answer to every question you asked about middle school, or his friends, or if he was going to try pitching another game in Little League. When you hug him, he keeps his arms at his sides. The boys are unsure about you, as if you are a stranger who is impersonating their mother. They are restless at your apartment and complain about the bubblegum pink walls and the cooking smells from your neighbors and your spotty Wi-Fi, but they do not cry around you. Like animals, they do not reveal injury in unfamiliar surroundings.
“They tried to,” you say. “But she was too heavy.” A few five-gallon buckets remain from the effort, stacked into a tower beside the whale’s jaw. A pair of onlookers stand at a distance, while a group of teenaged girls takes selfies on the other side of the whale’s body. For April it is cold, and you realize in the rush to leave the apartment you have forgotten to bring jackets. Ollie and JJ drive their hands into their pockets, narrowing their slight frames into reeds, as they stand side by side, two dark-haired boys with the same dimpled chin, one a full head taller than the other. You try to ignore the wind’s bite, awed by this giant, misplaced body, the humpback’s slick, ridged flesh arched as if paused in motion. Three days ago, she beached and died. Now, she is an attraction.
“Come on, let’s get a picture,” you say.
“I hear they can explode,” JJ says, raising his palm. “You know, methane build-up, and whatnot.”
“Is that true?” Ollie asks. Last night he wet the bed and woke, begging for his father.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” you say. This is the wrong answer. Both boys, in unison, look at their feet, reminding you that you still have not learned how to be a proper mother. Eleven years later, and you are the same woman in the hospital bed, loopy from Percocet, who tried to give the crying baby back to the nurse.
“Why did you move here?” Ollie asked you last night, his bony knees showing under the college T-shirt you’d given him to change into, while you pulled wet sheets from the trundle bed in the lavender guest room. You had denied his requests to call his father, the man you were still married to, the man who took off his glasses and pinched between his eyes and said maybe you need to talk to someone when you tried to explain yourself, because a call home at 2:00 a.m. meant nothing less than failure on your part. And what could you say to Ollie in place of the truth? “I like it here,” you tried, which was not a lie. You had not yet tired of the thrill each new day brought, the wide-open expanse of newness, hemmed in only by your worry for your children. But the real answer was your love for your boys was so heavy your chest ached to hold it, and still it wasn’t enough because you wanted more.
Scylla was a mother too. The article you read online said scientists have identified at least four of her calves. They have been tracking her for decades. Humpbacks can live to be ninety, you read, but Scylla was only middle-aged when she died. Forty-one. Your age. One day, instead of continuing her migration out into the feeding grounds of the Atlantic, Scylla separated from her pod and swam in the wrong direction until she ended up here, on this beach. What is it about that age to drive a whale onto land, to make you decide to leave your husband and children? The day you moved out, and into a coworker’s friend’s two-bedroom sublet that came fully furnished and decorated in a pastel, beach theme, you walked room to room with a glass of wine, taking inventory of the wicker furniture, hotel-grade paintings, stenciled seashell boarders, thumping from the upstairs neighbors and the odor of frying onions from next door, and knew that you had actually done it—you had abandoned every real thing you had. And why? Because, as your husband accused, you would never be happy, never satisfied? Perhaps he was right; throughout fifteen years of marriage you had held nine jobs to his one, you were the one googling impossible vacations while he played Sorry! on the carpet with the boys. Restlessness grew in you like a virus. Sometimes you worried you’d pass it on to the boys, this inability to settle, and you couldn’t help but wonder if they would be better off without you. In the end, all you knew was that you had been plowing, head down, through life. When you finally broke away and looked up, the brightness was blinding.
“The whale is not going to explode,” you say, trying again. “Okay?” “I wouldn’t rule it out,” JJ begins.
“Can we go?” Ollie asks. “I’m cold.” You put your arm around him and feel his shoulders shiver like an animal twitching off flies.
“We just got here. Don’t you want to get a good look?” You want them to be impressed by this enormous creature before them, close enough to touch. You want it to mean something to them. You run a finger along the white edge of her fin. “Feel it,” you say.
JJ crosses his arms. “And get diphtheria? No thanks.”
Ollie puts out one finger, as if touching the whale to see if she is hot. You point out the two blowholes on top of the whale and explain how whales have to think about breathing, that it isn’t involuntary like in people. You tell them how each tail fluke is as unique as a fingerprint. You show them the baleen peeking through the whale’s slightly open mouth and explain how she needed to catch over a ton of krill each day just to survive. You find it all fascinating, every detail of the article you read this morning still humming in your ears, but when you stop talking you turn to see Ollie and JJ gazing back at the car, stomping their feet. The group of teenaged girls is walking away, huddled together.
“Okay, guys,” you consent. “One picture, then we’ll leave.” Ollie’s face lifts. “Are we going home?”
You become aware of the numbness in your fingertips and the tip of your nose. “Yes,” you say, then hesitate. “You mean back to my apartment? Or home to Daddy?”
JJ and Ollie make eye contact with each other, as if transmitting silent messages. For all their fighting since the separation, the boys have forged a new connection you do not quite understand and are not privy to. You find it both heartbreaking and heartening, this necessary bond. It is something you cannot ruin, or share. “Home means home,” JJ says.
You rest your weight against the whale, wishing you could stay here with her. When you leave, and everyone else goes home, tonight, she will be alone. “Alright,” you say, unsure exactly what you are nodding to, but certain it is not optional. With this, the boys brighten and stand straighter, like shoots to the sun. The promise of home strengthens them, while it erases you.
Ollie, his eyes suddenly bold, picks up a rock and throws it into the water. “Daddy says you’ll be back by summer,” he says.
“Oh?” you say.
JJ shakes his head. “He just said maybe, that’s all.”
“I see.”
You know they are waiting for you to tell them you will leave your ugly apartment and move back home, that things will go back to the way they were. You know it is what a better mother would do. You have never lived on your own before, and you don’t know how you are supposed to justify doing it so abruptly, at this point in your life. Is it to find yourself? To finish your novel? To travel? You want all of these things but none of them makes up for what you will lose. The world is so big, though, and you are hungry for it. You want and you want and you want. It is something you cannot seem to fix.
“Maybe,” you say. “Maybe, by summer.” The fact that struck you most while reading the article about Scylla was how female humpbacks whisper to their babies when their babies are small, so as not to draw predators to the vulnerable calves. To keep them safe. In this moment, you tell yourself that is what you are doing—not lying, but whispering. In truth, you have already re-signed the lease. The thought of it tightens your throat.
“Hey, big smiles,” you manage to say. You pull the boys beside you and hold out your phone, angling to capture the dead whale behind you.
JJ rolls his eyes but leans in, and in the phone’s screen you see Ollie’s dark gaze meet yours. In the background, the bulbous, white fin of Scylla. “There you go,” JJ says, his lips stiff in a tense grin.
“Ollie, smile!” you say. “Just take it,” JJ says. “You’re not smiling.” “This is how I smile.” “Come on.”
“I’m trying!” Ollie says.
“Cheese!” you say, and snap a picture, the three of you with squinting, toothy grins. And with that, they are gone, jogging back toward the car, leaving you holding the phone close to your eyes. You stare at the picture, as if you do not trust the phone to save the image in all its brilliance, as if the next time you take the phone out to look, their smiles will have wilted and the worry lines will have returned to Ollie’s forehead. You will stare at this picture many times over the next year, and each time you will tell yourself it is proof the boys were, in that one moment, perfectly okay. It is the whale in the background that tells of what’s to come.
Waves have begun to wash over Scylla’s tail fluke as the tide rises. Tomorrow, scientists will drag her back into the ocean and transport her body to a research facility where they can perform a necropsy. They will study her organs and blood, determine what killed her, what was to blame. What was she after, swimming so close to shore? For her sake, you hope her last moments were fleeting and painless, that she did not have long to suffer the knowledge of her miscalculation. When sand rubbed against her belly and the last wave slipped over her arched backbone, you hope that she felt a momentary thrill at the vast, new land before her. You hope that she, too, was dazzled by the brightness.
Rebecca Reynolds received her MFA from Emerson College. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ascent, Redivider, Copper Nickel, the Boiler, The MacGuffin, Superstition Review, and The Cumberland River Review, and have received several Pushcart nominations. She lives outside Boston with her husband, three boys, and flock of chickens. She is currently working on finishing her short story collection.
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS & LOGO CREATED BY KELCEY PARKER ERVICK
HMS is an arts & culture nonprofit (Hypertext Magazine & Studio) with two programs: HMS empowers adults by teaching creative writing techniques; HMS’ independent press amplifies emerging and established writers’ work by giving their words a visible home. Buy a lit journal (or two) in our online store and consider donating. Every dollar helps us publish emerging and established voices.