“Trevor,” said Mrs. Marshall from her desk, “the bell has rung.”
And then, someone was standing next me: It was Seth, and he was saying something. Seth was saying something to me.
“Hey,” he said.
There’s a certain kind of shock that’s possible only when you’re young. I had the idea that he might be talking to someone else.
“Thanks for the card,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
“Did you hear about the whales?” he asked.
I had to look up to see his eyes. I worried I would say something wrong, so I said nothing for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said.
He waited for me to say something more. I could feel my face turning red. The flags of every country in the world fluttered from the ceiling tiles above the library.
“Maybe someone can help them get back into the water,” I said.
Seth shook his head.
“They would probably just beach themselves again,” he said. “My dad’s a scientist. He says that when whales beach themselves, there’s a reason.”
Other kids began to trickle into the library. These were the ones with doctors’ notes excusing them from PE.
“I’m going down to the beach after school to see them,” said Seth. The wheels of his skateboard spun slowly as he shifted it from one hand to the other. “Want to come?”
“What?” I said.
Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth’s Moreno’s mouth: “Want to come?”
I can still remember the red diamond pattern of the library carpet, the way the opening and closing of the library doors caused the overhead flags to swing back and forth above our heads.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay, then,” he said.
And that was it. He turned and walked away.
On the way home, we sat separately on the bus. We both stepped off with the usual kids at our stop. It was hot and hazy in the neighborhood. Dust blew across the empty lot. The other kids scattered. I drifted in Seth’s direction. I thought he might throw his skateboard on the asphalt and fly down the hill without me. Perhaps I’d misunderstood. Maybe this was some kind of joke.
Instead, he turned, squinting, and said, “We can drop our backpacks at my house on the way.”
We were quiet as we walked. We communicated with our feet, mine following his down the sparkling sidewalk to his house.
I did not tell my parents where I was going. They wouldn’t be home from work for hours anyway.
Seth lived two streets away from us in a beige ranch-style with a rusted basketball hoop overhanging the garage. The front yard had turned to dirt. A row of terra-cotta pots stood empty of flowers.
The front door was unlocked, and we walked right in, leaving our backpacks in the hall, which was cluttered with newspapers and laundry. Thick quilts served as makeshift blackout curtains. An oxygen tank and its accompanying tubing lay tangled like wreckage in one corner. Seth’s mother had died in this house.
“Want a Coke?” he said.
“Okay.”
We drank them at the kitchen table.
His father was at work, he said, he was there all the time. He was a bioengineer, Seth explained, at work on a new type of corn.
“If it works,” he said, “it’ll be able to grow without light.”
Seth knew a shortcut through the canyon to the beach. It was a steep and sandy trail littered with pinecones and shaded by limestone bluffs. The smell of the canyon was the same as ever, like soil and sage, but the colors of California were turning starker. All the greens were fading away. Most everything was dying. Still, the canyon buzzed with beetles and mosquitoes and flies—whatever the birds had once eaten was flourishing, unhunted.
“Watch out for snakes,” said Seth.
I liked the way he walked: loose and unhurried, a boy who knew his way. I was the girl walking with him, so I walked that way, too.
The trail swung around a corner, and the beach came into view. It was low tide—lower than I’d ever seen it. The slowing was throwing off all the tides. Hundreds of feet of sea floor lay exposed, the sand ribboned black with bits of iron. These were the ocean’s insides, revealed.
We stopped on the trail for a moment watching the ocean, side by side. Our hands were so close, they almost touched.
We crossed the coast road, ducked beneath the caution tape, and cut through the space between two ruined mansions, wet from the last high tide. One house had collapsed like a cake. Its walls were lined with barnacles. Sea anemones carpeted the front steps.
I bent to take off my shoes.
“Look,” said Seth.
There they were: the whales, dark and still, prehistoric in size.
A small crowd of people had gathered on the beach. Good Samaritans were dumping salt water on the whales. Other volunteers were returning from the distant tide, swaying with buckets full of fresh seawater.
We could hear the whales breathing, a slow rising and falling. We listened. We watched. They were social creatures, the whole group distressed by the stress of any one individual. It was obvious they were dying. But we couldn’t help it. We were mesmerized.
Seth picked up two empty plastic cups from the sand. They were bits of ancient litter. He handed one to me.
“We have to do something,” he said. “Come on.”
We ran barefoot down to the water, cups in hand. It was a long run. The mud sucked our feet. Creatures slithered unseen beneath my toes. Dead fish sparkled in the sun as my hair whipped in the wind. When we reached the lapping water and looked back, the humans on the beach were barely visible. Their hairline arms and hairline legs fluttered soundlessly around the whales. The only noise was the churning of the ocean.
We rushed to fill our cups with water and then ran back across the thick band of mud. We looked for the driest whale, the one most in need. We found it at the edge of the group, and we imagined that it was older than the others. Its skin was striped white with scars. I shooed flies from its eyes, one eye at a time. Seth poured our meager water supply over its head and into its mouth. He petted its side. I felt an urgency like love.
“Hey, kids,” someone called from behind us. It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. A gust of wind drowned out what he said, so he shouted it again: “That one’s already dead.”
We were solemn as we climbed back up through the canyon. We were hot and exhausted. It was the twenty-third hour of daylight. The sun showed no signs of sinking.
“It’s the magnetic field that’s doing it,” said Seth.
“What is?”
A strong wind blew through the canyon, kicking up dust and dried leaves.
“That’s why the whales are beaching themselves. They use the magnetic field for navigation, and now it’s decaying because of the slowing.”
I glanced at the sky, a smooth, unblemished blue.
“You can’t see it,” Seth said. “It’s invisible.”
Those were only the first of the whales. Hundreds more would soon wash ashore on the California coastline. Then thousands. Ten thousands. More. Eventually, people stopped trying to save them.
“It’s not just the whales who need the magnetic field,” said Seth as we arrived at the edge of the canyon and took our first steps on paved ground. “We need it, too. My dad says that all the humans would die without it.”
But that day I could hardly hear him. My mind was elsewhere. I was a little bit in love. I’d spent an entire afternoon with Seth Moreno.
25
The eucalyptus first arrived in California in the 1850s. Imported from Australia, the seeds crossed five thousand miles of open ocean before reaching the soil of our state. The trunks were supposed to be a miracle wood, perfect for a hundred different purposes, railroad ties especially. But the wood turned out to be useless. It curled as it dried and split
when nailed. The state’s eucalyptus industry went bust before it ever boomed.
But the trees remained—and they spread. They were everywhere in my youth, and in my grandfather’s youth, too. Their slender silhouettes once swayed along the coastal canyons, the beach bluffs, the soccer fields. Their long leaves floated in the swimming pools and the gutters. They drifted along the banks of saltwater lagoons. For over one hundred and fifty years, the eucalyptus thrived in California, surviving every calamity: earthquake, drought, the invention of the automobile. But now the trees were suffering en masse. The leaves were losing their color. Orange sap oozed from openings in the trunks. Little by little, they were dying.
On the morning of my twelfth birthday, I was lying awake in the dark, recalling in detail all the moments of the previous day’s events: the way Seth squinted in the sun as we walked through the canyon, the tenderness in his hand as he petted the backs of the whales, the sound of his voice at the end of the day, and those words—see you later—as he turned and jumped on his skateboard, pushing off hard with one foot and then sailing sideways down the hill, his white T-shirt rippling in the wind behind him. I had to remind myself again and again that it had really happened: he had invited me.
My room was dark. The house was quiet.
In a few hours, I’d see Seth at the bus stop, and I wanted to say the exact right thing when I did, to divine whatever the words were that would lead to a second afternoon at his side.
That was when I heard it: a loud crash from outside. I remember the breaking of glass and the screeching of car alarms on the street. I rushed to my window and looked out: The tallest eucalyptus on the street had sliced through Sylvia’s roof and crushed one corner of her house.
Over time, I have come to believe in omens. But I wonder if I might have developed a more strictly rational mind had I lived in a time before the slowing. Perhaps in some other era, science instead of superstition might have sufficed.
My parents rushed outside, my mother in her bathrobe, my father without a shirt. It was a dark night, cloudy, no stars. The tree lay diagonally across the yard, blocking Sylvia’s front door. The roots were exposed, hanging in the air, like a molar wrenched from a gum. One section of Sylvia’s roof had collapsed.
All along the street, lamps flashed on in bedrooms, doors swung open, the voices of neighbors rose from front yards. Sylvia’s house stood dark and silent. Some of the men jogged toward it in pajamas, but my father was first, dashing through the side gate, out of sight. My mother stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the street. I stood beside her, shivering in my nightgown.
“She should have had that tree cut down,” said my mother.
Two of ours had been removed already. There were stumps all over the neighborhood, and crews of men in reflective suits worked constantly along the roads, felling trees one by one and then carting the pieces away.
“We should cut the rest of ours down, too,” said my mother.
She took a few steps closer to Sylvia’s house, stood on tiptoes, angling for a better view.
“Where is he?” she asked.
I used to think my mother knew at least as much as I did about Sylvia and my father and that every question she asked was code for something else. But maybe she only sensed it.
She kept her own secrets too. She was hiding a massive new store of emergency supplies in the closet of the guest room. She was hoarding hundreds of cans of food and hiding them from my father. And she had placed an order for a greenhouse without telling him.
Finally, my father emerged through the side gate. Sylvia was with him, draped over his shoulder but walking, barefoot in a short white nightgown.
My father guided her to our porch, where she sat with her head in her hands.
“She’s okay,” he said. “She’s just shaken up.”
My mother brought her a glass of water, though she kept her distance as she handed Sylvia the glass.
Sylvia’s nightgown left her whole back exposed. In the front, the shape of her small breasts was apparent through the thin cotton. She sat for a long time, hunched on our steps like a girl. You see only a few adults cry the way she did on that night, open, abiding, unashamed.
“It hit the piano,” my father said softly.
“This was not an accident,” said Sylvia, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
The other neighbors had trickled back into their houses. The lights were switching off. It was five in the morning on a dark night.
“The tree was sick,” said my father.
“No,” said Sylvia. She shook her head. She had the thinnest, most swanlike neck. The knobs of her spine surfaced as she turned her neck. “Someone did this.”
Sylvia was the last real-timer left on our street. The Kaplans were gone. Tom and Carlotta were gone; a young family had moved into their house and begun remodeling.
“I’m telling you, Joel,” said Sylvia. The way she said my father’s name was not the way one neighbor speaks another neighbor’s name. My mother heard it, too. She glanced at my father and pulled her bathrobe closed at the neck. Sylvia continued: “They’re trying to drive me out.”
Later, I tried but mostly failed to sleep the last hour before my alarm clock sounded. Meanwhile, my parents argued through their bedroom door. I could hear not what was said but what was expressed, the anger radiating through the door.
It was tradition among the girls at my school to bring each other a balloon on the day of each girl’s birth. It was always the same variety of balloon, the shiny Mylar kind you buy at the party store. You carried it around with you all day or fastened it to your backpack, letting it float behind you, fat and lovely, through math, English, life sciences, PE. Weighted by a tiny beanbag, each balloon bobbed above the sea of heads in the halls, a buoy marking the precise location of a happy and well-liked girl. This tradition had not been interrupted by the slowing.
The year before, Hanna had brought my balloon—but that was a past life, or someone else’s, an earlier, uncomplicated spring.
I tried not to look at Hanna that morning at the bus stop, the way she was sitting against the fence, her phone pressed hard to her ear. She didn’t even say hello.
This year I knew my birthday would go unmarked at school.
I stood at the edge of the crowd at the bus stop, waiting in the darkness for Seth to arrive. I had spent a long time choosing what to wear, settling finally on the cream mohair sweater I’d worn for picture day and a knee-length jean skirt.
The stars glowed. Headlights flashed. Kids trundled in on foot from various directions. Some emerged from the passenger sides of running cars, backpacks swinging from their arms. Seth was not among them.
Minutes passed. I began to shiver.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and then discovered, to my horror, that the hairs on my legs were glittering under the streetlights. I was suddenly embarrassed standing there, just a few feet away from Michaela’s smoothly shaved calves, which were right at that moment standing attractively in a pair of heeled black sandals as she laughed into the ear of one of the eighth-grade boys.
Finally, there came the sound of plastic wheels grinding asphalt in the distance, the rattle of a board scraping the curb. My heart began to race. There he was: Seth Moreno.
He stepped off his board. He tucked it under one arm.
I wanted to tell him that I’d heard about another group of whales beached a few miles farther up the coast. But I wasn’t sure how to start. This was new to me, the special communications that tethered boys to girls.
The bus heaved up to the curb, and kids began to climb the stairs, but I lingered on the pavement, waiting for Seth to show me how things would be. Our eyes met. Seth nodded slightly.
I’d been rehearsing this moment for hours, and I had outlined a hundred different scenarios. Mr. Jensen once tried to tell us that there existed somewhere a set of parallel universes, unreachable but real, where every possibility came true; whatever didn’t happen her
e happened somewhere else, each option unfolding in a separate universe. But in this one world, at least, the outcome that morning was reduced finally to just this one version.
Seth stood on the sidewalk for a moment, averting his eyes from me. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. Then he walked right past me and kept going, as if the two of us were strangers, two kids who didn’t know each other at all. He stepped onto the bus and didn’t look back.
I don’t know how much time passed after that—thirty seconds, maybe longer—but I became aware eventually of the bus driver yelling down at me from his seat.
“Hey you,” he called over the hum of the engine. “Are you coming?” All the other kids were on the bus by then. A few were staring down at me through smudged windows, snickers forming on their faces. I was a girl standing alone in the dirt in a cream mohair sweater and a stupid jean skirt. It was hard to breathe.
It occurred to me too late, after I’d stepped onto the bus and sat down in the front, fifteen rows from Seth, that I could have disappeared into the canyon and no one would have noticed.
I spent the break between classes in the bathroom. I spent another lunch period in the library. Diane was there, as usual, the gold cross around her neck glittering beneath the fluorescent lights. Trevor clacked the computer keys, busy with the game he always played; he held all the high scores. Mrs. Marshall was returning books to the shelves—we could hear the whine of her cart as she wheeled it over the carpet, the crinkle of the cellophane book jackets as she slid each one into place. Every time the door squeaked open, I hoped it would be Seth Moreno—come to apologize or explain.
A bleak thought had begun to bubble in my mind: Maybe he didn’t want to be seen with me at school.
Through the windows simmered the muffled squeals of the other kids, running loose on the quad. Those kids never traveled anywhere alone.
Christy Casteneda swanned past the library window—it was her birthday, too, and not one but two balloons swayed from her delicate wrist, each one signed on the blank silver side in loopy, loving cursive.