Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

A Breach of Trust
by Elizabeth Zelvin

Uncle Tommy came to my room again last night. He never knocks. I hear the squeak as he turns the door knob, and the door opens very slowly. There’s time for my stomach to start feeling queasy and my hands to grow cold with sweat. I’ve asked Mom over and over if I can have a lock on my door, but she says I’m not old enough. When you turn thirteen, she says. When you’re a teenager, things will be different. You’ll start to change, you’ll have different needs. Almost two years. I don’t think I can wait that long.

When he finished, tears were leaking down my cheeks the way they always do. He usually acts as if he doesn’t notice. But tonight he flicked a finger along my cheek, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a funny little smile.

“How about if we go somewhere on Saturday, Jenny?” he said. “Someplace special, just you and me?”

My stomach clenched, and I felt a pang of dread in that part I didn’t even know I had until Uncle Tommy started coming to my room. He always uses that word “special.” We have a special relationship, Jenny, he says. Let’s keep it our special secret. He always says he loves me when he begins. Right before he’s finished, he whispers, If you tell, I’ll kill you.

“I’ll ask Mom,” I muttered. I was sitting up in bed, the blankets clutched around me.

He stuck out one finger and lifted my chin with it. He’s done that ever since I
was little. He doesn’t say, Smile, Jenny, the way he did back then. I know what he wants, and we both know I have to give it to him.

“Don’t worry about asking your mother.” He sounded cheerful, as if this was an
ordinary conversation. “She has to go up Cape tomorrow. I already told her I’d look after you.”

“Can I pick where we go?” I only dared to ask because I knew I’d pleased him. I didn’t want to end up on a deserted stretch of beach, all alone with Uncle Tommy on a blanket in the dunes. Somehow the sunshine makes it even worse.

“Sure, sure,” he said.

“Can we do the whale watch?”

“Sure, why not? We’ll go in the morning. Your mother is leaving early. She’ll be gone by the time you get up.”

***

I couldn’t eat my breakfast, but he made me choke down a piece of toast and gulp half a glass of milk.

“You’ve got a milk mustache,” he said, and wiped it off. He was smiling. Sometimes I hate his finger as much as that other part of him.

I had slathered on a lot of sun screen before I came downstairs. I’ve learned not to give him a chance to “do the honors,” as he calls it. I wore my one-piece bathing suit with a plain white tee-shirt and denim overalls over it, and over that a hooded pale blue beach wrap that I’d belted in tightly and knotted twice. In the Middle Ages, my favorite period in history, the men wore armor and the women wore chastity belts. I bet they didn’t even know how lucky they were. As we left the house, I pulled up my hood and stuck a giant pair of sunglasses on my face. Uncle Tommy clamped an arm around me
and hurried me toward the gate.

“Come on, Greta Garbo,” he said.

He likes to call me that. He thinks that line, “I want to be alone,” is funny.

We don’t live right on Commercial Street, but it’s still an easy walk to the dock where the whale watch starts. There’s never anyplace to park in P-town, especially during the season. In spite of Uncle Tommy, I couldn’t help a shiver of excitement at the thought of seeing the whales. I love the whales. They’ve been coming to Stellwagen Bank to feed forever. It’s been a National Marine Sanctuary since before I was born, though the whales don’t know that. Or maybe they do. Whales are very, very smart, maybe smarter than people. We don’t know what they know, because we can’t understand their language.

When I grow up, I want to be a marine biologist. I want to be the one who deciphers the whale song. Whales can get entangled in synthetic ropes and nets that injure them so badly that even if they’re rescued, they still die. Or stupid kids release balloons that lose their helium over the ocean and end up blocking whales’ throats and choking them to death. In some countries, they still hunt whales. Oil spills can kill them too. I’d like the people who are responsible for all these things to be able to hear the whales say, “Leave us alone!” in their own voice.

“Stop daydreaming, Greta Garbo,” Uncle Tommy said. “Come on, they’re boarding.”

We were swept aboard the boat in a crowd of tourists. Like all the Dolphin Fleet, it was built for whale watching, with two decks, a cabin that hardly anybody uses once the first whale is sighted, and a low gunwale with a tubular metal rail above it all
around the boat. It’s nicer to sit on the top deck, but it doesn’t matter where your seat is once you see the whales. There’s a pretty good snack bar and a couple of tiny rest rooms, and that’s about all you need.

We sat on the top deck in the sun. Nobody paid any attention to us. The tourists all around us were fussing with snacks and cameras and binoculars and trying to keep their kids from driving them crazy during the hour it took to get out to Stellwagen Bank.

“Don’t run!” the parents would yell. “You better not fall overboard.” But most of them didn’t get up and stop the kids from running.

“When will we see the whales?” the kids kept asking. “Will we really see them?”

“You have to be patient,” the mom or dad would say. “I promise you’ll see them soon.”

Grownups should never make promises to kids that they’re not sure they can keep. In this case, they were safe enough. P-town has the best whale watching in the world, thanks to Stellwagen Bank. It’s like the whales’ restaurant that’s always open. The Dolphin people say that 97 percent of their passengers see whales, and they’ll give a full refund to anyone who doesn’t.

After a while, the naturalist—there’s one on every whale watch—started to talk about the whales: what kind of whales we could expect to see, which ones are endangered, and what we know about their lives and behavior. The tourists settled down to listen. The naturalist passed around a piece of baleen. Baleen is a kind of built-in strainer. The plates protect the whales’ throats. They never have to swallow anything bigger than tiny, microscopic plankton and krill.

I love all kinds of whales, but the humpbacks are my favorites. We had a good
chance of seeing them today. They’re the other reason the P-town whale watch is so
popular. Finbacks, which we also get, are awesome. I mean the real awe, not just cool. But all you see of them is the top of their backs in the distance, a gleaming curve gliding up out of the water and back again. And the spout, which is the only reason you spot them at all. You know the rest of the giant is there, hidden beneath the surface, and that’s awesome too. But the humpies come right up to the boat and put on a show.

I always want to start searching the horizon for that first telltale spout too soon.
I reminded myself to wait till we got closer to Stellwagen. Anyhow, it’s usually the naturalist or one of the crew who sights one first. They know exactly where to look. So I closed my eyes, let my skin feel the warmth of the sun, breathed in the salt air with its overtones of coffee and fried clams, and didn’t let myself think about Uncle Tommy sitting next to me.

“Jenny. Do you want something from the snack bar?”

“What?” I opened my eyes. “Yeah, sure. I’ll go.”

Uncle Tommy reached in his pocket for some money.

“Do you want fried clams?”

“No, I’ll have a hot chocolate. I can bring you coffee if you want.”

He handed me a ten-dollar bill.

“Plenty of cream and sugar, okay?”

“Sure.” I knew how he took his damn coffee.

I made my way down the stairs at the stern. By the time I got back, the naturalist was scanning the horizon with powerful binoculars, and most of the passengers had left
their seats and gotten out their cameras. I handed Uncle Tommy his coffee and tried to give him back the change. He waved it away.

“What took you so long?”

“There was a line.”

I had finished my hot chocolate and tossed the cup on the way back. I stood and watched as he sipped his coffee. I had put in enough cream that it wouldn’t be too scalding to drink down. As soon as he drained his cup, I turned toward the rail. He followed me.

“Whale at eleven o’clock!”

They probably haven’t said “Thar she blows” in a hundred years. “Thar” doesn’t tell you exactly which direction to look. So instead, you picture a giant clock face in a circle around the boat. Straight ahead—the bow—is twelve o’clock. We were on the port side, to the left in landlubber terms. I could see the spout when it came again. Two of them, barely visible in the hazy air. It was only a couple of finbacks, but the tourists came crowding over, those on the starboard side stumbling and barking their shins on the backpacks and coolers people had stowed between the rows of benches.

I peered down at the crowd that lined the rail on the lower deck, squeezed in between the port side of the cabin and the gunwale. Heads bobbed as they jostled each other, most pretending that they weren’t. Everybody wanted a clear field for their cameras and binoculars. The cabin made it hard to cross the deck amidships. Up here, the deck stretched unobstructed from port to starboard only at the stern. On the lower deck, the biggest open space was the triangle at the bow, in front of the cabin.

I started toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

“I want a good view for the humpbacks.”

Uncle Tommy nodded and followed as I threaded through the crowd, down to
the lower deck, in one door of the cabin, and out the other.

Humpbacks aren’t the biggest whales, but they’re the most interesting. Each humpback is unique. The marine biologists who study their behavior have names for all of them. If you go on enough whale watches, like me, you can recognize a whale you’ve seen before by the markings on its fluke. That’s the tail, the last thing you see before the whale dives or sounds. Sounding is a deep dive. It’s how a whale leaves when it’s had enough.

Some of the humpbacks are famous, like Salt, who’s been seen every year since 1976. She’s the same age as my mom. Salt’s fluke looks like a pair of very broad white wings with a splotch of black in the middle that Mom calls an inkblot. You can tell one humpback from another by its dorsal fin, too. Salt’s is a little nub with the smattering of white around it that gave her her name. A lot of them have scars that help identify them. For example, the left side of Cane’s fluke is all chewed up, maybe from an argument with a shark. Whales’ wounds are out where everyone can see.

“Humpback whale at two o’clock!”

We had almost reached the bow on the port side of the lower deck. Everybody else rushed to the starboard side. Luckily, the boat is built not to tilt. Everybody oohed and ahhed at the sight of a white flipper waving at us from only a couple of hundred feet away. As the whale rolled and dove, I saw another spout, farther away but moving toward us. A black and white fluke flipped up at us as the second whale submerged. A moment later, we saw them spout again. They hadn’t sounded. They were coming to play.

“It’s Salt!” The naturalist’s voice floated down from the upper deck. “The other
one looks like Pepper. We’ll know for sure when they get a little closer.”


I knew it was Pepper. I recognized her asymmetrical inkblot and the dorsal fin that looks like a seal sitting on a rock. I didn’t need to hear the spiel. I already knew how much Salt has been studied and that she’s had babies with a number of different boyfriends. Anyhow, the naturalist was smart enough to stop talking when the two humpies reached the boat.

They went into a series of rolls, taking turns swimming under each other’s bellies and lifting more and more of themselves out of the water. They knew we were watching, all right. Every time they came up, the crowd gave a cry of delight, the way people do at fireworks or for acrobats at the circus.

Uncle Tommy put his hand on my shoulder. I ducked away from it. I looked up at him. He nodded toward the starboard side. I shook my head. Soon, I figured, they’d swim right under the boat and come up on our side. They were really into showing off today.

Sure enough, the whales went under. The newbies groaned with disappointment, but the experienced whale watchers made a beeline for the port side, our side. They pressed close behind us, babbling with pleasure, as the whales slid out from under the keel. Salt came first, then Pepper, so close I could smell their faint aroma, both animal and ocean, like a mermaid’s breath. I could see the blowhole on the top of each head and hear a sort of sigh as they spouted. It’s how they breathe. Each time they did it, a million droplets of water flew upward in a column of spray.

Salt went under. Pepper followed. Everyone watched the dimpled surface of the sea, trying to anticipate where they’d reappear. I couldn’t help grinning when Salt shot up like a ponderous jack-in-the box. She managed to lift almost half of her body length
out of the water. Cameras clicked. Pepper popped up next, not quite so high, then Salt again.

“How do they do that?” I heard a woman squeal.

“Wait till you see a full breach,” a man said. “You won’t believe your eyes.”

A breach is when the whale throws itself all the way out of the water. It can fling that thirty- or forty-ton body into the sky with a kind of joyous abandon. Nobody knows why they do it. I think it’s to feel the moment of total freedom. You have to be very lucky to witness a full breach. The whales don’t do it all the time, at least not where humans can see them. If I was a humpback whale, I’d swim way out to sea on a sunny day and breach till I got dizzy. Still, I hoped that Salt and Pepper would feel like it today.

The humpies showed off all their other tricks. They dove under the boat and swam from starboard to port and back again a dozen times. Each time, everybody rushed from one rail to the other. They didn’t want to miss a thing. The whales might sound at any moment. When that happened, the show would be over. I stayed put, leaning against the port bow corner of the cabin. The overhang of the upper deck gave a little shade. After a while, Uncle Tommy shrugged and let me be. But he stayed close, watching me as much as he watched the whales.

Salt kept climbing further and further out of the water, and Pepper kept up with her. The people got more and more excited. They started telling each other that they bet both whales were going to breach. If they did, that would be totally amazing. Even Uncle Tommy looked animated for a while. But then his face slackened. Turning away from the whales, he stumbled as he came over and leaned against the side of the cabin. I made room for him aft of me—to my left, facing the port rail.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He looked a little pasty, and his hair was damp at the hairline. He wiped his forearm across his forehead.

“Seasick?”

“Of course not.”

There’d been some roll and pitch as we steamed out from P-town Harbor, but once they’d cut the engines and the whale show started, the sea had been pretty calm. Besides, no true Cape Codder would admit to being seasick.

“You’re not dizzy, are you?”

“No, no. A little drowsy, that’s all.”

“It’s the sun,” I said. “You’re okay, though, aren’t you? They’re going to breach soon. You can sleep when we turn back.”

His lids drooped as he slid a glance at me sideways.

“They’d better breach on this side, then,” he said. “I’m not rushing back and forth for them.”

That was Uncle Tommy all over. Even Salt and Pepper had to do it his way.

“Fine,” I said.

A collective gasp from behind us made me look over in time to see Salt three-quarters out of the water, splashing the spectators with a powerful slap of her tail as she fell back and went under. I took a moment to peek in the cabin window. As I’d expected, it was empty. I scanned both decks. Every single person on board was on the starboard side, eyes glued to where they thought the whales would reappear.

“I bet they pass under the keel before they breach again,” I said. “They’ll need some momentum. Come on, we’ll have a front row view.”


I inched around the corner, my back leaning against the cabin wall, my shoulder nudging Uncle Tommy’s side until the cabin blocked us off from the crowd. I eased upright and moved toward the rail, veering even further to the left. He followed. I could hear a low murmur from the crowd, but no click of cameras. Salt and Pepper hadn’t resurfaced yet.

“Oh, look!” I wedged my toes into the side of the deck and drew myself upward, stretching from the abdomen, so I could bend double over the rail, clutching the gunwale lower down to maintain my balance. “They’re coming through. You’ve got to see this.”

He loomed up beside me and bent over. He was a lot taller than me. Folding his long torso over the rail shifted his center of gravity more than mine.

“Oh, wow, look at that!” As I said it, I stepped back.

He was cantilevered over the rail, his knees bent. He should have been holding on tight to the gunwale. But as I’d hoped, the handful of Mom’s sleeping pills that I’d crushed into his coffee had done their work. I clasped my hands together and looped my linked arms under his rear end. I brought one leg up and drove it into the back of his knees. As a chorus of shouts told me that Salt, or maybe Pepper, had breached, I heaved. I followed it up with one good shove between the shoulder blades before I risked a quick twist of my head. In my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of the beauty of both whales silhouetted for a fraction of a second against the sky. It broke my heart to look away. But as the whales splashed down with a mighty thwack, Uncle Tommy toppled into the water without a sound.

***

Nobody noticed me get off the boat. As I walked away up Commercial Street, I
took off my hooded jacket. I folded it up tight and zipped it into the little pouch that becomes a pocket when you open up the jacket. The pouch fit in the pocket of my overalls. I hooked my sunglasses by one earpiece over my bib, with the glasses hanging down on the inside. No more Greta Garbo. I spent the afternoon at the beach after all. The sun was glorious.

When I got home, Mom was there. The kitchen table was piled with shopping bags, and the heavenly scent of fish frying filled the room.

“I hope you’re hungry, Jenny,” she said. “I picked up chowder at the Lobster Pot. Did you have a good day?”

“Yeah, I did.” I took a handful of oyster crackers from a wooden bowl on the table and tossed a couple in my mouth. “The fish smells great, Mom.”

“Where’s Uncle Tommy?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He left the house right after breakfast, and he never came back.”

-----
Bio

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist and author of a mystery series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler. Her latest novel is Death Will Extend Your Vacation. Three of Liz’s short stories have been nominated for the Agatha Award and one for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story. As Liz Zelvin, she recently released Outrageous Older Woman, her album of original songs. Liz blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters and SleuthSayers. Her author website is at http://elizabethzelvin.com and her music website at http://lizzelvin.com.