How to Speak Dolphin Read online

  “Yours is a nicer story than mine.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “It was the day they wheeled me into surgery to remove my other eye. Momma was crying her eyes out—” Zoe smiles. “That’s a grim expression, isn’t it?” She waves her hand like she’s shooing a fly. “That’s the last time I saw her face, walking beside the gurney, sobbing. Now, even when she’s laughing, I have trouble imagining her happy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, don’t be. That’s not why I’m telling you. My dad understood. He leaned over the gurney and said, ‘Look at me, Zoe.’ He held my face. ‘I love you. Don’t forget what love looks like, sweetheart. This is how I will always be looking at you. Remember it.’ ”

  I blot tears with my napkin. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Is it? I remember it as a gift. My parents will never grow old in my eyes, and my dad will float there above me, saying I love you for the rest of my life. And you will always remember your mother smiling at you from the bridge.”

  “I guess I never thought of it like that.”

  Zoe puts her finger to her lips. “Wait. Listen.”

  “To what?” I whisper.

  Zoe nods her head toward the women sitting at the table next to us.

  “Did the kids get to swim with them?” one asks the other.

  “No. They were wild dolphins.”

  “Excuse me,” Zoe says without hesitating. “Do you mind? Where were those dolphins?”

  “Marco Island. Over by Naples.” The woman gives the waiter her credit card.

  “Thanks.”

  The woman nods and smiles, spots Zoe’s cane, then looks at me. “It was a tour boat. They took us out and taught my kids to identify dolphins by the cuts and scrapes on their dorsal fins.”

  “Do you remember the name, by any chance?” I ask.

  “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  After they leave, I say, “We can try to look it up online when we get home.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know, Zoe. It’s got to be more than a coincidence that we overheard her, and that those dolphins aren’t anywhere near where the oil spill happened.”

  “Excuse me.” The woman from the other table is back. “I found this in my purse when I was looking for my keys.” She hands me a business card. Dolphin Project, Captain Chris Desmond, Director.

  It’s Tuesday. Adam’s at school with Suzanne, and Zoe’s here. Yesterday, as soon as we got home, we called and left a message for Captain Desmond. Now we’re sitting on the steps in the shallow end of the pool, thinking our own thoughts and hoping he’ll call back, hoping maybe he can help us find a home for Nori.

  A damselfly hitches a ride on a leaf floating in the pool, and I’m watching it. The leaf is near the skimmer and I wonder if the damselfly will lift off before the leaf is sucked into the basket. “You’d better let go.”

  “What?” Zoe says.

  “I’m talking to a damselfly. It’s sitting on a leaf that’s about to disappear into the skimmer.”

  “You’re not going to let it happen, are you?”

  “Of course not.” I push off and wade out, expecting the damselfly to go. She doesn’t. I catch the stem of the leaf and walk it away from the skimmer. Still she doesn’t fly away. “She’s letting me take her for a ride,” I tell Zoe.

  “How do you know it’s a girl?”

  I laugh. “You’re right. It could be a male damselfly.” I settle back on the steps with Zoe. “He/she’s safe and sound. Wish our other job was that easy.”

  “Yeah.” Zoe shivers. “I’d better get going.”

  When her mother dropped her off, Zoe told her she’d walk home. Her mother looked at me and shook her head, which sticks me between letting her accomplish the walk on her own, or obeying her mother’s wishes. We don’t live that far apart, but there’s the busy Douglas Road to cross. “I’ll walk with you. Want me to?”

  “No. It’s not like I don’t know the way, and I can practice clicking and humming.”

  “Your mom will be mad if I let you walk home alone. You can still hum and click.”

  “All right, Mother.”

  My phone rings when we’re a block from Zoe’s house. The caller ID reads Dolphin Project. “It’s him.” My heart bounces around in my chest. “Hello?”

  “Miss Moran?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Captain Chris returning your call.”

  “Yes, sir.” I’m completely tongue-tied. Zoe finally elbows me. “Thank you for calling back so quickly.”

  “You’re welcome.” There’s a long silence. “Did you call to make a reservation?”

  “No, sir.” I take a deep breath and angle the phone so Zoe can hear, too. “I called because my friend and I are trying to rescue a captive dolphin.”

  He doesn’t laugh. That’s a good sign, but he’s quiet for so long, I think maybe he hung up. “Captain Chris?”

  “Yes, Miss Moran. I’m here. How can I help?”

  There’s a stop sign on the corner. Some guy blasts his horn at the woman in front of him who has taken a nanosecond too long looking both ways.

  “I honestly don’t know. We need a place to take her, if we can get her released.”

  “Where was she captured?”

  “Panama City.”

  “That’s good. She’s a Gulf Coast bottlenose dolphin. They’re smaller than the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. The ones here in Marco are also Gulf Coast dolphins. How old is she?”

  “About three, I think.”

  “And the reason she can’t be returned to where she was captured?”

  “Her mother died, and they’re finding a lot of sick dolphins up there since the oil spill. And she wasn’t captured, exactly. She had cancer, but she’s cured.” I cross my fingers.

  “Then I don’t see much of a problem,” he says.

  I find Zoe’s hand and squeeze it. Captain Chris is still talking. “Our community of dolphins would readily accept a young dolphin. We’re always finding new additions, and we have a lot of moms and calves. She’ll fit right in. May I ask who has her and how you think you might get her released?”

  “She’s at the Bayside Oceanarium—”

  “Oh. Well, even so, getting her released shouldn’t be too hard. They’re not permitted to keep rehabilitated mammals. Once they are cured, they must be returned to the wild.”

  “Yes, sir. We know. We’re working on that.”

  “You sound kind of young. May I ask?”

  I hesitate. He’s going to think we’re too young to make any difference at all. “I’m twelve.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Captain Chris, my friend and I can make it happen, if I can convince my dad to help.”

  “I tell you what. If you succeed, my team will transport her. Just let me know.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Good luck, young lady.”

  “Thank you.” I hang up, shout, “Yahoo!” and hug Zoe.

  Zoe won’t let me walk with her any farther than the street in front of her house. She wants to practice her echolocation. I watch her click her way up their gravel driveway and am about to turn for home when I suddenly remember those links she sent me to sites discrediting dolphin-assisted therapy. “Zoe, wait.” I run up the driveway and grab her arm. “You called dolphin-assisted therapy a hoax. Remember?”

  “Sure. What difference is that going to make?”

  “Don’s a scientist. What if we show him the proof it doesn’t do anything?”

  “Oh, my god, Lily. That’s it. There was one specifically discrediting the use of DAT to treat autistic kids. I’ll send it to you to give to him.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get Sandi Bowman to admit it doesn’t help.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’ll never admit it doesn’t work,” Zoe says. “She’d be out of a job.”

 
“I know. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “How are we even going to get Don and Sandi in the same room?”

  “That’s the easy part. We make them think the other wants to see them.”

  Zoe laughs. “I knew you were an evil genius.”

  “Sandi Bowman called.” I’m loading dishes into the dishwasher to keep from looking at Don. “She wants to meet with you to discuss Adam’s progress.”

  He’s sitting at the kitchen counter, reading the paper. “When?”

  “She said whatever’s good for you.”

  “I’d rather do it Saturday, either before or after Adam’s session. You can take him to see the stingrays while I talk to her.”

  I should have known this is when he’d choose. “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “I want to hear what she has to say, too.”

  “That’s fair.” He glances at Adam in his play yard with his iPad. “How about Friday? Suzanne can watch Adam. I’ll have my office call Sandi and set a time.”

  We did think of that. When we got to Zoe’s, she called Sandi Bowman’s office, pretending to be Don’s secretary, and told her he wanted a meeting. Sandi will be expecting his call. I just hope she doesn’t wonder about a different voice.

  I turn to look at him, trying to remember if he’s always said Sandi’s name in that tone of voice. “You don’t have a thing for her, do you?”

  He looks startled. “What would make you think that?”

  I shrug. “Do you?”

  “No. Our lives are complicated enough without—”

  Adam starts to babble. We both look at him. I dry my hands and Don folds the newspaper. We’re his planets.

  The article Zoe sends is from the journal Autism Research and Treatment. This article, “Dolphin-Assisted Therapy: Claims versus Evidence,” is full of dense scientific language, which I ended up liking even though it took reading it over and over to understand. I tried to imagine my father writing a paper like this, and maybe me, too, one day.

  The main points were that, even though DAT has been in use for decades, it’s considered an unproven therapy, and its use gets in the way of parents seeking proven treatments. There was a line in the summary that stood out: It is becoming more evident that reliance on and unrestricted use of unproven therapies for children with autism are hindering the field of autism spectrum disorders treatment and research.

  Zoe and I decide we’re not going to practice what I’m going to say to Don and Sandi, or what she’s going to say to Don. Neither of us wants to sound stiff and rehearsed. Instead, we are trying not to think about it by racing each other from one end of the pool to the other.

  Once she knew where the ladder was, and that the steps in the shallow end are only on one side, she challenged me to a race. She hit the wall pretty hard the first couple of laps, but now she’s doing almost perfect flip-turns. I come up laughing and gasping for air after beating her, to find Don standing by the ladder. He watches Zoe make an almost flawless turn and start back the other way.

  “How does she do that?”

  “She’s counted how many strokes it takes.”

  Zoe senses I’m not swimming, upends, and turns around in the water. “Where are you, quitter?”

  “Here.” I splash her.

  She swims to the side of the pool. Her knuckles are scraped up pretty badly.

  “Hi, Dr. Moran.” She doesn’t know where he’s standing, just that’s he’s here.

  Don shakes his head. Zoe’s a mystery to him. He doesn’t get that all her other senses work perfectly well and that water only muffles voices.

  “Your knuckles are bleeding,” he says. “When you get out, I’ll put some Neosporin on them.”

  “Thanks, they’ll be okay. I swam into the wall a couple of times. Hope there are no sharks in here with us.”

  “Just the one bobbing around with the chlorine tablets in it. You girls have fun.” He turns to go back into the house.

  “Dr. Moran.”

  “Yes, Zoe?”

  She moves down the side of the pool until she’s opposite where she last heard his voice and grips the concrete lip of the deck to the left of where he’s standing. Here we go. My heart’s in my throat.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.” He looks at me quizzically, like I know what’s coming.

  I don’t know what she’s going to say, only that it will be a pitch to let Nori go.

  “I’ve been blind since I was four—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, sir, that’s not why I’m telling you.” She sighs. “I don’t want people treating me differently, or feeling sorry for me. My Braille teacher was right. She told me I’d always be bumping up against other people’s low expectations.”

  “Now I’m sorry for a different reason.”

  “It’s okay. I just wanted to tell you that my parents started out trying to make being blind easier for me by making the world perfectly safe. Lily’s been to my house. It’s been eight years and all the furniture is still pushed against the walls.” She smiles. “Except for one wing-backed chair, my token obstacle.”

  I explain, “Her mom moves it around so Zoe can practice echolocation.”

  “How’s that going?” Don’s not sure of his part in this conversation. He keeps looking at me.

  “Fine, thank you. But what I’m trying to say is, if I had let them clear away all the obstacles I’ve faced since the last surgery, I would never have learned to overcome any of them.”

  I’m glad Zoe can’t see Don’s amused little smile. “It’s only because they love you.”

  “Love can cripple, you know.”

  His smile disappears. “I do know that.”

  “I came home from the hospital after losing my other eye, determined to be the greatest blind kid ever, only to find my parents had cleared the dinette set out of the kitchen and set up a fenced-in area for me, full of soft, safe toys.”

  “Are you trying to compare that with Adam’s play yard?”

  She’d forgotten about the pen in our living room, and it throws her off balance.

  “No. I—I …”

  I’m sitting waist deep on the second step in the shallow end of the pool. I swim over to join Zoe. “I think she wants to tell you that too much love—”

  “No, that’s not it.” She flaps her hand at me. “There can’t be too much love, but it has to be the letting-go kind.”

  “Zoe, you were a blind four-year-old. What did you expect your parents to do?”

  “Help me find my way. Instead they put me in a cage where I would be safe. It was terrifying. To navigate, I have to rely on the pictures that form in my head, and on my memory. In that pen, I couldn’t explore or create anything new.”

  “I’m not doing that to Adam.”

  “Dr. Moran, I’m not talking about Adam. I’m talking about Nori.”

  “Sorry.” Don holds his hands up. “I’ve already told Lily I would think about it. That has to satisfy you two for right now.”

  “We found a place for her,” I blurt out. “Over at Marco Island.”

  Zoe doesn’t give him time to do anything but blink. “Please listen, Dr. Moran. I’ve thought a lot about this. Just like Adam, I have to live with what I can and cannot do. I still want to be the greatest blind kid, maybe change the way people see the blind and change their expectations about what we can accomplish. And I admit I have an advantage over Adam. I can tell you how I feel. If he could do that, he’d tell you that he loves Nori—loves her enough not to want her penned up for his sake. My blindness could have been a prison for my parents if I let them pad the world for me. You don’t want that for someone you love. Do you understand?”

  “It’s not the same, Zoe.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” Her voice is shrill. “We don’t want to steal the lives of those we love.”

  I put my hand on her arm.

  Don looks at me. The skin on his face is slack like a sail with no wind, an
d there’s something about the way he’s standing with his arms at his sides that feels familiar, and not in a good way. Then I remember.

  July 29, two years ago, Adam and I were in the pool. I was clinging to the end of an inflatable raft, scissor-kicking to propel Adam through the water. His little feet were on my shoulders. A nanny, whose name I can’t remember, sat in the shade reading People magazine. When I turned, Don was standing near the deep end, arms loose at his sides, head down. I remember the sound my kicks made as the water lapped against the tile. There was a strange car in the driveway.

  “Whose car is that?”

  His head came up, and he looked over his shoulder. “It’s a rental.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  His face went from no expression to a look like he’d been stabbed. “Get out of the pool, Lily.”

  There’s no way I could have imagined what he was going to say, but the change in his face caused my heart to thunder and the water to feel like ice. “Where’s Momma?” I screamed.

  That same old sun-bleached raft was blowing around the pool when Zoe and I first got in. I pulled it out before we started racing. It’s lying on the grass. It never would have occurred to me that Don might also recognize the sameness of this moment, not until I see him look at it, then up at the blue, blue sky.

  Sandi Bowman comes around her desk and extends her hand. Don takes it. “Libby.” She nods at me.

  I don’t bother to correct her, but Don says, “My daughter’s name is Lily.”

  “Sorry.” Sandi closes her eyes and thumps her forehead with the side of her fist, then gives me an apologetic, horse-toothed smile. “I’m horrible with names.”

  I smile at her. I can be insincere, too.

  “Sit you two, sit. What can I do for you, Don?”

  Don’s confused. “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I’m always happy—” Sandi blinks. “It was your secretary who called me.”