Parasailers found her in the sword ferns and foxgloves down a ravine less than a mile from Wynoochee Lake. He asked me out after the service and handshakes and hugs and catered haze. I agreed before he introduced himself – I’d lost track of the awkward, grieving classmates — but we’d been standing in black on a fake spring Seattle night as cars in the church lot blinked home and when he said he knew my sister at UW, dying wasn’t the dumbest thing she’d ever done, I did something close to a smile.
I learned he volunteered at a sanctuary. He monitored a few otters who were in rehabilitation after being kept as pets in a koi pond behind a stucco condo complex. Fifteen hours a week he tagged flippers and netted feces from tanks. I asked if he’d seen the orca in Deception Pass who carried her dead calf for eighteen days this spring in what local news called a magnificent show of grief. He had. Her name was J35 and she terrified, his team’s research boat having been overturned by her the summer before. He knew the orca’s other name, Tahlequah, derived from the Cherokee meaning two is enough.
We walked away from the parking lot to breweries sprawled along Leary to 15th, brick streets showing through paved. He said my sister had lived down the hall from him in the dorms this past sophomore year and he owed her laundry money. She’d slide quarters into his mailbox through the slot intended for envelopes. It was unclear why this began.
I did not ask what else they did. My sister had never mentioned him and she was infamous for details. After a clam bake for thirty strangers last month on the coast, wind-whipped driftwood stripped white, she could recite everyone’s name like a song. She knew which children needed plastic utensils or preferred their hands, which families had dogs and what breeds, knew how long to keep littlenecks buried beneath fronds.
I adjuncted in the humanities department, but he had never taken a class with me. Didn’t even know in which brick building among the cherry blossoms I lectured. We went to a dark wood paneled bar to play ski ball and he used my sister’s change, plugging in quarter after quarter without ceremony.
We drank. The neon light showed us that none of the clothes we wore, blouse and slacks and socks, were exactly the same shade of black.
I had a daughter who lived with her father on the coast in Kalaloch, and he didn’t mind when I showed him their photos. Sea stacks and tide pools, little tentacles and soft gelatinous bodies. My daughter’s fingers dipped in water more light than wet with a face warping into joy at strange discomfort.
He didn’t mind when I told him about my ex and I driving to Kalaloch for the first time, eating tomato sandwiches and getting sunburnt on kayaks, how he removed the thistles from my coat with hands that smelled like garlic, and about his distress over a finch that became trapped in the enclosed porch and in its frantic confusion could not be coaxed free but rammed again and again into the screen. He grew so upset I’d sent him on a walk into town to get more firewood, and by the time he returned I had already picked up the stunned bird and hid its crumpled body in the rhododendrons.
I was pregnant then but would wait until our last night on the coast to tell him, and maybe the baby had already sensed my discomfort, because when the baby was born it didn’t cry. A team whisked it away to a table across the room. I knew something was wrong, that so small a body could hold so much reluctance.
Our IPA’s and shots accumulated and the bar blurred, dark linking bright. Kalaloch was a bastardized version of the Quinault word k’-E-le-ok. I wrote it out for him with a bar pen on the back of his hand. It meant a good place to land. When I kissed him he apologized and said he wasn’t really into things like that, that which I took to mean women or older women or professors or public affection or, as it would turn out, kissing in general.
I asked him to tell another story about my sister. I listened for traces of her but found nothing. It was easier to think of her by the lake as a different person who was full of lives unknown. She used to beat me up as a kid though she was younger. She lent me her shirt the night I lost my virginity. We spent every Halloween watching the same movie, her couch or mine or over a screen.
He broke a pint and a group playing darts complained. I said something I shouldn’t have to the bouncer. We left. Walking, streets blurring into our feet, I asked him to tell a story about me then cut him off mid-sentence. I was afraid he might say something insightful about myself. He might tell me the buried thing I already knew.
We wandered. I bought us pre-rolls. We smoked under the bell tower near homeless tents as bartenders navigated in windows the length of the street. After a bit, they became shuffling cutouts of black construction paper. I cried. I felt bad. For a funeral, I was having such a great night.
He called me a car, but before he left he drew a picture on the drink receipt of a loggerhead turtle his team had released back into the wild. He remembered her body in detail, he said – barnacles on her shell plates, scars on her flippers – because for an hour the turtle would not move, sinking further into the sand until a shining white moat of salt water accumulated around her.