She's Come Undone

People run from the cabin now, pushing past me, hooting and aiming their cameras and beer bottles at the afterimage. Thayer's head is above the crowd. He's shouting for me. I'm shouting, too, shoving back against the others toward him.
"Thayer, I saw her!" I yell. "I saw!"

She breaches.
Nose first, her grooved body heads straight for the sky. Her muscular tail clears the water, her fins are black wings. The fall back is slower—grace instead of power. She cracks the ocean and, in a white explosion of foam, reenters.
I've seen her, swimming and flying both. I'm soaked in her spray. Christened. I laugh and cry and lick my salty lips.

One of the public TV stations is showing the movie Woodstock. Woodstock: old enough to be a late movie!
Back on the bed, Thayer sighs, deep in his sleep. On the screen, John Sebastian in raggedy tie-dye is singing about a dream.
The cameras pan the crowd and there, for one quick second, I see them, unmistakably. Larry and Ruth and Tia. They've made it. They're there!

We inch closer to the green highway sign, close enough so that I can squint and read it. "Cape Cod and East."
"We're going to the Cape?"
He nods and smiles. "Certain old broad we know says you always wanted to see a whale in action. I'm taking us on a whale watch."

"Undone," I write in the journal—stare at that word, turn it over. Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I've undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love…

I know it now, accept it: I'll never give birth. I pull out my journal from under the bucket seat; I started it at the hospital six days earlier, as I lay in my hospital bed thinking about my life and waiting for the fertilized eggs to cleave. I uncap the Bic, meaning to rail about negatives: unfairness, infertility. But something different comes out, something I hadn't planned. I write: Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.

With my head against his chest, my eyelids closed against his sweatshirt, I saw him. Recognized him. Part man, part whale.
"I made a picture of you once," I said. "Years ago, way before I ever even knew you. Your wire rims and everything."
"You did?"
"On my Etch-a-Sketch. A psychic told me to draw what would make me happy and I drew you. Memorized you before I shook you free."
He pressed me closer to him. "So what's that mean?" he said.
"It means I love you. I'm proposing."
"Proposing what?"
"You and me. Marriage."
I looked up, saw the tears in his eyes. "Okay," he said. "Yes."

"Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love."
The storage company delivered the jukebox six months after his death, on a sunless afternoon in November 1987. The accompanying note read: "For my pal."

What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

"Why can't we just get married and make a baby like everyone else does? What are you so afraid of?"
"I'm not afraid."
"Then what are you?"
"Look!" I said. "My father used to beat up my mother! I had a husband who put me through the meat grinder and now one of my best friends has AIDS! I just don't believe in happily-ever-after. It's a crock of shit!"