The Whale Song
How to explain if anyone ever asked? Well, what looks like electrical wires, but surely can’t be, with lightbulbs that surely aren’t, light up the ocean street, as busy and bustling at night as any big city street you know above. The traffic is entirely its own kind, though, swooshing, swooping, talking-by-touching, by gazing, by swimming. The waves above, a kind of sky, ‘as fickle as yours ground-side,’ her friend says, ‘one day sun, one day roaring thunder.’ ‘You have a sky above your sky, then,’ she responds, and they laugh at the double-sky. ‘Above the clouds, the sun is always shining’, he says. ‘Above the wave-skies, the hemisphere, and the cloud-clouds, the sun is shining,’ she corrects. They laugh again. ‘Should someone your age know the word ‘hemisphere’?’ ‘this is a dream,’ she reminds him, even if she isn’t sure it’s entirely so, ‘someone my age can know anything.’ His fin lightly touches her back, leading her the way she knows is up. ‘Already?’ her stomach sinks. He twirls her, the water ripples. Dream or real, it feels closer to home than anything above.
The stairs are marbled grey as always, which makes her remember why she hasn’t been home in a while. The view walking up from the road, also grey, the sky darkening with night coming. She is doing those heavy steps of returning to the place she’s from. She hasn’t yet met anyone who could describe magnetic force of a childhood home, the force that, despite effort, pulls you back. But still she can’t tell the story of her birthplace as one of woe, thinking of the big windows overlooking the ocean, the veranda made in cold stone, boasting sunset backgrounds on the few warm summer days. ‘Nothing like that ever happened to me,’ she would lie when uni friends told stories of fathers or mothers leaving never to come back. She would only admit to how she could trace patterns of lightning from her first-floor bedroom-window whenever there was an electric storm, but not the voices of parents fighting travelling from the floor below, or the sounds heard in her sleep, sometimes awake, not of fighting but of song, not from her parents, but from the ocean. Saying these things aloud, she’d learned, makes it nearly impossible for people to love you.
‘Put your bags down wherever you like,’ her mum says. Her mother, sweet lady, now old, crosses her arms and leans against the kitchen counter, somehow expectantly. She feels like a guest, rebellious and rude for putting her bags down in the middle of the room. ‘Marina’, her mom rolls her eyes before she turns around to open the wine. They touch hands on the stem of the glass as Laurie hands it over, and for the first time since opening the door to this heavy, heavy home, Marina sees a beginning. Just there, in the corner of an eye, a stem of tenderness, water collecting on a lash, disappearing as fast as it came. ‘So tell me, how is it?’ her mother asks. ‘How is what?’ Marina wishes she would ask for specifics. She knows from Edna and Oona that asking for details is what makes caring and conversation worth it. ‘Uni, dear.’ Laurie answers with her back to Marina, already busy fixing something at the counter. ‘It’s fine, mum, I’m learning a lot. I’m making friends. I get drunk on the weekends,’ she says. ‘Good,’ her mother answers, chopping vegetables for a salad. ‘And you?’ Marina asks, but only gets an ‘everything is the same, dear,’ with a brief touch of her cheek. ‘Dinner will be half an hour.’ This is how most things are between them, implied endings, but Marina can’t resist extending the moment. ‘I didn’t know you learned how to cook’, she says, because a normal mother would be cooking her favourite dishes for her daughter’s return from university. A normal mother would know what her daughter’s favourite dishes were. ‘Anna made something for me to heat up. You can settle in while I make the salad.’ If her mother is hurt, she doesn’t give it away.
Her navel meets the water, as if a chord has pulled her there. It is summer, and she is also lying in her bed. It recurs, again and again, but when she is awake it all seems different. How can a belly meet water, as if what’s inside knows its kin outside? She is carrying a girl, she is sure, because her own mother’s voice is coming back to her as she stands. Beached, horizon-gazing, a long time ago. ‘Only to the belly button,’ her mother’s voice says from the shore. She waves back at sunglassed eyes and a smile. There is something humming in there, there always was. She wonders if it was her, the one inside. But she also knows the tune. ‘Laurie?’ His weight next to her. ‘You’re doing it again.’ His hand cupping her cheek. ‘What?’ she surfaces. ‘Humming in your sleep.’ She places her head on his shoulder, her belly touching his side as it touched water just moments ago. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles, falling back asleep.
Marina steps into a room, which is exactly how she left it. For anyone else, whose teenage room was kept intact, a story would be told. But Anna, who has made their dinner, has also made the bed. Her mother hired her for her similar kind of clinical precision when cleaning and cooking. For them both, the world is put in order by the straightening of bedsheet, the dusting of surfaces. For Marina, she hardly knows. She never had enough room to make a mess before it was cleaned up. Having her own room at university has made rebelling possible, but even then, her own preference doesn’t come naturally to her as she wavers between the comfort of mess and the comfort of tidiness. Not like it has always done for her half-sister Edna, whose home is made behind a coloured curtain in the kitchen, only thinly veiling the cooking smells from the rest of the house, lived-in, easy-to-relax-in. Edna has inherited her mother Oona’s freedom in all the ways Marina has inherited her mother’s restraint. When asked whether Oona ever minded being the other woman for ten years, who was left promptly when Marina’s mother became pregnant, Edna swears she’d always reply, ‘there is enough love and enough bad things in the world without having to add to the scale.’ ‘She refused to be bitter,’ Edna says, when she’s invited Marina over for the first nourishing meal she’s had since university. ‘She loved us both so,’ Edna says and holds Marina’s hand. It is the first time they speak of her like this, since she passed away just before Marina moved. She hasn’t wanted to impose her grief on Edna and her family. Oona and her weren’t even related. ‘I should be comforting you’, she tells Edna from their embraces, but Edna just smiles. ‘There’s enough for everyone, little one,’ Edna says, returning to stirring the pot. And after a pause, ‘besides, I have my little family here, who hold me when I cry. You don’t have anyone anymore who does that beside me.’ Edna never means to expose her sharp edges, or maybe she does, Marina no longer knows now Oona is not there to mediate between the hurt she feels and Edna’s meaning when she is curt. If Oona were here, she would have told her to apologise immediately, and even if Edna would feign ignorance of what she had said, her mother would know her better. Just one mother-glance would expose her daughter’s secret, and Edna would have to say ‘you’re right,’ and ‘I’m sorry’. ‘You know our dad was rich, right? You can afford a bigger place,’ Marina says, immediately regretting answering sharp with sharp. She knows this is how fights start, but Edna just points a soup-covered spoon at her. ‘You know I put my inheritance to marine biology research because of your weird ‘I speak to whales’-phase, right?’ Marina blushes. ‘I forgot’. Edna smiles warmly, ‘besides, what I wanted from him, money couldn’t give.’ The sound of lashing water brings Marina back to her window-seat in her old room. She watches the dark waves travel, crowned with white foam, from God-knows-where to the shore below grey home. Strange that she used to think she could hear the voices of whales from this sea.
Afterwards, how do we recover? Marina doesn’t know, apart from being by the water. Apart from secretly going into it, they grey, blue, sprinkled white waves surrounding her. Her friend at sea has told her this is normal. He has been preparing her for it for a long time. ‘Like the waves’, he says, ‘it comes both back and forth, back and forth’. He doesn’t need to say any more, but he always does. ‘The waves, like us, always contains forward and backward motion, one in the other.’ She doesn’t know how this is really supposed to help her, other than not at all.
Laurie has cut herself, distracted by her daughter’s presence, even when she’s not in the room, even when she is named by her father after the ocean outside all the rooms of this house. ‘Surrounded by water’ Anders tells her 23 years before, tracing the hill of her belly as they lie in bed, staring out on a calm sea, drunk on their happiness before she knew of the existence of a slightly older sister already. He had such a way, this white-teeth-grin, larger-than-life man, whose weight and breadth and height is entirely missing from the house, from her body, from her life. She never knew the physical aspect of losing someone before he passed. It has been 10 years now, of missing his body going through life next to her. When he finally came clean about Oona and Edna, she had to feign anger and surprise. She knew she would never leave him, but big-bellied and betrayed, she shouted at him threatening to do so, because that’s what she thought was expected of her in this situation. She had already avoided asking him where he went when he stayed away for longer than he’d promised his working-day or business trip would take. She thought only little about what her friends might say to her. It is not that she didn’t care, it was just that she didn’t know how to be in the world and not hold it at arm’s length, apart from riding its waves and ordering things as neatly as she could. This, too, is how she’d stumbled into motherhood, and so Oona was a relief. She had been a much better mother to Marina than Laurie could ever be, and, in her heart-of-hearts, Laurie was happy that her child was being mothered no matter who did it. As she washes her cut, she feels the gravity of her daughter’s body, oozing from the ceiling above. Her whale-watching daughter who never strayed far from the mysteries is sitting by the window watching waves, she knows it. Would she have been able to handle her child’s imaginary friends and her husband’s death without Oona putting it down to a blood-and-bone connection to these weird creatures living way out at sea? Years before, in the months after Anders’ death, Oona holds Laurie’s hands and explains. ‘We are not supposed to hear these things, but some do’. Despite Anders’ attempt to keep them apart, Oona had knocked on their door when the girls were young, scheduling their secret tea-meetings as Anders was away conducting affairs with others. ‘She might,’ Oona smiles, as Laurie makes their tea, as they both grieve for the man that united them, ‘even be the sane one of all of us.’
‘Who decides where lives depart from each other?’ He asks her. She doesn’t know if her decade-old brain can hold such unmooring. ‘God, maybe’, she suggests. He laughs, ‘yes, but which one?’ ‘There are more?’ she marvels. ‘Yes, little one. It takes them all to weave the threads between dreaming and waking, between mystery and the real so neatly.’ It is autumn now, and the double-sky is greying. It is always harder to come here once the light retracts and the cold sets in. His kin go elsewhere too, soon. ‘Do you want me to stay?’ he offers her in a way none of her parents have, but she understands the sacrifice all too well. Giving her belonging shouldn’t come at the cost of his. ‘No thank you,’ she says. He carries her up to sea-level and back into waking. ‘Stoic as always’ he says, as they depart.
Oona left her The Whale Dictionary; the recordings of whale spotting and whale talking. It was a game they played, she vaguely remembers. ‘Do they sound like this?’ she asks Marina when she comes over after school. Marina is peevish, because Edna is also there and finds the whole thing ridiculous. She places hot chocolate down in front of what she considers her two daughters, Anders be damned. ‘You can tell us’, she laughs, sending a look to Edna. ‘I used to talk to my teddies when dad left,’ Edna says. ‘It’s normal,’ she shrugs. Marina doesn’t want to say that it might be normal to talk to inanimate objects, but not to have a whale best friend,a who you visit in the ocean, and who talks back. ‘Yes and no,’ Marina answers them both, and looks out the window. ‘Sometimes it’s more like a song.’ ‘Beautiful,’ Oona says, as she starts stirring pots for dinner. Marina looks at Edna, who has clearly started to think about something else. But Marina is wrong. ‘Maybe one day we can go to the museum and see their skeletons. They’re huge. I read you can stand inside their bellies’, Edna says. ‘Or not,’ Edna quickly adds. Oona turns around to gage Marina’s reaction. The tension will be punctuated with either laughing or crying in a moment, but she can’t help but enjoy this pause between a feeling’s sensation and its expression. The Gods laugh, she knows, when we think we know which way life will go. Children, daughters, keep you in communion with a constant now. Before Marina cracks a smile, before Edna nearly falls from her chair apologising and holding her belly with laughter, Oona delights that both her daughters have the same colour eyes, grey and green. ‘I prefer my whales alive’, Marina says, as she comes up for air from giggling. Edna makes parodic whale sounds, sending them both into a second fit of laughter. Oona closes her eyes, returning to the boiling pot. These girls, these colours, this sound, this gift of life around her. Sometimes, and more recurringly as she gets older, Oona has trouble keeping her heart in her chest for joy.
Laurie tops up their glasses of wine, the kind of thing she can do with a grown-up daughter. Maybe it will help them talk before Edna comes tomorrow. How to describe the gravity of carrying a child like Marina, except saying she woke up in the night, feeling called to the sea when she was still in her belly? She knew there was water around her, but she also knew her daughter wanted to swim more. She never told anyone apart from Oona. ‘I follow her wet footsteps up the stairs in the morning,’ she looks for signs of judgement in Oona’s ever-open face, ‘and I don’t know what to tell her, or myself’ Oona takes her hand. ‘I think she goes into the water at night, but she comes back.’ ‘And when she wakes?’ Oona asks. ‘I don’t know. She’s stopped telling me things.’ ‘Everything can be true at once, Laurie’, Oona responds, but Laurie is tired. ‘Just tell me what to do. What would you do?’ Oona lets her hand go. ‘Stay up. Watch over her. Be happy she returns. Ask about her adventures.’ They have swapped the tea for something stronger, and Laurie swallows what’s left of her glass in a big gulp. ‘I don’t believe in stories in the same way you do,’ she despairs, ‘I can’t go where she goes, Oona, and she knows it.’ ‘Then,’ Oona pours half of her wine into Laurie’s glass, ‘I will ask her. Between us, we hold her.’ Oona knows too well that mothers need mothers, that whole structures need to be built around a person who takes care of another person. ‘Maybe one day, you can go with her.’
Will he still be here? Marina wonders by the window, and she has feared coming back exactly for this reason. Telling university friends that she studies Marine biology with a name like hers is already ridiculous enough. Telling them she does it because her oldest friend is a whale who she used to hang out with at night, a whole other. She is scared to sleep in this house, where everything is so neat and clean and straightforward. If her home had been less just-so, it might have been easier to hold all the waves in her head at once, but in this house and on this long street, people are people of the world, and they speak in the language of how-things-are. ‘Was it real?’ she asks the ocean, and goes downstairs. ‘I’m so glad you’re home’ Laurie says when they sit down to eat. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say that first.’ When Oona died, Laurie spent a week in bed. She never told Marina because she isn’t sure how to say, ‘I know your loss’, and ‘I miss her too’ in the same sentence. Being grieve-reliever and grieving, mother to someone who lost another mother, these are codes Laurie can’t crack. They eat in silence, and Laurie only braves a ‘Edna will be here at 9 tomorrow.’ Marina nods. When they have finished, Marina is quick to her feet. She clears the table despite Lauren’s ‘don’t worry, I’ll do it’ and ends their night on a ‘sleep well’ spoken from the top of the stairs.
He is coming back, not by decree, but because he knows she has made the kinds of choices that keeps all worlds together at once. The wave always has both the ebb and flow inside it. He hopes, at least, he has imparted her that, even if the layers of loss are as songlike-changing as the double-skies.
Laurie is wide awake at 6am and passes the time before the world wakes up as she always does, making coffee, wiping the counter down, looking at how the sea starts the day. She crosses from the kitchen to the living room as she feels water underneath her feet. Oona would know what to do about adult Marina’s wet footsteps leading up the stairs from the front door, but all Laurie can think of is wiping the floor and tiptoeing upstairs. Marina’s door is open, and she lets out the breath she has been holding when seeing her daughter fast asleep in her bed. Marina never knew her mother would stand guard in the small hours of the morning, watching her walk into the ocean and back again. Marina never suspected that Oona would ask and probe when Laurie fell short to ask her withdrawn child about fantasies and whales. It was too gnawing, too unsettling a situation for Laurie, so much so that all she could respond when Marina told her she would study marine biology was, ‘that makes sense.’ How else could she tell this child that the weight of the ocean had been around her always, even before she was born?
Edna has brought a flask of hot, spiced tea to Oona’s grave. None of them have said a word on the drive over here, as if all only reluctantly keeping their promise to her that they would meet here, a year on. Laurie knows that as the mother, she should start the conversation or at least hold its tension with some degree of authority, but she can’t. Oona had gravity that she never did, even when Anders did finally come home when he promised one day and saw them together. His face turned white watching what he thought was his best kept secret sitting and laughing together. When they see him, they burst into an even bigger fit of laughter, because it is all too ridiculous. Without much else, Oona finished her tea and conversation with Lauren, before patting Anders on the cheek as she left. Before, he had only confessed to the affair, but never who she was. He never found out how long Lauren had known Oona or why there was not more monstrous consequences. They all simply went on as they had, apart from sometimes, just sometimes, he would catch Laurie’s gaze at him knowing he had made something less whole.
Edna coolly remarks ‘we promised her we would talk. Who wants to start?’ Laurie freezes and Marina looks the other way. ‘Fine,’ Edna braves. ‘I miss her, and I’m angry with the both of you for not saying it more.’ Marina looks at Edna, asking for a hand to hold across the branching sea of connection. ‘She saved us all many times.’ They all go quiet again. Laurie feels Oona’s hand at her back, as it was so many times when she was alive. Come on, Laurie. ‘I,’ she starts and stops. ‘I hear her all the time, speaking to me’, she finally continues. ‘She knew so much more about what to do, so when I don’t know what I should do, she still talks to me.’ Laurie looks straight at Marina. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t understand before,’ she adds. They stand in silence for a while, before Marina says ‘I want to go home.’ When Marina and Laurie enter the house again, Laurie grabs Marina’s hand before she goes upstairs. She holds it for a time, before clasping her daughter in an embrace. Marina sobs into Laurie’s shoulder as the darkness falls around them. When they untangle, Marina’s eyes are swollen. Laurie places her hand on her daughter’s cheek, and this is how they start again.
Laurie sits awake in the kitchen by the front door. It might be a dream, because Oona is not far away, and she tells her to be brave enough to go on whatever adventure comes. When Marina comes down the stairs, she holds out her hand to Laurie and smiles. Together, they go to the beach and stare into the open sea. The waves lick their ankles, making them both smile. They go onwards, into the city below the water, electrical wires lighting up, whales swimming together. He is there, and when he sees Laurie, he says ‘I have been waiting so long to meet you’. They swim together, sit and share stories of Marina as a child, of Laurie while she carried her, of knowing things end only to begin again. Too soon, he carries them up to the surface. Too soon, they have to go. ‘Come back anytime’, a departure-gift like no other.
For the first time in years, Laurie sleeps in. She wakes to the smell of coffee, to Marina’s phone playing sweet tunes, to Marina cooking eggs. She embraces her daughter from behind, and they stand like that for a while. ‘Will you come back soon?’
The stairs are marbled grey as always, which makes her remember why she hasn’t been home in a while. The view walking up from the road, also grey, the sky darkening with night coming. She is doing those heavy steps of returning to the place she’s from. She hasn’t yet met anyone who could describe magnetic force of a childhood home, the force that, despite effort, pulls you back. But still she can’t tell the story of her birthplace as one of woe, thinking of the big windows overlooking the ocean, the veranda made in cold stone, boasting sunset backgrounds on the few warm summer days. ‘Nothing like that ever happened to me,’ she would lie when uni friends told stories of fathers or mothers leaving never to come back. She would only admit to how she could trace patterns of lightning from her first-floor bedroom-window whenever there was an electric storm, but not the voices of parents fighting travelling from the floor below, or the sounds heard in her sleep, sometimes awake, not of fighting but of song, not from her parents, but from the ocean. Saying these things aloud, she’d learned, makes it nearly impossible for people to love you.
‘Put your bags down wherever you like,’ her mum says. Her mother, sweet lady, now old, crosses her arms and leans against the kitchen counter, somehow expectantly. She feels like a guest, rebellious and rude for putting her bags down in the middle of the room. ‘Marina’, her mom rolls her eyes before she turns around to open the wine. They touch hands on the stem of the glass as Laurie hands it over, and for the first time since opening the door to this heavy, heavy home, Marina sees a beginning. Just there, in the corner of an eye, a stem of tenderness, water collecting on a lash, disappearing as fast as it came. ‘So tell me, how is it?’ her mother asks. ‘How is what?’ Marina wishes she would ask for specifics. She knows from Edna and Oona that asking for details is what makes caring and conversation worth it. ‘Uni, dear.’ Laurie answers with her back to Marina, already busy fixing something at the counter. ‘It’s fine, mum, I’m learning a lot. I’m making friends. I get drunk on the weekends,’ she says. ‘Good,’ her mother answers, chopping vegetables for a salad. ‘And you?’ Marina asks, but only gets an ‘everything is the same, dear,’ with a brief touch of her cheek. ‘Dinner will be half an hour.’ This is how most things are between them, implied endings, but Marina can’t resist extending the moment. ‘I didn’t know you learned how to cook’, she says, because a normal mother would be cooking her favourite dishes for her daughter’s return from university. A normal mother would know what her daughter’s favourite dishes were. ‘Anna made something for me to heat up. You can settle in while I make the salad.’ If her mother is hurt, she doesn’t give it away.
Her navel meets the water, as if a chord has pulled her there. It is summer, and she is also lying in her bed. It recurs, again and again, but when she is awake it all seems different. How can a belly meet water, as if what’s inside knows its kin outside? She is carrying a girl, she is sure, because her own mother’s voice is coming back to her as she stands. Beached, horizon-gazing, a long time ago. ‘Only to the belly button,’ her mother’s voice says from the shore. She waves back at sunglassed eyes and a smile. There is something humming in there, there always was. She wonders if it was her, the one inside. But she also knows the tune. ‘Laurie?’ His weight next to her. ‘You’re doing it again.’ His hand cupping her cheek. ‘What?’ she surfaces. ‘Humming in your sleep.’ She places her head on his shoulder, her belly touching his side as it touched water just moments ago. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles, falling back asleep.
Marina steps into a room, which is exactly how she left it. For anyone else, whose teenage room was kept intact, a story would be told. But Anna, who has made their dinner, has also made the bed. Her mother hired her for her similar kind of clinical precision when cleaning and cooking. For them both, the world is put in order by the straightening of bedsheet, the dusting of surfaces. For Marina, she hardly knows. She never had enough room to make a mess before it was cleaned up. Having her own room at university has made rebelling possible, but even then, her own preference doesn’t come naturally to her as she wavers between the comfort of mess and the comfort of tidiness. Not like it has always done for her half-sister Edna, whose home is made behind a coloured curtain in the kitchen, only thinly veiling the cooking smells from the rest of the house, lived-in, easy-to-relax-in. Edna has inherited her mother Oona’s freedom in all the ways Marina has inherited her mother’s restraint. When asked whether Oona ever minded being the other woman for ten years, who was left promptly when Marina’s mother became pregnant, Edna swears she’d always reply, ‘there is enough love and enough bad things in the world without having to add to the scale.’ ‘She refused to be bitter,’ Edna says, when she’s invited Marina over for the first nourishing meal she’s had since university. ‘She loved us both so,’ Edna says and holds Marina’s hand. It is the first time they speak of her like this, since she passed away just before Marina moved. She hasn’t wanted to impose her grief on Edna and her family. Oona and her weren’t even related. ‘I should be comforting you’, she tells Edna from their embraces, but Edna just smiles. ‘There’s enough for everyone, little one,’ Edna says, returning to stirring the pot. And after a pause, ‘besides, I have my little family here, who hold me when I cry. You don’t have anyone anymore who does that beside me.’ Edna never means to expose her sharp edges, or maybe she does, Marina no longer knows now Oona is not there to mediate between the hurt she feels and Edna’s meaning when she is curt. If Oona were here, she would have told her to apologise immediately, and even if Edna would feign ignorance of what she had said, her mother would know her better. Just one mother-glance would expose her daughter’s secret, and Edna would have to say ‘you’re right,’ and ‘I’m sorry’. ‘You know our dad was rich, right? You can afford a bigger place,’ Marina says, immediately regretting answering sharp with sharp. She knows this is how fights start, but Edna just points a soup-covered spoon at her. ‘You know I put my inheritance to marine biology research because of your weird ‘I speak to whales’-phase, right?’ Marina blushes. ‘I forgot’. Edna smiles warmly, ‘besides, what I wanted from him, money couldn’t give.’ The sound of lashing water brings Marina back to her window-seat in her old room. She watches the dark waves travel, crowned with white foam, from God-knows-where to the shore below grey home. Strange that she used to think she could hear the voices of whales from this sea.
Afterwards, how do we recover? Marina doesn’t know, apart from being by the water. Apart from secretly going into it, they grey, blue, sprinkled white waves surrounding her. Her friend at sea has told her this is normal. He has been preparing her for it for a long time. ‘Like the waves’, he says, ‘it comes both back and forth, back and forth’. He doesn’t need to say any more, but he always does. ‘The waves, like us, always contains forward and backward motion, one in the other.’ She doesn’t know how this is really supposed to help her, other than not at all.
Laurie has cut herself, distracted by her daughter’s presence, even when she’s not in the room, even when she is named by her father after the ocean outside all the rooms of this house. ‘Surrounded by water’ Anders tells her 23 years before, tracing the hill of her belly as they lie in bed, staring out on a calm sea, drunk on their happiness before she knew of the existence of a slightly older sister already. He had such a way, this white-teeth-grin, larger-than-life man, whose weight and breadth and height is entirely missing from the house, from her body, from her life. She never knew the physical aspect of losing someone before he passed. It has been 10 years now, of missing his body going through life next to her. When he finally came clean about Oona and Edna, she had to feign anger and surprise. She knew she would never leave him, but big-bellied and betrayed, she shouted at him threatening to do so, because that’s what she thought was expected of her in this situation. She had already avoided asking him where he went when he stayed away for longer than he’d promised his working-day or business trip would take. She thought only little about what her friends might say to her. It is not that she didn’t care, it was just that she didn’t know how to be in the world and not hold it at arm’s length, apart from riding its waves and ordering things as neatly as she could. This, too, is how she’d stumbled into motherhood, and so Oona was a relief. She had been a much better mother to Marina than Laurie could ever be, and, in her heart-of-hearts, Laurie was happy that her child was being mothered no matter who did it. As she washes her cut, she feels the gravity of her daughter’s body, oozing from the ceiling above. Her whale-watching daughter who never strayed far from the mysteries is sitting by the window watching waves, she knows it. Would she have been able to handle her child’s imaginary friends and her husband’s death without Oona putting it down to a blood-and-bone connection to these weird creatures living way out at sea? Years before, in the months after Anders’ death, Oona holds Laurie’s hands and explains. ‘We are not supposed to hear these things, but some do’. Despite Anders’ attempt to keep them apart, Oona had knocked on their door when the girls were young, scheduling their secret tea-meetings as Anders was away conducting affairs with others. ‘She might,’ Oona smiles, as Laurie makes their tea, as they both grieve for the man that united them, ‘even be the sane one of all of us.’
‘Who decides where lives depart from each other?’ He asks her. She doesn’t know if her decade-old brain can hold such unmooring. ‘God, maybe’, she suggests. He laughs, ‘yes, but which one?’ ‘There are more?’ she marvels. ‘Yes, little one. It takes them all to weave the threads between dreaming and waking, between mystery and the real so neatly.’ It is autumn now, and the double-sky is greying. It is always harder to come here once the light retracts and the cold sets in. His kin go elsewhere too, soon. ‘Do you want me to stay?’ he offers her in a way none of her parents have, but she understands the sacrifice all too well. Giving her belonging shouldn’t come at the cost of his. ‘No thank you,’ she says. He carries her up to sea-level and back into waking. ‘Stoic as always’ he says, as they depart.
Oona left her The Whale Dictionary; the recordings of whale spotting and whale talking. It was a game they played, she vaguely remembers. ‘Do they sound like this?’ she asks Marina when she comes over after school. Marina is peevish, because Edna is also there and finds the whole thing ridiculous. She places hot chocolate down in front of what she considers her two daughters, Anders be damned. ‘You can tell us’, she laughs, sending a look to Edna. ‘I used to talk to my teddies when dad left,’ Edna says. ‘It’s normal,’ she shrugs. Marina doesn’t want to say that it might be normal to talk to inanimate objects, but not to have a whale best friend,a who you visit in the ocean, and who talks back. ‘Yes and no,’ Marina answers them both, and looks out the window. ‘Sometimes it’s more like a song.’ ‘Beautiful,’ Oona says, as she starts stirring pots for dinner. Marina looks at Edna, who has clearly started to think about something else. But Marina is wrong. ‘Maybe one day we can go to the museum and see their skeletons. They’re huge. I read you can stand inside their bellies’, Edna says. ‘Or not,’ Edna quickly adds. Oona turns around to gage Marina’s reaction. The tension will be punctuated with either laughing or crying in a moment, but she can’t help but enjoy this pause between a feeling’s sensation and its expression. The Gods laugh, she knows, when we think we know which way life will go. Children, daughters, keep you in communion with a constant now. Before Marina cracks a smile, before Edna nearly falls from her chair apologising and holding her belly with laughter, Oona delights that both her daughters have the same colour eyes, grey and green. ‘I prefer my whales alive’, Marina says, as she comes up for air from giggling. Edna makes parodic whale sounds, sending them both into a second fit of laughter. Oona closes her eyes, returning to the boiling pot. These girls, these colours, this sound, this gift of life around her. Sometimes, and more recurringly as she gets older, Oona has trouble keeping her heart in her chest for joy.
Laurie tops up their glasses of wine, the kind of thing she can do with a grown-up daughter. Maybe it will help them talk before Edna comes tomorrow. How to describe the gravity of carrying a child like Marina, except saying she woke up in the night, feeling called to the sea when she was still in her belly? She knew there was water around her, but she also knew her daughter wanted to swim more. She never told anyone apart from Oona. ‘I follow her wet footsteps up the stairs in the morning,’ she looks for signs of judgement in Oona’s ever-open face, ‘and I don’t know what to tell her, or myself’ Oona takes her hand. ‘I think she goes into the water at night, but she comes back.’ ‘And when she wakes?’ Oona asks. ‘I don’t know. She’s stopped telling me things.’ ‘Everything can be true at once, Laurie’, Oona responds, but Laurie is tired. ‘Just tell me what to do. What would you do?’ Oona lets her hand go. ‘Stay up. Watch over her. Be happy she returns. Ask about her adventures.’ They have swapped the tea for something stronger, and Laurie swallows what’s left of her glass in a big gulp. ‘I don’t believe in stories in the same way you do,’ she despairs, ‘I can’t go where she goes, Oona, and she knows it.’ ‘Then,’ Oona pours half of her wine into Laurie’s glass, ‘I will ask her. Between us, we hold her.’ Oona knows too well that mothers need mothers, that whole structures need to be built around a person who takes care of another person. ‘Maybe one day, you can go with her.’
Will he still be here? Marina wonders by the window, and she has feared coming back exactly for this reason. Telling university friends that she studies Marine biology with a name like hers is already ridiculous enough. Telling them she does it because her oldest friend is a whale who she used to hang out with at night, a whole other. She is scared to sleep in this house, where everything is so neat and clean and straightforward. If her home had been less just-so, it might have been easier to hold all the waves in her head at once, but in this house and on this long street, people are people of the world, and they speak in the language of how-things-are. ‘Was it real?’ she asks the ocean, and goes downstairs. ‘I’m so glad you’re home’ Laurie says when they sit down to eat. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say that first.’ When Oona died, Laurie spent a week in bed. She never told Marina because she isn’t sure how to say, ‘I know your loss’, and ‘I miss her too’ in the same sentence. Being grieve-reliever and grieving, mother to someone who lost another mother, these are codes Laurie can’t crack. They eat in silence, and Laurie only braves a ‘Edna will be here at 9 tomorrow.’ Marina nods. When they have finished, Marina is quick to her feet. She clears the table despite Lauren’s ‘don’t worry, I’ll do it’ and ends their night on a ‘sleep well’ spoken from the top of the stairs.
He is coming back, not by decree, but because he knows she has made the kinds of choices that keeps all worlds together at once. The wave always has both the ebb and flow inside it. He hopes, at least, he has imparted her that, even if the layers of loss are as songlike-changing as the double-skies.
Laurie is wide awake at 6am and passes the time before the world wakes up as she always does, making coffee, wiping the counter down, looking at how the sea starts the day. She crosses from the kitchen to the living room as she feels water underneath her feet. Oona would know what to do about adult Marina’s wet footsteps leading up the stairs from the front door, but all Laurie can think of is wiping the floor and tiptoeing upstairs. Marina’s door is open, and she lets out the breath she has been holding when seeing her daughter fast asleep in her bed. Marina never knew her mother would stand guard in the small hours of the morning, watching her walk into the ocean and back again. Marina never suspected that Oona would ask and probe when Laurie fell short to ask her withdrawn child about fantasies and whales. It was too gnawing, too unsettling a situation for Laurie, so much so that all she could respond when Marina told her she would study marine biology was, ‘that makes sense.’ How else could she tell this child that the weight of the ocean had been around her always, even before she was born?
Edna has brought a flask of hot, spiced tea to Oona’s grave. None of them have said a word on the drive over here, as if all only reluctantly keeping their promise to her that they would meet here, a year on. Laurie knows that as the mother, she should start the conversation or at least hold its tension with some degree of authority, but she can’t. Oona had gravity that she never did, even when Anders did finally come home when he promised one day and saw them together. His face turned white watching what he thought was his best kept secret sitting and laughing together. When they see him, they burst into an even bigger fit of laughter, because it is all too ridiculous. Without much else, Oona finished her tea and conversation with Lauren, before patting Anders on the cheek as she left. Before, he had only confessed to the affair, but never who she was. He never found out how long Lauren had known Oona or why there was not more monstrous consequences. They all simply went on as they had, apart from sometimes, just sometimes, he would catch Laurie’s gaze at him knowing he had made something less whole.
Edna coolly remarks ‘we promised her we would talk. Who wants to start?’ Laurie freezes and Marina looks the other way. ‘Fine,’ Edna braves. ‘I miss her, and I’m angry with the both of you for not saying it more.’ Marina looks at Edna, asking for a hand to hold across the branching sea of connection. ‘She saved us all many times.’ They all go quiet again. Laurie feels Oona’s hand at her back, as it was so many times when she was alive. Come on, Laurie. ‘I,’ she starts and stops. ‘I hear her all the time, speaking to me’, she finally continues. ‘She knew so much more about what to do, so when I don’t know what I should do, she still talks to me.’ Laurie looks straight at Marina. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t understand before,’ she adds. They stand in silence for a while, before Marina says ‘I want to go home.’ When Marina and Laurie enter the house again, Laurie grabs Marina’s hand before she goes upstairs. She holds it for a time, before clasping her daughter in an embrace. Marina sobs into Laurie’s shoulder as the darkness falls around them. When they untangle, Marina’s eyes are swollen. Laurie places her hand on her daughter’s cheek, and this is how they start again.
Laurie sits awake in the kitchen by the front door. It might be a dream, because Oona is not far away, and she tells her to be brave enough to go on whatever adventure comes. When Marina comes down the stairs, she holds out her hand to Laurie and smiles. Together, they go to the beach and stare into the open sea. The waves lick their ankles, making them both smile. They go onwards, into the city below the water, electrical wires lighting up, whales swimming together. He is there, and when he sees Laurie, he says ‘I have been waiting so long to meet you’. They swim together, sit and share stories of Marina as a child, of Laurie while she carried her, of knowing things end only to begin again. Too soon, he carries them up to the surface. Too soon, they have to go. ‘Come back anytime’, a departure-gift like no other.
For the first time in years, Laurie sleeps in. She wakes to the smell of coffee, to Marina’s phone playing sweet tunes, to Marina cooking eggs. She embraces her daughter from behind, and they stand like that for a while. ‘Will you come back soon?’
Helene is a writer and researcher, whose work spans from performance and fiction to academic publications. She frequently works in the intersection between research, community building and politically engaged creative practices. Her works have been produced e.g. by Scottish Opera, The Night With, and featured in the Documenta15 Festival. Her fiction has been published e.g. by Dark Mountain Magazine, while her academic publications range from a single-authored monograph, Asylum and Belonging Through Collective Playwriting with Palgrave Macmillan, and other prominent scholarly journals. She will be a writer in residence at Tartu Literary Festival connected to Tartu as the UNESCO city of Literature this Spring.