A Possibility of Whales Read online

  Algonquin Young Readers

  2018

  For Linden and Lola.

  Os quiero mucho.

  Contents

  Part One: Canada

  Oh, Canada . . .

  Bird (Mom)

  The Itch

  Harry

  Cod Is Terrible

  A Bear on a Bike

  The Thing About Harry

  Solly/Soleil

  Harry

  The Things You Find When You Aren’t Looking

  Harry

  Postcard Number 2

  Science Fair

  Part Two: Mexico

  Bebida/Boobida

  Water Is Universal

  The SUPERMARKET mercado

  Nope Nope

  Harry

  The 34B Frog

  On The Roof

  Thirteen

  The Talk

  The Amazing Race

  The Whale

  In the Water

  Changes

  Quinceañera

  Harry

  The End of the Story

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Oh, Canada . . .

  On her fourth day at the new place, Natalia Rose Baleine Gallagher walked down the long, lumpy trail to the beach that lay at the bottom of the slope.

  The “Baleine” was silent, was what she told people when they asked, which was pretty much only when she was registering at a new school or had to show her passport. Baleine was the French word for “whale.” Nat loved the fact that it was there, hiding inside her perfectly normal name. She pictured the whale swimming past the Natalia Rose on her passport, surfacing when no one was looking to take a long huffing breath of air before disappearing again, under the Gallagher.

  “Baleine” was the heart of her name. (When Nat had to do an “All About Me” poster in first grade, she drew a whale where most kids put a heart.)

  “Baleine” was also a secret between Nat and her mother, who named her.

  Her mother, who named her, and then left.

  Nat did not know her mother. She had never met her, except for the few fleeting minutes after she was born. You can come out of someone’s body, she thought, and not have that count as meeting them.

  Not knowing her mother was the most defining everything about Nat’s life, which was more complicated than she’d like. Purposely not asking about her mother was Nat’s way of minimizing the complications.

  Nat knew she could easily find her mother’s identity by searching “XAN GALLAGHER daughter mother” (or some other combination of those words) on Google, but she didn’t. She mainly used the Internet to look up untranslatable words, which were words that existed in other languages but not in English. Her goal was to learn every language in the world until she found the right one for herself. English was too limiting.

  There is a word in Hindi, for example, viraag, which means the pain you feel when you are separated from someone you love. Nat had felt viraag about her mother for her whole life.

  See?

  It was complicated.

  Sometimes, Nat thought that she liked not knowing. Who doesn’t like a mystery? She rubbed the not knowing around in her brain like a pebble that was getting smoother and shinier and more beautiful over time.

  Nat thought she knew a few things about her mother, whether she wanted to or not. She guessed her mother was French, for example, because the name Baleine was French. And that her mother liked whales for the same reason. Once she made those assumptions, they became true in her head, as real and solid as stone.

  Nat also had a sneaking suspicion that her mother was “in the industry.” After all, famous people—and Nat’s dad was extremely famous—tended to fall in love with and marry only other famous people, although there were always exceptions to that rule.

  Sometimes they fell in love with and married their makeup artist.

  And as soon as Nat thought that, it became as true a fact about her mother as “French” and “liking whales.”

  Nat’s dad and Nat’s mom must have loved each other, but they did not get married. Nat was born and then her mother left. Those were the facts. No matter how Nat arranged the facts in her head, she couldn’t really make them add up to something that was OK.

  It wasn’t.

  Over the years, her brain—almost without her permission—had even formed a pretty complete image of what her mother looked like (beautiful, blond, pale, freckled). The whole portrait was pleasantly blurry, as though someone had put a glowing Instagram filter on it and turned it up so high you couldn’t really make out the specific features of her mother’s face.

  When Nat thought about it too much—which she did, all the time, without being able to help it—she sometimes decided that her mother must have been a terrible person who wasn’t worth knowing. Other times, she figured there was probably a really good reason for everything and so her mother, whoever she was, had had a good reason to go.

  It was a lot to carry around inside her head—her dad clearly didn’t want to talk about it, or at least, he never had so far—and she never brought it up with Solly, who was (in theory anyway) her best friend.

  But . . .

  But!

  But Nat was a person who loved possibilities, and when it came to her mysterious missing mother, there were a lot of possibilities.

  It was possible Nat just didn’t want to know who she was.

  It was possible she would never want to know.

  And, at the same time, it was possible she did want to know.

  It was even possible she wanted her dad to just tell her already, without waiting to be asked.

  It was also possible she was glad he continued to pretend he didn’t know that she sometimes did, and sometimes did not, want to know.

  Life was like that: a lot of thin layers all stacked together to make something whole, like a puff pastry. Thinking about puff pastry made Nat hungry, but thinking about her mother was more like poking a bruise. Except the bruise was her heart and the poke was just metaphorical, not literal. (People who said “literally” when they meant the opposite drove Nat crazy.)

  In addition to all the above possibilities, a new possibility Nat was considering—the most exciting one—was that it was possible that if her mother were to meet her now that Nat was twelve years old and not a purple-faced crying baby, maybe she would like her. Maybe even love her. (Some people were just not baby people.) And Nat might love her back.

  It was a huge What if? that hung over Nat perpetually, like a thought cloud in a graphic novel.

  But . . .

  But!

  But there was no changing the enormous and unforgivable fact that Nat was born and her mother up and left without even giving her a chance.

  And apparently did not look back.

  Nat loved her (whoever she was) because she couldn’t help it.

  Nat hated her (whoever she was) because she couldn’t help it.

  See?

  It was complicated.

  • • •

  Nat made her way down the trail, parts of which were muddier and steeper than they looked from up top. It wasn’t much of a path. Nature was a lot messier when you were in it than it looked on postcards, and Canada was very nature-y and messy. This beach was called French Beach even though it was nowhere near the French part of Canada, which was on the other side of the country. It was, at least, a beach. And Nat liked the name. It was très bien.

  She liked everything French, no matter what.
<
br />   “Je t’aime,” she said out loud. That means “I love you” in French.

  Her French was pretty good. It was one of her favorite languages to memorize. It made her think of bunches of flowers tied together with soft, pretty ribbons.

  Nat kicked a big broken branch out of her way. Her shoelace got caught and came undone. She leaned down and tied it up. She tried not to make eye contact with her sneaker. Solly had drawn pictures of hearts with eyes all over the sides of her shoes. The pictures made her sad now. She closed her eyes and tied the lace blind.

  When she had told Solly she was moving from San Francisco to Canada, Solly lay down on the ground like they had to do during earthquake drills. She curled up into a ball. “I’m in shock,” she kept saying. “I can’t stand it. Do people live in Canada? Why?”

  “Don’t be crazy,” said Nat. “Get up. Plenty of people live in Canada. Millions.”

  “But they’re Canadians,” said Solly.

  “Canadians are famous for being nice,” said Nat. “I like nice people.”

  “You like Canadians better than you like me,” said Solly. “I will miss you forever.”

  “Don’t be weird,” said Nat. She doubted that Solly even meant what she’d said. “I’ll see you again. You can come and visit.”

  Solly had squinted at her dubiously from the ground. “I guess.” She sighed. “It seems too far though.”

  Solly just didn’t know, Nat thought now. Canada wasn’t far at all. She had been to places much farther away, and to places that felt much farther away even though they weren’t. Places that were so different it was hard to believe they shared the same planet with America. Canada actually felt a lot like America. She took a big lungful of Canadian air and let it out slowly in a long whistle. It was summer, so the air smelled good. Was it different from American air? She couldn’t tell. It was oceany and warm and damp all at once. And clean. It seemed very clean.

  A squirrel scolded her from a tree and Nat looked up, still walking, and tripped over a fat tree root that was lying across the path like a gnarly, bloated snake. She hit the dirt hard, knees first, because she leaned forward so she wouldn’t land on her backside and break her phone. Her denim shorts offered nothing in the way of knee protection.

  It hurt so much that she couldn’t at first manage to make more of a sound than a gasping click in her throat. When she finally caught her breath, she tried, “Help!” but she knew no one would hear her. Her dad was the only one nearby, and he was impossible to wake up, even if she were standing right next to him, shouting directly into his gigantic ear.

  Nat crab-crawled over to a rock that was half covered with soft green moss and freckled with tiny ants. From somewhere in the shrubbery and trees, she could hear birds chirping and the rustle of leaves and needles being jostled by the breeze. There was no sign of the squirrel who had caused the problem in the first place. “Jerk,” she yelled at the tree where it had been. She sat on the rock, which was cool and solid, and hoped the ants did not bite. The sun burned down on the top of her head. Nat’s hair got as hot as a black cat’s fur in the sun.

  Her knee, on close inspection, was as white and tattered as old tissue paper. The blood trickled slowly down her leg. She stared at it for as long as she dared, a familiar fainty feeling tugging at her. When she couldn’t stand it for another second, she stretched her white T-shirt away from her body, leaned forward, and pressed it really really hard against the wound to make the bleeding stop.

  She felt extremely, achingly sad. Not because it hurt (which it did) or because blood made her feel light-headed (which it did), but because she was too old to burst into tears when she skinned her knee. Being too old for anything made her saudade.

  Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes a yearning for something you can never have again, like your childhood. It was a better word than plain old “sad.”

  “I am saudade,” Nat told the snakelike tree root. The ants marched across the top of her white sneaker with great determination. The hearts-with-eyes that Solly had drawn looked up at Nat like they wanted something important from her.

  “Solly,” she said to her shoe. Her voice sounded very small compared to the enormous trees. She would write Solly a postcard about the trees, her knee, and the squirrel. That was good postcard material. She had promised Solly one postcard a week, minimum. They were going to call it the Great Postcard Project. So far, all Nat had done was to buy ten identical postcards at the gas station. They had Canadian flags on them. It was the only postcard the gas station sold. She hadn’t gotten any postcards from Solly because she hadn’t given Solly her address. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to.

  Nat looked up the hill. The Airstream looked very far away and very out of place. It was parked at a strange-looking angle to maximize its view of the sunrise. Nat was never even awake at sunrise. She was just not a morning person. Mornings were for sleeping, period. From where she was sitting, the trailer looked like a crooked silver tooth jutting out of a yawning mouth with tree-teeth. She held up her fingers, pinched the trailer between them, and pretended to shift it over to the right, where it would be in the middle of the clearing and make more sense.

  At that exact moment, which was midafternoon on a Tuesday, her dad was inside, taking a nap. He slept sprawled out like a body that needed a chalk outline drawn around it. He took up more room than most people no matter what he was doing. She had left the door open, so she hoped nobody dropped in for a visit. But nobody would, because nobody knew they were there.

  At least, not yet.

  Nat knew it wouldn’t take long. Eventually, someone would recognize her dad—XAN GALLAGHER—and that person would tell two friends, and one of them would post it on Facebook and the other on Instagram. And some other person seeing one of those posts would tweet it. Then the paparazzi would appear out of the Canadian fog like one of those jack-in-the-box toys where you turn the handle, and even though you know it’s coming, you nearly have a heart attack when the clown doll jumps out.

  There was one paparazzo Nat hoped to never see again. Nat and her dad called him the Lion because of his ridiculous hair and beard and because he was always sneaking up on them, stalking them through the savanna and/or the streets of San Francisco or Butte or even, one time, Bali. He was the worst one.

  The only thing Nat liked about paparazzi was the word “paparazzi” itself.

  Nat got up from the ant rock, brushed the ants off, and stretched her knee. The bleeding had stopped. She walked more carefully down the last part of the trail: The muddy path led to a gravelly area and then to a log the sea had tossed so far up that grass was growing on it. Nat walked along the log, balance-beam style, and then jumped off, landing with both feet in the smooth, wave-worn rocks, some of which slipped into her shoes. Her knee hurt in a sort of stretchy, sting-y way.

  She sat down and took off her shoes, burying her bare feet in the cool stones. She could feel her phone pressing into her back pocket. She took it out and balanced it on the log so she didn’t drop it or lose it by mistake. She could call Solly, but talking to Solly on the phone was too hard. It made her absence three-dimensional, an actual Solly-sized hole in Nat’s life.

  She thought about calling the Bird, and then decided not to. When big things happened, like moving, she both desperately wanted to tell the Bird and wanted not to tell the Bird, because sometimes acknowledging change out loud made it more permanent.

  Her relationship with the Bird was complicated, too.

  “We live in Canada now,” Nat told the Pacific Ocean, which lay in front of her all vast and dark and gray. “We live here.”

  The wind picked up a bit and blew salt spray onto Nat’s face and into her hair. The waves curled up and splattered in white foam along the tide line. There were seagulls circling around and calling out. Nat could smell rotting seaweed and the fresh ocean and the hot-from-the-sun rotting log. She scooped up a handful
of smallish pebbles and put them into one shoe, and then started methodically sorting through them for a perfect one that she would take back up with her. It had to be a very good, very smooth, very beautiful pebble in order to be the One. So her head was bent and her eyes were on the pebbles when she heard the first loud, huffing exhalation of the whale.

  Bird (Mom)

  The Bird was a person, or really, a situation that began because of Solly, even though Solly didn’t know it.

  Solly was accidentally responsible for a lot of things, and on-purpose responsible for even bigger things, like why Nat and XAN GALLAGHER had moved suddenly to Canada the week before. But that was something Nat preferred to not think about directly. It was too much like staring right at a solar eclipse and accidentally burning your retinas to a crisp.

  The phone was not entirely Solly’s fault either, but it also was.

  Nat found the phone on the way to her first day of school the previous September. She was walking alone, having practiced the route already a million times with her dad. It wasn’t far.

  “No big whoop,” she’d told him. She didn’t want him to come. Walking down the street with her dad was like waving a giant neon sign that said, “Please stare at us and take our picture!” XAN GALLAGHER was unmistakably XAN GALLAGHER no matter what he was wearing or how much he thought he blended in. Sometimes (a lot), Nat just wanted to be Nat, not XAN GALLAGHER’S DAUGHTER NATALIA ROSE, all-caps.

  That day, Nat was a medium amount nervous (to be alone) and a medium amount excited (to see what was going to happen). She knew she would be at this school for only one year, tops. Even if it was bad, it would be bad for only a few months, and then it would be a fading memory, so no matter what happened, it had a feeling of impermanence, like it couldn’t possibly matter that much.

  The new school was private, so Nat was wearing the requisite plaid skirt—she didn’t usually wear skirts in her normal life, but this one swished around her legs in a not-unpleasant way—a crisp white shirt and a dark green tie, with a dark green blazer over the whole ensemble. Wearing it, she became just another girl. A regular person. Her hair was getting a little bit long, long enough to pull it into a very small ponytail if she wanted to, which she didn’t. She liked how it made a curtain she could hide behind. (When the world doesn’t offer you hiding places, sometimes you have to create your own.)