The summer my father rented the house the color of hay, was the summer the whales grew feet. On our third night in the rental, while we lay awake in strange, stale beds, a male humpback crept out of the ocean and up the rocky embankment and into our backyard. He collapsed between the shed at one end and the woodpile at the other. 

The yard was expansive enough to accommodate an adult whale, but it was a thirsty, unforgiving place comprised of grassy stubble and scabs of copper sand. Still, on that Thursday morning in June, there he was: just shy of the charcoal grill and covered in grit. We initially assumed he was newly dead, like Joel.  

My father went out into the backyard in his short brown robe, but not before dropping the skillet like a sitcom dad. He gaped out the bay window. The pan clattered. Sausage links rolled across the vinyl floor. Beth and I stood up from the table to see what he saw.  

“The end is here,” Father announced in a whisper.  

His voice was a coin; one side quiet terror, one side secret thrill. Doomsday had always been his explanation for tragedy. He forever carried a pocket-sized Mylar blanket, water purification tablets. He had handled his stepson’s death by canning beets, by tearing Revelations from a bible and waterproofing the pages with beeswax. He’d doubled down on the talking, too, which Beth and I had not deemed possible. How much could one man say? It was the grief. Mother’s passing had made him chatty. Joel’s, loquacious.  

“Make your amends.” He slid open the patio door. “Be honest about where and who you have failed. Make a list, check it twice. Go back to your first memory. There’s a foible soon following. Then go and see if they have kerosene here. See if this house has a generator. Trash bags. Peroxide. Pantyhose, even. Nylons can be used as tourniquets, filters.” 

Beth and I watched Father pick his painful, barefoot way across the lawn. The whale was weathered black, seasoned with scars and barnacles. His grooved jaw resembled an unfurled tire. When Father approached, the animal attempted a sad show of self-defense by laboriously lifting his tail then letting it fall. The hay-colored house shuddered. The grill crashed on the concrete pad. A flash of panic overtook Father’s face before he fell backwards and scrambled, crablike, for the house. His brown robe opened in a humiliating way that Beth and I left unmentioned.  

Soon after the fuss, I spied the feet. There were eight of them, dotted on the whale’s belly like teats on a nursing dog. Two rubbery rows resembling worn galoshes. I pointed them out for Beth to see and she loosely made the sign of the cross. She hadn’t set foot in a church since Mother’s service.  

Back inside, Father phoned the village police, but they’d received so many calls of whales in yards, he was put on hold and eventually disconnected. Father made more sausage to pass the time. As we ate, we stared out the window at the humpback. Once again, there we were: three of us were slumped around a table, grappling with something colossal.  

“Lighter fluid,” my father scratched a golf pencil across a paper towel. “Water, matches, raisins, gauze.” Beth rolled her eyes then closed them. Father went on. “Saltines, peanuts, charcoal, lard.” 

*

A few months prior, on Fat Tuesday, my stepbrother had fallen from a roller coaster and died. It was named The Draggin’. Everything I knew of the incident, I’d sourced from one of Joel’s community college friends. There’d been a collective gasp from spectators as the coaster descended its steepest hill, but no intervention. The ride completed its usual cycle, only to return with a hydraulic hiss and an empty seat. The seat was beside Heather Crisp. Heather Crisp was one of twenty-plus hometown girls, and four additional Heathers, infatuated with Joel. Heather Crisp was so undone she required her own ambulance.  

The next day, Father and Felicia—who was Joel’s mother and Father’s ex—were taken to The Draggin’ by limo, compliments of Joyride Enterprises, LLC. According to Father, the park was closed down especially for them. The area where Joel had landed was cordoned off by pink tape announcing: “Improvements Just for You!” A manager distributed greasy bags of cold popcorn, which everyone ate in a hollow, obligatory way. Four security guards carried out a detached car from the coaster. Its various restraints were demonstrated to Father and Felicia as if they were patent attorneys or judges at the World’s Fair and not in the market for a coffin. 

I was at home with Beth the whole time. The sky was the same irreparable gray as the day Lou Gehrig’s claimed Mother. People brought fashion magazines and red licorice for me and Beth and tubs of things requiring refrigeration. I left the tubs to collect on the stoop—a fuck-you shrine to curiosity disguised as condolence. When Mother had passed three years prior, I’d played hostess. This time, at seventeen, I watched from an upstairs window as women stood with egg salad and onion dip—mashing the doorbell twice, thrice. Eventually, they had no choice but to place Tupperware on top of Tupperware and retreat unacknowledged. 

That night, after Beth and I had eaten licorice for dinner, Father returned, a verbal madman. His mouth a wound, his words blood: 

 He fell in the grass below the rollercoaster where all the unsecured things fall. You know, the sunglasses, the wallets, the keychains. I suppose even the dentures, the hearing aids! The Ray-Bans. Anyway, in that grass, I saw a rabbit’s foot on a carabiner, which seemed good fortune somehow. It was orange, the foot was. And it appeared to be in perfect condition, so it was luckier than Joel, but still a sign, right? I maybe should have taken it, but I couldn’t decide if it was better karma to leave it there or rescue it. I think I probably did the right thing by leaving it there. 

 I will say, the ride seemed very well built. It was lime green and freshly painted. I would have gotten on the ride without a second thought if I rode roller coasters, which I don’t, but if I did, I would have boarded that roller coaster feeling confident I was boarding something safe. I got the exact same feeling from the roller coaster today that I got last summer when I got on that new Airbus and went to San Antonio to see Uncle Kip. There was not a lick of turbulence on that flight. It smelled of coffee and WD-40. You know, solid and professional smells. I got the same feeling from The Draggin’ but that’s just between you girls and me and me and Felicia. 

 Girls, I want to confess: when no one was looking, I took it upon myself to look in the places I thought the authorities might have forgotten to look or clean, but I could not see any blood anywhere at all. You know, now that I’ve been there, I don’t think there was blood. I think Joel broke the bones that we know he broke, but I don’t think he bled at all. You can very well die without bleeding. It was a clean death, girls. As clean as anyone could ask for.  

 I do think they’re guilty. Those people. The park people. They behaved how guilty people behave. The limousine was full of Kleenex and wine and soft-bake cookies. They were throwing on the grandma charm with that touch. The cookies. They knew better than to put out crumbly ones. Soft-bake! It was pretty blatant. Even Felicia picked up on it, and you know how things go right over Felicia. God bless her. Anyway, I know they are hoping we don’t sue, but we will. I don’t care how good the paint job was on the roller coaster. I know a lawyer or three. Felicia does, too. Between us, we could do some real judicial damage. What we avoided in the amicable divorce we can now throw on the table. 

 You know, Joel’s father is still in prison or else I like to think he would have been there. I hope for Joel’s sake, when he was looking down at us, he saw his dad right there with Felicia and me. Some people think Christ was a hologram. Let’s hope. Let’s hope God is still in the hologram business and made Joel’s dad look decent today. Put him at the scene in loafers and khakis, you know. Gave him a proper belt. The man always needed a proper belt. Women can get away without wearing a belt, but men can’t. Maybe it’s the hips. The lower center of gravity. 

Felicia sends her love. She’s an okay lady, you know. Nothing like your mother but no one is like your mother. Felicia has her quirks. Like that cough. You know the one. In the limousine, she was doing that hacking thing she does. The “hack job.” She does the “hack job” when she needs attention. You can imagine she really needed the attention today, given the circumstances, but that cough, if I was a betting man and had to bet, I bet that cough started in her childhood. Both Felicia’s parents were alcoholics. And I mean raging. Like we’re talking imagine the Hoover Dam failing. That level of raging. Felicia was playing bartender in second grade. When she was eight she knew how to make a French 75! It’s a wonder all she has is a cough. It’s a wonder she’s even here, on earth, Felicia. Your mother was a survivor, too. Her father had it in for anything adorable after the war. Kittens, daughters. He was ruthless. Physical, emotional, psychological. It eventually caught up with her with the ALS. That was unprocessed grief, that disease. You can’t tell me it wasn’t. I take it back. Felicia is the survivor. But your mother, she was a saint. 

I sat with a fashion magazine while Father unloaded. Celebrities went to and from the Met Gala in bras made of chain mail, shoes made of milk cartons. I didn’t say what I knew: that only Joel was responsible for Joel’s death. That three weeks earlier, he’d sent me a video of a guy boarding a roller coaster and jamming the restraint buckle with a nickel. Five sense, he had texted. He was a horrible speller. That and being chronically unimpressed were his only faults. I responded with a skull emoji, hoping to also appear unfazed. Joel was beyond bored. For him, life was an endless lecture on grammar. But the skull: it was our last text. Since his death, every time I opened my phone, I went to the text and stared at the skull. I’d probably logged four hours of skull time. When I tried to sleep, I could see the skull. Bright then fading, here then gone. Dad went on. Garrulous was an understatement. Still, I savored his words like hard candy, especially the details of the accident scene. They would get me through, even if all they got me through was a replay that I would replay that I would replay. It was still a form of living. 

Later that night, Beth swallowed three Benadryl to sleep. I found a wine cooler and took it and a bag of pretzels and a tub of porch dip into my closet where I could hear through the walls. Father was on the phone with Uncle Kip, telling him about identifying the body. 

He looked as if he’d been carved of marble. He was perfect. Except for his head, which seemed off-center. Like his skull and his spine were no longer friends. But all in all, a young god. This was without makeup, Kip. None of that funeral home stuff. Can you imagine? Marble. Nothing else. Just marbled, wasted youth. 

*

Forty days later, by Maundy Thursday, when everyone was back to their chocolate and porn, and the Tupperware had been returned or lost, my father—fifteen pounds lighter and never silent—had already secured, for the summer’s entirety, the house the color of hay. Normally, we went to a lake in Georgia for two happy weeks, not the ocean in Maine for ten sad, but normally Joel was alive. 

“This is what we need. Exactly what.” He said it as if the house were a new supplement he’d read about. Magnesium cures torment. “It’s what the doctor would order. A house by a sea we’ve never seen. A new body of water, a new climate, new restaurants. A new beginning.” 

The earth was still moist at Joel’s gravesite. The sod was still in squares that had yet to friend each other. A quilt laid out but not stitched. I knew in his coffin he was still recognizable. A wax boy whose undereyes were just beginning to toy with lilac. I knew a new beginning was absurd when the ending was just getting started. But these were not things I could say to a man living on oyster crackers.  

“It’s a town with a population of 333. That’s a sign right there if I ever did see one. Remember your mother and numbers? 7-7? 9-9? 4-4-4-4? For her, 333 was an angel number that meant terrific things were coming to those who’d endured horrific things. It’s just the three of us now. Three of us in a town of 333. Which you think would make it 336, but apparently the house we are renting belongs to three elderly sisters, triplets no less, who can no longer make it to and from the beach. I am just assuming they were counted on the census before they moved inland to assisted living, so we will take their places and bring things back up to 333. Sound like a plan, Diane?” Father asked an imaginary Mother aloud. “Sounds like a plan, Stan,” he answered in a feminine voice.  

The day of the humpback, I could not bring myself to go into the backyard. It wasn’t fear, per se, but something else. Something I could feel all around my teeth, like a mouthful of mashed potatoes. If I went outside, I was afraid I’d choke. Father and Beth were different. By the afternoon, they were up from the table and hard at work. They fussed about the yard in rainboots. Beth covered the whale with wet, striped towels and set the garden hose to “mist.” She went back and forth as if spray-painting a bus. I could hear her singing: …pulled into Nazareth, was feeling ‘bout half past dead… 

Father was on his knees with a turkey baster, trying to infiltrate the animal’s baleen. At lunchtime, he had gone to the town’s tiny, apologetic grocery store and cleaned it out of cod fillets and frozen fish sticks and canned clams. Back at home, there had been a blender, a stench, a manic mess. There was a look on Father’s face I’d never seen as he pulsed the blender, shook it, pulsed it, shook it. He was no longer preoccupied with the roller coaster’s seatbelts. Or what attendant might have been in charge and high on drugs. He had no time for Felicia’s cough or Mother’s terrible childhood. I even found his doomsday supply list, the paper napkin, crumpled on the floor. “A whale of a smoothie,” he said, holding up a milk jug of pureed fish. “Get it?” 

There was no science to the orchestrations of Father and Beth. The whale had chosen its death by climbing out of the ocean the same way a person might walk off the top of a skyscraper. And now what? The humpback’s decision was being undecided by two people unwilling to grieve. Beth and Father were, in a word, merciless. 

I stole a hard seltzer from the refrigerator and went out the front door of the hay-colored house. Up and down the lane, in the wide backyards of locals and seasonals, I could spy an assortment of resigned whales: an albino tinged pink like a prom carnation; a plump navy sperm losing its plump; a speckled species that resembled a Polynesian canoe, flipped over. All of them so bored of the endless blue—the endless blues—they’d grown feet. Humans ran to and fro with hoses and car sponges. What was heavier? A death you weren’t around for? One you couldn’t do anything about? Or a death you had to witness and try to stop? 

“I mean, God bless.” There was a woman in the street. She held a gold-rimmed teacup in one hand and a matching saucer in the other. She came right up to me, the two of us spectators in an amusement park. “Imagine trying to put fallen leaves back on a tree.” She gave off a mild combination of body odor and perfume. “People don’t let things play out anymore. That’s why the world is in so much trouble. Intervention.” 

The woman’s gray braids were secured with children’s glitter elastics. Her faded cap advertised a yacht club. Her shirt was tie-dye, her watch Cartier. Her teeth white but uneven. Her face leathery but lifted. 

“I brought an orphaned squirrel into my home once,” she said, ignoring her tea. “I gave it Enfamil and put it in a shoebox with a bag of cotton balls. One morning, it lunged at my face and tried to blind me. You know why? Because I was intervening.” The woman poured her tea out in the street. She wore foam slides and black toenail polish. “The same is true for these rock stars and their pills. No one needs to tell a rock star how much he’s loved but ‘guess what, pal? The pill days are over.’” The woman laughed once. “There’s only so much time. Why spend it that way? Intervening. People can only save themselves.”  

The woman turned north, walking with the correct assumption I’d follow. “Some people tried to get me to quit the Negronis once,” she said. “These were people I didn’t even live with. I didn’t have a dog or a husband. Not even a birdfeeder. I wasn’t in charge of keeping someone else alive. I wasn’t driving some kid to and from school plastered. These were people just looking for something to do. Here’s what it was if you want me to be honest: These people were bored and I was a drunk. But it wasn’t the drunk part that got them mad. I was making art, see? And my art reminded these people they weren’t making any, so they all got together and decided I had a drinking problem. That wanted to go and try to fix my interesting life instead of their boring one. One of them invited me out for burgers, and I ended up in some party room at a Red Robin with a bunch of assholes telling me they loved me. You know what I said? I said: ‘I should have interventioned all you motherfuckers. I should have taken all you losers out for shitburgers and told you about your addiction. To mediocrity!” The woman stopped in front of a cottage. “My backyard doesn’t face the ocean,” she said. “So lucky for me I don’t have to look at a dehydrated fish and wrestle with ethics.” 

The woman’s front yard was home to all manner of whirligigs, a thousand metal what-nots spinning in the breeze. Where whirligigs were not, totem poles were. I counted at least nineteen columns of carved and painted animal heads.  

“I call ‘em kabobs. My sculptures are that basically.” She set her cup on her saucer and set them both on a gate post. “I did quit the Negronis, FYI. But I did it when I did it and not when the assholes told me to. You know what they’re doing now? The interventionists? All of them still sitting at desks. All of them dying of boredom.” 

I finished my hard seltzer. I fought against saying something and lost. “That’s what Joel died of.” 

I couldn’t tell if the woman had heard me. To the right of the cottage, something large and dark sat amongst the weeds. I went up on my tiptoes. It could have been a whale, but I didn’t think it was. It would have had to have crossed the street and plowed through someone’s side yard to get there. Even those done with living still choose some joy. 

“It’s a grand piano,” the woman said. “My sister’s. Three months after Kimmy died, two guys in a white van showed up and knocked on the door. ‘Piano’s here,’ they said. They shoved a clipboard at me and I said, ‘Aw, no. You think a piano’s gonna fit in this cottage? And they said, in so many words, ‘Tough shit, Sherlock.’ So, I told them to put it in the yard and they put it in the yard and there it is. In the yard. Too heavy to move. What am I going to do with something that big? That heavy? I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do with that beast: not a goddamned thing.” 

Without asking, the woman took the empty seltzer can from my hand and stood it up in the road. She crushed it down to a metal disk with one pow! of her sandal. Then she handed it back to me, a giant nickel.  

“Kimmy’d be delighted it’s in my yard, falling apart. She was not sentimental. Another two or three bad winters and that piano will just be innards, and I can manage that.” The woman squinted up at the sun as if telling time. “Well,” she smiled. “Great talking at you. Time for me not to make a drink.” 

The woman’s whirligigs squeaked and spun. The sun made fun of my eyes. Walking home, I saw purple dots then bouncing skulls. When I got back to the hay-colored house, I sat in the kitchen and let my vision adjust. Outside, Father and Beth were still distracting themselves from the deaths that had already happened by trying to prevent another. The truth was, the animal would clearly die. It was already wilting. It would soon shrivel, then rot. A choir of flies and vultures would congregate and rejoice. Next spring, a skeleton would emerge from a snowbank. Summer, the ribcage could be draped in bedsheets. Vacationing children could crawl about the sunlit bones. They could sit cross-legged in the once-belly with juice boxes. Maybe one of the children would be named Jonah. Maybe we would rent the house again and show up just as changed as the humpback. Maybe father would be silent and Beth would be devout and I would be a hostess with red painted nails, willing to try and save a life if a life needed saving. Maybe I’d be more like my father: always anticipating the worst but set on figuring out a way to survive it. 

That night, reality set in. Beth went again for the Benadryl. Father put on his brown robe and, from his open bedroom, made another doomsday list aloud. Rubbing alcohol, beans, penicillin. I turned off the kitchen lights and slid open the patio door. There was no moon, no stars. The sky was black, the yard was black, the whale was too. But even with my eyes closed, I could feel the enormity of him, could pick my way across the hard yard to the whale’s side and place a hand on him. In that moment, all I could think of was the woman across the street. How the grand piano was allowed to sit in the weeds, unbothered, and slowly fall in on itself. Eventually, it would become so moveable—so light—that even a single person could carry it.