§
Lexi follows a curving road, finds the former naval Keep, now the site of the Maritime Museum and Dolphin Quest. She enters the courtyard, notices a rusty sign announcing the work of engineers from Bath, England, 1926; then a lone canon aimed at the ocean. She heads towards the dolphin tanks, anxious for the company of marine life, not the debris of men.
She is overwhelmed by emotion when she first sees the dolphins, there in the turquoise pools, separated into sections by floating walkways. A tiny porpoise is isolated with its mother in one tank. Lexi finds a spot on the grass near the pools, takes a bottle of water from her knapsack and drinks half of it.
She wonders if the dolphins sense the ocean beyond the bars of the Keep. If they strike against the gate, trying to escape, find the natural rhythm of open waves. She looks at her diver’s watch, not for the time, but for the freedom it represents. Tophe’s wedding gift was an invitation to remember a part of her life she’d buried. Yesterday she dove with a dive company, over shipwrecks and coral reefs, red shells crushed so fine they’ve become pink sand. In water only thirty to forty feet deep, she became weightless, no longer corporeal. She was compressed air, she was water, she was liquid light. She was a witness to the wreckage of others’ fatal mistakes as she swam over the remaining fragments of ships.
Something in the way the coral encased the ships made her think of her brownstone, how she had hidden behind its walls for a decade, unable to acknowledge her wounds and let them completely heal. She’d been socially buried, falsely believing she was safe, as she fossilized alone. She sat on the ocean floor, watched as her diving partner cracked open a shell and fed it to a parrotfish. She emerged from the water feeling lighter, thinking how shipwrecks belonged underwater.
A Bermuda Longtail swoops low, startling Lexi with its shadow—a fluttering of wings against a consuming brilliance. Tophe is a shipwreck. The statement flits through her thoughts, a gash against her belief in his solidity, his reliability. A shipwreck? She glances around, wonders if she’s spoken aloud. A young suntanned instructor wearing swimming trunks and a blue lifejacket monogrammed with Jake, approaches her smiling, and points out the newborn dolphin, only a few days old.
“Watch how he stays close to his mother, mimicking her fluke movements, her dives, twists and turns. He’s too young to have a group of people swimming with him,” Jake says, looking now at Lexi. “But if you’re swimming with us, you’ll be with Khyber, Cirrus, and Nimbus today.”
Lexi nods, fascinated by the way the mother dolphin is rolling to the side to check on her baby.
“If you’re here for the ten o’clock session, you should go register,” Jake gestures in the direction of one of the buildings.
“Wait! Do they ever get out?” Lexi calls as he’s walking away.
“You mean to the ocean?” Jake says returning. He and Lexi look at the open water, visible through a barred archway in the thick outer wall of the Keep spanning the width of one of the tanks. “Once, during a hurricane.” He pauses and stares at her intently, before leaving. “They all came back, though.”
After paying for her one-hour session, Lexi changes into her bathing suit in a cubicle behind the main building. When she emerges, Jake is waiting for her. “Come choose a lifejacket,” he says, and by the way he smiles at her, she wonders if he sees something in her that she is only just beginning to feel.
Lexi joins a couple in their late fifties and a man with his teenaged daughter who are waiting on a bench near one of the tanks. Jake leads them through a discussion of dolphins and the environment, but all Lexi can think about is touching a dolphin, looking one in the eye. As soon as the group is seated on a submerged corner bench in one of the tanks, Lexi squirms with anticipation, grinning like a child. She puts her hand on Cirrus’s back and closes her eyes. Rayon. Grey skin like rayon. And here, like silk. Cirrus rolls over at a command from Jake. Lexi touches the dolphin’s smooth pink stomach, the small belly button. Rubber. Supple rubber.
“Do dolphins sleep?” the teenaged girl asks.
“Well, researchers believe they function on only half of their brain at night and hover near the surface in order to continue breathing, about every seven minutes or so. They are voluntary breathers and can’t go to sleep completely or they would drown.” Jake gives another command and Cirrus rolls upright again. “Dolphins can live up to twenty-five years in the wild; up to fifty in captivity.” He pauses, his expression playful. “Cirrus is thirty years old, and is a former navy dolphin—whose work is still classified.”
Another dolphin swims up to Lexi, looks her in the eye. He has clear brown eyes that remind her of her grandmother’s.
“That’s Khyber,” Jake says. “Would you like to dance with him?”
Lexi nods and swims out a few feet, and on Jake’s command, Khyber lifts himself up so that he appears to be standing in the water, his flippers exposed. “Hold his flippers near his body, at the top. That’s it.”
Khyber rocks side to side, and Lexi can’t stop grinning, ecstatic. She hears a click of the camera. Another instructor is snapping photos that will be available for sale afterwards.
One of the men, the father of the teenaged girl, reeks of cigarette smoke and Lexi can’t help but think that Nimbus, who hasn’t left his side since they entered the tank, is trying to save him, touching his chest repeatedly. Lexi’s throat constricts and her eyes grow hot, as she wonders about the type of knowledge dolphins comprehend, whether they can detect heartbreak in another’s skin, loss in the voice of one who’s been damaged. She remembers reading about sonar testing causing haemorrhaging in porpoise brains, consistent with extremely loud noises. How dolphins have been washing up in the Bahamas, their sensitive minds overloaded with man-made sound, reacting as if to brutal beatings.
Khyber circles Lexi, dives and nudges her feet, and she follows him, swimming under the legs of the other people, unable to believe the feeling of euphoria pulsing through her, re-igniting a passion for dolphins she experienced years ago as a young girl, when she was still whole. When she surfaces, Khyber is smiling and clicking at her. He moves slowly towards her, submerges, nudges her belly, surfaces, grins and chortles, tossing his head to the side.
“What?” Lexi says, placing her hand on his head. He catches her gaze, gently turns his head again towards the tank where the newborn is swimming with his mother. “You want me to see the baby? Are you the father?”
Jake calls from the side. “No, he’s not.”
Khyber submerges and touches Lexi’s stomach, again. When he surfaces, she strokes his head, touches his dorsal fin, feels him moving away. Instinctively she holds onto his fin and Khyber pulls her forward, towards the back of the tank and the iron gate, and beyond—the ocean. Would there be room, to slip out between the bars, disappear? Up until a few months ago, before Tophe, Lexi often thought of vanishing without a trace. Not now.
She takes a deep breath as Khyber plunges below the surface. A sensation, like being rocked, seeps into her body like a mercurial liquid, thick and undeniable. Her scar resonates, receiving sonar waves from Khyber, the third degree skin responding, tingling, as if nerve-connected. Lexi is certain Khyber is releasing her pain to the ocean, allowing it to escape beyond the bars of the Keep, beyond the frame of her body.
Khyber traces a second arc by the gate, and that’s when she feels it: a belly-spiralled warmth, like a shell unfolding. Khyber circles back, and as if knowing she can’t hold her breath any longer, he surfaces near Jake who is watching from the edge of the tank, a bewildered expression on his face. Lexi leans forward, presses her lips to Khyber’s smooth skin, and slips from his back, almost certain her scar will have faded, replaced by new growth burrowed deep within her.
§
Later, when Lexi is dressed and taking one last look at the dolphins, Jake appears and hands her a large envelope. “A memory—Khyber never lets anyone ride on his back—not even me.” He kisses her on the cheek, then turns and saunters back towards the dolphins, whistling and clicking in their language.
Lexi is stunned, elated. She walks uphill, away from the dolphin tanks, towards the canons still aimed at the ocean, and sitting down, takes out the photo of Khyber and her dancing. She is awed by the intelligence in Khyber’s eyes, and how from this angle, her own face looks so much younger, stripped back into innocence.
She shields her eyes with her hand, squinting at the distant whitecaps. Perspective alters everything. She imagines viewing herself from the sky, just a speck of flesh on rock. Not remarkable really, not with so many other specks dotting the rotating planet. From this distance, features are indistinguishable, colour a blending into grey. All memories, languages, emotions, pasts—unreadable. Identities obscured. Meaning disappears. So easy to dismiss.
If she wants to, she can dismiss her own life this way. Every action taken, every emotion felt. Sweep away her identity. She thinks of her grandmother, her warm bulk enfolding her when she was maybe six or seven—before Epic was born—murmuring how much she loved her Lexi, how so many people had to be born just to make her the way she was. “Never forget, Lexicon, how you living will keep everyone else before you alive, too.”
What about Tophe? Lexi leans back against a stone wall, her hands linked over her stomach. Who came before him? Why has he dismissed them—erased them—from his life, by cloaking himself in her name? She didn’t want to know before today, before Khyber sensed what she couldn’t possibly yet know: that she is pregnant.
She’s hidden so much of her life from Tophe, and he from her. She imagines former wives, fatherless children, tyrannical parents-in-law, bitter siblings—random strangers resembling Tophe appearing on their front steps demanding admittance through a locked door. What lies between her and Tophe is the unsaid, the buried, the remains of shipwrecks.
§
Lexi waits for Tophe near the sailboats, away from the crowds, at five minutes to noon. When he comes into view she is taken by how confident he looks, his silver hair glinting, his tanned skin darker than hers. People turn to look up at him, watch him as he searches the marina for her. For a moment, she wonders if he’ll miss her, but he begins walking purposefully her way.
“I want to leave,” Lexi begins the moment Tophe is close enough to touch.
“Me?” Tophe’s voice falters; his face crumples.
“No,” Lexi laughs and pulls him to her. “Here. I want to talk with you.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you on board the ferry,” she says, tiptoeing to whisper into his ear.
When they’re on deck, and Dockyard is but a speck behind them, Lexi stands at the stern of the ship, allowing the wind to rush around her. Tophe is behind her, holding her close, his hands resting under her shirt on her paling scar, on the child hidden from him for now. Soon, she’ll turn to him, begin to tell him the story of the scar, what the Russian words tattooed into her dreams mean. She’ll tell him why she can’t trust crowds, why she’s afraid of sunshine, why she wants to name their child Trilogy. She’ll segue in tangents through her past, knowing how her life will overlap his, how she’ll want to hear stories about the random scars on his body formed from childhood mishaps, sports injuries, missteps.
She presses her hands over Tophe’s, feeling him curve closer, like wind rising at her back. A sensation like being unfurled, set free.
