The Complete Where Dreams - Volume 1 of 2

MARCH 1-1

id="toc_marker-6" class="Chapter">MARCH 1

“It sounds like someone is screaming and laughing at the same time.”

The technician, who wore his own set of headphones, nodded. “J-pod. That’s their dialect, Ms. Knowles.”

“Cassidy. What’s J-pod and they have dialects?” The two of them sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the first floor of the Lime Kiln lighthouse. Through the narrow window she could see the Georgia Straits. No whales anywhere in sight.

“The J-pod is one of our local groups of orcas. They wander up and down Puget Sound nattering away like a bunch of old-timers. And then,” he paused as a particularly quick set of chirps rattled through her headphones.

“There, hear that? That’s a group of youngsters. Sound like they’re maybe a mile offshore. The main pod is two or three miles out.”

“This is incredible.” She was listening to passing whales swimming somewhere out of sight below the surface.

Jeff was typing madly on his laptop.

“What are you doing there?”

“Just recording the time of passage and how many voices I hear, fourteen so far.”

She inspected him more carefully. Mid-twenties, nice face, at least what she could see above the heavy beard, with his brown hair back in a ponytail. He sat in front of a console with switches and plug-ins, though clearly most of it occurred in the laptop where wiggling lines mimicked the sound in a series of waves too fast to follow.

“We can only hear about a third of what they say. Most of the rest is ultrasonic to our hearing.”

“Ultrasonic, like the planes?” Whale-sized sonic booms?

“That’s supersonic. ‘Ultra’ means too high for us to hear. We had to develop special microphones to hear their full vocal range. See, our hearing stops here,” he pointed at a line near the lower part of the wiggles on the screen. Even as he did so, one of the lines shot well above his finger and she didn’t hear a thing on the headphones except a creepy sensation of fingernails running up her spine.

“What are they saying?”

He turned to face her, his neutral brown eyes wrinkled with a bit of a smile.

“Not a clue, yet. We think a lot of the high stuff is echo-location so they can find food and one another. Same things bats do. But what they chat about all day is a complete mystery. Their vocabulary is huge whatever it is. Not just squeaks and squawks. There are patterns, thousands of them as far as we can tell. Perhaps a fully evolved and complex language.”

Jeff’s specialty was as narrow as hers, and as highly trained: nuance, common themes, major notes, and minor notes. Hers were color and smell and taste, and his was sound, but they had far more in common that she’d have guessed.

They sat in companionable silence as the whales sang to each other. She tried to pick them apart. Did one always have a deep, dropping pattern? Heee-whaaa. What would it be like to learn more about another species? To study something with such passion?

Well, she had actually; since birth she’d been exposed to the details of wine and food.

Of course her passion didn’t require sitting in a concrete lighthouse with peeling white paint.

Maybe Jeff’s passion wasn’t so charming once she thought about it. The concrete room certainly wasn’t very warm despite the heater under the desk. She couldn’t smell the ocean just a dozen feet away. Instead it smelled of mold and decaying paint. It smelled of heated metal and sounded of the squeaky fan that was barely keeping her legs above freezing.

Out the slender window, an impossible vision appeared; not a whale breeching nor a row of tall fins skimming the water.

It was a blue sailboat with maroon sails. The same number of sails as the two pictures on her wall. One big one in front of the mast and reaching all the way to the deck. The other one, from the mast back until it reached past where the captain stood in the back. It hung so low that it looked as if it might hit him when it swung.

“Thanks, Jeff.” She dropped the headphones and rushed out as he stammered a call after her. She ran over the rocks, digging for her camera in her leather backpack. She managed the picture barely in time before he sailed out of the frame with the lighthouse.

She took another photo just of the boat in case the first one didn’t come out.

He must have the same calendar, because this was past coincidence. They’d met three months in a row. Too bad there was no way to signal him. It would be a good laugh to meet in a bar somewhere, maybe see if he had a set of letters too.

No, that would be too weird. Two lost people having their lives shaped by a calendar. She raised a hand in salute, but he was facing away, looking forward. He’d have no possible way of knowing why she was waving. It wasn’t as if she wore a huge red sail.

This is what her father had told her. In his letter he’d confirmed that she wasn’t unique. She tucked a hand into the pocket of her Kors coat and held the letter as she moved back to the cliff edge beside the lighthouse and looked out at the shining water. In the distance, Vancouver Island lay across the horizon, where she could see some tiny shapes at the limit of visibility, the buildings of the city of Victoria.

Farther south, the Olympic Mountains were still white. She could smell the snow and the sea salt. She could imagine the light, cold breeze starting as a whisper on the distant polar seas, a wave splash pushing the air ahead. The small swirl building along the Aleutians and sweeping down the coast. Threading among the Canadian Gulf Islands on its way to here, the wind’s first contact with the continental U.S. And she was the first to breathe it, to take in the salt spray thrown into the air three thousand miles away.

I had no direction. I was out of the Vietnam War, out of the army, and unexpectedly still alive.

Cassidy could hear her dad’s voice from the letter, soft and warm on the cold breeze. Not rough with throat cancer. She heard his voice from when she was a teenager, a sound she could wrap safely around herself when she grew scared. She didn’t turn to him, didn’t want to break the illusion.

Your mama never made it to grad school, I always felt bad about that. After a month we were living together. After six months she’d turned our vineyard into a business, not a big one, but a business. It was the real birth of the Napa Valley and there we were on the ground floor.

“Napa Valley? I certainly didn’t grow up in the Napa Valley.”

The big surprise came along, you. So we had a wedding in the fields right before the harvest.

September wedding in the vineyards, it must have been beautiful. He’d never told her they’d gotten married because Mama was pregnant. She’d always assumed it was the other way round. Not that it bothered her much.

Not much of a reception. I spent our wedding night out in the fields watching for an early frost. A real freak cold snap slid down from Canada and we weren’t big enough to survive the loss of even a single crop. We dodged that one, but then we were into the harvest. Never did have a honeymoon. Too much work to do.

But it didn’t matter. Your mama and I were just plain right for each other. From that very first moment when she’d tumbled out of that VW van. Her hair the same dark red as grape leaves in autumn.

You’ll find the right man, Ice Sweet.

That was a laugh. She was thirty now and the “right man” was a myth. She did require at least “compatible” though, and Jack James hadn’t even been that.

I know you don’t believe me, but you will. Until then, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. My life never did.

Love you, Ice Sweet.

“Love you, Daddy.”