Chapter 20
CAMILLE
I watched the skiff shrink in the chop until it was just a low, stubborn shape and Tamika’s arm a dark line bracing the sling. My father stood there with his hands on his hips like a man trying to will a boat safe with posture alone.
No. Not again.
I closed my eyes once and opened them into the day I’d been given. “Copy. This is Allard. Age class if you can—adult or juvenile? Head shape? Beak?”
“Longer rostrum. Gray. Adult size. She keeps rolling. Folks keep trying to push her back.”
“Keep people back. Don’t pour water. Don’t roll her.
Hands on, gentle, keep her upright and the blowhole clear.
I’m inbound.” I glanced at the skiff’s wake, then at my father.
“Tamika’s with the calf. Becca and Miguel are standing by at the facility.
Can you ride with me to the bridge and then peel off to the pen? ”
“I can,” Papa said, already moving. We jogged up the sand, wet shorts slapping, hearts thudding in the same old family meter.
At the truck, I shoved the short sling and blowhole shields back into the bin and grabbed what we had left: towels, an extra IV line, a soft kit that felt like the wrong size for what waited. Team thin. Everyone doing two jobs. I hated the arithmetic of it—the way need outnumbered bodies.
“Eli can pull the truck and go sit by your pen,” Papa said as I climbed behind the wheel. “I will follow the skiff.”
Eli wasn’t stranding-trained—his certs were welds and hoists, not whales—but he knew our place like his own hands and he loved being given a job.
I wasn’t in a position to turn down an extra pair of eyes and a steady radio voice.
He could sit a watch, count breaths, and call the second anything slid sideways.
“Call me if she dips,” I said. He knew which she I meant.
We split at the causeway. The drive to Kiawah ate time I didn’t have.
Cycles of red lights and slow tourists in rented Jeeps.
The kind of heat that makes asphalt smell like old anger.
I ran the siren just long enough to make space, then killed it because I couldn’t stand adding noise to a day already loud with it.
“Seven–Delta, Allard,” I said into the mic. “Soft perimeter at Boardwalk 18, Kiawah. Keep drones down. I want phones low and bodies lower.”
Ryker’s answer came back fast. “Copy. Local PD already staged. We’ll float the line wider.”
“Thank you,” I said, because he’d earned it today.
Kiawah opened to me the way she always did—long, elegant, a little too careful with her pretty.
The access lot was a snarl of minivans and bikes and a lone golf cart.
I left the truck crooked, flashers on, and ran the boardwalk with the sling over one shoulder, towels under my arm.
People turned. Cameras dipped. The sea drew me forward by the scruff of my neck.
She was there in the swash. Adult bottlenose, big, skin rubbed raw on the flanks where the surf had taught her a lesson she didn’t need.
No obvious prop scars. Old rake marks on the peduncle.
Fresh abrasions around the jaw from bad hands trying to be helpful.
The crowd had arranged itself into a ring of worry and ignorance.
A firefighter in too much gear stood chest-deep and did his best to be a post.
“Thank you,” I told him as I waded in. “Stay with me.”
“Dr. Allard?” A woman in a straw hat at the line had tears on her face. “I follow you on socials.”
I wanted to be kind. I wanted to scream. I settled for, “Thank you for standing back.”
The surf hit mid-thigh like a slap that wanted to turn me. I took the energy, bent it under the animal’s belly. “Hi,” I said to her, nonsense voice, French, the only thing I could make gentle on a day like this. “Bonjour, ma belle. On va y arriver.”
Her eye was open and too still. My palm slid along her side. Warm under sand. The musk of breath at the blowhole when the next wheeze came. Respiration too fast. Pectoral tone low. The math in my head tried to be clinical. My chest tried to split.
“Get me an umbrella,” I called, and two men I would not have trusted with my groceries moved with useful hands, planting shade over her flanks. The firefighter adjusted his stance on the other side and we made a cradle out of ourselves and stubbornness.
“Rate is … high,” he said, eyes wide, counting out of habit.
“We’re going to keep her upright and keep the blowhole clear,” I said. “That’s what we are going to do.”
I slid the sling under her on the lift of the next wave, canvas whispering against skin.
She flinched, then stilled. Her jaw trembled, just once.
A dolphin who had nursed babies. The ridge of a mammary slit along the belly was tender, rubbed raw.
My throat went tight with the knowledge that her calf was out there somewhere, calling into a water column I couldn’t fix. Or not out there at all.
A little boy on the sand asked if this was the same kind we saw jumping behind boats. His mother hushed him. I swallowed bile and said without looking up, “She’s tired, kiddo. We’re helping her rest.”
I was supposed to call for the long sling and a crew. I was supposed to triage with clear steps and a voice that calmed a crowd. Instead, I looked at her mouth, the line of it pulled wrong by effort, and I felt the whole machine in my brain hiccup.
How many times had we done this? How many times had we stood in a ring of noise and sun and tried to talk the ocean out of a decision it already made?
How many times had I driven home shaking, scrubbed salt out of my hair in a shower that smelled like bleach and defeat, written a report with words like “likely cause” and “mitigating factor” while my clothes dripped on the tile?
I kept my hands moving because hands know what to do when hearts stall. “Up on the next lift,” I told the firefighter. “Let the water do the work. Don’t twist.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
We lifted with the wave and took the weight in that breathless beat before it fell. The world narrowed to sling, muscle, the slick weight of a life I could not promise anything to. I felt the edge of her pectoral vibrate under my fingers.
Tremor. Exhaustion. Pain.
“Breathe,” I told her, which was a stupid thing to say to a dolphin and an even stupider thing to hear in his voice. It cracked something open in me, anyway.
We kept her upright through three sets. Four. Six. The crowd’s noise faded to a low hum. A gull landed stupidly close and I wanted to snap its neck. I am not a violent person. Today I wanted to be.
A man with a phone started to edge closer. One of Atlas’s plainclothes appeared like humidity and politely blocked the shot with his body. I didn’t look at him. I pretended the world was full of good people without thinking about where their checks cleared.
“Do we move her?” the firefighter asked low, so the circle wouldn’t hear.
I looked at the water, the width of it, the way it wanted to take and take. “Not yet,” I said. “Surf’s wrong. And I’m not bringing another adult female into my pen unless I can keep her breathing quiet. We wait for the long sling and more hands.”
His eyes softened like he could feel the edges of my voice going frayed. “Copy.”
I checked the blowhole rim with my thumb and flicked away a grain of sand. When she exhaled it misted my wrist. I felt something hitch in my chest that wasn’t anatomy. It was grief with a knife tucked under its skirt. I made it wait. There was work.
The next wave hit me in the ribs and pushed the thought I’d been sitting on up into my mouth.
“This isn’t fair,” I said to the animal. To the water. To myself. “You hear me? I am so tired of this not being fair.”
My voice broke on the last word and I hated that I was the kind of woman who would cry in front of strangers. The crowd went hush-shy. Someone said, “She cares,” like it was news.
I pressed my forehead to the curve of the animal’s jaw for a second longer than the professionals would have liked and I let the tears run hot and humiliating down my face and into salt that didn’t need help being salty.
“I am so tired,” I said again, softer. “Je suis fatiguée, ma belle. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I thought about the calf we’d just put on a boat and the calf this mother had maybe lost and the way the ocean keeps its own book of names for each of them that I will never get to read.
I thought about the tonal in my recorder and the piece of plastic in my pocket and how much easier it would be if I could lay the whole weight of this on one uniform and set it on fire.
I thought about Jacob—no. I pushed his name away like a palm on a stranger’s chest.
“Take a breath,” the firefighter murmured, thinking he was talking to the whale. Maybe he was. Maybe he was merciful to me without trying.
I took one. It scraped. I took another. It scraped less. The next one found a place to sit.
The radio on my belt hissed. “Allard,” Becca said. “Kogia One holding. Lactate down point two. Resp slow but steady.” Her voice had that careful point to it like she’d seen some part of me through the phone and was steering around it on purpose.
“Copy,” I managed. “Good work.” The words bought me a slim piece of belief. We were not losing everything today.
Another wave. Another lift. A change—a small hitch of muscle under my palm that said pain had shifted shape.
I checked her belly again. The mammary slit was raw and stretched.
The line of her body under my hand had that deflated quality nursing gives.
Milk had been asked of her recently. Rage rose in me like bile.
Where was that baby now? What had we done? What had we let into their world?
“Can we get her baby?” a girl’s voice said from the line, honest and brutal.
“Sometimes,” I said, because I will not lie to children. “Not today.”
That was the moment the tears I’d already let loose decided to be a wave.
Not the tidy kind. The kind that knocks you sideways and fills your mouth with water you didn’t want.
My hands stayed. My professionalism stayed.
My face betrayed me. I made a sound in my throat that felt like tearing something I had kept stitched.
The firefighter’s arm pressed warm against mine. He didn’t look at me. He kept the blowhole clear and pretended his shoulder was not there on purpose. Bless him for that.
Time went soft at the edges. Minutes piled up wet and heavy.
The long sling arrived with two more firefighters and a park ranger who looked like he had been waiting all year to be useful at the right thing.
We slid canvas under on the lift of a set and set stakes in sand where the ocean couldn’t have its way without asking.
We made a small, ugly altar out of salvage and hope.
“Tamika’s five out,” Miguel said over the radio. “Quiet pen is clear. Kogia calf is moving like a poem.”
I laughed, unlovely, and then backed it down. “Good.”
The bottlenose’s rate steadied into something I could call a rhythm. Every third breath had a catch. Every tenth was clean. Progress without a promise. The sun moved. My back burned where my tank had slipped. The crowd thinned to the ones who could stand to watch a slow thing matter.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My body knew whose name it wanted to see. I didn’t look. I couldn’t. Instead, I pictured an empty horizon and ran my hand over the whale’s flank until the vision faded enough to let the present back in.
“Should we try to move her?” the firefighter asked. “Surf’s easing.”
I tasted the water. I watched the crest. I measured the weight of the ring of people I could pull from the crowd if I asked for hands and whether they would listen. I thought about what would happen if we rolled her wrong and took hope out of her spine.
“Not yet,” I said. “We give her the dignity of breath before we give her the indignity of our plans.”
The firefighter nodded. A good man.
For a heartbeat the world went quiet between sets. In that lidless hush I had a stupid, mean thought: you cannot win this. The work you chose will not let you win. You will pour your life into the holes the ocean keeps and call it purpose until your hands give out.
I rested my cheek against the dolphin’s skin and let the thought burn through so it didn’t rot me from beneath. “I know,” I told the water. “I know. I’m here, anyway.”
My radio chirped again. “Allard,” Ryker said, voice flatter than usual. “Heads up. There’s a separate incident near Folly I need you to be aware of. I’ll brief you when you’re clear. And if your Marine reaches you, you’ll tell him to call me.”
My fingers tightened on the sling. “Copy,” I said. It came out level. That felt like a betrayal and an accomplishment at once.
Another set. Another lift. The bottlenose blinked. Just once. An agreement between us. I let my mouth make a small, dangerous promise to her that I would stay as long as I could and then some.
The long sling crew settled for a hold. We tucked towels. We shaded. We touched when touch helped and we stayed still when it didn’t. The crowd’s noise receded to the kind that keeps a person company without trying to fix anything.
At some point, I realized I was crying again, quiet, snotty, ridiculous. I didn’t stop. The ocean throws enough salt at me. It can take mine back.
I pressed my palm to the dolphin’s side and set my jaw and let the love I carry for these animals sit where everyone could see it. If it made anyone uncomfortable, too bad.
I didn’t know if we were going to save this one. I didn’t know where Jacob was. I didn’t know if the sound in my recorder belonged to the people I wanted to blame.
I knew how to keep a blowhole clear. I knew how to make a sling whisper instead of bite. I knew how to stay in a fight I wasn’t going to win and call the staying itself a kind of victory.