Whale Tail Park
Abigail Denike
I saw my cousins for the first time in five years at my grandmother’s funeral. It also happened to be my 21st birthday. Sam and Tristan, the ‘twins’, wore black shirts. They were the kind of shirts waiters wear with black ties at tacky steakhouses. I cringed thinking Sam must have gotten another job at another restaurant.
Sam, Tristan, and their older sister Polly, were always the coolest. I am much younger than them–-seven years junior to the twins and ten to Polly. But they never made me feel young. I remembered the last time I saw them; I was still in high school, and they showed me around their stomping grounds in West Seattle. The twins were yo-yoing in and out of college, and Polly had just gotten her first grown-up job. We walked around the damp streets as the autumn light faded, traversing the hills of their old neighborhood and the one I lived in for the first five years of my life. The leaves had turned and filled the corners of the streets, creating a musty mulch smell that mixed with the scent of coffee.
We stopped at Whale Tail Park. As a toddler, I would visit this park and attempt to scale the copper whale, slamming my open palms above my head to get the sticking power I needed to scamper up the side. Tristan would boost me with his fingers knitted together like a step. Now, I was the tallest of the four of us. The twins sat easily on the whale's head, which was positioned on the blue turf as if its body was underwater and just its head and tail were above the surface. I sat down next to Polly on a bench. Sam and I had always loved whales. We watched them together from his kitchen window while licking out the centers of double-stuffed Oreos. We used to play this game: each time I saw a whale tail emerge from the Puget Sound, I would point it out and he would mark a tally on his sheet, handing me another cookie.
From his perch, Sam lit up a cigarette and nodded at me, offering me one. I shook my head. I was too young to smoke and my mother would kill me.
“Sam, remember when you got caught smoking weed here in eighth grade?” Polly said, laughing. Sam shrugged and looked down, giving the slightest smile. He wore a Carhartt jacket, and his upper lip was split open. The sliver of red flesh seemed to widen as he smoked his cigarette. He kept fidgeting with his free hand, shoving it in and out of his jacket pocket.
“Come on guys, let’s go,” he said, standing to stomp out his cigarette. Sam wanted to stop in to see his friend at the Pizza Parlor, the restaurant he used to work at. He had been a chef there but was fired a few months back for a reason no one had said. Polly looked down and did not get up. “It’ll just be a quick stop,” he told her.
We trudged down the hill, away from the park, toward the waterfront and the West Seattle bridge that connected the peninsula to the mainland. The salty air began to waft up as we got closer. The red neon ‘HOT SLICE’ sign buzzed in the window. Sam slipped silently into the back door of the kitchen. Polly was quiet, standing far down the sidewalk kicking at seagull pellets. I wondered what they weren’t telling me.
As the three of them approached me at the funeral, I still worried something had shifted between us that day at the park. Tristan was the first to give me a hug and wish me a happy birthday, and my anxiety started to dissipate. Polly pressed a birthday card into my palm, and Sam winked at me. “We are celebrating after this,” Sam said. “Grammy would have wanted us to.”
After the funeral, we took our grandmother in her shiny blue urn to our favorite dim sum place down the road from the church. We took shots of Sake, slurped soup dumplings, and laughed. Later, we danced in the street to Lionel Richie–her favorite—with her in our arms, each taking a chance to hold her. I saw Sam wobble mid-spin, and laughed thinking it was a joke. Tristan lunged into the street and caught the urn just a few feet from the pavement, his face suddenly ashen.
After the near catastrophe, we all went to where we were staying. I went to sleep thinking about the last time I saw her alive. She was sipping a cappuccino at our favorite cafe. I was late to meet her coming from somewhere so insignificant I can’t remember why I made my grandmother wait. She warned me to look out for Sam. “He is more sensitive–he needs more love than the rest of you,” she said. I remained silent and sipped the cappuccino she kindly ordered for me before my arrival.
My mother called a few weeks after the funeral and told me the news. The memories began to fit together in my mind like a puzzle that suddenly formed a clear picture. I realized that day in West Seattle, Sam was looking for his next fix in the back of the pizza restaurant. The weed habit that began innocently in middle school had escalated to pills and then to heroin, causing him to drop out of college and lose his job. His split lip was from an altercation the week before my visit. He had been addicted for years without me knowing.
On the phone, my mother told me he had an accident. He fell off the West Seattle bridge, just three blocks from that kitchen window we used to sit at counting orcas as kids. He survived the fall, with only cracked ribs and significant bruising. It was some sort of miracle, she said. She told me he was too high to know what he was doing that night. I hung up the phone wondering if that last part was true.
Did he mean to stand on the ledge? Did he see the water underneath him and imagine what the churning swirls of foam would feel like against his skin? Did the water remind him of our grandmother’s urn—the urn she carefully selected before her death—painted to resemble the swirling wave pattern of the ocean? Did he, like myself, still play back the last voicemails she left on his phone; the ones where she said we were loved no matter what and reminded us to say our nightly prayers? I knew it wasn’t a miracle that allowed him to slip into the water with an ease that spared his life that night, it was her. I envisioned him alone on the bridge and my heart broke. He was a whale, slinking into the dark murky water, almost as if he belonged there, almost as if he was going home.
Abigail DeNike is an MS3 at UMass Chan Medical School and Creative Editor of The Interstitium
