How to Speak Dolphin

  Adam is trying to get into the water, straining against the hold Don has on his life jacket.

  “Let’s get started, shall we?” Sandi sits on the side of the raft, scrunchies her long hair into a ponytail, and slips into the water, which comes only to her waist.

  They say animals are great judges of people. Nori dives beneath the surface. When she comes up again, she’s against the fence on the far side of the pool—as far away from therapist Sandi as she can get.

  “Adam, sit here.” She pats the dock.

  He twists from side to side.

  “Adam, you have to sit here.” She puts her hands in his armpits, lifts, and plops him on the dock.

  Adam starts to wail and kick, soaking her.

  “Lily … it is Lily, isn’t it? Will you bring that bucket of fish over and put it next to your brother?

  “Now, Adam, look at me.” With her free hand, Sandi turns his head to face her, but his eyes roll in Nori’s direction.

  “Adam. Look at me.”

  He doesn’t.

  “Nori would like to play with you, but you need to call her over. Can you say ‘Nori’?”

  As much as I want my brother to talk, I pray with all my might that he doesn’t. Not today. That would be all Don needs to seal Nori’s fate—if it’s not already sealed. I hold my breath.

  Adam does a raspberry and flaps his hand.

  “Nor-ee,” Sandi says.

  Adam starts to rock.

  “Nor-ee.”

  He kicks his feet, splashing Sandi.

  She wipes her face and catches his ankles.

  “Nor-ee.”

  Adam twists, breaking her grip on his legs, but falls backward, hitting his head on the dock. He shrieks.

  Zoe smiles.

  Suzanne shakes her head. “Have you had much opportunity to work with autistic children?”

  Sandi pulls Adam upright and checks the back of his head. “It either wasn’t as prevalent when I was here in the nineties—” She has to shout to be heard over Adam’s screams. “Or, if it was, it wasn’t diagnosed as often. Many behavioral issues have a great deal in common.”

  Suzanne’s eyes flash when she looks at me.

  “Nori’s hungry, Adam.” Sandi pulls the bucket closer. “Would you like to feed her?”

  Adam is beyond hearing her.

  Don looks helplessly at Suzanne, who marches over, scoops him up, and carries him to a nearby bench. She sits and places Adam between her knees. I’ve seen her do this before. She applies pressure, gently but firmly squeezing him with her thighs. Since she came to work for us, she’s been reading books about autism, especially ones written by Temple Grandin, who has Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Temple built herself a squeeze-box when she was in college and would crawl into it when she felt a meltdown coming. It had solid sides, and she could close them down on herself. When Suzanne explained this to me, I told her how Mom used to let Adam sleep in the chest of drawers.

  It takes a few minutes, but Adam stops the rhythmic sirenlike shrieking, though he continues to cry. Suzanne whispers next to his ear, “Nori’s watching.”

  Adam sniffles and turns to look at Nori’s pool. Sandi has gotten out of the water, and Nori has moved nearer the raft. She’s upended and is watching Adam. Suzanne lets him go and he runs to the raft.

  Sandi claps her hands together. “Are we ready to try again?”

  Don catches her arm. “Let’s see what happens without making it an exercise.”

  “Well. Sure. Can’t expect miracles the first time out.” She laughs.

  Adam sits and scoots to the edge of the raft. Nori slides her head up next to him. He stokes her cheek, then gets curious about the hole in the top of her head. When he gets on his knees to look inside, she closes it, then opens it again, luring him closer.

  Adam puts a hand on either side of her blowhole, leans over, and cocks his head like he’s going to put his eye to the hole. Don reaches to stop him at the same moment Nori blasts him in the face with a puff of air. He falls back, giggles, and begins to pet her again, murmuring incoherently.

  I’ve been giving Zoe a blow-by-blow. When I tell her what Nori did, it dawns on me—Adam got the joke she played on him.

  Zoe realizes it, too. Her lips compress, then she turns and walks away.

  From the other side of a high board fence, I hear a girl’s voice shouting, “Have your picture taken petting a dolphin. Only fifty dollars.”

  The rest of Saturday and all day Sunday after our visit with Nori, Adam is calmer. He plays with his toy dolphins, watches his DVD, and sleeps through the night. By Monday, when Suzanne comes to take him to school, he’s as fussy as usual.

  Zoe’s JAWS program has read the entire 1972 Marine Mammal Act to her, and she basically spent the weekend reciting the whole thing to me. She keeps calling and emailing to tell me more facts. Since it was passed, aquariums haven’t been allowed to capture dolphins in American waters, though there’s a loophole if they are trapped for vaguely defined “research.” None, for any reason, has been taken since 1989. Instead they breed them, which explains what happened to all those baby dolphins at the Oceanarium. They sold them, or put them in the pens for the swim-with-dolphins program.

  Yesterday morning’s email: She’s a wild dolphin. How come they can keep her?

  Then in the afternoon: Did you know dolphins can live for 40 years? Can you imagine Nori in that place for another 37 years?

  I can’t, but I don’t answer.

  Today she’s burying me with her research on DAT—Dolphin Assisted Therapy.

  Zoe: There’s no proof it does anything!! It’s nothing but an expensive swim-with program. There’s a link attached.

  My answer: Can we stop talking about this?

  Of course, I’m pretty sure I do know how they’re keeping her. The Oceanarium and Don are in cahoots. I don’t tell Zoe because I think freeing Nori might be more important to her than our friendship and that she’d risk never being allowed in this house again if it meant saving her.

  I keep trying to tell myself that Nori’s only one dolphin. There are aquariums all over the world, and thousands of dolphins die in fishing nets every year. Heck, the Japanese eat them. If the AquaPlanet people hadn’t found her, Nori would be dead now. For Adam’s sake, I think we have to give it a chance to work.

  I tell myself that, but I keep thinking about those mother dolphins in that sterile upper-deck tank, scratching an itch on a metal pipe and having their babies taken away from them. And that sea lion trying to leap over the wall when there was really nothing on the other side.

  I don’t tell Zoe, but I’ve been online, too, reading more about what dolphins are like in the wild. How they stay with their families, sometimes forever, and they have whistle-names for each other.

  A few days go by without Zoe calling, and she stopped sending articles on DAT. Then this morning I get an email saying she hopes I’ll be okay with her contacting the AquaPlanet people who rescued Nori. I don’t answer.

  A couple of hours later my phone rings.

  “Hi, Zoe.”

  She launches right in. “After seeing where they are going to keep Nori, I thought you’d be with me on this.”

  “I’m not against you. I’m for my brother. What if it was your brother?”

  “I’d feel the same. Therapy with dolphins is a hoax.”

  “Is it? What about therapy dogs?”

  “Then have your stepfather buy him a dog. They’ve been domesticated. Dolphins are meant to be wild, and in an ocean.”

  “Zoe, what do you want from me? And how come you’re fixated on Nori, the one that might help Adam, instead of all the others?”

  “I feel terrible for all of them, but it’s probably too late for them. Nori’s young and still has a chance at a normal dolphin life. She’s the one we can help. They need to put her back with her mother before she forgets how to feed herself and be a wild dolphin.”

  “Just stop, Zoe! It’s like
you care more about Nori than you do about us being friends.”

  There’s silence on the other end. “That’s not true, Lily,” she says finally. “I want us to be friends more than anything.”

  “Then prove it and stop talking about this. Nori’s just one dolphin.”

  “Every dolphin should be free.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

  “Geez, Zoe, the world is full of—”

  She cuts me off. “Maybe the reason I’m so upset about Nori is because I’m only one blind kid among millions of people who can’t see, but not being blind would mean a lot to me. It would mean a normal life.”

  I’m in the bathroom with Adam when Suzanne finds us. Day before yesterday, she finally moved Adam’s potty to its new home on the floor next to the toilet.

  “Hey, toots.” She smiles at me. “How’s our boy?”

  “Adam, show Suzanne what you’ve learned.”

  He’s through peeing, but still standing with his back arched. He doesn’t look at me, or her.

  “What have you learned, Adam?”

  “You’ll see.” I cross my fingers, pull up his pants, then empty his potty into the toilet and flush. “Tell that pee-pee bye-bye.”

  Adam leans over and watches the water circle, then waves, but instead of turning his palm out, it’s facing him.

  She laughs. “What I’d give to be in his mind for a minute or two.” She puts a stool in front of the sink for Adam to stand on to wash his hands.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” She turns on the faucet and gives him a squirt of hand soap.

  “How do you feel about them keeping N-O-R-I now that she’s cured?”

  She turns to look at me. “I think it’s appalling.”

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  “That poor animal belongs with her mother in the wild, not cooped up in the pen. But it’s not my place to criticize your stepfather. He’s my boss.”

  “He’s totally behind this, isn’t he?”

  She turns to face me. “Not a word. Do you understand? He’d have every right to fire me.”

  I raise my right hand. “I promise, but he’d never fire you. He’s totally dependent on you. So am I.”

  “No one is irreplaceable.”

  I think of my mother. “Some people are.”

  “The Oceanarium people can keep her as long as she’s not cured, but they’ll only keep her if she’s healthy enough to go in with the other dol …” She dries Adam’s hands with a towel. “D-o-l-p-h-i-n-s.”

  I try to rearrange what she’s saying in my head, but I can’t. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Ya think.”

  “They can keep her if she’s still sick, but only if she’s healthy?”

  Adam jumps off the stool and runs down the hall.

  Suzanne and I follow. She puts him in his high chair and hands him the Communicator 4.

  Suzanne recorded the Communicator’s responses so when Adam pushes the I WANT button, it sounds like Suzanne if she was an android. “Grapes.”

  “Good job, Adam.” She gets grapes from the fridge, makes sure all the stems are removed, and puts them in a bowl.

  Adam pushes I WANT again.

  “Four, three, two, one.” Suzanne counts like the therapists do at school to warn him she’s taking the Communicator away, then puts the grapes on his tray. “Where were we?”

  “N-O-R-I,” I say.

  “Right. Normally, a clean bill of health would mean she has to be returned to the Gulf, but they can keep her if she hasn’t been cured of what brought her to them in the first place.”

  “But she has, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes and no. Her cancer is in ‘remission.’ ” She makes quotation marks with her fingers.

  I hold my hand up. “And remission can last a lifetime. So the truth is she’s healthy, but by saying her cancer could return, Don’s created the loophole that’s letting them keep her.”

  “That’s it.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He told me. He’s smug about it.”

  “Do you think it will help Adam?”

  She shrugs. “It might help some. He’s sure a happy little pea pod when he’s with her.”

  I look at Adam. He takes a grape from the bowl and places it on the tray in a line with the others. He is totally focused. “Do you think his happiness is worth keeping her in a tiny pen for her whole life?”

  We both hear Don’s car door slam.

  Suzanne turns and busies herself at the sink.

  I go to my room to email Zoe.

  Please don’t call AquaPlanet yet, okay? I’m thinking about it.

  Since my school let out for the summer, I’ve been going once a week to see how the Cutler Academy therapy program works so that we don’t undo at home any progress he makes. Even though Adam’s only been going for five weeks, Don’s impatient with his progress or, in his opinion, lack of it. When Suzanne calls Friday to say she has jury duty on Monday, Don decides to take Adam to school himself. That scares me. If little boys making flowers upset him, watching Adam stacking two blocks or trying to match a red cup with the picture of a red cup is not going to build his confidence.

  Don’s always up before the sun, so when I come into the kitchen at seven thirty, he’s already got a sleepy Adam in his high chair with a bowl of cereal in front of him. With his help getting Adam ready, we get to the school early enough for the morning singing circle, which I know exists only because we sometimes arrive in time to catch the end of the scratchy music.

  Adam, as usual, runs to the microwave, which is on the counter, and stands on his tiptoes to look at his face reflected in the dark surface. The first time I saw him do this, I tried to think of another reflective surface in our house. Our microwave is above our stove. The mirrors are all farther above the ground than Adam is tall, and the only full-length mirror is on Don’s closet wall. It makes me feel bad that he might not know what he looks like on the outside; none of us knows what he’s like on the inside.

  Adam holds the edge of the counter with his fingertips and puts his chin on his hands, totally absorbed in his reflection. I read somewhere that only humans, great apes, elephants, and dolphins have self-awareness and can recognize themselves in a mirror. Of course, scientists used to think tool use was the dividing line between humans and animals. They were wrong about that. Even birds use tools.

  Each child has a small plastic chair with his or her picture Velcroed to the back. The other kids are already in their chairs. When Elisa calls his name, Adam runs to his and sits. I just have time to think, so far so good, when he jumps up and runs around the room, holding his arms out, before squeezing into Roberto’s cubby. One of the teachers fetches him back to the circle.

  Elisa puts on the music and the teachers start to sing along with a book of pictures: “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a yellow duck, looking back at me.”

  As they go through the book, Don stands by the front door with his arms crossed over his chest like he can’t commit to coming all the way into the room. My stomach’s in a knot. If he pulls Adam out of this program that I think is helping, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Leaving Adam’s Saturdays with Nori as the only option would make any way Zoe and I might think of to send her home impossible.

  Adam gets up again and runs into the cubicle where his plastic box of dolphins is on a shelf. Elisa goes to get him and signs closed, one palm up and the other hand perpendicular to it. Adam hops like a kangaroo over to the microwave, gazes at himself in its black surface, then goes to the window and looks out at the playground. The air conditioner under the window stirs his thin blond bangs. The morning light gives his face a soft glow. He reaches and touches the glass. I move so I can see what he sees, but there’s no one there, just his reflection with me standing close behind him.

  I’m not sure why Adam’s fascination with his image upsets me. My first thought was Zoe and what it would mean to her if she could see
herself, something she hasn’t been able to do since she was four. But standing here behind Adam, I remember what Zoe said about Nori not being able to use her sonar in that first tank and that all she could see was wall, wall, wall. Mostly, I wonder what it means that Adam has started seeking out his own image.

  “Time to do our numbers, Adam.” Elisa smiles at Don. “He likes doing numbers.”

  Roberto has gotten up and is trudging around in circles, then pulls up a corner of the carpet and crawls under it. One of the teachers goes to get him.

  Roberto’s chair is next to Sonya’s, the only little girl in the class. Adam comes over, peels Roberto’s name off, and switches it with his own so his seat is now beside Sonya’s.

  A hint of a smile crosses Don’s face.

  “Good sitting, Adam,” Elisa says.

  Each kid has been handed a marker and an erasable board with ten squares. Elisa writes 1 in the first square on her own board and shows it to them. All attempt to write the numeral. Don walks over to where I’m standing behind Adam and watches him fill in the squares. He gets one through four done, loses interest, and drops his board on the floor. He runs to a plastic bucket, takes out a ball, and throws it across the room. When it hits the wall, it begins to flash purple and red.

  Elisa starts to get up.

  “May I?” I’ve come often enough, I know what to do.

  “Sure.”

  I retrieve the ball, get Adam’s book with the Velcro strips, and peel off the picture of a ball. “Adam, do you want the ball?” I hand the picture to him. He doesn’t look at it, but he knows the drill. He gives the picture to me and I give him the ball. “Good job,” I say, like they say every time he does what he’s supposed to do. I put the ball picture back in his book and put it on the desk. He throws the ball. It bounces off the sink and rolls under the lunch table. While I’m under the table, he goes to his book, takes off the ball picture, and brings it to me to trade. I look at Don. Whether he knows it or not, that’s a huge step. Adam and I are communicating.

  “Go check your schedules,” Elisa calls out.

  Adam goes straight to the room where his plastic box, containing three of his dolphins and a second copy of his Little Dolphin puppet book, is on a shelf. He points at it and jumps up and down. When no one takes it down for him, he crumples to the floor.