I knew, in the way that kids do, to let the silence ride shotgun. It wasn’t until we were driving for an hour on the old Route 66 that I finally asked where we were going. “You know,” my father said, huffing a laugh, “I have no idea.”
We’d just reached Catoosa when we saw the Blue Whale from the road. My father looked at me and I looked at him and by unspoken agreement, he drove right up to it—this weird, aqua-painted concrete whale half submerged at the edge of a little pond. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything quite so sad before—a landlocked fake whale in the middle of Oklahoma.
It looked like a minigolf sculpture without a putting green, like a kids’ papier-maché version of a cetacean. There was a gift store that was closed, but we could still walk right through the mouth of the whale into its boardwalk belly. There were signs saying no swimming was allowed, but at one point it must have been—there was a ladder and a slide right into the brackish water.
My father stepped up to a little plaque. “After noticing kids playing in a pond near his property, Hugh Davis built the blue whale in 1972 as an anniversary present for his wife, with a swim dock for local children. It became a major hub for people traveling across Route 66. When Davis died, the whale fell into disrepair, until his son Blaine restored it in 1988.”
I stared into the painted eye of the creature, which seemed to be saying it knew it was stuck somewhere it was never meant to be.
My father lightly kicked at one of the cement teeth, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe I should have built her a whale,” he said.
We drove back to the Next of Inn through Ochelata, which was slowly piecing itself back together. Mrs. Evans wasn’t there, but she had left us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat for dinner. I ate slowly while my father told my mother that we would be flying home the next day.
That night I woke up from a nightmare where I was doing a word search, and all of the letters kept sliding off the page. I tried to fall asleep again, but this time I dreamed that we were back in New York, and our apartment was nothing but splinters of wood.
My parents were not in their bed. The bathroom door was ajar and a slice of lemon light fell onto the carpet from inside. I could hear their voices over the soft rush of the faucet.
I didn’t think you’d be back, my mother said.
I’m not the one who leaves. That’s you.
What do you want me to say, Paul?
There was a hiccup of silence.
That you’ll come home with us, he said. That you’ll stay home.
I padded down the stairs and peered out the window beside the front door, which was no longer a window but an open space. The glass had been swept up from the floor, so I had a clear view of the night sky, stars suddenly close enough to touch, like sparks thrown from a fire.
There was also a red ember dancing in the dark. I pushed open the screen door and saw Vietnam Tim sitting on the wicker rocker, smoking a cigarette. “Hey,” he said, seeing me. He waved the cigarette toward me. “Want one?” Then he winced. “That’s probably like the cursing,” he realized.
“Yeah. … I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.
“What a coincidence,” Vietnam Tim replied. “So am I.”
“Where will you go?”
He waved his arm, the bright red tip of the cigarette drawing a loop in the night. “Wherever the winds take me,” he said.
“I’m going back to New York,” I told him. “I may never leave there again.”
His teeth flashed, a lightning smile. “So much for apples not falling far from trees,” Vietnam Tim answered.
In the morning, Vietnam Tim had left without saying goodbye, and I realized that my mother was not joining us to go to the airport. Instead, she was going to spend a few more days in Ochelata, photographing the devastation of the EF4 tornado. She would chronicle the absence of homes where they had stood hours before, and the empty arms of mothers who had lost children, piles of debris that had been family businesses and churches. The images would eventually include a Jenga heap of broken beams with the town population sign cracked down the middle; another of a horse rearing as it was being recaptured from the school gymnasium where it had taken frantic refuge; a dog’s paw emerging from a mountain of rubble; and Mrs. Evans, staring at the remains of her broken barn, her arm hooked around the neck of Nitpick. This series, Broken Things, would eventually be featured at the International Center of Photography, and won my mother a World Press Photo award.
Before we left, my mother hugged me. “I’ll be home soon,” she promised, but she looked at my father as she said it. “I can’t leave before I finish the job.”
“I thought you were here for the rain,” I said.
“That was the job,” my mother agreed. “But now it’s something else.”
It was always something else.
I watched my mother tentatively move toward my father, and even more tentatively come close enough for her to brush her lips against his. There was only a second of hesitation, and then he kissed her back.