Friday's Harbor by Diane Hammond Read Free Book Online Page A

facility, Viernes’s history, and the zoo’s hopes for a total rehabilitation that would give the whale an infinitely better, never mind longer, life. He was just about to take questions from the media when the crowd parted enough to allow Gabriel through, still wearing his wet suit.
    “Ah,” Truman said. “Here’s the man of the hour. Let me introduce Gabriel Jump, who’s pulled this rescue together in record time, and who will be in charge of Viernes’s rehabilitation. He’ll give you a status report on the whale’s condition first, and then he can answer your questions.”
    Over the course of the endless trip north, Truman had developed a deepening respect for Gabriel. Hour after numbingly cold hour he had radiated a profound, even shamanlike inner calm. Now, he briefed the gathering with an enviably easy informality and humor. As soon as he wrapped up his remarks the room burst into furious action: cell phones came out, laptops bloomed, TV crews and engineers scrambled to edit B-roll, and both Truman and Gabriel were assaulted by reporters eager for exclusive quotes and sound bites. But what they wanted most was access to the top of the pool so they could get close-ups of Viernes, which Gabriel had been adamant about denying for at least twelve hours, or until he felt Viernes was stable and settled in. Truman offered instead to open the underwater viewing gallery to the media. Though the pool’s depths were dark, the TV lights might lure him to the enormous windows, where the photographers and videographers would have a chance to see him up close.
    S ATISFIED THAT THIS whale was the animal that had summoned her, Libertine checked into the town’s cheapest motel, the Slumber Inn Motor Lodge. The room was damp, cheaply paneled, and poorly lit, and from its uncomfortable straight chair she looked bleakly at the bank balance on her laptop. Even at twenty-eight dollars a night, she didn’t know how long she’d be able to stay. She fervently wished that the people who doubted her abilities—which was to say, nearly everyone—realized what it cost her to follow her calling. She had to forego health insurance, a working dishwasher, nice clothes, and lasting friendships, living—barely—on a miniscule amount of money from her mother’s life insurance policy and the rare stipend paid her by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or comparable state agencies when she was able to convince errant seals and sea lions to move on from public docks and fish ladders. She wore thrift-store clothes and offered up her hair, naturally a dull shade of brown shot with gray, to the students at a beauty college in Anacortes, which explained why she often had hair in innovative colors and styles. The students loved her because it was widely known that they could try out anything and she wouldn’t bitch or cry, not even when the processing went haywire—which, given the students’ lack of experience, it often did. Libby —they’d say, handing her from student to student like a favorite if well-worn doll— you’re the best.
    People tended to assume that Libertine had always been single, but it wasn’t true. When she was just eighteen she’d married Larry Adagio, her life’s love and an earnest plumber who had taken great pride in his work. Libertine thought if he’d known a heart attack would kill him at twenty-seven, he’d at least have taken comfort from the fact that it happened while he was on the job, in a client’s bathroom, at the base of a new quiet-flush toilet.
    In her dreams she and Larry were together again, and neither of them had aged a day. They were usually running errands, earnestly debating whether Mini Wheats would hold him until his midmorning break. He’d had the metabolism of a chipmunk; every workday she’d sent him off with a stack of sandwiches like playing cards: peanut butter and jelly, baloney and American cheese, liverwurst and Swiss, cutting little hearts into each top piece of bread with a