I did the same thing to Heath.
The structure looked like safety from the outside and felt like a managed environment from within. The person who built it always believed that the containment was necessary. Thatthe parameters were correct even when the animal circled and circled and pressed its face against the acrylic looking for open water that wasn't there.
"I'm not sorry," I said. "If I had the same information tomorrow, I'd sign again. I'd keep him here."
The water moved in slow currents around Ansel's bulk. Fourteen hundred pounds of animal, suspended in place, patient.
"I'm my father. He said he was protecting me from the mistake of leaving, like I'm protecting Heath from the mistake of refusing to stay. Same logic. "
I was aware, distantly, that I was confessing to a whale.
The thought was funny, but I didn't laugh. I pressed my forehead against the acrylic. Cool. Smooth. Four inches of polymer between me and nine hundred thousand gallons.
"Heath would say I don't trust him with the truth. He'd say it quietly, and he'd be right."
That was the confession. Not that I'd signed without telling him and killed my plan. It was that I loved him and didn't trust him to choose correctly if given the full picture. I'd decided he couldn't handle this.
Arrogance. The data didn't lie.
I didn't know what to do with the data yet. Seeing a problem and solving it were two different skills.
"Night, buddy," I said.
Ansel turned to move back toward the deep water. His white body dimmed until he was a pale shape at the edge of visibility.
The Shedd parking lot was empty except for my car. March in Chicago. The wind came off Lake Michigan raw and wet, finding gaps between your collar and your neck.
At home, Gerald was on his coral. The tank hummed its low, constant note.
I undressed in the dark and climbed into bed. The sheets were cold on Heath's side, the left. He slept on his stomach with one arm off the mattress, and the left gave him room to sprawl without pressing an elbow into my ribs.
His side had been cold for six days. The pillow still smelled like his shampoo, the cheapest he could find. He'd bought it on a road trip to Anaheim and then kept buying it because it worked, and Heath did not fix what wasn't broken.
I lay in the dark and breathed it in.
At midnight, my phone buzzed.
One message. 807 area code. Northwestern Ontario.
He's hurting. Whatever you did, fix it. — P
A number I didn't have saved, attached to a person I'd never spoken to, who had gotten my contact information through channels I suspected were of questionable legality.
Whatever you did, fix it.
The sentence assumed the damage was repairable. Pickle didn't know the details. He knew Heath was hurting, which meant Heath had called Thunder Bay. He was hurting badly enough that he reached out for the one person who'd taught him that he could occupy space without apology.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand.
An even deeper confession arrived. Control was the thing I did instead of trusting people. I still couldn't send it to the person who most needed to hear it.
Across the city, a radiator clanked twice and clicked once.
Chapter seventeen
Heath
My tape job was clean.
