She had returned before our tenth birthdays with tears and hugs and declarations about how much she loved and missed me. Unlike my brothers, I wasn’t convinced.
“She’s gone home,” my dad had said.
Home, it turned out, had been to the East Coast, where she’d grown up. Home to the sea.
For eighteen months, Mom had lived in a ramshackle house on the coast of New Brunswick. She had helped researchers document North Atlantic right whales and trained with the crew members who perilously rescued the animals when they were caught in lobster fishing lines.
She’d studied to be a marine biologist before Darwin was born. Up until she left, her love of whales filled the early years of my life, and I could dole out cetacean facts like an encyclopedia with pigtails.
North Atlantic right whales are one of the most critically endangered species in the world.
They can weigh up to one hundred and forty thousand pounds and grow as long as fifty-two feet.
While right whales can live to about seventy years old, human-caused deaths mean female whales live to around forty-five and males to around sixty-five.
We had a map where we’d pin recent right whale sightings, and for my third-grade talent show, I recited my mom’s favorite poem, Mary Oliver’s “Humpbacks.”
Then one day, I woke up and Mom was gone. To the whales. Without me.
By the time she’d returned, George and I were joined at the hip. He was instantly smitten with Mom, and she loved him right back. She praised his eyes and his manners. She ruffled his hair constantly. He loved to eat, and Mom loved to feed him. She threw us a huge joint birthday party, and he followed heraround like a plant turning to the light. I tried not to let it bother me—George didn’t have a mom. She died when he was seven.
One day that fall, George and I came home from school to bowls of my mom’s still-warm apple-berry crisp. He was on his second helping and I was picking at my first while she told him the story behind my name. Darwin was named after the biologist. Moby, after the fictional whale. I was named after a real one—a right whale Mom had seen on a family vacation to the East Coast while she was pregnant with me. Somewhere, at that very moment, an enormous whale named Francesca was swimming in the Atlantic.
She used to tell me fairy tales about the adventures of a girl and a whale who shared a name.
“Once upon a time,” she’d always begin, “there was a girl named Francesca and a whale named…”
“Francesca!” I would sing.
“Francesca the girl lived by the sea, and the best thing about living by the sea was…”
“The whales!”
I once thought of whale Francesca as my sister of the sea. But when Mom left, the girl who loved whales went with her.
I stared into my bowl of fruit as Mom told George that researchers track right whale sightings in a DNA data bank, and that some have names. All are given a catalog number and can be identified by their unique markings and scars. Francesca was catalog number 1950. It was the first time Mom had spoken about whales since coming home, and I was angry.
“That’s so cool,” George said, waving his spoon in the air. A raspberry landed on his sweater, and I rolled my eyes. Georgecould never stay clean, and his pants always had holes in them. “I think that’s what I want to do when I grow up—work with whales like you did.”
I glared at George, pushed my chair out from the table, and marched my half-eaten bowl to the kitchen. I dropped it into the sink with a clatter.
“Frankie,” my mother scolded. “Careful.”
“I wish you never came back,” I told her, and then I ran.
George found me in the branches of a red oak, crying. He climbed up to me, and I told him I hated him. I accused him of liking my mother more than he liked me. I told him I never wanted to talk to him again.
I ignored him at school the following day, but on the bus ride home, he handed me a letter.
Dear Frankie,
I do like your mom. Sometimes I wish she was mine. But I like you more than anyone.
Youare my best friend. And I’ll be yours forever. I can prove it, too. Meet me in our secret place.
From,
George
