The motel we pulled into had a crushed-clamshell parking lot and a dead lawn bordered with rocks painted white. They gave me the room next to the soda machine.

Domingos brought in my knapsack and the doughnut bag and asked if he could use my phone to call his cousin. He had apologized over and over about stopping to see the whale. My behavior had made him afraid of me.

I sat on the bed, smoking, as he yakked on and on in Spanish or Portuguese, whatever it was-in a happy tone of voice he hadn't used once during our whole trip up. Honeymooners, ha! What a pathetic rucking joke I was.

"Okay, that's all set," he told me. "Augusto's wife's already frying up the linguica."

"What's that?" I said.

"It's sausage," he said. "I ain't had any in-"

"Your cousin sounds nice. I'd really love to meet him."

His face went scared. "Oh, well-"

"Not now. I meant sometime. Did you think I meant right now? God, I was just trying to be polite."

"Oh," he said. "Right. And plus you got those friends you're meeting, right?"

"Yeah, right," I said. "If they ever find me."

He laughed, embarrassed, and moved backward toward the door. "Well," he said. "I guess I'll see you then. I enjoyed meetin* you and, you know, talking to you. Sorry about that whale."

"Yup." I looked at the wall, not him.

"Thank you very much for those doughnuts you bought. /Uid that coffee."

"No problem."

"Don't forget, now, I'm going to say a little prayer for you. 'Saint Anne,' I'm gonna say, 'you help this lady out now >cause she's a very nice lady.'"

"Yup," I said. "Thanks."

"You have a nice vacation now. If that's what this is-a vacation."

"Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

The wall decorations were dusty metal lobsters and faded pictures of ships. The bedspread had cigarette burns. Inside the nightstand drawer were a complimentary pen and three postcards. "Vacation Dreams Begin at the Coastal Dreams Motel." I went out to the machine and got a soda. The sun 'tvas going down; the sky was orange and pink.

The TV only got two boring stations. I watched the end of some old movie. Golf. I kept changing the station, over and over around the dial, but all I got were those two channels, or snow. I had spent half my life watching TV.

I thought again about the paperweight. I'd had it less than a week when I shook too hard and accidentally sent it flying across my bedroom where it hit the floor and cracked. Leaked, became useless. At the time, it was my biggest tragedy-breaking that paperweight.

The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout- A song Jeanette and I used to sing... And then the pus comes oozing out. Mrs. Nord would get mad when we sang it and make us stop.

I lit a cigarette and held the tip to the musty bedspread, made a fresh burn... I could smash the drinking glass and follow the line of the scratch I'd made, cut deeper. Or use the curtain cord-strangle myself like Anthony Jr. Suddenly I saw my brother's discarded baby furniture, on the pile at the dump that day with Daddy. Felt in my stomach our wild escape away from there, Daddy, in his anger and loss, gunning the pickup truck over ruts and bumps. I'd looked back and watched that shrinking pile of furniture Anthony would never use. Saw again the pile of my ruined belongings that Eric had made. I'd lost the painting. Lost everyone.

I snuffed the smoldering bedspread cloth with my thumb. I was afraid to die in this ugly motel.

When I reached inside the doughnut bag, I found three hundred of the four hundred dollars I'd paid him to take me here. I began to cry: all my life, the best people left me-just drove away. I didn't want to die. I didn't want to live, either. After dark a car pulled into the parking lot. Not Domingos, like I'd hoped. A man and woman in their thirties.

In the glow of the soda machine I recognized him: the scientist they'd interviewed for that newspaper article. The man with all the theories about whales. "You want anything?" he called to the woman. "I don't know. Fresca, I guess. We still have vodka left, right?"

"I think so."

The cans clunked down. He walked toward her and handed her her soda. "Oh, man," he said, "I'm exhausted."

She reached behind him and touched the back of his neck, a gesture so natural it filled me with aching. "Plus you've had zilch for sleep," she said.

They walked to a room three doors down from mine and went inside.

Postcards, suicide notes.

I lay back on the bed and tried to decide who to send them to. Grandma? Domingos?... The one I really wanted to write was Ma's. "You didn't deserve what happened. I did." I thought of that photo of Ma and her friend Geneva Sweet-the one on Grandma's stairs. The two of them, happy and young and pretty, their arms locked, forever.

I pushed myself back up and wrote two of the cards against my leg.

Dear Grandma, I just couldn't take it anymore. When you remember me, try to think of me as a person, not some big fat mortal sin.

Dear Geneva, You've never met me, but I feel almost as if- They sounded stupid, so I ripped them up. Lay back again. Closed my eyes...

In the dream, Jack Speight and Eric and Daddy had me out on the ocean in a rocky boat. It was snowing-thick snow-a blizzard. I'd never seen snow on the water before and wanted to just sit and look, but they kept leaning over, jabbing at my feet with the edges of their oars. "Cut it out!" I yelled at them. "Stop it!" I jumped into the dark, choppy water. Then I was swimming beside a baby dolphin. Fast and smooth, we glided. The snow had stopped. When I looked back, the boat was far away.

The dolphin's face looked familiar. Then he wasn't a dolphin anymore, but a little boy with a dolphin's smile. Dottle's little dead boy. He swam away.

I woke up thirsty. The office was closed and I'd used up all my change. The sink water tasted warm and poisonous. I didn't like touching that slippery drinking glass.

Dear Grandma, Tell my so-called father I don't want him at my funeral. I don't want him anywhere near me...

I didn't want to write. I wanted to talk to someone, some person I hadn't failed-someone who would listen. I could walk down to that door, knock, wake up the scientist. "Excuse me for bothering you. You don't know me, but..."

Or I could just go ahead and do it. Stop those nightmares. Pnd it.

I picked up the phone.

The Cape Cod information operator talked to the operator in California, who said there were three of them: Brian Sweet, M. J. Sweet, and Irving Sweet.

"Irving," I said. "Get me that one."

It rang and rang. Her voice sounded far away. "Wait a second," she said. "Tell me again?"

"Bernice's daughter," I said. "Bernice, your friend who died. Her daughter."

I reminded her about her telephone call after the accident, when she'd had Grandma put me on the line so she could tell me how much she wanted to meet me, how the bottom had fallen out of her life when she heard the news. She'd sent flowers to the funeral home-white gardenias-the biggest, most beautiful spray.

"I've saved every one of her letters," she told me now. "We wrote on and off all those years. The night I heard about it, I took them out and read every single one. I know one thing-she loved you very much."

She waited for my crying to stop, she told me to take my time. She asked me how I'd been, what I was doing. I was in college now, wasn't I?

I told her it hadn't worked out.

Was I calling from Rhode Island? From my grandmother's?

I said I was calling from Cape Cod.

"Cape Cod?" she said. "It's cold up there this time of year, isn't it? What in the world are you doing up there in November?"

"Oh, nothing much," I said. I watched myself in the mirror as I spoke, twisting the ends of my hair with my finger, watching the way my weight sunk the mattress. The crying had slitted my eyes. "Just trying to think," I told her.

"Think about what?"

"Oh, lots of things... Death, for one. I saw this whale die today. I'm staying at this place where whales keep dying."

There was a pause on the other end.

"Tell me some more about my mother," I said.

She talked about Ma and Daddy's wedding, how my parents had been so crazy about each other, how Ma had prayed to get pregnant. She talked on and on.

"Her letters the last couple of years, though-honestly, they just broke my heart. First the divorce, then her breakdown. It seemed like every time she'd get back on her feet... she just seemed so vulnerable."

If I did it, I thought, I'd be free-of myself, of all those Jack Speight nightmares.

"I used to invite her to come out here all the time. For a little vacation. Have a few laughs, you know?-a little R&R.".

"The worms come in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle..." I sang it more to myself than to her. Her conversation was beginning to bore me.

"Dolores, honey?... Is everything okay with you? You're all right, aren't you?"

"I have to go," I said. "There's this pinochle game." I laughed out loud at my joke.

"Honey, does your grandmother know where you are?" I hung up on her. Rich bitch.

I walked and walked, down the unlit highway, then down the twisting narrow road, dodging headlights, waiting in the brush when I heard cars. The road went on and on, but I didn't mind. I felt energized, ready for anything. Fat girl on a skinny road, I thought. It struck me as hilarious. I knew this was the way. I followed the sound of the ocean.

There were two cars in the parking lot. I climbed the steep dune, stopped at the top. The ocean looked silvery in the moonlight. The wet air had a stink to it already she had begun her sweet rot.

Two men stood below, holding hands and watching her. Their dog kept barking at her size. Down the beach, three people sat huddled in front of a driftwood fire, each of them facing her. I sat above, on the crest of the dune, apart and waiting. Two teenage couples arrived, slamming car doors, laugh-ing and swigging beer as they ran down the dune toward her. Their loud fun sent the other spectators away. The boys climbed up and walked her body, out to the face and back. They bent and sliced their girlfriends souvenirs.

People came and went like that, like Ma's wake. I outlasted all of them-a chaperone for her corpse. I stayed with her all night.

At dawn I stood and looked down the beach as far as I could see. One side, the other, the parking lot behind me. The two of us were all alone.

I walked down the dune toward her.

The tide was further in than it had been the afternoon before; though she hadn't moved, she was deeper into the water. At the ocean's edge, I pulled off my sweatshirt, pulled down my jeans.

The water was no colder than the wind, but my nipples hardened against the sensation at my feet My fat turned gooseflesh blue. I waded out to my knees, my legs aching, then numbing to it I went further in, to my waist. The end of my hair was wet. I lifted up and under. Swam.

From the beach, she had looked black, but now, swimming beside her, I saw that her skin was mottled, blotched with darker and lighter grays. I reached out to touch her. She felt firm and muscular against my palm, my shaking blue fingers. Against my lips. The kiss felt soft and coarse. Salty.

I swam underwater to the front of her and resurfaced, bobbing and treading water. I was weightless.

Her massive head and snout were covered with knobs- ugly, patternless bumps littered with barbed chin stubble, sharp to the touch. Her scarred mouth gaped open, as if she'd died trying to drink her way back to safe, deep water. Her jaw, half above the surface, half below, was lined with thick broom bristle. Her eyes were underwater.

I held my breath and went under, my own eyes open.

The eye stared back at me without seeing. The iris was milky and blank, blurred by seawater. A cataract eye, an eye full of death. I reached out and touched the skin just below it, then touched the hard globe itself.

This was how I could die. This was where.

W/'tLLY L*AMV I fought against myself, my head butting downward toward bottom, arms pushing and flailing to stay under. I drank seawater in thick gulps and swallows, glimpsing the death eye in the midst of my battle.

Then I fought it, angrily. Burst upward, crashing the surface. I coughed and spit, gasping and choking for breath, letting the good air burn my lungs.

I swam to her other side, around the torn and broken flipper. My feet touched bottom. I stumbled and waded back toward the shore, hit again by the full, throbbing cold. My clothes sat in a wet heap by the water's edge. I struggled them back on.

I had reached some kind of end. But hadn't reached it.

I don't know how long I sat there shivering.

From far down the beach, as far down as I could see, it approached. First just something to look at, then something to hear. A jeep.

The wet clothes, the wind, made my shaking uncontroll able.

A man in a tan uniform cut the engine and walked toward me, smiling. He squatted down beside me.

"Hello there," he said.

"Hello."

"Would you by any chance be Dolores Price?"

I nodded.

"Some people been looking for you. They been worried."

He had plump little yellow teeth, like a row of sweet corn.

I told him I was sorry.

"I got a blanket for you if you're cold. You look cold. Are you?"

I nodded again.

"Then let me get that blanket then."

Back at the jeep, he talked into his radio. "Okay, she's here," he said. "I got her."