Whale Bone by Erin Weber Boss

The April wind whispered through the beachgrass and the seat oats, which nodded gently towards the water with the sea breeze. Seagulls congregated at the tide’s edge, a loud summit determining the likelihood that we, the lone humans walking down the empty shoreline, might be carrying lunch. Lemon-yellow beach flowers dotted the dunes while the sky loomed mist-gray above.
Ahead a lighthouse stood, holding its quiet vigil – waiting to guide the ships past the craggy line of rocks jutting up from the water. As I walked, I noticed a sharp arc of white off to my left, rising out amidst the dried seaweed and sea glass that littered the sand. I walked towards it, and Luke redirected his steps to follow.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a whale bone, maybe a rib.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a whale bone, Luke. I’m positive.” He averted his gaze, not ready to argue with me. I ran my hand across the smooth surface of bone until it reached the jutting end. It was jagged, broken at some point. Perhaps it had belonged to some poor creature who was hit by a fishing boat, or it was broken post-mortem as it washed ashore in a storm. It didn’t matter, since whatever animal it had once been attached to was long gone from this earth.
“Did you know that whales adapted from land animals?”
Luke raised an eyebrow but kept his gaze on the bone. He never looked me in the eye anymore.
“Well, they were,” I said. “Some fossils were found outside of Cairo over a hundred years ago. In Whale Valley, but nobody cared until the 80s when it became easier to travel out to the desert. I read about it in National Geographic. Early cetaceans, archaeoceti.” I stumbled over the scientific name, but he didn’t seem to notice. It was always harder to pronounce something aloud that I’d only read in books. I’d learned this when Max was three and obsessed with dinosaurs. He made Luke and I read through the dinosaur books over and over, pronouncing and re-pronouncing the names. “Do you think it’s a ‘whopper’?”
Luke nodded his chin, ever so slightly, acknowledging the inside joke but not commenting. At five, Max heard a story from his grandfather about fishing and loved the description of the prize catch mounted on the den in Grampa’s house. From then on, Max described anything remotely large as a whopper, and charmed those who heard him in the way only a precocious, wide-eyed child can. The tomatoes at the farmers market were whoppers, the giant water slide was a whopper. The mini-van we test drove, Mt. Rainier on a postcard, the elephant at the zoo, and finally – the needles during his cancer treatment.
Luke had pushed forward, always positive, always encouraging. He was the model of a supportive father as we went to appointment after appointment. I worried and paced and prepared for the worst. I meditated on tragedy. I envisioned a life, my life, without Max. If I planned for it, it couldn’t happen, though. Those are the rules, or at least what the rules there were supposed to be.
When the end came, I was more prepared, or as prepared as one could be when losing a child. I went through the motions, made Max as comfortable as possible, and – when he left our world for good – I called the family and returned the medical equipment and made the funeral preparations. Luke became distant, silent. It was a kind of shellshock that immobilized him. Sure, he went through the movements expected of a human being – eating, drinking, sleeping – but he didn’t talk or cry or joke or even yell out in frustration. He was hollowed out and I couldn’t find what was scooped away. My fingers lingered on the ragged edge of bone as I thought about how different our life was from two years ago. Our world had come crashing down and now my husband seemed nothing but bleached bone and ocean debris as our precious son was lost to the sea.
I turned to head towards the lighthouse again and bumped my shoulder into Luke’s chest. He’d walked up close behind me and I hadn’t heard him over the crashing waves behind us. I leaned in, realizing we hadn’t really touched, much less hugged, since Max’s death. Luke lifted one hand and placed it on my shoulder but didn’t push away. We weren’t the same, but we were still here – something different. We weren’t land animals, returning to the sea. Primitive whales that would fossilize in Egypt or Chile or wherever else the massive creatures were found, some of their ancient stomachs with the contents still intact. We were grief, we were loss, we were alone. Solitary bones slowly deteriorating into sand and dust.