Tina Wainscott - The Best Of Me

“Need some help?”

“No, I’ve got it.”

She kicked off her expensive, and ruined, pumps and threw them onto the concrete deck. Then she pushed up on the edge. If only she could manage a shred of dignity…that was not to be the case, she realized as she shoved and grunted and not even Bailey moved from the spot he seemed riveted in.

“Let me help you,” Chris said from behind her.

“I can manage. It’s just that my pants are heav—”

Before she could even finish the sentence, he placed his hands on her behind and pushed her right out of the water. She was so surprised, she almost forgot to do her part, which was grab for the ground and gain her balance. Even then, she could still feel the imprint of his hands on her bottom.

“I’m not sure whether to thank you for being gallant or remark on where you put your hands,” she said, feeling irritated and flustered at once.

A wicked gleam sparked in his eyes as he slipped easily from the pool. “I enjoyed it, too.”

She could only roll her eyes at his attempt to goad her on. When she looked at the small crowd watching with interest, she realized she’d become the sideshow at her own park.

“Bailey, please get these people out of here,” she said, trying not to sound impatient and out of sorts.

He jerked, as if from a trance. “Yes, Miss Lucy, right away.” Before he turned toward the crowd, he said, “Don’t let him take da fish. Remember my six childrens at home starving.”

“You said five before.”

His black face screwed up. “Did I? Well, six counting da goat.”

“You said you had three goats.”

He paused for a minute, then smiled. “Two are only visitin’.”

She shook her head and waved him away. When she turned back to Chris, he was watching her with a curious expression. At least he wasn’t crowding her zone. She knew about business power plays and how body zones worked, and she didn’t much like when they were used on her.

“Can we go into the office and talk about this like two businesspeople?” she asked, trying to ignore the rivers of water running down her legs and pooling at her stocking feet.

He glanced down at his nearly naked self. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Miz Lucy—” that last part in Bailey’s accent “—I’m not a business person, and this isn’t negotiable. I gave your employee the letter that states the dolphin is mine. That should clear the matter up.” Then he slid back into the pool in one liquid movement and waded to the bucket of fish. She followed him and crouched by the side, careful of the edge this time.

“What you said about this dolphin, about the chlorinated pool, and the snout….”

“What you’re doing to this dolphin is cruel and inhumane. Liberty—or Randy as you call him—wasn’t put on this earth to entertain us. Dolphins are probably smarter than we are. How would you like to live in something like this day in and out, eating trash fish, and having to suffer the indignity of performing to get even that? To look at white walls instead of the endless variety the ocean and the reefs offer?”

Liberty poked his head out of the water as if to second Chris’s words, or probably to get the shiny fish he held. Her heart twisted when she saw the bruises on Liberty’s snout. Then she realized that Chris thought she was the one who had been running this park all along.

“I haven’t done anything to this dolphin.”

“You said you were the owner.”

“I just inherited it from my father, Sonny Boland. I didn’t even know he owned this park, or where he even was for most of my life.” Why was she telling him all this? Stick to the facts, Lucy. “Anyway, I arrived today, and Bailey told me about a man stealing a big fish.” He rolled his eyes, and she added, “I know, I know, it’s a dolphin.”

He reached out to touch Liberty, but the dolphin shied away. Another fish lured him close again, but Chris didn’t try to touch him this time. He was again immersed in his world, and she had faded into oblivion. If she had any dignity whatsoever, she would walk away. Just get up and hold her soggy shoulders high. Unfortunately, her curiosity overwhelmed any shred of dignity she’d managed to maintain.

“Why do you call him Liberty?” She glanced up at the banner. “His name is Randy.”

“Calling dolphins by human names encourages people to humanize them, so I renamed him Liberty.”

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked after a few awkward minutes of silence. She wanted to change into dry clothes, but she couldn’t leave without his acknowledging that she wasn’t an evil person who abused dolphins. Though she didn’t explore why that was so important.

“I have to untrain him, teach him how to catch live fish and to live in the wild again. He’s come to depend on humans and their language now. He has to learn to be a dolphin again, to use his sonar.”

He hadn’t glanced up at her even once as he’d spoken. She wanted to see something other than disdain in his eyes. She ran her hands down her pant legs, squishing water out of them.

“What do you mean, his sonar?”

His fingers made circles on the water’s surface. “Dolphins use echolocation sonar to map out their surroundings the same way we use our eyes. They send out signals that bounce back to their lower jaw, telling them where they are and where their prey is. Here in this shallow pool, the signals bounce crazily back to him, so he stopped using them.”

Sonar? It sounded so high-tech, so…advanced. She watched Liberty circle, trying to imagine what he saw down there. White walls. Chris’s legs. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

The sun glistened off his wet curls as he shook his head. “Just leave me and Liberty alone, and we’ll be fine.”

He hadn’t even thanked her for offering. Still hadn’t looked at her. He reached for Liberty, and again the dolphin shied away. As she watched Chris, she wondered if her father wasn’t like him, other than the dolphin-saving thing.

“Is this what you do for a living? You said something about a free dolphin society.”

“I am the Free Dolphin Society. I travel around to different abusement parks and work on freeing the dolphins trapped there.”

“Abusement parks? Is that what this is?”

“For this dolphin, yes. I don’t know how the other creatures are treated.”

She looked around, but couldn’t tell from where she was crouched. The park looked clean, if old. “Do you think my father was being cruel or just thoughtless?” She was surprised to find him looking at her when she turned back to him. More surprised at the effect that gaze had on her.

“I only met the man once, when I first came to investigate claims of neglect. It was probably a little of both. Liberty here eats about fifteen pounds of fish a day, so Sonny bought the cheap stuff. He didn’t want to mess with filtering in fresh seawater or even making phony salt water, so he put chlorine and copper sulfide in the pool. Your father was upping the profit margin, and Liberty was paying the price. Now I’m pumping in seawater, and hopefully he’ll be able to open his eyes all the way soon.”

“Will he bite? I mean, was I in any danger when I fell in?”

A smirk tugged at the edges of his mouth, and she bet he had a great smile, if he ever did smile. Of course he was probably laughing at her expense, remembering how she must have looked, all arms and legs and terror.

“The only thing in danger was your dignity. Dolphins are pretty docile in captivity.” He tossed Liberty the last of the fish in the bucket and rubbed his hands together under the water. He lifted an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t your spirit be broken if you were held captive?”

She shivered at the thought, watching Liberty as he waited patiently for more fish, his head bobbing. “Probably,” she answered at last, meeting Chris’s gaze across the sparkling water. “Dolphins are your life, aren’t they?”