Friday's Harbor

Dedication

For Nolan

Acknowledgments

It seems appropriate to begin these acknowledgments by recognizing the place where I found a safe haven and writing space throughout the nearly two years it took to complete
Friday’s Harbor:
Amore Coffee on the corner of Smith and Annapolis in St. Paul, Minnesota, my new home.

No newcomer could ever ask for more. Amore owners Cathy Hauser and Nancy Breymeier welcomed me and my husband, Nolan, into their shop, home, and hearts from the day we first arrived here with four cats, two dogs, and no friends or even acquaintances for a thousand miles in any direction. Cathy and Nancy, you gave us the best twin gifts anyone could receive: excellent coffee and unconditional acceptance. And you introduced us to a circle of new friends whom we treasure, not least because they withstood my endless whining at Amore every Saturday and Sunday morning as the early pages of
Friday
failed to take shape. To Becky and Mike Aistrup, Judy Daniel, and Kathy Ernst go my boundless gratitude. And I owe a special thank you to Kathy Farnell and her corgi, Poppy, for amazing acts of friendship through good and bad days, including throwing a ball for our dogs when it was seven degrees below zero and we were down with the flu. You two have been wonderful ambassadors for all things Minnesotan.

I’d like to extend a very special thank you to Brian Joseph, DVM, for helping with several veterinary medical issues. And my deep appreciation goes to Brenda Ambrose for her ongoing friendship and for continuing to champion my work from Bend, Oregon, including providing critical insight into
Friday
character Libertine Adagio. It would not have been the same book without you. To my sister, Laurie Coplin, and mother, Debbie Coplin, go my undying gratitude for reading and critiquing this book—yours were the first and most reassuring words I heard when
Friday
’s first draft was finally done.

My heartfelt thanks go to my greatest supporter and crutch, editor Kate Nintzel, who not only knows her editorial stuff, but also understands exactly how and when to hold the hand of this nervous writer. Kate, there are simply no words to adequately express my gratitude—you have not only kept me sane, but made me a better writer. My thanks, too, to agents Erin Malone and Anna DeRoy for having the backbone I lack, and to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh for creatively answering the question
What’s next?

Finally, I give my heart and soul to my husband, Nolan Harvey, without whom this book could not exist. You believe in me when I don’t; you give me courage when mine fails me; you give me up to the voices in my head with incredible grace and fortitude. There is no way to adequately express the depth of my gratitude for sharing this crazy life with me. I love you.

Contents

Prologue

I
N
B
OGOTÁ,
C
OLOMBIA,
a twenty-one-foot-long, nineteen-year-old, North Atlantic–caught killer whale swam around and around. His small, warm, cloudy pool was the main attraction of a theme park long past its glory days. Because he always swam in a counterclockwise direction, the centrifugal force may have caused the fallen dorsal fin that curled tightly over his back. He was called Viernes—
Friday
—but he’d been given that name years and years ago and no one left knew why.

Viernes hadn’t lived with or even seen another killer whale in eighteen years, which was how long he’d been in captivity. He wasn’t alone, though: he shared his pool with a changing cast of bottlenose dolphins that hectored him mercilessly. His skin was delicately filigreed all over with rake-marks from their teeth: while they could move fast in this small pool, he barely fit, which made him slow and awkward. Whenever he dropped his tail flukes, they rested on the bottom of the pool while his head stayed above water.

It was all too obvious that the killer whale’s health was breaking down. Clusters of wartlike lesions encircled the base of both pectoral flippers and formed a black masslike bubbled tar above his tail flukes; he was two-thousand-pounds underweight. But he still performed in shows twice a day on weekdays, three times a day on weekends and in summer, producing on command a series of lumbering bows that splashed the delighted children in the front rows around his pool. Sometimes there were birthday parties, too, which he enjoyed because the children were allowed to come closer, where he could watch them. They were allowed to pet his face and head, and he liked this most of all. When they went home, they took with them cups and kites and stuffed plush toys in his likeness.

In Colombia, he was a star.

From time to time, people from other marine parks in other countries had come to assess his well-being; among the international marine mammal community he’d been considered at death’s door for years. They never stayed for long, and nothing ever changed. But now, though he had no way of knowing it, a different kind of committee had arrived at the park’s invitation.

The committee members included an older woman in a flowing, floor-length caftan and Nikes who held in her arms a tiny dog that interested Viernes very much. He’d never seen an animal like this before, and he hoped she’d put it down so he could take a closer look, but although they stayed at his pool for an hour or more, she kept it in her arms.

The woman reappeared off and on during the rest of the day, always with the dog and sometimes, but not always, with other people. At the end of the day she returned for the last time, accompanied by a man Viernes recognized from past visits. He and the woman talked and talked and talked, with their arms folded over their chests, considering him. This, too, had happened before.

Viernes drifted to the far side of the pool and closed his eyes.

Chapter 1

W
HAT WOULD COME
to be known by the Levy family and friends as the Whale Business began that day in Bogotá. The woman in the flowing Egyptian caftan and cross-trainers was Ivy Levy, a longtime board member of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Washington, who had traveled to Bogotá at the very last minute, filling in for another representative stricken with food poisoning.

At sixty-two, by her own admission, Ivy was a boozy old gal with more time and money than she knew what to do with; broad in the shoulders and wide through the beam, canny and keen-eyed, plainspoken and possessed of unshakable convictions—that most people were more stupid than they thought they were; that young people squandered their elders’ wisdom; that in all the world only animals were honest; that if God were truly almighty, things would be going a lot better.

Ivy had joined a blue-ribbon panel convened by the Bogotá theme park to solve Viernes’s increasingly desperate housing and health problems. In addition to the Whale Museum, the committee included representatives from SeaWorld, the Vancouver Aquarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Sea Life Park—some of the world’s preeminent marine parks. The committee’s unqualified conclusion was that the whale had run out of time, but that saving him would require an immediate move out of Bogotá. Unfortunately, not a single zoo or marine park would take him. He was a high-profile, failing animal that might die of stress during or shortly after transport, on top of which no one had a pool that was at the same time big enough for a full-grown killer whale and unoccupied, which it had to be in case he arrived with something contagious. And then there was the problem of money—enough to underwrite the crippling costs not only of transporting a killer whale out of Central America, but also of sustaining him through a long and uncertain rehabilitation.

Ivy’s last-minute involvement was, as she would put it, a game-changer. She knew what no other committee member did, namely that the tiny Max L. Biedelman Zoo in Bladenham, Washington, had just finished constructing, but not yet populating, a large saltwater pool intended to exhibit porpoises, thereby beefing up the zoo’s dwindling revenue stream; that the zoo was run by Ivy’s nephew Truman, a newly minted lawyer and recently appointed executive director; and that Ivy herself was exceedingly, excessively, congenitally rich.

In her eyes, the project was perfect.

O
N THE SAME
day that Ivy got back to her home on San Juan Island, off the northern Washington coast, Truman sat at his computer drafting a staff memo with a subject line reading
No More Fear and Trembling at the Zoo!
Though he had only been appointed zoo director six weeks earlier, he knew the Biedelman zoo very well, even intimately. He’d been its business manager until three years ago, when he’d cast aside his normally pragmatic judgment and colluded in a plot to smuggle the lone Asian elephant, Hannah, out of the zoo. After that, his career in shambles, he’d enrolled in law school. He had just gotten word that he’d passed the bar exam when the Bladenham City Council petitioned him to come back as the zoo’s director. The board had just fired his predecessor and former employer, Harriet Saul, and thought he’d be an excellent replacement. Unfortunately, the zoo had also just completed construction of a porpoise pool for which Harriet had advocated tirelessly.

“Nothing brings people in the door like dolphins. Have you ever seen one? Of course not. No one in the Northwest has, except maybe on vacation at SeaWorld,” she’d famously asserted during her campaign to persuade—some would say browbeat—the city’s mayor and councilmen into approving the expansion. They had eventually capitulated in the face of Harriet’s tireless hectoring, but from the moment ground was broken, a year and a half ago, the pool had proved to be a never-ending son-of-a-bitch. The fourteen-month timeline had been determined by Harriet’s trademark impatience rather than by its inherent doability, forcing the facility’s design and construction to occur more or less simultaneously. There had been issues with the ozone filtration system; with the company responsible for constructing realistic-looking underwater rock work that would make the pool look less like the cement box that it was and more like some undersea grotto; and, most recently and disastrously, with the intergovernmental permits required to move three harbor porpoises from their current rehabilitation facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Biedelman Zoo. No one seemed able to say when the animals might be transported; the pool had already been filled, making its lack of inhabitants that much more damning. The fiasco had cost Harriet her job, though
Bladenham News-Tribune
reporter Martin Choi allowed her a face-saving quote in which she stated she’d been successfully headhunted by an up-and-coming safari park in Texas.

It was Harriet’s dramatic fall from grace that had motivated the skittish Bladenham City Council to woo Truman to take her place, and not only because of the extensive working knowledge of the zoo he’d gained during his tenure as business manager, but also because he had not one contentious or narcissistic bone in his body, which would be a welcome relief after Harriet’s disastrous reign. Being the quiet only child of one appellate court judge and one high-profile attorney had made Truman an ideal consensus-builder, though it sometimes gave him a falsely milquetoast demeanor. Milquetoast he was not.

Truman had no illusions about his lack of passion for the law, but he’d worked hard to get where he was, and was looking forward to the relative financial security it offered him and his fourteen-year-old son, Winslow. Working at the zoo, even at the top, would mean a life of basics. Still, he’d invested a lot of himself in the place before he left, and he felt the facility could thrive under a measured hand, so before he could think better of it he’d said yes.

Harriet Saul had been a bully and a micromanager who had so relentlessly ridden her employees that the zoo personnel were paralyzed. When the head of maintenance came all the way across the zoo grounds to request Truman’s permission to order toilet paper—
toilet paper!
—Truman had had enough.

I welcome any and all ideas,
he now typed with two fingers,
and hope that you will all feel welcome to bring them to my attention, either in person or in writing. I believe we can bring this zoo to greatness, but it will take the brainpower of every one of us. By the same token, do not feel you need my permission to carry out your job’s day-to-day functions. I trust you and your dedication to this zoo implicitly. You were hired for your expertise. Use it.

His phone rang as he was deliberating over whether to change
I welcome
in the first sentence to
I’d love to hear
. On the other end of the line he heard his Aunt Ivy’s strident voice say, “I have a proposition for you.”

He moved the receiver six inches from his ear.

“There’s a killer whale I need you to take in.”

“What?”

“That got your attention, didn’t it?”

It did.

“Here’s the thing,” Ivy continued. “There’s this poor killer whale named Viernes in an awful place in Colombia—”

“Missouri?”

“Central America.”

“Ah.”

“—who’s been living in a terrible little pool for
years
and now he’s dying.”

“Okay,” said Truman. “I’m listening.”

“You need to take him. The zoo needs to.”

“You’re kidding,” Truman said flatly.

“You know me better than that.”

Truman sighed. He did. “But there must be facilities much better equipped to deal with an animal like this.”

“Evidently not. If you could have seen the poor thing, honey, it would have broken your heart.”

“I understand that, but we’re a zoo. An
inland
zoo.”

“Don’t patronize me, Truman,” Ivy snapped. “You have a brand-new pool with no one living in it.” And Ivy was in a position to know: she’d contributed nearly seventy-five thousand dollars to its construction.

“A pool, yes,” Truman acknowledged. “Expertise and staff, no. Right at the moment, we can’t even get permits to bring in porpoises, never mind a dying adult killer whale.”

“If that pig of yours was dying you’d be more responsive,” Ivy said bitterly.

“Now you’re just trying to cheer me up,” Truman said. Miles, his three-year-old potbellied pig, was always a tender topic.

“What do you mean?”

Truman sighed. “We’re fighting over who gets the bed.”

“Your bed?”

“Yes. Or, as Miles would tell you, his.”

“You let him on the furniture?” Ivy sounded appalled. “Honey, he’s a pig.”

“I know he’s a pig. I know it and you know it, but
he
thinks he’s a dog, and dogs get to be on furniture. Ipso facto, he wants the bed.”

“Your father told me he goes to some cockamamie doggie preschool,” Ivy said.

“First of all, it’s doggie day care,” Truman said defensively. “
Neva’s
doggie day care.” Three years ago his girlfriend, Neva Wilson, a career zookeeper, had been fired for her role in the plot to relocate Hannah. In order to be close to Truman, she had stayed in Bladenham and taken a job managing
Woof!
Now Truman told Ivy, “Second of all, it keeps him socially engaged. Otherwise he roots.”

“Roots?”

“It’s what pigs do,” Truman said absently, mulling. “Look, I’m sorry but I don’t think the zoo’s in a position to help.”

“Oh, that’s just a bunch of hooey,” Ivy said. “And you know it.”

Truman sat silently for a long beat. There were certain resources he could probably tap into, charitable trusts with soft spots for marine mammal welfare projects. “If I approach the board about this—and I’m saying
if
—I have to be able to guarantee them that all the funding will come from donations,” he said. “One hundred percent, and up front. There’s no surplus in the budget—zero.” And that, at least, was the absolute truth.

“I have a checkbook, don’t I?” Ivy said irritably. “And frankly, I’m surprised you’re not looking at this as a chance for the zoo to get some favorable press for a change. B
IEDELMAN
Z
OO
T
AKES IN
A
ILING
O
RCA
. Look—I want you to talk to a fellow named Gabriel Jump. He’s an expert in this kind of thing. He was down there with me, and he can answer all your questions.”

Truman became aware of the vertiginous feeling he always got before he jumped off the cliff of moderation. In words he was sure he’d live to regret he said, “Have him call me.”

“Hah!” Ivy crowed. “Now you’re talking, baby. Come up this Saturday and I’ll have Gabriel here.”

It was at that exact moment, Truman would later recall, when he first should have known he was screwed, screwed, screwed.

T
WO DAYS LATER
Ivy waited in her car for the early afternoon ferry to bring both men to San Juan Island. She watched the ferry pull into the dock, its workers bright in yellow rain gear and safety vests as they secured the boat and signaled the first car to clatter ashore. She’d been watching this unchanging ritual all her life and she was still thrilled to hear the sound of car and truck tires
chunk-chunking
one by one off the steel ramp and onto the asphalt streets of Friday Harbor, the island’s only town. She spotted Truman walking off from the upper passenger deck, and she thought what she always thought when she first saw him: that at thirty-nine years old, his pleasant appearance couldn’t be more unmemorable, belying the keen and agile mind spinning within. Of all her nieces and nephews, Ivy loved him most—not that she’d ever let that on to him or anyone.

She threw open the car’s passenger door and waved him over—as though he could miss her old robin’s-egg-blue, four-door Mercedes. With the sort of reverse snobbery practiced by the old-moneyed and the very rich, it was cheerfully and unapologetically down-at-heel: the antenna was bent, the driver’s side door was dented, the bumpers showed spots of incipient rust.

Truman put his overnight bag in the car’s backseat and hopped in, moving his feet at the last minute to avoid a neat little dog turd on the floorboards.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” said Ivy, looking down. “Really, Julio!” She pulled a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and with practiced efficiency picked up the turd and tossed it out her window. The culprit was a Chihuahua named Julio Iglesias, with whom she’d been locked in a passive-aggressive warfare for years; he glowered at her from a booster seat clipped into one of the backseat belts. “He must have done that this morning while I was in the drugstore,” Ivy said. “And then he wonders why I make him sit back there.”

The dog shot Ivy a look of pure contempt.

“Gabriel was on the ferry, too,” she told Truman. “He’s one of the pioneers of marine mammal husbandry and rehabilitation. People talk about him with a certain degree of reverence.” She spotted a weathered pickup matching the description Gabriel had given her, and waved. He waved back, and once she was sure he was following her, she pulled out of the ferry parking lot. By her reckoning, she had six minutes alone with Truman to cogently review the killer whale’s plight. Once they got to the house the show would belong to Gabriel.

“Let me tell you what I know,” she said, making sure Truman’s passenger-side window was fully raised so it didn’t dribble.

“Fire away,” said Truman, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hello, by the way.”

She waved this away impatiently. “Now, listen. His name is Viernes, which means Friday, and he’s in this tiny pool he shares with Satan’s dolphins—”

“Is that a species?” Truman said.

“Of course not.”

“Oh.”

“—and they make him do these shows even though he’s thin as a rail and weak.
Cheesy
shows with beautiful girls standing on his head giving parade waves to the crowd while he swims around the pool, and they have him jump out of the water and splash people in the front rows of the bleachers, that kind of thing. Tacky.”

“I didn’t know animals could die of poor taste,” Truman said.