Sunset off Anacortes

The house was littered with discarded trinkets, forgotten clothes, and left-behind household items. Things that once mattered. What his wife took were the photographs. Albums. Frames. They were meticulously removed, the dust just starting to settle where they once were.

Dustin couldn’t even be angry. He couldn’t yell or cry, and to whom would he and what was the point? Louise had returned to France and he remained in Minneapolis. Neither with their son. It had been two months. Two months too short for him so that he could still pretend a family lived here, and two months too long to actually believe it.

Today, he donned funeral attire again. His black suit wasn’t yet dry-cleaned since the last time he wore it. It was as if he could still feel Louise’s hot tears on his neck, his shallow breathing, his loved ones looking away, fearing they would catch whatever bad luck he had that made the world take his little boy from him.

Dustin came home from his aunt’s funeral smelling of dirt and morning dew but now with an energy he hadn’t felt in a while surging through his blood. He should feel guilty or mournful, but he couldn’t summon those emotions. Instead, he stumbled up his stairs and rifled through the bedside drawer with the vigor only a sizeable inheritance could bestow. Dustin wasn't close to his aunt, but with no kids of her own, she left him a $20,000 inheritance, a revelation no one attending the funeral that morning could have predicted. With the tax deduction, he had just enough to…

There. He found it underneath old bills and some medical papers. A little black Moleskine notebook. He skimmed through his own handwriting: grocery lists, payments to be made, phone numbers, random calculations static on the page.

Then he found it, a splash of color: An orca swimming in the ocean and smiling. A sailboat in the distance. The sun bigger than the orca, its yellow lines touching the mammal as if in embrace.

When Dustin first saw this drawing, he got angry at his son for taking his notebook. Now, it was the only thing of his child’s that still seemed alive.

Before giving it a second thought, he bought himself a plane ticket to Seattle and in 24 hours found himself with the same clothes on his back three hours north of the Emerald City in the sleepy town of Anacortes. The marina was quiet; the soft waves and the clomping of his shoes against the soddened dock barely masked the ferocity of searching seagulls circling above.

“You Dustin from the phone?” A gruff man said to him on the dock’s edge, eyeing him from top to bottom, likely questioning why a man would come whale watching in a suit. Dustin wondered if both man and seagull could sense his loss, could detect that he was not moving in the same direction as the earth was spinning. Dustin followed the man to join the others waiting for the boat they would all share as they made their way into the Pacific for the hope a seeing an orca.

The gruff man later introduced himself as Charlie and told everyone to get onboard a dingy boat called ‘Seas the Day.’ The demographics of his fellow passengers were stratified themselves when choosing where to sit. The families sat in the bottom level of the boat, with the warmth and the relative stability. The teenagers and young couples were on deck in the open air, ready for pictures but weary of the wind.

Dustin found himself crawling up the ladder with another man to the top deck. Charlie said it bared the most wind, but you could “see ‘em better that way.”

Dustin’s top deck companion was an "underfunded" researcher in the area, studying whale habitats and their interactions with humans. After such a burden of a brief introduction, the researcher turned to silence, conspicuously taking notes.

Seas the Day took off against the late afternoon waves as they lurched and pulled the feeble-looking boat. This was the first time Dustin had been on open water. As soon as he got comfortable, the boat picked up speed and the wind slapped his face. The researcher pulled up his turtleneck. Below, Dustin heard Charlie interact with the other whale watchers. “Where are you from?” “First time here?” “You like whales?”

For many, whale watching seemed to be something to do while visiting the Seattle area, as if an afterthought to bigger and better plans of Mount Rainier and Pike Place Market. Dustin and the researcher, however, seemed to be the only two desperately needing to see a whale today, and unfortunately, that wasn’t guaranteed.

Yet, Dustin grabbed onto hope like it was a life vest and gripped his phone at the ready. What if he didn’t get the picture? And if he did, what would he do with it? What next?

After a good while in the open water, Charlie said through the mic, “it’s a good thing you all picked the sunset tour. Looks like there will be no whales today.”

A few groans of disappointment. His son would have been one of them. Dustin would have found him another distraction to take his mind off it—a funny rock, or a piece of seaweed. Louise would have cradled him, soothing his sadness. That’s all it was to his son. Happy and sad. Angry and happy. His emotions were like primary colors. There were no shades of frustration, humiliation, emptiness—the world hadn’t taught him that yet, or at least, he didn’t have the words.

A spray of ocean water. He remembered Louise gripping him for support as she watched her son's burial and Dustin found their marriage not enough of a distraction from his pain.

“There’s one.” The researcher said. “Two actually.”

Dustin caught the bumps of water and tried his best to look through the darkening ocean. The humps disappeared. “Maybe we can get closer.”

The researcher shook his head in the negative.

Dustin noticed that he felt the waves most when they were not moving. When the boat was still, he could feel the swelling of the wave, the pushing and the release. There was no control here.

Yet the whales could cut through the water with seeming ease. This time, he spotted it first.

“There it is.” Dustin said. The researcher moved toward him.

“Whew. What a beauty.” The researcher said. “That’s actually not a whale, you know. Orcas are from the dolphin family.” The orca's body glimmered and then dipped in the darkening waters.

Dustin took a picture but it was a blur. It was hard for the camera to capture it, and Dustin felt foolish for thinking it would smile.

“This must be the one who lost its child a bit ago.” The researcher said.

“How?”

“Who knows.”

Dustin pretended that the orca could sense him, but he knew better than to fool himself. The orca lingered for a second and then turned, giving a splash in the distance. The people below shrieked with joy as it took off.

“So, that’s it.”

“That’s it.” The researcher said.

“That’s quick. It was such a short moment. Is it always like that?”

“Not always.” The researcher said. “But sometimes, yes.”

The researcher continued to take notes in silence.

“Well, that’s it. Folks. Heading back.” Charlie’s voice boomed.

Dustin shivered as the sun began to retreat. Water all around, he couldn’t see the shore. Not a whale. Not an orca. No one to look at, he just looked up.

It was as if a painter decided to make their masterpiece at that very moment, with Dustin as witness, the sky as the canvas. Crimson. Magenta. Sweeping oranges and brilliant yellows danced above him. Hues of purple and lavender set against uncompromising red sweeping against the green trees and the deep blue up above and down below. Primary colors and so many colors in between. He tried to take a picture, and it couldn’t compare.

Dustin felt the wind wipe away his tears.

He had never seen a sunset like it and he never would again. Even if he came here day after day, he would never see this kind of sky again.

And yet, because he came here this day, this sunset was his.

They reached the dock, and he and fellow passengers de-boarded, all feeling stunned in differing capacities. The darkening sky shaded his damp cheeks. He was the last one off the boat, except for Charlie, who joined him on the dock.

“How did you like it?”

“Amazing,” was all Dustin managed to say.

“Refer your family and friends! We always love referrals.” Charlie patted his back and moved to the next passenger to tell them the same.

Dustin sat in his rental car and turned to the picture in the Moleskine book. His son had ignored the fact that it was a lined notebook. Messy scribbles. Colors mashing up against the other, marks whizzing through them. It was just like that sunset. It was just like the world his son hopefully saw, for what little time he had in it.

Dustin inputted Sea-Tac airport in the GPS. He still had a good deal of money left to spend, but nothing worth spending in Minneapolis.

But, there might be in France. He wondered what the sunsets look like there.