Cry of the Sea Read Free Page B

center for environmental emergencies that was
basically a one-man operation run out of our house. What was the
call about this time? Hurt animal? Fallen tree? Probably not. Even
though we get those kinds of calls a lot, and I mean A LOT, those
calls could usually wait until morning. Only big calls came this
early. Forest fires. People chaining themselves to trees. That kind
of thing.
    Or it could be Mom calling from Alaska. She
was okay when she called last night, but maybe the cold up there
caused her to get sick, like “go to the hospital” sick. Anchorage
in September has got to make the weather here in Olympia seem like
summer. I pulled a blanket over my knees to warm up.
    Or maybe...
    Oh, the way my mind can go to the absolute
worst thing at two in the morning. I hated myself for thinking it.
This was my mom we were talking about, not a character from a
primetime TV drama.
    Melodramatic or not, though, I couldn’t help
thinking just then about how she told me that people from the
organization she had been lobbying against had been harassing her.
Maybe they did something to her. Something horrible that warranted
a call hours before the sun came up. Maybe she was in real
danger.
    I couldn’t wait the five minutes until Dad
told me who called and what about, so I slipped my fingers around
the receiver and used my other hand to cover the mouthpiece so no
one could hear my breathing.
    At the sound of my mom’s anxious voice, I
felt instantly nauseous.
    “Peter! Are you awake? Are you hearing
me?”
    I wanted to scream into the phone, “Mom, are
you okay?”
    Luckily my dad asked for me.
    “Calm down, Honey, what’s the matter?”
    Good advice , I thought. Calm down.
Just listen.
    “Affron’s rolling,” my mom sputtered. “Their
ship was sighted off the Canadian shore three and a half hours ago!
If they stay close to the shore, they’ll be passing you any time
now.”
    “I thought they were going to wait,” Dad
said.
    My mom had no patience for this. “I thought
so too, Peter, but apparently they didn’t.”
    I carefully hung up the phone. Oh, that was
all. Not that this threat from Affron Oil was a little thing, by
any means. But Mom wasn’t hurt. That was what really mattered.
    Especially after the fight we had on the
phone before I went to bed. I didn’t want those stinging words to
be the last one we ever shared with each other. How could I live
with that?
    Okay. No point in dwelling on it. My mom
wasn’t under immediate threat, so I would have time to apologize
and maybe try to fix things with her later. Unfortunately, the news
Mom relayed made going back to sleep an impossibility. She had
called before dawn on purpose to let us know we had to get up and
over to the nearest beach ASAP. And our Northwest American beaches
weren’t nice and warm like the one I’d been dreaming about. Odds
were, too, that it would be raining.
    I shut my eyes and listened for the familiar
tap-tapping on my bedroom window. It rained so much here in
Washington that I was used to tuning it out, and I had to really
work to hear it. Just a drizzle, it sounded like. Enough to make
the roads slick. The sand at the beach would be easier to walk on
because it would be firmer. But it would be extra sticky and hard
to get off our shoes and clothes, even without the oil that most
likely would be splattered everywhere.
    While rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I
rolled out of bed. Like a firefighter to the beat of a pulsing
siren, I jumped into my jeans, sweatshirt and rubber boots. I
yanked my hair back into a ponytail and covered up the loose
strands with a cap. It didn’t matter what I looked like. No one who
mattered would see me. Besides, what else could I do with my hair?
It was long, straight, and black. No one has ever had straighter
hair than me. I laugh at girls who use straightening irons on their
hair. Honestly. Why would anyone erase her curls?
    I headed down the hall as Dad hung up the
phone. My father’s groan let me