Grayson by Lynne Cox

just off to the right.
    As I swam, I focused on Big Bear Mountain to keep a straight course. Now and then, I turned around and looked behind me and sighted off the peaks on Catalina Island. By imagining that I was drawing a line from the mountains on Santa Catalina Island to Big Bear Mountain, I was able to maintain a fairly straight course.
    I told myself to swim for twenty minutes and then I lifted my head.
    I wasn’t making much progress. The pier was a mile away. It looked like a long-stem rose held out at arm’s length.
    The sea surface was changing from a smooth, light silvery blue to a rumpled navy and white.
    In the distance the wind was blowing stronger and the sea was becoming increasingly choppy. It felt like I was swimming uphill. And I knew I’d have to seriously watch for windsurfers and sailboats. If I wasn’t careful I could easily be run over or get a skeg in my head.
    Wind gusted to twenty knots and tossed up more waves. The waves were hitting me in the face. It was hard to breathe, and I could barely see a foot in front of me.
    “Grayson, I hope you can hear me. Please come back and swim with me. I need you.”
    Grayson returned!
    He surfaced beside me. He rolled over and floated like a runner who had just finished the last hundred-yard sprint of a marathon. He was
poofing
and
poofing
very quickly and deeply, as if he couldn’t catch his breath. His body was moving up and down as his lungs filled with air and pulled in more. His body was fighting to recover from a very deep dive.
    “Grayson! I am so happy to see you! I was so afraid something had happened to you. But you’re back now, you’re back now, my dear little friend.” I felt such joy that he had returned.
    Grayson floated with his head above the water, the two holes on top of his head opening and closing quickly as he breathed in and out. His pectoral flippers were gently flapping. He looked at me and made some chirping and clicking sounds.
    “What are you trying to tell me, little whale?”
    He tried to speak with me again. This time he grunted, then he repeated the grunts and turned away from me.
    For a second my heart dropped to my feet. I thought he was going to swim away again.
    “Grayson, don’t go. We’ll find your mother. Be patient. Sometimes you just have to believe. Sometimes that belief gets you where you want to go, sometimes it carries you a little closer, and then you discover another way.”
    Grayson lay on his side. He looked tired. Waves were washing over his massive head; he was looking at me and he was listening to the water.
    Tilting my ear into the water, so I could hear what he was listening to, I listened and heard something I’d never heard before.
    It sounded like a hundred high-pitched sparrows singing through a hundred tiny megaphones turned up to the highest volume.
    “What’s making that sound?” I asked.
    I swam to within two feet of him and floated beside him. He looked as if he was anticipating something.
    From behind us came a squeak. Grayson lifted his big gray head and he stared across the water. My eyes followed his gaze. There were long winding waves withno beginning or end, just miles and miles of water, endless, ceaselessly moving water.
    But I suddenly saw something cutting across the water, a dark dorsal fin moving very fast, at about twenty knots. Then I saw another and another. In a moment there were three more fins, then twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred ten, one hundred twenty, thirty, forty, sixty, seventy, one hundred eighty. There were two hundred and twenty dolphins, a sea of dark gray fins bobbing up and down as they raced across the sea, speeding toward Long Beach.
    The fins were in the middle of their backs and varied in color from black to light gray. They were all outlined in black. The dolphins were between seven and a half and eight and a half feet long. Their bodies were beautifully cylindrical and they had a distinctive hourglass