Surfacing by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page A

way too small and weak, and what good would it be to have wings so small and so useless? Maggie tried to concentrate on her TV show, a dog video on YouTube, and her reading homework for honors English. Then Matthew’s name popped up as a “friend online” in a short list at the right-hand bottom of her screen, and a few seconds later he sent her a message.
    Whassup?
    And just like that, her heart broke into loud thumps. Matthew was leaving that afternoon, later, he explained, but had a little time just before he headed back upstate. Did she want to meet him? Maggie immediately agreed, expecting somehow that wholeness could come by tearing herself apart.
    As a gift, when she finished her swim lessons — not only learned to swim but turned out to be exceptional — her father had planned a trip for the whole family to Club Med, where Maggie would get to swim with the dolphins. Her dad knew she had always loved dolphins. Didn’t she watch the
Free Willy
DVD over and over? Of course, Willy was a killer whale, but what’s the difference, and all girls love dolphins and horses, don’t they? He wanted to make her happy, and he wanted to heal his family.
    Lucas and Dylan were only two years old when they all boarded a plane for Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic.
    The twins had gotten past their infant stage, when they did nothing but cry and eat and poop, and were actually getting kind of cute. They were finally living up to their birthright, their birth
burden
, to overshadow the memory of Leah’s death. Besides, Mrs. Paris had worked hard on getting her figure back, which is why she agreed to this trip at all. Body Pump and Inner Strength classes had been her religion for the last four months. Vacations were good by definition, right?
    But by Wednesday, the day of the dolphin excursion, Mrs. Paris was sick with diarrhea. She put the twins in the full-day babysitting, and thirteen-year-old Maggie and her dad headed out on the open-air bus alone.
    “The guy at the desk said it’s a twenty-minute ride, didn’t he?” Mr. Paris leaned close to ask his daughter. It was hard to hear, between the wind and the sound of the bus motor. They had booked an excursion to Dolphin Island. The hotel arranged everything, including the bus ride.
    Maggie shouted back, “I think so, Dad, but he had a strong accent. I’m not sure.”
    “Hmm, French or Spanish?”
    “What? I can’t hear you, Dad.”
    He didn’t hear her either. He rubbed her back and asked, “So are you excited?”
    It was even louder now that they had hit the highway. She tried to yell out her answer, but she gave up. Yes, she
was
excited. After all, dolphins were kind of Maggie’s animal guide, weren’t they? Mammals that swam, breathed air but lived underwater, and what about all those TV specials where dolphins were reported to have rescued people or led boats to safety or fended off shark attacks?
    “In the wild,” the Dominican dolphin trainer explained, once everyone was standing in the murky, forty-by-twenty-five-foot floating enclosure, surrounded by slimy algae-caked fencing, “a dolphin might live thirty to thirty-five years. They have a lot of natural enemies out there, including humans.”
    Everyone else was smiling, Maggie noticed. The young girls and their mothers, especially, could hardly contain themselves as the dolphins swam back and forth, around the line of people in which Maggie and her dad stood shivering. As luck would have it, it was the one day, the one hour, in Punta Cana that the sun had not come out since they had arrived in the Dominican. When one of the two dolphins, apparently insane with repetitive stress behavior, swam close to the humans in its circle, everyone was supposed to put out their hands and let their fingers graze the top of the massive animal. A girl or two squealed each time.
    “But here, safe, at Dolphin Island,” the man went on. He stood atop the wooden platform that surrounded the tank, whistle poised in his