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“What are they?” Mary asked.

“They’re bones,” Mac said. “From the spine of a whale.”

He took one hand from each child and helped them reach around to feel their own spines, to feel the bumps there with their fingertips. “A spine is a bit different than the other bones because it has to be flexible. I think each of these is a vertebra, just like we have.”

Frankie, wide-eyed, wiggled in slow motion as he felt his own back. Mary looked skeptical.

“Was it a boy whale or a girl whale?” she asked.

“A boy. The university people could tell somehow, don’t ask me.”

“Who made us?” she asked.

“Well,” Mac said. “When a father and mother fall in love—”

“God did,” Frankie said. “My mom already told me.”

“Oh, yes. God,” Mac said.

“And who made the whale?”

“God did,” Frankie said again.

Mary was looking at Mac shrewdly, as if trying to see his secret thoughts.

“And this,” Mac said, sweeping a child into each of his arms as he stepped into the cage. “Is his ribs. Feel your own ribs. They’re there to protect your heart. It’s the same for a whale. We’re standing where his heart would have been.”

They looked around at the size of it, awed. Picture it with flesh, Mac wanted to tell them, but he didn’t want to scare them. Picture it with eyes and blood and organs, picture hundreds of gulls feeding on it at once. How could Barry have possibly forgotten that day?

“Why’d he swim up on the land?” Mary asked, frowning. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“He died out at sea somewhere and then he washed up with a flood tide,” Mac said.

“Was he young or old?”

“I don’t know, love. But I do know the type of whale he was can live to a hundred years.”

“How long do people live? How old was… that woman.”

Nuala. Mary didn’t know what to call her because Mac hadn’t told her. And he hadn’t told her because he didn’t know.

“In her seventies. Cathal was born in the year 1917 so he’s sixty-eight. She was a bit older.”

“What year were me and Frankie born?”

“You two were born in 1980. I remember because that was the last time your mother or I had a good sleep.”

The cousins looked at each other.

“Mary said the woman isn’t really dead,” Frankie said, ignoring Mary’s glare. “She says she saw her pinkie move. She said when she’s buried she’ll be alive underground and will shout for help but no one will hear her.”

Mac looked at Mary and Mary took a sudden strong interest in a clamshell at her feet.

“That’s not true, Frankie,” Mac said. “She’s messing. Mary, tell him you were messing.”

Mary shrugged as if to ask what she could do, she’d only reported what she’d seen.

Mac bent to his nephew, who would never stand a chance against Mary. They’d get thrown together for the rest of their lives and this was how it would always be. He took Frankie’s hands. “You know what you do with a messer? You ignore them. It drives them mad.