“Will you please keep quiet long enough for my mother to answer my question about the strandings?” he demanded.
“I do talk a lot, don’t I. When I was making movies—”
“Just—shut—up!”
“Jack!” his father warned, frowning at him in the rear view mirror—the three kids were in the back seat of the rented Ford Taurus, crowded tight because of Bindy’s width.
“Sorry,” Jack mumbled. “Mom, please tell us about the strandings.”
His mother twisted around from the front seat to face him. “First, Jack, I don’t like you being rude to Bindy. Second, I want to finish what I was explaining. The word ‘mammal’ comes from the Latin word—”
Oh, crud! Jack knew where the word “mammal” came from, and he knew exactly what the Latin word meant—it had to do with how female animals fed their babies. It would be so embarrassing to listen to an explanation of mammary glands while he was jammed thigh to thigh beside Bindy. “Let her look it up in the dictionary,” he muttered, but his mother ignored him. He covered his ears with his hands and started making soft na-na-na noises inside his throat until Olivia finished her lecture, but he could still feel his cheeks growing hot.
“You are such a dork, Jack,” Ashley told him, reaching across Bindy to smack him on the knee. “You just acted like you were about three years old.”
For once, Bindy said nothing, but Jack could see that she looked a little embarrassed, too.
“Now about strandings,” Olivia went on. “As you know, Bindy—or maybe you don’t know—marine mammals like whales and dolphins and porpoises and seals live in the water, but they have to breathe air.
They stay submerged for a while, then every so often they surface to take a breath. If they didn’t, they’d suffocate, just as you or I would drown underwater if we couldn’t breathe.”
Sitting twisted around like that must have made Olivia uncomfortable, because she turned to face forward again. Since she never missed a chance to teach something to kids, she pulled down the car’s sun visor and spoke into its mirror, looking at the kids’ reflections while she talked.
“To answer your question about the strandings, Jack, marine mammals strand for a variety of reasons—injury or disease or harassment from humans or pollution in the water or getting tangled in nets. And if baby whales become separated from their mothers, they’ll often strand because they can’t find food by themselves.”
Steven added, “Sometimes stranded marine mammals are already dead when they wash ashore. Other times they wash ashore first. And then they die.”
“Do they always have to die? Can’t anyone save them?” Ashley pleaded.
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