I knew, in the way that kids do, to let the silence ride shotgun. It wasn’t until we were driving for an hour on the old Route 66 that I finally asked where we were going. “You know,” my father said, huffing a laugh, “I have no idea.”

We’d just reached Catoosa when we saw the Blue Whale from the road. My father looked at me and I looked at him and by unspoken agreement, he drove right up to it—this weird, aqua-painted concrete whale half submerged at the edge of a little pond. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything quite so sad before—a landlocked fake whale in the middle of Oklahoma.

It looked like a minigolf sculpture without a putting green, like a kids’ papier-mâché version of a cetacean. There was a gift store that was closed, but we could still walk right through the mouth of the whale into its boardwalk belly. There were signs saying no swimming was allowed, but at one point it must have been—there was a ladder and a slide right into the brackish water.

My father stepped up to a little plaque. “After noticing kids playing in a pond near his property, Hugh Davis built the blue whale in 1972 as an anniversary present for his wife, with a swim dock for local children. It became a major hub for people traveling across Route 66. When Davis died, the whale fell into disrepair, until his son Blaine restored it in 1988.”

I stared into the painted eye of the creature, which seemed to be saying it knew it was stuck somewhere it was never meant to be.

My father lightly kicked at one of the cement teeth, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe I should have built her a whale,” he said.

•

We drove back to the Next of Inn through Ochelata, which was slowly piecing itself back together. Mrs. Evans wasn’t there, but she had left us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat for dinner. I ate slowly while my father told my mother that we would be flying home the next day.

That night I woke up from a nightmare where I was doing a word search, and all of the letters kept sliding off the page. I tried to fall asleep again, but this time I dreamed that we were back in New York, and our apartment was nothing but splinters of wood.

My parents were not in their bed. The bathroom door was ajar and a slice of lemon light fell onto the carpet from inside. I could hear their voices over the soft rush of the faucet.

I didn’t think you’d be back, my mother said.

I’m not the one who leaves. That’s you.

What do you want me to say, Paul?

There was a hiccup of silence.

That you’ll come home with us, he said. That you’ll stay home.