I READ ABOUT THE BONES at seven a.m. on a Sunday morning, and by eight, we’re on the road. A sperm whale had washed up on an Oregon beach a few months before and started to decompose. I kept thinking I would go see it, then kept putting it off. Now, a bad storm had spread the bones down the Oregon coastline. A skull hidden among driftwood. A vertebra disguised as a log. My chance to see the whale was slipping away.

“I read that a humpback whale washed ashore in Neskowin,” my lover says. “There might be more to see.” But a humpback won’t do. I need this sperm whale. These bones.

My lover, he is a man who understands a mission. He packed the minivan before I was even out of the shower. Now he takes the curves so fast I hold my breath. The rain smacks against the windshield.

In the back, two car seats sit empty.

Just that morning, my kids had left home. Headed to their dad’s house. Two and five, tiny hats, moon faces looking backward through the glass door. Now all I have is time.

I’D SEEN PICTURES of the bones online. They looked like warped pieces of wood, rubbed white and smooth by the ocean. Only their otherworldly shape gave them away. And their size. In one photo, a giant jawbone protruded from the sand, creating tiny tide pools at the base.

But when we arrive, the sand stretches flat and gray in front of us. I squint my eyes to see if I can make out a hulking shape, but nothing. The stretch of beach where these bones are spread is miles long, and we don’t know which direction to go.

We drive the van onto the empty sand. Haven’t we always wondered how it might feel to drive fifty miles an hour alongside the wide-open ocean? Aren’t we young and free and in love? The van wheels sink, then we gain traction and are off, the two of us alone in our strange spaceship in this strange land.

My kids would love this, I think.

WHEN I FIRST HAD KIDS, sometimes I would calculate all the weekends they had stolen from me. Before we got divorced, their dad and I would talk about all the things we might do with those weekends, if we just had them back. We’d sleep in and do triathlons and start a charity and sleep in and organize the garage and have sex for hours and learn a second language and also sleep in. It horrified us both sometimes to think of all the time we had lost to our children.

Then one day, I got the Sundays back. Hundreds and hundreds of them returned to me, no use for them anymore. Now I calculate all the weekends with my children that have been stolen from me. “You should take a yoga class,” says every person I know. “Must be lovely to sleep in and go do yoga. . . . You might even do yoga teacher training.”

As if I gave birth to two children to spend ten years of Sundays doing yoga.

Haven’t we always wondered how it might feel to drive fifty miles an hour alongside the wide-open ocean? Aren’t we young and free and in love?

“WAIT WAIT WAIT.” I spot a rib cage among the logs. “Right there.” I’ve lost sight of it, so I jump out of the van before it has fully stopped and take off running. Up close, nothing looks the way you thought it would, and I wind my way through shoulder blades that end up being root systems, and shreds of whale flesh that turn into wads of kelp and debris. I find the rib cage; it’s the branches of a tree.

My kids would love this. I cannot stop thinking it. If I close my eyes, I can imagine them on the beach with me, climbing over the bones of whales and trees, screaming as loud as they can scream.

On the way back to the car, I spot a log that is too bare, too smooth. As I get closer, I can see that it’s curved. A mandible. I am delighted but not surprised. How could I have come this far and searched this hard and not found what I’m looking for?

But then I see it, a dark knot. Small nodes where branches once attached. No whale jaw; just another tree.

WHEN MY SON WAS A BABY, we would lie in bed at night and listen to whale sounds. They’re haunting, aren’t they? A baby is honest enough to recognize that. My son would lie wide-eyed in the dark, not scared but not settled either.

Some nights, we would make whale sounds to each other, moan back and forth at an eerie pitch that we both recognized cellularly. The call and response. Are you there? I’m here. Where are you? Here I am.

THE ISSUE IS THAT whale bones look quite a bit like driftwood.

Over and over, I yell and point and we stop and I get out and scramble over and lean down and stare into and poke at. Over and over, I return to the van, dejected.

I’m sorry, my lover says, his hand on my knee.

He thinks I care about these bones. He does not understand that I am only trying to find something as urgent, as clarifying, as a child’s voice at six-thirty a.m. calling for me.

We drive and drive and drive, and the clouds get darker and the rain comes harder. I know there are no whale bones. That I could drive forever on this flat beach, could search forever, eyes scanning the sand, and never see what I long to see, never get back the thing that has been stolen from me.

But still we drive on.