by Rory Power
“All well,” Welch says. “Did the replacement arrive safely? Over.”
Silence, and then the man says, “Confirming receipt. Over.”
Receipt? And replacement for what? Nothing leaves the island, not even our bodies. When one of us dies, we burn her out back, as far from the house and the fence as we can manage. A whole square of earth scorched, the smell unbearable, bones and fillings buried under stone cairns.
“There’s something else,” Welch says, sounding almost reluctant. “We have to make a return. Over.”
The supplies, that’s what I think of first, but we’ve done that already. She has to mean something else.
For a long moment no answer. Welch starts to pace, and I track her movement as the steady light under the door shifts. She won’t come in here, I tell myself. I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe. Finally, her walkie chirps back to life.
“This time tomorrow,” the man says. “Drop her at the Harker house. Over.”
Her. Not the body, but her, and that’s Byatt. It has to be. And they’re talking about her like she’s still someone. I feel my heart bloom with relief. But if she’s not here, where is Welch keeping her until tomorrow? And what for?
Welch stops pacing. “Confirmed, over.”
“Over and out.”
The air goes quiet. A moment later the light under the door fades, and I hear Welch’s footsteps heading farther along the hall. I ease out the window, heave it shut. Settle on my hands and knees and slowly, slowly, inch across the roof. The Gun Shift girls still have their eyes on the trees, and they don’t see me as I lower myself over the edge and swing in through the second-floor window.
I sneak down the hallway, across the mezzanine. Check the rise of the moon, mark it in my head—this time tomorrow, that’s what the man on the walkie said—and go back to my own room, to my own bed. To Reese, sitting up in her bunk and waiting for me, because of course she knows I left.
“Something’s happened,” I say. “She’s not in the infirmary.”
Reese frowns, and I can see it already, the disbelief building in her. “What are you talking about?”
“And there was this man, on the walkie.” I’m practically out of breath, tumbling over myself to get it all out.
“Slow down. Start from the beginning.”
I tell her everything, about the empty rooms, about the needle and thread. About Welch, about the walkie-talkie and the man’s voice on the other end, about the plans they made to take Byatt to the Harker house.
“I don’t know where else Welch could be keeping her,” I finish, leaning against the ladder. I can feel a shake setting in my muscles. “She has to be holding her somewhere if they’re not leaving until tomorrow.”
The classrooms on the ground floor aren’t private enough, and there aren’t any outbuildings on the grounds besides the barn. Just an old toolshed, but we’ve torn that apart for firewood. “What do you think?” I say, looking to Reese.
At first she says nothing, the light from her hair showing me her widened eyes. And then she lets out a shuddering sigh.
“My house,” she says. A strange contortion of her face, like she’s trying not to laugh, or maybe cry. “You’re sure he said my house?”
Of course that’s what she’s focusing on. I guess I can’t exactly blame her. “I’m sure,” I say. “For real, Reese, we have to find Byatt. She’s still here somewhere.”
“I’m sure she is,” Reese says. Words light and easy, a deliberately blank expression on her face, and that means she’s holding something back.
“But what?” I say. “Byatt’s here somewhere, but what?”
I should be expecting it, but it’s still a surprise when Reese says, “Is she dead or alive?”
A hot rush of anger, bright and shattering, because I’ve been pushing that thought back since the infirmary, and couldn’t she let me? “What kind of question is that?”
“An important one,” she says. “You’re not an idiot, Hetty. You know what usually happens to girls like us.”
“None of this is what usually happens.” I take a deep breath, clench my fists. Don’t let it in. She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive. “Girls don’t usually disappear like this. That has to mean something.”
“Yeah,” Reese says. “I think it means she’s already dead.”
I push back from the bunk, ignore the panic swelling in my gut. Reese is wrong, and Byatt is fine. “Then how come we haven’t burned her? She’s alive. I have to find her. I just do.”
“And then what? We can’t help her.”
She’s right, of course. But it doesn’t matter. “We can get through it with her,” I say. “That’s all we have left. And I’m not giving it up. I might not know where she is right now, but I know where she’ll be tomorrow night. I’m going out there after her.”
“You can’t do that.” Reese’s voice is low, urgent as she leans closer. “You know you can’t. It’s breaking quarantine.”
“So what?” I say. “I’m Boat Shift. Boat Shift is allowed past the fence.”
She rolls her eyes. “I think they meant that for going to pick up supplies and not sneaking after your friend.”
I wave it away. They’ve always told us the quarantine is the most important thing, but if I’m choosing between it and Byatt, it’s no choice at all.
“And even if you did go out there,” Reese continues, “how would you get back in past the fence?” She pulls at the end of her braid with silver fingers, her split ends starting to fray. “The gate locks and—”
“I’ll climb over it,” I say hotly. “I’ll figure it out. I’m not worried about that.”
“I am,” she says, but she’s looking at me, her face open and unsure, and there it is, that kick in my chest, that reaching I’ve been trying to ignore since we met.
“Come with me,” I say. “We’ll go together.”
It’s magic. One second she’s in it with me, her head bent close to mine, and then she’s settled back into that posture I know so well. Arms crossed, jaw clenched, eyes emptied of heart.
“No,” she says. “No, you do what you want, but I won’t go with you.”
For once I’m not willing to let it lie. This is too important, all of it. “Why not?”
She makes an exasperated sound. “Hetty—”
Whatever patience I had left is gone. I’m gripping the edge of the bunk so hard I can feel a splinter bite deep into my palm. “What is wrong with you? Byatt’s our friend. Don’t you want her to be okay?”
“Wanting has nothing to do with it,” she says, but it’s pouring out of me, louder than I should be, angrier than I expected.
“Because I know you don’t care.” I keep on, a bitter twist to my words. “I know that makes you better than me, but I can’t just write the whole world off like you do.”
“I don’t care? Are you—” And then she breaks off like it hurts. For a second I can see it all laid out across her. The longing and the resignation and the betrayal, the sting of watching the island she loves steal the people she pretends she doesn’t.
“Oh,” I say. My voice thick, lodged in my throat. I’ve spent every day since I met her telling myself the wrong thing. Telling myself over and over that she was cold, when maybe she was burning the whole time. “I’m sorry. Jesus, Reese, I’m sorry.”
Her parents both gone, and this is what it did to her. This is the wreck it left behind. I should have seen it. I should have seen how she loves as hard as I do. Only I think it pins her down where it picks me up.
“I wish I could,” she says, not looking at me. “I wish I could be like you. But I can’t go looking for her if I couldn’t go looking for him. I thought Boat Shift was the only way past the fence, but here you are, ready to tear it down with your bare hands.” She lets out a shaking breath, and then softly, “W
hy couldn’t I do that for my dad?”
For once I think I know what to say. It’s what people used to tell me when I was small, when my father was deployed. “You’re his daughter,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be the one protecting him.”
She doesn’t answer. Still she has to be listening. “But Byatt’s our girl.” I’m watching Reese’s face, and I have her. I know I do. “We are supposed to protect her. Just like she’d do it for us.” I take a deep breath. “Just like I’d do it for you.”
A flicker of surprise on her face, one that lights an answering spark of shame in my stomach. Is that really news to her?
But she reaches out then, and I feel something catch in my chest as her palm slides against mine. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
There’s nothing more to be done tonight, and the adrenaline is draining from me, leaving me about ready to keel over. I smile at her and let go, duck into my bunk.
I lie on my back, still leaving room next to me for Byatt like always. Above me I can hear Reese taking off her jacket to use as a blanket. It’s too quiet, and as easy as it just was with her, suddenly, I want more than anything for the ground to swallow me up so we don’t have to listen to each other pretend to be asleep.
“Hey,” Reese says suddenly. “It wasn’t my dad, was it? On the walkie?”
“Um.” I’m not sure how to let her down.
“Never mind.” She sounds gruff, embarrassed, and I can picture her shaking her head. “I just…I thought if one of my parents was gonna come back, it would be him.”
A rustle, and a creak in the wooden ribs of our bunk beds as she gets comfortable, ending the conversation. I’m surprised she started it to begin with.
But then, she’s different without Byatt here. Or maybe we both are. I clench my fists, try to work up the courage. I’ve wondered this since I met her, but when Reese doesn’t want to talk, nothing can make her.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I start. There’s a tremor in my voice. I keep going. “But, Reese, where did your mom go?”
I can’t see her, so instead, I watch the patterns of light her braid throws onto the ceiling, trace their soft, blurring glow. “It’s complicated,” she says at last. “Or maybe I just wish it was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Last I heard, she was still in Maine. Portland, maybe.”
“What?” That’s barely two hundred miles away. I’d always assumed she’d gone far, or even that Reese didn’t know where she was.
“Yeah,” Reese says. She doesn’t sound sad. Or angry. Or anything. “She didn’t want to leave Maine. She just wanted to leave me.”
I don’t know what could soothe that sting. But she’s talking to me. That has to count for something. “I’m sorry,” I say. “You know you could have told me about it before.”
“Some things don’t belong to other people,” she says, tired and drifting. “Some things are just mine.”
As if I needed more proof that we’re built from different things. Reese holds herself so apart, and all I’ve ever wanted was to be half of someone else. Coming to Raxter, it was like I hadn’t found my place until I got here. Like I didn’t know who I was until Byatt told me.
And I know what Reese would say. I know she’d say that’s not healthy, say that’s not how it’s supposed to work. But the whole world is coming down around us every day, and don’t we have bigger problems?
No, Reese isn’t Byatt, but I like her. I like how she talks without talking. I even like that she doesn’t always like me.
BYATT
CHAPTER 7
Trying to blink but what
Slow thick like my tongue hot and dry here a sliver of something here the world sneaking back under my eyelids here I am I am I am
Awake.
Heat running through my head like a current. Light pricking at my eyes until I’m in a bed in a room. And I don’t hurt, but I feel my whole body at once.
The room is big. Built for something different than this. Peeling linoleum floor. Curtain half drawn around me, and through the gap a bulletin board on the wall, hanging at an angle, and three other beds, all empty. I reach out to touch the curtain, to pull it back, to
Can’t move. Hands strapped down, held by my wrists, IV needle slipped in through my skin.
Somewhere a door opening heavy, muffled steps a suit, plastic and pale sleepy blue, I can see it through the curtain as it approaches. Pushing in and shaking an arm to keep the curtain from clinging and it says
Feeling okay?
* * *
—
He is a boy, he says.
His name is Dietrich.
He’s just joking. He doesn’t know why he said that.
His name is Teddy and he’s nineteen. He’s only a Seaman and this is his first day. He was barely at Camp Nash for a week before they sent him here, and he is still not sure why they did because all he does is move equipment and look out of windows. He is sorry, he is rambling, but it’s only that he doesn’t know what the CDC doctors are saying most of the time, and medicine is confusing and he is very nervous.
Look hard, try to remember how a boy is built. Can only see his eyes above his surgical mask, the rest of his body blurred by the plastic suit. Hair brown like mine, skin golden but faded, like it’s missing the sun.
Teddy asks me questions. Teddy asks me what day it is. He asks me my birthday, my last name, the price of milk. I don’t answer I want to but the words won’t line up on my tongue.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, he says. Jill Jill Come on you know this.
Jill came tumbling I say but that’s all can’t and oh god I forgot I forgot how it hurts like a shock like bile stinging in my throat like a shiver in my bones shaking and screaming and if I don’t stop I’ll just break apart and eyes wet stomach heave
Quiet Teddy says please be quiet that hurts us both
Tells me it’s okay. Tilts a cup of water to my lips, drip, drip and swallow. Locks the door behind him when he goes.
* * *
—
Alone, awake, all of me here in my body. Nobody around, just the whir of a fan somewhere beyond my curtain. Tug and tug but the straps around my wrists have no give.
I think I have been a problem all my life. Here I am where problems go. First Raxter and now here, and I have always been heading here, haven’t I, haven’t I. Too bright and too bored and something missing, or perhaps something too much there.
It was my mother’s idea and my father just nodded and went to sit in another room. Silence all that summer until they put me in a car headed for Raxter. Nobody there will know, I told myself. Nobody will know what you do when you’re bored. What you do just because you can.
* * *
—
Teddy comes back with the sun, tells me they’re figuring it out. Quiet for now, he says, and I don’t mind. I remember the hurt. And he lays out a packet of forms, unbuckles my wrists and moves the IV stand and helps me write the answers down.
Byatt
Byatt Winsor
16 almost 17
January 14th
No allergies
Elizabeth and Christopher Winsor
Beacon Hill
What street?
West Cedar
House?
Number 6
You’re getting anxious, Teddy says. Don’t get anxious.
I almost forgot, I write.
But you didn’t.
* * *
—
Wake up before I’m supposed to IV still full a haze I can’t blink away and when I close my eyes I am back back in the woods that night the night I came here
Cold damp irises crunching under my boots and Welch holding me tight for the best she says for your friends like there’s a choice I made but it
wasn’t I didn’t and pulled me from the infirmary marched me down the stairs no guards no nothing Hetty asleep somewhere Hetty alone
She needs me I said and Welch said no said she needs you to do this
Through the gate into the trees sounds in the brush animals moving their eyes like torches Welch’s breath warm on my ear and then people waiting
They took me even though I fought even though I ran dart in my thigh and a fog in my brain and Welch leaning over me
I’m sorry she said and I think the worst part is I think she meant it
* * *
—
Something blue out in the bigger room, and I notice, my eyes clear, world firm and real around me. Barely time to see it all, barely time to check my IV and see it’s empty before the curtain’s sliding back, a rustle of plastic pushing through, and then it’s a person, a woman in a suit like Teddy’s, standing at the foot of the bed, holding a patterned hospital gown.
“Hello,” she says. She sounds like she’s smiling. “Time to change.”
She undoes every strap holding me down and helps me to my feet. My limbs are weak and shaking, so she undresses me, her heavy fingers working slowly at the buttons on my shirt and the laces on my boots. For a second I’m shivering in my bra and underwear, and I see her staring at me, at my back where that extra ridge of bone erupts through my skin, and then the gown is slipping over my head. I can’t even lift my arms to get them through the holes. She has to do that for me.
Her suit is thick like Teddy’s. Rubbery and stiff. They must be afraid of me, of what I have. But it stops at her neck, and I can see the beat of her pulse. Count it—one, two—and it feels better that way.
“Does that feel all right?” the woman asks as she straps me back in. “Comfortable?”
I open my mouth, but she lays one gloved finger across my lips before I can get anything out.
“Let’s stick with nodding for now. Teddy tells me we’ve had some trouble with talking.” She pulls back the curtain a little more to show a sink tucked into the counter against the wall. It doesn’t look quite like a hospital. There’s something sad and ordinary about it. Like the kitchen in a back room of a church, or the break room in an office building.