Gray Wolf Island

by Tracey Neithercott

Gabe’s muscles tense. “You saying I’m not a man because I don’t have a dad?”

  “I’m saying you have no idea what it’s like to lose a dad the way I did, so you can’t call it the easy way out.”

  “No,” Gabe says. His eyes are wild, almost glowing in the moonlight. “No, you meant that I’m not a man because my mom’s a virgin. That nothing male made me, so how can I be? You meant it like all those other people mean it when they say I’m unnatural.”

  “You know I don’t think that,” Elliot says.

  Something in Gabe’s eyes tells me he’s past the point of understanding. That the rum in his blood has him voicing a conversation he has with himself all too often.

  “Of course we know you’re a man. You’ve been with girls, Gabriel. They talk,” Anne says. “Though I suppose that’s your intention.”

  “You think I put them up to it? That they’re all lying?” Gabe’s face is red now, so red I worry he’ll start sweating blood.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Whatever, Anne.” Gabe turns to me, and I push my back into the wall. If I sit really still, can I bleed through the wood and into the night air?

  Of course not.

  Gabe’s gaze locks on mine for only a moment. I see pulled-together brows and flared nostrils and angry eyes and lowering lashes, then nothing because Gabe’s lips crush to mine. The kiss is hard, demanding. Rough fingers hold my head still, digging into my scalp. I push at Gabe’s shoulders, but he doesn’t budge. His mind’s on his tongue slipping into my mouth.

  “Stop,” I say before his lips can be back on mine. I feel his pain and confusion, and there’s nothing romantic about it. I push against him again, harder. “Gabe, stop.”

  He moves fast, so fast. I blink and he’s across the room, sinking into the corner like a skittish animal. Anne reaches for him, but he shoots to his feet.

  “It’s okay,” I say, rubbing my swollen lips.

  “No. It’s really not. You said stop.” Gabe rubs his head with both hands. He stares at Elliot and Charlie. “She said stop.”

  And then he’s gone. The door clacks against the frame, revealing a glimpse of dark earth and a dark sky and a deep, dark hole.

  Elliot squats beside me. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He stares at the door, and when he speaks again it’s with vicious calm. “I’ll handle this.”

  Then he’s gone, too.

  Without a clock, I can’t watch the time tick by, but I know we wait a long time for Elliot to return. Alone. Anne sets up outside the shack to wait for Gabe, so Elliot, Charlie, and I go to bed.

  But I don’t sleep. I picture Gabe stumbling over a cloak of guilt and rage and falling down that endless pit. And when I slide from awake to asleep, I picture his bones at the bottom, and a skeletal smile and the tortured eyes he wore after our kiss.

  Gabe’s alive.

  No, alive’s not the right word for the boy who’s standing over the pit with terrifyingly empty eyes. He’s here. And he’s breathing. That seems about all we can ask for this morning.

  Charlie kicks a stone down the hole. “An hour. Only an hour.”

  He spent all of breakfast trying to convince us that a brief stop down a dark hole is the best way to start the morning. “I get that you have this pathological sense of adventure,” I tell him. “But I won’t help you die.”

  “Ruby.” He says my name like he’s pulling taffy. “Are you not filled with curiosity? Like, an hour’s worth of curiosity?”

  Right about now, Sadie would look me in the eyes and somehow read my mind. She’d step into the spotlight for me, part sexy, part sweet, and she’d remind Charlie that she was in charge. But it’s only me now, and there’s nothing sweet or sexy about my response. “Someone’s on the island with our map. We’ve seen no star symbol and no wolves, so we’re not wasting time down a hole that may or may not be our eventual demise.” I shoulder my pack. “We’ll backtrack until we see the clue. And then you can attempt to maim yourself.”

  I head for the woods.

  “Well done,” Anne says, jogging to match my stride. I slow so we can walk side by side. “A fantastic dismissal. Elliot just about tossed himself down that hole with all the laughing he was doing.”

  “Sadie was the nice sister,” I say.

  “Which sister were you?”

  “I was the nice sister’s sister.”

  Anne links her arm through mine. “And now?”

  “I don’t know.” I’m less me than I was in Wildewell. It’s as if the island has taken the me-ness out of me. Or maybe it’s sucked the Sadie out of me, and since all I’ve ever been is wrapped up in my twin, there’s not much of me left.

  “Sadie once said she hoped I died first so she could make sure my name got on my gravestone and not ‘Sadie Caine’s Sister.’ ”

  My words linger there, a line of lyrics to the forest’s orchestra. The insects and birds chirrup the kind of song I’d like to play right now, something like breathing my soul into the harmonica and having a song slip out the other side.

  I clear my throat. “The next night she left me behind when she went out with friends.”

  “Yeah, my great-grandmother says when love’s involved someone always gets left behind.” Anne swats at the monster blackflies that swarm the forest. “She says my parents loved each other so much that it created the kind of heat everyone could feel. It got too hot for them to live in Wildewell—or anywhere with other people, really—so the summer I turned six, they left me and my brother with our aunt and uncle. I think they’re out there somewhere, burning everything up. Or maybe they’re in the Arctic.”

  “You miss them?”

  Anne trips over a tree root. Her cheeks are rosy. “We should be searching for wolves.” Her eyes dart away from mine. “You don’t want to hear any more about me.”

  The strangest thing of all is that I do. I tug her to a stop. “Do you miss them?”

  “It’s stupid. I know what Ronnie says about our parents. I should hate them like he does. Maybe I should hate everyone whose parents stuck around. Ronnie does. But I have a lot more hours to think than he does. And I can’t seem to think myself into anger.” She sighs. “I’m a hopeless optimist.”

  “Optimistic is good, Anna Banana,” Charlie says, approaching from behind. He ruffles her hair. “Now, bossy…” He pretends to glare at me, but Charlie’s face only holds angry for seconds before it reverts to affable. They chatter as they crunch over the broken limbs of half-felled trees.

  Elliot appears on my right. Today he’s wearing aviator sunglasses with blue-mirrored lenses and a Treasure Island T-shirt.

  I tug his sleeve. “Highly appropriate attire.”

  “Let no one say I’m too tough for good fashion.”

  “Elliot.” I don’t even try to hold in my laughter. “That’s not a thing anyone would ever say.”

  He knocks his shoulder into mine and sends me stumbling a few steps. That cracks him up, but only for a minute. He gazes at me from behind those stupid blue lenses, and it’s like staring at the sky. “Are you okay?” he whispers. “After last night?”

  I nod. “But I should talk to him.”

  Elliot aims a glare in Gabe’s direction, then jogs ahead.

  I fall into step beside Gabe, whose stiffening posture is the only sign he sees me. I scan his frame, slumped beneath something heavier than his backpack. He’s got a tangle of brown hair and is wearing yesterday’s clothes, creased and covered in dirt. “Gabe? It’s okay. I’m okay.” Seventeen steps and he’s still silent. “Can we at least talk about it?”

  He looks at me, not in the sultry appraising way he’s done in the past but with an achingly honest expression. “Do you think we can ever be better than our worst?”

  Anne spouts wisdom like a faucet, but I come up dry. How can I answer a question I’ve asked myself a million and one times, not once learning the answer? “I don’t know,” I say. “But if you knew what I’ve done, you’d
understand why I want to believe we can.”

  He nods. Slows his steps. I may not know what’s eating Gabe Nash, but I know he wants to work it out on his own. I leap over a warped tree root. Trample a waving fern. The forest comes alive, composing a song of crinkles and chirps and the ring of wind through the leaves.

  Go down to go up. Go down to go up.

  It repeats enough in my mind that I stop seeing a bottomless hole. I see the cliffs to the east, the flat plain where I noticed the book was missing. I see the thick forest that leads north to the deep, dark pit. I see the trees that continue west to the valley, to the mountains, to the great, wide ocean. “I see where we went wrong.”

  “But do you see how to turn the wrong right?” Anne yells from up ahead.

  I race to catch up. “I’ll need to see the map, but I think I know the way.”

  Elliot pauses on a sloping rock. His sunglasses perch on his head like a crown. Hands on hips, shoulders back, chin held high—he looks like the king of something significant. “What’s the plan?”

  “The poem’s deliberately misleading,” I say, unrolling the map on top of the rock. I stare at it, running the poem through my head.

  Elliot’s brow furrows as he catches my gaze. “Tell me you have a brilliant theory for us, Rubes.”

  At the moment, I have a head full of warm air and a fizzy feeling like champagne bubbling in my chest. How have I lasted so long without hearing my nickname spoken aloud?

  It’s not just about Sadie or what she used to call me. It’s what it means to hear it roll from Elliot’s tongue like a, and, or the. Like a million other words he says every day. Like friend.

  My cheeks flush, and I duck my head. “Probably not brilliant, but an idea.” I take a deep breath, then say, “Once we climbed the cliff, I think we were supposed to go down the hills to go up and out of the valley—which would have put us by the Star Stones.”

  Elliot leans over the map, hands splayed wide on the rock. I press a finger over a forest on the eastern side of the island. “The poem said, ‘Too far to the south, and your quest is done,’ so we went north here. But even though the Star Stones are in the south, they might not be too far to the south.”

  “So we need to hike southwest across the valley to get back on track.” A small smile inches across his face. “This is it.”

  A loud squawk cuts through the forest, and I nearly jump a foot. Anne tilts her chin to the sky. “Birds,” she says. “We’ve seen birds and rabbits and squirrels and otters and deer. We heard that owl and those awful screaming fisher cats.”

  “Okay, Ranger Anne.”

  “Don’t mock me, Charles Kim. I’m simply pointing out all the animals we’ve seen and heard.” She turns to Elliot. “So where are all the wolves?”

  Fifteen minutes into our trip around Gray Wolf Island, the boat lurches in the water and I drop the egg.

  “Gotta move with the boat,” Bishop says, shaking his head.

  The deck’s a mess of gold shells and yellow yolk. I scoop up whatever I can, toss it overboard. The rest I rinse with bucketfuls of seawater.

  “Next year, Bart.” He steers the boat around the curve of the island. A cliff of tan stone towers above, its flat top covered in waving grass. “Starting tomorrow, we’ll practice until you can hold an egg in that spoon while dancing a jig. The cup will be ours.”

  He’s talking about the golden chalice, a stand-in for whatever treasure’s buried in that pit. It’s the prize Bishop and I would have won if we’d sailed around Gray Wolf Island faster than anyone else participating in Race ’Round the Island and I hadn’t dropped the egg. “Fecking egg.”

  I’m trying to curse less.

  Bishop shakes his head. “How’s the map coming?”

  We’re rounding the west side of the island, the spot I was studying before Bishop’s last trip. He returned from it last night, just in time for Wildewell’s Festival of Souls.

  “I decided something about myself, Bishop.”

  “That you’re scrubbing egg from my boat tomorrow morning?”

  “That I’m not an artist.” I learned this the day I started drawing the treasure map. Up until last week, I’d resigned myself to creating a really terrible map. “I’m making a word puzzle instead.”

  Bishop takes a while to respond. He’s doing something with the sails and lines—I don’t know what. He hasn’t taught me to sail yet. “Like a treasure crossword puzzle?”

  “Like a poem.” I like this idea more than I’m letting on. I’ll keep going with the stupid drawing if he’s stuck on the idea of an old-time treasure map. I’ll even color it with tea and burn the edges like he wanted. It’s his treasure, after all.

  But I’ve already started writing the poem. Words are as easy as breathing. Drawing’s kind of like drowning.

  “Will it rhyme?”

  I search his eyes, but the bill of his hat hides them with a shadow. “You want it to rhyme?”

  “Of course I want it to rhyme, Bart.”

  I smile. “It rhymes.”

  We’ve rounded the island. If I hadn’t dropped the gold-dipped egg, we might still be in the race for the chalice. Since we’re not, Bishop sails at a leisurely pace. He leans back, crosses his ankles. “And how far along did you get?”

  “To the Star Stones.” I think it’ll be a good part. There’s a lot that rhymes with star. I’m trying to work it so I allude to the island’s possible pirate past. Aarrrh.

  I tilt my face into the sea spray. “How’d they get there?”

  Six towering stones squat at the base of Gray Wolf Island’s tallest mountain. Back in 1886, a treasure hunter named George Aston figured out that when you connect the stones, it makes a six-sided star. If the treasure’s not down the pit, then it’s below those stones. That’s what I thought. That’s what Bishop thought. I guess every treasure hunter who’s ever struck out at the pit has thought that about the stones.

  They dug. Found an empty cave—a whole system of empty caves. No treasure.

  “Who put them there? What’s their purpose?”

  Bishop tips his head back. I do the same.

  Sky’s so blue it looks fake. There’s a lot to like about today.

  “Maybe someone found the treasure and erected those stones as a monument to it,” he says. “Maybe the island grew them from pebbles. Doesn’t matter, Bart. You’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not who or how, but what those stones say.”

  They whispered to me a month ago when Bishop brought me to the island to mark landmarks with a mysterious symbol. It’s not actually mysterious to us—it’s straight from Bishop’s brain—but he’s hoping it will be to treasure hunters. I carved it right into one of the Star Stones, which was not the right thing to do. Bishop went on and on about them being super old and maybe important.

  “They talk about the truth,” I say. “But what truth?”

  He shakes his head. “Isn’t that the question?”

  Captain Thirwall has glued his hand to the Race ’Round the Island chalice.

  He was worried about the cup getting lost or stolen. That’s what he says, anyway. More like he was worried people would stop asking him to reenact the race. And then he’d have to stop talking about it so much.

  Now whenever a little kid tries to steal the trophy, the captain screams.

  It’s hilarious.

  I make a move for it, but Bishop yanks me away.

  “Sometimes you act like you’re six,” he says.

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Maybe you’re immature for your age.”

  “You’re immature for your age,” I say, stopping in front of Hank Windsor’s stall. It should smell like the morning’s catch, but the barrel fire nearby masks the scent.

  Bishop explains the barrels to me as we wait in line. Goes back almost four hundred years.

  French missionaries and Native Americans lived out on Gray Wolf Island at the start of the seventeenth century. When the English came to the island a few decades later, t
hey claimed the land. Slaughtered French and Native Americans alike. Burned the bodies.

  Some people whispered that the bodies weren’t burned. They’d been thrown in a pile. One on top of the other. Mixed with all that sorrow, it was too much for the land to bear. It crumbled. They fell.

  There’s an endless hole marking their grave.

  Not long after the first excavation of the Gray Wolf Island treasure pit got under way, the people of Wildewell started dying. Everyone thought the two were connected.

  They were convinced it was an epidemic of angry spirits looking for revenge.

  The treasure hunters wanted to stop. Wanted to not die.

  But they wanted that treasure more.

  So the people of Wildewell crafted big metal barrels. Created giant fires inside them.

  It scared away the angry spirits.

  That’s what they said, anyway. Bishop says it was a cholera epidemic all along.

  “The English takeover on the mainland wasn’t quite as devastating,” he says.

  Charlie Francis doesn’t think so. He huffs from behind us in line and says, “They graciously didn’t kill the indigenous people and allowed my ancestors plots for crops on their own land as long as they fought in a war for the revolutionaries’ freedom.”

  But Wildewell likes a party, so once a year, during the Festival of Souls, the town sets out fat steel barrels. Lights their insides on fire.

  They smell amazing, even if they mask the scent of my lobster roll.

  Bishop and I meander through the crowded streets. His dark fingers are white with frosting from his cupcake. I devour squiggles of dough fried in oil and dusted with powdered sugar. It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I don’t need to know my past to know that.

  “Bishop Rollins,” a voice squawks. “Get that fine ass of yours over here this instant.”

  “Don’t curse, Doris,” he says with a smile.

  Doris Lansing is Bishop’s closest friend and something like a billion years old. Bishop is old, but Doris is old enough to be his mother. Doris doesn’t seem to care about that, though.

  “Look, it’s your girlfriend!” I laugh. Powdered sugar puffs in the air.