“I mean, in which way?”
“Oh. Her feet are bleeding. She has no shoes on. Or coat.”
“I guess that takes precedence over the barrel.”
“I guess it does,” I say quietly, and wait by the scooter as Iris goes to look after Mom.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
KETAMINE TRIPS NEVER LAST LONG. MOM will be back in the world of the living in another thirty minutes.
Still, now that the captain’s brother has seen us, there’s no point pretending Mom helped find the barrel. I’ll have to deal with her begging to be smuggled on board again, even if she had the chance and blew it. If she’d been clean—
I’ve got Iris. That’s what matters.
I hold on to that thought as we push our scooter and canoe back into the water. Iris tells me—her words interspersed with grunts of effort—about rinsing Mom’s feet and getting her to lie down.
As I step into the scooter, she asks, “Will the doctors on board help her? The wounds need to be cleaned better.”
“I don’t know.” I steer past the airport buildings. With the barrel tied to the back, the scooter’s more sluggish than I’m used to, but I need to go slow for Iris’s sake anyway. I’m more worried about stability. The wind has picked up again. “They’re trying to save supplies.”
“What about the alcohol from our safe? Can we get to it?”
“I’ve emptied the safe already. We had to use the alcohol on my arm.”
I take us into a gap between buildings. The passage is tight because of a collapsed wall on the left, but we slip through, although the bottom of the scooter scrapes dangerously past the debris. I clench my hands in response to the sound, which sends a stab through my injured arm.
Iris’s eyes widen when we approach the ship closely enough for the cloaking to fade, but she says nothing. I watch her reaction to see if she’s impressed or awed or disappointed. For the second time, she reminds me of Mom, and for the second time, I can’t tell why.
We’re close enough for my tab to send proximity messages. I need my hand to steer the scooter, so I send a voice command to Els rather than a text message, telling her I’m coming in with Iris and a barrel.
I wave at the engineers out of habit. I recognize more faces each time. A Surinamese woman always beams when she sees me return, calling out to ask whether I’ve found what I’m looking for; Engine Room Guy—the little person who worked with Max—has started acknowledging me with a grunt and a crooked smile; this bald white man who must be two meters tall never says a word, but will tap an imaginary hat at me before continuing to work.
It starts off the same way this time, until the bald man sees us and says his first words to me: “Hey, is that . . . ?” He nods at the barrel.
The next few minutes are a whirlwind—questions, accusations, exclamations, curious looks. Iris responds before I do, saving me from having to think of proper responses.
Els meets us in one of the downstairs hallways, confirms the barrel is intact and that it’s actually seeds like Iris said, and seems torn between chastising me for bringing someone on board and relief over retrieving a barrel. The latter wins. She thanks Iris so profusely that I end up tuning her out. Even when we head toward Captain Van Zand’s office, I’m barely listening, and I end up sitting against the opposite wall and staring at my shoes as I roll them from heel to toes and back again.
This has to work. It has to. I can’t have found Iris just to abandon her in the airport with Mom. Surely Captain Van Zand can’t get mad over this. Can he? I remember Mirjam’s stories about people the captain had kicked off the ship. I should have planned better. Should have stowed Iris somewhere with the barrel, told the captain, let them pick her up, obey the rules.
I just couldn’t wait.
Not until I see Iris’s hand in my vision, gently approaching my knee without touching it, do I look up and realize we’re not alone. Anke, Max’s mother, stands right in front of us.
“You’re . . . sisters?” she says.
My irritation flares—does she recognize Iris as trans? Is that why she hesitated?—and dies a second later—because she can’t, since no one who didn’t know already ever does. The hesitation may just be because we don’t look much alike. My face is round and Iris’s is long-stretched; my hair is a thick cloud while Iris’s is all slick curls large enough to twist my finger in.
“Yes, we are,” I say, immediately regretting how wary I sound. Anke lost her daughter this weekend. The same daughter who told me most of what I know about the Nassau, who worked by my side in both the kitchen and the airport offices. I haven’t even visited Anke in her cabin the way Max suggested.
Anke picks at her fingernails without looking, echoing the nervous tic from when I first met her. She looks paler than before. “Do you know Max?” she asks Iris. “My son and your sister are becoming quite close. I barely even see him lately.”
“No. I only just came on board.”
“You’re—I see.” She backs up, but doesn’t leave yet. Pick. Pick. “Where are you staying?”
Iris opens her mouth to answer, then stops. She gets the same blank look I saw earlier. Iris isn’t blank. Iris is everything but blank. This time, the look passes quickly. “Around. I was on the move.”
“Was. Are you hoping to get a spot on board?”
“Of course not,” Els cuts in. “The captain has made it very clear no one is to approach him about that. We’re simply here to give him information.”
Anke tilts her head. “I suppose what he does with that information is his decision?”
“I suppose,” Els says.
“And you needed to bring her on board to give him that information? Well. Good luck. Aren’t you lucky some spots opened up.” Pick, pick, pick. The sound is so forceful, it’s like she’s trying to tear her nails off. I want to tell her to stop picking at the same time as I want to run away. I have no idea how to act around this woman after taking her dead daughter’s place on board.
Anke goes on. “I’ll be praying for you, of course, but you understand that we can’t just take anyone on board. There’s a waiting list, protocol . . . limited supplies . . . Some of us have family members trapped in shelters . . .”
“Iris found one of the missing barrels,” Els says. “Thanks to her, we’ll recover some of our most essential seeds.”
“Ah.” Even I don’t miss the frost in Anke’s voice.
“Ah,” Iris repeats. She stares the woman dead in the eye. I wish I could whisper to her about Mirjam, that this is her mother standing here, but Iris’s expression is already softening. “You have family in the shelters? How are they?”
“That’s a good question.” Pick, pick. Her voice is sharp-edged. “Hungry, I expect. Boxed in. On account of my family’s circumstances, I was hoping to convince the captain to send someone for them. They’re not far. And they’re not exactly in a position to retrieve lost barrels.”
“Who are they?”
“My sister and brother-in-law, and their daughter.” A pause. “My niece was born two days before the announcement.”
“Ah,” Iris repeats again. This time, her voice is without a trace of a challenge.
Anke goes into the captain’s office first.
Two minutes: that’s all it takes before she comes back into the hallway, teary-faced.
“I’m sorry,” Iris says.
“My family is dead and dying,” Anke says. “They need your sympathy more than I do. It’ll do them just as little good.”
She spins on her heel.
The three of us enter Captain Van Zand’s office next, legs stiff with worry. Iris tells her story; I confirm it; Els vouches for the state of the barrel. We’re back in the hallway as quickly as Anke was.
“Told you: supplies get people on board, guaranteed,” Els says. “Welcome to the Nassau.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ONLY A FAINT GLOW ILLUMINATES THE cabin I share with Iris, but it may as well be daylight compared to the sunle
ss world outside.
“We can’t smuggle Mom on board,” I say.
“It’s Mom. We have to.”
I’d expected to spend tonight celebrating Iris’s spot on board, asking around on the network for spare clothes her size, explaining the Nassau’s rules while she braided my hair. Not this. I prop myself up on one elbow, my blanket sliding down, and emphasize my next words. “We’ll get kicked out.”
“Most people barely looked at me when we entered. It’ll be easy. Mom needs us. Did you see her?”
“Yes. She’s no different.”
“She’s worse. Mom is the way she is because she’s lonely, Denise. She’s depressed.”
I close my eyes. I’m already trying to get her on board, aren’t I? I don’t want to hear this, don’t want to be asked to give her yet another chance beyond that. If Mom wanted to change, she’d have accepted help. If she doesn’t want to change—then she’s made her choice, and that choice is not us.
It’s not a choice, a voice whispers, just like I told Max. Feels the same, though. And if she really is too sick to accept help . . . then I don’t know what I could offer, anyway.
“She couldn’t handle the work,” Iris goes on. “She made bad decisions and got in over her head. Then one after the other, Dad left, she got fired, her ex-colleagues lost interest, her mother died . . . She feels it’s her fault. She keeps taking small steps forward—she makes a friend, gets a new job, helps someone out—then she figures she’ll only screw up again. She freaks out. Then she does screw up, and feels worse.” Iris coughs. The doctor gave her something to help, but that cough will stick for days. “Mom’s drugs will run out eventually. With the right support, she can get better. Or at least be safe. If loneliness and failure set her off . . . where she is now isn’t good for her.”
I push my face into the pillow. I like the dimness of the room, the silence around us. My pillowcase smells like me. It makes it easier to get the words out. “The engineers outside might have let you through, but they could recognize Mom.”
“There are other entrances, aren’t there? Els found me an old tab. I studied the map. Some entrances must have fewer engineers crowded around.”
The exit where Max helped me into the water comes to mind.
“If Mom pretends she belongs . . . ,” Iris continues.
I don’t want to risk it, I want to tell her. I don’t want to go back. We’ve got you and me. We’ll survive. Isn’t that enough?
The words sit on my tongue, waiting for me to give the go-ahead. I don’t.
I feel silly being so scared. I feel ashamed, because I’m arguing against saving my own mother and that’s not the sort of thing a good person does. And I think—I think I might just be tired, because I don’t want to argue about anything anymore. I have Iris. I’ve reached my goal.
All I want now is to sleep.
At seven forty-five that morning, my alarm goes off, and for the first time in months, I think, Not yet. I reach to deactivate the alarm so I can turn onto my other side.
Iris’s shape in the bed across the room stops me. A smile curls on my lips. (She’s here. I found her.)
We’ll figure out Mom later. For now, it’s enough that Iris is here. I climb out of bed. Not long after, we’re headed toward breakfast. “Avoid Dining Hall D,” I tell her as we walk. “It’s closest, but you can’t trust the chairs. My friends and I mostly use Hall B. Sanne messaged me—she’s there already.”
“It’s true,” a lazy voice behind us says. “Hall B has the sturdiest chairs in town. Spread the word.”
“Max!” I say as he comes up next to us. “You’re up early. For you.”
Every time I see him, I have that split-second shock of Holy shit, his sister died, what am I supposed to do, what should I say? but every time, Max has been so normal that it’s hard to reconcile those thoughts with the joking, yawning boy in front of me. It’s not like I’d know what to say if he were different, though, so I’m selfishly glad for his request that we act the same.
Max shrugs one shoulder. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Maybe he’s a little different. There’s something else, too. I point at his chin. “You have scruff.”
He scratches the yellow-orange stubble staining his cheeks. “You just noticed? Yeah, my mother, she . . . I’m not supposed to shave.” He squints at Iris. “You’re the famed Iris, huh? My mother told me you made it on board. Good for you.”
I wonder what exactly Anke said about Iris—it can’t be good, based on last night—but he and Iris introduce themselves without any trace of awkwardness.
“Sanne’s in B?” Max says. “Surprised she’s not already at work.”
I step aside to let two chatty girls in wheelchairs pass. “It’s early.”
“Engineering starts early. She has childcare in the evenings, too. She’s taking on whatever people have to offer.” His brow furrows. “I think it was childcare. Maybe kitchen duty. Mirjam mentioned the cooks liked her. Or . . . crops . . . ?”
“Whatever people have to offer,” I repeat. It’s the first time he’s mentioned Mirjam since her death, and I don’t know what I was expecting—for Max’s voice to hitch, or for him to abruptly change the topic, maybe—but he seems absorbed by Sanne’s potential evening activities.
“It’s kind of funny. I used to be the one with three jobs. Now everyone trips over themselves to take on as much as they can—even my parents are too worried to skip work, and they shouldn’t be working at all for another two days—but people are letting me off the hook.”
People are still rushing back and forth around us. I’ve been trying to avoid the hallways, since people keep hassling me about my trips into town and updates about the shelters or open spots, but it does seem more crowded.
“People weren’t working before now?” Iris asks.
“Not like this. The Productivity Wars.” Max laughs his abrupt laugh. “That’s what Fatima calls it.”
It dawns on me. “People are competing for the open spots. Everybody wants their family moved higher on the waiting list.” The open spots were a touchy topic for his mother, but Max just nods. “Our top engineers are helping with diaper changes now?”
Another hard laugh. “Ha! Close. One of them adopted bathroom-maintenance-bot care. My mother asked me to keep helping out. She wants to get my baby cousin on board. I’ve been offering to do more, but . . .” A shrug. “The engineers are all so sympathetic. They’re like, ‘No, it’s fine, you go sit shiva. Your sister died.’ I tell them, ‘It’s not sinking in. Let me work in the meantime.’ And they’re like, ‘We’re fine, go read something instead.’ So. Then I read.”
“Um . . .”
He waves a hand at me. “Say what you want to say. I told you. I’m fine.”
“Well . . . are they being sympathetic or stealing your workload?”
“Holy shit.” Max blinks at me as though the thought had never occurred to him.
We split off before the dining hall—us to eat, Max presumably to chase down the work thieves. We sit at Els’s table rather than Sanne’s, and Iris devours breakfast like she hasn’t eaten in months, despite last night’s late dinner.
Ten minutes after loading up her plate, when Iris is sipping pale apple juice, she asks Els across the table, “I’m told I should make myself useful. What are my options?”
Els spears a strawberry. “What can you do?”
“I organize.”
“Like your sister.”
“I organize people, events,” Iris says. “Denise organizes information.”
I absorb that. I never thought of myself as organizing anything. I think of myself as listening, coping, avoiding. The words feel good, rolled over in my mind: Denise organizes information.
“Iris helped organize festivals,” I say, as if returning the favor. “They set up picnic tables in the park. Sometimes there’d be almost a dozen vendors—and some home cooks—all from the neighborhood, selling food all night long. There was live music, dancing. It was
great.”
Iris gives me a funny look, while Els says, “That’s good. Anything else?”
“Math, numbers.” A hoarse bout of coughing interrupts Iris. She waves off our concern. “I helped with finances.”
I swell with pride at Els’s smile. This is my sister, I think. This is the person I brought on board. It’s like if Iris is useful, I am, too. I add, “People. Iris makes friends easily.”
Iris nods slowly.
Slow. She shouldn’t be slow. Is it the ship? Did something happen while she was away? Is she worried about Mom? My last thought is childish, but I think it anyway: Is she not happy to be back with me?
It’s a familiar thought. I always told myself that Dad didn’t leave because of Iris or me; Dad left because his parents needed him. And when he didn’t come back, it wasn’t because of Iris or me, either, but because of Mom.
And Mom—she didn’t start taking drugs because of Iris or me; she started taking them because she was under too much pressure at her job. And when she lost her job and kept taking drugs anyway, it wasn’t because of Iris or me, either, but because she was addicted.
I’m used to those thoughts. I’m used to rationalizing them away. In that split second between the notion coming up—because of me—and common sense kicking in, though, it stings like hell.
I’m still staring when Iris continues. “I’m all right with handiwork and electronics. I know how to clean a mess.”
“All of this is great,” Els says.
I sneak glimpses at Iris as I chew my bread. She’s back to normal. Her eyes are clear. She’s here, across the table, exactly like I’ve imagined. My heart does a funny, excited patter.
I’m going to survive. Iris is going to survive. I haven’t had those thoughts in months.
“It’s so strange to be eating normally,” Iris says suddenly. She loaded up her plate with bread and sugared strawberries, like Els—I skipped them, on account of those annoying seeds on the skin—and is pushing the last strawberry around on her plate.
“You didn’t have anything out there?” I ask.
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