The November Girl

by Lydia Kang

  Well, almost a half fish. I started noticing that my portion was getting smaller and smaller. She’d been hungrier, I guess. Or maybe her own food supplies were running out.

  Today, the temperature dropped. I mean, it’s always cold, but this was a new cold that completely blasted through my jacket and pants, too easily. So I shiver inside my clothes and wear both pairs of pants (and my new hat), but it worries me. It’s only late October, and the weather will get worse. It’s a good thing I bathed off my grime yesterday. It took five minutes to bathe, and hours to warm up again. That water today might kill me if I dunk myself again.

  Every time I’ve tried to wash, she’s been there. I know it. I don’t always see her, but everything gets really quiet all of a sudden. There’s no wind, no birds singing. The surface of the water becomes glass. Once I saw her face peeking behind a tree, and I caught her eyes. She made sure not to be seen the next time.

  Strangely, I’m never embarrassed by her seeing me bare. I’m no nudist or anything. But her eyes on me are never an intrusion or lewd. More like fascination. Like how a person might notice a shiny rock or an interesting moth.

  But then after I got used to this bizarre voyeuristic thing, something weird happened.

  I’d walked knee-high into Lake Superior instead of one of the interior lakes to wash up after fishing. As I splashed the icy water over my arms, I waited for the calm. And as expected, the surface of the water quieted to stillness.

  Something appeared in the water. It was only about ten feet away, and the water was pretty clear, since the wind was low. Rusted beams tangled with chains, some old rotten canvas fabric, and an algae-covered hull.

  A shipwreck? This shallow, right in Washington Harbor?

  I rubbed my eyes and looked again, and suddenly there were no rusty beams, no pieces of a ship. Only a skull, with a face half rotted off and a fish snaking into one open eye socket.

  “Shit!” I’d screamed, backing out of the water so fast I tripped and landed on my back on the shore. Hyperventilating, I sat up and peered into the water.

  It was gone. All of it, gone.

  Maybe I’d been hallucinating from hunger or sleep deprivation. I didn’t see it again after that. But it definitely helped me to stop caring about being clean.

  I may be dirty for the rest of the season. But one thing’s for sure, I’ll be freezing all the goddamned time, too. After a week, I finish my wall of branches. I’m really proud of my work, though it looks like I’m living in a kid’s play fort. And yet I shiver every night inside. I try banking the other walls with branches, but it does no good. The rain sheds nicely, but the wind practically scoffs at my work. Sometimes I suspect that the wind around that girl’s house purposely tries to find me at night, sneaking between the down layers of my sleeping bag. Because when I sit up and try to shift, or go outside to take a leak, the punishing wind immediately backs off. Like a crook walking away from a crime scene, whistling as if nothing happened.

  Whatever. Now I’m really losing it.

  And then one morning after I’m done fishing, I return to camp to find it got hit by a windstorm of some kind. The wall of branches I’ve so carefully woven are totally wrecked, like a mini tornado untwisted all my knots and scattered the branches.

  Fuck.

  So, right. I need a new place to stay. Today, I gather my stuff. Minus all the food I’ve eaten (and the fox ate, too), it’s a lot lighter. I take the foot trail back to Windigo and walk past the dock to search for houses along Washington Harbor. I see a few, but before I can get any closer, the wind picks up. The green firs along the shore shudder, and the surface of the lake is slapped into sharp, breaking peaks. There’s a strange, distant keening sound. A storm is rising for sure.

  I hike up to Feldtmann Ridge to see if there are cabins there I can break into. Clouds hang low in the sky, the color of smudged ash. There’s a freighter near the horizon, like the ones parked in the Duluth port that dump coal and stuff. My worry over the weather turns into simmering panic when the clouds above start to churn in greenish-gray poufs. It’s going to rain, and I can almost smell the lightning about to strike. I’m in the wide open. I turn around to head off the ridge, closer to the lake and lower ground.

  That’s when I see her.

  Chapter Ten

  ANDA

  Not now. Please, not while he can see me.

  I’d gone to the water’s edge after following him. The pines grow right to the edge of the lake, where there is only a rocky ridge separating land from shore. I stand on the precipice of a large boulder, swaying.

  The air pressure is low, so much that my skin might expand monstrously against my will. The clouds lust for me to change, beseeching me to enter the water. Droplets from the surface of the harbor spray my face, and I drop my bottom lip open. The mist is a drug on my tongue; sweet and delicious and bitter, all at once. Though the wind begins to push the trees this way and that, my hair hangs untouched. My nightgown doesn’t swirl against my ankles, as if I’m sheltered within a bell jar.

  She cries for me.

  I miss you, Anda. A year is so long. I made this for you.

  I’ll give this gift. Be a good girl, and give me what I want in return.

  “It’s not yet November,” I say calmly, though my heart pummels my chest from inside. “I promised Father. I must wait until November.” The color red thrums within my ears. My mouth is dry. I’m thirsty. So thirsty.

  I’ve always been able to hold off until November, when Father can be gone, and when my need and the wind knit into something bigger, more satisfying. But now, my want seeps past the confines of what I’ve done in the past. I’ve been changing more than I realize.

  She wants me to cooperate. To do what I do after holding back all year for his sake. And for the first storm of the season, I’m lost.

  I don’t know how to be, when this boy is so near.

  He came down from the ridge to escape the lightning and found me instead, fifty feet away. Too far; too close. I couldn’t hide in time. Because I had followed him again, like I have every day. Quietly, from within the shadows. It has become my normal, something I never owned before.

  But I’ve found that I own many things now. Possessions. Things like cooking fish in spattering butter every day. Finding treasures to give to the boy. I’m not collecting diamonds or gold. I am not a greedy human who tries to surround herself with glitter and jeweled beauty, so these things don’t count. When I find things with weight, like a lovely, spotted, red-capped mushroom—Amanita muscaria, only somewhat poisonous—I don’t keep it. I blink at it fondly, and then leave it for him. Because when you own things, that’s the beginning of the end.

  He’s beginning to own you, Anda. And you belong to me.

  I pause. With every give and take with this boy, is something more accumulating? Perhaps I just don’t know what to call it. But I can feel it, and it’s beginning to consume me. It’s different, being consumed, instead of being the one who takes and takes, every November, without mercy.

  The storm is strengthening because of my presence. The invisible bell jar that keeps the wind from touching me is thinning. My toes tingle, and my hair crackles with electricity. I’ve felt the weakening, the draining of my self, for weeks now. I’ve held it at arm’s length for too long. I am weak. Too weak.

  “Wait, wait!” I cry out, only to find that my lips are closed. But there is no more waiting. The invisible bell jar around me turns to nothing. The boy’s eyes lock onto mine, but soon I can’t see him anymore, because I’ve already closed my eyes to him. To everything.

  With a single sigh, I let the storm take me.

  Chapter Eleven

  HECTOR

  She stands there on the rocky shoreline for a few minutes. When I get close enough, I see her eyes. They’re black as wet lake stones. It confuses me, because I swear they were gray. She seems to focus on the trees behind me, like I’m not even there. But the oddest thing is how the wind doesn’t seem to touch her. I’m s
quinting because of the dead leaves flying through the air, swirling around my head, threatening to scratch my eyes out.

  But nothing’s touching her. Not a hair on her head moves. The hem of her nightgown doesn’t even flutter.

  What the hell.

  “Hey. Hey! Are you okay?” I yell, which is a joke, because between the two of us, I’m way, way more freaked out. And then suddenly, it’s like a veil between us rises and she sees me. Her eyes latch on and it makes me shiver, because everything feels wrong. Like my eyes have just committed a crime. And I open my mouth to yell louder, when the laws of physics decide to suddenly function again.

  The wind swirls her nightgown around her pale legs and her hair goes science-experiment-static-wild. Her eyes close and she turns to step into the water.

  Oh, Jesus.

  The girl takes one deliberate step after another, until she’s thigh-deep in the freezing water. She doesn’t even flinch. Her nightgown darkens from the lake water. She’s still going.

  “What are you doing? Hey! Hey!” I yell at her, but she’s still not listening to me. I crash through the brush, trying to reach her, but I’m not fast enough. She’s already waist-deep when I jump into the lake, the icy water knifing up my legs and making me gasp. “Stop, stop!” I scream at her, but the wind has picked up and she can’t hear me.

  The cold water weighs down my boots as I slog closer when the wind hits me like a body slam. I stagger back, falling backward into the lake, wet to the shoulder. When I shake the water out of my eyes, I catch a glimpse of the girl’s white hair disappearing beneath the surface. She’s twenty feet away, too far away. It’s just like a nightmare, when you can’t move fast enough.

  No, it’s worse than a nightmare. Because this is really happening.

  Chapter Twelve

  ANDA

  The storm is immense. I’ve been paying so much attention to the boy that I’ve become distracted, not even realizing how large it’s become. The lake is releasing its captured summer warmth, mixing with cold air from the north, sodden air from the Gulf. It twists and coils about the lake. I don’t need the radio to tell me what I feel.

  Winds are rising to thirty miles per hour.

  Waves at six feet along the south coastline.

  It’s a vicious song in my head, the twisting winds that gather strength when I sigh.

  A heartbeat pulses near me. Vaguely, I remember the boy. His rapid pulse is too small a quarry for me right now. It isn’t the salty warmth within his blood vessels that attracts me.

  It’s the St. Anne.

  She’s a beautiful laker, she is. A longboat, with a narrow waist and smooth lines. Small for a freighter, only six hundred feet long. With a belly full of dolomite, she’s only just passed through the Soo Locks yesterday evening. She’s a mere nineteen miles from the Isle, still visible to human eyes from here. If all goes well, she’ll be in Duluth’s port by evening tonight.

  All will not go well.

  The St. Anne has been lucky enough to escape the fate of many of the freighters her age. Her steel is more brittle than the bones made by steel mills today. She creaks with tiredness. She aches for the scrapyard. But scrapping is the tidy way for a freighter’s life to end. Beaching the ship ashore, where her captain will shake hands with the hangman and turn a blind eye to the coming feast. A crew who’s never known her will gnaw her apart like ants on a carcass. There is no glory in scrapping.

  I swirl the wind tighter about her, bringing them closer to sixty miles per hour. Twenty-nine hearts beat faster. Hands are on deck and below. Water is entering through a crack in her hull that they’ve yet to discover. I smile and force the water in. The crack widens. The ship lists to the side, ever so slightly, and more water comes on board, into one of the hatches.

  Twenty thousand pounds of dolomite isn’t that much, but the St. Anne’s middle is hogging now, sagging from the weight as it did at port. But with the winds and the water, the stress is too much. The captain issues a distress signal.

  It’s too late. Their fear is an electric sourness on my tongue. The crew are scrambling for lifeboats, being hurled against the metal of the ship’s interior skeleton. I’ll not let them go. It’s a gift, really. They fight so hard, when relief is so close, so close. Their panic pains me, almost as much as the dragonfly with its leg snapped off in the tree sap, more than the dark-eyed junco that struggles out of its cracked shell.

  I’ve waited so long. Eleven months is a long time to go without the breaking of such creatures. I fed sparingly on the growth in spring, on summer greenery, but they are nothing to the feed of a wreck. I reach in the water to grasp the body of the St. Anne. The shattering of her is a symphony. Her two halves are uncleanly rendered apart, filling with water and sinking quickly. Within her fractured body, the sailors’ bubbled screams are silenced. The north wind’s penetrating strength has chilled the water and quickly numbs arms and legs punching through the depths, attempting to rise. Twenty of the crew have made it onto the rafts, but nine have not.

  They are mine.

  The sourness on my tongue changes to the iron tang of torn metal as the St. Anne’s bow hits the sediment of Lake Superior. The stern swirls and falls three hundred feet away, but it isn’t the boat’s demise that will fill me.

  The nine are struggling within the crushing pressure of the lake’s depths. Metal crushes thighs and cracks rib cages; some float freely, corked and trapped beneath what was once a floor, now a casket’s closed top. The glacial water shocks their muscles, stiffens them prematurely. Water pours into their throats, their larynxes spasming, forbidding any last scream. I listen as the hearts thrill with a frantic rhythm before the lack of oxygen strangles each muscle into a slower pulse.

  The first heart slows to a still. In that moment of savage surrender, its spent energy becomes mine. The trilling hunger in my bones is somewhat quieted, finally. I will be glutted before long.

  Smiling, I barely notice the hand gripping my wrist.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HECTOR

  Oh God. Where is she?

  One second she was there, and the next, she was underwater. I surge toward the last place I saw her. The sky rumbles, and powerful wind spits lake water and stings my face. I squint, trying to protect my eyes.

  My soaked clothes weigh a thousand pounds, and I hyperventilate reflexively from the gnawing cold. My sodden boots drag me down, and I can barely kick. Minutes go by, each one feeling like a century. Soon, the shoreline is frighteningly far away, and it’s an effort not to think, holy shit, I might actually drown today. It’s everything I can do to not panic. Drowning is everybody’s worst fear, but stupid Hector didn’t think of this before he dived in the water, of course.

  The surface of the lake is prickling from raindrops. Swells that weren’t there before bob me up and down, and I swallow water once, twice. I spin around, kicking hard to stay afloat.

  And then I see something. The tiniest smudge of white color pushing away the darkness, maybe about ten feet away, inches below the surface. Whatever it is, it’s sinking quickly. With a huge breath, I surge forward and kick, my muscles already burning. I reach forward, down, grabbing into the wet void at anything. My fingertips graze something soft. I lunge again, and burning skin meets my hand.

  I grab wildly, and my hand closes around a thin limb—ankle or wrist, I’ve no idea. I yank and pull, trying desperately to bring her to the surface. I grab her small waist, jerking her up so her face stays above the water. Her eyes are shut. The lake splashes around us, and water pools in her open mouth. Oh no.

  What’s more, I can’t seem to move her. Something’s snagged on her legs, as if she’s chained to the bottom of the lake. I kick harder, and a wave of water crashes over both our faces. I cough and sputter, fighting to drag her to shore. She’s still tethered somehow. With a massive grunt, I throw us both closer to shore, and something gives way beneath us. We’re loose now, our limbs flailing.

  My muscles start to scream from effort as I ki
ck my waterlogged boots and paddle with one hand. I end up flipping onto my back, arching my chest and kicking while towing her torso under one arm. It takes forever, we’re out so far from the shoreline. My feet finally touch the gravel bed of the lake and I drag her onto the narrow shore. I flip her onto her stomach to let the water empty out of her mouth. My heart is pounding so hard it’s going to bust out of my rib cage. I turn her onto her back, ready to do mouth-to-mouth, chest compressions, whatever it takes. Her eyes are partly open now, trancelike, but she’s breathing—miraculously. My cold fingers clumsily feel for a pulse in her neck. A tiny throbbing nudges stubbornly beneath my fingertips—her heart is beating. Her nightgown is sodden and clings to skin that burns beneath my fingers, hotter than cement in the summer.

  She’s got a fever. She must be sick and delirious.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” I hoist her into my arms. Before I head back to Windigo, I turn and stare at the lake’s horizon. That big freighter that was passing by is long gone, but its absence sends a chill down my spine.

  I start carrying her back to Windigo. She’s a dead weight, and my heavy, wet clothes and the pounding rain don’t help. I’ve been eating barely half a fish a day for the last two weeks. I’ve lost a lot of muscle. So every footstep is an effort. My biceps and quads are screaming with pain when I finally make it to her little cottage.