by Lydia Kang
Now, not knowing what to do with myself, I crouch by the fireplace, crumpling balls of newspaper to make a fire. Not now. I couldn’t risk having that smoke attract the Coast Guard to this house. But maybe when whatever’s going on blows over out there, a fire would be nice.
“We mustn’t burn things.”
I turn around and there she is, in her blue nightgown, standing only a foot away. I want to yelp and jump a mile, but force myself not to.
“So how do you keep warm?”
“We mustn’t burn things,” she says again. And then, when I wonder if we’re somehow communicating in different languages, she points to the stove. Oh. It’s attached to a portable fuel tank outside the walls. I’d seen it when I walked around the house the other day. I forgot that they like to use fuel for camping and cooking on this island. It’s a nature preserve, after all. They can’t be burning down all the trees. Or cutting branches to make shelters. Whoops.
“You must be freezing in here,” I comment.
“You must be freezing out there.”
“I have been.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Neither should you.”
We both hesitate. Because the next question is obvious. Why? Why are we here? But to say it out loud hurts more than knowing. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing, because she bites her lips together and stays quiet.
I guess we’ll sit on our secrets for a little longer.
“So…uh…there are a lot of Coast Guard ships out there.” I gesture to the window. “Any idea why?”
“They always come after a sinking.”
Sinking? So maybe someone did lose a boat after all. “How do you know?”
She opens her mouth to speak, then bites her lip again. Then opens her mouth. Like she’s fighting the urge to tell me bad news. The boats, the helicopter. I’ve driven past so many car crashes they seem ordinary now. A price you pay for being on the road, if you’re stupid or unlucky. But a ship sinking really freaks me out. After getting my head forced underwater at the public pool by meathead kids one too many times, drowning is one of my worst nightmares. Well, aside from the one I’ve been living.
“Do you have a radio?” I ask.
She nods and pads over to the fireplace, where a small battery-powered radio sits on a pillow, as if it were a pet dog. She hands it to me and I turn it on, twisting the dial until a crackling news station comes on.
“—still searching for survivors, though the chances…water temperatures are low…seven bodies recovered and identified…James Johnston and Casey Merrick have not been found…” There’s a lot of static, but I get the gist.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “Seven people died?”
“Nine,” the girl says, matter-of-factly.
I sit on the floor, suddenly tired. “Oh my God. I can’t believe this.”
She responds by staring out the window. The helicopter is doing another pass of the coastline.
“Man, I feel so sorry for them.”
“The twenty will get their chance, too,” she says, soothingly.
I look at her cockeyed. “What twenty?”
“The survivors. They’ll die, too, someday.”
This girl, she makes no sense. “I meant,” I say slowly, as if maybe English isn’t actually her first language, “that I feel sorry for the guys who died.”
“Why?”
This time, I’m the one who’s silent. What is wrong with her? “Uh, because dying is bad…especially if you don’t want it to happen yet. It’s just…bad.” I’m not able to hide the edge to my voice.
“It isn’t. Death doesn’t nullify life. It brings more of it.” Her lips pucker the smallest bit. She’s miffed at my argument. “The molecules of your body came from other things that died. You eat dead things, too.”
“Well, yeah, but—” I struggle for a moment, because what she says is true. Decomposition and fertilizer and Simba and the circle of life, whatever. I get it. I’m more than the fried fish I ate yesterday, but somehow it doesn’t seem worth saying. Finally, I say, “Life is still worth fighting for. That’s all.” I’m embarrassed at my simple words. I sound like a meme, and I’m a hypocrite. Life has beaten me down with brass knuckles, and here I am, running and hiding. I’m not the best lawyer for this argument.
The sound of the helicopter blades beating the air cuts into my thoughts. Reflexively, I hunch my shoulders and duck, though there’s no way they’d be able to see inside the house, let alone through the window.
“It will be like this for a week,” the girl says.
“Until they find the last two,” I add.
“They won’t find the last two,” she says with a confidence that makes my skin crawl.
Chapter Sixteen
ANDA
I know this aversion to death. Father has it, too.
I’ve also seen the fear on his face before. It was only a matter of time. But Father didn’t recognize this fear of me, not at first. Unlike other children, I remember all of my existence since I arrived on the shores of Isle Royale. I remember being milk-fed, only a day old, and vomiting up every white drop. Father quaked in fear that I would die, not realizing I sought a different kind of nourishment. I remember being so angry, not being able to speak when my infant mouth lacked the tone and control to do so.
And yet I forget things. Too many things. Like the fact that once, I enjoyed strawberry jam. Or that there was joy to be found within other months of the year. It wasn’t always about November. And now it is nothing but.
I remember other things, too. There were days in my first years that Father would watch me tend to a patch of rock cress among a collection of stones near the house. He couldn’t understand why I would weep every time they grew an inch. He couldn’t see the roots forcing their way into the soil, pushing aside other lives for their own sake. He is blind to parasitism, in the guise of spring greenery and plumpness. But I know that pain has to be nurtured for the surrender later. I don’t like it, but there is an order in the world that even I cannot undo.
Years ago, Father found me smiling for the first time. He panicked. My chubby hands were curled around the wrung neck of a scarlet tanager, blood and red feathers all the same color, the smear of crimson on my triumphant cheek. It would not have to go hungry any longer or be buffeted by the winds on its journey southward. Calypso orchids and thimbleberry plants would sigh with contentment, their roots threaded about the skeletonized remains someday. I didn’t know why, but taking the bird was easy compared to what the struggling rock cress offered.
Here, I had found relief. And in my father’s face, horror.
In that sliver of a moment, I hurt in a place I couldn’t quite locate. I felt this way because I am partly my father, and my father is apt to mourn the ending of things, unable to see that twilight and dawn occur at the same time, everywhere. Is death not a gift to the living? If there were no death, would not the world corrupt itself and shatter into its own unalterable ending? This taking and giving on the island, abolishing one life to nourish another—it must be nurtured. Still, his pain was ten times mine, yet worse for me because I bore witness to it.
So I started to make allowances here and there. I made an effort to live off the flourishing springs and summers, though they made me clench my teeth. And I orchestrate deaths, too. Father is not upset by a wolf consuming an infirm, old moose, but he is upset by my splintering the bones of a living calf at a mere thought. So I save my most violent renderings for when he is gone, when November is eager to unfurl its energy my way.
These are things I learn, and do, to live. To keep him happy.
But the death of humans and ships is my domain as well, and it can’t be suppressed forever.
November is coming in a few days. And I am still hungry. I, too, must live.
But this boy’s eyes bore into me like Father’s, that flickering of human sentiment that lights a fading piece within myself. I can’t forget the way they looked at me, pained, when I ask
ed him why death was such a terrible thing.
Perhaps I can wait a little longer before I let another storm bring me a ship.
I can be patient. Can’t I?
Chapter Seventeen
HECTOR
We don’t speak for the rest of the day.
After our conversation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this girl had something to do with the deaths of those sailors. It makes no sense, of course. She was less than thirty feet away from me the whole time it was happening, and then she was unconscious.
I don’t understand, but my gut says I should probably leave this girl alone and flee far, far away.
But I stay. She’s not quite better. She looks frail, the way she’ll refuse to move for hours at a time, just lost in her thoughts. Maybe it’s selfishness, but taking care of her makes me feel good. I experiment with the flour and sugar to make some really bad pancakes, and she gobbles them down. Her appetite is a great distraction from everything else. That evening, she consumes another sleeve of crackers and jam, plus a load of biscuits as dense as rocks. She watches me, but says nothing. Not like she’s afraid of me—I get that plenty already, just walking down the street in Duluth—but like she’s afraid of what I think of her.
Smart girl.
But after a while, even I can’t bear the silence. When I pick up her dirty dishes, I say, “I wish we had more strawberry jam. We’re running out.” I pause, because she’s staring at me from her thin bed. But her eyes brighten at my comment. “Uh. I guess you like berries.” Dumb thing to say, but silence makes me talk without thinking.
“Strawberries are not berries,” she says.
Since when? I want to say. “Then why are they called—”
“They aren’t true botanical berries. They are an aggregate accessory fruit.” When I say nothing because the definition does diddly for me, she adds, “A false fruit, or pseudo fruit. Like pineapples.”
I lean against the wall by the door, dishes still in hand. “Wow. I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know things, too.” She sits up in bed, eyes brighter. “You like to eat fish. Why?”
I laugh. “Because I have no choice? Not much else to catch on this island, and I don’t plan on eating a moose.” She waits and seems to know that’s not the only answer I’m capable of giving. I focus on a hangnail and explain. “Well, my mom in Korea made it for me every Sunday. She’d sprinkle it with salt and cook it until the skin got crispy. I don’t really like fish any other way.”
“But no butter.” The girl pouts.
Oh. That’s right. Her version has been a bit different. “Hey, butter is good. I like the butter.”
She smiles, and we just hang in that silence for a minute, not knowing what else to say. Soon, her eyes flutter. Before long, she’s asleep again, and I wonder how a convo of berries, fish, and butter could be so exhausting.
The next day, I spend the afternoon with the radio, listening to more about the sinking of the St. Anne. Apparently, she was an old ship and bent too much in the middle from her heavy cargo. It’s weird to hear about a ship that’s over fifty years old, dying in such a way. But then again, all things have to die, right? Even ships. It’s sad, though. Funny how I care more about an old boat than my uncle or my dad.
There are still Coast Guard ships on the horizon. I put away the binoculars when the girl exits the bedroom. She eyes the binoculars on the kitchen counter where I put them and curls her lip a little, like she’s cussing at them. Weird.
“They’ll be there a week,” she says again, as if I forgot our conversation yesterday. I nod, but this time, I’m not bringing up the evils of the sweet Siren song of death, so she actually smiles at me. “Are you well?” she asks me.
I want to laugh. Well? Does she mean healthy? Intact? Sane? “I have no idea,” I say.
She grins at my response. What the hell? Sometimes I think if she were stuck here with the varsity football quarterback, the one who’s going to Princeton on a full ride and looks like fucking Tom Brady, she’d have torn him to shreds already.
Her white hair rises a little in the front from static, and sticks to her forehead in that annoying way that only happens to people with superfine, stick-straight hair. My head is covered in thick black stuff with a stubborn wave to it. Static runs screaming away from my head, as do combs and brushes.
She battles with her own strands for a moment, trying to push them back and flatten them down. She huffs with annoyance and marches to the kitchen, where she pulls out a large kitchen knife from a drawer. She grabs a hunk of hair in one fist and holds the knife to it.
Holy shit. “Hold on! Geez, what are you doing?”
“I’m cutting it,” she announces.
That would explain why it’s four different lengths and so irregular. “Don’t you have scissors?”
She blinks at me. Apparently, logic is some orange-winged creature she’s never met before.
“Oh.” She puts the knife down and rummages through a drawer full of twine, pamphlets, and keys that probably don’t open anything. She pulls out an old pair of long shears with black handles, the kind that teachers always have at their desk. And then she grabs another handful of hair and starts to hew at it with the scissors.
“Wait, wait.” I put my hands up to stop her. “Let me do it.”
She freezes with the open blades against a hunk of hair.
“I’m no expert, but I’ve watched the barber do this a million times, so…I’m a visual expert. Sort of.”
For a whole minute, she just stares at me. It’s distinctly uncomfortable. This girl would win the world championship of staring contests. This girl would make a damn fish blink.
“All right.” She takes the scissors and puts them on the counter.
I go back to the bedroom, where the three-legged stool sits beneath the now-empty mug of honey water. When I carry the stool into the kitchen, I notice that the stone cairns dotting the floor have been moved aside to make room for the stool. Oddly, the stones are still perfectly balanced on each other. If I’d moved them that fast, they’d just be a scattered mess.
I pat the stool, and she bends over and pats it, too.
I frown. “No, I mean, sit down here.”
“Oh.” She plops down and I stand behind her, reaching to pick up the scissors. I hope they’re not too dull, or else this is going to be as effective as cutting with spoons.
“How short do you want it?” I ask.
“Short.”
“Uh. Can you be more specific?”
“Like Jean Seberg.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jean Dorothy Seberg was an actress born on November 13, 1938. She starred in thirty-eight films in Hollywood and Europe, and died of a barbiturate overdose in Paris at the age of forty.” She turns to see my expression of undiluted surprise, then points to my head. “It was short. Like yours. Shorter, even.”
I nod. Okay. Short it is.
I start cutting bits off here and there, aiming to keep it about an inch long. I try not to touch her skin, but it’s hard not to. Especially when I start snipping off the bits at the nape of her neck. I do what the barbers do, and capture a lock of hair between two extended fingers, then cut it off on the palm side of my fingers to protect her skin. Her neck is so soft, like velvet or silk. And it’s still really warm, like she’s got a furnace within her body.
Every time I pinch another bit of hair and nestle my fingers against her neck, she blinks and swallows. And I blink and swallow. I’m not used to being so close to girls. To any girl. Carla’s a faint memory these days.
No one at my high school wanted to have anything to do with me. I oozed leperdom out of my pores. The truth is, most people want normal when it comes to choosing friends or hookups in school. Complicated is for the movies. Complicated gets you shunned faster than a case of publicly announced chlamydia. Complicated always ends badly. My life in the last ten years has only ever been school, my uncle, Walmart, and those letters. Those shitty let
ters.
There was never room for normal.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
I’ve stopped cutting, forgetting where I was. I’m not in Duluth anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a few months. I’ve left it all behind. All that matters right now are these scissors, and this girl.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m almost done.”
Her white hair is cropped short now. She looks like a pixie, or some sort of elf. I shuffle to the front of her and reach for some longer wisps of hair near her forehead. She leans closer to meet me in the middle. The neck of her nightgown bows open, and I see the tops of her breasts when I look down.
God, she’s so beautiful.
I swallow again and will my body to not embarrass me. I go from novice haircutter to an expert in seconds, desperate to finish before my whole body fires up like an inferno. I finish off the last few pieces, put the scissors down, and step away. “It’s all done.”
Her long, delicate fingers touch her head all over. She smiles, delighted. She stands up and approaches me, her breasts tenting the front of her gown. I take a step back, and then another. I’m afraid to be so close. She’ll know I’m attracted to her. I wish my body would calm down. Soon, my back hits the stone fireplace, and she closes the distance between us. She points at me with a tapered index finger, reaching until her finger pad touches my neck. It’s not a delicate touch, but deliberate and oddly aggressive. I get the distinct feeling that she’s feeling the pulse in my neck. It must be going a mile a minute. She opens her mouth.
“My name is Anda.”
Chapter Eighteen
ANDA
His face flushes a faint dusky pink beneath his chestnut-colored cheeks. He smells of the boreal forests of the Isle. Of trees and cold lake water and musk. He meets my eyes, but there is a hint of panic there. He doesn’t like me to be so close. Well, no one would, if they knew what I was.