The November Girl

by Lydia Kang

  Anda wipes the sweat from my face and chest. She’s dressed in filthy jeans and a sweatshirt big enough for a linebacker. There are smudges of mud in her white hair. It doesn’t matter. Funny how clothes and hair only matter when you don’t know someone, when they’re all you have to judge someone on.

  The silvery color in her irises is muted, maybe because it’s dark now. Her eyes concentrate on me and are small with worry. I miss that wide-eyed look she had before. Care and concern have brought her back to earth. She’s closer to me now, and yet something is missing, too.

  I remember once flying a kite in school, the day before summer vacation started at the end of fourth grade. It was sunny and gorgeous, and the June wind was strong. My science teacher took us out to fly kites, and he’d flown a red-and-orange butterfly kite up in the sky when he handed me the string. The wind began to die down, and I had to reel it in more and more to keep the tension strong so it would stay aloft. But all the while, I was desperate to hold that kite in my hands, to feel the balsam wood parts that kept those wings wide and stiff, and to touch that fluttering tail of red and orange stripes.

  Before long, it was in my hands. That kite was incredible to hold, but I was acutely aware that half its beauty was gone now that it wasn’t flying anymore.

  “You’re the kite,” I tell Anda. Like it’s obvious that she should know what the hell I’m talking about. She looks at me quizzically, and then understanding shadows her face.

  “Yes.”

  She rubs my back, as she’s often done since I’ve been sick. It reminds me of my mother. When I was ill, she’d do the same thing—rub my back in endless, comforting circles. No matter how cold our apartment was, or how sad she was, her hand was always warm and strong. It showed the strength of her love. But it wasn’t stronger than other things, like hate. And fear.

  During my few wakeful moments, I catch Anda staring out at the horizon with longing. Like she actually wishes the gales were back, or that she could run back into the lake and sink more ships. I don’t understand why anyone would crave that kind of awful. Then again, I have my own scars to prove their worth.

  “You want what’s possible,” I say to her, inside one of my fever dreams. Or am I awake? I can’t tell. The fir trees wave merrily above us, or maybe dancing in anticipation of our doom. It must be nighttime, until I realize that my eyes are closed. “Pain is so easy. It’s what we do best.”

  “Yes, Hector,” she says. “Yes.”

  ...

  Little by little, I get better.

  I wake up one morning, the most clearheaded I’ve been since I got sick. Anda is squatting by the campfire, cooking something. And in my memory, I can clearly see that boat sinking, and that lady screaming in the water when it pulled the man into the depths.

  “Why did you do it?” I ask.

  She stops stirring but won’t meet my eye. She knows exactly what I’m asking. There’s silence for a long time.

  “I needed it. It was part of me,” she explains.

  “Can you really stop?”

  She goes back to stirring the pot on the fire, and her eyes well up. “I’m trying now.” And then another long silence. “If I try hard enough, will you still run away from me?”

  I imagine what it would be like to have a lover kill for you. It’s asking the unaskable. And I realize that’s what Anda is doing, only the opposite. Maybe it’s just as awful, though in my world, it’s so obviously right.

  I look down at my arms. They’re starting to heal again, a process that circles around to a fresh cut, inevitably. I’m so damn sick of inevitability. Anda stares at me, with patience, not expectation. It gives me enough energy to tell her, “I’ll try if you try.”

  She smiles shyly at me. “All right,” she says.

  ...

  The more I improve, the worse off I realize we are.

  Two days later, before dawn and after a long and deliriously good night of sleep, I look around. Peachy-gold colors the horizon, slowly brightening the sky. A yawn nearly cracks my head in half, and I sit up and stretch before groaning. My whole body feels creaky and very, very old. Geriatric at seventeen. Excellent.

  Anda is taking a bowl of something off the campfire a few feet away. The embers crackle and snap; the scent of smoke is soothing. She offers me an antibiotic pill, and then a sip of hot, steaming, delicious…water?

  For the first time in however many days I’ve been sick, I’m ravenous.

  “Do we have anything else to eat?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. Her hair is really dirty. Mud is caked on a few locks, and some twigs have tangled in there, too. She must have been sleeping on the bare ground.

  “None?”

  “None.”

  I think for a minute. “How far away are we from Rock Harbor?” I ask her.

  “About thirty miles.”

  I pause, and her eyes say exactly what I’m feeling. Fear. Isle Royale might kick our asses in a very un-royal way.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ANDA

  Hector moves slowly, but he’s only able to walk in small bursts that day. Without food, we can’t go too far. Washington Creek is a short hike away, and I can sense the cool slither of life, sinuous in the water. Much of the green around us is dulling to a brown in anticipation of winter. The urn-shaped flowers of the bog rosemary have all disappeared, and the carnivorous sundew have retreated into their sleeping buds for winter.

  Water is dangerous for me to be around. Temptation simmers in the liquid, its connection with other living things that ought not to be aquatic. Boats. Humans, especially. But luckily this little stream is hardly a danger. I am relieved that we are planning on hiking the Greenstone Ridge Trail to the other side of the Isle Royale. In the center of this island, I’m least tempted by the lure of the lake, by Mother’s influence.

  Hector shows me how to cast the fishing rod a few times, and then I practice while he rests on a rise of drier land. He lacks confidence that we’ll catch anything, but we must. Thirty miles of hiking will take several days, especially in Hector’s state. He must eat.

  The lure plops into the trickling water, and I gently urge the undulating water to tickle a trout from beneath a deep stone toward the dancing rubber worm. I yank on the rod with a jerk, responding more to my own knowledge than the nibbles on the line.

  With a spray of silver water, the fish lurches out of stream and arcs over my head. It lands squirming and wriggling beneath the shadows of an ash tree. Hector gasps with surprise, then jumps up to grasp the fish in his hands, deftly removing the hook. He strings a forked stick through its gills. It’s only just over a pound.

  “Wow. That was pretty lucky.”

  I smile. It has nothing to do with luck, but he’ll figure that out soon enough.

  Within twenty minutes, we have four fish. Hector’s look of surprise is replaced by awe, then relief.

  “Looks like we won’t starve after all,” he says, holding up the catch of trout.

  I beam at him.

  ...

  We eat trout, pike, and perch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not to my liking, but the fish do their job. Hector gains strength back slowly, though not with the vigor he’d had when he first set foot on the island.

  The weather is strange as we walk eastward on the Greenstone Ridge Trail. At times the wind tries to sting my face, and when I rebuke it, it listens to my commands less and less. Usually, the weather and the lake move through me, or I move through them, just as they do with Mother. It’s hard to discern. There is a word for it in physics: resonance. When an external force (me) drives another system (the weather, the lake) to something far larger.

  But ever since I kissed this boy, ever since I decided to stop taking lives, the weather has become an altogether separate entity, chiding me. Pleading. Punishing me. It’s acting like a castaway lover. I’m finding that I can’t prevent the wind from roughly slapping at our backs. I’m losing my grip.

  There are other signs, too. Dead bi
rds show up on the trail, sometimes denuded of feathers, sometimes with their eye sockets eaten away by vermin that ought to be dead or insensate this time of year. We see anemones and columbine blossoming as if it were May, not November. And the radio tells me tales of rogue waves hitting shipping vessels on the calm, clear days recently. My sisters are not happy with my decision, either. I’m spending so much energy keeping my hunger at bay that the island is suffering.

  It’s not the only one suffering, though.

  My body hungers for loss. Letting Agatha go free, and Hector, too—it’s taken a toll. Weakness snakes into my limbs, wearing me down. I think through the shipwrecks dotting the island shoals, like memories of past desserts savored: the Emperor, Chester Congdon, America, Algoma, Glenlyon, Monarch, Cumberland, Henry Chisolm, George M. Cox, Kamloops…the list is a nautical graveyard lullaby for my dark heart.

  As I walk, the quiet sounds of nature don’t soothe; they warble noisily in my ears. The dulcet whispers of the wind grate on me. I’ve never felt the weakness of thigh muscles and knees, or the need for oxygen, and I’m becoming a servant to them. I need nourishment to keep my energy up. And yet roasted campfire fish and endless cups of spruce tip tea don’t bring the same energy that I need. It’s a fire made from paper, instead of a good, seasoned, hardwood log. It burns fierce and bright, leaving me with nothing but ash far too quickly.

  It takes all my concentration to keep the wind from pushing us too harshly, and to keep the ambient temperature around Hector level. It’s actually far colder than forty-five, with the wind, but he can’t tolerate that in his state. Later, it will be harder to keep him safe while we sleep, but I’ll have to try.

  I understand. But I had to let your father go. You will have to let go, too, or it will be your undoing.

  What Mother doesn’t understand is that I toy with the idea of my undoing. What would it feel like to be utterly unraveled? I imagine that it would be terrible and beautiful at the same time, but that in the end, I would disappear like a rising ember into a night sky.

  I fear oblivion.

  Instead, I focus on what I can. It takes every effort to keep the wind and low temperatures at bay around the two of us. I remember the taste of Hector on my tongue. I watch his lean, sturdy legs climb in front of me. And I start asking questions, because I’m finding that his voice is a balm for me.

  “What’s your favorite color?” I begin.

  “Gray. Because depending on how you look at it, it can be every color.”

  “Have you ever broken a bone?”

  “Three. My left fibula, my left pinkie, and my right collarbone.”

  I surreptitiously lick my lips. I love bones. Broken ones, especially.

  “Tell me about your father,” I say.

  He stops walking and turns to me. His eyes glitter, and not in a merry way. He says nothing, just searches my face—for what, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks that knowledge comes with a price.

  “I will tell you about mine,” I add.

  Hector turns his back to me and wordlessly continues walking.

  ...

  He stays silent for the next three hours.

  We take a break every thirty minutes, taking a few bites of dry roasted fish or a long drink of water, and stare in opposite directions. Normally, I can live with silence for vast amounts of time. But the quiet between us is a thick, sticky thing.

  When we hit Sugar Mountain (for the first time since I was five, I am disappointed that sugar doesn’t await us in glistening, snowy piles), we’re too tired to go farther. Island Mine campsite is nearby, and we unload our packs. Hector puts up the tent, though it takes a half a dozen grimaces, a few growls of frustration, and two “fucks” to get it right. I thought doing such normal things would come naturally to anybody but me. I’m finding that I am not the only person who isn’t loved by the trappings of even semicivilized life.

  It’s not a good thing to learn, really.

  Hector lights the portable stove (ah, so that’s how you do it) and boils a canister full of chicken noodle soup. He’d found a lone packet hidden at the bottom of his bag, and whooped in triumph at its discovery. I’m fascinated by it, now that I have a moment to consider what it is. First it was a chicken, then murdered and plucked, then cooked, pulverized and dried into powder with desiccated onion and chives, but now reconstituted back to brothy life. Hector eyes me skeptically as I attack the globs of powder sticking to the sides of the cooking can with an aluminum spork. He sets out a few strips of roasted pike with the skin still on, bubbled and crisp. The sun is departing past the horizon and it’s growing colder. Cloud cover quickly spreads over the rest of the inky sky, blotting out the moonrise. Hector feels the chill. I’m so tired, and it’s taken a lot of effort to battle the wind.

  The wind is not your enemy, Anda.

  I turn away from the south and face north. My movements are an insult, I know. I watch the simmering soup instead. The flames licking the bottom of the boiling can are lovely. I wish I could eat them, or wear them like starflowers in my hair.

  “Tomorrow we’ll reach Lake Desor. I can try to fish then,” Hector says.

  “There’s no fish in Lake Desor.”

  “Well…” Hector studies a map. “Uh, Hatchet Lake then.”

  “There’s no fish in Hatchet Lake.”

  He stares at me, waiting. For what?

  “So what lakes have fish?” he asks, huffing. I know this tone. I’ve heard it before in Father’s voice. I believe it is called exasperation.

  “Ahmik, Angleworm, Beaver, Benson, Chickenbone, Dustin, Epidote, Eva, Feldtmann, Forbes—”

  “Basically, every other lake except the two I mentioned.”

  I nod.

  He shakes his head. What have I done wrong?

  We slurp the salty soup as nighttime takes a stronger hold. I don’t like the soup nearly as much as candy. I should like more sweet things. I wonder if consuming a pound of chocolate in a day is bad for a body. Surely not. I am, however, happy that the granola bars are gone. They tasted like pinecones glued together with sap. And it’s dark, so dark.

  Hector goes about carefully tossing away the fish remains far from camp. “I don’t want the foxes or wolves to come near our stuff,” he explains, when he sees me watching curiously.

  “They won’t come.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  I glance over my shoulder into the depths between the trees. I listen for the moose, the wolves, the foxes. Nothing. “They always stay away from me.”

  At this, Hector stops rinsing his hands with water. “Why?” he asks quietly.

  “They don’t like me.”

  I put my palm flat on the ground, near some browned strawberry leaves and tangled grasses. The soil around my hand trembles, the little clots of dirt shaking as if a tiny earthquake has hit. Worms and centipedes and pill bugs erupt out of the soil, fleeing in an outward wave, desperate to get away.

  Hector’s eyes are large with astonishment.

  My father’s home is not hermetically sealed from the outside, but not a single spider or ant ever trespasses. There are no cobwebs in the corners, and it’s not because of my nonexistent immaculate cleaning.

  “Did you learn to do that?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Can you…not do it?” he tries again.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to not be myself. When I try, bad things happen. Up until now, I forgot that there was more than this one part of myself.”

  This time, Hector nods. “Tell me about it.” He chuckles, but he’s not happy. “I’ve been half of something my whole life. Too Korean or too American. Too Black, or not Black enough. It gets exhausting sometimes.”

  “What do you do?” I’m desperate to know.

  “Oh, there’s no good answer. I try to stop forcing myself into neat little boxes that people want to corner me in. They never stop trying, though.” He shifts uncomfortably. “It never feels right when I try to ignore half of what I am.”


  I nibble my rough cuticles. Boxes. I think of what it’s like to place parts of myself in them. My need to shatter, submerge, bleed. I think of how my warring sides of agony and relief bring more balance to the seasons. How that balance only happens when I allow myself the mercy of death, every November. How I weep for weeks in springtime, when living things on the island emerge to exist with excruciating pain, only to be relieved by death.

  And then I think about licking butter off my fingertips. Of melting chocolate on the roof of my mouth. The delight of Hector’s weight crushing me when we tumbled in the cabin that bashfully regarded us. I look at Hector’s handsome, worried face and think of his hungered kisses—a completely idiosyncratic human action that means nothing in the clockwork of nature. His kisses had been an opiate for me—the girl, Anda Selkirk—and I returned them just as ravenously.

  Can I redraw a line that’s cut me in two for so long?

  “Look, I’m no expert. I’m still trying to figure it all out,” Hector says after a minute of silence. “So what are you fighting, exactly? I don’t understand.”

  “If I told you, you would run away again.” I frown. The insects and worms have since left the earth around me and once again, I’m alone. I can’t stand the idea of Hector leaving, too. “I’m so tired,” I say. “I’m not used to being tired.”

  Hector pauses. “You said you’d tell me a fairy tale sometime. This is what you were talking about, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” I hesitate. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.”

  Hector bristles at my words. He turns away from me and goes to the tent. “I’m pretty tired, too.”

  I furrow my brow. His words have no relationship to my last words.

  Ah. This is evasion.

  I stand up and crawl inside the shelter. It’s so small, this tent. It’s a nylon tomb. Next to Hector, the whole sides of our bodies might touch. But there is only one sleeping bag here. A small clip light hangs from the peak in the roof, casting a dim glow inside. I look up at him, and he’s poised to walk away.

  “Listen,” he says. “It’s not as cold as I thought it would be. So I’ll sleep outside, and you can sleep inside.”