Orphan Island

by Laurel Snyder

  “But . . . ,” said Ess at last.

  “Yes?”

  “But Jinny . . . hafta go away?”

  Jinny sighed. She hadn’t technically lied to the girl, but she’d certainly been avoiding this conversation. She wished she knew how Deen had told Sam about the rules of the boat. What words had he chosen for the telling? She wondered when the conversation had happened—how Deen had known Sam was ready.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Jinny said with a shrug. “I don’t want to make you sad. But, yes. It’s true. I will have to leave. One day.”

  “When will Jinny go?” asked Ess.

  “I’m not . . . sure,” said Jinny. “Nobody knows. It happens when it happens.”

  “Jinny goes away . . . like Mama,” said Ess. She did not ask this as a question. It was a statement. The tone of acceptance in her voice was flat, final.

  “I suppose, a little bit,” Jinny began. “I don’t really know. But Ess . . .” And it wasn’t what Jinny meant to say, but the words that slipped out of her next were “I’m not your mama. I’m just . . . me.”

  Ess’s eyes filled with silent tears. “I know,” she said even more softly, looking down at the thick cuff on her arm, her shoestring bracelet, which was now spangled with bits of shell and tiny feathers. “I know.”

  Jinny sighed. “This is hard. I don’t think you can really understand what I’m trying to say. Can you?”

  Ess looked up from the bracelet and stared at Jinny. “I unnerstand.”

  Jinny couldn’t help being frustrated. There were so few words that fit the moment and so many feelings. She wanted Ess to understand that leaving, when it happened, wasn’t her choice. That she loved the island and didn’t want to go. Though at the same time, Jinny knew inside herself that she did wonder about the world out there . . . a little. She wondered where Deen had gone. It was all so confusing.

  Meanwhile, Jinny’s ankles, in their awkward crouch by the water, were beginning to ache. “You need to understand,” she said, straightening up, “I’m not your mama, Ess. If I were, I’d never leave you. Never! Mamas don’t leave their kids, unless they have to. Mamas are forever and ever. The problem is . . . here, on the island, mamas are only in books. Like dragons or birthdays. We take care of ourselves here, so we don’t need mamas. Do you see?”

  Ess scrunched up her mouth. “Mama’s . . . not real?” she repeated softly, covering her bracelet with her hand.

  “That’s right,” said Jinny. “You’ll understand soon. I promise. That, and also you’ll . . . forget her.”

  At that, Ess suddenly crumpled. She fell down in the wet sand, in the shallow surf beside Jinny. The choking sobs told Jinny just how wrong her words had been. But what could she do? Was she supposed to lie to Ess? Pretend there were mamas stored in a cave somewhere on the other side of the island? Or that a boat with a bunch of parents was going to magically arrive from out of the mist? Everyone kept telling her Ess could handle more, work harder, hear the truth . . . but now, when she tried that, this happened. Maybe Ess wasn’t ready for everything so fast. Maybe everyone was wrong.

  Ess continued to weep, and Jinny let her, unsure of what to do. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she sat down in the water and reached for the girl, set a hand gently on her back. Ess shrank from Jinny’s touch at first, but something told Jinny not to take her hand away. Instead, she reached one arm around Ess’s middle and pulled the wet child into her lap. With the other hand she pushed the thick tangle out of Ess’s face. Then Jinny held her Care. Tight, firm. She crossed her arms over the girl’s frail chest and rocked her in her lap, so that she could feel every tremble, every sob that shook Ess’s body.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Jinny into Ess’s damp hair. “I wish it wasn’t true. Or that I could remember what it feels like, so I could help you more. I can’t be your mama, but I’m here. I’ll be here when you need me. And I promise, you’ll be okay. We all turn out okay. Don’t we?”

  Ess turned and looked at her, straight in the eyes. With words clearer than usual, she said, “Stay, Jinny. Peeze don’t go?”

  Jinny looked at her, remembering what stay had felt like in her own mouth, not so long ago. She grimaced. And she didn’t mean to do it, but somehow . . . she nodded. It was a lie, the nod, and Jinny knew it, but it happened all the same. Jinny only meant to nod at the wanting. I know you want that, she meant to say with her nod. I know how it feels to want that. But she didn’t think Ess had understood. She was pretty sure Ess thought she meant I’ll stay for you, like a mama would, forever and ever. Which was funny, Jinny thought. Since nobody on the island had any idea how that would even work, or feel. Nobody they knew had ever stayed, or lasted forever.

  In any case, Ess kept crying softly. Until. From some deep place in Jinny, a song came creeping out, a small song, a quiet song, but a song she didn’t know she knew. “Shush,” sang Jinny.

  “Shush, shush, shushabye hush.

  Sweet little girl, be slee—eepy.”

  Jinny sang this song in a whisper and stroked Ess’s forehead, and somehow her sobs became quieter, calmer, until at last she shuddered, then stopped, limp in Jinny’s lap, leaning a small head against her shoulder.

  Only then did Jinny stop to wonder if she’d made the song up or pulled it from some deep forgotten place. There was no way to guess. It felt conjured, like magic.

  After a few minutes, Jinny looked around and saw that the others were watching from a distance. All of them, from different vantage points around the beach. Ben, stirring something in the kitchen, and Joon, mending a net with some prairie grass on a rock. Sam wasn’t even pretending to do anything but listen and watch intently. Everyone’s eyes were trained on Jinny and Ess, down at the waterline.

  Jinny looked back at Ess and saw that her eyes were open again now, and the tears had stopped. “Hey,” Jinny said gently, giving the girl another squeeze, “I think you’ve got everyone a little worried.” She pointed down the beach, to where Nat and Eevie were watching them with armloads of driftwood and solemn eyes. “How about a smile? Let them know you’re okay? What do you say to that?”

  Ess limply lifted her head from Jinny’s shoulder. “Okay, Jinny,” she said softly, with a sniff. “I smile.” She forced a quiet smile, an attempt.

  Jinny touched the smaller girl on the nose and said, “That’s only a tiny little bit of a smile. I want to see a great real smile, a sloppy smile! Do you have one in there for me?” Ess looked unsure about that, but then Jinny gave her a tickle in the ribs, and uncontrollably Ess burst into squeals.

  All down the beach, the other kids heard the sound and breathed again. Work resumed. Ben clanked and stirred in the kitchen. Joon whistled as she braided.

  As if on cue, Oz and Jak ran toward them. Oz called out, “Hey, Ess, Ess! Want to play with us?”

  “Oh, jeez,” said Jinny. “What do you think those rascals want now?” She rolled her eyes and Ess laughed. They both stood up, dripping, and turned to greet the boys.

  “We thought maybe Ess would want to play Grab a Crab?” Oz called out as he ran up, holding out two particularly big, angry-looking crabs, brown claws snapping.

  “Yeah,” echoed Jak. “Grab a crab!”

  Ess squealed and pointed at the creature. “It’s pinchy!”

  “Yep!” Jak grinned. “Pinch, pinch, pinch!” He made his own hands into claws and pretended to pinch Ess in the belly until she laughed out loud, a grunting, easy laugh.

  It wasn’t a game Jinny would have chosen, but she could see how awful Jak and Oz felt. They were trying to help, and she knew it. They only wanted to make things better. “Well, I suppose we could give it a try,” she said.

  Ess clapped her hands and spun in an uncontrollable circle. “Yes. Me, me, I grab!” she shouted as she spun.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Jak whispered, hanging back to talk to Jinny as Ess followed Oz up the beach. “For what I said.”

  “Thanks, Jak,” said Jinny. “But it’s not your fault. It’s not any
one’s fault. I just don’t want to make Ess cry. But I guess it’s like Deen used to say—I don’t always get what I want.”

  “That’s not exactly what he used to say,” Eevie said, snickering as she walked up. “Not quite, anyway.”

  “What?” Jinny turned to look at the girl’s sharp, smug face. Why did Eevie have to wrinkle her dumb nose like that? “What do you mean?”

  Eevie squinted at her. “Deen used to tell the rest of us, ‘You don’t have to give Jinny what she wants. You just have to let her think she’s getting it.’”

  “He said that?” demanded Jinny.

  Eevie nodded.

  “Really?” Jinny whirled around and asked Oz and Jak. “Did he say that to you guys too?”

  Oz and Jak looked at each other and shrugged.

  It was an awful moment, but all around her, the others were gathering for the game, so Jinny tried to push what Eevie had said from her mind. She could only handle so much before breakfast.

  Then Oz shouted out, “Okay, make a circle, everyone—here we go!”

  And Jak repeated the shout, “Here we go!”

  Soon everyone was suddenly shouting, “Here we gooooo.” Moments later, Oz released his angry captives and sent a huge crab scuttling straight at Jinny.

  Startled, she reached out and grabbed for the crab. She darted forward and gripped the beast by its shell, then raised it into the air, claws waving furiously. When she released the animal again and sent it off in Sam’s direction, she gave a shout so loud she surprised everyone, including herself.

  “Aaaaagh!” she raged into the air.

  Everyone stopped for a moment, to look at her.

  “Did it pinch you?” asked Sam. “Are you okay?”

  Jinny just shook her head. “Nope,” she said, looking the other way. “Not a bit.”

  12

  Keeping Count

  Jinny wasn’t certain what made her start counting her sleeps. She only knew that some deep urge made her take up her knife one morning and carve a small notch into the doorpost of her sleeping cabin. It made a thick soft sound, shoonk. Jinny stared at the notch, and at the knife in her hand. She wondered why she’d done it. Funny.

  From books, Jinny knew that the world out there counted time—in minutes and hours, days, weeks, and months. Decades and centuries. But on the island, there were only sleeps. Snaps dried to candy in ten or twelve sleeps. Every twenty sleeps or so it was time to change the bedding. But no one really counted beyond that. They figured a year was the number of sleeps it took the green boat to return to the cove. But nobody was certain whether their years were equal to each other or not, because nobody had ever thought to keep track, that Jinny knew of.

  Jinny knew that counting her sleeps wouldn’t change anything, really. The notches in the doorway couldn’t keep the green boat from appearing, full of some drippy little boy she’d never even know but hated already.

  Still, it was oddly satisfying to see the notches grow in the weathered wood. She liked to run her fingertips along the grooves as she came and went through the door. The counting felt good to her. It was something, anyway, a thing she could do, a kind of knowledge. The notches were reliable. Steady. Permanent. Counting them was a comfort.

  One day there were ten notches in the wood.

  Then there were twenty.

  By the fiftieth notch, Ess had learned to swim well and to relight the fire with a flint. She had learned to wash her feet at night without being told, so Jinny no longer had to shake the sand from her blankets in the morning. Ess had also learned to speak in nearly full sentences. She had learned to make seaweed stew all by herself. And for the most part, Jinny had learned to believe that Ess could do these things. She didn’t worry so much.

  Jinny tried to remember to invite Ben along anytime she was going to show Ess something new, but that sort of thing tended to be unplanned, to happen when it needed to happen.

  “I’m sorry,” Jinny explained to Ben when he asked how she’d taught Ess to repair the fishing nets. “Oz showed her, actually—it wasn’t even me this time!” And that seemed okay. Ben seemed okay.

  When Jinny reached her hundredth notch, she ran out of room and had to move around to the other side of the doorframe. Now, when she made the groove each morning, she felt a tremble in her belly. One hundred seemed like a very large number, and at the same time, the hundred notches seemed to have appeared so suddenly.

  The morning of her two hundredth notch, Jinny woke to the sound of rain, spittering softly against the sand and leaves outside her window. On the island, rain was usually something that happened for brief minutes in the night, while everyone slept. It was rare to have a rainy morning. Jinny looked out the window and wondered at it. She nudged Ess with her foot. “Ess, hey, Ess, wake up!”

  The little girl rolled over and buried her face in her pillow. “Oomph,” she said. She began to breathe heavily again into the cloth.

  Jinny kicked harder. “Get up, Ess. Look, it’s rain, day rain!”

  “Rain?” The girl sat up groggily and rubbed her face with the back of a hand. She looked out the window. “Rain.”

  “Isn’t it nice?” asked Jinny. “I’ve got an idea! Let’s grab a nibble and then curl up in the book cabin, to read the morning away and listen to the rain. Okay?”

  Ess nodded, and the two girls pulled on their day clothes and opened the door. Outside, everything smelled wet and bright, alive. Together they ran through the rain. Ess laughed the entire way, sticking out her tongue as she ran. “Ahhhhhh!”

  In the outdoor kitchen, the fire had gone out, so Jinny and Ess just grabbed a big handful of swinks and another of nuts, slamming the metal boxes shut quickly.

  “Ach, we’re out of snaps again,” said Jinny. “But I guess this’ll do us for now, right?”

  Ess nodded. “Yes. This’ll do us!” Her face was already smeared with swink juice, her mouth full and happy. She followed Jinny up the wet sandy path to the book cabin. But when they pushed open the door, the girls found Nat and Eevie already inside.

  “Hey,” called Nat, looking up from a small bowl of dried snaps on the table beside her.

  “You’re the culprit!” shouted Jinny, laughing and reaching for a treat. “Look, Ess. Snaps!”

  Eevie only grunted. She was squinting to read in the dim light from the overcast window.

  “Move over,” said Jinny, wiggling her wet way onto the couch beside the two girls. “Make space.”

  “Hey, no way!” said Eevie, looking up. “There’s not room for everyone, Jinny. And we were here first. Plus, you’re getting too big, especially some parts of you.” She pointed at the top of Jinny’s tunic, which had begun to swell out in a way that nobody else’s did.

  “Shut up, Eevie,” snapped Jinny, crossing her arms over her chest. “Anyway, Ess and I will be more comfortable on the floor. Right, Ess?”

  Ess didn’t answer. She’d already pulled a book from a stack and plopped down on the woven mat. She began to turn the pages.

  Nat smiled from across the room. “What have you got there?” Ess held up a worn and ragged book, with a picture on the front of a sleeping monster and a sailboat. “Oh, that’s one of my favorites. I’ve always thought that place looked a little like our island. Why don’t you read to us?” She settled back to listen.

  Ess looked up. “Jinny can read it,” she said.

  “Of course she can,” Nat said with a smile, “but I’ve heard Jinny read plenty. I want to hear you read it!”

  Ess shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t.”

  “What’s that?” asked Nat. “What do you mean you can’t?”

  Eevie looked shocked. She spun to look at Jinny and said, “She’s not reading yet? What have you guys been doing all this time?”

  “I . . . everything else,” said Jinny. “There’s a lot to learn. You have no idea how much. Anyway, it’s none of your business.”

  Jinny turned back to Nat. “Honestly, I know she should be better by now, but it’s so
hard, and we are working on it. The reading is just . . . going slowly.”

  “Slowly?” scoffed Eevie. “You’re running out of time, you know.”

  “Let’s not talk about that just now,” said Jinny. She raised her eyebrows and jerked her head in Ess’s direction, sending a warning. “Okay?”

  Eevie rolled her eyes. Nat said nothing and went back to her book.

  Jinny glanced at Ess, who was gently turning the colorful pages in her lap. As she opened a book herself, she tried to push away the thought of Ess’s reading, but it kept circling back, distracting her from the words on the page. It wasn’t that Jinny hadn’t tried to teach the younger girl to read. It was just that she wasn’t a very good teacher, and Ess wasn’t a very willing student. It was like the swimming all over again, but Jinny wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. There was no way to just throw Ess into a book the way Joon had chucked her into the sea. Instead they sat each day and stared at books together, and Jinny ran her finger underneath the words as she read them aloud, hoping Ess would learn. She sang her the alphabet at tooth-brushing time, and also in bed at night, but the girl just didn’t seem to be getting it. Between the two of them, they’d only succeeded in giving up.

  Now Ess looked up from her book and pointed at something on the page. “Jinny! What does Abigail say? Here!” She shoved a grubby finger at the page. Jinny leaned closer, to peer over the little girl’s shoulder, and read what Abigail had scribbled in the book.

  “Ummm, yeah, right here, after the part about how Max climbed into the sailboat and sailed away, she’s written, ‘What kind of dumbbell runs away from home, just because they have to go to bed without supper?’” Jinny stopped for a moment, stared at that line, considered it. Then, flustered, she flipped a few pages, stopping when she saw more pencil marks. “And here, after the part about how Max sails back home again, she’s written, ‘If only it were so easy.’”

  Ess was quiet for a long moment. Then she asked, “What’s supper?”

  “I’ve always assumed it was kind of soup,” offered Nat.