by Abby Geni
But you had no time for such whitewashed fables. You preferred stories that were chaotic and enigmatic. The world of your fairy tales—though magical—showed the world as it actually is. Secrets flourish undiscovered. Loved ones die. Danger is not always perceptible. Evil goes unpunished. There is no order; there is no safety. I believe this is what you were trying to tell me.
I HAVEN’T THOUGHT much about my conversation with Charlene. I have not wanted to consider it. And yet, against my will, it has never been far from my mind. It is like a bright light in the corner of the room—too bright to look at directly. Though I have been keeping my gaze averted, I am still aware of that uncomfortable glow.
I know what she was suggesting. I have even dreamed about it. Andrew on the rocks, facing the sea. His skin agleam. His breath steaming the air. A dark figure behind him, rising up. Stone in hand. I have heard the grunt of pain. I have seen the splash of blood. I have watched Andrew’s body tumble down.
What I have decided, finally, is that Charlene was wrong. Charlene was mistaken. The cabin is old. Sounds carry unaccountably between the rooms through the pipes and heating grates; I have noticed it before. Once, as I was sitting at the table, I realized that I could hear Lucy gargling in the bathroom upstairs as clear as a bell, while in the kitchen the bang of pots and pans seemed muffled. On the night in question, something similar could have happened. Charlene might have heard Andrew on the porch, along with Mick and Forest murmuring in their bedroom. She might have conflated two different events: footsteps outside the house, voices inside the house.
Or perhaps it was the ghost. I have dreamed about this too. Andrew slinking along the shoreline in the moonlight. A shimmer in the air beside him. A woman’s figure. Her body solidifying out of the mist and rain—out of nothing. I have seen the haze of her nightgown. I have seen the swing of one pale arm.
MICK CAME BACK today, along with Lucy and Forest. This caught me off guard. It is hard to keep track of time on the islands. Calendars, clocks—these things seem so arbitrary. An artificial construct. There is a timelessness about this place. The seasons are measured not by a variation in the weather but by a variation in the animals. Winter is when the whales and seals breed. Summer is Bird Season. Autumn belongs to the sharks. Night does not follow day, not really—that would imply that one occurs before the other. Instead, day and night are a great wave, beginning at the base, the bright dawn, and sweeping up through the long golden afternoon to crest in the evening and crash down again into darkness, where the cycle begins anew. Time on the islands has become, for me, self-contained and unchanging.
And so, this morning I missed any number of clues that something was going on. To begin with, I slept through the early call on the radiophone. (Before Andrew, I had always awoken with the birds. Now, though, After Andrew, I was as fatigued and somnolent as a teenager.) During breakfast, I didn’t happen to glance out the window and see the ferry approaching the islands. I didn’t observe Galen slipping out to meet the boat when it dropped anchor. I didn’t even hear the voices carrying on the wind from East Landing, where Lucy, Forest, and Mick had been deposited by the Billy Pugh, breathing in the salt air with smiles on their faces. During all this time, I was lying on the couch, leafing through a book on pinnipeds. When I heard a clatter, I shot a look at Oliver the octopus, who was floating in his tank, his skin a delicate mauve.
There was a crash, and the front door flew open.
“Woo-hoo!” Mick shouted. “Home at last. Thank the lord!”
I had forgotten how very big he was. In two strides, he had crossed the room. I found myself being swung in a circle like a rag doll. The walls pivoted around me. When he set me down, I stumbled and almost fell. Mick laughed and planted a kiss on the top of my head.
“I missed my little mouse girl,” he said. His gaze wandered down my frame, drinking me in. As he stared at my torso, I saw his brow furrow quizzically for a moment. Then, however, Charlene came hurrying out of the kitchen in an apron, her arms sudsy and glistening from washing dishes.
“Hey, you!” she cried. “I thought to myself, either there’s a herd of elephants in the cabin, or Mick is back.”
THAT EVENING, LUCY took Oliver out of his tank. She played with him, transferring him from hand to hand, wetting the floor. She seemed to be lost in pure delight, as if she had missed him terribly during her time away. She, Forest, and Mick were all in this state—so happy to be back on the islands they were almost weightless. The mainland had been a fine respite, but they had all talked about the shell shock of returning, however briefly, to civilized life. Forest had been on the islands for five years, Mick almost as long. Lucy, a little younger, had come here straight out of college, a year or so ago, dragging Andrew in her wake. Since their arrival, all of them had voyaged home to the mainland now and again. Each time was the same. They would be baffled by the sheer quantity of land, our blue planet replaced by a carpet of grass and concrete. They would be unsettled by commonplace things. Fire hydrants. Central heating. A car horn. The gleam of jewelry. The sugary odor of a bakery on the breeze. The squeal of a bicycle braking. They would find themselves out of step, out of place: waking too early, eating at the wrong time of day, overloaded by the simple fact of a telephone ringing. They would return to the islands like elephant seals reentering the ocean. Back in their natural habitat. Back where they belonged.
I was sitting on the couch, the others distributed around the living room, all of us watching Lucy as she lifted the octopus high. She rolled him down one arm, giggling at his confusion. Oliver flashed through a rainbow of colors. His suckers wriggled and groped, trying to find purchase on her sleeve.
I turned to Mick, who was seated at my side.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you weren’t supposed to interfere with the animals here. Not ever. Isn’t that the biologist’s credo?”
I meant this to be an aside, a private exchange. But the room was quiet, and everyone turned to look at me. Lucy flushed.
“I study birds,” she snapped. “Does Oliver look like a bird to you?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s a pet,” she said. “Pets are different.”
She glared at me a moment longer, then stomped over to the aquarium and plunged the octopus into the water with a vicious movement. He sank, ballooning outward, changing shape. His tentacles glittered with bubbles.
22
IN A PLACE like this, it should be hard to keep secrets. Southeast Farallon is small, and the cabin is smaller still. All of us live on top of each other. We all know about Lucy’s crying jags. We are all aware of Galen’s nocturnal restlessness, pacing his room with quick footsteps. We all know when Mick engages in a late-night snack, banging around the kitchen at three in the morning. Until recently, I had begun to think that I knew everything there was to know about the islands.
But as it turns out, there has been a secret right under my nose for months.
Last night I woke to the sound of voices. It is January, the heart of Seal Season, and the archipelago is never quiet, regardless of the hour. The males boom, the females grunt, and the pups squeal all night long. Their constant noise sets my nerves on edge. It is a perpetual reminder of mating and birthing and suckling. I do not want to think about these things. I do my best to tune out the roar. Now I lay awake, assuming I’d heard wrong, mistaking animal sounds for human speech.
Then it came again. A man’s voice. Someone was outside the window.
My heart began to pound. I sat upright, tugging the blinds aside. It was a bright, moonlit night. The landscape was a jumble, the familiar contours transformed into a lurid black-and-white photograph. Gradually I saw that there were two figures moving on the slope. They had been talking, but they were quiet now.
The scene continued to clarify as my eyes adjusted. It was a bit like watching the shape of an undersea stone coming clear through the ruffled surface of water. The silhouettes belonged to Mick and Forest. I recognized the former’s bulk
and the latter’s delicate slimness. They were heading away from the cabin. They were whispering together. Forest laughed, a high-pitched sound, something I had never heard him give before. Then he leaned in. Before my eyes, the two men kissed.
It registered as an electric shock. There was no mistaking what was happening: it was a passionate, abandoned, drowning-without-each-other sort of lip-lock. There had been a line of radiant blue separating their frames, but now they merged. Forest went up on his toes. They swayed back and forth.
I reached for my camera. It was an automatic reflex. Tomcat, one of my digital SLR instruments, was settled, as always, on the night table. I kept it there for emergencies—a shark attack, a whale sighting, the return of the ghost. I did not think. I merely acted, lifting the camera to my eye.
Mick’s face came into focus, all snowy planes. Forest was harder to track. I kept zooming in on the back of his head. Their hands met in space, fingers reaching. I still had not adjusted to the firework display of stars on the Farallon Islands. Cassiopeia and Orion blazed above the horizon like configurations of torches. Mick and Forest paced with a practiced step across the granite. They were moving toward the coast guard house. Mick was almost skipping. Something—a bird calling, a seal barking—made them pause and gaze to the left, toward the ocean. At the door of the coast guard house, they engaged in a funny little pantomime, each attempting with exaggerated politeness to give way and allow the other to go first.
Once they were inside I adjusted the focus, skimming frantically across the windows. The upper story was as lightless as a black hole, nothing there but the whirling and flickering of the bats. Biting my lip, I waited. One minute passed. Two minutes. Then something pale darted across my lens.
Mick and Forest had stationed themselves in the moonlit hollow of the living room. I sat up straighter. It was more difficult now to keep an eye on them. Since they were framed in the window, the slightest shift from side to side could remove either of them entirely from my field of vision. And they were moving fast. I watched them kiss hungrily, almost angrily. Mick was unbuttoning Forest’s shirt.
I began taking pictures. Because it was tricky to catch a glimpse, I wanted to keep what I caught. The sound of the shutter echoed around the room like gunfire. I snapped Forest’s marble rib cage, bare to the navel. I snapped another wild kiss, Mick’s hands flying upward in a blurred, avid surge. I snapped Forest tearing off his own scarf and flinging it aside. Soon they were both unclothed. The window cut off their bodies at the waist. Still, it was easy enough to follow what was going on. Forest swiveled so his back touched Mick’s belly. Two moon-pale torsos moved in concert. Mick wrapped his arms around Forest’s chest, and I marveled anew at Forest’s slimness, not an ounce of fat on him. At first their dance was tentative, graceful. Mick buried his cheek in Forest’s shoulder. Forest’s head rocked back. I heard the cry he gave, a moan that would ordinarily have passed for the rowdy wind or the rumble of the elephant seals. He threw out a hand, bracing himself against the wall.
I lowered the camera for a moment. The sensation was an odd one. For the first time in a long while, I was remembering desire. The spark of hunger. The pull of lust. That part of myself. But the memory was faint, distorted, as though from a dream. Once upon a time, I had experienced these things. But that had been another life. I remembered it now the way a ghost might. All mind, no body.
After a while, the inevitable happened: Mick and Forest tumbled onto the floor and vanished. I waited, my heart hammering. Perhaps their lovemaking would not last long. Perhaps they would reappear. The wind picked up. The sea roared in the distance. Mick and Forest stayed out of my sight.
I sat back on the mattress, brushing my hair out of my face. So many things made sense to me now. The more I considered the matter, the clearer it became.
To start with, there was the issue of cohabitation. The cabin now had six people and only five bedrooms. Charlene, as the lowest member on the totem pole, lodged in a bedroom that was quite literally a former closet. (Her bed took up the entire floor, and the decorations on the walls were racks of coat hooks.) In the past, Andrew and Lucy had shared a room. Until now, however, I had never understood why Mick and Forest had also chosen to share. It would have been a great deal more practical for Forest to bunk with Galen—his fellow shark addict, on his same schedule.
Other questions were now answered, too. Forest’s reserved nature. His impenetrable demeanor. His stillness and silence. In his presence, I’d always had the feeling that he was keeping himself under tight control. Now I understood why. He was hiding a key facet of his personality, the core of his nature. By the same token, Mick’s lack of romantic interest in me no longer felt like an insult.
I flicked through the pictures I had just taken. Mick smiling as Forest nuzzled his throat. Forest laughing in the wake of a hearty kiss. Their arms tangled, fingers entwined.
For the first time, my conscience pricked me. Obviously, both men had put a premium on secrecy. They shared a room, after all; they could easily have engaged in their romantic adventures there. But the cabin was ancient and creaky. I shuddered, remembering the many times I had been an unwilling audience to Lucy and Andrew’s trysts. Mick and Forest, it seemed, regularly risked injury and illness to keep their relationship hidden from prying eyes.
I considered deleting the snapshots. But the photographer in me would not allow that. They were a chronicle, and any chronicle was sacrosanct. A few of them were quite beautiful, too—I had been able to catch the energy of those fiery embraces, the motion of two bodies swaying together. I would hide the camera under my bed. From now on, I would not use it publicly, just in case.
Eventually I realized how tired I was. It was nearly one in the morning. I lay down. I wondered how often Mick and Forest had made these late-night journeys during my time on the islands. I wondered how they managed to behave so normally the next day. Rising at their usual hour. Greeting each other casually, like friends, like colleagues. Showering one another’s sweat off their skin.
AT DAWN, I awoke with a frightened jolt. I had been dreaming about Andrew. This often happened; it was a nightmare I could not seem to escape. Sometimes I had to relive the rape—breath on my neck, weight on my belly. Sometimes I saw the ghost again, glimmering in the corner of my room. Sometimes Andrew was bloodied and battered in these dreams. Half-dead in the darkness above me. His head bashed in. Dripping fluids and brain matter onto my pillow.
This time, though, I shook off the nightmare fairly quickly. I was doing mental calculations. On the night in question—the worst night, the night everything had changed—I knew exactly where everyone in the cabin had been. I had considered it many times. Galen: drunk and incapable. Charlene: lost in music, headphones on. Lucy: asleep. Mick and Forest: out on the grounds.
Until today, I had thought those two were whale-watching by moonlight. It was a silly explanation, but it was the only one I’d been able to come up with. Now, of course, I knew the truth. My mouth was dry. I sat up in bed, shoving the blanket away. Outside the window, the fog was so thick that I could not see the ocean. It had been two months since Andrew had assaulted me. On that night, Mick and Forest had slipped away to the coast guard house to make love.
Huddled on the mattress, I gave a whimper. Mick was my friend. He was a true friend, maybe the first I’d ever had. If he had known what was happening, he would have stopped it. He would have protected me.
I could not be sure of the others. I could not be sure of any of them. No one had been a witness to my assault, of course. But even if they had, I did not know how they might have reacted. They were biologists. Cold. Impassive. Uninvolved. If Forest had been in the cabin that night, I could imagine him putting a pillow over his head to block out the noise. If Charlene had caught the creak of bedsprings, she might not have thought it was her place to interfere. Galen might not have leapt into action either. He might have analyzed the situation, head cocked, listening. He might have studied my rape as he would observe the
struggle of a lost seal pup.
Lucy was a wild card. She disliked me, and she had loved Andrew. Her mind was a dark morass. I could not begin to parse her motivations, let alone predict what she might have done if she had woken in the night to the sound of muffled cries above her, her boyfriend’s heavy breathing, the clang of my headboard.
But I knew about Mick. He would have fought for me. He would have saved me.
For the first time, I wondered if Andrew had been aware of this too. He might have made a similar calculation, tallying up the location of each biologist, weighing the risk. He had chosen a time when he would not be overheard. He had waited for footsteps on the porch, the murmur of Mick and Forest’s voices. In his quest for romance and release, Mick had left me vulnerable. He had left me all alone.
23
THE ELEPHANT SEALS are giving birth. Throughout the month of January, the females have appeared by the dozen. I am enraptured by them. Unlike their male counterparts, they are beautiful in the traditional manner of seals: smooth and rotund, their faces vaguely canine, their black eyes filled with pinniped intelligence. I have photographed more births than I can count. The pups are charcoal-colored when they arrive, slimy and blind. More blood on the rocks. They uncurl their bodies, sticky with amniotic gel, teeth flashing. The females sing to them in booming, grating voices. They are imprinting themselves on their newborns. They are telling each pup which scent and voice belong to its mother.