by Anna North
“Did you know my dad?” she asked him. “He died of parrot fever. His name was Alejandro.”
Nathaniel shook his head.
“Like I said, I didn’t spend much time with them. Pretty quick, I realized I had a shot, I had this new identity. For at least a little while, Tyson wouldn’t know who I was. And I could get off his blacklist—but not if I kept hanging out with the kids I grew up with.”
He stopped talking, and Darcy watched him. He had a new look on his face now, some tension in the eyebrow muscles, like hope, like caution.
“The worst was my sister,” he went on. “When we were kids, she used to put her hands around my head”—he pressed his small palms into his scalp—“and no matter how scared or angry or sad I was, I’d calm down, because I knew she would always be there. But then we grew up, and she was working these really marginal jobs, trash collecting, day labor—I suspected worse but she’d never say—anyway, I knew I couldn’t see her anymore.”
Darcy understood now what she saw in his face. She had seen it in Yuka, and sometimes, when she happened to pass by a mirror, she now saw it in herself. It was loneliness.
“I didn’t have the courage to tell her outright,” he went on, “so I just stopped answering the door when she came around. I had roommates then, a couple of young second-boat guys, real clean-cut; they didn’t know about my operation, they didn’t know I even had a sister. The last time she came she sobbed outside my door for an hour, and I told my roommates she was a crazy person who was stalking me.”
Darcy wasn’t sure what to say. Here was someone who had one person who had loved him all her life and would love him until she died, and he had abandoned her. The very thing that had been taken from Darcy, he had simply thrown away.
“I’m sorry,” she said flatly.
He sighed.
“No you’re not, I didn’t expect you to be. Or maybe I did—I don’t know. You were right, I did have an easy life. It’s hard to believe, but the island was doing really well for a while. New factories springing up, new jobs. GreenValley was growing. I got really settled there, rose up through the ranks. I was Nathaniel Cobb to start out with, but when I got divorced I started going by Rosen again, just because I missed it. I felt that safe. I was so stupid; I should’ve known they’d figure it out eventually, and that someday I’d be shit out of luck and I’d have given up my sister for nothing. But I didn’t think about that.”
His self-pity made her angry; she wanted to yell at him, treat him like a sniveling child. But she thought, too, of the guard, of how she’d been willing to give up part of herself to get what she wanted. It was not right that their lives had required this of them, that the island required this of them, and her anger began to take a different course—she thought of Tyson, not as he must be now, but as he was when Yuka knew him, young and power hungry and conniving. Darcy wished she had been alive then, that she had been on the mainland. She would have known not to listen to Tyson; she could’ve told the others. Of course, she had the advantage of Yuka and Nathaniel to tell her what had happened. Still, there must be people in the world who are not fooled, who can catch evil before it spreads. She wondered how she would know if she was such a person.
“All right,” she said. “I’m not sorry. But I get why you did it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I haven’t told anyone that story. Not even my wife. I don’t exactly have a lot of friends.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and she felt something like sympathy between them. For a moment she liked it, and then it became uncomfortable.
“Look,” Nathaniel said, pointing at the bucket. “I’m not going to use that thing. I’m going outside.”
“Are you sure? It might not be safe.”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “I don’t really like to go in front of people.”
Darcy wondered if he was embarrassed about his penis. She imagined him cupping his hand over it in public restrooms, shielding it from view. She imagined him explaining it to his future wife, sitting on his couch with her, not touching, his eyes cast off to the side. She understood why he had wanted a job so badly—money bought privacy.
Water rushed in the door as he shut it behind him. She saw him pass the smeary plastic window, heading for the narrow space between the shacks. She thought of Nathaniel as a child, a little girl wishing for a boy’s body, her sister’s hands around her compact, splitting head. Sarah must have played with them, she might have shared a room with them at night, one of ten kids packed into the kitchen or bathroom or supply closet. They might have heard her cry out in her dreams. Why had Sarah never mentioned them? Why hadn’t they come to the apartment when Darcy was growing up, to reminisce about old times? Why had no one ever come to the apartment? The humid closeness of their life together had always seemed natural, but now it began to seem strange.
Then Darcy heard a sound. The sound was loud—it rang out above the rain—but short, too short to have an obvious source. It could have been the truncated bark of an angry dog suddenly placated with food, or the abrupt slamming of a door—or Nathaniel’s voice, trying to cry out before someone stopped his mouth. For a second she thought of hiding, but if Tyson’s guards were really here then surely they would find her, and even if they didn’t, she didn’t want her only link to her mother to disappear. She felt a new kind of fear heating up in her belly, a fear that was almost excitement, and she let it rise up all the way to the top of her head, and then she stepped outside. She looked around her. A tiny girl with a bloody nose half ran, half swam into a nearby shack. A seagull flapped above, cackling like a witch. Darcy called to Nathaniel; her hands began to shake. And as she stood on the rushing street, she smelled the heavy fetor of all Hell City’s stirred-up trash, and beneath it something different, something sharp and insistent and almost sweet, like the rain was trying and failing to clean the world it washed over, and then she heard something behind her, and then she felt hands on her arms and something sharp in her neck and she had the sensation, not unpleasant, of the sky and the shacks and even the water itself melting before her eyes.
9
When you wake up for the first time in a strange bed, you wonder not only where you are but who you are. Are you, perhaps, the person who has always slept in this cool room, between these smooth blue sheets? Are you the one who played with this stuffed owl, these smiling china ponies, who gave them names and whispered their stories to your soft pillow when you couldn’t sleep? Are you the girl whose father read to you in that wooden rocking chair, whose mother gave you those roller skates for your birthday?
And by the time you realize that you are not that girl, that this room has never been your own, that you have never been the kind of person who sleeps in a room like this—by that time you are not as you were before, and all the certainties and convictions that held your brain in place are loosened slightly, like the laces of a shoe.
“Don’t be alarmed,” a woman said.
Darcy snapped upright, felt the pain fork up from her ankle all the way to her face, looked down to see her foot encased in some kind of blue metallic sleeve, and shouted at the woman with all the rage her muddled mouth could produce, “Who the fuck are you?”
The woman laughed.
“I should learn not to say that. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ right after someone’s just come out of the operating room. Of course you’re going to be alarmed. I’m Marie. I prepped you for surgery, remember?”
The woman was small, with a pointed chin and green, wary eyes. She had the look of someone who had been undernourished as a child. At first Darcy thought she was young, but as she came closer and set a plate with an aluminum cover down on the nightstand, Darcy saw the loose skin beneath her eyes and along her jaw, the wrinkles in her forehead—she might be fifty, or older. Her dark brown hair was cropped close to her head.
“You did surgery on me?” Darcy asked.
“Your ankle was a mess. It looked like it had never been set properly and you’d been wal
king on it for a while. It was a nasty break—I don’t know what you did to it.”
Darcy remembered the Big Top, and the polar bear, and the memory had the effect of cleaning out her mind all the way up to the moment when she’d stood outside the shack looking for Nathaniel, and no further.
“Where’s Tyson?” she demanded. “I want to see him.”
Marie smiled, a little ruefully.
“You’ll see him,” she said, “as soon as you’ve rested a bit. You haven’t eaten in several days, and we had to give you some heavy-duty painkillers. You’re going to be a little woozy for a while, and when the pain comes back, you’ll probably want something a bit lighter.”
Marie held out a hand with two brown pills nestled in her palm. Her fingers were short, blunt, savage-looking.
“I’m not taking those,” Darcy said. “Take me to see Tyson.”
“I don’t blame you. Who the fuck am I, anyway?”
Her voice was good-natured, but with a hard edge to it.
“I’ll put them on the nightstand,” she said, “just in case you change your mind. Oh, and keep your weight off that leg—but then that’s obvious.”
She turned to leave.
“Wait,” Darcy called. “Where’s my mom?”
Marie turned back, with something like sympathy about her eyes and lips.
“We’ll explain all that to you soon,” she said, and as she walked out the door she tugged her earlobes, the left and the right, and Darcy realized who she was.
What did it mean that Armin’s old lover, the one who pulled her earlobes to keep away the frostbite, was here now, apparently working with Tyson? It meant that someone poor, someone neither first-nor second-boat, could become someone who held other people captive.
As soon as she left, Darcy hopped out of the bed on her good leg and tried the door. She rattled it against the lock until she couldn’t stand up anymore. Then she lay on the floor with her head against it, breathing the smell of the wood. It smelled clean and old. The air in the room was dry, without the heavy rot scent she was used to. It felt good to breathe deeply and slowly; it felt like the air was cleaning out her blood.
She was so weak that standing up felt like climbing a mountain. She wasn’t hungry, but she knew food would shore her up, make her muscles work again. She lifted the cover from the plate and saw a hamburger sitting smug and beefy on a sesame bun. It could be slathered with cyanide to knock her dead, or laced with truth serum to make her tell everything she knew. But she knew so little, and if they had wanted to kill her, why would they have set her leg? The bun gave slightly under Darcy’s fingers. When she bit down, she tasted ketchup, the slight sharpness of real mayonnaise. Then the beef—savory, fatty, slightly grainy on her tongue. It tasted better than she thought food should and so she wolfed it fast, like someone might take it away. She looked at the rocking chair and saw that the room was coming back into focus; her vision had been fuzzed and furred with weakness or drugs. She saw a small window up near the ceiling, letting in a chunk of blue sky. She saw the titles of the books on the bookshelf—The Odyssey, Siddhartha, Merriam-Webster’s World Atlas. Darcy picked up The Odyssey. She had never held a book like this before—heavy in her hands, the pages textured like cloth. At school the books were shiny Seafiber, each light as a slice of bread, each shot with bullet points and packed with pictures. She replaced The Odyssey and hefted the atlas—three times the size of her Animal Atlas, with its title embossed in gold. Tucked inside its front cover was a sheaf of loose-leaf maps, the paper tea-colored, worn at the edges, threadbare in the folds. The first map was of the West Coast and Pacific Ocean, with numbers and notes and a long dotted line written across it in a cramped, spidery hand. The second—just spots scattered across a grid—confused Darcy until she remembered the constellations they’d studied in fourth grade. Then the spots resolved themselves into a hunter, a woman, a dipper, and she understood that the spot circled several times in faded blue ink must be the North Star. She turned the page, and found a sheet torn from another book, badly water-stained but legible, titled “Navigation by Sextant.” She’d never heard of a sextant, but from the instructions and the diagrams she could tell it was to help sailors find their way at sea. The papers seemed to buzz in her hands—Tyson must have used them to plot the course from the mainland to the island. Darcy flipped back to the ocean map and traced the dotted line with her finger. It began in Seattle and snaked across the sea, before ending at a spot marked “AP.” Darcy stared at the line—a record of her mother’s journey, made even before the journey began.
On the second shelf was an oxblood leather binder with the word “Photos” embossed in gold on the spine. It was even heavier than the books; it smelled animal and dark. Alone on the first page, behind a protective film, was a photo of a baby in a maternity ward. The photo was old, turning the odd liverish color of photos from the beginning of the century, and the baby looked pinched and scrawny and not entirely healthy. Darcy turned the page and saw a birthday party for a one-year-old, a fat chocolate cake with a single candle in it, tiny children around the table with their parents rising up out of the photo like trees. The birthday boy was clearly the same one as the newborn, and though a year had plumped him out a little, it had not made him look any better suited to the universe. The other children seemed to be laughing and gurgling at one another; he was staring, faintly cross-eyed, at the cake.
Darcy began flipping pages. She bypassed childhood, and adolescence, and she was about to put the book back on the shelf when she saw the boy, a young man now, standing outside in a graduation cap and a parka. His face was unpleasant—weak-chinned, sallow, prematurely haggard. But it was a familiar face: if you took every part of it and made it stronger, more distinguished and handsome, you’d have the picture of Tyson from the morning flyers. He even held his shoulders strangely, just as Yuka had said—one hitched up higher than the other, the arms unnaturally straight. As though his entry into the world had been some kind of injury.
She looked back at the other photos and saw that in almost all of them, Tyson was alone, if not in fact then in gaze, all those around him seeming to laugh at a joke he was only pretending to get. In his baseball-team photo—nine boys in hats and scarves kneeling on a brownish field—he was slightly apart from the rest, his shoulders in that half hunch, his eyes pointed at the ground. In his high school prom picture, he held his date’s elbow like it was a teacup, breakable and hard. Darcy looked at his graduation photo again and saw a misfit boy who had somehow learned relatively late in life that he could influence people. She could see how someone whose childhood snapshots looked like this might want to cancel them out, might want a manly, powerful version of himself plastered on every news flyer. But why, then, the nostalgia? Why the rocking horse? Why build a monument to a time when you were an outcast?
Darcy was confused, and her head still pounded from her recent sedation, but still she felt calmed by the room. She liked its smells, the way it was full without being crowded, the way its furniture was old but not falling apart. She could almost imagine that it was her room after all, that she had grown up here, in another time, without heat or ice or sorrow. She picked another book from the shelf, one called Kon-Tiki, and read about sailing until her leg began to hurt again. Then she gave in, took the brown pills, and read some more, until she fell asleep.
Into her dream came an unfamiliar smell. It was thick, greasy, savory, like tiny particles of fat suspended in the air. In the dream it came from the bell of a purple, fleshy-petaled flower. In reality it came from a plate on her nightstand, a plate glistening with red-brown bacon and real, orange-yolked eggs. Marie was sitting on the edge of the bed. Darcy saw that she’d brought a crutch with her; it leaned against the bookshelf, glinting expensively. She wondered where she was supposed to use it.
“You slept like a stone,” Marie said.
Darcy didn’t like the idea that she’d slept soundly in that place, and she didn’t like that Marie knew it.
&
nbsp; “I know who you are,” she said.
Marie raised an eyebrow in weary amusement.
“Do tell,” she said.
“I know Armin Abcarian. He said you had an affair on the mainland. He got you onto a boat so you could be together, but now he thinks you’re dead. It sounds to me like you used him.”
Marie knit her brows momentarily at the mention of Armin’s name, but as Darcy kept talking she shook her head and smiled.
“Armin may not have mentioned his wife to you,” she said.
“He did,” said Darcy, “but I don’t think she’s around anymore.”
“Maybe not now,” Marie said. “Maybe she died, or maybe she found out about another one of his women. But back in Portland, she was very much around. I met her once—she was sweet, kind of impractical. She went on about how much she missed the flowers from her childhood. Anyway, he said he was going to leave her, we were going to go on the second boat together. It was all set up. Then at the last minute he says actually the two of them are going, but it’s okay, because I should just wait two years, and he can get me on the next one. I throw a fit, of course, but it turns out his wife is pregnant. He’s not budging. He tells me to promise I’m not mad, to promise I’ll be with him when I come. He says he has to call in every favor he owes just to get the extra passage, and pay a lot of money, and if I want it I have to promise that I’m not mad, that we can pick up where we left off. So I put on a nice face, and I said of course, sweetheart, I love you, what’s two years to our love? In those two years I lost two toes and four teeth and twenty pounds, and in the last six months I lived in an old office building with six thousand other refugees, except by the end it was four thousand, each of us eating one cup of soup a day and so anemic we got bruises turning over in our sleep. And when the time came I took the passage and I was very careful never to run into him again. Maybe I did cheat him, but I don’t give a shit about it.”