by Anna North
She tried to remember if Sarah ever said anything about how the island should be run. But all she remembered were the games, the songs, a fabric of playacting so thick that by the time she was sixteen Darcy sometimes found her mother frivolous, unacceptably childlike. She remembered shouting at her once, over a cheese-food can filled with hot water, “I’m not going to pretend it’s fucking soup!” And that one warning, whenever she asked too many questions: “Don’t get stuck in the past.” Was that her way of condemning Tyson’s nostalgia, his desire to make the island like the mainland, at least for a few people? No matter how many times she played each conversation in her mind, Darcy couldn’t extract a philosophy from her mother’s life. But her mother had fought, and in the end had died, for something. Whatever that thing was—and she still wasn’t entirely sure—Darcy owed it some honor.
When Marie came with her breakfast—strawberries with sugar today, and jiggly poached eggs—Darcy asked to talk to the other prisoners.
“They knew my mom,” she said. “I need to talk to them before I decide if I can help you.”
Marie looked annoyed.
“You can,” she said. “But I’m not sure if it will do much good. They’re not exactly the most mentally stable people.”
“What does that mean?” Darcy asked.
“Look, I think what Tyson did to those ships was horrible. I told him that at the time. But we can’t even be sure Daniel sent them at all. And even if he did, to pin all your hopes for some kind of revolution on someone you knew when you were a child—it just seems a little crazy.”
Anger quickened Darcy’s blood.
“My mom wasn’t crazy,” she said.
“Of course she wasn’t,” Marie said. “I just mean, their plans were impractical. I don’t know what you’re going to learn from them.”
“I want to find out for myself,” Darcy said.
“Well,” Marie said, “I’m not sure when I can take you to them. I’m not even sure where the guards are holding them right now.”
All the doubts that had been ghosts the day before began to take on clarity and substance.
“If you’re so close to Tyson, how come the guards don’t listen to you? How come they don’t at least tell you their plans?”
“They were loyal to him, not me. A lot of them thought of me as an interloper.”
“For all those years?” Darcy asked. “When you did all that stuff for him?”
Marie sighed. Then she looked at Darcy with a new fixity.
“Darcy,” she said, “you know me. We’ve had the same life. If you trust yourself, you should trust me.”
Darcy thought of her life. She thought of the things she had done to get what she wanted. She thought of Armin, she thought of the circus, she thought of Glock. She knew she would have lied to save her mother’s life. Would she have killed? She cast her mind back into the time before she knew of her mother’s death, a time whose innocence disgusted her but that was heart-wrenchingly recent and easy to return to. She imagined a choice between her mother’s life and someone else’s. She found herself wishing that she had that choice.
“If we really have the same life,” Darcy said, “that makes me trust you less, not more.”
“What are you saying?” Marie asked.
“I can’t help you. My answer is no.”
Marie’s eyes hardened then, and Darcy saw a face she hadn’t seen before. It was angry, and thwarted, and grimly determined to push past the thwarting. Darcy was sure she herself had worn this face often enough.
They put her in a hot room with no windows. A woman was in the room already, cuffed to a wrought-iron rack that looked like it had once held gardening equipment, and when she turned her head to look at Darcy, Darcy recognized her little puffy mouth immediately. She was even wearing the same cheap skirt she had on when she came to Darcy’s apartment the night before her mother disappeared. Tyson’s guards had probably kidnapped her that night. She recognized, too, the family resemblance—the small, shrewd eyes spaced far apart, the round, compact head. Her hands were no longer shaking.
“You’re Esther Rosen?” Darcy asked.
“Long time no see,” Esther said. The wink she gave Darcy seemed to signal less the survival of humor than the surrender of seriousness.
A guard shoved Darcy down and cuffed her to the rack next to Esther. Behind them was a pile of feed sacks labeled “Deer,” “Rabbit,” and “Bird.” The room smelled like fertilizer and urine. The guard left, locking the door two ways behind him.
Looking at Esther made Darcy cry again. What if she had never come to the apartment at all? It was terrible how easy it was to imagine her mother still in the world, terrible how plausible it seemed.
“Cheer up,” Esther said, in a wry voice. “At least you’re alive.”
“That doesn’t cheer me up,” Darcy said.
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. There’s not a lot to do in here. I kept hoping they’d pick me, just to relieve the boredom.”
“Pick you?” Darcy asked. Esther’s dry voice absorbed some of her sorrow like sand absorbs a spill.
“You know,” Esther said. She pointed a finger gun to her head and shot it.
“They said they shot my mom while she was trying to escape,” Darcy said.
“If by ‘trying to escape’ you mean ‘sitting on the floor in this room,’ then you got it.”
Darcy’s skin shrank against her flesh.
“Why did they kill her?” she asked. “To keep her quiet?”
“More like to get the rest of us to talk,” Esther said. “They wanted us to tell them where Daniel is, so they could send a ship to finish his people off. They kept killing us one by one, hoping to get the rest of us to cave. Now I’m the only one left, and I think they’re out of ideas.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Darcy asked. “The guards?”
“And Marie. With your mom and Cricket, she pulled the trigger herself.”
Darcy remembered clinging to Marie’s body like a child. She could’ve reached out and snapped Marie’s neck with her hands. She could have gouged her eyes out. She cried again, this time tears of rage that left a sour taste in her mouth.
“What was this all for,” she asked finally, “what was the point of it?”
Esther’s voice lost some of its cynicism for a moment. “For Daniel,” she said.
“What does that even mean?” Darcy asked. “Why did you guys do all this for him?”
“When we were little,” Esther said, “we had no one to watch out for us. Your mom, me, my sister”—Darcy caught a hint of bitterness in the word—“a few others. Our parents were dead, or deadbeats, and the grown-ups made sure we got fed, but that was about it. Then Daniel started teaching us. I already liked him—he showed me a type of bark you could chew to be less hungry, and he knew how to go walking outside for a long time without getting too cold. But after we heard about the island he started spending every afternoon with us. He taught us how to read a map, and how to navigate with the sun and the stars. He taught us history, especially the American Revolution. To me it was sad, all these people who thought they were starting a new country, and there we were at the end of it. But Daniel always looked happy, he looked upbeat. And when we were almost ready to go, he said some things none of us understood at the time. He said that Tyson wanted to give us back what we had before the Ice Age, but we couldn’t really have it back. He said it would only give us more problems, just like it had the first time around. He said the past was a trap, and we had to break out of it if we wanted to be happy.”
“My mom used to say something like that,” Darcy said.
“We all did,” said Esther. “We got obsessed with it. We came here, and it wasn’t anything like what we’d been promised. We couldn’t get jobs, we couldn’t get apartments, we were pariahs. Now I know it was because Tyson never trusted Daniel, and he wanted to keep anyone who had contact with him from getting too much power. But then we didn’t know what to think; we just knew
we were getting shat on. Even before things started to go to hell—before the cave-ins, before the sidewalks started to melt, before the last boat came and there wasn’t enough food to go around anymore—we were radicals. But we didn’t really know what to do. When they finished Manhattanville we protested the ribbon-cutting ceremony—we wanted them to call it New Pacifica Central. When they built the Las Vegas Strip we vandalized a casino—we thought they should make an island theme park instead. We were angry, and we were just casting around. The thing is, Daniel had told us he would send for us. When we left the co-op, he left too. He said he was going south. If he found a place, somewhere we could live and not freeze, he would send a ship from there. We protested, and we made a few crappy little fertilizer bombs, and we waited. We waited for years, and he didn’t come.”
“Why didn’t you try to get rid of Tyson on your own, back then?” Darcy asked.
“We were young, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. It had been kind of fun, the whole radical thing, but as we got a little older it wasn’t fun anymore. Cricket went to jail and came back with this awful fungal disease in her eye. We had to keep moving to worse and worse places because the island was filling up. We started out squatting in a building under construction in Manhattanville—we had this whole ground floor to ourselves—but by the end we were in the back room of a grocery store in Little Los Angeles owned by a woman Duncan was sleeping with. And it used to be easy to scavenge food—mangoes, fish, stuff like that—but the island got more built up and the ocean got more poisonous and we started getting really hungry.
“This whole time Sarah was in charge. We never said it—in principle we were against the idea of having just one leader—but she had this quality that made you want to listen to her. She had always been Daniel’s favorite, and it was easy to see why. When you were with her, it felt like you didn’t need anyone else and neither did she. And even though all of us felt that way, it seemed absolutely real to each of us. Later I thought it must be some wanting in her that made her that way, some loneliness. But at first it made all of us love her.”
It was hard to imagine Sarah a leader, the same person who so often acted like a child instead of a mother. But it was easy to imagine her making everyone she knew feel like the only person in the world. Darcy wondered if it was the same wanting that made her mother seem so far away some evenings, staring off at the apartment wall, or mornings, frozen while brushing her teeth. What did she want?
“When things got bad,” Esther went on, “people blamed her. I don’t remember who started it, but the flip side of our loving her was feeling really bitter about her. Everybody wanted to be her favorite, and we started to resent the hold she had over us. We called a meeting, and we sat in our little circle like we always did, and we told her she was dragging us down and we needed her to leave the group. She didn’t cry, she didn’t argue, but I saw all the light go out of her face, and I realized we were all she had, and now she had nothing. I regretted it then, I wanted to take it back, but it was too late. She left in the morning.
“After that there was nothing holding us together. Nobody stepped up, nobody could make us feel like she could. We heard she had a kid, got a job. We kept up the pretense of having meetings for a while, but a lot of us moved out of the grocery store, mostly to worse places. I got hooked on solvent. Duncan lived on the street, Simone was turning tricks. And then, ten years ago, when we were totally broken-down and useless, Daniel finally sent a boat.”
Darcy saw why Sarah told her to forget the past—it was Daniel’s idea, but it must’ve been hers too, her way of blocking things out. But Sarah hadn’t abandoned the past. Esther had come back that night, the whole thing had begun again. Something must’ve pulled her back in.
“And then what?” Darcy asked.
“And then nothing, for a while. We all suspected that the Hawaiian story was fake, that the boat had really been Daniel. But none of us knew for sure, and none of us knew what to do. Then, two years ago, Sarah got in touch with me again. She said she’d made a mistake. She said she never should have let us kick her out of the movement. She said life was getting worse all the time—the solvent, the cave-ins, all of it. But she said she didn’t care about any of it—all of Hell City could fall into the ocean and she’d let it—but what she couldn’t stand was that her daughter had to drop out of school and get a job. She said even we had school, remember? And I did.
“She thought she knew where Daniel was, and she thought he’d try to come again. She thought maybe we could overthrow Tyson and teach everyone to live differently, to adapt. No more buses, she said, no more Seafiber. She thought Daniel could show us how to live on the island like it was an island, not a bad copy of home.
“I didn’t really buy it. I didn’t think Daniel was coming back. He could have been killed in the first attack, he could’ve been frozen out. And even if he was still alive, why would he risk another trip? Still, I started getting in touch with some of the other orphans. A lot of us were getting our act together back then—Duncan was working as a janitor, Simone was in the Seafiber plant. We met a few times. And then the second ship really did come.”
“How did you know it was him?” Darcy asked. “Your brother said something about a symbol.”
Darcy saw Esther stiffen in the dim light. When she spoke, her voice had a new urgency—she sounded more like the woman in the hallway a month ago than the broken-down one who had winked at Darcy.
“You saw my brother?” she asked. “Is he okay?”
“I don’t know,” Darcy said. “I think they got him too.”
The rack vibrated as Esther slammed her cuffed hand against it.
“Fuck,” she said. “I thought at least being such an asshole would keep him safe.”
“I’m sorry,” Darcy said. “I think he thought so too.”
A single sound came from Esther’s throat, a half-swallowed sob.
“It was so hard for him growing up,” she said. “You’d think a bunch of hippie kids would be all kind and gentle. It was bad enough we were orphans, but to act like a boy and pee like a girl—I always thought if I’d protected him better, maybe he wouldn’t have cut me off the way he did.”
“He told me he felt like shit about that,” Darcy said.
“He should,” Esther said. “Fucker. Maybe he’s okay, though. Maybe they just wanted information from him.”
“I hope so,” Darcy said.
Esther took a deep breath.
“We didn’t have a lot of books in the co-op. A lot of them got torn up for toilet paper or burned to keep warm. By the time Daniel was teaching us, the only kids’ book left was called An Animal Atlas of the West Coast.”
Darcy felt a little pulse of shock.
“I have that book,” she said. “I mean, I used to have it. It was my mom’s.”
“He gave it to her,” Esther said. “That was something that used to piss us off, that she was the one who got it. Anyway, we liked the book when we were kids because it had all these animals we’d never seen, animals that were extinct by the time we were born. Ducks, mountain lions, salmon. We had it all memorized, where each of the animals went.”
“So do I,” Darcy said.
“Well, the ships had mountain lions painted on their sails.”
Darcy remembered the mountain lion, its tawny coat, its black eyes. According to the map, it lived in Southern California—below its feet were the words “Los Angeles.”
“At least, that’s what Sarah said,” Esther went on. “She had some Seaguard friend at the docks who told her everything.”
“I met him,” Darcy said. “I talked to him.”
She remembered the Seaguard’s young, stupid face, how sweet it had been to hear anything, however slight, about her mother. Now that she had heard so much from Esther, she felt that her mother had been replaced by someone entirely strange to her, someone she would have to get to know all over again. But this stranger was dead, and beyond the reach of her knowledge, a
nd she had only Esther to reconstruct her.
“Why didn’t she tell me about any of this?” Darcy asked, hurt.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Esther said. “Maybe she was worried you’d tell someone else.”
“There was no one else,” Darcy said, remembering the days and weeks and years of going to sleep with her mother, and waking up to her, and leaving her and coming home to her, and speaking to her in half sentences, in fragments, as though everything that could be said or known was already shared between them.
“Maybe she wanted to shield you, then. Maybe she thought the less you knew, the less likely Tyson was to come after you. Or maybe she just wanted you to be free to do what you wanted, without thinking about Daniel or Tyson or anybody.”
But I was never free, Darcy wanted to say. Even if we had had money, even if I didn’t have to work and I could’ve gone to the University like the rich kids, I never could have left her. An alien feeling came over her then, like standing slightly to one side of herself. She wondered if she was free now.
“Was it worth it?” Darcy asked. “Was Daniel worth my mom dying?”
“You know,” Esther said, “I don’t really know much about Daniel. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like. I remember what he taught us, but after all these years, I could be remembering it wrong. For us, the word ‘Daniel’ meant ‘There is life outside this island.’ It meant ‘There is life outside Tyson.’ It meant ‘There is a way of living that is different from this one.’ If I were still free, I’d be trying to get to the mainland right now, just on the strength of that.”
11
They were in the room together long enough that time grew shapeless, stretched beyond all its familiar increments. Darcy cried, and slept, and cried again, and once she heard Esther crying, but she stopped when she realized Darcy was awake. At first they were embarrassed by their proximity, but then in the dimness and tedium of the dayless hours, Darcy began to think of Esther the way a rat thinks of its den mates, instinctively, without guilt or courtesy. When neither of them had moved in a long time she scooted a little along the floor, to circulate the air between them. She grew hungry and was surprised at how uncomfortable the feeling could still make her. At one point the guards brought water, but no food. Darcy asked Esther how they were supposed to piss, and Esther suggested that she unbutton her jumpsuit so at least it didn’t get wet. By contorting her waist and lifting her hips, she was able to do this with her cuffed right hand.