Not entirely alone. A grey spot winged above the island group. It mewled a high tremolo: an eagle.
Goose looked around, shocked that she’d fallen asleep. She remembered telling herself not to, pushing herself upright in the chair. How could she have let herself drift off when she knew she was being watched by . . .
By . . .
She wrestled with the conviction that she was still dreaming. She made herself stand up and walk around the boat. The anchor chain scraped and creaked. She felt the horrible stiffness she associated with falling asleep in the car. She was cold to the marrow.
No one was aboard with her.
Take the boat away, and the dawn gathering around her could have been ten thousand years old. The mutter of the outboard and the lurid red and green and white of the running lights suddenly seemed intrusive. She switched them off, her fingers clumsy in thick gloves. At once an oceanic immensity of wilderness enveloped everything, too raw and vast for habitation. The only sound now was an ambience of gentle white noise, air and water at rest, like the dawn breathing. The eagle vanished against a darker line on the horizon. That long smear could have been either side of the passage, the mainland or the great island. She might have looked at the gimballed compass beside the wheel to find out, but she didn’t want to. There were no charts or directions, no comings or goings. Everything was unnamed. A directionless breeze sent wavelets to brush against the hull. Their unstopped sibilance was the sound of her mother tongue, saying vous êtes ici, vous êtes ici.
She began remembering how she’d got there. It was a complicated effort. She seemed to have come loose from reasons, causes, effects. She couldn’t find a good way of thinking about what she was doing on Jonas’s boat far out in the Passage in the very early morning. She remembered Jonas; she remembered Jonas escorting the shriveled-looking blind woman with the grotesquely long hair off the abandoned ferry; she remembered the same woman sitting in the stern of the boat, saying things that sounded more like incantations than words; all of it seemed to belong to another dimension, dream or theater or fiction.
The nearby land was becoming solid. Light spread and sharpened the edges of its silhouette. She began to distinguish the shoulders of rock that separated one solid mass from another. The nearest was no more than a bare reef draped in kelp. Beyond that were tree-crowned hummocks, and a longer grey wall behind, a larger island still murky with distance.
What am I doing here?
Might as well ask that eagle. Or the reef. They weren’t doing anything here, or not the way the question meant it. They just . . . were.
Jennifer. She was looking for Jennifer. That was right, wasn’t it? She was looking for Jennifer because it was her job. She’d told her boss she’d find the kid; she was a Mountie and the Mounties always got their man. She had a duty of care. The girl was a vulnerable minor. Due in court. Due at the juvenile facility over on the mainland. Et cetera. Procedures, protocols, obligations.
She remembered that Jennifer had shut her mouth to that whole world. She remembered the girl sitting in the cell, looking at her, mute. Then the girl had walked out of the locked cell and disappeared into the silence.
This silence.
Goose knew then that what she really wanted was to find out what the silence had to say.
Back in the world she’d stepped away from, flights were canceled. Traffic had stopped. The navigation lights were all switched off. The ferry had turned into a ghost ship. The TV wasn’t working. The Internet had failed. Voices from the wrong places came and went on the radio.
Instead of all that, then . . . what?
This, she supposed. She rubbed her arms briskly. This: daybreak in solitude. Sounds and colors unchanged since before there’d been people to hear and see them. She didn’t doubt that Jennifer was here. Where else would she be? There were no due dates here, no court orders, no decisions made by legally constituted authorities. No papers. Zero megabytes. No words.
No place for herself either, Goose admitted, reluctantly. Hunger and cold were her prompts. She’d have to go back to Hardy, or whatever was left of it. Still, at least she could bring Jennifer with her. Not to the station, though. Not to be arrested or institutionalized or whatever. There’d be no more cells or court orders. She’d put the kid up herself if she had to, or maybe Jonas would. Jennifer had spoken, that night when it all began. Shouting, the file said. Crazy stuff. But it wasn’t crazy, of course, and everyone would have to admit that now; or at least if it was crazy, that didn’t stop it being true. They’d all have to try listening to her, instead of just yelling at her in the wrong language.
Starting with me, Goose thought. I’m here because some kind of undead ghost freak thing with an English accent sat in the back of the boat and told me where to go, unless I imagined it all, which maybe comes to the same thing anyway. I’ve got to be ready to hear some pretty crazy stuff.
She didn’t bother checking the compass. It seemed unlikely that it would be reliable, and anyway, if she wanted to find out where she was, why not just look? She knew how the Passage ran, a widemouthed funnel with its open end to the northwest, the coastal range walling it on the mainland side. It was only a few weeks to the equinox. The dawn light would be spreading from the southeast, then. She turned a full circle counterclockwise and saw where the horizon brightened above a thin blur of forested land, and then where it rose into snaggle-toothed peaks, and then where it was serenely empty, sea and sky touching like watercolor paper peeling back from an ink-dark block. Southeast, northeast, northwest. Hardy lay somewhere to port and astern, then, hidden in its bay for now but easy to find if she simply turned the boat around and motored down the Passage along the southern shore. There wasn’t another vessel in sight. Here, one of the world’s busiest marine highways, and the only thing she could see traveling it was the eagle again, gliding toward the islands ahead.
She followed its flight, watching as it banked and vanished into the dark outline of the larger island. A spot of incongruous color caught her eye by the shore beneath the trees. Yellow.
She was looking down a channel between outlying rocks. Shadows made it hard to see but the daylight was strengthening steadily. There was definitely a brushstroke of unlikely yellow there, as alien to the grey-blue world as she and her boat were. She saw the way it sat above the waterline like a lurid instance of the ubiquitous stripped logs that decorated every shore along the Passage. She made the connection: the kayak. What was his name? Mr. Hall’s kayak. (The scowling boy inside the house. What were they doing now, she wondered, while she was out here in this gigantic silence? Was it beginning to sink in there, too?)
An idea occurred to her.
She went forward and pulled up the anchor. She had to take her gloves off to get a proper grip, and the chain was rough and painfully cold. After she’d stowed it she had to sit on her hands for a few minutes before she could manage the key and the throttle. When she did finally get the motor going, the noise and the petrol smell and the froth behind the propeller embarrassed her, as though she’d caught herself taking a spray can to the dawn.
She eased the boat forward nevertheless. From the length of exposed rock at the skirts of the small islands ahead she could guess that the tide was a good meter below its highest point, but Jonas’s boat drew very little, and the water was icily clear; the channel didn’t look too risky. She noticed that she was almost deliriously relieved to be trusting her own eyes and making her own decisions. Whatever had happened to her in the night, the dawn must have banished it. There’d been a lot of bad nights recently. Even in her dingy apartment in Alice, surrounded by nothing more sinister than packing boxes, things could turn wrong quickly; even lying awake in her own bed had sometimes felt like being afloat in a black ocean. But when daylight arrived you could always see straight again: the despair turned out just to be tiredness, the bad thoughts just distractions. Whatever had haunted her this past night, the main
thing about it now was that it had disappeared.
The islands grew tall in front of her, trees crowding together on their shelves of rock like survivors on an insufficient raft. Dead wood tumbled over the edges, weathered and rotted into twisted arabesques. In their lee the water turned perfectly calm. She saw the sea floor rising beneath, but the gap was wide and deep enough. She steered through into a sheltered bay ringed by shoals and the low promontories of a more substantial island, draped with bunchberry and salal as well as the tight-packed evergreens. The kayak had been drawn up above a small arc of slate-colored sand. Behind the scent of damp forest Goose caught a momentary smell of smoke.
She cut the engine and raised the outboard. Every noise was magnified by the stillness but no one had come running yet. If Jennifer was awake by her fire, perhaps she was deep in the trees, or perhaps she didn’t care. That was the advantage of her idea, Goose thought, as she stripped off jacket and gloves and watched the bow drift toward the sand. It would make any negotiation a lot simpler.
She took the bowline and waited till the drift brought her close enough to jump ashore. Solid ground jarred her for a moment and her legs were briefly unsteady. She looped the line around a spur of beached wood and went to fetch the kayak. Jennifer hadn’t bothered to turn it over. The paddle was tucked down in the cockpit, washed by a small puddle of seawater and dew. Rather than dragging, Goose heaved the boat up to her shoulder and carried it back across the beach. There was no question of jumping now but she didn’t mind getting her feet wet, though the first trickle that came in through her boots was astonishingly cold, bitter enough to make her swear between clenched teeth. Nor was there any question of being discreet. The only way to get the kayak into Jonas’s boat was to reach up and tip it in. It clattered down onto the plastic tubs and other assorted junk he apparently needed for his fishing trips (That’s not junk, man, that’s equipment). A pair of ravens flapped out of the trees, annoyed by the racket, and began spiraling upward. Goose waded back to the beach, untied the bowline, and clambered back aboard. The stern had come round and was scraping gently against shelving rock. She used the kayak’s paddle to push out away from the shore and then sat down to get her boots and socks off before her feet froze.
The island undergrowth crackled. She was drying her feet on one of Jonas’s rags when the girl stepped out of the trees.
Their eyes met, as in the cell. Her look was the same, Goose saw. Jennifer was wearing the same clothes too, donated, probably, from some charitable collection in one of the various hospitals and holding pens she’d been shuttled among: a hooded athletic sweatshirt in burgundy, grey sweatpants, old sneakers. She had the hood up, which made her look even more like a seal, round-headed, wide-faced, with big dark silent eyes. The only thing that was different was that she’d acquired some kind of necklace from somewhere, the pendant a plain brown ring hanging from a grey chain.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Goose said. There was no need to raise her voice.
“That’s my kayak,” Jennifer Knox said.
Goose was so surprised that the surprise was for an instant indistinguishable from fear: a sharp cold shock. She stood up.
“Well, hey. Nice to hear your voice.”
“What are you doing with my boat?”
The shaman girl sounded just like any other grumpy teenager. She came down to the wet sand. The sleeves of her sweatshirt were too long. She pulled them down over her hands, her fists improvising pockets.
“Technically,” Goose said, trying to keep the nerves out of her voice, “I think this belongs to a George Hall. Of Tsakis Road, Rupert. You know Mr. Hall? Fat little dog? He got it for his kids. The kayak. Not the dog.”
The girl stared. Her face was young, a girl’s face, healthy and fresh the way only teenagers could look, but the way she stared made her look ten years older, or a hundred.
“You’re that cop.”
“Officer Maculloch. I’m glad you remember. Though I probably just got decommissioned, so why don’t you just call me Séverine. Though actually everyone calls me Goose. Long story. Did I tell you that already?”
“What are you doing here?”
The boat was barely drifting at all, sheltered from any wind and out of the pull of the tide. What little lazy momentum it had was away from the beach, which made Goose feel a little more secure. She propped her arms on her hips and tried to smile.
“It’s time to go home, Jennifer. I thought I’d come and fetch you.” She patted the wheel. “Easier than paddling all the way back, eh?”
The girl’s face was a mask, a smooth coppery mask.
“Not, like, your actual home,” Goose went on. “Obviously. Because you set fire to that. Right? Didn’t you?”
Hands still curled in the sleeves, Jennifer folded her arms.
“No one was hurt. You’ll be glad to hear. I guess.”
This was what Goose remembered from their few minutes’ encounter in the back of the station in Alice: the way anything she said to the girl just bounced off.
“Okay,” she said. “Look. Actually I don’t care about what happened with your house. Truly I don’t. I’m sorry I brought it up, eh? That’s all finished with now. Okay? I’m not trying to arrest you, nothing like that. No more cells, no more hospitals, no more lawyers, whatever. Promise. I didn’t come here as a cop, I came here as me. You understand? Come on, Jennifer, talk to me.”
“How did you follow me?”
Goose picked up the paddle and corrected the boat’s drift, nudging back toward the beach. “You know,” she said, “it might be easier to talk on board. While we head back.”
“I’m not finished here.”
“Oh. Well. How much longer do you need?”
“It’s not your business.”
She dipped the paddle again, keeping the bow straight. “See, the thing is, Jennifer, I’ve got your boat.”
The girl didn’t answer.
“Mr. Hall’s boat. Or let’s call it yours, doesn’t matter, I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I took this one without asking too, now that I think of it.”
“You better bring it back, then.”
“Oh, I’m planning to. Oh, wait. You mean the kayak.” It sat awkwardly along the gunwale, stern tipped up, a big yellow plastic prize catch. “I’ll be straight with you, Jennifer. This is kind of why I took it, eh? I mean, I could have come ashore and done the whole heavy cop thing, but, you know. No one wants that. So you finish what you need to do, and I’ll wait right here with the kayak, and whenever you’re ready you come on aboard and off we go. How’s that sound?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Goose tapped the kayak beside her. “I guess you don’t, really. Sorry.”
The girl turned her head abruptly, as if she’d heard something unexpected. “You here on your own?”
Goose spread her arms. “Looks like it.” Her heart was going faster than it should have been. There’d been no sound; she was sure she’d have heard anything nearby.
“How’d you find this place? You shouldn’t be here.”
Goose concentrated on holding an unthreatening smile. “You know what? We both have a lot of questions. There’s a ton of stuff I’d like you to tell me about. Like the last time we met, for starters. I spent quite a while running around looking for you after you walked out of the station, you know? So. If you’re ready, I’ll paddle over, you can hop on in, and we’ll talk. I have to say, it’s great that you’re talking to me like this. I’ve got to think that’s a good sign, eh? It’s going to make things much easier.”
The stare was wavering. Jennifer stepped back from the water a pace. She pushed back her hood and glanced around the bay again.
“I hate to say it, but you probably shouldn’t take too long deciding. I’d kind of like to get started back. You know. Breakfast.”
The girl’s hands popped out of their sle
eves. She lifted the chain of her necklace and tucked it down inside her sweatshirt.
“If I have to,” Goose said, “I’ll come and get you. But I’d prefer not to.”
“You’d dare touch me?” It wasn’t the usual empty bravado of pumped-up teenagers squaring up to the cops; Goose would have recognized that. Jennifer seemed genuinely incredulous. “You gonna lay a finger on me? You heard about the other cop yet?”
Goose gripped the wheel to hold herself steady. “Fitzgerald?”
“You put your dirty white hands on me, they’ll start stinking so bad you’ll want to cut them off.”
“Jennifer.” Goose’s smile disappeared. “Give it a rest. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want . . .” What? “Come back. Talk to people. I’ll help. I understand why you wouldn’t say anything before. But look, you’re talking to me now, right? I’m listening. I’m not going to let anyone lock you up or make you go back to your mom. Nothing like that. I know you didn’t push your brother down the stairs. Whatever you’ve done, I know you’ve done it for a reason. Everyone treated you wrong, I know that. But you’re talking to me, right? So you know I’m okay. I’ve . . .” For an instant she saw what Jennifer’s silence was like from the inside. There were certain things you couldn’t say: she felt the unsayability on her tongue. “I’ve seen some things,” she finished, lamely.
“Talking with you’s like talking with nobody,” the girl said, matter-of-factly.
“Jeez. Thanks.”
“Who’d you bring with you?” Jennifer edged toward the water again, distracted. She shouted something Goose didn’t understand, in another language perhaps. From high in the upper air the call of the ravens answered, another language again.
“No one,” Goose said. “Just me.”
“Bring the boat.”
“You’re coming? Great!”
“All right. Come on.” Jennifer’s stare had gone the way of Goose’s professional smile. She looked her age again, a girl on a beach, worried she was going to be left behind. She craned back to look at the ravens, who were still circling one another, rising, already impossibly high.
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