by Karis Walsh
As long as she was taking care of the animals, she could keep her mind off the earthquake and the fear it had shaken loose inside her. Once she stopped, even for a moment, it rippled through her again.
Iris sat cross-legged in the pen, one hand stroking Gus and the other reaching into the adjoining run to tickle Jack’s chin. He had three paws wrapped in white gauze because he had gotten out of his damaged kennel and trotted through the shards of glass from the shattered office window. She was lucky that these were the worst of the injuries. The cats had looked like an electric charge had run through their small house, making their backs arch and their tails fluff to twice the normal size, but after an hour or so, they had gone back to their usual unruffled state. The dogs had barked and howled through the night, but they were settled by morning. Aside from a few bandages and piles of broken branches, the exterior signs of the disaster were abating. Inside, though, Iris still felt aftershocks, as if she had a fault line of her own running through her body.
Casey had made her internal faults shift again, until they scraped against each other and made her erupt with anger. She hadn’t been mad at Casey, and she really had no reason to blame her for being interested in studying the earthquake. Casey had looked cool and in control. Untouched by the disaster that had frightened Iris to the core. She hadn’t seemed to have family she was worried about or broken belongings she was mourning. Iris was a little jealous of Casey’s apparently unencumbered state. She also was a whole lot tired of being afraid all the time. Even if she had been in Casey’s position, without a care in the world besides her search for knowledge, the earthquake would still have reduced Iris to a quivering mass of fear.
She got to her feet and gave both dogs a treat before heading back to Jack’s normal kennel, at the end of the shed row. She put on a pair of heavy work gloves, about two sizes too big for her slender hands, and grabbed hold of the heavy limb that had landed across the back corner. She tugged and pushed, trying to rock the branch loose, as dislodged bark dusted her face and her hands scratched for traction in the loose gloves. She paused for a moment, leaning against a wooden post to catch her breath while feisty Sasha barked and spun in circles in the kennel next door.
Damn. She had been miserable enough having lingering fear from the quake reassert itself in her rare idle moments, but now every time she stopped what she was doing, Casey managed to insinuate herself into Iris’s thoughts as well. Iris could fill most of her time with work, with talking to Agatha and Leo, with caring for the dogs and cats, but she had to rest occasionally. Would Casey infiltrate every spare moment?
Iris pulled off one of her gloves and wiped a few bits of flaked bark out of her eyes. Her response to Casey on the ferry only managed to emphasize how out of control Iris was feeling right now. Casey was unfazed by the earthquake, practically elated by the opportunity to study it, while Iris was overwhelmed and trembling. Casey was independent while Iris was bound to her shelter.
Iris put on her glove and reached for the branch again. She braced her foot against the post for leverage and pulled hard, finally wresting the limb free of its wedged position. She fell backward and landed on her ass with the branch on top of her. Very undignified, but Sasha seemed happy to have her at ground level.
Iris shoved the limb aside and lay back, resting until her breathing was back to normal. She stood up and got a pair of fence pliers and some loose pieces of heavy-gauge wire out of her toolbox. She was struggling to straighten the crumpled chain link when Leo appeared by her side and reached for the jagged edge that had been severed by the thick branch.
“Thanks,” she gasped, using her weight to pull the other side of the torn fence to meet the part he held. She worked one hand loose from the fence and the too-large glove and joined the two edges together with a length of spare wire.
“Careful, there are some sharp ends up here,” he said as Iris added another wire, slowly suturing the gashed fence with strands of metal.
“I’ve got it. Just one more, and…Ouch!” Iris raked her finger across the ragged edge and drew blood. She grimaced at the throbbing pain and tried to hold the finger out of the way as she twisted the wires tightly with the pliers. She cut the loose ends and tamped them down so none of the dogs would be in danger from the patchwork job.
“Told you,” Leo said with a teasing smile as he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped Iris’s bleeding finger. He sighed and gave her hand a gentle pat. “You and Agatha are working too hard. I wish I—”
“Don’t, Leo. Please.” His chronic back problems had been part of the reason he and Agatha had sold their Seattle nursery and come to the islands to retire. “You do more than your share in the kennels and with the animals. You know I couldn’t run this place without you.”
He shook his head, but let the subject drop. “I put a box and some blankets in one of the bungalow’s closets, and your mama cat seems to be happy there. I’d say she’ll have her litter soon, maybe a few days. I just hope the stress of yesterday didn’t do any serious harm.”
Iris frowned. “Me, too. I’m headed back to the house to shower, and I’ll give Bianca a call. See if she can stop by and check on the cat since I don’t want to pack her in that crate and move her again. Are you and Agatha coming by for dinner?”
“Yes. We wouldn’t miss one of your home-cooked meals.”
“Home-thawed is more like it,” Iris said. She left Leo to sweep the dust and debris out of the newly repaired kennel while she put the tools away and walked to her small house. She stopped by the bungalow on the way, and found the pregnant gray cat hiding under the bed and glaring at her with angry green eyes. Iris checked to make sure she had enough food and water, and then went home.
As soon as she got to the flagstone path leading to her door, she could smell the herbs Agatha had planted in her front garden. Some of them had already flowered and gone to seed, past their growing season, but some, like the piney rosemary and fragrant lemon balm, were still growing strong. Iris plucked a few leaves of oregano as she walked past. She would add them to the lasagna she had taken out of the freezer to thaw this morning, layering a note of freshness into the premade meal.
Another difference between her and someone like Casey, Iris thought with a humorless laugh. Would Casey make a bunch of meals and freeze them just in case? Iris doubted it. It wasn’t as if Iris had prophesied the earthquake somehow. She just always had food on hand in case something went wrong and she wasn’t able to cook. But Casey didn’t seem to be a worrier.
Iris opened her door and went into the house, feeling some of her stress ease away. She had cleaned last night, frantically sweeping up broken knickknacks and tossing damaged furniture into the garage. She had wiped everything that remained with vanilla-scented wood polish while the windows had stood open to let the fresh—and very chilly—air inside. Soon she’d add the aroma of baking tomato sauce and cheese to the comforting scent of home.
Iris got in the shower and washed the messiness of the day away with steaming hot water. Of course, Casey followed her into the shower, too. Iris scrunched her eyes shut and tried to ignore the image of a naked Casey lounging casually against the tiled wall. She’d surely be as self-assured and laid-back without clothes as she was while wearing them. Iris leaned her forehead against the tile, close to the spot where she imagined Casey’s shoulder rested, and let the water pulse against her shoulders and back. Casey had been a disconcerting part of a difficult day, but right now, for one unguarded moment, Iris let herself feel a little comfort from their imagined closeness.
Chapter Five
Casey eased into a sitting position in the cab of her truck. Her head felt permanently tilted to the right after spending the night wedged against the driver’s side door, and she awkwardly massaged her muscles with one hand until she could lift her chin again. She was surprised she ached so much since she had spent most of the night wide awake, staring at the readouts from the seismometers she had deployed along the desolate stretch of road
where her truck was now parked.
A series of tremors—most too gentle to be detected by humans—had rocked the island while Casey watched the readings splash across her monitor. She had noticed two of the higher magnitude events, but she wasn’t sure if it was because she saw the evidence of them and imagined she felt the movement to match, or if she had actually felt the ground move. She wasn’t the type to stick her head in the sand and ignore geologic inevitabilities, and she wasn’t about to pretend that earthquakes weren’t a real danger in the Northwest, but she had longed for a few hours of peace and ignorance last night.
Had Iris felt the aftershocks? Casey wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Iris’s dogs and cats had been extra jumpy, since evidence suggested that animals were much more sensitive to seismic activity than humans. Casey pictured Iris as she looked yesterday, with frown lines etched in her forehead and exhaustion evident in the dark circles under her lovely eyes with those incredible lashes. She didn’t like to think of her having even more to worry about, although the chance of another high magnitude seismic event wasn’t out of the question given the amount of activity Casey had been observing.
She got out of the truck and bent forward, stretching her tight lower back muscles. She had spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Iris while she was scrunched in the driver’s seat, hoping no one would come by and arrest her for vagrancy. At first, her thoughts had been similar to yesterday’s, as she alternated between memories of their argument and memories of the way the corners of Iris’s eyes crinkled endearingly when she had briefly laughed about the crowd on the ferry.
She hadn’t been laughing when she berated Casey for having a job, though.
Casey sighed and rubbed her hand across her face. She didn’t need to go in those circles again. She had followed her spiraling thoughts for hours in the dark cab, caught between wanting to yell at Iris and wanting to hunt her down and sleep with her. Admittedly, the latter option sounded more and more appealing as the hours wore on, partly because she figured Iris had an actual bed. A comfortable, soft, sheet-covered bed.
Casey got back in her truck with a groan and started the engine. Luckily, the temperatures had been cool but not anywhere near freezing, or she would have needed to keep the engine running the whole night. Instead, she had gotten away with wearing most of the clothes she had in her bag. She turned the heater on full blast and pulled onto Westside Road, passing the state park at Lime Kiln Point and continuing along the coast for another mile until she came to an overgrown dirt road. One of her array of small seismometers had stopped transmitting just before dawn, shortly after a sudden gust of wind had buffeted the truck and yanked Casey out of sleep. She figured a fallen branch or a curious raccoon had toppled the instrument. The protective case should have prevented any serious damage, but Casey wanted to get the machine working again as soon as possible.
She parked behind a screen of trees and walked deeper into the woods, batting at massive spiderwebs that must have been spun overnight. She shuddered at the creepy feeling of delicate and unseen threads touching her hands and face, and she tried to pretend that the webs were empty and there were no huge spiders attached to them. She was glad no one was around to see her as she whacked at every tickle on her skin as if a hairy tarantula was migrating up her arm. The logical side of her brain told her she was in more danger of picking up a tick and getting Lyme disease than dying of a spider bite, but the nonlogical side—usually the side that kept to itself and made only rare appearances—wasn’t reassured by that information.
She wished Iris could see her right now, risking her life, sort of, to collect data that would be used to help scientists learn how to predict earthquakes with precision someday. Maybe she wouldn’t be so quick to judge Casey’s level of compassion if she understood what she was trying to do out here.
What did she care what Iris thought of her?
Casey realized she’d asked herself the same question with varying levels of righteous indignation at least a hundred times since yesterday’s ferry ride. She asked the question, but she didn’t want to look too closely at the answer. Iris had gotten to her somehow, and that was enough to make Casey realize she was best avoided.
She pushed Iris out of her mind and walked on, finally coming to a curved clearing. She gave one last exaggerated spider-removing shudder before walking over clumps of dry brown grass and toward the water. The grassy area ended with a three-foot drop to a thin strip of rocky shoreline, but Casey stayed on top of the little bluff and looked out at the slate-gray water. Ahead of her was Haro Strait and the dark silhouette of Vancouver Island, Canada. To her left was the Strait of Juan de Fuca and—too far to see in the murky weather—the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Casey stood quietly for a few moments, marveling at the feeling of being totally isolated in between the two massive countries.
She raised onto her toes and squinted toward the horizon when she saw half a dozen tall black fins cutting through the waves on the Washington side of the strait. If she’d had a chance to get back to her apartment before this unscheduled trip, she would have brought binoculars with her, but she was terribly unprepared for even a week on this remote island, far from the glorious benefits of civilization, like functioning hotels. She stared into the distance until the fins disappeared from sight, and then she turned inland again with a sigh.
She traipsed across the meadow, counting trees as she went, and ducked under a bush with sparse foliage. She found her seismometer where she had left it, but askew, and she pulled it out of its hiding place. She looked around for a place to sit, but had to opt for the ground. What the hell, she was a mess anyway. She pried open the case and used a pair of slim needle-nose pliers to reattach a wire that had come loose.
She’d hid the instruments carefully, but the field machines weren’t exactly top of the line. The UW lab had massive and highly sensitive instruments in place around the Northwest—all protected much better than her portable machine was by the bush she had chosen. Sometimes, though, having someone in the field getting detailed readings from selected areas using intuition and observation provided more information than the fancier equipment.
Casey finished making her adjustments and was about to replace the canister, but she decided to move the instrument to a different location based on the trends she had seen in her readings the night before. She tucked it under her arm and hiked back to the truck, trying to retrace her steps exactly so she’d be traveling through a web-free zone. She got off course somehow though, and ended up wading through a thick layer of bracken ferns. The coarse, lacy fronds brushed against her as she walked, parting as her legs pushed through them and slapping back into place in her wake. She held her free arm down by her side, her fingers outstretched, and let the leaves brush against her hands.
She had been in cities for a long time, from Chicago to Palo Alto to Seattle. She belonged in them, amid the bustle of urban life, but she was surprised to discover that something about this island was affecting her deep inside. Her nerve endings seemed more alive, more aware. Every touch, whether it was the rasp of tree bark or the ghostly tingle of an ocean breeze coming off the Sound, seemed to wake her up, out of some sort of dream, a little bit at a time.
She pushed through the last of the ferns and emerged from the woods a short distance past her truck. She walked back to it and put the seismometer on the passenger seat before driving to the new location. She supposed she was just feeling what hikers and outdoorsy types always droned on about—some sort of communion with Mother Nature. She would attribute it to a lot of months without a vacation that culminated in a trip to Stanford, Land of the Exes. She just needed a break, something completely different from her normal life, and the ocean and trees were doing the trick.
Casey wouldn’t have minded a little more communion with Iris, too, if they hadn’t been so at odds with each other on the ferry. She lumped her strange obsession with the near-stranger in with her unexpected enjoyment of nature. Iris, with
her fierce devotion to her animals and to her community, was unlike anyone else Casey knew. She was a change of pace, that was all.
Casey could learn from this and solve her fixation with logic. She didn’t need to move to the middle of nowhere and live like Thoreau, and she certainly didn’t need to track down Iris and ask her to stop criticizing Casey long enough to go on a date with her. What she needed was to do her job, return to Seattle, and take up a hobby or something to get her out of her rut. Skydiving? Rock climbing? They had indoor versions that didn’t involve actual rocks, didn’t they?
She couldn’t find another offshoot road leading to the spot where she wanted to place the seismometer, so she parked along the side of the road and started another trailblazing hike through the woods. She heard a dog barking in the distance, reminding her of Iris yet again. Was Iris really that different from her after all? Casey cared about her world and the people in it just as much as Iris did, she was sure. She just had a different way of expressing her concern. A way that Iris had been unable to see. The animal-loving thing wasn’t a comparison Casey could make, either. It wasn’t like Iris liked animals and Casey didn’t. She just wasn’t familiar with them. Or comfortable around them. They were messy and unpredictable. Two things Casey was not.
Casey paused to get her bearings. Where was the water? Which way led back to her truck? She hoped she’d be able to find her way back by nightfall. She had complained about using the cramped truck cab as a bed, but it beat sleeping on the fir needle covered ground.
As she stood quietly, she caught another whiff of smoke in the air. Yesterday when she had explored the tiny island, she had seen several small, intentional fires lit by people who must have been clearing away the debris left over from the earthquake. The smell was out of place and slightly disconcerting when she was in the middle of the flammable woods. Casey veered in the direction she thought led to the shoreline.