by Tom Crockett
“I will go on faith.” She said this out loud to the jungle. “I need water, I will find water. If I am supposed to be here now, then water will be provided.”
She laughed at herself, but not out loud. To whom was she speaking? she wondered. She did not believe in a god, but, at the same time, this island seemed alive with spirits. Perhaps one of them was listening.
Her request, more a statement than a prayer, really, was answered in a way that made her remember her father telling her to be careful what she wished for.
It began to rain.
She heard it before she felt it. The rain seemed to need to quench the thirst of the canopy of trees first. Then, only when the canopy had drunk its fill and topped off its reservoirs, did the excess pour down on the forest floor in torrents. In some places the rain fell evenly. In other places it gushed as if channeled through the downspouts of some high cathedral.
Marina took her jacket off and rolled it up tightly. She broke off a large leaf, rolled her jacket bundle up in it, and tied it with a supple bit of vine. She drank her fill from leaf bowls, letting the cool water spill across her chest. Then she picked up her bundle and continued hiking in the rain.
The trail soon turned to mud beneath her bare feet and she felt it squish between her toes. She had walked naked on the beach the first day she had left the Turtle Woman, but that had been different. It had felt dreamlike. Now it felt exhilarating. She enjoyed the feeling of rain splashing on her shoulders, running through her hair. It called up memories of a younger Marina.
She was perhaps seven, maybe eight years old. She had spent the summer with cousins on a farm in Georgia. They grew peaches in an orchard, raised some cattle, grew corn and soybeans, and, most important, had enough wooded property that Marina could get truly lost. She found the workings of the farm interesting and she liked her aunt Beth, her mother’s sister, but of her cousins, Alice was several years younger than she and Dawn, several years older. This, according to her mother and Aunt Beth, was no problem, but in reality there was too much of a gulf between them for anything more than polite play while the grown-ups were watching. When not required to put on a display, Dawn retreated to the barn to fuss over her two horses, and Alice preferred to be indoors with her dolls and their dramas. This left Marina free to explore.
It had been a drought year, hot and sticky. Marina had been following a dried up stream bed carved through cracked red clay when it started to rain. She was too far away from home to avoid being soaked by the rain on her trip back so she decided to stay out in it. She continued to follow the creek bed, fascinated by the way the red of the clay deepened to blood, then wine, as it was saturated by the rain.
She was, as always, barefoot, and her feet were red from the clay. Her cut-off jeans and T-shirt were already soaked through so that when she found the little hollow filled with red mud and clay, it didn’t seem unreasonable to explore it.
She took the precaution of slipping out of her clothes first, hiding them under a low bush, before wading into the warm mud. She sat down into it then lay back. She debated for a moment whether she should get it into her hair, but it was raining hard and she was sure it would rinse out. She looked down at where her body should have been but there was only thick red mud. She let her head sink into it. The only part of her that was out of the water now was her face. She closed her eyes and let the rain fall on her.
When she opened her eyes again it was because of some movement. She could barely hear anything. Her ears were below the mud line, and the steady drone of the rain masked the more subtle sounds of the forest, but she felt subtle vibrations that made her eyes open. Not five feet away from her a stag was drinking from a little pool of clearer water.
It was not unusual to see deer on her aunt and uncle’s property, but always at a distance. Marina had never been this close to a deer, especially one so large.
It moved closer to her as if she were not there. Marina blinked her eyes slowly, like a cat. She felt connected to the stag in a way that was both strange and wonderful. Marina, mud, earth, deer, rain, clouds—she could not say where one began and the other ended. There was something in this moment that changed her or, more precisely, shifted her direction.
Eventually the stag moved away, disappearing into the rain. Marina climbed from her hiding place. She stood in the rain and rubbed the mud and clay, as much into her body as off of it. It was hard to rinse the red clay from her hair. For a week after, she would tint the shower water red when she stood under it in the evenings. She pulled on her soaked underpants, shorts, and T-shirt and made her way home in a kind of daze.
Marina tried to tell her aunt about the stag. She listened politely, but Marina knew that the experience, the moment, was one she could not communicate with words.
She spent the rest of the summer in the woods with her camera, sitting still for hours at a time to photograph a deer, a raccoon, squirrels, birds. She used up all of her summer allowance, the money her mother had given her for ice cream, sodas, and treats, on film for her camera. She never saw the stag again, but by the end of the summer when she returned to Washington she had a portfolio of little black-and-white snapshots. Some were blurry, out of focus, under- or overexposed. Some showed animals barely visible against the forest background into which they were designed to blend. But some of Marina’s photographs even made her father take notice. One in particular, a deer that had come close enough that Marina could have reached out and rubbed its snout, was good enough to be enlarged and her father sent it off for this honor.
Later, of course, Marina’s interest in blending in and being the invisible observer expanded to the photographing of people, but it had begun as a child, in the forest, in the rain, in a liminal moment when she could have been one thing or the other and she chose the other.
It began in a place not unlike where Marina now found herself.
When she came to a crossroads where the trail divided, she stopped. She had not yet had to make a decision about which path to choose. There had been other paths that led off the main trail before this, but it had been clear which was the main path and which a diversion. This fork offered no simple choice. The branch to the right was steeper and water flooded down it, almost as though it were a stream. The branch to the left was not as steep, but appeared to curve and wind off into the distance. Both appeared to have been well used, the right branch perhaps a bit more traveled, but the channel of water sluicing down it made it look like a slippery and uncertain path.
Marina took the trail to the left. It wound up more gradually, as if here the giant steps had eroded and rounded out. The rain stopped, and as it did she could hear the sound of running water echoing through the trees. It sounded like only a small stream tripping and falling over rocks, puddles, and pools on its course downhill. The trail led her to the stream and Marina stepped over it easily. From there, however, the trail seemed to follow the stream to its source in lazy S-curves that climbed, crossed, and recrossed it.
The source of the stream was a steady trickle of water that flowed from a worn crack in a wall of carefully arranged stones. She might have missed it altogether, as the wall was set back from the trail several yards within a grove of trees. She found it more by sound than sight.
The wall was taller than Marina and seemed to define a kind of terrace. The terrace itself was well hidden by thick old trees that grew up closer to each other than seemed natural for the jungle. She could find no easy way around the wall, so Marina tossed her jacket bundle up onto the slab and scrambled up the face to find the source of the water.
It was getting late in the day. The sun had come back after the rain, but Marina could tell by the glimpses of it she got through the canopy that it was setting. She should find a sheltered spot to spend the night, she thought, and if this was a source of drinking water that was off the trail and protected, it just might serve her needs.
The pool itself was deep, dark, and still. Some leaves floated on the surface, but the only moti
on was at one edge of the pool where the water overflowed the stone border and spilled out over the rock face Marina had climbed.
It was unnaturally round, and it took several moments for Marina to understand why. It was man-made. Old cut stones, now almost completely obscured by moss, ringed the pool in a perfect circle. Ferns and other plants had sprouted up from the cracks and depressions in the stones, but it still retained its shape. Around the pool and back for several yards the ground was clear and free of all but the smallest plants. It was covered in a spongy carpet of more green moss and tiny white flowers. Beyond that was the ring of trees that grew thick and tightly packed, their roots and branches so entangled, that they looked as if they had been planted to create just such a wall. The pool backed up to a rock face with a shadowy opening.
This seemed a good place to stop for the night, so Marina dropped her jacket bundle and knelt by the pool. She dipped her hand into the dark water and was surprised at how cool it was. She brought some to her mouth in a cupped hand. It was sweet and clean. It must come from an underground spring, she thought.
She lay down on her stomach to drink more deeply from the pool. The moss was like fine velvet against her skin, cool and soft. She put her face close to the surface and lifted cupped palms full of water to her mouth. When she had drunk her fill she rested her head on folded arms and watched the water quickly return to its mirrorlike stillness.
That’s when she noticed her own reflection in the water. She seemed younger than she remembered. The little lines were still there at the corners of her eyes and the perimeter of her smile, but the dark circles that had grown to be a fixture underneath her eyes were gone. That alone seemed to take several years off her age, but there was more.
She had been photographing herself for the past several years, something she had never done before. She would turn the camera back on herself in the middle of moments of stress. She would photograph her body or just her face in cracked mirrors in little hotel rooms. She made close-up photographs of her scars. She had an entire collection of work locked in a safe deposit box in a bank that no one knew she kept an account at. She had been obsessed.
Always in these photographs, there was something oppressing her, some shadow that seemed to shroud her. In the darkroom she tried adjusting exposure times and contrast filters, she even experimented with infrared film, but she could not bring a sense of translucence to her own skin. She could find it in the images she made of others—that subtle glow of life—but not in her self-portraits. It was as though her skin was too thick, almost a disguise. In the end this had made it easy enough to choose to die, when she could find no evidence of life within herself.
Now her skin seemed to fit her better. Even in her reflection in the dark pool she could see a radiance, a glow.
Her reflection smiled.
Marina had not smiled, but was unaware that she hadn’t.
Her reflection blinked, slowly, like a cat, like Marina had as a little girl when she had seen the stag.
Marina had not blinked. She brought her hand up to her face, touched the corner of her mouth.
Her hand in reflection did not move.
Marina reached out to touch the reflection on the surface of the pond, was reassured to see a hand reach up to meet her. But when fingers met, the reflection did not give way. There was no melting away, no penetration of surfaces, only light resistance, pressure for pressure.
Marina gasped.
“She is only your reflection. She cannot hurt you.”
Marina sat up sharply, looking around. The grove of trees and the stones surrounding the pool created odd echoes. It was hard to tell where the voice was coming from.
“Don’t be frightened, child. I am right here.”
Marina found the source of the voice. A woman was sitting cross-legged on a stone near the opening in the rock face. She had rich dark brown skin and long gray hair that hung about her shoulders in dreadlocks, with some thick rolls curled crownlike around her head. Marina could not guess at the woman’s age. Her body was covered in a long robe dyed in patterns of moss green and cerulean blue, revealing only her pink-soled feet and tiny folded hands.
Though she thought it silly and a little late, Marina unrolled her bundle and pulled on her jacket. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“It’s quite all right. I don’t get too many visitors. Most of them pass this place by. Only those who have lost something of themselves come here.”
“What do you mean, lost something of themselves?” She seemed to have abandoned the need for introductions and polite preliminaries. She was at once ready to enter almost any discourse, especially with someone who might know more than she.
“If you had not lost some part of yourself, you would not be here.”
“That isn’t really an answer, you know.” But as the words were leaving her lips she realized that she had probably misinterpreted the woman’s answer. She continued to clarify. “Unless you mean that it is why I am here . . . ,” she gestured up to the sky and around her, “not just here.” She finished, patting the moss-covered stones.
“You came to Turtle Island to find that part of you that understands what a gift life is. Yes?”
“I came here by mistake actually.”
The woman smiled at her serenely, knowingly. It annoyed Marina. If this woman had something to say she should just say it, she thought.
“What?” Marina asked. “What did I say that was so funny?”
“Do you really still believe in mistakes and accidents?”
“What I mean is that I meant to die, and I ended up here.”
“And do you still want to die?”
Marina did not answer this immediately. It was an important question, and, even though an answer leapt to her lips almost instantly, she felt like she should be careful before she spoke aloud.
“No. I don’t think I want to die now . . . but surely it must be too late for me.”
“Never too late for finding.” The old woman’s eyes sparkled. “If you find what you’ve lost you won’t die.” She paused. “Now living, well, only if you are strong enough, but at least you need not die.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Come, my name is Atana. Stay the night with me. I have food and you must be hungry. The moon will be out tonight, the lovers will swim.” The old woman gestured at the pool. “A good time to find what is lost. I will tell you what I know.”
The sky was darkening and Marina had no place to go and no reason not to stay, so she agreed. The old woman led Marina into what had appeared to be a shallow cave from the outside, but was actually quite spacious on the inside.
“My sister and I keep the mirror pool.”
“Your sister?” Marina asked, looking around.
“We take turns. I am the waxing sister. I watch the mirror from dark of the moon to full. My sister watches the waning.”
“And what is your sister called?”
“Atana.” Marina looked perplexed and the old woman laughed. “We are never here at the same time so it causes little confusion. It is the way it was with my mother and her sister and her mother and sister for as long as anyone knows.”
Atana lit a few candles in the cave and Marina realized that while some of the cave had clearly formed naturally, other parts had been etched into the stone. There were raised stone benches carved into the sides of straight, smooth walls. Carefully cut and fitted stones that looked ancient and worn by time formed tables and shelves. Niches had been cut into the stone to hold candles. Images of the moon were carved or painted on almost every surface. There were the makings of a little cooking fire set into a corner in a stone fireplace, but it was not lit and Atana did not choose to light it.
She bade Marina sit on one of the woven mats in front of a low stone table and brought her food. There were more fruits, some like those she had eaten with Rafael and some she didn’t recognize, and little salty bean-curd cakes. She washed this down with the sweet
water of the spring.
Marina ate slowly despite her hunger, tasting every new food fully before swallowing it. Atana ate very little, and seemed to be studying Marina. They ate in silence, then Atana cleared away the food and returned with a stoppered gourd and two small wooden bowls. She poured a silvery-black liquor from the gourd into each of the bowls and handed one to Marina.
Marina wanted to ask what it was, but Atana was already sipping hers slowly and it seemed impolite to question. Marina brought the bowl to her lips and sipped. It was heavy and sweet and cooler in her mouth than it had been against her lips. It tasted like the juice of silvered pears. Marina knew this wasn’t possible, but the poetic description that popped into her mind seemed more appropriate than any rational combination of flavors she could think of.
She finished it faster than she’d intended, but Atana just said “Good,” as she took the bowl from Marina.
“Come,” Atana said as she stood and took Marina’s hand. Marina let herself be pulled to her feet by the little woman and led outside. Marina felt a little dizzy, intoxicated by the silvered pear liquor, but she followed and sat next to the old woman on the mossy stones beside the pool.
“The moon will come tonight,” Atana said pointing up. The trees formed a circular opening overhead like a skylight through which she could see a dark night sky sprinkled with stars. “How do you call the moon in your place?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you say the moon is a woman or a man?”
Marina had heard folktales in which the moon represented male deities, but in most of the stories she could recall the moon was feminine. “A woman, I guess.”
“Ahh . . . well, the thing to remember is that when water is a woman, the moon will be a man. He will enter her here.” Atana gestured at the pool. “She will be drawn to him and push away from him, strong, like the tides. It is a good time to look for lost things.”