by Beth Kephart
Do something.
Mitigate the risks.
Do not disappear.
Deni was cautious on behalf of every one of us.
Deni was taking care.
“We’ll keep an eye on her, okay?” I said.
“Smells like trouble,” Deni said. “Her giving her find over to him.”
“They’re just binoculars.”
“We’re talking about Eva,” she said. “And a guy who calls himself Shift.”
Down Oyster Way. Toward the sanctuary. Across the crushed shells where the cars of summer parked. Toward the stubby bushes and the narrow boardwalk with the thick-rope rails and the sign: respect. preserve. That’s where the sanctuary began. Ms. Isabel, up in front, was dialing the buttons on her lavender coat as she thought. She was lecturing about the stress on birds of changing climates, environmental heat, environmental endurance, and now she was turning the dahlia in her hair, as if she could somehow turn clocks back to a time when birds could fly wherever they wished—no factories, smokestacks, hot air, ozone blips. Keep walking. We did. There were swans in the pond that we passed—our swans, we said, of the family Anatidae, of the genus Cygnus—Anatidae and Cygnus being the kind of words that hold a thing in place, keep a swan from vanishing. There were red tips on the black birds in the trees. There was a tanager on a brambly branch and it opened its mouth to sing.
“Bird manners,” Ms. Isabel said, and we took out our notebooks and our pens; we drew, as she had taught us to draw, the shape of the wings and the song. If you look at the world, you will love the world—that was Ms. Isabel’s motto. If you love the world, you will save it.
We looked. We drew. We listened. We walked deeper in. Through the green shade, beneath the tree cover, into the smell of pine, old moss, cracked shells, root rot. In a soft clearing of pine needles, we stopped and formed a circle and for the first time that day Ms. Isabel actually looked at us. She stopped thinking about the birds. She started counting.
Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Shift.
He was leaning against a giant oak—his hood up and Eva’s binoculars still hanging from his neck by a cord. He had one knee bent and one flip-flop foot pressed against the tree bark. He was taller than the rest of us, and his eyes were so unreadable that he might have been wearing shades. There was moss furring up the branches above Shift’s head, nests in the knot of some foothold, wings up high, deer in the shade. There was a breeze in the tops of the trees, two dragonflies with silver wings, the stirrings of a hawk.
“Shift,” Shift said.
She took him in. Paused as if he were another foreign creature, a bird of paradise, a strange new species. “Shift,” she said, and then she wrote it in the book she carried, and that was that. We stood in that circle on the pine-needle floor, the smell of salt and feathers and green so close. She took a yellow book out of her bag. She began to read. “‘People change the world,’” she started, then flipped to another page. “‘Faustian restlessness is one of the defining characteristics of humans,’” she read. She touched the dahlia in her hair and turned more pages, careful, squinting. She began again:
“‘The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more
than a hundred thousand years and during
that period they had no more impact on their
surroundings than any other large vertebrate.
There is every reason to believe that if humans
had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals
would be there still, along with the wild horses
and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to rep-
resent the world in signs and symbols comes the
capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is
also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic
variations divides us from the Neanderthals,
but that has made all the difference.’”
She stopped, looked up, caught our eyes, had our attention. “Elizabeth Kolbert,” she said. “The Sixth Extinction.”
She turned her head toward a rustling in the trees. We turned, too. It was there—the great blue heron with its bearded feathers, its yellow eyes, its strength: Ardea herodias. “Ruler of the earth, according to the Seminole tribe,” Ms. Isabel said, leaving Elizabeth Kolbert for her birds. We watched the mighty creature crunch its neck, then stretch. It spread its rusty feathers. It shook its plume.
“The Bird will make sure that all things are put in their proper places on earth,” somebody said.
Ms. Isabel turned.
“You know the Seminole legend, Shift?” she asked, because he was the one who’d said it.
“I guess.”
“Somebody teach it to you?”
He shrugged.
“Hmmmm,” she said, writing something in her book. “Hmmmm. Yes. Thank you, Shift. The heron,” she now said, to the rest of us, “puts things into their places. According to legend. Just like Mr. Shift said.”
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
Shift.
Midmorning that day was Algebra 2: (xy)(n) =. It was Deni with her stare on and Shift with Eva’s binoculars, and Eva looking possessive, rubbing her finger under her nose like she does when she is dreaming or thinking or wishing. “I can see all the way to Atlantis,” she’d say, dreamily. “I can see Last Island.”
“Atlantis is gone,” Deni would correct her, but Eva never listened.
Focus on the math, I thought. Focus on the quiz. Focus with the sky so bright above us.
=
x(n)
multiplied by y(n)
Math was symbols. I preferred words.
I sketched taxonomy charts in the margins of the worksheet. I got called on for an answer, and I was wrong. “You should do your best in everything,” Mickey would say when the report cards came in. “I am,” I’d tell her, and she couldn’t prove me wrong. Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.
Lunch was the sandwiches we’d brought from home on the picnic tables with the graffiti carved into the weathered wood: taneisha + tiny tina. That was last year’s news. ultimate frisbee. That was forever. italian love songs rule. Which is what Mario sang, with his baritone voice; you couldn’t believe the size of the voice that short kid had. There was graffiti from now and graffiti from years ago, rumors of graffiti from The Year of Our Birth. We couldn’t prove it, but we thought, maybe. Maybe that Cupid. Maybe that arrow. Maybe that marry me, please, bruce springsteen. Maybe that broken heart was from someone we knew. Maybe it belonged to our mothers.
“You watching this?” Deni, leaning over her chicken salad, said.
“On it,” I said, looking up from my Tupperware applesauce, Mott’s, not homemade; Mickey wasn’t a homemade-sauce mother. And there was Eva, at table number three, her binoculars still on borrow.
“Not like he needs the binoculars to see the mayo on his wheat bread,” Deni said. “I can see the mayo from here.” If there was any condiment of which Deni vociferously disapproved, it was mayo. Shift was sinking fast.
“She looks happy.”
“That girl has no defense system,” Deni said. “She’d flunk a test on precautions.”
“Guy knows something about herons,” I said. “And Seminoles.”
“Guy got lucky.”
“Guy isn’t half-bad-looking.“
“Please. Can’t even see his face, thanks to the hood.”
The breeze blew in. It teased our wax paper, Ziplocs, paper bags, catching us in a scramble of chase and snatch. By the time we had collected our things, the bell had rung, and Mr. Friedley was out, sending us back into the school and up the spiral stairs and onto Level 3. To Pompeii and the city. To Trap the Metaphors, which involved, on that day (I remember this) cirrus clouds, rain in buckets, sun on the anchor of one shoulder.
We had Art after that—t
he sound of our charcoal sticks working in time to the tune the kindergartners were singing until Mr. Friedley came by and asked for silence. After that, it was 3 p.m. and the bell was ringing and the school day was finally done. We gathered at Alabaster’s door. It was the hour of the Slurpee.
“Yo,” Deni said to Eva, practically accosting her. “You coming to Rosie’s?”
Which wasn’t usually a question anybody ever asked, because Slurpees in off-season was our best-friend tradition. Slurpees was our gathering hour, our talk-it-over time, our gossip. Slurpees was unhitching our Modes from the racks at school, strapping our backpacks to our shoulders, and going.
But there was something about the way Eva was standing there, her ribbons of blond hair twining around her neck, her color high, her hands distracted, and Deni knew. She had her antennae way up, she was expecting as much, she was on the defense, standing close.
“Not so sure,” Eva said.
“Not so sure?” Deni pressed.
“Think I’ll skip it today.”
“Something else to do?”
“Maybe?” Eva shrugged. She looked at Deni, looked at me, looked at her ten sparkle-decaled fingernails. “You have a Slurpee for me, okay?” Eva said to Deni, sweet as Eva always was, because Eva wasn’t the kind of girl who would hurt on purpose. She was just the kind of girl who loved too much, stretched too thin, went way out of proportion too quickly, saw things that weren’t there. The kind of girl who would loan her best find to a guy who’d kept his hood up all day.
We turned. There, on cue, was Shift. His flip-flops were a little sandy with the outdoor classes’ wear and tear. He was standing among us, but mostly standing beside Eva, her binoculars dangling casual at his neck.
“Shift,” Deni said.
“Yeah?” he answered.
“Shift. That’s your name.”
“Um. Yeah.” His voice was a big shrug, like he’d been asked the question a thousand times before, like the uncoolest of uncool things would be to stand there and explain.
“You coming?” Deni finally asked me.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I keyed on my roller skates. Deni revved up her Gem. We left Eva where she was, pink up high in her cheeks.
Shift.
First name?
Last name?
We had no clue.
We rolled, we glided to Rosie’s. We had one Slurpee each, and then we split another, and then Mr. Carl, Alabaster’s janitor, drove up in his 1962 Wrangler—top down, radio on. Rosie brought him a double cone of orange spice as if she operated a drive-in, but fact of the matter: Rosie was Mr. Carl’s wife.
I caught the sound of the radio on his weather station. Some bunch of clouds forming way south and east. Clouds with the air of Africa in them, and the wetness of an ocean, and the height of a skyscraper, the reporter was saying, which was what the reporters on weather were always saying, nothing to write home about, something far away, and they were just words.
We’d been through every version of weather on Haven.
We knew water inside and out.
Some reporter on the radio couldn’t scare us.
Here I should probably explain the rules, the lines in the sand, the ins and outs of Haven. We were a people shaped by extremes. Too much and too little were in our genes.
To be specific:
Too little was the size of things—the dimension of our island, the we-fit-inside-it-bank-turned-school, the quality of restaurants, the quantity of bridges.
Too much was The Season—Memorial Day through Labor Day. Vacationeers by the boatload, bikinis by the square inch, coolers by the mile, a puke-able waft of SPFs. The longest lines at night were at Dippy’s Icy Creams. The longest lines by day circled the lighthouse. During The Season the public trash bins were volcanic eruptions, the songbirds were scarce, the deer hid where you couldn’t find them, the hamburgers were priced like mini filets mignons, and the rentable bikes streamed up, streamed down. At the Mini Amuse the Giant Wheel turned, the Alice in Wonderland teased, the dozen giraffes on the merry-go-round looked demoralized and beat. At Dusker’s Five and Dime the hermit crabs in the painted shells sold for exorbitant fees.
Whoever was up there in the little planes that dragged the advertising banners around would have looked down and seen the flopped hats, crusted towels, tippy shovels, broken castles, and bands of Frisbee fliers—Vacationeers, each one. Whoever was up there looking down would not have seen the bona fides, the Year-Rounders, the us, because we weren’t on the beach. We were too employed renting out the bikes, flipping the burgers, scooping the Dippy’s, cranking up the carousel, veering the Vacationeers out of riptides—to get out and be seen. From the age of very young we had been taught to maximize The Season, which was code for keeping the minimum wage coming, which was another way of saying that we stepped out of the way, we subserved, for the three hot months of summer.
We Year-Rounders had been babies together, toddlers together, kindergartners together, Alabasterans. We had a pact: Let the infiltrators be and watch them leave and don’t divide to conquer. We knew that what mattered most of all was us, and that we’d be there for us, and that we would not allow the outside world to actually dilute us. Like I said, we knew our water.
Six miles long.
One-half mile wide. Haven.
Go forth and conquer together.
I woke to the sound of Old Carmen’s transistor news. A ripple wind was kicking the sound waves my way. Wind speeds, someone was saying. Updrafts. Eye. Something was continent-size and massing, whirling and frisking, but that’s what storms do. They collect themselves. They spin. They kick and moan and spit their way toward the minuscule Caribbean, scratch the stratosphere, and blow. Most storms don’t make it all that far. Their chimneys pop. Their speeds collapse. They blow out to sea, disorganize.
I lay in my bed with the window open, listening to the radio words and the ocean. I lay there wondering if it was just another dream or a touch of déjà vu—this radio voice in my room, in my head, in the breeze. I pulled the thin paisley sheet off my legs and stared around at the room—the planked floor cool and the ceiling so low that when I stood I had to crouch, except in the room’s middle, where the roof rose to a peak.
It was September. I was seventeen. The only Mira Banul in the miniature family of Banuls. Banul was my name and my species. In every school photo ever taken, I have the same expression: What? Me? I have the same Mickey-cuts-my-hair hair, the same spangle of freckles across my left cheekbone, the same unerasable lopsided stare. “You could try to smile,” Mickey would say, but Jasper Lee, my perfect, brilliant brother, gave himself last-word status every time. “You do the Banuls proud,” he’d say. And I’d look at him and feel so full of love that my heart would want to scream.
Jasper Lee—he never had a school pic taken. Not a single, stupid one.
Along the one edge of that attic sprawled the velvet couch—emerald in the sun, purple in the shadows, secure as a castle. In a bucket by its side were the snake, the frog, the turtle, and the walrus that I’d won during a good-luck streak at the Mini Amuse. Over there was the old walnut cupboard, just four feet high, where Mickey left the dishes my aunt had left behind. We never used them. We never sold them. We never talked about what had happened. Not a story worth telling. That’s what Mickey had said. I’d moved into the attic when my brother came around, when he needed the second downstairs room as his own. I took it over, took it on, found room for me. The attic, its adjacent bathroom, the photographs that my aunt had left, too, the portrait of her in the frame. The best picture of my aunt is her at twenty-six years old, her long bangs disguising her eyes.
It said me, 26, along the edge of the picture in ink.
Which is the only way I knew.
I stepped from the attic through the sliding door onto the deck. The tide was out, the edge of the sea against th
e horizon. The sun was a minor ridge of pink. Ginger’s black lab was out in the sand, playing a game of Territory with a spotted mixed-breed I had never seen before, and there was Old Carmen, wrapped up in her blankets, on her swatch of sand. I closed my eyes, and the radio voice droned. Sahara something. Wind speeds 68. Caribbean crawl, no, not a crawl, a stall.
Haven was ready for anything. They’d pumped new sand onto our beaches the summer before—big pipes tossing out wet stuff from the ocean floor. They’d piled the dunes in front of the beachfront homes. They’d pieced new rocks together in black vertical juts. They’d said, Be prepared for anything, and we were. Our closets and basements and storage coves were rife with plywood and nails and duct tape. Our pantries were full of flashlights, batteries, cans, crackers, water jugs, candles, and the otherwise stuff that was stocked front and center in the hardware store that never closed.
Our training was impeccable.
We were used to weather. We were proud of being used to weather. Onto posts, signs, stucco, brick, inside our basements, we marked the places where the waters had, through the years, risen, like other people mark the growing inches of kids. In restaurants we hung photos of historic storms. In the DVDs they sold at the gasoline stations, they told the stories of our previous survivals.
But this storm.
This storm had stalled.
I pulled my hair into a ponytail. I watched the dogs chasing each other’s tails. I saw Old Carmen stand and wobble down toward the sea. In the downstairs distance, in the paisley-plaid kitchen with the mustard-gold oven and fridge, I heard Mickey—her TV snapped off, her scrapple in the pan, because it was Wednesday, an Elaprase cocktail day, by which I mean a rumble-across-the-bridge-and-drive-another-hour-and-park-in-Visitors’-at-Memorial-Hospital day. They had a Jasper Lee bed on the second floor. They had a needle they hooked into his arm, a line that dripped, and a bunch of old magazines, but Mickey didn’t read them. Mickey sat with Jasper Lee, talked to Jasper Lee, pulled puzzles, Monopoly, Crazy Eights, checkers from the canvas Bag of Tricks that they hauled hospital-way each week, and my brother always won.