by Beth Kephart
The tide was swelling around our messed-up pairs of boots. My bruises were throbbing, my bandage itching. Sterling was pacing the beach by now, not going far, looking for places to do her business, because doing business, for all of us, was ranking high among the strategic nightmares. So much water on the island, but none of it useful. Haven was gooey and gross and disorganized, and it was about to get a whole lot worse, and I hope you don’t mind that I will not be talking about that part of the story.
The indecency of everything.
“I have to get back,” Deni said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I promised Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Meet at Old Carmen’s rock later? When the sun looks like noon? A couple of hours from now?”
“Whatever hours are,” I said.
“Whatever noon looks like,” she said.
I needed more Friskies from the rock, more swigs of water, another meal of peanut butter. I needed the toilet that stood on the stilts of what had been my house and I needed the supplies I’d forgotten the first time around, when my head was banged up and I was dizzy and I didn’t know if I was dead and if Old Carmen was part of the dying dream I was having. I needed to climb Rapunzel and climb back down. I needed to think. I needed to figure this thing out. I needed to find Eva.
We shook on noon, Deni and I. We hugged. I kissed the bruise on her cheeks, touched her arm in the sling.
“We’ll find her,” I said.
We goddamned had to.
It was as if time had ripped open a tomb and the dust of a million years had settled. The attic was a vague, soft thing. Sand was its only color. The stuff had blown in from the deck through the open sliding door. It had conspired and spread. It had crusted the piles I’d built and the furniture I’d inherited, coated the hook on the wall, the curl of a poster, the animals on the loveseat, the wheels of the roller skates left hanging from the lamp, the mess of clothes I’d stripped away after getting clobbered on the head. The sand had blown in, and it had won. It had claimed the things I’d saved. It was blowing, still.
Sterling leapt and slid across the slippery headboard ledge, catching herself, a startled meow. The closet door swung on its hinges, ticking like a clock. The clothes hung damp on the hangers, sand in the collars and the seams. There was the sound of the gulls in the crippled downstairs and rotting, chemical smells. I had sense that I wasn’t alone.
I wanted to run. I wanted my old cottage back, my life, my friends, my Banuls, the categories of life and living that made sense to me. Seemed like years before. Put things in their categories. Keep them known and safe.
Nothing was safe.
“Hello?”
Someone had been here. There was the trace of footsteps in the damp, crusty sand.
In the sky behind me a cloud slid over the sun. When the sun returned, I was sure: Someone had walked through the sand that had blown through the room, let their weight sink into the crystals. Footsteps—bootprints—that had walked the path I’d left between the salvage I’d collected. There were footsteps, and there was proof, too, of a person having lain down on my bed—something about the way the sand was scattered from the pillow, something of a trace of long legs and strewn arms in the horizontal sheets of sand. The doors to the curio cabinet had been left open, but not by me. That swinging closet door wasn’t right, I’d heard the latch latch before I’d rappelled to the beach that first time, Sterling in my pocket. The drawers to my bureau had their tongues hanging out, and I had not left those tongues hanging out. And now, I realized, some of the piles I’d built had been rearranged—divided and restacked, cut through and repositioned. Breezes stirred in the crusty pots and pans. Air rustled inside the old news of magazines, and when the next breeze blew the wings snapped. There was a rise of crisp, white birds.
“Hello?” I said.
The boots had walked the skinny path in the hoarder’s city and returned. They had stepped back over the threshold of the sliding door and trailed away through the ever-shifting sands on the tilted deck. Hello to no one. Whoever it had been was gone. He’d cut across the deck and slid the rope Old Carmen had thrown and I’d secured. He’d slipped away, onto the beach, where everything was chaos and the rules had been tossed and nothing was like it had been before, and there was something in his pockets. Or might have been.
He’d taken, or he hadn’t.
He’d be back, or he was satisfied.
He’d been looking for something.
Or he’d found it.
Someone had come. Someone had gone. Whatever had been taken was infinitesimal when stacked up against all that had been stolen by the storm. The breeze would blow the stranger’s bootprints from the sand. The tide would convert the evidence. There was no one but me who could ever be sure that he’d climbed up, walked through, lain down on my bed, but I knew, and Sterling’s whiskers were on alert, and I remembered, as if it had happened in another world, the thief who had crept in and out of the Zone.
Now with the next breeze another flight of crisp, white birds flew—lifted up from the split stack of Nat Geos I’d saved. They were paper birds, pages sailing out of my brother’s magazines. I reached for one. I turned it over. I read my brother’s words.
This is the story of you:
Stuff:Forams
Chabazite
Olivine
Source: Kapalua, Maui
Ordered: May 8, 2011
Received: July 2, 2011
Fact: Smitherings are lovely.
Smitherings are lovely.
“Jasper Lee?”
I reached out into the breeze. I snatched the next white bird. I read.
This is the story of you:
Stuff:Sea urchin spine (red)
Sea urchin spine (green)
Coral dust
Source: Galápagos Islands
Ordered: March 3, 2013
Received: April 16, 2013
Fact: What you are is still alive.
I sat on the bed, on the shivering sand, where the stranger had lain down before me. I heard Sterling mew and leap. I felt her find my lap. I felt her paws insist, ask questions. There was another crisp, white paper bird now, close enough to snatch. I read:
This is the story of you:
Stuff:Pink garnet
Green epidote
Red agate
Black magnetite
Hematite
Source: Lake Winnibigoshish, Minnesota
Ordered: November 2, 2012
Received: January 4, 2013
Fact: You will always be your own true colors.
One by one the pages that used to be stuffed inside the stack of Nat Geos peeled away, and one by one, I reached for them and read them. The story of sand scooped out of a war. The story of sand from a blackened beach. The story of diatoms and shark-tooth shatters. The story of something wanted, asked for, mailed—mollusks, coral, barnacles, basalt, foraminifera. The stories were of crush and time. They were of broken beauties, missing pieces, legends. They were the stories of sand and the story of my brother. They were somebody crying. They were secrets. They were chasing each other with every breeze that blew in, and Sterling was quiet now, touching her paw to each page, tracing the clumsy letters that my brother had written in the blackest charcoal.
All glory to the survivor.
Live eternal.
Invisible is not the fault of the thing,
but the fault of the person who’s looking.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Jasper Lee,” I said.
And I don’t know if I’ve ever missed a human being as much as I missed him.
The nicking of the sand blowing in.
The cat on my lap.
The cries of gulls in the empty space beneath me.
I closed my eyes.
The sand sifted, stayed.
I remembered.
Something.
An adventure we’d had. It was a December Sunday, Mickey sleeping in. It was the voice on Old Carmen’s radio reporting snow coming in from the north. Old Carmen out on the rocks, wrapped in her blankets, her radio blaring, her flag at her back.
“I would prefer,” Jasper Lee had said.
“Prefer what?” I’d asked.
We’d been lying feet to feet on his double bed, watching the planes fly nowhere above our heads. I had my hands beneath my head. He was propped up on three pillows. Around his mouth were the triangle lines from the BiPAP machine he had slept with—the face mask leading to the tubes leading to the machine on wheels, the machine’s green face glowing. He’d needed the BiPAP air the night before—more oxygen into his stunted lungs, into his blood—but now he was breathing on his own. He had his glasses on, the ones with the lavender frames. His eyes were open. And then they closed.
“I would prefer to be the first Year-Rounder to see the year’s first snow.” He said it all at once, with a single breath, then took a noisy swallow of air.
“That’s what you want?” I said.
“That’s what I want,” he said.
It was quiet in the house, with Mickey still sleeping.
He cranked his one foot around its anklebone. I heard the bones in his body pop. He sighed and his lungs gurgled and I pretended I didn’t hear—studied the ceiling, thought about the things my brother preferred. To find the stars on a clean-sky night. To have a second scoop of ice cream, just before bed, teeth already brushed. To have somebody read him his favorite books, over and again. To be photographed sitting so no one could see the curve of him standing, or not to be photographed at all.
I was lying there imagining that I could see us both from up above, that I was flying one of his planes, looking down. My head at his footboard, my knees like a tent, the shine on my painted toenails, the flop of Jasper Lee’s tube socks, the crank of his foot, his flannel pajama bottoms with their rolled-up hems, the Yankees sweatshirt that Mickey had hemmed quick with a pair of scissors and some yellow thread. I imagined Jasper Lee’s hands, like animal hands, he used to say, like claws. I imagined his head propped high on three foam pillows. I imagined his nose, his lips, his tongue as what they were, and after that, his ears, which were perfect pale, exotic shells.
The enzymes had not touched them.
Through the windows behind him, I could see the nighttime dialing its darkness back. To the one side was the BiPAP. To the other his nightstand with the home-schooling pile—the workbooks and secondhand Scholastic readers and science that Ms. Isabel sent home once each week in a green-folder pack, Ms. Isabel staying sometimes, sitting on the edge of Jasper Lee’s bed explaining, or asking Mickey for baking soda and setting off a volcano, or listening to Jasper Lee talk about his sand, because already he had questions about its infinitesimalness, about how there was so vastly much, how the world never ran out of sand. Ms. Isabel listened. She helped him look things up. She brought him books, she brought him vials, she drew out worksheets just for him.
Everything was frozen beside Jasper Lee’s bed.
Everything was still.
Jasper Lee wanted to see the snow.
It was like a dream he’d had.
“All right,” I said, after a long time. “All right. Get up.”
He struggled up onto his elbows, didn’t understand.
“Be ready,” I said, “for when I come back.” I rolled off the bed and left him where he was. I ran the stairs to my room, but very quiet. I turned on no lights. I hurried into my jeans. I pulled one of my aunt’s old hats and scarves from the closet we shared and pulled my skates from beneath the skirt of the bed.
He was ready by the time I got back downstairs. He was standing by the door with his four-pocket khaki pants on, the hems cuffed high. He had his navy parka on and Mom’s tulip-patterned scarf around his neck and his straw hat pressed to his head, his lavender glasses on the bridge of his stunted nose.
“Game on,” I said, opening the door, letting it close soft behind us.
He waited. I got ready. Fit the skates onto my Skechers. Took the key from around my neck. “Wheels up,” I said at last, crouching so that he could climb onto my back—tie his arms around my neck, knot his legs around my waist. Our house was four miles from Haven’s northern tip. Jasper Lee was seven years old and small and weighed what I could carry. I was his sister, and together we were strong. I felt his heart beating into my left shoulder blade.
I walked over the pebbles.
I stepped onto the walk.
I climbed over the curve.
We were off.
All the pebbled lawns of Haven were sleeping, and Mickey, too, was sleeping, and the darkness was giving way to gray, and we disturbed no one. We reached the north end of the island just as the snow began to fall.
“What you prefer,” I said, catching my breath. “At your service.”
He hugged me hard from behind, and then he climbed down. I skated, he slowly walked to a weathered bench where the fishermen sat on summer days, throwing their lines into the sea. But that day it was just Jasper Lee and me keeping company with the striped lighthouse and the lapping edge of the water and the soft snow that fell. We let it fall on us, gently blanket us, color of perfectly white and simply perfect.
“You’re the luck part of my life,” he said. “You and Mickey and Haven.”
The luck part of his life, I thought. The luck part of something. I’d been sitting on the bed where the stranger had been. The sand had been breezing against me, a stiff crust. Sterling had settled in for a nap and so had the crisp, white birds of Jasper Lee’s stories. I didn’t know the time, but the sun had risen. Deni would be coming for me soon, standing by Old Carmen’s rock, anxious with news—her news to tell and to take.
I used the toilet down the hall that didn’t flush. I dug out my map of Haven as it once had been, before all its parts had perished, the thermos that had rolled beneath my bed the night of the storm, still some water in it, and these I tucked into my trench coat pockets, alongside Jasper Lee’s stories. I did all this, but first I found the pen and journal I’d salvaged the day after the storm, still right there in my trench coat pocket. I wrote:
Tell me who you are, and what you’re taking.
“Game on,” I told Sterling, nudging her out of her sleep and tucking her down into the pocket. I found a snow globe in the curio cabinet. I left the note on the bed. I anchored it down with the snow globe.
That was it. All my preparations.
“Let’s blow this popsicle joint,” I told that cat, and we staggered out, across the tilted deck. We gave our lives over to Rapunzel.
The tide was drawing back. The sand was wet cement oozed over gutters, swished across ironing boards, flat on the flat-screen TVs, swirled in the swirls of chandeliers and candlesticks. The beachcombers were scavenger birds, their heads bent, their hands hooked over cranky parts and pieces. Nothing had changed except the smell was worse and the beach seemed more crowded and there were bootprints, somewhere, left behind by the stranger who’d come, kicked up into the chaos.
The sun was noon-high in the sky. I picked my way toward Old Carmen’s rock—the red flag flapping and the fire sending up a thin SOS. The hem of my trench coat skittered over the dry upper sand. It dragged where the sand was damp and my waders sank. Sterling had two paws on my shoulder and her tail in a pocket. She had assigned herself a detail that I called the reverse lookout.
“You are,” I told her twice, “an excellently fine cat.” She was especially talented in reverse.
Now, lifting one hand to block the sun, I searched for Deni. I saw everything but her and nothing but ruin. I kept walking, watching where my waders went, cutting the distance between me and the rock, until finally I saw Deni still way out ther
e, hugging the shoreline in her brother’s army boots. Her hair had spiked back up to antennae heights. Her aviators were pooling the sun. She’d changed into her brother’s army sweatshirt, its round neck cut in a fraying V—I would have known that anywhere, picked it out from any mile—and she was traveling Gem-free. Her hurt arm high in its sling, she was half-walking, half-running; she hadn’t seen me.
“Hey!” I waved.
Too much between us.
Matching Deni’s pace now, ignoring the throb in my knee, threading as quickly as I could across the stalagmite landscape. I was doing a dangerous weave between sofas and butcher blocks, pillows and lampshades, the people I knew, the split side of a deck, the triple shelves of a library shelf, Elly P. in loafers and an anchor miniskirt, Rahna D. with a bandanna holding back the lovely masses of her hair, Dr. Hagy, who had never gone far without her tennis racquet and who was carrying it now, like a miniature webbed table, its strings holding the silverware she had dug out from the sand. We all were going in between and out. We were stopping to hug each other, to console each other, to say what we’d heard, what we knew, what we suspected, but not for long. We had to carry on. We were scratched, dirty, standing, sorry, and there was nothing we could do, and Deni was coming, she was so much closer, and when people wanted to talk I did, and when people couldn’t look up I understood.
Tragedy is a public thing.
It is also a private condition.
“Hey, Deni!” I called, and she heard me this time. Stopped to make sure. Started cutting faster in my direction. She was past Old Carmen’s rock, her boots splashing the edge of the sea. She was past where the deer had been and where Chang and Mario had disappeared into the mirage or into the weird place of my imagination. Weather vanes and a parking meter and a Christmas wreath lay tossed between us. A chili bowl, a clothesline pole, a telephone, a mattress. The mattress had its quilt intact and a wet dog curled at its end and I thought it was dead except for how it barked when we passed, and now Sterling was making a show of discontent—little desertion moves, all four of her feet crouched on my shoulder.