by Beth Kephart
“Don’t you dare leave your post,” I said. “We’re almost there.” Lifting her from my shoulder to give her a good, stern glare and still walking forward because Deni had news, I could tell she did, and I had news for her.
That’s when the thud of my boot struck the bell of some metal.
That’s when I tripped and shivered forward, then fell flat.
I remember Sterling flying, better than some circus act.
She was helping me up to my elbows. She was yanking the trap off my foot. She was pulling off my wader, measuring my ankle with one hand.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Not swollen,” she said. “At least not yet.”
The sky a little too blue. The clouds were fuzzy.
“Ms. Isabel,” Deni explained. “Her roller cart.”
I sat up a little higher, let the next wave of dizzys pass, let my eyes focus, and Deni was right: It was Ms. Isabel’s cart—mangled and empty. Ms. Isabel’s cart that I’d stepped inside and that had snapped its jaws like a land mine.
“Look,” Deni said now. She stood and came back with a busted cassette player in one hand, its lid cracked to ninety degrees. She stood again and scooped a tangle of coppery magnetic tape from not so far away. It looked like tumbleweed, or a strand of yarn. It looked like play to Sterling.
Deni waited for my queasiness to fade. She watched Sterling bat the magnetic tape, all those vanished birdsongs. She looked at me and brushed her fingers across my forehead. “Looks like you fell asleep facedown in a pile of sand,” she said. “You should be careful. That thing on your face could get infected.”
I would have told her right then about the stranger. I would have asked for her advice, but right then I didn’t know how to. She’d done her evaluation on me, and I was dirty but I’d be fine. “Give me your hand,” she said, pulling me up with her one good one.
We stood side by side, surveying the world at our feet.
“Pompeii has nothing on this,” she said.
And then: “I still can’t find Eva.”
The news from North wasn’t good. Deni told me as we walked. Five dead of drowning. Seven dead of crush, shock, or heart attack, bad luck, worst choices. Several dozen unaccounted for and six whole blocks of North gone, no proof that anyone had ever lived there to begin with. Without the bridge and with so many slips and ships sunk off the mainland itself, it would be days before the National Guard could come, the police and medics, the unlocal firemen.
“I can’t find Eva, Mira.” Deni said it again.
We’d been back to the rock. Filled two pockets with Friskies, nodded at Old Carmen, who had nodded at us, who had moved the cactus with the pink bow from one end of the rock to the rock’s very middle, near the shine of her toolbox. Deni Norfleet, Deni had said, putting her hand out like she’d been trained to do, cause and effect of her status as a minister’s daughter. Old Carmen shook Deni’s hand back, like they were making a pact: two survivors who thought things through better than the rest of us.
“Broken or sprained?” Old Carmen asked, about Deni’s slinged-up arm.
“Sprained, ma’am.”
“You keep it protected. No messing around.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You tell this one”—Old Carmen pointed at me—“to keep that bandage clean on her head. Cut like that, it takes some healing time.”
Deni looked at me and nodded. Told Old Carmen she was heading out for some reconnaissance. Nobody but a girl in her brother’s shipped-home uniform could have used that word straight, but it fit Deni fine.
Old Carmen nodded. Deni did a salute. No questions needed between two people who took defense as their first duty.
We left the rock and headed west toward what used to be the town, Sterling trotting behind us. The asphalt, the sidewalks, the former yards of former houses were somewhere and somehow beneath us, but really: Haven was sand. Haven was an unending stretch of Jasper Lee’s obsession, far and wide as our eyes could see. I needed quiet to take the strangeness in and some privacy to look away. I needed a different kind of map.
“Used to be—” I said.
“No looking back,” Deni said. She shook her head.
The sure corners and right angles of the town equaled gone. The telephone poles stood at slugger angles, the wires strung between them loose and low as black Us. Street signs and shop signs were tossed notes; I thought of the flying octagon, the crack in my head. It was as if asteroids had fallen from the skies and this time it wasn’t H2O but glass and timber, Plexiglas and metal, cash registers, frying griddles, the ice cream cases from McCauley’s, brass doorknobs and plates.
“This way,” Deni said.
I thought again of the useless map. Sterling lagged behind, trotted ahead, let her tongue hang loose and her tail wag and her triangle ears poke high anytime we stopped, anyone we saw, anybody Deni asked: How bad are you hurt? What do you need? Heard about the brigade at North? Seen our other best friend, Eva?
“Eva Hartwell,” she’d say. “Platinum blond? About so tall?”
She’d wave the photo that she’d tucked inside her pocket: Show me where. Hunch her shoulder on account of that sling, on account of needing to know.
Anybody Deni asked knew Eva—The pretty girl, the delicate one, the one whose mom would sing at Buckeye’s on Fridays, that one? Yes. Eva Hartwell. Haven’t seen her since the storm. A brigade at North? What kind of brigade? Who else have you found? Who has a radio?
Minister’s daughter, hero’s sister—that was Deni. Polite. Determined. Please. But we couldn’t find Eva in the gutters of Main, in the broken crosswalks, in the humps of sand, in the cars with their windshields torn off, on the buried steps of Alabaster, in the Slurpee freezers that had been tossed to the street, in the questions Deni asked. Eva? We walked until our feet felt like a color—blue. We walked and we would not stop because we had to find Eva, because she was waiting on us, because no more losses were acceptable; the storm had stolen enough. Because Deni said, How about the sanctuary?, which was a crooked block that way, and because we went.
We were searching for Eva.
We walked side by side plus cat between houses that had tossed their coats to the ground, their under- things. Houses standing around in their bones with their roofs peeled off, torn curtains like petticoats in the windows, broken glass in the yards, which were heaped sand. Nobody out. Nobody home. Keep walking. Until we reached the crushed shells of the sanctuary lot, which we could not hear or feel, because they were buried beneath sand.
Deni kept going. Sterling climbed up into my hands. No boardwalk, no rope rails, no dragonflies up ahead. No Respect. No Preserve. Just ruin. “Eva!” Deni called. “Eva!” The unearthed roots of the sanctuary bushes squirming like worms. The trees split or in a crouch, the paths plugged or destroyed, and I stood there trying to remember before, the O’Sixteens, the darted wings of birds, Eva and Shift in the easy shade, the pop quiz Ms. Isabel wouldn’t have had the heart to give us.
“She wouldn’t have come here,” I told Deni. “Why would she come here?”
“Because she’s Eva,” Deni said, and I knew what she meant: heart for a head. Alabaster romantic. I can see Alexandria from here. I can see Last Island. I can see vanishing, and maybe I can stop it. She’d been last seen with Shift, that was all we knew, and who was he, and where had she gone?, and where were the birds?; the trees had lost their heads. It was silent, too silent. Nothing stirred except for the twigs Deni snapped, the nests we walked on, the whisks of ourselves through the claustrophobic leaves.
“Eva!” Deni called, as we made our way through the jungle of the place, but it was useless. The broken stumps and fallen limbs kept taking us back to where we started until Deni would begin again and I would follow and I began losing sight of that short hair, that fraying sling. With every whip-back of the branches I was confused. With eve
ry turnstile churn of the splintered trees. With every step through the scuttling green, the thorns.
Deni went deeper and I followed and Sterling kept her head tucked low and sometimes, through a break in the trees, the sun would shoot through and I would go blind or dizzy or more confused. “Deni?” I called, because I couldn’t see her anymore, and I stopped, and there, in the wishbone split of a broken tree was a kite, but it wasn’t a kite, it was half of a bird. The single wing of a swan.
“Deni?” I called.
“Eva!”
I heard her.
The branches. The brambles. The shadows. The buzz, low to the ground and suddenly, up ahead, it went perfectly still. No more boots crunching fallen things. No more Eva echoing back. I heard something in my own heart snap. I heard Sterling grrrrrrrrr.
“No, no no no.” I heard Deni’s voice at last. “No!”
I battled the limbs. I ran.
I saw the long coat first. The lavender. The buttons. I saw the tossed book with its green spine cracked, its bird wings fading. I saw the everlasting dreads and the oak where Shift had been sitting a few days before, Shift and Eva, together and strange, but now the oak was sawed in half and its top branch had crashed, and beneath it—her eyes wide and her body still—lay Ms. Isabel.
“Help her,” Deni was saying. “Help me.” Taking Ms. Isabel’s pale hand in hers, scrunching down to turn her head, find her mouth, blow air into the empty lungs. It sounded like drowning—Deni sobbing into Ms. Isabel’s lungs. I yanked at the fallen limb, scratched at the bark, desperate to relieve the killing weight of things. I couldn’t. Nothing moved. Not the limb, not our teacher’s lungs.
The branches and the brambles like a roof against our heads.
The terrible misting of bugs.
Sterling on the ground, mewling.
“Ms. Isabel,” Deni was crying, rocking back, rocking forward. “We’re here, Ms. Isabel. We’re right here.”
There were rivers running down Deni’s cheeks. There was desperation in the way she moved, until suddenly she stopped and threw herself against the stump of the murderous tree, and I was thrown back with her. I tried to imagine Ms. Isabel in the dark of the storm, in the terrible winds, the deafening howl. I tried to imagine, but I couldn’t stop the sky from falling. I couldn’t fix anything. It was Ms. Isabel who had come, not Eva. Ms. Isabel who had died for the birds.
What are our responsibilities? A Ms. Isabel question.
To pay attention.
To love the world.
To live beyond ourselves.
How much time went by? I don’t know. How could we stand it? We couldn’t. How are we alive, still? Parts of us aren’t. I couldn’t see, for all those tears. I couldn’t breathe, for all that sadness. I couldn’t. When I looked up again I saw the break of sun between two dented limbs, I saw a slow heartbeat in the trees. I heard a deep whoosh and I saw a dagger and a beard of feathers.
A deep whoosh whoosh, and then it flew.
“The great blue heron,” I said, and Deni looked, too.
The Bird will make sure that all things are put in their proper places on earth.
“Proper places,” I said.
And there was no counting all those tears.
I talked to Mickey and Jasper Lee. I talked to Mr. Friedley and the O’Sixteens. I talked out loud, I talked inside, I said, I am sorry but maybe I’m not big enough for this, not brave enough, not strong enough.
Deni talked to her dad. Deni prayed. She promised another perfect person on her way to heaven. “Make room for more wings.” Her tears like two rivers and mine like the seas and we closed Ms. Isabel’s eyes. We buttoned her coat. We made a bouquet of white swan feathers. We slipped them into her dreads.
“We need to tell someone,” Deni finally said. A choke of words. A respectful decision.
She stood tall as she could beneath the ruined trees.
“I’ll go, you’ll stay? You’ll keep her company?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll—”
She tried to speak but couldn’t.
“You won’t be long,” I said.
“Coming back,” she said. “Soon. For Ms. Isabel.”
Once, a very long time ago, I was drowning. I’d gone out for a swim. I was nine years old. It was dark, and I should have been sleeping, and Jasper Lee was just a toddler then who cried at night; there was no name for his disease. Mickey was four part-time jobs and exhausted and she had sung him to sleep, like she always sang him to sleep, and on this night, I remember, she fell asleep beside him, on his bed.
The ocean was right there. Down the stairs, through the Zone, over the lump of the dune. The tide was high. I’d been sitting on my deck chair listening to the lather foam, my skin sticky with sea-salty sweat. I only wanted a swim. It didn’t seem so wrong. My bathing suit was dry on the deck rail, and the sea was right there, and I pulled my T-shirt and my underpants off, put my tank suit on. Mickey didn’t hear me on the stairs going down, didn’t hear my feet out in the Zone, over the Dune, on the night sand. I felt the first foam on my toes and waded deeper in.
A cool splash.
A knee dip.
Ocean to my thighs.
The moon was a few days after full. The stars were bright as planets. I lifted my chin to see the million pinpricks, and then I lay on my back to count them. It was so easy, lying there on the pulsing waves, easy as sleep in a cradle. My medium hair swimming from my medium face. My arms and legs wide, like a starfish.
I was too young to know the power of the tide. I was too in love with the magic of the stars to think about the shore, to gauge my place in the sea. I was too slow to realize that the depth beneath me had changed and the waves were riding higher and now there was something up against the flesh of my neck, something nipping at my hair, a tug. I stood to shake myself clean, but there was no sand beneath me. I was out too far, suspended like a puppet from its strings in the bob of the sea, and the waves were drawing me out, farther.
Farther.
Farther.
There was no one near to save me.
I flung myself toward the shore, but my body tugged under. I dove, I rose, I drifted. The more I tried, the worse it was—the water pulling me down, the lights along the beach growing tiny as the stars, the picket fence, the dune fading from view. I screamed, and I was sinking. I called out and my words were bubbles. I batted my arms and kicked my legs and my body pulled me down.
Waves breaking.
Waves over my head.
We die backward. That’s what I learned that night. We die looking over the length of our own lives, floating through time. I saw Mickey singing to my brother in his bed. I saw Mickey stacking the plates in the sink. I saw Jasper Lee with his blue bucket on, king of the tidal parade. I saw the day I’d moved into the attic room—It’s yours now, sweetie, all this and the view, too—and the birthday party with the sequined wings. I saw me at three and Deni at three, Deni with long, glossy hair, no aviators; I saw Eva blowing out candles. I heard Mickey saying, You’re a big girl now, and I heard her crying, and the last thing I remember is feeling very sad, feeling sinking, feeling sad, and everything bobbing up and down and the stars losing their light and I wasn’t afraid after that.
All gone.
All done.
Good night.
And then it was all dark and all right until my back was thrown hard against the sand, until my lungs exploded with salty air, until water poured like fire through my nose until I thought I heard, somewhere far off, a song. Time changed direction. Mickey’s fists were pounding my lungs, her mouth was feeding mine air, I was sicker than I’d ever been.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” she sobbed. “Never. Ever. Ever.”
I looked up, and Mickey’s hair was like yarn. Her tears were like dewdrops. Far away I thought I heard the sound of
someone leaving.
“Don’t ever,” she repeated. “Again.”
I looked down the beach, in the direction of the footsteps and thought I saw, never knew if I saw, a shadow trailing off.
Mickey would never speak of it again. She blamed herself.
“Come back,” I whispered to Ms. Isabel. “Please.”
But there on the pine-needle ground our teacher did not move. There with the feathers woven into her hair and her coat buttoned so that she wouldn’t grow cold and Sterling watching over her, batting the insects away, and a single dragonfly had come, and from somewhere I couldn’t see, a bird had started to sing, and beside that song was the whoosh whoosh of the heron. The survivors of the sanctuary. Us.
Home of the brave, I thought. Home of the brave. I wrote Ms. Isabel like my brother would. I wrote her down, for Eva’s eternal ever.
Stuff:The black bird with the red wings.
The blue heron in the green shade.
The swan that wanted to save you.
We wanted to save you,
Too.
Bird chirp, wing beats, owl lullabies,
Kites and nightjars, hummingbirds,
Also dragonflies.
Source: Every song that played the skies was
Something
You knew.
We knew,
Too.
We’ll know
Always.
Lost: September 20, 2015
Fact: This is the story of you.
“The story of you,” I whispered.
I kissed her cheek.
I watched her sleep.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
“We won’t forget you,” I promised.
That night, on Old Carmen’s rock, I could not sleep. I closed my eyes and it was all right there. The lavender coat. The shattered limb. The broken shade. The dragonfly. The heron. Ms. Isabel, the story of her. Deni returned, but I don’t know when. She returned with the people she had gathered—Miss SaraBeth, Mr. Samuel Brown, Darlene Daniels, Jeffrey Bean, one of them a lawyer and one of them a friend and one of them, Darlene, in a big straw hat and a quilt in her hands. It took all of us to shove the fallen limb away. All of us to lift Ms. Isabel’s body into the sling of the quilt, and to carry her one final time through the hovering trees.