by Ashley Ream
“I’m glad Harry has someone staying with him,” he said.
“You and Harry are friendly?”
Tip pressed his lips together and crinkled his chin. “Friendly might be pushing it. His dog dug up three hundred dollars’ worth of brand-new plantings, and there was disagreement about their replacement.”
“How do you know it was Shooby?” Tilda asked.
“That’s how my disagreement with Harry started,” Tip said. “I’d rather have a nicer conversation with you.”
She repressed the urge to roll her eyes. Tilda had spent the past decade around men who flirted with any woman sitting across from them. They flirted in the hopes of sex, yes. But they also flirted to deflect meaningful negotiations. They flirted as a form of dismissal. They flirted to win votes, to curry favor, to assure themselves of their charms, and they flirted because they’d been at this popularity contest for so long that it came like breathing. Tilda didn’t know how she’d ever be able to see any man flirt again and not wonder what highway project he was looking to save.
“Tell you what,” Tip said, glossing right over her inner monologue. “Why don’t you come to my restaurant tonight? It’s just three doors down. You’ll be my guest.”
Tilda shook her head and opened her mouth to deflect the invitation.
“Please,” Tip interrupted. “This island is too small for neither of you to like me. Besides, I already have all this bread, and someone has to be there to eat it.”
* * *
“I’m going out,” Tilda said. She delivered this news from the room’s doorway, indicating her desire not to linger.
Harry was sitting at the piano trying to put the last ten or so notes he’d played in the right order. They were recalcitrant, and he was losing his patience with them. Shooby knew the signs and had retreated under a Shaker-style chair in the corner with the rawhide bone given to him by the last nurse Harry had run off. When the rawhide mixed with Shooby’s drool, it made a paste that smeared onto everything the bone touched.
“Take that away from him,” Harry said, pointing with his favorite Blackwing pencil at the dog.
“What for?” Tilda asked.
“It’s disgusting.”
“It’s not hurting anything. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. It gets everywhere.”
This wasn’t a conversation Tilda wanted to continue, so she decided not to. “I made you a sandwich. It’s in the fridge. The chips are out on the counter along with the cookies. Don’t eat too many of them.”
“What are you eating?”
“I told you I’m going out.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
Tilda and the kids had learned not to talk to Harry while he was working. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be interrupted; although he didn’t. And it wasn’t that he was in a foul mood when interrupted; although he was. It was that he remembered nothing of any conversation. He became a temporary amnesiac on every topic that was not the composition at hand. When he was thirteen, Juno had once interrupted Harry to tell him he needed to be picked up at the airport the following Tuesday. He was flying to Georgia to visit Tilda’s parents, his first time on a plane by himself. Tilda would be away on state business when he returned, so Harry needed to take the ferry to Seattle, drive to the airport, and pick him up. Harry promised he would. Juno sat alone in the terminal for four hours before a concessions worker got concerned and called security, who called Tilda in Olympia. It had not been her task to pick him up, but Tilda had been mortified, and it had taken a long time to forgive Harry.
“I did say I was going out. I said it less than two minutes ago. You weren’t listening.”
Harry either ignored the criticism or didn’t hear it. “Out isn’t very specific. Where out are you going?”
“I’m going to a restaurant. I don’t expect to be late.”
“You’re going by yourself?”
“I’m meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“The neighbor.” Tilda gestured in the appropriate direction.
“Why the hell would you have dinner with that jerk?”
“Because he asked me to, and it was the polite thing to do. He said he hoped to improve relations with us.”
“Well, he can go suck a lemon.” Harry had taken off his reading glasses and now put them back on. “He doesn’t even have a real name.”
“His name is Tip.”
“Like I said.”
Tilda wasn’t in the mood to concede the point and, having imparted the information she needed to impart, turned to go.
“You’re dressed up,” Harry said to her back.
Tilda looked down at herself. She’d changed clothes three times and had only settled on the black cigarette pants and ivory ribbed turtleneck because putting on something else seemed even more absurd than what she was wearing. She wasn’t at all sure ivory was her color.
“It’s a dressy restaurant,” she said.
“Tell me this is not some ridiculous date.”
“Of course it’s not,” Tilda said and felt herself flush. It was not a date. She had already had that argument with herself, and having had the argument proved that she had entertained the merest notion that Tip might have been suggesting such a thing when he’d asked her. She had told herself that was ridiculous, but she didn’t appreciate Harry saying it. When Harry said it, it sounded mean. It sounded like she was being silly.
“Some of us are simply capable of making friends,” she said and walked out of the room.
On the way to the front door, Tilda stopped at the thermostat and turned it down. It was getting far too warm in the house.
12.
According to the missionaries, the glowing green ribbon that appeared around the island once every one hundred years represented to the Olloo’et either a path from the ancestral world to this one or the other way around, depending on how it was translated. So those who drank of the bay’s waters would either receive spectral visitors—a sort of personal haunting—or their souls would be transported to a spectral plane, which is an entirely different kind of thing.
One of the missionaries recorded in his diary that several members of the Olloo’et tribe confessed to him that they feared being transported and never being able to return to their bodies—that the spirits were, in fact, actively working against their return—and, if they did manage to come back, the men feared they would be cursed for their impertinence. It was not the sort of thing Rachel had given serious thought to. A native tribesman in the 1800s had a number of things to be afraid of—starvation, small pox, and syphilis for starters. A soul coaxed across the spectral divide and forever trapped in a netherworld seemed, by comparison, overblown. But then again, those men had not taken magic mushrooms behind the Dumpster at the Stop-N-Go when they were sixteen. Rachel had, so the extra shimmer that the electric lights began to take on and the patterns that appeared in the sand while she worked at the research site were nothing more than pleasant flashbacks.
Compared to LSD, the visual effects were minor. There were no melting faces. She didn’t suddenly see only in black and white. Time did speed up for a moment and then slow down. It wasn’t easy to follow a lot of text on her computer screen. Side effects. They were side effects. A minor inconvenience she would happily tolerate if it meant feeling like this for the rest of her life.
“You want a soda?”
Rachel blinked. She couldn’t clear her mind, but she could concentrate harder. She tried that. “What?”
Hooper was standing over her. She didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. His face had more and deeper lines than usual. The wrinkles had turned to folds. It was, of course, the light. The white tents they’d set up on the beach just beyond the water’s edge had the kind of lightbulbs hanging from the supports that she associated with mechanic shops. They plugged straight into an extension cord, which plugged into their generator, and each bulb had a little aluminum half shell around its backside. They made
for odd shadows and pockets of light and dark under the tent. It made Hooper look strange. It probably made her look strange, too. Rachel didn’t want to look strange. She tried to do a better job of arranging her face.
“I asked if you wanted a soda.” He was holding out a can of Diet Coke he’d pulled from the cooler. Meltwater from the ice was dripping off of it and onto the table that held three of the team’s laptops.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “Thank you.”
Hooper stood there while she opened it and took a drink. His presence made Rachel self-conscious of her movements. This was, she thought, exactly like taking magic mushrooms behind the Stop-N-Go, except this was the part when she had to go home and talk to her mother like she hadn’t been taking magic mushrooms.
Rachel set the can down next to the laptop she was working on. Marcus, who had forgotten to pack a knit cap for his prematurely balding head and so had a hoodie up and tied under his chin, was sitting in the chair next to hers at his own laptop. She’d known him for a year or so. He tended not to say too much, which was what she liked about him. They were flash freezing a portion of the sample they had collected for future analysis. Another portion they were preserving in formalin for taxonomic identification. Rachel had taken detailed photographs of the preserved Artemia lucis under the microscope, and she was e-mailing the images back to colleagues at the university. Enlarged, the arthropods looked like B-movie monsters.
John had kept his distance, volunteering to take the kayak out and check the ADCPs that measured water temperature and currents. Once away from shore and the artificial light, he was invisible, out somewhere on the bay, paddling farther and farther away. If something happened to him, no one would know. Not until it was too late. This thought did not upset her.
Rachel let her hand move up to the knot at her temple. She didn’t want Hooper or Marcus to notice her doing it. She pushed on the swelling. She pushed hard. Still nothing. No pain. It had been more than five hours since she’d taken the dose. This was excellent. She had to write it down.
Every hour, she’d been testing her pain responses in both her back and her facial bruising. She wrote it all down. It was still zero on a scale of one to five. She had estimated her back before taking the dose to be a four-point-five. She checked her watch, recorded the current time, and wrote in detail all the side effects she had become aware of. The last thing she needed to do was take her temperature and pulse rate.
Rachel stood up, and once she did, she wondered if she’d done it too fast. It felt like she’d exploded from the plastic folding chair like a pilot being ejected from a downed aircraft. But then again, it might be time getting elastic again.
Hooper had taken an interest in a spreadsheet open on someone else’s screen. He didn’t look up.
“I have to pee,” she said.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Hooper said.
Marcus glanced at her and rolled his eyes.
Rachel gathered her backpack and hurried out of the tent. Earlier in the evening, she’d been out in the bay collecting samples close to shore and wearing waders up to her waist. But she was done with the wet work for the night, having deposited her portion of the team’s samples where they belonged and secreting away her own new supply. Now in sneakers, it was easier to run up the beach, sidestepping the rocks and brush to the stairs and then up the stairs to the top of the cliff. The doing of it—the sheer physical ability—was exhilarating.
Porta-potties had been set up by the public parking lot. She ducked behind one, checking over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. No one was. Rachel squatted down and leaned her back against the blue plastic wall of the toilet. It didn’t smell, at least not too much.
Her shoes crunched. The asphalt was covered in a thin, blown layer of sand that scratched and scraped with every adjustment of her body weight. Near blind in the dark, Rachel unzipped the backpack. It was navy blue with a leather bottom. Loose change rattled around the small front pocket, along with some stray Tic Tacs and empty gum wrappers. It had accumulated ten years’ worth of accidental pen marks and stains and was not the sort of thing anyone would so much as bend over to steal, but to Rachel it had become the most valuable thing in the world. She reached inside and fished around for the small, metal flashlight. When she found it, she twisted it on and put it between her teeth. Both hands free, she pulled out her notebook and started recording data.
“What are you doing?”
The flashlight clattered to the ground. Her balance failed her, and she fell the last few inches to the asphalt, slamming her notebook shut before looking up.
Even in the low light, she could see the tattoo on John’s face. It made him look ancient somehow, like he was from another time. She didn’t like it, and she wasn’t sure if he really looked that way or if it was another side effect.
“Stay away from me.”
Her flashlight had rolled over by his foot, shining bright as ever. He looked down at it but did not stoop to pick it up.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
“Nothing.” Her answer sounded childish even to her.
“People who aren’t doing anything don’t hide behind portable toilets.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“Yes, you are.”
This wasn’t a question, and Rachel didn’t answer it. In the silence, the sound of the waves below seemed to get louder and closer. “I asked you to leave.”
He moved his eyes down to her shoes and then back to her face. “This isn’t like huffing paint under the bleachers.”
“If you don’t stop, I’ll file a report with Hooper.”
“I hope you do. I hope you tell him exactly what you’re doing.” John bent at the knees, dropping fast into a crouch. The quick move scared her, and she tried to skitter back, banging into the plastic toilet.
“My people have been living with this phenomena since the time of the creator. If you were as smart as you think you are, you would listen.”
“If you had anything worth saying, you wouldn’t have to corner people,” she spat.
“I’m giving you a warning, Dr. Bell, the same warning that was passed down to me. The breeding opens a doorway. Souls can pass back and forth easily during this time. If one of your souls crosses into the spiritual plane, you may not get it back. You may be”—he paused to consider the word—“unwhole.”
Rachel knew the Olloo’et believed in multiple souls. The loss of the bodily soul was death. The loss of either the immortal soul or the soul attached to their name would lead to something worse than that. The missionaries had used the word “damnation,” but that was a Christian concept that the tribe lacked.
“If you believe those stories, we have nothing to discuss,” Rachel said, trying to put more force behind her words than she felt.
“Don’t be so damn literal. I am trying to help you.”
Rachel held her notebook to her chest. “You have offered nothing like help—nor have I asked for it.”
John pushed himself back up to standing. “Your pupils are the size of a cat’s, Dr. Bell. Keep it up, and neither of us will have to say anything to Hooper.”
And then he turned and walked back down to the tents.
* * *
Harry had no business being out on the beach alone, but it was a little late to be having that realization. Even Shooby seemed concerned. Harry had gotten on his shoes and his coat and gone out the sliding glass door to the deck all right. Even the stairs down to the sand weren’t so bad. He had his cane in his left hand and the railing in his right. It was slow going but without incident. The beach, however, was turning out to be a different kind of thing.
Beaches on the island looked nothing like Florida postcards. The sand all but disappeared below the bits of driftwood and surf-worn rocks. Bits of feathery red seaweed and green kelp with floating bladders were scattered like trash after a concert. There was always something to step over or go around, and the sand beneath it shifted under his feet, whic
h had not been fully under his control for several months. In fact, he couldn’t always feel them. He could no longer trust that he would know where in the process of taking a step he was. It was as though he were always having that awkward moment of thinking there was one more stair and discovering too late and with a jolt up his shin that there was not. He could no longer watch the horizon but had to stare down at his shoes wherever he went.
The beach after ten o’clock on a cloudy night was a very dark place. Harry was looking down at his feet, but they and the landscape of sand, all of those treacherous miniature hills and valleys and trip hazards, was indistinct. He had to rely on his cane, which sank too deep when he put his weight onto it, and it took effort to pull it back up again.
It would’ve been hard not to be angry in a situation like that, and Harry wasn’t trying. So he just went right ahead over the hump to furious. He couldn’t even take a walk in what was, by all rights, his own backyard to clear his head. Harry’s work was going miserably. No matter what notes he played they didn’t say what he wanted them to say, which was certainly because what he wanted changed from moment to moment even when his fingers did cooperate. How was one to write about the end of life when life was ending? His emotions wouldn’t stand still long enough to be captured, and he had no perspective. He had no perspective, and he would never have it.
Harry was furious that he had already agreed to provide Gerald this piece. It had been an arrogant thing to do in his state. He was afraid that it would turn into an embarrassment, that his career would end with people saying, “Well, he was very sick—” as an excuse.
Harry was considering pulling out. Gerald would argue, of course, but what could he really do? That was the one bit of freedom afforded to Harry these days. What could anyone really do to him?
With this morbid thought, Harry stopped trying to walk. He’d only made it a few dozen yards anyway. He had thought he might walk along the yellow tape toward where most of the looky-loos had gathered, down by the public stairs that led up to the road above, but instead he decided to give up and make the slow, unsteady trudge back to his sleeping place on the couch. Maybe he would watch Law & Order. It was bound to be on one of those channels. But first he needed to rest, so he looked up.