We sat in two wooden armchairs with a table of magazines and a potted plant between us. He picked up a Sunset, looked at the cover, then glanced up and offered it to me. The cover story was “Ten Island Getaways.”
“No thanks.” I laughed.
“I guess we’ve made it,” he said, putting the magazine back.
“A clean getaway,” I said.
“Do you live here in Orwell?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. I looked at the manila envelope in my hands. All I had to do was file the deed, then the cottage would be mine. “I grew up here. I’m just back to take care of some family business.”
He nodded.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Ma’am?” I repeated, and laughed. He was maybe three or four years older than I.
He blushed, chewed the inside of his cheek. I couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or just embarrassed.
“I’m here for work. I’m not sure where I’ll be living at the moment.”
A sheriff’s deputy came through from a back office.
“Hey there, Carey, sorry to keep you waiting,” the deputy said. He came around and shook hands with the man next to me.
“Hey, Chris,” he said, “no problem.”
His last name was embroidered to his uniform: Lelehalt. I recognized him. Chris Lelehalt. His grandma May and my grandma Lucia were both Lummi and in a sewing circle together. Many of the old-timers were Catholic, so the sewing bees were always at St. Mary’s, in the basement meeting room with folding tables and chairs, plates of cookies, grandkids playing tag in the cemetery. Chris was a year younger, so I didn’t play with him much, but his mom worked at the refinery on Marrow, one of the few women at the plant. She made it home after the quake. Mom and I saw them at the church, where the Red Cross was distributing supplies. It may have been the last time I saw Chris—still lanky and pre-adolescent, black hair cut short and neat. Our mothers were standing around while an old lady gave us all typhoid shots. I remembered my mother asking her something—I didn’t actually hear what she asked; they were just outside the circle of mothers. Deb had shaken her head and hugged Mom hard. Chris was next in line, wincing as he watched the shot go into my arm.
“We’ve just got a few things to go over,” Chris was saying, tapping some papers on his hand. “The notary will be here later, the normal rigmarole, and you should be all set up by the end of the day. Let’s head on over.”
Carey, soon to be all set up by Deputy Chris Lelehalt and the notary public, turned back to me.
“Have a nice day, ma’am,” he said.
“You too, sir,” I said.
Chris Lelehalt watched this exchange, not recognizing me, and turned when Carey joined him, leading him through to the back of the clerk’s office.
“Well, it looks like you’re all mine.” The clerk stood and was staring at me from behind the desk. She was so short that her eyes were nearly level with mine in my chair against the wall.
I told her why I was there, and she handed me something else to fill out, took my deed, and looked at it.
“Bowen,” she said, “the cottage out there by the Swenson place?”
“Yeah.”
“Haven’t been Bowens out here for a long time.”
“No.”
“You won’t remember me,” she said after a long pause. “My son Aaron worked with your dad. Lost him the same day.”
I stopped filling out the form. She was right; I didn’t remember her. I hadn’t even noticed her name plate on the counter, hidden behind a box of tissues: MARLA SHARPE.
“I’m sorry” was all I could say.
“So am I, dear.”
She was quiet while I filled out the rest of the form, then she took the lot and made copies.
“Are you moving back here?” she asked while we waited, printer humming.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It needs a lot of work.”
She nodded. “It’s an old house; survived a lot better than some. If you’re thinking of selling, talk to Jacob Swenson first; he wants to keep that side of the island from development.”
“I’ve never met him—does he live at Rookwood year-round?”
“Oh, yes. He’s around most of the year. He oversees things, since Julia passed.”
I nodded. “Is he an artist like Julia and Maura?”
She laughed.
“An art lover, maybe. Collects antiques. No, I think it’s just a man his age, unmarried, living alone in that big old house out there, people will talk. They call him eccentric. But he’s no more eccentric than Julia ever was. Keeps to himself, but makes nice with folks when he needs to. Gives out a scholarship every year at the Festival.”
“He doesn’t seem to be home. Do you know if he’s away now?”
“He goes back east around Christmas, usually, and to Seattle every now and then. Comes back with his little red car packed with knickknacks and furniture.”
“A red Saab?”
“Yep, at least thirty years old, that car—I don’t know how he keeps it running out here.”
“I think I saw his car—in the garage. Does he usually leave it here when he goes back east?”
“That’s odd.” Her brow furrowed. “He drives himself everywhere. I think he parks it at SeaTac when he flies.” She waved her hand. “You know, he’s probably just sleeping off a late night, dear,” she said quietly, and winked, then turned away to retrieve the copies.
My mother had always complained about the islanders’ propensity for gossip, but as a journalist I privately rejoiced every time I met a local busybody like Marla Sharpe.
“Try again this evening,” she said, handing me the papers. “I bet he’ll give you the tour of his collection.”
“Sure, thanks.”
I gathered up my copies and slid them into my bag.
I walked toward the cemetery. On the way I passed the Co-op and stopped in to buy a clutch of dahlias—ISLAND-GROWN, the sign proclaimed. There were dahlias bursting like anemones around fence posts and front porches all over the islands this time of year. I probably could have walked up to any front door and asked to pick a few. But I paid the six bucks and kept walking up the hill, past the church itself and through the wrought-iron gate and into the cemetery. The ground was soft under my feet, like the thick soft carpet inside the church.
I passed Aaron Sharpe’s headstone, untied the bundle of flowers, and put one in the scummy vase at the base. Near the back, just before a broad open hill sloped down, was Dad’s marker. WILLIAM WHITMAN BOWEN, his father’s name within his own. Grandma Lucia and Grandpa Whit were tucked together next to him. As a child I had pictured them sleeping side by side in a cozy bed, blankets folded under their arms. A grave was just an underground bedroom, where people went into permanent hibernation.
At my dad’s funeral, there had been nothing to imagine. There was no interment, just a headstone on soil, waiting. In case he washed up somewhere. In case some bone fragment gave up some DNA we could trace through mine to confirm. We had nothing to bury. Of all the survivors of the Marrow ArPac disaster, none could remember when or where they had last seen my father. One thought he saw him boarding a boat just before the first waves came; another thought he was helping others, inside, just before the explosion. A few men had burned to cinders when the fire controls failed; pipes that carried water to sprinklers were crushed under the weight of collapsed steel, and water glugged uselessly out into drainage ditches and then back into the sea.
Coast Guard boats and fire flights that may have come to help had either been incapacitated in the quake or dispatched to other emergencies before the radio calls reached them. ArPac was the oldest, smallest petroleum refinery in the area—there were two others—and fires were already underway at Tesoro in Anacortes. There were chemical spills all over the sound, from ships and barges washed against pilings or slammed ashore, from paper plants, from railways along the water. The coal
terminal in Bellingham had just been completed, and the wave—though less powerful than it was farther south near Everett and Seattle—spread a cubic mile of coal over land and water throughout up and down the sound.
There were people in the water who needed saving, too.
Bodies had washed up for weeks after the quake, along with all the other flotsam. I had been forbidden to beachcomb—a daily routine in ordinary times—but Katie and I slipped away. Our mothers were sleepless and busy with post-disaster chores, easily manipulated into believing the other mother was on watch. We were twelve and shrugged off their worry like wool cardigans. We had walked through the woods between our houses to a rocky crescent of shoreline. I don’t know what we expected to find—I don’t remember if we went for any reason other than transgression—but there were more dead shorebirds than I had ever seen, cast among the jagged hulls of small boats, rope and fishing gear, fish and crabs trapped and suffocated or starved in the mesh. We had pulled our shirts over our noses to filter the air, thick with sea rot and animal rot, mixed with the eye-glazing fumes of the chemical dispersants they had eventually used on the oil slicks around Marrow. Everything had an oily gloss, a sheen like a puddle in a gas station parking lot.
A feeling had come over me, as we picked through furniture and disintegrating cereal boxes and a pair of eyeglasses. A man’s work boot, a hooded sweatshirt, items of clothing so filthy and sodden we couldn’t identify them, heaped over driftwood, branches. I remembered reaching out to touch them—wanting to uncover the logs, maybe? And realizing they weren’t logs. I had looked at Katie, and her face mirrored the unease that had settled in me. She had climbed up onto a giant downed tree and reached down for my hand. I took it and joined her, staring over the wrecked shore below us, the clouds of flies hovering over the heaps. We jumped down the other side into the grass and ran back into the woods. We never talked about it; but we both knew. We had been breaking a cardinal rule. And it was obvious he was already dead. What could we do to help him? We couldn’t tell anyone without getting in trouble ourselves, so we didn’t.
The body wasn’t my father, who never did wash up, at least not on Orwell or Marrow, convincing my mother that he had been trapped in the refinery by the fire. I laid the flowers across his headstone. There was a plot next to my father, for my mom. She was remarried, so I figured the plot would be mine, someday.
I spent the rest of the day going over the cottage, making lists of things to be fixed or assessed by a professional. The water heater was ancient, as was the electrical panel. I couldn’t believe my mom hadn’t needed to replace them after the quake—but then she’d probably hired an out-of-work ArPac friend of my dad’s who wasn’t going to bother with bringing things up to code. It didn’t matter what she had done then anyway; a couple decades of island weather and winter vacancy had left peeling paint, moldy cabinets, leaky pipes.
I stood at the screen door drinking a beer, letting the breeze cool me, and staring up through the mesh at Rookwood. I had pulled up the drive when I got back, knocked on the door again. There was no movement at all from inside, no sounds. I felt the hairs on my arm rise and looked down to see a mosquito lifting off, full of my blood. She flew straight for the screen and knocked herself against it, up and down, until she found a hole—probably the hole through which she had come. I turned to the counter and added screens to the list.
Evening was coming on, but there was still plenty of light, so I spent it in the yard, wrangling a season’s worth of weeds. In the shed were the tools and more notes from my mom to visitors or hired hands: how to oil and clean the blades on the manual mower (carefully!); how to plug in the weed-whacker (run the cord through the bathroom window); how and where to find the strawberry patch and the raspberries so as not to mow them down (Follow the birds and the bees in June!); encouragements to pick the wild irises for bouquets; where to put the hatchet when not splitting logs (on the wall in the shed); and random admonishments and warnings (Wear gloves! Watch for nettles!).
By dusk my muscles were spent; I had blisters on my hands (didn’t wear gloves!). I dropped to the ground, fibrous shards of crabgrass stabbing me through my sweaty T-shirt. The lawn slanted steeply, and my head was pointed downhill, toward the water, arms thrown up, watching the tide upside down for a while, letting my mind drift. I rolled my head to the side, where I could just spy Rookwood’s long wide lines through the trees. There were no signs of life at the house other than that one light, still burning. No cars had come or gone. I thought about the red car in the carriage house.
I sat up and downed the last of my beer. Eyes tired, or maybe just dusty, I saw everything through a filter of spores. I felt watched, but also called, beckoned by the glowing window.
“You’re drunk,” I said. I counted how many beers I’d had and how little food.
In the cottage I pulled on a sweater and found a working flashlight. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself. No one on the island would mind if a neighbor saw to a light left on. There were probably still keys to Rookwood somewhere in the cottage. I thought of Marla Sharpe at the clerk’s office—she knew my family; she could vouch for me. I was a landowner! I let myself follow the drunken logic, emboldened by my legitimacy as a remade local and a newly minted property owner, as I crossed the lane in the dark. I knew enough not to pause, not to think. On Rookwood’s dark porch, I didn’t hesitate as I reached for the latch on the door. Like most doors on the island, it was unlocked. I gave it a shove and watched it swing heavily over the flagstones of the entry.
I called out a loud hello. My voice didn’t even echo, lost to the heavy walls of the house.
“It’s your neighbor, Lucie Bowen,” I called again, closing the door behind me and standing there in the silence, flashlight aimed at a mirror opposite the door. An arch to the left led to the parlor, an arch to the right led to the hallway and carved staircase. I felt twelve years old again; I wished Katie were there with me.
I found the light switch—an old-fashioned one, two Lucite buttons with circles of abalone inlay—and the chandelier above me lit up. It made everything beyond its glare seem darker and more forbidding. Being alone in a half-lit house seemed scarier than being in a dark one, so I turned it off.
I kept the flashlight trained ahead of me and headed for the staircase. The house smelled dusty, stale. Unlived-in. I stopped on the landing and sneezed a few times, wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve. I looked down at my feet, at the carpet on the stairway, faded and worn to threads in places.
Above me was Maura’s famous self-portrait, lifelike and imperious. She was probably in her forties at the time, brown-gray hair pulled up and back, wearing a pale blue dress, not a trace of a smile on her face. It wasn’t a beautiful portrait, but it was striking. She painted it between the wars; art had changed then, Julia had told me, because of the shock of modern warfare. I was ten at the time, in shock myself from the quake. Maybe that was why she had said it. Because she wanted me to know that there was a world full of tragedies besides my own.
I continued up the stairs, telling myself I had no intention of snooping, just turning off the light. The adrenaline was killing the beer’s soft buzz. A long hallway ran the width of the house at the top, and I turned to the right, following the glow at the end, the last door on the right. It opened on a large bedroom with a perfectly made four-poster, a suitcase open and half-filled with clothes on top. The sight of something in progress like that made me doubt myself: Maybe he was home? Maybe he had been home and I had missed him? But the rest of the room was off: there was a through-breeze; the window of the dormer was open wide, and there were two lamps lit, not just the one visible in the window. The other was tipped on its side on a bedside table, the shade hanging over the edge. I closed the window, noting water stains on the sill and leaves on the carpet below. It had been open for some time. When was the last rain? It had been a few days, a hard rain after weeks of unseasonable warmth.
When I turned to the lamp on the table, my foot bumped w
hat was left of a broken highball glass on the floor. On the bed, the suitcase lay open like a book. Men’s clothes, folded neatly. I ran my hand over the cool cotton shirts. A belt, a pair of casual leather loafers, an eyeglasses case, a toiletries bag. I couldn’t help myself; I was in this far, wasn’t I? I opened it. There were shaving supplies, a toothbrush, contact lens case, and a prescription bottle of Klonopin with Jacob Swenson’s name on it.
I swallowed a lump rising in my throat and took a breath. I thought again about walking through the wreckage with Katie, reaching for the remains, realizing what they were, reaching out for her hand instead.
Four
The Woods
MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST, OREGON
MAY 2, 2016
BABIES EVERYWHERE. This time of year is all eggs hatching and sprouting and slippery bald heads and blind eyes shoving themselves toward the light. Everywhere you step, a birth.
After Carey left for work, I saw one of those spiders that just weeks ago looked ragged and starved. It had survived the winter somewhere under the shitty couch and was hauling itself out of the darkness and making its way across the floor in the direction of the back door. I didn’t examine it before I reacted. The door was open, beckoning to the spider, I suppose, so I grabbed the broom and tried to sweep it out onto the porch. But with the first swipe hundreds of babies went tumbling off her back. They were so fast, the specks of them with their spotted translucent bodies like baby octopuses, almost not there at all. They raced off in all directions, spun their immature threads wildly at the broom straw, clung to it. I tried not to step on them, shaking them from the broom, trying still to usher them out the door. But their mother just kept running, all eight legs whirring, a few little ones still holding to her body and dangling off by weak strings.
“Don’t leave your babies!” I called after her, but she was faster now that she wasn’t carrying all her children. “What am I going to do with your babies?”
Marrow Island Page 4