Marrow Island

by Alexis M. Smith

  But she was out the door.

  “Shit. Shit, shit!” I sounded just like my mother. I learned to swear by listening to her cooking dinner, cleaning out the cabinets, weeding the garden. Household chores pissed her off, especially after my dad was gone.

  I watched the babies scatter, tried to create a breeze that would waft them after their mother, then tried gently sweeping, but I just smeared their delicate bodies across the linoleum tiles. I took the broom outside and thrashed it against a tree trunk to shake off any still clinging, any still alive.

  It’s my birthday, again. I did the math when I woke up; it was my first conscious act. Thirty-five. I’m thirty-five. I’ve been losing track, adding years without thinking, or taking them away.

  My mom called this morning, just after the baby spiders, but I didn’t pick up. She left a message on the old machine. The machine with Carey’s voice that says nothing about me, the way I requested it. She knows where I am; I always tell her now. But I don’t write or call much. It will be Mother’s Day in a few days and I’ll call then. She used to tell me that my birthday was her Mother’s Day, that she didn’t care about the holiday. I remembered this while she was talking through the machine. I’m still in trouble for taking off and almost dying on the same island that killed my dad. She would never put it that way, of course, but I can hear it in her voice. Yesterday was the anniversary of the quake and his death, so I was thinking about it. Every year, the anniversary comes hulking along, its shadow blotting me out.

  I considered picking up the phone. But there are no direct conversations with my mom. Only questions underneath questions. No matter how I try to steer it, we seem to cover the same well-trod path around what we won’t talk about: that we both lost the first and best man we ever loved, the man who had tied the two of us together in a safe, tight knot.

  “How’s Carey?” she starts, which is her way of asking if he has proposed or if I’ve proposed to him. If I don’t intend to marry him, if we’re not going to make babies, she can’t fathom why I would come out here. Why did I leave the city, where I was closer to her and my stepdad, my grandparents, a therapist? She thinks I’m undertaking some kind of self-concocted exposure therapy.

  “I sleep better out here,” I told her once. It’s true: I sleep like there’s no earthquakes, I sleep like there’s no ocean.

  I wiped minuscule spider parts from the linoleum, listening to her wish me a happy birthday. She was on her cell phone in the car, traffic under her voice.

  Carey’s at work all day. He insisted we do something for my birthday, so when he comes home, we’ll make the drive to Prairie City and eat at the hotel restaurant. Some days, when he’s been out in the woods, he smells like lichen; a heady boreal sweetness you’d never guess would come from a plant that does not bloom. I smell him every time; I put my face right into the crook of his neck as soon as he walks through the door. After a while he asked me why I did that, and I told him. I want it, that smell. I want it in a way that I can’t explain, that goes all the way into my cells. I can’t tell if this desire is biological or emotional. The first time he went down on me, here in the woods, in the high mountain winter, he told me I tasted like the sea. I kissed him and tasted myself in his mouth, and it was true—it was like urchin or salmon roe. I had never noticed before, my own taste. I think about the things you cannot know about yourself until someone else shows you, and I wonder if this is how it starts, love, or if this is all it is.

  I’m taking the old mining road to the lake today. I leave a note that says “I’ll be home soon” on the kitchen table. There’s only one note, I just keep leaving it over and over again, then pocketing it as soon as I get back. I always make it back before he finds it. It’s on the table today, just in case. If something happened to me out there, Carey would find a crumpled, weathered piece of my notebook paper with deep crease lines from the folding and unfolding. He would hold it in his hands carefully, barely touching it, like a suicide note. If I didn’t come back, he would be the one in charge of finding me.

  I witnessed a rescue in my first days here, a backcountry skier who didn’t report back. Dogs, helicopter, volunteers in the snow with whistles. They let me volunteer, though I didn’t have the training. I learned as we went. It was the most exciting thing that happened all spring, the prospect of coming across a mauled, frozen outdoorsman. That was how Carey prepared me for the worst.

  “Could’ve been a lynx,” he said. “They follow the sound of the skis from miles away. It’s like deer through the snow.”

  I thought about this and concluded I would always root for the lynx, even if it meant I never cross-country skied again.

  But the guy was just lost. He had a dozen protein bars and some emergency matches on him; he melted snow for water. He seemed irritated it took us so long.

  Then the snow was gone, earlier than usual. There weren’t as many hard freezes, and snowfall averages all around the state were low, despite a late-season fall. When the pack isn’t as deep, it can melt completely in just a few warmer-than-average days. Spring arrived suddenly; now everything is blooming and hatching. The conversation around the ranger station is all almanac, all the time. Mosquito year. Blackfly year. Drought year. Fire year.

  I asked if that meant the fire lookout would be staffed this year, and Carey said, “Yeah, maybe.” Which means I’ll have to find another place. My first choice is the lake, since there’s a one-room cabin there. Carey said Eagle Scouts built it in the nineties; it’s a miracle it’s still standing. I’ve seen it once, from a distance. It looked more like the setting for a horror movie than a place to relax, but I’m going to investigate. Get my scent in the air so the animals there start to know me. If they know me, if they recognize my scent, will they be less likely to want to eat me? Or more?

  I spend a lot of time up here thinking of all the different ways people die in the wilderness. There’s the obvious: hypothermia, dehydration, hunger. Or the fatal mistake: eating strange plants, drinking giardia-laced water. There’s the unlikely, but imminently possible: drowning; bear; snakebite. There’s bad luck: rockslide; falling tree; lightning strike; drunk hunter. There’s the long exit: tick bite, Lyme disease.

  Or when I’m hiking a steep trail and my foot slips in the loose rocks and I catch myself—just barely—on a root or a tree branch, stumble back onto the path. I look down and see a very real vision of my broken body and the headline flashing across the news feeds of everyone I know, the shares on social media: “Body of Seattle Woman Recovered in Malheur Forest.” At some point I made a choice to be there, snagged on that shelf of earth and not down at the bottom in a heap. Not just one choice, many choices. Thousands—how far back in my life? days, weeks, years?—they flow back instantly, it’s not even conscious; all the choices jolt through the body and some cellular consciousness, some small muscle in my foot that senses the imminent danger, sends up a flare to my brain. So that I reach out at the right moment, leaning just so, throwing my weight back onto the trail. My thoughts stream back. I remember the moment I chose that particular trail, chose to come out alone, at that time of day, under those dry conditions, in those inadequate shoes, not the proper boots, because they would be too hot. Did I drink enough water? Eat enough breakfast? I rested, on that rock in the shade just a mile back, though I wasn’t especially tired—did some part of me know? And farther back—the choice to leave Seattle and follow Carey to the woods at all, the choice to go to the islands, where we met, where I could have died. It flashes through my body, with the adrenaline in my bloodstream, the certain knowledge of how tenuous it all is, the web of everything I’ve done—all leading to this moment: staring down at that parallel life, the one where I/she lies unable to move, in the bottom of that ravine, covered in dust and rocks and the ash of old fires, until I/she dies. Which choice was it? Which one saved me? Which one killed her?

  And I then wipe my brow and hike on.

  Halfway to the lake, mosquitoes strum the air. The sun angles through
the trees and I’m aware of my sweat, along with the chemical perfume of my exhalations that the female mosquitos recognize from yards away. So much for this dry heat; where the air is thinner, you work harder for each breath, and I’ve been exerting myself. I might as well have a neon sign over my head that says BREAKFAST. The mosquitoes have been exerting themselves, too. They’ve been fucking and now they’re hungry. They need energy to lay the thousands of eggs they will deposit in the first still pool of water they find. Through the pines to the lake, they feed on me like children. I don’t catch them till they’re flying away, full of my blood. Male mosquitoes, the dandies, survive on wildflower nectar.

  I smell the water before I see it. Water lifts all the smells around. The mist rises; the vapors carry particles of resin and pollen and fungi spores. As I climb the last fallen tree and the lake comes into view, I connect a low murmur to the sound of it: not waves lapping, but the deeper, subtler sound of movement beneath the surface. I close my eyes and inhale, trying to feel the course of the vapors through my body, the whole invisible forest in my sinuses, my lungs, my blood. Everything right down to my cells and further: to the mitochondria, the tiniest lungs, where respiration continues after the death of the brain, the heart. The last breaths of the cells happen there, as the body decays, releasing all that stored energy at last. Hot sacks of cells, our bodies, like compost heaps, steaming with everything we take in, unsure of how to let go.

  When I open my eyes, I focus on the ground near my feet. A shrug of fallen needles and leaves that seems to be levitating, and I know that underneath I will find the fruits of the mycelium. I carefully lift a corner of the leaf cover with a stick to reveal the pale young bodies of the mushrooms. I squat to get closer, and a smell like maple syrup wafts up out of the duff. I pluck a specimen from the rim of the colony. A fat, opalescent beetle scuttles into the vacancy in the soil. I hold the specimen in my palm and gently examine it. It looks deceptively delicate, almost feminine, something out of a fairy tale: thin white stem, slick, round, lilac cap; but it is firm and unresisting to the touch. I look at it lying in my palm and think of Sister J., shroud-pale, plucked from her island, cell walls breaking. Sometimes I hear Katie’s voice in my head, answering questions I haven’t really asked. I hear her now, telling me to put my hands in the soil, like I did on Marrow, to feel the threaded white mass netting my fingers.

  “Mycelium takes everything we give it,” she says, “and transforms death into life. It communicates directly with the soul of every living thing that touches it.”

  “But I probably shouldn’t eat it,” I say, to Katie or whatever’s listening.

  You’re supposed to talk or sing when you’re alone in the wilderness, to alert the wildlife that you’re there, that you’re coming, to startle them away. I usually sing. A woman in Colorado fended off a cougar by singing opera to it. When I’m not singing, I talk to Katie. At first it was awkward—I was afraid I’d encounter another hiker who would overhear my half of the conversation and think I was crazy—but now I’m so used to it that I find myself talking to her in the cabin or at the lookout.

  The birdsong continues all around as if I’m not there; Katie’s gone quiet. I want to eat the mushroom. I test it with my teeth. I take a small bite out of the cap. It’s slippery on the outside but almost powdery dry inside. I hold it in my mouth long enough to know it is vegetal, almost spicy but not unpleasant, then spit it out. I pick another and place them in a small paper bag. Tuck it into the top of my pack, so it won’t be crushed. There’s a book back at the cabin for taxonomic classification.

  The scout cabin is another mile around the west side of the lake. I take a small, almost-disused path and have to scrape my way through a curtain of branches to find it, a half-fallen tree barring the way. The door is off the hinges and leaning horizontally across the threshold. I use a large forked stick with clusters of lichen to remove the spiderwebs from the door frame. Not taking any more chances with arachnids today. When the doorway is clear, I poke my head inside. It’s dark, with only one window (broken out), and it smells distinctly like piss. There’s a shiver in a dark corner, and I’m certain there’s a nest of snakes there, so I step back outside and walk along the trail until I find a path down to a small stretch of silt and rock shoreline.

  It won’t do for a retreat. At the fire lookout, I float above the trees. That’s where I’m most at ease—in midair, like a cloud.

  I plant myself on a dry boulder and grab a can of beer from my backpack. As I open the can with a pop-crack, I wonder what kind of meal I sound like to the lynx. The cheap lager foams all over my hand. My mouth and throat are parched, so I drink half of it in one slug. It buzzes through me. The cereal and peanut butter balls go down fast, and the rest of the can after. Then I’m stripping off my boots and socks, without a second thought, opening another beer, and wading into the water. It’s so cold I gasp, but force myself to breathe through it. The days have been warm this spring, but at this elevation the nights can still fall close to freezing. In the winter, the lake was frozen over, and it hasn’t been that long since it thawed. It’s ice-clear; I see all the pebbles in the bottom, stretched several feet in front of me, where the bottom dips into a darker blue. There are layers of color, in the lake, just like in the sea, when the water is still. The water is denser where it’s coldest near the bottom, so the colors become murky and shaded, and the fish and rocks down there distorted.

  The second beer goes down while I’m up to my ankles, kicking one foot then the other to acclimate them. The sun is directly overhead now, shining hard on me, shining straight into the water. I look out across the whole of the lake as a breeze stirs it up and the smallest whitecaps I’ve ever seen wave at me from the deep, dark center. I drink the rest of the beer, feeling the blood thump in my feet.

  I look out several feet in front of me and catch a strange glimmer in the water, threads of light, dancing like weeds from the lake floor, at first just one, then I count three, four, six. I blink, let my pupils adjust. Still there, a trick of the light. Burning on the back of my eye. Like the filaments of incandescent light bulbs. Like old-fashioned tinsel from a Christmas tree. I look away, but when I look back, they are still there. When I move my foot, they move with the ripples but stay more or less in the same place. They are farther out than I planned to go, but I want to get closer to them.

  I back out of the water, watching them, letting the angle of light through the trees change my view, but I still see them there. I try not to take my eyes off them as I drop the beer can, take off my jeans and unbutton my plaid shirt. I pull my tank over my head as quickly as I can, and they are still there, glowing elements, shocks of lightning, though they seem slightly farther out than before. I consider leaving my bra and underwear on, but it seems weirder, somehow, to wear them, so I take them off, too, and drop them on the pile of clothes.

  Naked on the shore, I watch the filaments underwater. The lake surface quakes in a breeze. It beckons me, with its crisp little waves, so I walk into the lake. When the water reaches my navel, I take a breath and dive under. My eyes close on their own, and when I force them open, they burn and everything blurs. Then ribbons of light streak through the water, and for a moment I think I can see the filaments again, but then they are gone.

  I surface panting, water dripping over my face, off my eyelashes, scanning for the filaments, eyes skimming the water all around me, raking my arms to stay afloat. I swim back toward the shore, and that’s when I notice the larvae, skirting the warmer, weedy, silted edges of the lake: thousands of them, translucent, writhing, their mosquito mothers hovering over them. I think it’s another trick of the light, but I can almost feel their hunger; I am sure they can smell me. I find the rocky floor and stand hip deep, swaying. When the air hits me, I feel the tug of cold water on my numb limbs and scramble ashore.

  Five

  The Islands

  ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON

  OCTOBER 10, 2014

  I CALLED THE sheriff fro
m the cottage. My voice shook a little as I explained to the dispatcher that I thought my neighbor was missing. She told me to file a report at the station in the morning.

  “I can do that, but there are signs of—a struggle, I guess, at his house.”

  “What do you mean, ma’am?”

  “Overturned lamps, a half-packed suitcase with medication left in it. His eyeglasses. I haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Do you see him every day, ma’am?” She sounded young but jaded—a world-weary eighteen-year-old.

  “No—” I decide not to tell her that I’ve never met the man. “But this seems unusual, for him.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe he’s in danger?”

  “Not really, no. But I’m alone on this side of the island, and he’s my only neighbor. I won’t be able to sleep.”

  She sighed.

  I hated how frightened I sounded. She was right; it could wait till morning. It was an unnerving scene, but so were lots of odd scenes in strangers’ homes—I had no context. Maybe an emergency called him away from his packing? Did I really want to explain to a sheriff’s deputy why, in the middle of the night, I had snuck into the house of a man I’d never met? I could hear her typing.

  “All right, ma’am. Looks like there’s a deputy who can come out.” She took down my name and address.

  I had toast and coffee and listened to the radio while I waited. After a while, I heard the wheels of a car coming down the lane and pulling in the drive behind my car. Chris Lelehalt stepped out.

  “Shit,” I said. I took a breath and met him at the door.

  He nodded at me. “Hi there, ma’am.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and read, then looked up again. “Lucie Bowen?”