by Lucy Treloar
‘I do,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what. Everything . . . everything. So fucking sad.’
‘It’ll get better, sweetheart,’ Hart said.
I did not say my true thoughts: that she might do no more than get used to it, the knowledge of it, that she might work out ways to hold its roar off at a distance, like a mad dog on the other side of a screen door. Something like that. We’re all of us close to its hot breath; we feel it sometimes if we don’t always know it. Don’t look too hard now, you don’t want to provoke. Some people pretend it’s nothing but imagination. They frighten me, those people.
Hart patted her hand and she held his and I hooked my arm through hers and held it in tight by my side. She turned her head and stared hard at me, or so I assumed since her head was at an unnatural angle and remained there; I could just discern the movement of her eyelashes, like butterfly wings in sun. ‘You stay here,’ she said, grinding the words as if they were stones and that would release their meaning.
‘Okay,’ I said.
She and her boy Hartford, born the year after Cat headed north, visit quite often, and after the first few days tut-tutting at the dangers of living alone and why I won’t be sensible and go and live with Hart in town, and my untidy workroom and the lack of vitamins in my bathroom cabinet, Claudie pulls on old boots and stamps around like an island girl. She and Hartford drag bikes from the barn and pedal the busted roads and she gets freckles and lets her hair go wild and dry as late summer grass, and draws pictures, beautiful pictures actually, sometimes of ugly things: bones, dead birds, dying trees, rotting fruit, trapped creatures. She lies on the end of the dock and stares into the water at the sea grasses and I wonder what she thinks staring through that queer membrane into another universe. I forget myself in wondering – the wondering of the outsider now, not of someone waiting to become part of it and looking forward to it in some part of myself, though I don’t remember it being hard and terrible when I thought and felt that way. It was a peaceful prospect then.
Hart has the wire skiff and the boy traveller making from long ago. ‘My boat boy’ he calls it. It means a lot to him. He has it where he can see it. I’ve seen him resting his hand on it. It is best to take the long view in life. I have often failed. It sometimes felt like I suffered more for my failings with the living than over the people who lost their lives at my hands. (Say it, Kitty: who I killed.) I built a new making: a skiff of wood and another boy. I was slow and careful, trying to remember the things I had seen in boatyards. It looked sturdy to my eyes. I took care over the boy too, and when I had finished him I saw that he resembled Claudie’s boy Hartford. I will give it to him one day, I suppose. He seems to like it.
Claudie and Hartford come on some of my expeditions through the backwoods and byways on the roads heading north, mostly near the coast where people got dropped at water’s edge. Folk travel in different ways now, the old ways and borders being so dangerous. Water has been useful, time out of mind. You leave no track and no scent; it is quiet; you are there and you are gone; darkness is a protection, not only a shroud. Hug the shores and you can miss the big boats. The little ones can dart in and drop off; big boats will tear out their bottoms if they try. Who knew all those failed jetties would yield such benefits. That all blew up a while back, when they started caging children, the separations and worse. People learned from those things, though they didn’t always learn the thing intended. They heard Stop, and thought: Try another way. We will all choose a chance at life and future over death and despair, especially when children are involved; that was never going to change.
A few old watermen of my acquaintance have newfound careers ferrying people passing through. It’s simple economics. People will pay what it takes. I put a bit in to keep things running smooth and Nate Strudwick the writer helps keep the boats in good order. (It appeals to his ‘countercultural nature’, he says.) It would have been a good line of work for Tobe. It saved Owen Jims’s mind and their marriage, his wife once told me. It’s strange how a skill can be valued for centuries and then be worth nothing. I’m glad for it to have a use again. It’s a little bit of Wolfe to me. Some people feel the water different, like a muscle under skin, the way it flexes and rolls, the way it’s knotted in places if something isn’t right beneath. That can save people.
I visit the houses I stayed at with Cat and Alejandra and Luis and Treasure, and on my own. There are other places I come across that seem convenient and likely stopping points (cheese houses, iron sheds becalmed in fields, barns, abandoned farmhouses), marking them on a map so I don’t forget, and stock or restock the cupboards. I use the lists from my notebook of things I wish I’d brought on my journey south as a guide. Looking back, I can see now how each new list I wrote prepared me for the event just passed. I only needed bandages the once, for the runner, and I made do without. Food, warmth, and shelter are the essentials. I plant fruit and nut trees all over the place – near doors, mostly, so people can’t miss them. I think of the apples Alejandra collected not long before Girl died, and of the nut trees I once found in the woods with Hurtle, and how a walnut or a beechnut or a hickory nut is the best thing you’ve ever tasted if you’re in need. They are life itself. I throw the seeds of lettuce and peas and beans and pumpkins, in hope, and sweet peas, petunias, sunflowers, zinnias, cornflowers and chicory too, for the bees and butterflies, should any be around. I see the signs of plants sometimes having grown (orange pumpkins in a sea of blackened vines, lettuce gone to seed, pea pods spilling their dried inner selves), and that people have passed through. Claudie thinks I’ve lost my mind and tells me so.
‘You don’t know what it can be like,’ I told her on one trip, and handed her the spade to dig the next hole. The spade hissed into the soil and a sweet smell rose. I pulled the sapling – an apple – from its pot, and loosened the roots and put it in, scraping the dug earth back in around it, taking care with a worm worried for its life. We trod the soil snugly around the roots and I poured over some water. There. It was nothing but a collection of twigs, but it felt good to have it connected to the earth and to feel that it might help someone out if it survived.
We collected bundles of kindling and put them on back porches and inside doors. Next time I passed through it was gone often enough, or a new pile had taken its place. Sometimes people were in a hurry. I made a note in my little book, which was filled with tiny maps I’d drawn.
‘Will you tell me what happened one day?’ Claudie said.
‘I might. Some of it.’ I stacked a few pumpkins up on the porch of the house we were at and they glowed like fire-filled eyes. (I remembered the day that drone appeared and started the end of Wolfe, the first frost of the winter.) The porch roof drooped like an old-time movie star’s smouldering gaze. It was a fearsome sight at first glance. ‘I’ll see. I’m too old for jail.’
Claudie laughed, and when I didn’t join in or even smile she said, ‘No, really, Mother, what did happen?’
‘Explanations don’t always reassure, sweetheart,’ I said. Still I keep writing in my notebook, whichever one I’m up to. She can read it all one day if she wants and I hope if she does that before judging me she will take into consideration what I did to save the lives of people she holds dear. (Please remember this, Claudie.)
Every time, I missed her when she went. Every time. And I thought of the time I might have spent with her and didn’t and wondered at it all. Mostly I was grateful.
But this was now, and Alejandra came inside. ‘Oh, pomegranates.’ She touched the fruit and it swayed.
‘Planted a tree the week I moved in. Cat and Claudie – how about that? I’m glad they’re speaking; that’s a good thing. I think it is.’
‘Oh, me too,’ she said.
Then she saw something on the coat stand – the satchel I found on the edge of Deadness. I had fetched it from my house with my other things. ‘Luis’s bag!’ she exclaimed.
‘Really? I didn’t know. I found it on Wolfe. He saw it and never said.’
‘That’s strange.’
‘And the initials – H and G – of course. What did that man call him?’ I was thinking of the man who shot him, but couldn’t say the words, not to Alejandra.
‘Oh. I don’t remember.’ She became carefully blank, so I knew she understood what I was saying. ‘It was just a bag he had.’
We followed Cat on the news and elsewhere and heard from her once in a while. She was a notable troublemaker or beacon of hope, depending on your point of view, and would likely be arrested if she tried to come back. ‘And Treasure, how’s she? And Teddy?’ Teddy was Cat’s second child, a boy the same age as Hartford.
‘They’re good.’
‘That’s what Cat says.’
‘She loves them and she has things she has to do.’
‘Sometimes you can’t stop. If you can, it’ll break you.’
‘Hard on the people around her.’
‘They could choose different.’
‘The children couldn’t.’
Suddenly I was remembering a conversation I had with Cat in Freedom, not long before we went our separate ways.
‘Do you ever think about Josh?’ Cat had asked.
‘Not much,’ I said, which was a lie. ‘Do you?’
‘Only, was it my fault?’
‘That’s what I wonder. But you didn’t make him threaten his daughter, and neither did I. He chose that himself.’
‘But what was I thinking? That’s what I think about. I feel like I don’t know myself. What if I did something that stupid again?’
‘We all have to live with that, our own stupidity.’
‘I thought he cared about people. I don’t think he did. Maybe he did a bit. He was kicking against his parents, after some adventure. I know I was too. But there wasn’t more to it for him. I don’t think there is more to him.’
‘There might have been. He cared about Luis. He wanted to impress you.’
She made a disparaging noise.
‘And Luis?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know much of what he thinks. You can tell what he is from what he does. He has things he must do. He’s determined, you know? He will make a family and a life. He lets me be what I am. And if he doesn’t, that’s the end for us.’
I told Hart about this conversation a long time later and he said, ‘That’s our granddaughter?’
‘She’s wonderful. She survived that. She kept them together. She loves them all. She’s got things to do. She’s something.’
‘I will never know what happened, will I?’
‘You might not want to.’
Alejandra gave me a look, thinking about Cat, as I was, moving a few pieces around in her mind by the looks, and deciding to let it go. ‘Is the island still there?’
‘A little piece of it at least a couple of months ago. I give it another year, maybe two, depending on the weather.’
‘I’d like to go see. Would you take me? Could we do that?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Good idea before winter sets in. You’ll get a surprise. I might get a surprise.’
‘Do you have your collections still?’
‘I do. And new ones.’ We wander to my makings room and she looks around with a more knowing eye, picking up pieces and looking closely. ‘Some of these things, they’re pretty rare, you know.’ She is on her way to becoming a scientist, a biologist, and I know she’s right.
‘I know. I don’t really care about that.’
‘Unless you need the money.’
‘My makings take care of that.’
‘What about your Watermen?’
‘Sold them when I got back and bought this farmhouse. They did their job. I miss them, though.’
‘I hope they’re outside, with plenty of space around. I wouldn’t want to live with them. The first time I saw them . . .’ She made a face of childhood horror.
‘They weren’t designed to be friendly.’
‘You know, when we came in the boat, the whole way in Josh is saying, “Shit, holy shit. Would you look at those fucking things? Are you sure this is safe?” and Cat’s saying, “How would I know? Have you got a better idea? A nice hotel in town?” It was pretty funny looking back. I hated him.’
‘Yes. Anyhow, he’s dead, did you know?’
‘He is?’ It was the strangest thing, watching her in that moment, as if something collapsed inside her, as sudden as if it had been punctured. ‘Oh God.’ She shut her eyes. Her skin turned pale, the way it was when we first met on Wolfe. I thought she might faint.
‘Alejandra.’ I held her arm and her hand and rubbed it with a thumb.
She opened her eyes and shook her head a little. ‘It’s just a relief, you know?’
‘Not really.’
‘I thought, I don’t even know I thought, he might appear again. I hated him. I really hated him. What happened?’
‘Killed in the war. He was a good soldier, they said.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It was something for his parents to hold on to.’ Way back, I heard from Claudie that Josh had gone into the military. His parents had got a good lawyer, pulled some strings, and got him off any charges. I suppose that’s what justice looks like for a person who looked like him. Not a lawyer in the world could save Luis and Alejandra’s mother.
‘I don’t care about them.’
‘You might think differently if you ever become a parent.’
She looked clear at me. ‘No. No one’s going to do to me . . . My girlfriend wants one.’ She nodded very slightly a few times, piecing out her thoughts, would she give them voice or not. ‘It doesn’t matter what country you’re in if you need something and no one cares. There’s no help comes for nothing. Not much anyway. I learned from you, Kitty, and from my mother. I saw what happened – that day we found Mama. That guard taking her into the trees, remember? I’d seen that before. I never told you. I know what I saw that day. I knew it then. Mama always said they wanted to ask her some questions. But I know. I saw things and I think she knew that. But she had to pretend for me and I had to pretend for her; otherwise we would know too much – both of us. It would be so easy to see it in each other’s eyes, less than one second. Once, it nearly happened. I could see it when she realised I knew something and it made her afraid. So I asked her what was for dinner. It was a little trick of mine, you see? This was all she wanted, for me not to know, for me to feel okay, because then she had been a good mother; no matter what things had happened to her, she had done her job. There was a man.’ She stopped and circled the makings room touching things, some cut-out sections of flattened tin, an oyster can, a creature dangling from the ceiling, and circled back. ‘There were things that happened. I don’t want to talk about that. “Don’t tell your mother, little girl. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to her.” That’s what he told me. If I did, my mother would know she had failed and I wanted her to feel good about something, that she had taken good care of me. This was my life. Treasure’s normal is a mother who loves her; for sure she loves her. No, I don’t know what normal means for a lucky kid, that shitty word. I never lived it so how would I pretend it right? Any man takes you by the arm and marches you into bushes or the long grass or a shack or an office is not stopping until they do what they’re going to do. I carry a gun. I learned that from you, Kitty. I’m not afraid of using it. I’m afraid of something going wrong with the gun, of someone tricking it from me, of losing it. I will use it if I have to. Believe that.’
‘I believe you.’
‘I can’t stop talking, Kitty. Why is that?’
‘You’ve got things to say.’
‘I do. You shouldn’t have left us. That is the other thing I have to say. That is the main thing, I think. You shouldn’t have. That was wrong.’<
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‘They wouldn’t take me. You know that.’
She narrowed her eyes like she was looking at me through a telescope and trying to make me bigger, trying to see clearer, seeing if the focus would change. ‘I saw in your face. I can read faces very well – and fast. I know that a little piece of you was relieved. I saw that little piece in your eyes.’
‘Alejandra.’
‘And you said, “Take Niña,” to make yourself feel better, like you were the good one. It was nice of you to give me Niña. She is a wonderful dog. I miss her like crazy, like right now I miss her, you know? She is very good with the children.’ She looked about like she was expecting her to come up a creek bed, the way Girl used to, shadowy in the blackness, wild but connected to me anyway. There was nothing there. ‘I feel like I have no clothes on without her. Anything could happen to me. I couldn’t bring her. I thought someone might take her. I thought you might want her back and I’d be too weak to stop you.’
‘I would never do that. Never. Never. Never take another person’s dog no matter what. She would never leave you. A wolfdog doesn’t do that. It’s not in them. My last dog someone gave me, in a manner of speaking. I would never have taken her. She was broken, that dog. But broken things can still be something. She was something in her way, to herself, not just something to me. She decided to stay with me when she could have run off.’
‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But about the other thing, I am right about that.’
‘I don’t remember exactly. Only I couldn’t go; I would have gone if I could. Maybe the other thing you said, maybe that’s true. But I would have come even if I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t have left you. Were you safe? Or is it like with your mother, you’ve been telling me things?’
‘No. We were safe, but it was . . . it was hard anyway. And my mother and Luis.’ She blinked rapidly here and crossed her arms and held her elbows.