Marrow Island (6 page)

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 what 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?”

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.