This Is the Story of You (14 page)

She was helping me up to my elbows.
She was yanking the trap off my foot. She was pulling off my wader, measuring my ankle with one hand.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Not swollen,” she said. “At least not yet.”

The sky a little too blue. The clouds were fuzzy.

“Ms. Isabel,” Deni explained. “Her roller cart.”

I sat up a little higher, let the next wave of dizzys pass, let my eyes focus, and Deni was right: It was Ms. Isabel's cart—mangled and empty. Ms. Isabel's cart that I'd stepped inside and that had snapped its jaws like a land mine.

“Look,” Deni said now. She stood and came back with a busted cassette player in one hand, its lid cracked to ninety degrees. She stood again and scooped a tangle of coppery magnetic tape from not so far away. It looked like tumbleweed, or a strand of yarn. It looked like play to Sterling.

Deni waited for my queasiness to fade. She watched Sterling bat the magnetic tape, all those vanished birdsongs. She looked at me and brushed her fingers across my forehead. “Looks like you fell asleep facedown in a pile of sand,” she said. “You should be careful. That thing on your face could get infected.”

I would have told her right then about the stranger. I would have asked for her advice, but right then I didn't know how to. She'd done her evaluation on me, and I was dirty but I'd be fine. “Give me your hand,” she said, pulling me up with her one good one.

We stood side by side, surveying the world at our feet.

“Pompeii has nothing on this,” she said.

And then: “I still can't find Eva.”

The news from North wasn't good.
Deni told me as we walked. Five dead of drowning. Seven dead of crush, shock, or heart attack, bad luck, worst choices. Several dozen unaccounted for and six whole blocks of North gone, no proof that anyone had ever lived there to begin with. Without the bridge and with so many slips and ships sunk off the mainland itself, it would be days before the National Guard could come, the police and medics, the unlocal firemen.

“I can't find Eva, Mira.” Deni said it again.

We'd been back to the rock. Filled two pockets with Friskies, nodded at Old Carmen, who had nodded at us, who had moved the cactus with the pink bow from one end of the rock to the rock's very middle, near the shine of her toolbox.
Deni Norfleet,
Deni had said, putting her hand out like she'd been trained to do, cause and effect of her status as a minister's daughter. Old Carmen shook Deni's hand back, like they were making a pact: two survivors who thought things through better than the rest of us.

“Broken or sprained?” Old Carmen asked, about Deni's slinged-up arm.

“Sprained, ma'am.”

“You keep it protected. No messing around.”

“No, ma'am.”

“You tell this one”—Old Carmen pointed at me—“to keep that bandage clean on her head. Cut like that, it takes some healing time.”

Deni looked at me and nodded. Told Old Carmen she was heading out for some reconnaissance. Nobody but a girl in her brother's shipped-home uniform could have used that word straight, but it fit Deni fine.

Old Carmen nodded. Deni did a salute. No questions needed between two people who took defense as their first duty.

We left the rock and headed west toward what used to be the town, Sterling trotting behind us. The asphalt, the sidewalks, the former yards of former houses were somewhere and somehow beneath us, but really: Haven was sand. Haven was an unending stretch of Jasper Lee's obsession, far and wide as our eyes could see. I needed quiet to take the strangeness in and some privacy to look away. I needed a different kind of map.

“Used to be—” I said.

“No looking back,” Deni said. She shook her head.

The sure corners and right angles of the town equaled gone. The telephone poles stood at slugger angles, the wires strung between them loose and low as black Us. Street signs and shop signs were tossed notes; I thought of the flying octagon, the crack in my head. It was as if asteroids had fallen from the skies and this time it wasn't H2O but glass and timber, Plexiglas and metal, cash registers, frying griddles, the ice cream cases from McCauley's, brass doorknobs and plates.

“This way,” Deni said.

I thought again of the useless map. Sterling lagged behind, trotted ahead, let her tongue hang loose and her tail wag and her triangle ears poke high anytime we stopped, anyone we saw, anybody Deni asked:
How bad are you hurt? What do you need? Heard about the brigade at North? Seen our other best friend, Eva?

“Eva Hartwell,” she'd say. “Platinum blond? About so tall?”

She'd wave the photo that she'd tucked inside her pocket:
Show me where.
Hunch her shoulder on account of that sling, on account of needing to know.

Anybody Deni asked knew Eva—
The pretty girl, the delicate one, the one whose mom would sing at Buckeye's on Fridays, that one? Yes. Eva Hartwell. Haven't seen her since the storm. A brigade at North? What kind of brigade? Who else have you found? Who has a radio?

Minister's daughter, hero's sister—that was Deni. Polite. Determined.
Please.
But we couldn't find Eva in the gutters of Main, in the broken crosswalks, in the humps of sand, in the cars with their windshields torn off, on the buried steps of Alabaster, in the Slurpee freezers that had been tossed to the street, in the questions Deni asked.
Eva?
We walked until our feet felt like a color—blue. We walked and we would not stop because we had to find Eva, because she was waiting on us, because no more losses were acceptable; the storm had stolen enough. Because Deni said,
How about the sanctuary?,
which was a crooked block that way, and because we went.

We were searching for Eva.

We walked side by side plus cat between houses that had tossed their coats to the ground, their under- things. Houses standing around in their bones with their roofs peeled off, torn curtains like petticoats in the windows, broken glass in the yards, which were heaped sand. Nobody out. Nobody home. Keep walking. Until we reached the crushed shells of the sanctuary lot, which we could not hear or feel, because they were buried beneath sand.

Deni kept going. Sterling climbed up into my hands. No boardwalk, no rope rails, no dragonflies up ahead. No Respect. No Preserve. Just ruin. “Eva!” Deni called. “Eva!” The unearthed roots of the sanctuary bushes squirming like worms. The trees split or in a crouch, the paths plugged or destroyed, and I stood there trying to remember before, the O'Sixteens, the darted wings of birds, Eva and Shift in the easy shade, the pop quiz Ms. Isabel wouldn't have had the heart to give us.

“She wouldn't have come here,” I told Deni. “Why would she come here?”

“Because she's Eva,” Deni said, and I knew what she meant: heart for a head. Alabaster romantic.
I can see Alexandria from here. I can see Last Island. I can see vanishing, and maybe I can stop it.
She'd been last seen with Shift, that was all we knew, and who was he, and where had she gone?, and where were the birds?; the trees had lost their heads. It was silent, too silent. Nothing stirred except for the twigs Deni snapped, the nests we walked on, the whisks of ourselves through the claustrophobic leaves.

“Eva!” Deni called, as we made our way through the jungle of the place, but it was useless. The broken stumps and fallen limbs kept taking us back to where we started until Deni would begin again and I would follow and I began losing sight of that short hair, that fraying sling. With every whip-back of the branches I was confused. With every turnstile churn of the splintered trees. With every step through the scuttling green, the thorns.

Deni went deeper and I followed and Sterling kept her head tucked low and sometimes, through a break in the trees, the sun would shoot through and I would go blind or dizzy or more confused. “Deni?” I called, because I couldn't see her anymore, and I stopped, and there, in the wishbone split of a broken tree was a kite, but it wasn't a kite, it was half of a bird. The single wing of a swan.

“Deni?” I called.

“Eva!”

I heard her.

The branches. The brambles. The shadows. The buzz, low to the ground and suddenly, up ahead, it went perfectly still. No more boots crunching fallen things. No more
Eva
echoing back. I heard something in my own heart snap. I heard Sterling
grrrrrrrrr.

“No, no no no.” I heard Deni's voice at last. “No!”

I battled the limbs. I ran.

I saw the long coat first. The lavender. The buttons. I saw the tossed book with its green spine cracked, its bird wings fading. I saw the everlasting dreads and the oak where Shift had been sitting a few days before, Shift and Eva, together and strange, but now the oak was sawed in half and its top branch had crashed, and beneath it—her eyes wide and her body still—lay Ms. Isabel.

“Help her,” Deni was saying. “Help me.” Taking Ms. Isabel's pale hand in hers, scrunching down to turn her head, find her mouth, blow air into the empty lungs. It sounded like drowning—Deni sobbing into Ms. Isabel's lungs. I yanked at the fallen limb, scratched at the bark, desperate to relieve the killing weight of things. I couldn't. Nothing moved. Not the limb, not our teacher's lungs.

The branches and the brambles like a roof against our heads.

The terrible misting of bugs.

Sterling on the ground, mewling.

“Ms. Isabel,” Deni was crying, rocking back, rocking forward. “We're here, Ms. Isabel. We're right here.”

There were rivers running down Deni's cheeks. There was desperation in the way she moved, until suddenly she stopped and threw herself against the stump of the murderous tree, and I was thrown back with her. I tried to imagine Ms. Isabel in the dark of the storm, in the terrible winds, the deafening howl. I tried to imagine, but I couldn't stop the sky from falling. I couldn't fix anything. It was Ms. Isabel who had come, not Eva. Ms. Isabel who had died for the birds.

What are our responsibilities?
A Ms. Isabel question.

To pay attention.

To love the world.

To live beyond ourselves.

How much time went by? I don't know. How could we stand it? We couldn't. How are we alive, still? Parts of us aren't. I couldn't see, for all those tears. I couldn't breathe, for all that sadness. I couldn't. When I looked up again I saw the break of sun between two dented limbs, I saw a slow heartbeat in the trees. I heard a deep whoosh and I saw a dagger and a beard of feathers.

A deep
whoosh whoosh,
and then it flew.

“The great blue heron,” I said, and Deni looked, too.

The Bird will make sure that all things are put in their proper places on earth.

“Proper places,” I said.

And there was no counting all those tears.

I talked to Mickey and Jasper Lee.
I talked to Mr. Friedley and the O'Sixteens. I talked out loud, I talked inside, I said,
I am sorry but maybe I'm not big enough for this, not brave enough, not strong enough.

Deni talked to her dad. Deni prayed. She promised another perfect person on her way to heaven. “Make room for more wings.” Her tears like two rivers and mine like the seas and we closed Ms. Isabel's eyes. We buttoned her coat. We made a bouquet of white swan feathers. We slipped them into her dreads.

“We need to tell someone,” Deni finally said. A choke of words. A respectful decision.

She stood tall as she could beneath the ruined trees.

“I'll go, you'll stay? You'll keep her company?”

“Of course.”

“I'll—”

She tried to speak but couldn't.

“You won't be long,” I said.

“Coming back,” she said. “Soon. For Ms. Isabel.”