Marrow Island (23 page)

She reached out for my hand, took it in both of hers firmly, then sat in the other chair opposite me, next to Sister.

I repeated my condolences. Maggie smiled gratefully but seemed resolved to carry on with some sort of business.

“Your visit happened to coincide with our loss.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Sister said. “Lucie is here for a reason, like all of us.”

“I don’t know about that,” I demurred.

“You lost your father on the island.”

There was a familiar sinking in my chest, but I knew how not to react. I had many years of practice, hearing the pity in voices, the oblique references to my failings, my brokenness, as a result of my deep, untamed sadness. Everything I did, good or bad, for years after the quake was traced back to that loss, by everyone who knew.

“It was a long time ago.” I didn’t want them to use my father against me.

“And yet, here we all are,” Sister said. “Brought together in grief.”

I said nothing.

“How did Sarah die?” I asked, finally.

“Cancer,” Maggie said. “But you guessed that.” The ebullient woman I had met in the dairy was gone.

“Your tea is getting cold,” Sister said, to either or both of us.

Maggie and I looked at her. Sister picked up her own cup and drank it down. I watch the steam rise from our cups on the table. I could smell mint, other herbs, and an underlying bitterness—some root, maybe? I picked up my cup and took a sip. It was lukewarm, not pleasurably hot anymore. The mint was there and something lemony, but there was a dirty undertone, something gritty and fermented, like rotting apple.

Maggie saw the look on my face.

“Reishi mushrooms,” she said, flatly. “That’s what you’re tasting. We drink them, we eat them: they’re in everything. The Chinese have used them for thousands of years medicinally.”

“For cancer,” I said. I was aware of the reishi sold in supplement form and the health claims.

“And fertility, and the circulatory system, and the liver . . .” Maggie said.

“But Sarah’s cancer—the reishi didn’t save her?”

Maggie looked disgusted. “It’s not magic. Not everything works for everybody, for every illness. Sarah tried many different treatments. We did everything we could.”

“So everything here is part of the project? Even your bodies?”

“We have an opportunity to use the oldest of the earth’s medicines against the newest of the world’s diseases.”

“What happens when they don’t work?”

“We manage the pain,” Sister cut in. “Just like the doctors in hospitals do, after they’ve irradiated and poisoned all the cells in a body and the cancer returns.”

“But you knew that you would make yourselves sick. There are babies in that graveyard, burial ground, whatever you call it. Women lost their children. You lost another generation. You put yourselves in the way of certain suffering and death.” The cup was getting colder in my hands, the taste of the tea sour on the sides of my tongue.

“Lucie.” Sister’s voice was soft, pliant. She wasn’t the orator now; this was a plea. “We have nothing but
this
. We have one life each and one death. What comes between birth and death is up to us. You put yourself in the way of death every time you get in a car, every time you drink alcohol or eat hamburger. The entire population of the industrialized world is putting itself in the way of certain death and suffering. The only choice for us is to live in service to each other and to the planet itself. That’s how we put ourselves in the way of God’s love.”

“What am I supposed to do, Sister?” I searched her face, her expression. She searched mine. She was the kind of woman who would be ignored, written off, invisible to almost everyone outside this island: fertility gone, beauty gone, vanity—if she ever had any—gone. But her eyes shone; her heart and mind certain. She had no doubt, no fear. She would walk into the fire whether anyone followed her or not.

What did she see in me? Would I walk into the fire with her? Or would I turn and run?

“You can do whatever you want, obviously,” Sister said. “You could stay here with us awhile longer. Spend more time with us, with the project. If you wanted to write about this place, it would be unfair to do so in haste. We’ve been here almost twenty years. We’ve invested our lives. Give us the time to show you.”

Sister looked to Maggie, who stared out the window, across the boundary waters, miles away.

“Whatever you do,” Sister said, “I would ask you to think of the harm it might do to our work here, all the work we’ve done to honor your father’s resting place.”

The tide was out, the muddy flats stretched away from the shore around the island, seaweed and driftwood and shells. The sun was trying to burn through the clouds, but the wind was blowing in more, bringing in darker clouds from the northwest. I had pulled on a sweater, but the wind blew right through the wool weave. I had packed so quickly, in the darkness before dawn. My windbreaker was hanging in the closet at the cottage, next to my dad’s field coat.

Everyone took the afternoon off from their work. Meals were makeshift—leftovers and bread and cheese and shellfish cooked over the fires they were making on the beach. They would stay as long as they could, on the shore, into the evening and night, Katie said, so they could send off paper lanterns and driftwood boats. If anyone boating saw us on the shore, we looked like late-season vacationers having a clambake.

I wandered the shoreline, looking for agates, moving my body to keep warm between sun breaks. There was a wet chill in the air; a portent of winter. Voices carried occasionally, a word here and there of conversation. Everything felt fractured. Where I had felt part of the gathering before, now I felt outside of it, outside of myself.

Katie came up behind me and took my arm. She didn’t say anything but walked with me for a while. I had seen her talking to Tuck, to Maggie. They seemed to agree to something—to leave me to Katie. I didn’t know how to talk to her. Something between us had gone astray—unapproachable but watchful, scavenging our scraps of conversation, feeding on our feelings. We sat on a log and watched the boats pass, the gulls pecking at the bull kelp and crab carapaces. I shivered and she put her arms around me, squeezed me tight. I tried to relax into her, but I felt a tug in my gut, like this was the end of us.

She released me and pulled out a flask.

“Thirsty?”

“What is it?” I asked. I realized I hadn’t eaten much that day. I hadn’t had anything but Maggie’s reishi tea in hours.

“Birch liquor. It’s like gin.”

I took the flask and drank. It was sharp and herbaceous, astringent. “It’s good.”

“Have it,” she said. “I have another one.” She patted her pocket.

I took another sip and felt it burn its way into my stomach.

I needed to eat something, I told her. So we made our way back to the others and found mussels in broth and chunks of sourdough. We sat there quietly, dunking our bread into a cast-iron pot of broth. I had been sure the lack of conversation was about my presence—they didn’t trust me now, they didn’t want to say anything in front of me—but now I thought it was just another of their silent observances, like the work prayer.

I drank from the flask and gradually felt warmed, inside and out. Others passed around a bottle of dandelion wine, then a bottle of elderberry. When the alcohol had sunk in, there was more talk. When I caught the voices, I heard only words that soothed me. The sounds of words like
anemone
and
caldera
and
parish
—or maybe it was
perish?
There was a languorousness to everyone’s movements. Hymns begun in mid-verse then ended, minor chords suspended in the air around us then swept away by the outgoing waves. Jen looked at me, her eyes both dark and shiny, like stars. She took my hand in both of hers, looking at it, feeling the weight of it, then she placed it tenderly back in my lap. I looked to Katie, who was stretched out at my feet. Katie smiled warmly at me, but we didn’t speak.

My stomach started to ache.

“I think I’ve had too much,” I told Katie. I felt the sudden need to shit. I started quickly up the beach to the Colony. It seemed miles away. I felt lightheaded. I didn’t notice Katie following me, but when I reached the closest toilet, behind the chapel, she was there behind me.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said, and I heard her feet trod off up the path.

I emptied my bowels but the cramping in my stomach continued. I tried to take deep breaths, but every inhale caused a stabbing pain.

I left the toilet and started walking. The fresh air and movement seemed to help. Katie caught me halfway up the hill to the bluff. She handed me a canteen, like the kind we carried as Girl Scouts. I stopped and looked at the pattern on the side for a moment—
chevron,
I thought—and Katie nudged me and told me to drink. The water was so cold going down my throat, but it didn’t help the pain and nausea rising. I kept walking, but slower.

“Katie, I feel really strange.”

“It’s okay. Keep walking. It’ll feel better in the woods. It always feels better in the woods.”

She took my arm and led me up the path, away from the Colony. I knew I had been on this path before, but I couldn’t place it.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

“I don’t feel right, Katie.” All the plants looked like they were lighting up at the tips, flickering with green flames. Long fronds of fern vibrated, giving off waves.

“Do the trees seem taller to you?” I stepped off the trail and walked up to a cedar; its bark was warm to the touch and responsive like human skin.

“Katie! Come here!” She came and I reached for her, pulled her to the tree. “Feel this.”

And she did, stroking the bark like it was fur. She was wearing a sweater so I reached a hand under her shirt at her hip to feel her skin. She looked down at my hand curiously. With one hand on her body and the other on the tree, I felt a humming run through me. I pulled away.

Ravens called, loud and various, sometimes speaking in English.

“Katie, what’s happening?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s part of the grieving process.”

“What is?

“We all do it.” Her voice came rolling toward me, soft, then loud, then louder, then crashing into my ear. “It reminds us how connected we all are. We give them to the dying, too, to ferry them along to the lights.”

“Am I dying?” I asked, but I wasn’t angry with her—I felt unreasonably calm. I knew that I should be mad, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt the parts of my brain that reasoned, that wanted to make sense of everything, falling back, into the shadows. I noticed things, but I stopped forming coherent thoughts about what I saw or felt. I couldn’t feel the pain in my stomach anymore, though I sensed that something was happening there. I could feel the movement of the organ, its machinations. And the nausea—it was still there, still rolling and rising up through me in the same seasick waves I was so used to, but I wasn’t alarmed. It was a sensation that was happening in my body that made me want to move, so I pushed on through the trees.

I heard Katie behind me—heard her breathing in my ear—but when I looked back, she seemed so far away, down a long tunnel of green. I took her hand for a moment, but we slipped apart. We weren’t on the path anymore. I was pushing through bushes that scratched and spiderwebs that could choke me—I was sure of this—if I didn’t hold my breath.

I broke into a meadow full of tall grass, a barn at the far end. Two ravens sailed through the air. I ran into the meadow but felt like I was sailing, my arms out skimming the top of the grass like it was water. The sun came through the clouds, and it seemed much lower in the sky than it ought to be, lighting up silver cumulus with dirty yellow rims. The sea beyond, down the hill past the trees. I could see all the islands—every one of them—from this place. There were so many of them, teeming with life. I could feel everything the islands felt. Every drop of rain, every footfall, every car and bike wheel, every bird landing, every insect crawling.

I fell down in the grass and stared at the clouds. I heard Katie calling me. I heard the trees calling me. The ravens inscribed a circle in the sky above me.
Everything,
they said, back and forth to each other.

“Everything,” I said. “Everything.”

Katie lay down beside me in the grass.

“Do you hear them?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, because I was sure I had.

“This is the way they go,” she was saying, or maybe “This is the way you’ll go.”

I looked at her freckled nose, her eyes closed. I closed my eyes and reached for her, that soft spot on her hip where her sweater fell away. I felt her warm skin and the beating of her blood, the movement of her bowels, the growth of tumors on her ovaries, clustering out like fungi, like witch’s butter, in clumps of yellow and orange, feeding on her, eating her away from within, hastening her decay.

“They’re the ones we picked from the babies’ graves,” I heard her say.

I sat up. Was I dreaming? I was sweating. It was so humid, this weather. I threw off my sweater. I struggled to get out of the sleeves, yanked free and dropped it in the grass where Katie had been laying. Where was Katie? I hadn’t felt her leave. I hadn’t heard her go.

I called her. The ravens called back.

I looked again at the spot where she had been lying, the grass pressed in the shape of her body. I looked off across the field toward the trees, but there was nothing. Only the trees, sparking and dancing. Then my knees buckled as if I’d been struck, as if I had been standing on the shore, struck by a sneaker wave. I could hear it, like an earthquake, rolling toward me. I threw up in the grass. The mussels, the bread, the wine, the honey cake—I tasted it all, coming back up. I heaved so hard it came out my sinuses. I coughed and spit and gasped between waves, one after another, until everything was out.

It was suddenly much darker but lit up by lightning. I wiped my mouth on my sweater. Then the thunder cracked above, and I saw the rain falling out over the water.