Marrow Island (9 page)

“But not out here,” he said. “People love their public lands here. No anti-government fanatics shooting at rangers, setting tripwires and spikes on service roads.”

The state wanted to reopen Fort Union State Park, he told me, on the other side of the island from the Colony. I nodded that I knew where it was; Katie and I had gone to summer camp there. It was a decommissioned military base and historic site from the Pig War in the 1850s; the campers had all slept in the old barracks.

“How much do you know about what happened here?” I gestured to the ruins of the ArPac Refinery. We were coming up close to it. The docks were wasted; the charred, weathered cement of the remaining walls and smokestacks looked like a monument to something—a terrible war, maybe, something violent and manmade—not an earthquake. There were plants growing out of them now, taking root in the cracks, in the dust. I looked back to Carey.

“I know a lot about the disaster itself,” he said, “but not about what’s happened to the island in the last twenty years. That’s the reason I’m here.”

“Me, too,” I said. We looked at each other. I felt calmer. It felt uncomplicated, admitting it to him.

The boat had ripped past the ruins of the refinery at the southeast edge of the island, pulled north-northwest around a forested ridge where the Colony’s dock in the rocky harbor finally came into view. Coombs hollered back that he had radioed ahead to the Colony. He brought them mail and supplies when he was coming their way. There would be someone there to meet us.

We were seniors in college the last time we saw each other, but I knew the woman standing on the dock was Katie. I wiped my eyes and blinked into the wind to watch her getting closer, becoming real to me again. She was tall, taller than I was by two inches, slender, but with broad shoulders and long arms, a narrow neck, like a goose. She had never been graceful but had always seemed at ease with her body, confident and deliberate in her movements. She stood at the end of the dock, hands in her pockets, perfectly still, watching our approach. Or at least she looked serenely in our direction; maybe she was looking past us, over the water, to the islands, to the mainland. Her dark curly hair squiggled out from under a knit cap. She wore knee-high rubber boots with jeans tucked into them and a thick canvas jacket over a long wool sweater.

Behind her, small wooden houses were tucked into the hillside above the harbor, the occasional rounded roof of a yurt in the trees, almost camouflaged, and closer, at the pinnacle of the first rise above the dock, the pale weathered chapel with its steeple rising like a treetop. Against the landscape, Katie looked like an icon, a modern saint: she was beautiful and austere; she owned the landscape. I was almost terrified of her.

Carey and I looked to the shore silently as the boat neared the dock. He would disembark there and hike up to Fort Union and the old guard station. The park and the Colony were so close, the only signs of human intervention on the north side of Marrow, separated by a single paved road that ran down the center of the island.

There had once been a few residents—homesteaders, fishermen—and summer inhabitants of the rustic, roughing-it variety. Unmarked gravel and dirt roads passed between houses here and there. Some had private docks; others used the harbor near the chapel as moorage. The chapel dated back to the 1840s, to the Catholic missions. A village and trading post had sprung up near the chapel, for the white settlers, with a one-room schoolhouse for the settlers’ children and baptized children of the nearby Coast Salish tribes. My grandmother’s parents met at the school: a Lummi girl and an Irish boy who married when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. The schoolhouse was long gone, along with most of the other original buildings, in ruins or torn down by the 1920s and ’30s, replaced gradually by vacation cottages and rustic cabins. There had been a house or two on the western slope of the island, south of Fort Union, northwest of the refinery, but they were destroyed by a landslide after the quake. What was left of the makeshift village near the chapel to the northeast was now Marrow Colony.

After so many years, I didn’t know what to expect from Marrow. The refinery fire had burned for days, and its smoking ruins were all we could see from our shores. The communities on all the islands had been affected by the quake, but the petroleum and the flame retardants and oil-dispersing chemicals had toxified Marrow’s groundwater, its soil. Everyone living on the island had come to Orwell or gone to one of the other islands. There had been efforts at cleanup, then settlements with property owners, but when we moved away the following winter, Marrow Island had been abandoned.

Before Katie decided to join the Colony, the ruins and abandonment were how I thought of the whole island. I had nightmares for years in which I was there, searching for my dad, who was somehow still alive but lost, unable to find his way out. I was the only one who knew he was still there, but I was unable to save him—he was always just a few more feet away or under rubble I couldn’t lift. In my waking life, I pushed the islands out of my thoughts.

Coombs cut the engine and threw a rope out to Katie on the dock. I watched her tie us fast. She seemed as worn as the pilings, patches of dirt and holes here and there in her clothes, weathered hands. When she stood up and looked at me, her eyes shone, her cheeks were rosy under her freckles. She had crow’s feet, deep lines in her forehead—it was obvious she worked outside—and strands of silver in her auburn curls, like her mom, who had also gone gray in her late thirties. Still beautiful, but more confident, stronger, as if she had filled into her potential self. She radiated joy.

“And here’s the welcome party,” Coombs said. “Hallo, Miss Kate! I brought you the Orwell folks I promised you. They smelled fresh when they came aboard, but this one”—he gestured to me—“might need some airing out.”

Katie laughed. “You could never hold your breakfast, could you?”

“I didn’t eat breakfast,” I told her.

“Never go to sea on an empty stomach, Lu. You know that.”

I shrugged Carey’s coat from my shoulders and handed it back to him. He looked like he needed it. His cheeks were bright red, his nose running. I reached in my vest pocket for a tissue and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” I said to him.

He took the tissue and nodded, wiped his nose.

“You’ll come back on Monday morning to pick me up again?” I asked as Coombs helped me down to the dock.

“I’ll be back for the both of you. Be down here at sunrise.” Then he turned to Katie. “I have mail for you, Kate.”

Carey and I looked at each other. We would be going back together, too. How much of me could he handle? I’d probably puke on the way back. I couldn’t tell if he was picturing the same scenario.

“Are you sure you don’t want to find another boat?” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I dropped my bags on the dock as Katie took two large parcels from Coombs. She scanned the return addresses briefly, then set the boxes down next to my bag.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, and hugged me tight.

Her body was warm. I squeezed her back, feeling the strength in her limbs and the bones of her sternum and spine. The dock swayed; I squeezed harder, for ballast.

When we pulled apart, she said, “You look like you.”

“You look like a new woman,” I said.

“Thank god,” she said. She looked askance at Carey, who had been pretending not to watch, shrugging his coat back over his shoulders, warming up. “Excuse us,” she said to him, “we haven’t seen each other in a long time.”

“Carey McCoy.” He put out his hand. He seemed to shift into his uniform. His smile stiffened, became official. I compared it to the smile he almost gave me at the clerk’s office: his smile had been deputized. He seemed on his guard.

“Kate,” she replied, taking his hand firmly.

“Carey and I are new friends,” I said. He might have blushed. I cleared my throat. It was still raw from the vomit, my mouth full of saliva.

“I see you’re from the Forest Service,” Katie said, trying to sound nonchalant, but with an energy that told me she might be on guard, too. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a ranger out here.”

She looked back and forth between us, gauging our familiarity. Her smile never disappeared, but there was a wariness in her eyes. I knew that whatever her outward expression, she was scrutinizing every detail. Carey apologized and explained he was new to the post, but that he’d be out more often over the next few weeks and bringing colleagues from Fish and Wildlife eventually. Katie nodded.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll have a lot to do at the park. You’ll have to let me introduce you, first,” she said.

“Introduce me?” Carey asked. He looked at me.

Coombs was setting off again and gave a shout and a wave. We watched him and waited for the sound of his motor to fade.

“This way.” Katie set off up the dock onto the shore and we followed.

Climbing up the bank behind Katie, I tried to get my bearings. I could feel the torpor from my lack of sleep, the early boat ride. I was desperate for a cup of coffee and some toast. Carey asked how I was feeling.

“Better,” I said, and tried to believe it.

We tramped up a gravel path, winding through boulders weedy with vetch and bird-scattered mussel shells, the rocks slick with last night’s mist. The sun broke through the clouds and lit up the tree line behind the chapel. Gulls wove in and out of the long early morning shadows.

At the top of the embankment, I looked out over the water we had just crossed. Orwell wasn’t visible from here, only Haro Strait, and the distant mainland. Inland, beyond the chapel, a rooster crowed, sparrows called, and the tide flowed symphonically. Otherwise, it was quiet; no sounds of people, machinery, industry. Inland, the landscape was serene, prosaic. After all the nightmares, all the years evading thoughts of Marrow, it might as well have been the island I knew before the quake. I wanted to feel relief, but I couldn’t, quite. I knew better. I knew that beneath the surface, tremendous changes had taken place.

Carey made small talk with Katie, and I listened to her responses, to her voice, the same voice I had always known.

“Nineteen ninety-six,” she was saying, to the question of when Marrow Colony started.

“And how long have you been here?” Carey asked her.

“Since 2005,” she said. She looked back at me. “I dropped out of Evergreen without telling anyone. Lucie went all the way to Olympia on the train to surprise me for my birthday, and I wasn’t there. My roommates gave her all the stuff I left behind.”

Carey glanced back at me.

“Do you still have any of that stuff, Luce?”

“Nope,” I said. “I burned it all.”

“She’s kidding,” Katie told Carey. She could always tell when I was lying.

“We don’t have coffee around,” Katie told me. “Not unless someone trades for it at the farmers’ market or something.”

I stared into the cup she had handed me. The steaming brew looked like coffee; it smelled smoky and bittersweet. I had poured goat milk and honey into it immediately. But it wasn’t past my lips before I knew it was not coffee. Carey and I sat at a round wooden table in the kitchen of the larger cottages, which was a sort of communal space for meetings and record keeping. Through an archway in the living room was a small office with a very old computer and dented filing cabinets.

“It’s roasted chicory and dandelion root,” Katie said. “Like the Civil War soldiers used to drink. It’s nutritionally dense: magnesium, potassium, phosphorus. You won’t miss the caffeine.”

I told her I doubted that but drank anyway.

She laughed, her back to me, cutting bread from a dense little loaf on the counter. Carey had already swallowed half his cup. He seemed anxious to get on with his work.

“Sister J. will be here any minute,” Katie said. She put a plate of bread and a crock of soft, pale butter on the table. I helped myself, spreading the butter thickly over the bread. It was toothsome and sour, like a Danish rogbrød, dark and moist and flecked with seeds, and the butter was briny and tart. I ate the small piece in three bites and washed it down with the chicory brew. Carey watched me, sidelong, and I pretended not to notice.

I looked out the small window next to us. People passed on the worn path between this house and the fields, the woods. They carried tools of various sorts, buckets. One woman carried a chicken under her arm, stroking its head. At one point she leaned down to whisper something to it. The room was barely lit; no one noticed us peering at them from behind the dark glass.

“You seem worn out. The boat did you in, huh?” Katie asked me.

“No,” I said. “It’s not that. I just didn’t sleep much last night.”

“No?”

I hesitated. I was still uneasy about what I had found at Rookwood.

“I guess I’m just too used to the city now.”

Katie narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing me, like she knew there was more. But she smiled.

“You’ll get used to it before you know it. Then you’ll go back to Seattle and have to put in earplugs.”

There were loud stomps at the side door—boots shaken of soil or sand—and a deep, laborious cough and clearing of throat. In the morning quiet, the sounds amplified, reverberated through the wood of the door and the plaster walls; the table shook lightly on its uneven legs. I had the uncanny feeling of a child who has woken a sleeping grandfather, a surly, unappeasable patriarch. As the door opened, I was looking at the top of the door frame, waiting for someone tall and burly to enter—like a lumberjack. But Sister J. was short—maybe five feet two inches—and solid, but gaunt, swallowed by an enormous gray hoodie.

She closed the door and stood with her hands clasped behind her, gazing brightly at us, looking intently at Carey, then me. Then she closed her eyes and took a long breath, seeming to breathe us in, her nostrils flaring a bit and her chest rising to meet her oversize clothing. When she opened her eyes, she looked to Katie and nodded firmly.

“It’s a good day,” she said, her voice deep, marled by time. She might be mistaken for a man over the phone or on the radio.