“Well, no. That’s why I know they’re coming today. I mean, if they haven’t called that means they’re just going to rock up, like a surprise. I mean, if they get the late boat out to Appledore, they could probably . . .”
She does a squint-frown; she doesn’t understand. And something in her expression makes what I was saying stop making sense to me too.
“It’s my birthday. I’m eighteen.”
Rose gives a big “aww” and hugs me, which sends loads of Calvin’s feathers flying. And then it looks like she wishes she didn’t get up so fast and she has to grab the back of the bench and lower herself back down.
“You doing anything nice?”
“I made a cake.”
“And you didn’t bring me any?”
“I’m a growing girl.”
“Woman. That’s what you say now. Ya hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I pull the last of Calvin’s feathers off his wings and turn him around and around, tugging off the stragglers.
“Right!” and she slaps her hand down on the counter in her yee-haw way. “What d’you say I take you out to the Relic tonight?”
“The Relic? Will they even let me in? Nick would go apeshit.”
“You leave that to ol’ Rose.” She goes on, but now she sounds a little unsure, like she’s speaking a foreign language. “Bring yer folks.”
“Yeah. I will. Sounds good.”
All naked like this, Calvin just seems like chicken as opposed to a chicken—a real animal with a personality and shit. Rose looks him over and smiles at my work. I follow her inside and into her kitchen, feeling eager to show Rose that I know what to do next. I slice an opening midway between the thighs, reach in and pull out his guts, cut the heart away from the lungs, remove the kidneys and the liver, discard the intestines and stomach into the white plastic bin. The organ meat goes into a little plastic bag and back down into the cavity. I wrap the chicken up in paper, wash my hands, give the countertop a good scrub, and remember to say thank you to Rose.
She hands me a bunch of tarragon tied up with twine. I reach into my pocket and she leans over and slaps my hand. Her rings sting but I know she didn’t mean them to. “No, ma’am, not today you don’t pay. Not for one thing, ya hear?”
“Thanks, Rose. Really.”
“You’re welcome, Small-fry. See you around sunset.”
* * *
Someone’s ringing the chapel bell. Every once in a while there’ll be talk about buying a thing you could set to make the bell ring on the hour, which seems like it would be really nice actually. But a lot of the Wrinklies thought it would be dodgy having a machine keeping time, and I can see their point, too. But leaving it up to the Swans was a massive fail. When they tried to work out a system of people coming and ringing the bell themselves it fell apart pretty quickly. That’s what Rose told me. Wrinklies would show up late or miss a shift altogether and people kept getting confused about what time it was. After a couple of days no one was using it to tell the time anyway, so they decided it was pointless to try, and let it drop. Since everyone likes the bell, people just ring it whenever they feel like it. And they ring it before island meetings, but they’re not having one today, they’re having one tomorrow—the meeting to talk about the Duchess—so right now it’s just someone ringing the bell for the hell of it. It doesn’t mean anything.
I listen to it anyway. I wish I’d started counting the tolls right away. Probably six so far. I head for the center and climb the rocky path that leads up to the chapel and keep counting. Seven more. The grass brushes my legs and as I approach the chapel it feels like I’m walking up to a big, friendly, sleepy animal. Maybe it appeals to me so much because it’s right in the middle of the island. If you’re looking at the chapel, you can’t see the ocean. It’s the one exception, the one place where you can feel safe from the sea. But if I corrected the Swans every time they pulled their whole “Have you noticed that you can see the ocean from every point in the island?” routine, I’d seem like a smart-ass. Or, what’s that thing Rose is always calling me? Contrary.
There are people inside talking so I don’t go in. I think it’s the quilting group. I decide to go to the Oceanic for a bit.
Joanna and Ernie wave at me as I make my way up the stairs, and when I get closer I can hear them talking about Duck. Apparently there are still people down on the beach watching the explosions, which are happening less often, but there’s still the occasional thud.
There are more flowers in the Duchess’s room today, plants from the greenhouse. One contingent says it’s wasteful to grow anything that’s purely decorative since there’s only a small space to grow things on the island; people like Nick who say, “We don’t have capacity to carry passengers.” Since the Duchess has been bedridden, more of the garden and greenhouse space has been taken up by flowers that are just flowers for flowers’ sake. So there.
There’s a new orchid that must have been smuggled in from the Bad Place. I can’t imagine anyone growing something like that here. An orchid will die in such a sunny room, but I guess it’ll outlive the Duchess. A dead orchid would look pathetic—bent, empty twig of a stem, any flowers that managed to hang on curled and limp like cold French fries—and even though this one looks okay right now, I know what’s going to happen eventually, and that makes it hard to look at, so I put it on the floor by the dresser on the other side of the room. There’s a pot of bushy flowers with yellow middles and three white leaves on each blossom sitting on the book we were reading, and now the cover’s all bloated from water draining out of the bottom, and the edges of the pages are stained.
I know she isn’t going to get better, but I still listen hard to the rhythms of the machines that mime her life for her. I watch her closed eyes and try to read the movement beneath her eyelids.
But it’s not Morse code. It doesn’t mean anything.
I hear footsteps and pick up the book. The cover is soggy and I don’t like holding it. And I don’t understand the guilty feeling in my stomach. I was just watching her. She’s my friend as much as theirs. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Except maybe wanting her to stay here with me. I feel guilty for being selfish.
I think of us as climates constantly threatened by storms that always break somewhere else. The empty immensity of things, the great forgetting that fills sky and earth . . .
Between words I listen to the machines breathing for the Duchess’s body, pushing air in and pulling it out again. Her heart beats a pulsing LED landscape. Her blood is a single red line.
“God, I’m so tired, Dutch. I slept all morning and I’m still so tired. It should be me. I should be you and you should be me. The one of us who wants a life should have it. It should be me in that bed. I don’t know what to do.”
She’d know what to do, if she still had a mind to know things. I know this in my heart as another dull thud comes blasting out of Duck.
I’m about to start reading again when I get an odd, urgent sense that it’s time to go. I put my lips to the soft, worn skin on the Duchess’s forehead and leave her to the flowers and machines. As I make my way down the stairs, it becomes clear that one of the voices I hear is familiar but out of place. I slip a little but manage not to stumble down the steps. My heart speeds up like I’m running or falling. But . . . no. It’s not my dad.
It’s coming from one of the rooms they use for checkups and treatments and stuff like that. “Tee, oh, zee.”
Shit, it’s Nick. I hide my smile behind my palms and hang back away from the door.
“Good,” Gretchen coos in her reassuring doctor way. “Line four?”
“L, P, E, D . . .”
“And nothing else is going on? No headaches? Spots in your vision?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about phantom smells, nausea, anything like that? Sleeping more than usual?”
“For Christ’s sake, I told you, everything else is completely normal.”
He doesn’t have to shout at her. Listening
to him snarking is killing my satisfaction-high. I try to sneak by, but I’m only just past the door when I can feel eyes on me. I can sense her looking before she says anything, and I know it’s going to be a massive pain in the ass but there’s no way to escape.
It’s Gretchen, obviously. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Me? Aren’t you busy with a patient?”
Nick comes out of the examination room behind her. “We’re done here.” And he walks out without thanking her or anything. Douche.
Gretchen looks back at me. “Five minutes?”
The weight of the bag in my hand gets my attention. “I have a chicken here. From Rose. I’d better get home, get it in the fridge.”
“Here.” She reaches out and takes it from me. Just takes it. “I’ll stick it in ours. Go have a seat in my office.”
It’s more of an order than an invitation. I do as I’m told. Just my shit luck—marooned on a secluded island with no parents and instead of getting to do whatever I want I’ve got a zillion old grand-dorks bossing me around.
Gretchen’s office is okay I guess. It’s decorated in the antiquey style that Mrs. Tyburn uses in her house, but there’s less stuff. Hardly any ornaments. Leather-bound books with serious titles line up in a dark wood bookcase. A desk, a lamp with glass tiles forming a flower-shaped shade, a framed picture of a guy who must have been Gretchen’s boyfriend, the one who died before I came to Swan. He looks like Saddam Hussein on a smiley day. Two seats on one side of her desk, her leather throne on the other. There’s a couple of filing cabinets and a locked cupboard with glass doors showing bottles and boxes of pills inside. I haven’t been in here since she told me that Lolly wasn’t going to make it through the night. The radio on the windowsill buzzes classical music. The room gives off a whole Check me out, I’m brainy and modest—I can totally tell the difference between Bach and Brahms but I’m too cool to brag about it vibe. She’s such a fake.
I’m still standing when Gretchen comes in; she gestures for me to sit. I notice that she’s closed the door behind her.
“Listen, Gretchen, I’m expecting a call from my folks, so I really need to get back home. Could we do this some other time? Or you could just send me an email. Whatever.”
“Five minutes.”
She looks at me with this asshole grin until I finally sit; she fixes her face after that. She has lots of silver hair mixed in with the black. It makes her whole bob shine. There’s a beauty mark next to her lips like an old-fashioned movie star, the kind of beauty they don’t make anymore, the kind of person I’ll never be. God got lazy, or maybe God retired. More likely he got outbid by someone who figured out how to do the whole creation thing cheaper. Now they’re just running off copies, sloppy and blurry with generation loss.
“So,” she starts, and then leaves a little suspense gap. I force boredom out of my face. You are the most boring person ever to walk the earth. “You and Jason looked very smitten yesterday.”
Another suspense gap, but it’s my turn to fill it.
“Is that a question?”
“I suppose not. I just wanted to make sure that you’re”—she leaves another gap, but this one is to tell me that she’s about to drop a euphemism—“taking care of yourself.”
My turn to pause. I feign a shudder. “Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth. Is there, like, a medical term for that?”
“I know the resources on Swan are somewhat limited and I just wanted to make sure you have”—euphemism pause—“everything you need.”
“I’m all set. Thanks.”
She moves to the next thing before I have a chance to get up. She makes my spit hot and bitter as though someplace in my mouth a cut is bleeding hard. “I’ve noticed you don’t go off-island. I don’t know all the details of your situation and I don’t expect you to tell me, but I feel it’s my responsibility to check that everything’s”—euphemism pause—“in order. Do you have a family doctor on the mainland? Have you ever had a pap smear?”
And I’m up. “Yeah, Gretchen, thanks. That’s great. And, yeah, we have a great doctor, so I’m all set. Really. But I have to go. I’m waiting for an important phone call”—the chapel bell rings but it doesn’t mean anything—“so I should really take my groceries and get back.”
Gretchen gets up too. I think she’s going to do something dorky like shake my hand but she just stands there behind her desk, grinning. “If you ever want to talk . . .”
“Yeah, I’ll send you a friend request on Facebook.”
She shrugs, like I’m not mad, just disappointed, walks me to the kitchen, and hands me the paper bag out of the big fridge. I’d be out of here on the quick but there’s something I need to say. It feels like I’m waiting for my question to become real so I can say the words, but I know that’s pretty much the opposite of how it works. So I just spit it out. “Gretchen, I want to go to the meeting tomorrow. About the Duchess and what you’re going to do.”
“Didn’t Rose speak to you about it?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“And what did she say?”
Don’t cry. Do not cry. “I just thought that you could say something to the others. You know, because I come here—almost every day—and she’s, you know, we were . . .”
“I’m sure no one would object to you paying your due respects. Really, no one would deny you that. But we have rules here. We all loved your grandmother and we’ve been flexible, allowing you to stay with us for the last few months, but I doubt there is anything that can be done in this case.”
“I’d just listen. I wouldn’t say anything.”
“Wouldn’t you?” And it’s not a question because she half laughs like she’s just caught me in a stupid lie, but it was supposed to be a promise. Like I’d try, I’d do my best, if she’d just let me come. But there’s no point arguing anyway. I’ll probably be gone by tonight.
“Okay, fine.” And that’s the last thing I say before my throat closes up with helpless anger.
She could thank me. She could say something. It’s not like I need to come here. Except that I do, I guess. Still, she could, I don’t know, acknowledge me, say something to let me know that it matters. What I’ve been doing for the Duchess matters. On my way down the big front steps I grind my teeth and don’t cry at all.
The chapel’s empty when I stick my head around the door, so I take a seat in a pew by the entrance and roll a joint. It’s a good place to get your feathers smooth. The stone walls and floor are always cool. The air feels more still than it does outside, as though even the oxygen molecules get all respectful and know how to behave in here. I can just sit and break up buds with my fingernails and breathe and let it go. I didn’t really think she’d say yes, but I asked. I said it. They need to have their bizarro separatist society and I need to respect that. Or get the fuck out.
The bulletin board says there’s a lecture starting soon—Lesbian Sex, Arthritis, and You—so I don’t linger. Even though I’ve only been in the chapel for a few minutes, it takes a couple of blinks to get used to the warm and bright of outside. I spark up and make my way back to my little house on a shitty half-assed cliff on the southern tip of Swan.
There’s nothing like a joint and a good walk in the fresh air to take the edge off when life feels jagged and frayed. I’ve tried most drugs, I guess. Not smack, though. If I were curious about it, I’d try it, but I know everything about it already. You know how sometimes you hear old ladies listening to new pregnancy advice, like don’t eat stinky cheese or eat prepacked spinach, and they kind of shrug it off and go, “Oh whatever, I smoked a pack a day and slugged half a bottle of sherry for my nerves when I was pregnant with Jimmy and Sally and they’re fine.” The kind of things Mrs. Tyburn would say. Once I heard my mom saying that, except about heroin. She said it to her friend, and I was right there, in the same room with them. She didn’t try to whisper or anything. “And look, she’s fine.” I guess she thought it wouldn’t matter if I heard since I was fine. I am fine. I was kin
d of little then. I don’t know, probably ten or eleven. So I’ve known for a long time that I didn’t need to do smack. I always knew how it would be: that I’d love it. I always knew I’d probably find it deeply comforting, like a bed you could bury me in.
I used to drop acid kind of a lot. Mostly on the weekends, but sometimes I’d skip school and drop a couple of tabs or eat some mushrooms. It’s a good thing to do when you don’t like where you are and you can’t do anything about it. And it’s good for bridging the gap. When things start getting heavy and girls you know start carrying handbags to school, and people expect you to think about a college major and a career and sex and, like, having a boyfriend you’re in love with. By the time you’re fourteen or fifteen everyone is trying to be so grown up, but tripping lets you get down on all fours if you want, or laugh at something stupid and normal like wallpaper or your reflection in the mirror. You can look at things like you’re a baby again. You can play. Maybe not everyone needs to take a break from growing up, but I did.
Some people can’t even handle the thought of tripping, but I’ve always been okay with it. My mom had a talk with me when she found out I was doing acid. She found out the very first time. I was thirteen and by then our rule was that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted but I had to call her and let her know where I was. (They didn’t do the same for me; they could disappear for days and I wasn’t allowed to say anything. But no one ever told me life was going to be fair.)
So I called her up to say we’re all going to a gig and then crashing at my friend Shaggy’s, which was completely true, and immediately she goes, “Are you tripping?” Like I wasn’t actually talking but singing or moaning or something. And I thought I’d been so cool; I’d practiced what I was going to say standing by the pay phone while the cigarette butts and globs of discarded bubble gum on the sidewalk swam around my feet, before I’d slipped in my quarter and dime and punched my number in.
The next day she sat me down and told me everything I needed to know, laying it down in a firm voice, a whole new set of rules: ice cream to come down, orange juice to trip harder, never talk to cops, avoid hospitals unless your life literally depends on it, and remember that wherever you go, no matter how far away, no matter how fucking weird it gets, you’ll always come back. People always come back.
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