The November Girl

by Lydia Kang

Hector.

  I withdraw my hands to my chest. The ship above me is already half consumed beneath the waves.

  Hector.

  I scream so loud that the sky shudders with fear and the sisters cower, dissolving into infant swells.

  What have I done?

  But my heart. Oh, my heart. I miss him already, and he’s right here.

  I see him with more clarity as darkness drains from my eyes. The tar-like, lifeless color recedes in my fingertips, and I recognize with full understanding where we are.

  Hector.

  I yank his arms toward me, and will the water to settle so I can ease us through the flapping door of the sunken ship. But it is hard. Even with my ability to change the pressure and waves around us, the boat continues to roil with anger at being taken. The deepwater surges don’t respond to my command.

  Let go of that boy.

  I jerk in surprise. There is a strong, winding core of current that swirls around Hector, trying to pry him away from me. But I won’t have him stolen. Never.

  I grasp him firmly around the chest from behind and issue a command to the waters around us. The water concedes, and we lift upward. I push the door to the boat cabin open, but I have to kick with my human legs for the force to exit the ship. My body flails in the bubbling water around us. I have trouble seeing which way is up, knowing without instinct where to go.

  You are making a mistake.

  I want to scream at her. Mistakes are for those who can make a choice. It’s mine to make. You can’t stop me. This is what I want.

  She doesn’t answer me. Not with words, not this time. Her fury boils within the water and it scalds my skin—a sensation I’ve never felt. There has always been that energy within me, scorching with ability, but now it’s outside my body. Huge, and expanding. And there’s something else that’s also changed. My hunger is still there, but it seeks its nourishment from a different source. Not to extinguish, but to kindle.

  I want life.

  I kick and kick, pulling Hector up with me. Luckily, we are buoyant and let ourselves shoot up like corks. As our faces break through the water’s surface, I gasp for air. Hector’s face is ashen, his eyes still half closed. Our bodies crest over the huge waves, up and down, and still he won’t wake up.

  “Hector!” I scream, shaking him. For an agonizing ten seconds, he does nothing but let the lake water flow over his face, into his throat. “Hector! Wake up!” I grasp him around the chest and squeeze him so hard that water pours out of his mouth. I squeeze him again and again, as if just embracing him could spark an awakening. Just when my arms are so tired they burn with pain, Hector coughs and sputters. He gasps a few times more, then pitches lake water from his throat.

  I cling to him as the waves around us grow even larger. He coughs, a terrible barking dissonance, the most gorgeous sound of life I’ve ever heard. We cling to each other, hard.

  “What happened?” he tries to yell, but his voice is bubbly and hoarse. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know!” I scream back. It’s the answer to everything.

  The storm rages on and tightens its hold over the area around us, as a fist squeezes a sodden tea bag. We kick and paddle, trying to stay afloat though the waves try to pull us down with each mighty wall of water. Hector is still wearing his orange life jacket. Were it not for that, we’d both have trouble keeping our heads out of the water.

  My body is tiring, and I’ve never known this type of exhaustion in the water. My muscles crave air, and sugar, and rest. I keep kicking, though my calves feel leaden and tight with lactic acid. A wave of water crashes over us, and we spin beneath the surface, water forcing its way into our noses, burning our sinuses, blinding us. We fight again for the surface, coughing and sputtering for a blessed few seconds before another wave comes over us.

  Hector’s arms find their strength—what little he has to offer—and give it to me. For a second, his eyes meet mine and ask the other question he wishes to know.

  Why can’t I control it? Why won’t I stop the storm?

  Do you really want to know, Anda? Mother asks me. Let me show you.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  HECTOR

  She’s not the same.

  The inky tendrils have fled from her body. Her body is cold against mine, not the burning torch I’d felt when she’d been in the lake before. Anda’s got one hand on my life jacket and one around my shoulder, but her grip is flimsy. Her eyes are gray again, huge and taking in the storm around us. Exhaustion pulls her face into a scowl. We struggle to keep the water out of our throats.

  “Can’t you make it stop?” I scream, but Anda can’t answer, because a huge wave pushes her underwater, and I have to use every bit of energy to pull her up. When her face surfaces, white hair plastered and splayed across her forehead, the landscape of her expression is unrecognizable. I’ve never seen terror in her face like this. “Make it stop, Anda!” I beg her.

  Anda twists her head to face me, but there are no answers in her expression.

  You really want to see what we are made of, Hector?

  I’ve never heard Anda’s mother before in my head. It leaves behind pain that simmers across the seams of my mind.

  I clutch at Anda, asking for answers, but she’s silent. She’s looking past me, far in the distance. At first, I think she’s having another spell. But then I realize she sees something.

  I turn my neck. A huge mound of water rises out of the lake. It’s as if an unseen hand is pinching the surface, tenting it upward like a tablecloth. Spikes and spires poke out of the surface in the distance, around the pinnacle of water. I blink and paw the water from my eyes, but it’s still there. All of it.

  Only twenty feet away, something muddy and tarnished rises out of the water. At first, I think it’s a piece of rotted log, pitched upward by the roiling lake water. But it keeps rising and rising. It’s not a log, but a broken mast. Chunks of green-covered metal are attached to it and faintly, writing on the side of a huge wall of metal becomes visible.

  Gle--yon

  It’s a sunken ship.

  Holy shit. This can’t be happening. Just can’t. But even as I’m not believing anything I’m seeing, more spires and chunks of metal rise out of the depths. Wrecked hulls of boats, small and large, begin swirling around the mound of water that grows taller than a house. Taller than a building now. It’s a cone of lake, ever growing, surrounded by the swirling skeletons of dead ships.

  Anda is watching, too, but she’s not aghast like I am. Her terror settles into reverence and cool acceptance. Whatever she’s seeing, it’s no surprise.

  A chunk of metal swooshes beneath us, narrowly missing us. It would have chopped us in half if it were closer. Anda and I try to swim away from this hurricane of rusted metal and water, but the water swirls and pushes us closer. It’s impossible to get farther than a few feet in a few seconds. It’s hopeless to try.

  Yes, hopeless. Some battles can’t be won, Hector.

  The voice leaves its acid marks inside my thoughts, and pain blossoms anew at my temples. Somehow, I know that I’m not meant to hear her words. It’s unnatural, and I’m paying the price for it.

  We watch as more and more wrecks rise out of the depths, traveling from the distance to join the others as they spin around the torrent of sickly green water. The water peaks and narrows before widening higher up. The clouds dip down from the sky and enshroud the hourglass of water, and lightning sizzles against the smoky sky. Two twirls of cloud spiral down on either side, like dancer’s arms wanting to touch the wrecks.

  “Holy fuck,” I mutter, between coughs.

  It’s her. This gigantic vision of a creature, with her waist encased in mist, hair made of storm clouds careering down her shoulders, and a gown made of the skeletons of sunken ships.

  I’d heard of her through Anda. I thought I’d never seen her. And then I remember the skeleton in the lake that disappeared at a second glance. She’d made herself known, and I’d tried to ignore t
he sign. She’s always been there, waiting to show herself.

  “Mother!” Anda screams.

  Chapter Sixty

  ANDA

  She turns her massive body to look down at us, tiny as we are among the flotsam of the storm. Though tendrils of air and vapor surround the crown of her head, she has no face. No expression that I can read. But I don’t need a visage to understand what’s in her heart.

  If you cannot do what’s in your nature, then I will. For both of us.

  Mother swoops an arm toward us, a waterspout of tremendous force that pulls us out of the water. Hector and I are over and above the lake, ten, twenty feet, before she lets go and we plunge, screaming, back down.

  As soon as we hit the surface, Hector’s hand is yanked out of mine.

  No.

  I churn my legs in the lake, trying to find the surface, trying to find Hector. When my head comes above the water, I see him, but he’s already twenty feet away. It might as well be a mile.

  “Anda!” he hollers. “I’m coming!”

  But as he reaches for me, the jagged stern of a huge boat sweeps toward him. I see it come so slowly, knowing what’s about to happen. Tons of metal, torn from the lake bed where it had been living for over forty years.

  The George M. Cox.

  As its broken stern slices through the water, it sighs, unhappy to be clawed from its resting place by the Rock of Ages lighthouse. It was happy there, an old man in repose on the lake bed. It enjoyed the curiosity of the divers that hovered about its wreckage, like children pawing at a grandfather’s knee. Now the steel plates of its hull groan and creak as Mother throws it with precise care, tearing the watery space between me and Hector.

  It’s pushed too close to Hector. As it sinks back into the depths, it swallows the water nearby, sucking everything down with it, including him.

  “Hector!” I scream.

  But he doesn’t surface. He’s too far away, and I can’t swim fast enough to get to him, not with this useless body. I paddle through the greenish foam anyway, trying to grow closer, trying to paw the water, a feeble attempt at finding him. But it’s no use. I’ll never find him.

  I won’t win, not like this. She’s forcing my hand on purpose.

  Mother turns to me with her petticoat of wrecks flailing around her, the storm clouds gracing her empty brow. She’s won, and she knows it. This was always the plan. She would have me only one way, and she’s willing to show herself to do so.

  I’ve felt the warring sides within me. I’ve let them push me this way and that, never realizing that I could change the terms. Never understanding that there were choices that could be made.

  I close my eyes and exhale, letting my body sink into the depths. I splay out my arms and fingers, feeling the water at my fingertips, welcoming the energy there. The darkness. The light. The beauty and the horror. My vision blurs into one that sees far beyond the murky three feet before me. I see the ships pawing at my mother’s swirling skirts, the demineralized skulls skittering across the lake floor.

  Black tendrils snake up my arms, and my heart ceases to beat. With a flick of a finger, the waters around me calm in an orb, and the winds above whimper in fear. I see her nod her head with approval.

  Once you make your choice, daughter, there is no going back.

  She thinks I’ve come to my senses. She thinks I’ve come back to her. She thinks I can divide myself, once and forever, when no division needs to exist. Hector has taught me this, too.

  Deep within the water, I reach out and sense what I’ve often cowered from. The ancient lake sturgeon and hook-nosed trout; the mussels clinging with fierce tenacity to the lake beds; pines and cedars and birches that root into history itself. Always, their pain in fighting and living stung me; always, I ran away from it. But I’ll entangle this colossal strength in my embrace now.

  Mother doesn’t realize that though I may be her daughter, I am not her possession. I never was. I am my father’s daughter, too. Mother may be the lake, and she may be so for centuries. But there is one more thing that outlasts mountains, and lakes, and rivers.

  Time.

  I am November.

  This is my time. I can reach down, and up, and into the endless nothing in between, and take with me the strength of a million Novembers yet to come. I can stop splitting myself in two, and take strength outside of death, where life rouses itself in earthquakes, in cells, in seeds, in struggle. In my human imperfection, there is power that exists in no other being.

  Time. Life. Death.

  Human. Island.

  All of it is me.

  I am the Witch of November.

  And Mother has made me angry.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  HECTOR

  I can’t get loose.

  The back of my life jacket is snagged on a piece of metal, on this huge wreck that is falling into the depths of the lake. The pressure on my ears is excruciating. It’s dark, and the cold is worse than anything, and I can’t breathe.

  I wish I could help Anda.

  I almost wish that I’d never come to Isle Royale, but that would be lying. I always knew at one point or another, I’d run away and not come back. And I don’t mean in the visiting sense.

  I close my eyes and let the pressure squeeze harder.

  No. You won’t run away, not this time.

  My eyes fly open. I see nothing in the water, only the black depths of the lake. But something pushes against me. It’s powerfully strong, but doesn’t snap my bones. I’m forced upward as my orange life vest is torn from my body, still snagged on the wreckage. Just when my brain wants to burst from lack of oxygen, I break the surface—and find that the surface is broken.

  The lake looks like nothing I could imagine. It’s frozen, rain locked into place as it hovers in heavy sheets above it. Large pockmarks litter the surface, which doesn’t seem liquid anymore. It isn’t frozen, or solid, or gas. It’s nothing that can be defined by any textbook.

  The ships are locked in place, half submerged. In the air, Anda’s mother is still in her gigantic, unearthly form, but something’s wrong. She’s blurred at the edges, and she seems to be locked in a struggle with something I can’t see. Until I realize I’m looking in the wrong place.

  A hundred feet away from Anda’s mother is a wisp of darkness, floating above the water. It’s almost like a smudge of smoke, hovering there for no good reason. But it shimmers and sways, and seems to be sucking the light and energy from everything around it. I peer harder and see arms, legs. The dark blob of head swivels and turns to me. The eyes pierce right into me, seeing everything.

  It’s Anda.

  Her mother notices me at the same time Anda does. Everything unfreezes with a roar. Her mother raises a mass of solid water that pushes toward me with terrific speed. I barely have time to inhale before the water hits—when it doesn’t. The water pauses in a thick wall, like boiling glass only feet from me. Anda’s hand is raised in my direction. With a twist of her wrist, the wall of water dissipates into a cloud of vapor.

  A piece of stained wreckage floats nearby, a newer piece of boat with the fiberglass hull still intact. I grab on to the smooth surface, trying to buy myself time to catch my breath. Over my shoulder, Anda’s tiny dark shadow of a figure continues to hover, while her mother’s vast body of wreckage and clouds tries to pummel her.

  Every assault that Anda’s mother sends my way, Anda blocks, almost too easily. But she can’t stop the storm, and I can’t hold on for much longer. The waves are still high enough that they douse my head over and over again, and the burning in my forearms becomes agonizing. The cold is numbing my brain. My hands begin to slip, when I wonder. Why am I trying? What could come out of this that could possibly be worth living for? I think of my uncle, wonder if he’s still alive. Wonder if there will really be an Anda for me to ever come back to. My fingertips make helpless squeaking noises as they lose purchase on the wreckage, and Anda’s head turns toward me. Though a mile away, I can see her expressio
n of hurt and fury.

  Don’t you dare, Hector.

  I understand. This life isn’t just mine to throw away anymore. She knows it, and I know it. I hyperventilate, trying to get oxygen into my limbs, then kick my legs anew to get a better hold on the piece of fiberglass. There’s a broken chunk of metal above me, and I reach for it, dragging myself higher. I have a better grip. This time, I’ll hang on for a bit longer.

  I don’t know if that will be long enough, but I’m not planning that far ahead right now.

  While Anda fights off another enormous rogue wave that comes my way, I hear the faint buzzing of a noise, barely above the din of the rain and roaring wind that’s buffeting my head. I think maybe it’s a helicopter, which would be madness in a storm—especially this storm. But there’s nothing overhead but gray swirls of condensation. Faintly, a single voice forces it way through the chaos.

  “Gracie!”

  I turn around. In the distance, a small boat is churning through the rough waters, headed toward me. It’s Mr. Selkirk, with eyes on nothing but the unstoppable force that is Anda’s mother. I scream at him when he’s only forty feet away, and he slows the motor down, just enough to scan the choppy waves. Bobbing up and down, it’s a miracle he sees me, stuck to this piece of junk. He steers closer to me, and my body sags with relief. I let my cramped hands slide off the wreckage as Mr. Selkirk draws closer.

  I hold out my arm, but he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t throw a line.

  His dark blue eyes are snapping with intensity behind his wire glasses. He still wears the old wool hat that encases his white hair. I sigh with relief when he bends over to drop anchor, but to my surprise he only tosses a big orange life vest. I catch it, but my face says everything I want to. Why won’t he let me on board? My exhaustion is ten years old, my muscles cramping painfully, and even with this vest, I won’t last long in the frigid water.

  Mr. Selkirk yells at me. “You tell her why.”

  “What are you talking about?” I sputter lake water, clinging to the life vest.