The November Girl

by Lydia Kang

  I promised Mr. Selkirk that I would explain things to her. The whys. Though I’m not sure what there is to explain.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do on May 3.

  Five months is a long time to decide.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  ANDA

  The lighthouse and I have an understanding.

  We don’t agree on everything, but we at least know each other. One by one, I go to make peace with the others. The Rock of Ages lighthouse, Rock Harbor Lighthouse, and even Passage Island lighthouse. Their very foundations shudder when we meet, but it doesn’t last for long. They sense the change in me. I make my apologies, and they do, as well.

  Someday I will visit them again. The proper way, in a boat. I will have to learn how to use one. Transportation is a clunky, hefty word that fits into a human world. One I’m learning to live in, without constantly snagging myself on sharp corners of common sense. It’s not easy. I’ve been bruised pretty badly, but I like the marks they’ve left on me. Like Hector. He’s a bruise that reminds me of violets in the shade.

  Hector.

  I’m not ready to think of him yet. Wait, just wait, I tell myself.

  I listen for advice from Mother, but my choices are making it harder to hear her.

  I listen for Father, but the vacant silence only upsets me. I’ve added a lot of salt water to the lake this month. For so long, we’ve lived in each other’s periphery, even when we’re only feet apart. But that distance mattered little when he was there. Now that he’s gone, the emptiness that’s filled his place is yawning and enormous. I bounce around it, not knowing which way is north. Not knowing where the center of the earth is anymore.

  But there are some things I know. There’s a darkness inside me that won’t ever go away, but I cannot be a slave to it anymore. It hurts to rearrange myself, the devotion to this other side of me, the light. Reaching into the growth of the island and finding that it can nourish me if I let it, if I accept the struggle. It’s strange, not running away from the wealth of strength there. I had annulled the choices before in accepting November as the only time when I could truly renew myself, through the carnage of sinkings.

  The lighthouse was right.

  November is not the only answer.

  It will always be a struggle. But I won’t partition myself off anymore, and there is no more Father to beg it of me. After all, the extremes pushed to their furthest limits away from each other have wreaked havoc. There is light and darkness in life, and in death. Neither is purely good. Neither is purely bad. But it’s taken me this long to understand, and it is still a fight, every minute. But that is what I get for nurturing this humanity inside me. The constant testing of oneself; the constant effort of being better than I was only minutes ago.

  At the end of December when the last of the police and park rangers left the Isle, I left my hiding place on Menagerie Island. Once again, it was just me and our little house near Windigo. Once again, Isle Royale sat there like the queen it is, the eye of the wolf. She lay half immersed in water and continued to sleep the winter away.

  I was alone. I was safe. But not from everything.

  The house was full of ghosts. I’d see Father folding clothes into the drawers, putting a pound of butter into the small refrigerator, warning me not to break the weather radio. I’d see Hector scraping fish scales on the back porch, and Mother’s voice enticing me to join her in the lake’s oblivion.

  I’d sometimes spend an entire week, just studying the stones on the shore by our house. Sometimes, I cook food and expect Father to come indoors, sniff the air with surprise, and thank me for a plateful. But the door never opens. He never comes.

  Oh God, he never comes.

  I ask why, and I get no answers.

  Sometimes, I weep for days on end.

  But I also know where he is. I’ve dreamed about it. I see Mother embracing his inert form, cradling him and bringing him to the shore, spent and sagging. She pushes away at the earth and places him in there, replacing stone and soil as if each were a gift, weighing his corpse down with adoration. She lets the lake water rain over the spot, and kisses it with her winter’s wind.

  In the spring, crocuses will crack through the top layer of cold earth. It won’t be Father, back in anyone’s arms, will it? But when I let my soul quiet down and stop my own whimpers of loneliness, I can feel his warm smile on my cheek.

  What I can’t sense anymore is Mother. She’s noted the change in me. She’s aware of the battle. Several large storms come to the island, coaxing me back to the water, but I don’t go. My thirst for death is slowly slackening, but it’s there. I understand it is necessary, and it will never truly go away. But I also understand that I can parcel it out in a way that makes more sense. Not having to save it until November means I can be gentler with what I take and when I take it.

  When I grow too weary of my dreams, I go back to the water. I need it less than before, but I still need it. I allow the winter lake, drowsy at dusk, to swallow me whole. My arms reach west, toward the coordinates that play a crooked tune in my head.

  N 47°53’1.06”, W 89°28’1.79”

  Down in the depths, the newly broken ship lays, grimacing and uncomfortable on her new bed. I touch the still-strong, smooth metal hull with my hand and enter the cabin, where the steering equipment is still perfectly intact. Trout and muskellunge swim through the broken glass and visit the glints of metal that have yet to be covered by summer algae. I sit down in the corner and hug my knees to my chest, staring across the cabin to the company I keep here.

  The captain greets me with a fixed, morbid smile. His unmoving body lies crumpled at the bottom. His polyester clothes are still almost new-looking, but his body is succumbing to the elements, even with this heavy pressure and damning cold. I wait a long time. I am very patient. Eventually, he begins the conversation.

  You’re sad.

  “I am.”

  You miss the boy?

  “I do.”

  Well. It’s not up to you, anymore, is it?

  “But I’m not happy.”

  You weren’t happy or sad before you met him. It’s a curse, isn’t it? To be even partly alive for once?

  “Yes. It is.”

  Are you ready? Do you really want that sort of tedium?

  I nod, unsmiling.

  There are hearts beating in boats on the water, but my hunger for them has lessened so much now. With the captain, I feel a roiling pain inside myself, too. Empathy is a new emotion I’ve only just met.

  The captain recedes back into silence. I kiss the tattered flesh of his cheek and say my good-byes. He sighs and comforts his ship. She still mourns her own death, more than her own captain does. His soul will stay there until she’s sung her final song and is, at last, ready to fade.

  He is a good captain.

  ...

  December. January. February.

  I begin preparing. I read all the books on Father’s shelves to squeeze in lessons on how to be. I practice phrases like, “Nice to meet you” and “As you know, dolphins are highly intelligent mammals.” I use the boat to steal supplies from the storerooms in Rock Harbor, because I’ve been living with a selfish companion who’s finally come to stay these days—hunger.

  March. April.

  The Isle has been awakening. The trees have long since sprouted their proud green leaves. The red-breasted mergansers and grebes have returned, as well as the humans who are working hard to get the park ready for new visitors. I study the Grand Portage ferry schedule for hours at a time.

  May 3 arrives. A Wednesday.

  I practice my story and walk into Windigo when the first ferry appears in the distance. One of the park workers is at the dock, and she looks at me with shock when I walk onto the pier in my boots, Father’s canvas jacket, and messy hair. No nightgown. I look like them. Sensible and work-worn, like I’ve been preparing for visitors. Like I belong here. When the woman won’t stop staring at me, I take a breath, forcing words ou
t of my mouth.

  “Hello. I’m Anda Selkirk.”

  “You’re…are you related to Jakob?”

  “Yes. I’m his niece. He told me to look after his cottage if anything ever happened. I arrived a few days ago with some of the park employees.”

  The lines come out only a little bumpy. To my own ears, I sound like a foreigner. What shocks me more is not that I’m speaking them—it’s that the middle-aged woman with wiry auburn hair in two braids over her shoulders can see me without effort. I feel naked.

  “I’m so sorry, Anda. We liked Jakob a lot. Welcome to Isle Royale.”

  I nod and wipe away tears. Discreetly, I taste them on the back of my hand. It never fails to surprise that I weep seawater even though the lake runs in my veins.

  It’s nine thirty in the morning. I’d rather hide behind the same tree as when I first saw Hector on the island, but the good sense that’s shakily taken root inside me says don’t. The ferry grows in size in the distance, and my skin flushes with nervousness when it finally touches the dock. Eager campers disembark with their stuffed, oversize backpacks, happy to be the first on the isle for the season. My eyes hungrily read each face, searching, searching. I look for tall bodies, for handsome brown skin, for forgiveness.

  Finally, the captain exits, and the ship tells me what I already know.

  Hector is not on board.

  On Saturday, I do the same thing at nine thirty. And then on the next Wednesday again.

  I’ve become obsessed with the ferry schedule. I want to discuss it endlessly with the house, with Mother. But no one answers my questions. Even down in the deep—if I could visit him—I know the dead captain would refrain from telling me anything at all. Even he would know how hopeless I’ve become.

  The lady I met at the dock visits me once a week. Her name is Cecile. She thinks I’m lonely (she’s right) and brings me things to eat because she thinks I’m too thin (she’s right) and brings me tiny animals she’s knit of nubbly gray wool. I don’t know what they’re for. She asks if I would like to learn to knit. The idea of creating something not made of soil and air and chitin and microbes fascinates me. I grow calluses from the pressure of knitting needles and crochet hooks. I make an afghan in the shape of a walleye, and Cecile says it’s quite unique.

  I believe she is called…a friend.

  The island is bustling with the pitter-patter of hiking-booted feet. It’s strange to no longer need to hide as I walk around the island and take short hikes. Spending money (Father had something called “an account” at the Windigo store) for food, because I need to consume nourishment like a baby, every few hours. I am thankful that no one comments on the half dozen Hershey bars I occasionally take home with me from the camp store.

  I blend in with visitors on the island. It used to be that they couldn’t see me, because I wouldn’t let them. Now they can’t see me because I share their common tale of existence.

  I’m glad their glances pass me over. It would hurt too much to have any set of dark eyes on me that aren’t the ones I’m seeking.

  ...

  June comes.

  Then July. With its arrival comes air that is warm and marmalade sticky. The mosquitoes and black flies have woken up. The first Wednesday ferry has just left for McCargoe Cove on its trip around the island, but this time I did not go. I take a long hike to Feldtmann Lake instead. It never stops, that knifelike sensation that comes when the last person leaves the boat and he’s not there, so I experiment to see if the sensation happens even when I don’t watch—and the pain arrives anyway. The void inside my rib cage grows with time, marking its permanent residence within that tells me the truth.

  Hector is not coming back. He’s forgotten me.

  Mother has not, but the changes within me have made her quieter. We will never be the same. The threads binding her to me have frayed; we sense each other still, but at a distance, as if through memory. I am still there to keep the soil acidity just so, to bring about the death of a goshawk chick that isn’t ever meant to fly. Both make me cry; both make me smile. And she nods when I do these things, before going back to gathering what solar warmth she can into her breast before winter.

  I walk home through the woods. As changed as I am, I can’t completely escape the creature I was. The birds and insects still flee from my footsteps. The bloodthirsty insects look elsewhere for salty red comfort. But I’d welcome a bite. It would be a distraction, having myself consumed by something else for a change.

  The house is quiet and still, and the breeze plays dully against the eaves. I listen quietly and hear nothing. It’s been like this for months now. No whispers on the wind anymore. I reach for the cottage door when I trip over something on the slate step.

  It’s half a dead lake trout, scaled and cleaned.

  I throw open the door and race from room to room in my fish-bloodied boots, but no one is here. I run outside, frantically looking left and right, listening.

  All I hear are the waves of the lake, lapping on the rocks by the shore. So I tear through the back path that leads to the lake, under the canopy of verdant leaves. I crunch mercilessly on the millipedes whose scurrying legs aren’t quick enough. I dodge the thimbleberry bushes and push away the foliage, running as quickly as I can.

  The dappled sunlight on the lake water blinds me at first. A shadow, ten feet out, soothes my eyes.

  Someone stands in the lapping waves, wearing a sagging gray hoodie. His bare feet are immersed, pant legs rolled up to muscular calves. Hands in pockets, he hears the sounds of the brush being stepped upon behind him.

  Hector turns and sees me.

  And the world around us disappears.

  Acknowledgments

  Any story has roots in imagination, but it takes real friends, family, and keen eyes to help transform it into a book. I am deeply grateful to my husband, Bernie, and my children for being so supportive of my endless hours of laptop shenanigans. I’m so proud of each of you, and you make me beyond happy. Every day.

  My deepest thanks to my mom and especially my father, for his patient answers about all things Korean. As always, you’re a tome of wisdom! Kate Brauning, my editor, saw something special in this manuscript, and I will be forever grateful for her guidance. She pushed me, pushed Anda, and pushed Hector to be our perfectly imperfect selves. I am indebted to my entire team at Entangled—I couldn’t be more thrilled to bring this story to fruition with the support of so much human awesomeness!

  I pestered John Heneghan and Gwenn Aspen with Isle Royale questions, and finally went to visit IR in person in August 2016. It was so beautiful, I cried. A huge thanks to the rangers and the National Park Service for taking such good care of Anda’s island.

  Justina Ireland and Lamar Giles, an enormous thank-you for the reads and early, honest feedback. Leo Monardo and Ben Su, I appreciate the beta reads. You promise to be my beta readers forever, right? Thanks to Ohsang Kwon, Alice Kang, Maurene Goo, Christina Ahn, and Haerin Jung for the hangul help! The very sweet Karin Akins answered all my foster care questions, and thanks to Sydnee Schmidt and Emalee Napier for keeping life chaos at bay and for never freaking out when I’d randomly talk about gross stuff like corpses. And an enormous thanks to Mindy McGinnis, Elle Cosimano, Maurene Goo, and Marie Lu for your support. You guys rock.

  To the Kang/Kwon family—squishy hugs from your Eemo/aunt Lydia/sister, and thank you for never questioning my weirdness. Thanks to Tonya Kuper for indulging the post-event-burger runs and being there whenever I need her and for helping me find a home for this book. For Lenore, Dushana, Val, Gale, Ilene, Cindy, Anna, Angie, Alice, and so many other friends, near and far—I owe you all a lot of lattes. To Angie Ralph, thank you for being a champion of authors and young adult lit. To my colleagues and patients who kindly ask, “Hey, Dr. Kang—are you still writing?” The answer is, always! Thanks so much for caring and asking! And for Isabelle Pagani, who is probably too young to read this but hopefully will someday—you probably already know this, but your da
d loves you. A lot. I hope you love the book!

  About the Author

  Lydia Kang is an author of young adult and adult novels, as well as nonfiction and poetry. She is also a mom and a practicing physician, and lives in the Midwest with her family. Lydia has been slightly obsessed with Lake Superior since she was a child. Find her other writings at:

  LydiaKang.com and on Twitter, @LydiaYKang.

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