by Abby Geni
“Sorry,” she murmured. Her gaze lingered on the empty spot on the couch beside me, but after a moment she sank unsteadily to the floor, next to Forest. Her arrival had all the ceremony of a stage entrance. Everyone gaped at her. Even the alpha agent’s bureaucratic manner was momentarily derailed. He stood scratching his cheek before continuing, “Galen here—Mr. McNab, I should say—has offered to let us use his bedroom for our interviews. We’ll have a bit more privacy there. I’ll be asking each of you to—”
Galen interrupted. “Do you have a cause of death?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Cause of death.”
It was Dr. Alfred who answered. He was settled on a chair in the corner, and he looked up from his clipboard. “Drowning. Foam in the lungs. Petechial hemorrhaging. No question.”
Lucy gave a barely visible shudder. I saw Forest reach toward her. Then he thought better of it and withdrew his hand.
“The wound on the head?” Galen asked. “The broken ankle? It was broken, wasn’t it?”
“A fall,” the doctor said. “That’s what it looks like now. I’ll find out more at the autopsy.”
“There will be an autopsy, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
Once again, Lucy shivered. It was a convulsive movement, like a dog shaking off water.
“And the time of death?” Galen asked.
Dr. Alfred glanced at the alpha agent, who gave a barely perceptible nod. The doctor pursed his lips and said, “Between midnight and two a.m. last night, based on the liver temperature. My best estimate.”
In that moment, something happened to me. Even before I’d had time to process his words, I felt the room beginning to pivot. The floorboards swung under my feet. I gasped a little. I could not help it.
Someone was speaking—Forest, asking a technical question. Something else about Andrew’s ankle. Mick had his hand raised like a child in school. They were biologists, after all, unfazed by blood and injury, interested only in the mechanisms and specificities of death. They had spent years practicing this habit of mind. Clinical distance. Emotional detachment. Facts, not feelings.
My brain was in a tumble. Andrew had been on the grounds at midnight. I had been on the grounds at eleven p.m. I had lingered in the coast guard house for at least half an hour. In my wildest dreams, I had never imagined that my late-night trek could have had anything to do with Andrew’s demise. The two events had seemed entirely unconnected. I had gone to the coast guard house. He had gone for a stroll. Naturally, I had imagined a morning stroll taking place well after dawn.
Now my breath came strangely, stifled in my chest. When I had departed the cabin last night, during the witching hour, I had been aware that I was putting myself in a certain amount of jeopardy. I had been willing to risk losing my way, exacerbating my flu, even wrenching my bad ankle. Evidently, however, it had been a greater gamble than I knew. In a million years, I would never have risked seeing Andrew alone. We had been ships in the night, missing one another by minutes. My nausea returned, and for a moment it seemed likely that I would vomit on the beta agent’s shoes. But I controlled myself. I took a deep breath and sat up straight again.
“—definitely broken,” Dr. Alfred was saying. “The right tibia. It happened antemortem, but just barely. I would say the bone was fractured a few minutes before death. That would be consistent with a fall.”
“He had some scratches,” Forest volunteered. “What does that mean?”
“Oh, drowning victims usually do,” the doctor said. “The body floats facedown, and the arms are dragged over the bottom. It’s common to see many kinds of wounds. Those would be inflicted after death.”
At this point, the alpha agent cleared his throat.
“As I said,” he announced, “we’ve got to head back to the mainland soon. No time to waste. This is a bit unorthodox, you understand. Normally we’d do things differently. But here, on the islands—” He sucked in a breath, looking around with a pained expression. “We’ll be asking each of you to come up in turn.” He indicated Lucy, who was sitting with a blanket clutched around her shoulders. “Ms. Crayle, I guess we’ll start with you.”
OUTSIDE, THE SKY darkened by degrees. The clock ticked in the corner. A breeze rattled the panes and set the front door to rocking in an arrhythmic rattle. Ordinarily, we would have been preparing for bed now. There would have been the usual squabble over who would have the first shower before the hot water ran out completely. Forest might accuse Mick of swiping his toothpaste. Galen might settle himself at the kitchen table, chin on fist, flipping through the tidal chart.
Tonight, however, we remained cloistered in the living room. The mood was both listless and tense. The rumor of voices filtered through the ceiling. Normally, I was sure, the federal agents would have had hours, even days, in which to collect information. Normally they would not dine with their witnesses, then take statements in somebody’s bedroom. But the islands, as usual, had made everything more difficult. Time was precious; space was limited. The agents could not urge us all to stop by their offices when we were feeling a bit calmer. They could not plan to return for a chat. Unless they felt like commandeering the helicopter again—unless we felt like spending twelve hours on board the ferry, there and back—this had to be done now.
The tension affected everyone differently. Any conversation that might have arisen between us was constrained by the presence of the doctor, who had remained in his corner, scribbling away on his clipboard. Mick was at the window, peering out at the sunset. Charlene was on the floor, slumped against the wall, as pale as I had ever seen her. Her freckles stood out like chips of sand caught in ice. She had not said a word since dinner. Forest, on the other hand, was frenzied. He was pacing like an expectant father. His movements were so rapid that I kept thinking he would barge straight into the wall. Instead, he pivoted on his heel. I had never been able to get a handle on Forest. Clearly he was in the grip of some strong emotion, but whether it was anxiety, or anger, or ghoulish enjoyment, I could not tell.
In the past, I had always assumed that there were only two mental states: waking and dreaming. The former was conscious, logical, and sane. The latter was chaotic and bizarre. I had never confused the two before. But in recent days, I seemed to have stumbled on a third state of being: a twilight haze, somewhere in between. In this half-lit realm, everything around me looked and felt like the reality I had always known. The ocean and sky still met in a precise line. Gravity functioned. The laws of daily life continued unabated. And yet monsters walked abroad. Rape, drowning, Andrew himself—these things belonged in the land of nightmares. Waking and dreaming were no longer distinct. Now the moon, the cabin, and Mick at the window were all happy reminders of the wide-awake world. But the federal agents, the helicopter, and Andrew’s dead body had sprung out of a bad dream.
After a while, Galen got to his feet. He shot me a searching glance, which I pretended not to notice. He wandered over to Dr. Alfred.
“Well,” he said. “You’re definitely doing an autopsy, then?”
“Oh yes,” the doctor said.
“I must say, I don’t see why. It seems like a clear-cut case of accidental death to me.”
Dr. Alfred set his pencil aside with an impatient gesture. “These things can be interpreted many different ways. We never want to rush to judgment.”
“There’s only one interpretation here, surely,” Galen said.
“In layman’s terms—” Dr. Alfred began.
At that moment, there was a clatter on the stairs. Lucy was descending. She had divested herself of her blanket, and without that sweeping cape, she looked smaller than usual. Normally there was a solidity about her hips, but now her frame seemed to have shrunk like a doll left in the wash. She kept her head bowed, her hair falling in her face, and slipped into her bedroom without speaking to any of us.
“Mr. Audino?” called a voice from upstairs.
“That’s me,” Mick said. “Jesus, this is awful.”
I got to my feet and went to the window. Lighthouse Hill stood against a watercolor sky. A few boulders were silhouetted, spills of ink. Two seabirds were calling in harsh voices, back and forth, like a married couple engaging in a well-rehearsed spat. The sea roared. The clock ticked like thunder. The doctor was dozing, his chin sunk onto his chest. His glasses were sliding down his nose, millimeter by millimeter. I wondered whether it was worth it to wake him or whether I should let the inevitable happen and hope the fall didn’t break the fragile frame.
Soon Galen succumbed to habit. At the table, he got out a small green notebook. Murmuring to himself, he made some notes. Mick went up to bed. Forest went with him. I heard feet in the corridor. There was a whooshing in the pipes—teeth cleaned, toilet flushed. They shared a room at the end of the hallway, and for a while there was shuffling and banging in there. Then two bunks squealed audibly.
But I was wide awake. I lifted a hand and touched the window, as cold and slick as a sheet of ice. In the distance, a seabird gave one last cry, the final word in the argument. I barely noticed when Charlene came back downstairs, sniffling a bit, and disappeared into her bedroom beside the front door.
I was thinking about the whales. Mick had recently told me an interesting fact. Humpbacks are known for their family life. They play games with their calves, make lasting mates, follow one strong leader, and sing without cessation. They stick together. But over the years, whalers noticed something odd. (Mick can’t say the word whalers without grimacing. He knows a lot about them. Too much.) Whenever a humpback was harpooned, its pod would swim off and leave it. For a time, the sailors believed that humpbacks were incapable of affection. The animals smelled blood in the water, heard cries of pain, and did not stay to render aid or comfort.
Yet the truth was more complicated. Human beings are visual creatures. The whalers imagined that because they couldn’t see the pod anymore, the wounded animal had been abandoned for good. But Mick knows better. Whales are tactile, auditory, alive to sonar and magnetism. The harpooned creature would be pulled away, salting the sea with its blood. As it was dragged into shallow water, where the worst of fates awaited it, its pod would keep pace nearby—staying deep, out of sight of the sailors—and sing to it. They would sing until the very end.
“Excuse me,” someone said.
I spun around. The beta agent was standing behind me, hand outstretched, as though about to tap my shoulder. He had plainly been trying to get my attention for some time.
“We’re ready for you now,” he said. “Ms.—I’m sorry—”
He fumbled for the clipboard in his hand, running his finger down a list. I sighed. No one on the islands seemed able to keep track of my identity.
“Her name is Miranda,” Galen said.
His voice was quiet but firm, carrying from the table where he sat. I looked at him in consternation. It had been a while since I had heard my real name. I almost didn’t recognize it. At the expression on my face, Galen smiled.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Worthy of admiration.”
“What?” I said.
“Miranda,” he said. “That’s what it means.”
15
YOU MIGHT BE surprised to hear that I still find joy in the islands. In truth, I love this place as I have never loved anything else. (Except for you, of course.) Every morning, I climb out of bed and smile involuntarily at the view. The landscape is a charcoal drawing, varying from smudgy black to ash gray. The tumbled shoreline. The granite of the nearby islets. The flicker and dart of the mice. The clouds are gauzy. The sea lions are the hue of slate. Distant whales pass by like metallic submarines. It is a colorless world, yet I find it as beautiful as a rainbow. My affection for the islands has only deepened in the past few weeks. I have come to see the archipelago as more than eerie, more than wild. It is a nurturing, protective place.
I have felt this way since the night Andrew assaulted me. My alleged friends and companions were nowhere to be found then. No one defended me. Galen drank himself into a blackout state. Charlene put on headphones and stopped listening. Mick and Forest left the premises, abandoning me completely. And Lucy was asleep. Andrew used to joke about how she went down like a ton of bricks. It would happen suddenly, sometimes midsentence. Her normal whirl of energy used up so much juice that she would remain in a near coma until morning. (Apparently hummingbirds were the same way. During the daylight hours, their wings moved in a blur and their hearts beat several times each second. At night, however, they dropped into a temporary hibernation. Their hearts slowed to one beat per minute.) Lucy the hummingbird slept right through my ordeal.
But the islands were awake. The islands were listening.
I often imagine Andrew’s death. In fact, I like imagining it. The islands paid attention when no one else did. They protected me when no one else would. Andrew hurt me, so the islands took care of it. They took him away.
Lately I have been studying the others here. For once, I am the biologist, and they are the specimens. Everyone has reacted differently to Andrew’s passing. Mick has grown louder, more jovial. His bonhomie is almost painful in its intensity. Charlene, on the other hand, has withdrawn. She has always been quiet—cowed by the others—but now she has melted into the wallpaper. More than once, I have entered a room, found it empty, settled down with a book, and just about had a heart attack half an hour later when a cough or sigh behind me indicated that Charlene had been there all along. Watching me or lost in thought, I cannot tell.
For his part, Forest has become an automaton. His steely focus has increased by an order of magnitude. It is December, rainy and cold. There are only a few more weeks before the last of the sharks will depart for warmer climes. I have begun to hear Forest’s alarm clock going off at three in the morning. Mick, his roommate, will toss and turn, the squeal of bedsprings echoing down the hallway. Even before the sun is up, Forest wants to be in the lighthouse, on call.
And Galen—poor Galen—seems a little lost. For the first time, I can see that he is a man in his sixties, twice the age of anyone else here. He has become absent-minded. Sometimes he seems to be on the verge of asking me a question, but decides against it, averting his gaze. I have come across him wandering around the kitchen, looking everywhere for his reading glasses, unaware that they are perched on his brow. He trails off in the middle of telling stories, staring at me.
If I were a fanciful person, I would say that in those moments, he hears death speaking to him. More than ever before, death is with us on the Farallon Islands. In the past, it was like the sound of the sea caught in a shell’s curl—distant, vague, half-imagined. Now, however, death is front and center. It is there at the breakfast table. It appears amid the silences in an everyday conversation. It lingers outside the window in the evenings. Perhaps Galen is distracted by that cloaked figure, barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Another ghost in an already-crowded cabin.
The days are growing shorter. The constellations have pivoted, the autumn shapes dipping beneath the horizon, the winter stars shining with greater urgency. The sea seems different too. The islands sit on the edge of the coastal plateau. To the west, the ocean floor plummets into black depths. Storms blow in now from the deeper water. They do not last long; they are brief, vicious squalls that have stripped our two little trees of leaves. Rain has battered the cabin and soaked the porch. We have all taken to wearing ponchos around even when the sky is clear, just in case.
I am still expecting Lucy to leave. Indeed, I am amazed that she is not gone already—that she did not board the helicopter with the federal agents and flee without a backward glance. But instead she is hard
at work. She is on a mission to tag more birds than anyone else on the planet ever has. She does not eat; she barely sleeps. Her hummingbird energy seems perilous now. The mechanism that drives her is clearly working beyond its capacities. I can just about smell the smoke from the overheated gears. Lucy continues, each evening, to scrub and mop the house; I have woken in the night to hear the vacuum cleaner running. She polishes the knives and wipes the countertops as though the grime and dust are the physical manifestations of her own sorrow. By eradicating mold, by making each countertop shine, she might wash her soul clean of suffering, leaving herself burnished and bright.
A FEW DAYS ago, I lay in bed, awake. I had been dreaming about the whales again—their slippery weight, their unearthly song. The sun was rising. My room brimmed with light like a wood stove. I had grown accustomed to perching in the bedroom like a spider on a web, determining where the others might be by the shake of floorboards, the chime of voices. Today there was someone in the kitchen. I caught the scrape of a chair. Someone was making coffee; that earthy odor wafted up the stairs. Forest and Galen were out on the grounds. I could hear them calling to one another.
Getting to my feet, I saw that a slip of paper had been pushed under my door. On one side, my name was printed in block letters. MELISSA—my name here. On the other side was written, Lucy Crayle would appreciate your attendance at a memorial service for Andrew Metzger. It will be held at sunset on Friday.
I read it twice. I could imagine Lucy cutting up a sheet of paper; there was a faint pencil mark where she had measured it out. She had evidently made formal invitations for each of us. I was aware that she would not be attending Andrew’s real funeral. His family was in Maine, and the trip would be too long, too expensive. This, apparently, was her solution. I stood there for a long while, holding the square of paper, a lump in my throat.
THERE WAS SOME excitement that afternoon. Mick, Forest, and I walked to the Tit—a rotund promontory on the northern shore—to get a look at a pod of gray whales that were frolicking there. The day was chilly. I positioned myself on the plateau with my tripod. The granite seemed especially loose, sliding and crunching beneath my shoes like melting ice. I leaned forward, eye to the viewfinder, and I experienced the mental shift I always feel in those moments—the physical falling away, my sensory organs dimming, aware of nothing but color and exposure and light.
