by Abby Geni
“Did anybody see her this morning?”
“She did say something about going up Lighthouse Hill.”
“I remember! The elephant seals—”
“She must have lost her footing.”
“The fog was bad. I got turned around at Breaker Cove.”
“Me too! I was at Dead Sea Lion Beach, and—”
“Did anyone notice if Charlene had her binoculars with her? Maybe she dropped them. They’re a good pair.”
“She shouldn’t have gone up alone.”
Still, I said nothing. Galen’s glance flicked my way. He was frowning. There was tension in the air, running beneath the casual conversation.
WHEN THE HELICOPTER arrived, I was in my bedroom. I watched through the window as Forest and Galen hurried across the grounds. The helicopter glinted in the sun. It had the look of an aerial ambulance, a red cross painted on the door. Awash in déjà vu, I watched it settle on the helipad.
Two figures emerged from inside, hefting a stretcher between them. I had been expecting more federal agents—more badges, more clipboards, more holsters tucked discreetly out of sight—but these men were clearly medics. They wore hospital green. I had been expecting, too, to see the same doctor who had attended Andrew. Now, though, I realized that he must be a medical examiner, specializing in the dead. This time the mainland had sent along two older gentlemen, one with gray hair, one black. Galen and Forest approached them and shook hands. The group made its way toward the cabin.
With some trepidation, I left my bedroom. There was a bustle at the front door. Lucy was heading outside for a little bird-watching. (Later on, she would justify her actions, claiming that she’d seen an albatross landing near Indian Head. More likely the incident had reminded her of the loss of Andrew. She couldn’t stick around for that.) I stepped into the living room in time to see the doctors negotiating their stretcher down the front hallway. One bent over Charlene, checking her pulse and peering beneath her eyelids. Mick was hovering against the wall, chewing on his fingernails as though he intended to gnaw them right off his hands. Forest and Galen were standing at attention. They had the demeanor of athletes on the bench during a key game.
With great efficiency, the medics hefted Charlene from the surf-board onto the stretcher. They held a conference, standing close together. Their aspect was unhurried. They clearly did not perceive Charlene to be in any immediate danger. The black-haired doctor tugged a notebook from his pocket. He stared at Mick, frowned at Galen, and examined me as though taking my measure.
“Sit,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed. “Sit there.”
I sank onto the couch. It was not a time to argue. The doctor peered at me a moment longer, then turned to Forest and beckoned him over.
“I need to know everything,” he said. “When did the accident happen?”
Forest began to speak in cool, thoughtful tones. On balance, I was glad to be seated. I felt dislocated, outside myself. Tiny details seemed of immense importance to me. The hum of the radiator. The scratch of the medic’s pen on his pad. Outside, the sea was breaking against the shoreline. The spray was wild, casting up a mist that glittered with rainbows like a sprinkler in the sunlight.
A sound caught my attention. The second doctor—a gray-haired fellow with a generous paunch—had left his post at Charlene’s side. He was approaching Galen. There was a diffident quality about him. I gave him a long glance, summing him up: gentle, bespectacled, a teddy bear of a man. Though he kept his voice low, I could hear every word.
“You look familiar,” he said. “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so,” Galen said.
“I’m good with faces. Are you from San Francisco originally?”
For a moment, I thought Galen wasn’t going to answer. Then, unwillingly, he said, “Yes, I am.”
“Are you married?” the doctor said.
Galen blushed. There was no mistaking it. He went pink all the way up to the tips of his ears. Seated on the couch, I shifted in surprise. I had never thought that Galen could be capable of such a human response.
“No,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Galen said, with a look of pure dislike.
The doctor took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully. “For a moment there, I thought I had it.”
Galen’s blush had begun to curdle, turning an angry red. I was amazed at the doctor’s pluck—or else his obliviousness. I would never have dared to antagonize Galen to this extent.
A hand touched my shoulder, making me jump. Mick was sinking onto the couch. He pushed a glass of water toward me. I drank it down without registering much beyond the iron taste of the pipes. On the other side of the room, Forest was in midflow, pointing to Charlene’s prone form, and the window, and the sea. His reedy voice filled the small space. On her stretcher, Charlene gave a little, fluttering sigh, like a sleeper in the middle of a not unpleasant dream.
LATER ON, I watched the helicopter zipping across the water. The sun was still high, pinned to the silken air like a brooch on a collar. The helicopter moved at a brisk pace. I squinted, trying to keep track of its dark frame, the whir of the rotor.
Gradually, before my eyes, the sea began to change. Something was happening far out, scarcely visible. I caught a splash of spray, a gleam of silver. Shapes were bursting through the surface and ducking under again. Eventually I realized that it was a pod of gray whales. They were passing to the east of the islands, frolicking in the deep water. In the manner of their kind, they had all come up to breathe at once. I saw a shiny torso, a fat snout. Charlene’s helicopter passed above them, and their bodies shifted in concert, fins and tails in motion, as though waving goodbye.
26
I COULDN’T SLEEP THAT night. I lay awake for a long time. My ceiling has become unpleasantly familiar; I know every stain, every scrap of peeling paint. One crack trails out of the corner and sketches a shape that, from a certain angle, looks like a horse’s head. I stared up at this equine outline, my mind in a tumble. I could not shake the image of Charlene on the hill. Charlene stumbling, falling. The lurch of her hands. The spray of her red hair. The impact of her body on the granite slope. I could see it as though I had been there. The way her flesh must have skidded and torn. The ground crunching and cracking beneath her. The look on her face as the lights had gone out—blank, empty.
Earlier on, Mick had tucked me into bed. He had brought me a hot water bottle, insisting that I put it against my spine. “Back, not belly,” he repeated several times. He did not seem terribly concerned about Charlene. He had explained, as though to a child, that these things happened. In his tenure on the Farallon Islands, he had seen bruises, twisted ankles, and concussions. I myself had gashed my stomach. I had been with Forest when he had sliced open his calf. Once, another intern had fallen so badly that he’d suffered a compound fracture—nasty, nasty, Mick said, refusing to go into detail. What happened to Charlene had been an accident, he said.
I fell asleep with that word in my head—accident, accident. I must have dreamed. There was another sound. A mewling. A baby’s cry. I wrenched myself out of sleep, bewildered, reaching instinctively for the lost seal pup.
The stillness was deafening. The islands had settled, the sea bedding down, the wind heading off to do its wailing elsewhere. Even the elephant seals seemed subdued. For the first time in my memory, they were inaudible. Lucy was not humming in her sleep downstairs. Galen was not snoring. The only thing I could hear was a mouse inside the wall, tearing at something. The cabin was so quiet that I could differentiate between the individual noises of its teeth and its claws.
I hefted myself out of bed and threw on a sweater. I would hunt through the living room for a reference book of some kind. There was no better cure for insomnia than one of those brick-sized tomes, full of Latin names and anatomical terminology, guaranteed to bore me back to sleep.
On the stairs, however, I was brought up short.
A lamp was burning in the living room. I bit my lip. Nobody would have left the lights on needlessly; we did not waste electricity on the Farallon Islands.
“Hello?” I called.
There was a scuffle. Galen appeared, tucked inside the armchair, gazing at me with wild eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You scared the life out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I was not surprised to find him there. Galen was often active in the middle of the night. I had once read that as people aged, they required less sleep. Galen was living proof. I had grown accustomed to hearing his light step reverberating throughout the cabin, touching the edges of my dreams.
Still, even for him, it was late to be up and about.
“Can’t sleep?” I said.
He shook his head. “Insomnia is a beast. Surely there’s a line from Shakespeare that would apply here. The death of sleep. Murdered sleep. Something from Macbeth.”
It was cooler downstairs. A draft pooled around my ankles. The white walls of the living room had a snowy appearance, and Galen’s hair stood up in tufts, like icicles. As I approached the bookcase, I felt myself shiver. I had the momentary sensation that Galen himself was radiating a field of intense, damp cold.
“Chilly?” he said, as though answering my thought.
I shot him a nervous look.
Running my finger along the spines of the books, I glanced over the titles. The Private Life of Sharks. Pinnipeds: A Study. Seabirds of the Pacific. The clock ticked in the corner. The sea was louder now, a dull, insistent boom.
There was a flicker on the coffee table. I glanced across the room to see Oliver in his tank. His skin was a muddy orange. His tentacles were in motion. He was palpating the glass with his suckers, working systematically from one end of the aquarium to the other. I frowned. He was still trying to find a way out.
“I know why I can’t sleep,” Galen said. “Why can’t you?”
“I think too much.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Everything.” I shrugged. “Can you recommend a book for me?”
He did not respond. His brow was knotted. I could not tell if he was looking at me or peering at something over my shoulder. For an instant, I imagined that the ghost was hovering behind me in silence. I resisted the urge to pivot and check.
“Can you recommend a book?” I repeated, each word distinct.
He didn’t answer. I was beginning to feel alarmed. I glanced behind me at the empty staircase. Then I shook Galen’s shoulder.
“You there?” I said.
He sighed, coming back to life. “Something to read? No, I can’t think of anything in particular.”
“Are you all right?”
He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Not even a little bit.”
“Oh,” I said faintly.
We stayed that way for a minute, my hand on his shoulder. He stared up at me. The expression on his face was one I recognized—the biologist’s gaze, detached and dispassionate, studying me, storing away the data.
“Your name is Miranda,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But the others call you Melissa, and Mel, and—what is it—rat girl?”
“Mouse,” I said. “Mouse girl.”
“You’ve been here for months. You haven’t corrected them. Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
I stepped back, putting a few feet of cold air between us.
“That’s not an answer,” Galen said.
“Does it matter?”
“Everything matters.”
The chill in the room had increased. I wrapped my arms around myself, half expecting to see my breath coalesce into frost on the air.
“I have to decide what to do,” Galen said.
“About what?”
“Many things. So many.”
There was a current running beneath our conversation—a tremor of electricity, of secrecy. It was as though he was trying to tell me something through code. I could not discern what that was. I could not figure out his mood, much less his intent.
“Do you understand?” Galen said. “I’m talking about Charlene.”
“Oh,” I said, a slow exhalation.
“Seeing her like that.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “Poor little thing. It’s been a tough day. A terrible day.”
“Yes,” I said. “It has.”
“I brought her here,” Galen said. “That’s the problem.”
I swallowed hard.
“I choose who comes and who goes,” he said. “It’s my decision. I approved Charlene’s internship. I approved your residency. I signed off on everyone here.”
“I know.”
“I’m responsible for you all.”
I nodded. I believed this too.
“It can be a burden,” Galen said. “Not always. But sometimes. Tonight it feels that way to me. Tonight it’s a dreadful burden.”
I thought I understood what he was driving at, though I could not be sure. His state of mind seemed to be in flux, shifting from anger to calm to sorrow with all the unpredictability of the weather on the islands.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“What?” he said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I repeated. “What happened to Charlene.”
Galen gave me a look that made me quail. It had the force of a thunderbolt hurled from a mountaintop. Once again, I was reminded of Greek mythology. He might have been an angry god of the sea reprimanding a lowly mortal.
“Fault,” he said. “An interesting word.”
“Mm.”
His eyes glittered. “If an elephant seal eats a fish, whose fault is that? If a shark eats the seal, who is to blame?”
I thought about saying, You tell me. I did not dare.
“The islands are a dangerous place,” he went on. “For humans and for animals. Should I be held accountable for what happens here? Should Charlene? Should you?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly.
“Noninterference,” he said. “That’s my job. Watching and studying. Never intervening. If a seal pup drowns, I make a note of it. If a white shark is wounded, I take a photo for my files. That’s my job. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“But this—” he said. “Charlene—”
He broke off. An unspoken question seemed to hang in the air. Galen was watching me as though waiting for an answer. I did not know what to say. I could not follow his logic. I could not decipher the pattern.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator gave a wrenching groan. Galen and I both jumped. This was a common occurrence on the islands—the fridge was old, and its mechanism always came to life with an angry cry—but now it sounded like a thunderclap. It rattled for a minute, then quieted to a hum.
“I’m disturbed by recent events,” Galen said. “That’s my point.”
“Charlene is my friend,” I said, finding my voice.
“Yes, I know.”
“I’m upset too. What happened to her makes me sick.”
“And what did happen?” Galen said fiercely.
I stared at him with my mouth open.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me in your own words.”
“An accident,” I said. “Another accident.”
He got to his feet in one smooth bound. I had noticed before how youthful and athletic his movements could be. Years of spartan living on the islands had kept him lean and wiry, a pillar of muscle. He strode across the living room and took up a sentinel position by the window.
In the tank, the octopus ballooned upward. His flesh was decorated with a patchwork of hues—ochre, green, splotches of pink. He was as multicolored as a firework. It was unusual to see him flaunt his abilities like this. I wondered if his coloration was indicative of his mood or if he was simply flexing his muscles. Perhaps his capacity for camouflage required this sort of practice.
At the window, Galen spoke.
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br /> “That doctor,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“That damned doctor. He remembered me. I remembered him too, but I wasn’t going to say anything. We don’t talk about the past here.”
I was still catching up. Galen was apparently referring to the gray-haired teddy bear of a man, the bespectacled medic who had accosted him and claimed to recognize him. I had more or less forgotten the whole encounter. It had been eclipsed entirely by Charlene’s condition and my own anxious state.
“He knew my wife,” Galen said.
“But you said—” I began, then faltered.
“My wife. He knew her. What are the odds?”
I gazed at him for a moment in consternation.
“I didn’t realize you were married,” I said.
“She died. Eleven years ago. She died.”
“Ah,” I said, stunned.
“Damn,” Galen spat out.
He sprang into motion again. As I watched, he paced to the hat stand and back to the bookshelf, making the most of the little space.
“I don’t mention it,” he said. “I never bring it up. We don’t talk about—”
“The past here,” I said. “I know. But sometimes, maybe, it’s okay to—”
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes.”
Even his hands were restless, moving through the air as though manipulated by a puppeteer—a novice unaccustomed to the delicate wiring. Fingers drifting. Palms turning upward. Elbows akimbo.
“Will you tell me what happened?” I said.
“She drowned.”
“Oh.”
“We were on a fishing trip. We lived in San Francisco then. We had rented a boat, just for the day, with friends. A squall blew in. Choppy seas. She shouldn’t have been on deck. I told her to stay inside—I told her. She never listened to me.” Galen gave a tight, pained grin. “She lost her balance. Hit her head. She was unconscious when she entered the water. We couldn’t get to her in time.”
“I see,” I said softly.
And I did see. Many things were falling into place.
Something had driven Galen to the most godforsaken, far-flung place on earth. Something had induced him to stay indefinitely. Until this moment, I had been unable to comprehend it. It had been one more puzzle of the islands, too difficult to solve.
