Island of Lost Girls

by Jennifer McMahon

  “I don’t know. But I think you should listen to your dream. Study it. Write it down. Draw it. You’re an artist. Make a picture showing what happened.”

  “And this is going to help how exactly?”

  “Maybe it’ll take you deeper,” Warren said.

  “Deeper where?”

  “Down the rabbit hole,” he said.

  JUNE 16, 1993

  THEY WERE ON the wooden stage. Peter was leading Rhonda and the O’Shea boys out the window of the bedroom, yelling at the boys to Speak up, damn it! and sprinkling fairy dust on them, which was actually gold glitter. The kids from the lake were not around (much to Peter’s frustration), so they went over the nursery scenes again and again while they waited for the lost boys, pirates, and Indians to wander in, no doubt to be reprimanded for choosing boating with their families over Peter Pan.

  Lizzy was on a nearby stump, holding a mirror while she practiced her pirate scowl and drew on a thin, curling mustache with one of Aggie’s eyebrow pencils.

  Before rehearsal, Rhonda had found Lizzy in her room, hanging upside down from the bar in her pirate costume. Her hat was lying on the ground beneath her. Lizzy had barely spoken to her since the day she spied on Rhonda and Peter in the cemetery.

  “Away with you, lass, or I’ll take an eye out with me hook!” Lizzy threatened.

  “Are you mad at me or something?” Rhonda asked.

  “And why would I be mad at you, Miss Wendy Darling?”

  “I don’t know. About me and Peter?”

  Lizzy reached up with the hand that didn’t have the hook, grabbed hold of the bar, and unhooked her legs, dropping to the floor. Her huge boots made a loud thump when she hit the ground.

  “Ah, Pan,” Lizzy said through gritted teeth. “One day, he’ll get his. I’ll smite him. You mark my words, my wee lass!” She reached down and got her hat off the floor, carefully placing it on her head, then stopping to eye herself in the mirror on her closet door. She gave herself her best pirate sneer.

  “Do you like it?” she said to Ronnie, in her own voice now.

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  Rhonda nodded. “It’s good. Very piratey.”

  “It’s still missing something,” Lizzy said. “I think what I need is a mustache.”

  Rhonda followed Lizzy down the hall to her parents’ bedroom, where she rummaged through Aggie’s makeup on the dressing table until she found an eyebrow pencil. She also took a gold hoop earring.

  “Wanna see something?” Lizzy asked, once she’d put the earring in her left ear. She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a little drawstring bag. She opened it up and pulled out a stack of coins. Silver dollars. About ten of them.

  “Where’d you get those?” Rhonda asked.

  “They’re my pirate treasure,” Lizzy explained. “Look how shiny they are. I polished them with toothpaste. It’s just as good as silver polish.” She spat on a coin, shined it up on the sleeve of her jacket, then returned it and the others to the pouch. Then she was off, wooden sword drawn as she raced out of the house and into the woods, shouting lines to the trees in her pirate voice—“Make them walk the plank! Aye, matey!” Rhonda followed silently behind.

  PETER, RHONDA, AND the O’Sheas were just about to jump off the stage and start flying when the arrow hit.

  It was a huge wooden dowel, three feet long, and at the tip was a ball of flames made from gauze soaked in lighter fluid. It hurtled through the air from above, missed Malcolm O’Shea’s head by a few inches, and landed on one of the fold-up cots they were using for the children’s beds. Both the O’Sheas hit the floor, screaming. Rhonda, who had been perched in the window frame, ready to jump, froze, desperately trying to comprehend what had happened.

  “Holy Christ!” Peter yelled. He rushed to the flaming cot and began flailing at it with his wooden sword. The sword itself caught fire. He waved it through the air, which only fanned the flames. At last, he threw it to the ground and stamped on it, the O’Sheas up and screaming, “Do something! Do something!”

  The sword was extinguished, but the flames were spreading cheerfully along the cot. Peter yelled, “Get water!” and the O’Shea boys took off like lightning. Lizzy, who had dropped the mirror, the eyebrow pencil, and even her hook, in the dirt in all the excitement, led the red-headed boys through the woods, shouting, “Water, mateys! The ship’s burning!” The O’Sheas seemed relieved to be sent a safe distance away should any more flaming arrows come from the sky.

  Rhonda jumped out of the window at last, grabbed a wool blanket from the other cot, and threw it on top of the fire. The smoke was black and thick, and Rhonda and Peter choked on it, but the flames stopped. Billows of dark smoke filled the stage. It smelled of smoldering wool, like a singed animal.

  Peter walked to the edge of the stage, waved his blackened sword at the tree tops in the most threatening gesture he could manage.

  “Greta!” he bellowed, his eyes red and watering. “Show yourself!”

  They heard a cackling from a nearby white pine. Rhonda squinted up through the thick cover of pine needles and saw a flash of red.

  “Greta Clark, get your chickenshit ass down here!” Peter yelled.

  “Come get me!” she taunted.

  Peter tucked the sword into his belt, jumped down from the stage, and ran to the tree. He hoisted himself up on one of the bottom branches and began to climb.

  “You could have burned down the damn stage! The whole forest could have caught fire!” he yelled up as he climbed.

  “Better luck next time!” she called down. Greta began to climb too, making her way up toward the top, slowly and surely, with Peter scrambling beneath her.

  “You’re sick!” shouted Peter.

  “And you’re the worst actor I’ve ever seen!”

  Peter paused a minute to catch his breath and plan the rest of his route up.

  “And I suppose you could do so much better!” he shouted up at her. “What with your mom being a Hollywood movie star and all!” He was nearly to her first perch now, but she was all the way at the top, swaying as she clung to the thin peak.

  “As a matter of fact, I can. I could act circles around you.”

  Lizzy and the O’Sheas came running into the clearing then, carrying buckets of water and squirt guns. They stopped at the base of the stage and looked up into the tree, to the same spot Rhonda was squinting at.

  “So why don’t you prove it then?” he asked. “Be in our play.” Peter was just below Greta now, and the top of the tree bent and swayed with their weight. Greta was quiet for a moment, perhaps securing her grip.

  “Peter!” Lizzy screamed up. “What are you doing?”

  “Yeah, she can’t be in our play. She just tried to kill us,” said Malcolm, running his hand through his hair, checking to see if it had been singed by the arrow.

  Rhonda just held her breath, wondering what might happen next.

  “Why would I want to be in your sucky play?” Greta asked.

  “To prove what a great actress you are! To rub it in our faces. You could be one of the Indians. God knows you can shoot an arrow okay.”

  Greta frowned and looked through the branches at Peter. “I don’t want to be a dumb Indian!”

  “What do you want to be?” asked Peter.

  “I want to be able to kill someone!”

  “But no one gets killed in our play. Only Hook at the end. He gets eaten by the crocodile.”

  Greta thought for a moment, reaching up to adjust the small hat on her head. She wore her bow slung with the string across her chest and ran the fingers of her free hand down from her hat to the string, plucking at it like an instrument.

  “Then I’ll be the crocodile!” she called out.

  And that was that.

  They climbed down from the tree, as the O’Sheas dumped water on the still smoldering cot, and they went back to rehearsing. Peter told Greta she had to make her own costume and she agreed, seemed eager even. She practiced b
eing the crocodile, crawling around on her belly, circling the stage.

  “I was thinking that maybe you hide in here,” Peter explained, showing her the trap door, and Greta Clark practiced crawling up through the trap door. She snapped her jaws at Lizzy, who sneered her best Captain Hook sneer, but Rhonda thought Lizzy couldn’t help looking a little afraid.

  “Another thing,” explained Peter. “The crocodile swallowed a clock and so when we see you, you have to call out ‘Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.’”

  Greta nodded and from then on, she practiced all day. In fact, she seemed to take her role quite seriously.

  “Tick tock!” she called out when she left to go home for lunch.

  “Tick tock!” she hollered an hour later, as she walked back through the woods, snapping her arms like jaws, like she was warning of her approach. Like maybe, Rhonda thought, you always needed to be on guard for Greta Clark, for the tick and tock, and she was giving you a fair chance.

  JUNE 15, 2006

  THE STORY WENT something like this: There was once a woman named Queenie Benette, who gave her sweetheart, George Dixon, a twenty-dollar gold piece for luck. George Dixon would one day become captain of the Hunley. Before that, on April 6, 1862, he was shot in the leg at the Battle of Shiloh. He happened to have the gold piece in his pocket, and the bullet struck the coin, saving his leg (and possibly—so the story goes—his life). The bullet left its impression in the gold. Lieutenant Dixon carried that gold piece with him for the rest of the war, a good luck charm. If the story was true, Dixon had the coin in his pocket the day his luck ran out, and the Hunley went down.

  Clem had always loved this story and even now, as he told it to Rhonda for what was easily the hundredth time, there was a glint in his eye. Justine sat beside Rhonda on the couch, absorbed in her crossword puzzle. Clem was pacing around the living room, gesturing with his coffee cup as he spoke. The bagels Rhonda brought over were on the kitchen table along with cream cheese, jam, and peanut butter.

  “Everyone has something like that gold coin, some little piece of protection, some tiny thing with the potential to save them, whether they know about it or not,” Clem said.

  Rhonda sat, sipping coffee, half-listening, gazing down at the framed Hunley pictures she’d done for him years ago, in a whole other lifetime. What Rhonda was most interested in, what she had driven all the way to her parents for, was to reacquaint herself with the mechanics of the submarine: how the cranks worked to turn the propeller, how water was taken in, then expelled to make the craft rise and fall. She needed these details to work into her new drawing. She wanted to make sure the rabbit had all the right switches and gears.

  It felt good to have something to focus on other than Ernie’s kidnapping. Tock had been right: it wasn’t Rhonda’s job to go poking around in other people’s lives like some stout, bumbling version of Nancy Drew. She was a witness, that was all—in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe the right place at the right time—despite what Trudy said, without Rhonda, no one would even know about the rabbit taking Ernie.

  So Rhonda decided to take Warren’s advice and spend the day working on a drawing of a scene from her dream—poking into nothing but her own subconscious. She was excited at the thought of drawing again. It had been her great love throughout childhood, and as she grew older, she let it go, using her skills only when they were required, like for the biology classes. She’d been so busy with school and her work study job as a lab assistant (which was really little more than a glorified cleaning job) that she had time for little else. Drawing for the sake of drawing felt indulgent, and to give herself a whole day for it—decadent.

  Gazing down, Rhonda saw that the one thing she hadn’t put in her father’s Hunley drawing, the thing she’d carefully left out, was any emotion. The faces of the soldiers were blank—they were like mannequins or robots; more like machines than men—no sense of danger, fear, or imminent death in their expressions.

  And what must it have been like the last moments aboard the Hunley, trapped in an iron coffin, the smell of sweat making the thin air seem heavy? Rhonda stared at the faces of the soldiers, searching them for any trace of a sense of what was to come—for just the faintest hint of fear or sorrow.

  The Hunley, she knew from her father’s daily lectures, was finally found in the waters of Charleston Harbor on May 4, 1995. Dives showed that it appeared to be intact. It took five years of planning and preparation, of discussion and debate, but on August 8, 2000, the Hunley was raised—pulled out on straps with a crane and carried to land. It was placed in a tank of cold water to keep it preserved. Over the months that followed, the submarine was opened and the sand and silt sifted through. Clem checked the Internet every day, sometimes several times a day—a man truly obsessed, not wanting to miss a single detail. He told Rhonda each time something new was found: a wallet, a canteen, a sewing kit, buttons, a tobacco pipe. But what Clem and Rhonda were waiting for, what they both held their breath in anticipation of, each day, was the bodies. Eventually, they would find the remains of those men. And they did.

  At first, it was just three ribs. Then leg bones. Skulls. Bone by bone, scientists discovered the bodies of the crewmen. The placement of the remains suggested that the crew remained in their stations right up until the end. Turning the hand cranks, pumping away as they sank. Right up until the end, Rhonda thought as she studied the drawing she’d done when she was ten. Then she looked up at her father and wondered what the one thing that could save her might be.

  On May 21, 2001, the remains of the captain of the Hunley, Lieutenant George Dixon, were found at the front of the sub. He too had stayed in his place, held his position until the very end.

  On May 25, 2001, Dixon’s legendary gold coin was found inside the sub, the dent from the bullet clear. One side of the coin had been sanded down and given a scratched-on inscription in Lieutenant Dixon’s cursive: Shiloh April 6, 1862 My life preserver.

  Clem had tears in his eyes the day they found the coin. The day he learned the story was true. My life preserver, scratched into a piece of gold carried in Dixon’s pocket the night he drowned. It made Rhonda think of how you could hold off the inevitable with dumb luck and good timing, but in the end, when your time came, it came. The submarine would sink. The rabbit would snatch you. Whatever happened, you’d go down, life preserver or not.

  JUSTINE’S SWEAT SUIT today was pastel blue.

  Rhonda had inherited her mother’s straight brown hair, her plump face and body. When Rhonda looked at her mother, she thought to herself, This is how I will look in thirty years, and the thought somehow comforted her. Justine at fifty-six, Rhonda thought, was pretty in a frumpy, housewife kind of way. She wore her shoulder-length hair cut in a pageboy. She had it colored to cover the gray. The lines on her face had grown deeper over the years, but were the same lines that had always been there: the wrinkles around her eyes that showed when she smiled and the ones around her mouth that showed when she didn’t. She was ten years older than Clem but looked younger than he.

  “I need a six-letter word for deceive,” Justine said, not looking up from the puzzle on her lap. She put the end of the pencil in her mouth, nibbled on the eraser.

  “Mislead,” said Rhonda.

  “That’s seven letters, dear.”

  “Delude,” said Clem, not looking up from his own puzzle.

  “That’s it!” cried out Justine. “That’s the one. Thank you, sweetie.” She began penciling busily.

  “I’m going to go look for the photo albums,” Rhonda announced. She’d told them she was working on a new drawing and wanted some old photos to work from.

  “I think they’re mostly in our bedroom closet,” Justine said.

  “I might have moved them,” Clem told her.

  “I’ll go check,” Rhonda offered.

  Past the closed door to her old bedroom, now used only for storage and the rare overnight guest, and into Clem and Justine’s room, Rhonda made her way to the large closet an
d pulled back the folding slatted door. The left side was her father’s, the right, her mother’s. Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought, then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull—the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have been chosen for her. Then she thought of Warren, of holding hands in the cemetery. Dare she even hope that this might go somewhere? Did she really want it to?

  She found the leaning stack of photo albums on the shelf above her father’s Civil War costumes, which were hung in plastic bags from the dry cleaners.

  “Found ’em!” she hollered over her shoulder, not realizing Clem was right behind her. He helped her get them down. They were mostly bound in cracked and stained fake leather with Family Photographs and Memories embossed in curly gold script.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Clem asked as he helped her carry the albums down the hall and into the kitchen, where there was better light.

  “Pictures of Lizzy, mostly.”

  Clem smiled weakly. His already ashen face lost whatever hint of color it may have had. Her father, Rhonda thought, looked terribly old.

  He was still tall and trim, his hair gone to a distinguished salt-and-pepper. But his breath had a whistling rasp to it and he coughed often. Smoker’s cough. The hollow hack of a man twenty years older.

  Over the years, both Justine and Rhonda had begged him to give up cigarettes. He tried a few times, half-hearted attempts, really just to placate his wife and daughter. But he would end up sneaking cigarettes in the garage, at work—making up lies for reasons to duck outside for a smoke. He took the trash out twice a day, went to the store for milk when there was still half a quart left. He was fooling no one. Just going through the motions.

  “Why the interest in Lizzy all of a sudden?” he asked.

  “I had a dream about her. A friend suggested I do a drawing of it,” she explained.