The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  “I wanted to douse you in gasoline and light you on fire last night.” Cal walked toward William. “But then I thought Gretta might want to do it. I sent someone in a boat to fetch her last night, right after we put you here.”

  William tapped the mesh wall gently, as if Cal was the animal caught inside and not him. “What about my daughter?”

  “You mean the one you killed?” Cal asked. “You won’t even see her in the afterlife.”

  William’s face set into a mask of true hate. “Sorceress. Enchantress. Every word you speak is a lie.”

  Cal gestured for Apollo to walk out of his cage, but Apollo couldn’t do anything but stare at William.

  “You’re saying he killed his daughter?”

  “She’s lying to you, you nitwit. She’s casting a spell. That’s what witches do.”

  “I’ve decided to give you one more chance,” Cal said to Apollo, ignoring William.

  Cal had something tucked under one arm, hidden in the folds of her sweater, but Apollo could see the way she kept one arm tight against her side. Maybe it was a gun. Maybe William told the truth and this was nothing more than a ruse to take him outside and put a few bullets into his skull. And if so, what could he do about it?

  “Why?” Apollo asked. “Why give me another chance?”

  “Emma told me about you, Apollo. While she stayed with us, she and I spoke quite a bit. She told me you’d come here, but I didn’t believe her. I thought we’d done a pretty good job of hiding ourselves away. I told her no man could find us on our island, but here you are. Just like she said. She didn’t mention this one being with you, though, so I had to think things over for the night. That’s why I’m giving this second chance. You betray us again, and you won’t get a third. Now come on.”

  She waved him out and adjusted her other arm one more time. Whatever she had there had almost slipped when she gestured. Apollo moved to the cell door. He didn’t look at William.

  William shouted as Cal and the guards led Apollo away, but the words—if they were words—remained unintelligible. He sounded, instead, like an animal that knows its end is near and resists the knowledge as much as the death.

  Apollo Kagwa would never see William Wheeler again.

  CAL DIDN’T SPEAK to Apollo until they’d left the TB Pavilion. The twin guards, as before, said nothing. Apollo kept expecting one of them to bring a mace down on his head or for Cal to reveal a pistol, raise it, and shoot. He had little to say as he anticipated his execution. As soon as they were outside again, Cal reached into the deep pocket of her sweater.

  “This is for you,” she said. She stopped him and turned him toward her.

  “No way,” Apollo said. “No way.”

  Cal held out a copy of a children’s book. Outside Over There.

  “How did you get this?” he asked. “I left this in my home, on my bookshelf.”

  She laughed. “You do know there’s more than one copy of this book in the world.”

  Apollo took it from her and held it gingerly. He almost expected it to explode in his hands.

  “I told you that Emma and I spoke. We had a lot of late nights together. She told me about your father, about this book and how much it meant.”

  “What does it have to do with my father?”

  Apollo opened the cover as if the answer would be written there on the endpapers.

  “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about this book. This story. I want you to understand where you’ve found yourself.”

  “This island?”

  “For a start,” Cal said.

  She took his arm and led him back toward the courtyard. She steadied him in the places where the land dipped or rose, and she pulled him when he nearly walked right into a tree. He couldn’t stop staring down at the book. Confusion threatened to drown him like the rising waters of a flood.

  “You were in New York when you got on Wheeler’s boat, and for a time you were in the East River. You probably passed Rikers Island, maybe you went under the Whitestone Bridge or the Throgs Neck. But when you got close to us, when you approached our island, you crossed new waters, and when you beached that boat, you were on a different shore. The Amazons were said to live on the island of Themyscira, and the Yolngu people of Australia tell of Bralgu, the Island of the Dead. Magical places, where the rules of the world are different. You’ve crossed into such a place, Apollo.”

  “This is North Brother Island,” he said. Ahead he heard the sounds of children now, laughter and squealing.

  “It was,” Cal said. “But then we arrived here and remade it.”

  As they stepped through the brush and into the courtyard, Apollo saw women and children out now, buzzing off in this direction or that. Young children were being led, or carried, down a path Apollo hadn’t seen last night. They moved toward a small building with a series of windows facing the courtyard. Apollo watched the kids go in. Their small heads disappeared as a woman inside the building gestured for them to sit. Behind this woman, there was a blackboard on the wall.

  “A schoolhouse?” Apollo said. A one-room schoolhouse.

  “It’s the library,” Cal told him. “But it serves as their school as well. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes,” Apollo said. He couldn’t stop watching the windows. He couldn’t even see the children, but he imagined them there, sitting cross-legged, attention on the teacher. There were so many commonplace events he had expected to enjoy when Brian was born. Peeking in on his child during class. Parent-teacher conferences. Helping with homework in the evening. He hadn’t understood what a luxury such drudgery would be until he lost the chance.

  “We take our meals there,” Cal said, gesturing to another ramshackle building.

  One of the twins brought a hand to his shoulder and pushed him forward. He drifted on just so he wouldn’t fall. He clutched the book tighter to his belly.

  They’d reached a doorway. Cal stepped in first. Inside, women sat on the floor in small groups, plates or bowls in their laps. They noted him, every single one. More than a few of them tensed, even rose to their feet as if to rush him, but since he was being escorted by Cal and the guards, they returned to the pleasure of paying attention to one another rather than to him. To his surprise Apollo found himself scanning the faces, looking for William’s wife. He didn’t even know what she looked like, but he sought her out anyway. Did he plan to help William? He didn’t know.

  “Me and you be sisters,” Cal said softly as she moved through the room, a kind of greeting perhaps. “We be the same.”

  The women responded, all together. “Me and you coming from the same place.”

  “How long was she here?” Apollo asked as Cal led him toward the one table in the room where a series of serving plates sat.

  “Three months,” Cal said. “On and off.”

  “On and off?”

  “She went back to New York at least once a week. She’s the one who stocked our library. She was shocked when she saw how little we had. To her, a life without books wasn’t living. Even out here Emma wanted the kids to read. She couldn’t stop being a librarian. The kids appreciated it. Some of the other women felt judged.”

  Apollo burned with hunger but had no appetite.

  Cal filled a bowl with oatmeal. “This is good on a cold morning,” she said.

  “How did she go back and forth? I’m sure the water taxi doesn’t make stops at your magic island.”

  “We have our own navy,” Cal said. She sprinkled a spoonful of brown sugar on the oatmeal. “Navy’s an exaggeration. We have a trawler and one small watercraft, a creek boat. It’s built for one. You use a paddle. Emma brought books back in the creek boat.”

  “She knew how to use a creek boat to cross the East River?”

  “There were a few spills,” Cal said, leading him now to a corner where they could talk alone. “But your wife never gives up. Didn’t you know that about her? She’s got a will on her.”

  “Yeah,” Apollo said. “That I knew.”


  Cal squatted on the ground and patted the floor for him to follow. She set the oatmeal in his lap.

  He placed the book down on the ground. Instead of eating, he scanned the story.

  “ ‘When Papa was away at sea,’ ” Cal read aloud.

  Apollo leafed through the pages. Mama sitting on the bench in the garden. Ida inside the house with the baby, playing her horn. At the window the small figures in purple robes, their faces shrouded in shadows. The goblins were sneaking in. He stopped here, pulling his hand away from the book. Cal reached out and turned the page for him.

  Now Ida stayed playing her horn and looking out the window. Behind her the goblins carried her baby sister away. The child’s mouth opened in a shout, the eyes wild with fear and pleading. But Ida couldn’t hear her sister over the music. In the crib the creatures left a replacement. A baby, identical to Ida’s little sister, wearing the same bedclothes. Except the replacement had been carved out of ice.

  On the next page Ida lifted the ice child and held it close, cooing. Ida whispered to the thing, saying, “I love you.” But the creature couldn’t return Ida’s embrace because it wasn’t alive.

  Cal closed the book again.

  “I don’t know why your father read this book to you when you were little,” she said. “But I’m showing you this book because it tells the truth. You and Emma have ended up in one ugly fairy tale. Every woman on this island has been where you are now. It won’t do for you to shut your eyes or pretend otherwise. You’ve crossed the waters, and you can’t go back. William was right about at least one thing. We are witches. But let me tell you what else is true. The man in that cage consorts with monsters.”

  Apollo took a moment to wonder, again, at the threat of William’s cavalry.

  I won’t call it off. I won’t even try.

  APOLLO ATE HIS oatmeal. Neither he nor Cal spoke for a little while, and instead the sounds of the other women filled the room. Some joked with one another, others discussed routines and repairs for the island, and here and there pairs of women sat together and whispered to one another more intimately.

  “Did these women…” Apollo couldn’t finish.

  “Did we do what Emma did?” Cal set her spoon back in the bowl. “Yes. All of us.”

  Apollo set the bowl down. “What about the kids I saw outside?” he asked.

  “Some of these women had more than one child. When they ran to me, they brought their other children with them.”

  “What do these kids know about what happened?”

  “At the library we teach them reading and writing and arithmetic.”

  “But not history.”

  “Not that history.”

  “Why do they stay? Life looks pretty rugged around here.”

  Cal set her chin and didn’t look away from Apollo, a resolute gaze. “Not all of them do. I don’t demand that they stay. These women came to me bereft and confused. I offered them a place where they would be believed. Not second-guessed. Not dismissed. Here they wouldn’t have their realities explained away. Do you know how few women get that simple gift? It works miracles. Not all of them want to stay but every woman leaves this place stronger than when she arrived.”

  Apollo rose holding the bowl, the book tucked under one arm, and for a moment he loomed over Cal. He didn’t even have time to straighten up before one of the imperial guards appeared, her makeshift mace in hand.

  “I’m just getting up!” Apollo shouted, agitated by the crowding. His body ached so badly from last night’s beating that he couldn’t imagine how they still thought of him as a threat. It had been hard enough just to get back on his feet.

  Cal went onto her knees, then pushed up slowly and with exertion. In the daylight she appeared more her age. “He’s fine,” she said, patting the guard.

  Apollo walked among the clumps of women still eating on the ground. Two basins sat on the long table, each filled with water. He did as the women did, dumping the last of his oatmeal into a nearly full bucket—collecting for compost—then washing out his bowl in the basins.

  While he did this, Cal visited with the women there, saying a few words to one or another. She returned to him only to show him where they set the wet bowls out to dry. As he did this, he weighed the option of informing Cal about William’s bargain, William’s threat. But when she came to him, he didn’t mention it.

  “Can I see the kids?” Apollo asked. “Can I meet them?”

  Cal gave Apollo the once-over once more. “You really want to?”

  “I liked hearing the laughter,” he said.

  She dumped traces of oatmeal from her bowl, washed it out, and set it down to dry. “Wonders never cease,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  Cal brought Apollo back to the courtyard, recess in session. A few of the older children played tag while others had large plastic balls they kicked or threw around. The high point of incongruity was one girl, maybe three years old, riding a scooter on the uneven brick of the courtyard. She held the low handle of the machine, one foot on the board and the other on the ground. She couldn’t keep her balance yet. She fell and she got up and she fell and she got up. When a woman came to try and help pull the scooter, the tiny girl swatted the woman back. She was going to do this herself.

  Apollo listened to the children. The screeching frustration of the girl on the scooter. The monkey cries of two boys wrestling over a yellow ball. The taunting and whining, the cooing and cackling. Children. Glorious and half wild. He nearly fainted from the beauty of them.

  Cal brought one arm to his back to steady him. “When I became a mother,” she said, “being this close to children was enough to give my husband hives.”

  “Let’s get closer,” Apollo said.

  Now a small group of women appeared from the Doctor’s Cottage. They held work tools and gardening apparatus. Large burlap sacks were slung over each one’s shoulders.

  “The best part about setting up on this island,” Cal said, “is that we can grow our own food. A kibbutz in the middle of the East River.”

  Apollo gestured toward the girl at the far end of the courtyard, the one whose scooter had toppled again. The three-year-old stood over the fallen scooter and hissed at it as if it was a dog in need of correction. She cried with frustration and tried to lift it herself, but it was too heavy.

  Cal and Apollo walked toward her, weaving through the children who played around them. When they reached the girl, she looked up at them, squinting, then swatted at them and shuffled around so she stood between them and the scooter.

  “No!” she said.

  Now she reached down and grabbed the handle of the scooter and lifted it partway, but it fell back on its side.

  Cal crouched down beside the girl. “You need some help,” she said.

  The little girl backed away from Cal and bumped right into Apollo. She turned, looked up at him, and gave a grimace. “No!” the girl shouted at him.

  Cal waved Apollo down so he crouched in front of the girl, at her eye level. The girl’s hair had been styled into thin, tight box braids with small, clear beads on the ends of each one.

  “My name is Apollo.”

  She watched him curiously, then turned back to Cal, who nodded faintly. The girl looked back at Apollo, still a skeptic.

  “Can I help you with the scooter?” he asked.

  She looked at the unwieldy scooter, then back to him. He raised his two empty hands. With one he grabbed the handlebar of the scooter and lifted it. Instantly the girl turned from him and Cal, set one foot on the scooter, and with a kick she was off. They watched her go. She made it five feet, wobbling.

  The three-year-old finally lost her footing. She flipped the scooter and flopped onto her side. It didn’t look like a bad fall, and in fact, the kid just lay there on her back looking up at the morning sky as if she’d finished with riding and moved on to the leisure hour.

  “Let’s go get her,” Cal said.

  When they got there, a small hand
grasped two of Apollo’s fingers and tugged him. He helped her up.

  “This is Gayl,” Cal said.

  The little girl had tired of the scooter, and now she took a step toward the library. The power of her grip told Apollo his company was required.

  “I think you made a friend.”

  “Can I speak to Gretta?” Apollo asked.

  Cal narrowed her eyes, crossed her arms. “What for?”

  “You said William killed his daughter.”

  “He did.”

  Gayl took two more steps. Apollo was about to be dragged.

  “Every woman here did something similar,” Apollo said. “So why hold him to a different standard?”

  “No. Not similar. That’s wrong. What Wheeler did was evil.”

  “I want to hear it from her.”

  “You do, do you? Give a man a little breakfast, and suddenly he’s giving orders.”

  “It’s a request,” Apollo said as Gayl pulled at him once more. He took three steps. “Please, Cal.”

  “We don’t travel back and forth on the river during the day,” Cal said. “Gretta will get here tonight. We’ll put on the puppet show after dinner. If she’ll talk with you, that’ll be the time. For now, you take care of Gayl.”

  Off Apollo and Gayl went. Cal watched them quietly until one woman came close with urgent business.

  APOLLO JOINED THE rhythm of the island. He moved from one job to the next—attending to kids or cleaning up after them—and all that time Gayl remained with him. Was he helping her or the other way around? Many of the women asked the question, playfully, and Apollo didn’t mind. He met Gayl’s mother. She had a five-year-old boy as well and seemed only relieved to have Apollo’s help. He fed Gayl lunch, read to her from Outside Over There, and brought her back to her mother when she had to use the potty. Apollo felt the old push-pull return, the confidence in doing something that felt natural and necessary, the fear that he was doing it wrong, putting this vulnerable life at risk. The anxiety was even worse here on an island of women who could kill him. Together Apollo and Gayl folded laundry, Apollo doing the work and Gayl undoing it all earnestly, then peeking up at him begging to be caught. When he feigned his anger, she giggled so hard, she cried. At times Apollo heard someone else’s laughter, too. It was his.