by Ashley Ream
Rachel had very few options, and all of them were bad. She could leave the door open while she worked, which was impossible. Or she could slam the door on Mrs. Streatfield’s foot and break her toes. There was no time to pack up. No time to be thrown out, and if she were thrown out, there was nowhere for her to go. She couldn’t go back to the camp with all the sneaks and the spies, and every hotel and guesthouse on the island was taken. She simply could not and would not leave this room. That’s all there was to the matter, so one way or another Mrs. Streatfield’s foot had to get moved. Rachel braced herself.
“Tilda? Tilda, what are you doing?”
Rachel could not see Harry through the crack, but she could hear him just fine.
“I’m trying to determine what sort of immoral or illegal activity is going on in this room,” Tilda said. “Because it’s sure as hell something, if this woman is installing locks in our house without permission. Jesus Christ, that’s just insane!” Tilda was exhausted, and the pitch and volume of her voice increased with every word until she was shouting.
“What’s going on? Why is everyone yelling?” Juno had opened his door and stuck his head out.
“Everyone isn’t yelling,” Harry said. “Your mother is yelling.”
“Why are you yelling?” Juno asked.
“I demand to know what is going on in that room,” Tilda said.
“Tilda, what in the hell has gotten into you?” Harry stepped, shuffled, and clomped down the short hall toward her. “Leave that young woman alone. Jesus.”
Everyone was acting like Tilda was the crazy one. How had that happened?
“Don’t you think her changing the entire doorknob is a little odd?” Tilda demanded.
“I think you’re embarrassing yourself,” Harry said.
“She changed the doorknob?” Juno asked and was ignored.
“Can you imagine the headlines?” Tilda asked. “Former senator’s home turned into drug den.”
Harry was right behind Tilda then. She had to twist at an odd angle to see him and her son, what with her leg stuck in the doorway like it was.
Harry lowered his voice, not so much that Rachel couldn’t hear but maybe enough to keep Juno out of it. “Tilda, this is not your house. This is my house, and you will take your foot out of the door so this woman can go to bed. She’s been up all night.”
Harry had pulled his navy blue terrycloth robe over his pajamas, which hung on his frame like they were two sizes too big, something that had never been true before. He had gray stubble on his cheeks. Some of the hairs were dark gray, and some of them were white, and he was paler than she ever remembered him being before. He had bags under his eyes that weren’t just puffy but looked purplish and bruised, like they would hurt if she touched them. He looked like a man who was terribly sick, who might wet his pants and start seeing and talking about relatives who had passed like terribly sick people sometimes do. He was that man—unequivocally that man—and he was telling Tilda that she was the crazy one embarrassing all of them.
Tilda took her foot out of the door, which shut like it was spring-loaded. She heard it lock from the inside. Harry didn’t say anything else. He just executed his three-point turn and headed back toward his room. Juno, who had hardly been acknowledged, returned the favor, shutting his own door without another word.
Tilda opened her mouth, but the words didn’t find their way out, and no one was there to hear what she had to say anyway.
* * *
It was the in-between hours, the little bit of time after the night shift had come back but before the day shift was to go. The closer to the end of the project they got, the shorter the in-between hours were, which meant Hooper had almost no time to himself, almost no time to be here, a condition made worse by John. He had become overly watchful and distrusting, aggressive really, and Hooper regretted bringing him.
Hooper’s key, unlike those the others carried, unlocked all of the cabins, including what had been Dr. Bell’s. He stood there in her space, which she had vacated several days before. The one bed that had covers looked as though someone had been in it just moments before. The sheet was pulled off to one side and dragged down onto the floor, and the blanket was kicked down in a nest at the foot. In the bathroom, he’d found nothing but hair in the sink. For a moment he’d thought the trash can would be more promising. Inside, he found packing materials and bits of Styrofoam, but none of it had labels. There was a muddy pair of socks, which was odd but unenlightening.
Whatever she had been doing, she had left little evidence behind. Hooper sat down on the spare bed. He was very tired. He had not slept more than a couple of hours at a time for a week. He had a headache, which did not respond to aspirin, and his thinking felt dull.
He moved his feet back just a few inches, moved them so that his heels were under the bed. He wasn’t even aware that he had done it, but he was aware of having kicked something. It scooted a bit across the dirty linoleum floor, and Hooper could hear the sound of years of grit.
He hung his head down to peer under the bed, and then, after a moment, climbed down onto his hands and knees. He reached into the charcoal gray dimness and pulled out two shipping boxes. They had been cut open and folded flat, and they still had the labels attached to their outsides. They were from laboratory supply companies, both of which Hooper recognized. He used them himself. The recipient was Rachel, but they had been sent care of a mailbox and shipping storefront on the island.
Hooper broke the perforation of the thin plastic envelope that held the shipping label, which, when unfolded, was also the list of contents. His eyes skimmed Rachel’s order. Whatever she was doing, it was clear to Hooper that it was very different than their work at the site. They were collecting, examining, preserving, documenting. Rachel, though, Rachel was feeding.
34.
Tilda had been so upset when she carried her stool and her book up to her crow’s nest of a room in the peak of the house, a refuge that suddenly felt like being shut away, that she was sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Her chest hurt, and her eyes were itchy with unshed tears. She pulled back the covers, which she always tucked in too tight, and lay down on the cold sheets. She didn’t like this pillow. It was lumpy and synthetic, and she missed her down pillow that was now in storage with everything else she owned. This room just wasn’t enough. She needed to have her own space, some place she knew she could run to if she wanted and needed. She would take care of it that day, Tilda told herself, and it was the last thought she had before falling into the dead sleep she didn’t believe would come.
* * *
Tilda slept for five hours, woke to her alarm, and dressed without showering. She put on a ball cap and sneakers and left the house without saying anything to anyone. She had something to take care of, someplace to be.
Out on the beach, the wind had picked up, tiny bits of salt and sand buffeted her, and she let them. She had, it seemed, run out of resistance. And now, she would wait. She would stand there and breathe in the brine, and both she and the boat would wait.
It helped to think they were together in this, absurd as that sounded. It was only a boat, a thing not a person, but it was steady and predictable in a way that other things that should have been were not. And like her, the boat was stuck, tied to the house, unable to get away when it needed. There was a long list of things that Tilda could not help, but this was not on that list. This was fixable.
The boat’s rudder and centerboard, like the belly fin of a fish, pivoted up, leaving a smooth bottom that could lie on a trailer or be pushed across sand, but at twelve feet from port side to outrigger, Serendipity was as wide as it was tall. Tilda knew her limits. Even if the beach had not been blocked off, the distance between house and water was too great. She had called up the island’s largest marina the day before, explained her situation, and had been promised a small regiment of men.
The first of them walked right past her, heading toward the water, looking left and right and only turned bac
k when she called. Behind him, in a small clump, came the rest of the men, some in better shape than others, but all boat men, boat men who were looking for a boat, which she had to turn and point to there under the deck. They squinted at it with varying looks of surprise on their faces.
When it had just been her, it felt as though the boat were a big, solid thing keeping her company, but now with a whole team of strangers around her, it felt more like it was hiding, like a wounded cat that had run under the house to heal its wounds.
The men moved toward her, forming a semicircle with her at the center. She explained again what she had on the phone. They all wore windbreakers and whiffs of their bodies found their way into her nose, pushing out the ocean brine. One of them had worn aftershave, and they had the smell of sweat and work on them. They nodded while she talked, accepted her direction and the credit card she produced for the one with the clipboard. They asked few questions, and then, without making any deal of it at all, they did what they had come to do.
With caution tape and scientists blocking the most direct path to the bay, they instead lowered the mast, lifted the small craft off the jacks, and carried it with any number of heart-stopping jerks and starts up to the road. They loaded it onto a trailer they had brought, tied everything down, and navigated the twisting half mile of road to the housing development’s communal dock.
The truck, trailer, and boat had to take the road so slowly that Tilda, who would not fit in the vehicle with them, kept them in sight the entire way as she jogged along the gravel-covered shoulder. She stopped, her hands on her hips, and walked slowly from the road down to the ramp, catching her breath and steadying her words before she got to them.
The boat’s design would’ve allowed them to push it into the water, launching and landing from the beach like a canoe. But the ramp here was concrete, and so they backed the trailer into the water just like her father had when she was a child. Tilda climbed up onto the trailer and then stepped into the boat, one leg swinging over the side at a time. She knelt there, holding her breath as the boat met water for the first time.
She was suddenly nervous. She had been nervous the whole way, of course, nervous they would drop the boat, nervous it would come off the trailer, nervous that the mast, once down, would not come back up. But now she remembered to be nervous about this, the biggest thing. Would the boat even float?
She crossed her fingers inside her jacket pockets as the bay began to take Serendipity’s weight, and the men pushed her off the trailer and into the water.
“How’s she look?” the most senior of the men asked her. He was her age or very near it with deep gouges radiating out from his eyes and in smiling commas around his mouth that, despite the lack of a tan, spoke of a life lived almost entirely outside. He wore a frayed ball cap pulled down low over his eyes, which were green and kind, something Tilda might have taken more notice of if her stomach hadn’t been attempting to turn itself inside out.
“Good,” Tilda said before enough time had passed to really tell.
The men pulled Serendipity over to the long, slender dock that stretched out into the bay, just left of the ramp. Two other boats were moored there, and her boat—Tilda thought of it as hers even though she knew well enough that it wasn’t—took its own place. Together, they raised the mast, checked the rigging, and attached the sail, raising it foot by foot as they secured the slides. It was a simple boat. She had only the one sail, and with many hands, it was a fast job.
The boat had been in the water for a while by then, and the inside of the cockpit was the driest thing for twenty miles. Even with the taped sail and patched wood, Tilda was proud of herself.
“She’ll do all right,” the man said, running his hand over the side.
Tilda nodded. She had something in her throat that resembled a rubber band ball that she could neither explain nor swallow.
“You want to bring her down now?”
He was asking if she wanted to lower the sail, cover it, and tie it down, maybe ride back with them to the house, which was the very last thing Tilda could imagine wanting.
She shook her head. “Gonna take her out.”
The man smiled and nodded, and with her in the cockpit, he threw off the moorings.
* * *
Rachel had been up for an hour, and she had still not left her room, not even to go to the bathroom. The blinds were closed tight. Even at just past noon, the room was so dark she’d had to switch on the lamps. But the lamps weren’t the only source of light. When she unplugged the UV bulbs over her tanks, the Artemia lucis, thinking it was night, glowed their brilliant green. The individual flasks shimmered in the darkened room. Up close it was a bright lime both beautiful and alien.
Nearly being run down by a car had been worth it. It had been worth it because here those same samples were. They were here, and they were alive. They had lived through the night and half the day, and they were glowing and shimmering and moving and mating. She was sure they were mating.
It had worked. She had done it.
She had done it all by herself, and now the possibilities were unimaginable. She would load these and all the other samples she could carry into the truck and onto the ferry. She would have to take the truck. There was no way around it. The covered bed would be big enough to hold everything, including her small generator, powering the tanks. She would set it all up in there, a mobile lab, and she would take it straight to her apartment. She would need to get started isolating the possible proteins and synthesizing them right away. Then the Artemia lucis wouldn’t be needed anymore. She could make as much of the active agent as she needed, test it and tweak it. She was only the first patient. Thousands and thousands after her would get better. Millions even.
Rachel had to take a breath. There was work to be done before she could pack everything. Every detail of the final conditions mattered. She had to be able to replicate this exactly to keep the samples alive until the work could commence. Rachel had written down everything she could think of in her notes, coded of course. She wanted to type the coded messages into her laptop, but she was terrified to e-mail them to anyone or upload them anywhere. That’s what John wanted, of course. He had been the one to chase her into traffic. He had been the one spying on her from the very beginning. She knew it. She couldn’t put the secret anywhere that could be hacked. And, of course, her laptop could be stolen just like her notebook could be stolen. There needed to be contingencies.
She was making three, no four, no five—five would be better—copies of the secret notes and folding each piece of paper as small as she could make it. She shoved one into the already sliced lining of her puffy winter coat. She slid others into the lining of her bags. She pulled the footbed out of her boot. She tried to think of everything. If only she had a condom, she could have put a set of notes into that and swallowed it.
35.
Tilda sat with her hand on the tiller heading northeast across the bay toward Carpenter’s Island. It was smaller and greener than Olloo’et with fewer full-time residents and far fewer ferry stops, especially in winter. Harder to get onto and off of this time of year, almost no one bothered, which was entirely the point.
With no other boats to look out for, Tilda turned her face to the clouds. The bank hung low but was moving fast. It would cross the sound before ripping open and then pile up against the Cascades, dumping out its payload before floating up and over the mountains, turning innocuous as the clouds drifted over the dry half of the state. Olloo’et would be spared this one, she thought, but it would be big enough that visitors at the top of Craven’s Lighthouse would be able to see the rain come down in the distance like a blue-gray sheet on the horizon.
That same wind that pushed the clouds was pushing her. The sail was full, stretched really, and the hull clipped along the top of the water like a skipping stone. Multihull boats were known for speed, but this was more than she had expected. She would make landfall in less than an hour, making her early for her date with Tip
.
She would use the time, she thought, to walk out the kinks. Even small waves batted Serendipity. Tilda held tight to the tiller to keep from losing her seat, the boat coming down hard with each skip and bruising her tailbone.
There was no question that it hurt. It hurt, and she was wet from the spray. She’d been squinting to keep the wind from her eyes, something that she had largely failed at, and so tears streamed from the corners. Her hands ached from holding the tiller and the side so tightly—or at least they would ache when they warmed and feeling returned. There was every reason to be miserable. Anyone else would’ve been miserable. But adrenaline was flooding Tilda’s bloodstream. She was excited. She was proud. She was in control of something, and Tilda could not remember a time, not in months, that she had been this happy, this purely and unquestionably happy.
* * *
It was hours before her shift was to start, but Rachel had no intention of working another shift. She needed more containers from the research site. She would take them, just go in and grab them like they were hers. Then she would go back down the road to the collection site from the night before and fill every one of them with samples. She had on her boots, which she’d reassembled, and her coat, and she unlocked and opened the door.
Harry’s fist was at face level. Rachel blinked, struck dumb for a moment, and then she ducked. Harry lowered his hand.
“I’m sorry. I was just about to knock.”
“I’m leaving,” Rachel said. “No time to talk.”
Harry looked over his shoulder like he’d heard something. Rachel looked, too, and saw nothing. He turned back to her, distracted. “You know why I’m here.”
Rachel stepped into the hall, forcing him to shuffle backward with his cane and make room. She closed the door behind her and pulled out her key to lock it. When she turned back around to face him, her mouth already open and ready to refuse, he was holding up a roll of money.
