by Ashley Ream
* * *
Flat on her stomach, Tilda looked like she was hugging the carcass of some monster fish. Years of swimming laps at the Y had gotten her to the boat before hypothermia stole away her muscle control. She’d clamored onto the hull, getting all of herself out of the water. The boat had turned completely turtle. The centerboard had sheared off and floated away, but the body of the boat with the outrigger still attached was buoyant. And so she lay out there, her arms and legs outstretched for grip and balance. Her cheek rested on the painted wood while she stared into the darkness.
The waves had been terrible. They had been scary and nauseating. Tilda thought maybe she had thrown up a little, which seems like the sort of thing you wouldn’t have doubt about, but clinging to the bottom of an overturned boat in the middle of a storm makes a lot of things unclear. The rain was hardly noticeable. Tilda was wet everywhere it was possible to be wet, and the sound of the deluge hitting the hull was drowned out by the crash and the hiss of the ocean, which behaved like a foul-tempered creature awakened before its time.
Tilda held on as best she could with her wet, splayed limbs suckered to the boat like a starfish. She breathed through the rolling of her stomach, which was moving sympathetically with the waves that lifted up the wreck and dropped it between sets. She got a little happy when her limbs started to shake. She hadn’t shivered since she’d gone into the water, and she knew that was not a good sign. It was like her body had given up any hope of being able to warm itself, but as the shivers started in her arms and worked their way down, it seemed her life force was having second thoughts. Perhaps it had given up the ghost just a little too early. But more than anything, Tilda tried not to think at all.
With no way to keep time, she couldn’t be sure when it was. Dark. Well past dinner. She wondered if Harry had eaten, if he was at the house or if Juno had called 911 when she didn’t come home. She wondered if either of them was frightened. She was frightened.
Tilda was thinking these things when she noticed that the rain had lightened and the waves had calmed. She had not marked the moment when the worst of the storm had passed over her. She only noticed after the fact that it was so. She was disappointed by that. She had been so busy not thinking, just like the clingy starfish she had become, that milestones were passing without her knowledge.
Perhaps she would not be so afraid, she thought, if she shared Harry’s faith. If she believed that there was some other place where she would go and once there would see Becca again, then perhaps this all wouldn’t be so bad. But Tilda had never been a person of faith, and lying there in the middle of the sea had not changed that. She did not believe her daughter waited for her. She did not believe she would ever see her again no matter how much she wished it, and she did. She did wish it. But wishing and believing were different. Believing would have been the only reason to give up, to let herself slip down. It was her nonbelief that kept her focused. Tilda was not giving up. She said that to herself. She said it very clearly. She was not giving up.
It wouldn’t do to simply cling. She needed to think. She needed to be an agent of her own rescue even though moving sounded terrifying. What if she ended up in the water again, unable to save herself a second time? She was exhausted. Her limbs were like lead from the swimming and the clinging and the cold. She tried wiggling her fingers. It felt like they moved. She was too nervous to lift up her head to check, but she was fairly certain they had moved.
With paralysis ruled out, Tilda got thirsty. Very thirsty. The kind of thirsty that drives otherwise rational people to try sipping saltwater. Tilda told herself not to think about that. Instead she thought about how hungry she was. She’d eaten almost nothing—nothing but a few handfuls of trail mix and one bite of fried chicken—all day. She got a little angry with herself over that. How could she have been so neglectful?
Tilda’s eyes were closed. She noticed then that they were, but once more the milestone had passed without her marking it. She knew, no matter how tired she was, she should not sleep.
40.
The Last Day of the Miracle
Rachel, who was down on her knees, tried to ignore it, but the pounding was relentless. It was the pounding of a cop or a landlord, someone who was making it clear that they expected to be let in. She was far too busy to deal with whoever it was, but the knocking was unbearable. She cupped her hands over her ears and rocked. She couldn’t think like this. She couldn’t work. And she was angry, so very angry.
With a grunt, she pushed up to her feet. “What?” she demanded.
“Open the door.”
John.
Her heart rate shot up. Panic. Sweat. No. No, she told herself. Breathe. She would not feel this. She would not be afraid. He could not do anything. She knew too much. She knew it all. It was hers, and he could not have it.
“Go away,” she yelled.
“Open the door, or I will tear it down.”
His voice was even, solid. It had form that entered the room and sat on the floor next to her, touching her.
“You have ten seconds,” John said.
She believed him. The question was whether the door would hold. Probably it would not. She needed to take control of the situation. She needed a second option. She spun on her heel and spotted the box cutter lying on the floor near the bookcase. She picked it up and held it behind her back before opening the door. She allowed only a crack, just enough to stick her head out, but John was taller than she was. He could see over her head and into the room, right past her even as she stood on her tiptoes and tried to expand herself like a porcupine extending its quills.
The bed was stripped of everything but the fitted sheet. Some of the bedding was on the floor at her feet. Some of it had been dragged around to other parts of the room. Tubes and cords ran to and from the tanks. Grow lights hung over everything, and the pumps and fans were whirring. She had cardboard boxes all over the floor, along with canisters and other containers that she was preparing to pack. Small appliances sat on the rug with more cords running from them. Everything she had brought with her, shoes and jackets, shirts and jeans, were strewn across the room, and the rugs had been tracked with mud; although Rachel couldn’t remember doing it.
She tried to keep her temper in check and her voice businesslike. “I’m working. Go away.”
“How much have you taken?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me how much. When did you start?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
This conversation had already taken too much time. Rachel tried to shut the door, but John shoved his hand in, gripping the edge and pushing back. Rachel dropped the civility. She grimaced and shoved, but his hand didn’t move. The door didn’t move. John was just standing there looking down at her like a grown man looks at a child pushing on his legs.
“Hooper lied to you.”
“Everyone has lied to me!” Her anger was at the surface, like simmering milk with only the top skim to keep the bubbles from bursting and splattering out of the pot.
“I haven’t,” John said.
“You’re the worst of them! You followed me, chased me, spied on me.”
“It wasn’t me, but I believe it happened. I believe some of it happened.”
His voice was even. His eyes were steady. They took her in, looked her over, examined her like something under his microscope. What did it mean that he believed her? She suspected a trap.
“How far down the path have you gone?” he asked her.
It was not the question she expected. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
No one alive had taken the waters. There were only reports, sketches, stories passed down in families, stories told to missionaries and what they wrote down, altered and changed. John’s curiosity was almost insatiable. He wanted to know what she knew, to open her mind and see what she had seen. What was a hallucination? What was real? Could she tell? Was it different fo
r her, a white woman, than it would be for him? He had not taken any himself. He could have, but he had not. Without the proper ritual, it would have been sacrilege. Without other members of his tribe, it would have been dangerous. But still, he wanted to know. He wanted to grab her and shake the answers from her, but it was obvious, standing there, that she would not survive it.
“What have you seen?” he repeated.
“I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do know.”
He stared at her hard, stared until her muscles squirmed under her skin.
“Your hair is falling out,” he said.
She made a face at him, something to convey what a ridiculous comment that was, to talk about her appearance at a time like this, but it wasn’t so ridiculous. Not really. Her hair was greasy and hanging in strings around her face. She had noticed it in the bathroom. She hadn’t had the chance to shower much in the past week, and so that was fine. It was to be expected, but when she had bent forward to wash her hands, she had seen her own scalp. It had stopped her. She could see the dull, grayish skin under the strings of dark hair. It wasn’t visible in patches but all over, a general thinning of her hair that she was sure hadn’t been there before. It had worried her, but that made her feel vain, and so she pushed the feeling aside and did not deal with it anymore.
“Why is her hair falling out?”
Rachel’s head snapped up. She had not known the Streatfields’ son was there. He was smaller than John and standing somewhere behind him. She had not seen him and still could not. They were ganging up on her.
“I’m fine. You need to leave. I have work to do.”
“You’re not fine, and you need to come back to the mainland with me. No one else can help you. Not like I can.”
Rachel almost laughed. She wouldn’t have trusted John to save her place in line for the bathroom, and he thought she would leave the island with him. Absurd.
John watched her thoughts play across her face. She had no mask anymore, no ability to hide anything. She had waded into this on her own, unprotected, unaware, and she had taken too much. John did not pretend to know the right amount, the spiritual amount, but anyone could have seen that she had overdosed. John could only begin, as a scientist and as an Olloo’et, to guess at the consequences—her nervous system, her prefrontal cortex. She needed help. She needed a doctor. A medicine man. Both. She was dying.
“Go to hell,” Rachel said.
John smacked both hands against the door. She didn’t know he was going to do it, and the force of it knocked her back into the room. The sound disoriented her. She took two skittering steps and opened her mouth to object, but before the words could find their way out, John had her chin in his hand and was forcing her face up toward his. It made her mad, and she swung the box cutter at his bicep.
He made a sound like an animal. She had stuck him but not deep. He was wearing a puffy coat, a sweatshirt, layers to protect him from the elements, and she was not strong. She would have tried again, but he had his hand around hers, squeezing. She dropped the box cutter, but he didn’t let go.
“Look at me,” he said, holding her face near his.
Rachel tried to twist away, but it was useless, and it tired her.
“Your pupils are huge,” he said. “Are you hallucinating right now?”
“Get your hands off of me.”
John reeled when her breath hit his face. It took all he had to hang on to her, his hand still wrapped around her chin. He pushed her backward into the room, taking shallow breaths to keep from retching. It smelled like rotting fish and unwashed bodies and something else, something Rachel couldn’t smell anymore.
John’s arm hurt. He would need stitches, antibiotic. He tried to ignore it. He looked around. He looked and did not like what he saw.
“Jesus, what are you doing in here? Are you concentrating it?”
John let her slide out of his hands. He didn’t even think about it. He was concentrating on the tanks, the lights, the aerators. Then he saw the feeding stations, the algae. Oh, God—
Rachel tried to stand in his way, but he moved around her, covering the distance to the tanks in three long, loping steps. The grow lights simulating daytime were on, and the Artemia lucis were not glowing. They would likely not glow again. Under the microscope, Rachel had seen the cysts that, if left alone, would disperse in the water and do nothing at all for another hundred years. The animals had bred. To see, just to see, Rachel had ground a small sample of the cysts and taken it. The effect had been far stronger than with the adults and much more immediate. She was having trouble holding her thoughts together, but she knew one thing. She had to get them back to the mainland right away. She had to start experimenting with them, and she did not have time for this.
“Leave that alone!”
John had known, but he had not known. He had suspected something, something like this, but to see it, to see this most sacred thing floating here, manipulated, turned into something it could not be, should not be. He reached into one of the tanks and pulled out a flask full of the Artemia lucis and their eggs.
He turned his eyes to her. How could she, and how did she? Both questions at the same time, questions from the scientist in him, questions from the Olloo’et. He settled on just one. “What have you done?”
“Everything!” She puffed herself up, lifted onto her toes, pushed her shoulders wide, the blades coming together in the middle of her back. “Everything you couldn’t.”
John, with the flask still in his hand, looked at her. “I never wanted to.”
“Liar!”
“We were here to observe, to learn. Never to interfere. Never to take.”
“I am saving people.” There was passion in Rachel’s voice. “I am making the world better, bearable.”
“You don’t understand,” John countered.
“I understand everything.”
“You won’t survive this.”
Juno had followed them into the room, and neither of the scientists was paying him any attention. He did not matter. He was not important. He wasn’t until suddenly he was.
“You gave this to my father, didn’t you?”
John’s eyes went wide and swung to look at Juno, who was locked on Rachel.
“You experimented on him,” Juno said. “That’s what’s wrong with him, isn’t it?”
John looked from Juno to Rachel and back again.
She pressed her lips shut like a child.
John looked as though he’d been shot. “You experimented on a person? A stranger?”
Rachel squeezed her jaw muscles tight. She would not tell them anything. They could not make her.
“How much did you give him?” John demanded.
He was still holding the flask in his hand, and she lunged for it. With his good arm, he held it up out of her reach, and she clawed at him trying to get at it.
“Tell me what you did,” he demanded.
“No!” Rachel shouted.
John tossed the glass flask at the wall. It bounced once, and then shattered on the hardwood floor. Juno jumped out of the way, as though the spray might burn him. Rachel let out a primal cry, and John reached into the tank and grabbed two more.
“This is sacred. Do you not understand? Are you so blind? You perverted it. You used it. You were selfish. Now look. Look at yourself!” John could no longer keep his temper.
“I am saving people,” she shouted back. “Didn’t you hear me? I am saving myself!”
“You are dying!”
“I am alive! I am alive for the first time in years!”
John threw the two flasks at the wall in just the same spot. Only one broke this time, but they both spilled. The sound Rachel made was subhuman. She threw herself at him.
If any of them had been paying attention, they might have heard noises coming from downstairs, but they were not listening. John grabbed more flasks.
“Tell me what you gave that ma
n. Tell me what you did!”
“Those are mine!”
“They are not yours. You have no right.” John threw the samples to the floor.
Rachel screamed. She could not imagine losing her work. She could not imagine going back to the way things had been, the endless, terrible pain. She would do anything, anything not to go back. There were no boundaries anymore.
“Tell me!”
“Go to hell!”
Smash, smash, smash.
Rachel hit him. Then she hit him again. She pummeled him with her fists, both of them, one right after the other. Hitting and hitting and hitting. John, with his good arm up to protect his face, reached for the whole tank.
“No!”
She grabbed hold of his coat tight, so he couldn’t throw her off, and she bit him. She sank her teeth into the back of his neck like a fox grabs hold of a chicken. Joy surged through her. She had him. She had him then.
“Stop it!”
The hands were on her, grabbing her. Rachel tried to fight them off, but two attackers at once were too much for her. She flailed helplessly as Juno pulled her off, yanked her down to the ground, to the ruined carpet at their feet. He pinned her there, using his weight to hold her down.
John, free, grabbed the tank and brought all of it—the flasks and the fans and the lights and the tubes and the cords—crashing to the floor in an unholy mess of fouled water, broken glass, and electrical equipment.
Rachel howled, watching helplessly from the floor as John reached up again and again, grabbing the edge of every remaining tank, bringing them all crashing and spilling to the ground around her.
* * *
Tilda opened her eyes. She’d fallen out of consciousness. Her arm was curled up close to her body. Before she’d been terrified to leave her starfish position, and now she was afraid to move back to it.
She wasn’t nauseated anymore. That was something. And she had a view. She could see the 100-Year Miracle off in the middle distance. The light was so electric, so very, very green, it was hard to believe nature created such a thing. It was the kind of green that could only really be appreciated against black velvet, like those terrible sunrise paintings sold off the side of interstates. But here again, nature had provided. The sky was nothing but black velvet. The clouds blocked the moon and the stars, leaving nothing but that beautiful ring of green. She could see the shape of it as it curled around the island, marking it as special, as the chosen spot of the chosen people. It really was something.
