But I see her enormous eyes recognize me, and I cross the room.
“They call it ‘the Inland Empire’ out here,” Janet says, stopping to swallow every several words. It’s sharp, the swallowing. I can hear the esophagus creaking. She’ll let me moisten her lips by holding a small paper cup of water to them, letting the water drip over them, but she won’t drink. “The mountains, the rivers, the Palouse, all the way down to the Columbia. It doesn’t feel right. Using a word like empire in this day and age. As if we could ever own any of this. It owns us.” Speaking exhausts her, but for the moment, she wants to get out whatever comes into her head. I sit next to her bed holding her hand, careful of the portacath at the top of her wrist.
“It’s too quiet here; I miss the sea,” she says, and falls asleep.
They’re giving her regular morphine injections for pain now, and she sleeps intermittently. I walk around. There’s nothing of Janet’s in the room, but then she didn’t have any possessions to begin with. I thought there might be books, but she can’t read anymore. A picture of the island, maybe. If ever she felt ownership for anything, it was Marrow Island. Her island. A picture of Maggie wouldn’t have surprised me, but she would probably hide it, keep it close to her body. Maggie is still in prison.
I don’t want to leave the room, in case she wakes, but I’m getting a headache from the smell—like isopropyl alcohol and feet. I step out into the hall to ask the sister at the nurses’ station whether I can open the windows. She says she doesn’t see why not and follows me back into the room. I crank the windows open, and the smell of the rose garden comes wafting in. The sister places a hand on Janet’s wrist to feel her heart rate, and after a moment she leans down and tells her, in a voice so soft I can barely hear, that it’s time to change her “trousers.” This sister is younger than the others—maybe my age, maybe younger—and she has a Spanish accent; her name is Monica. Janet grunts and looks confused to see both of us.
“Your friend Lucie is here to help us,” she tells Janet, and she continues to speak softly, telling her that we’ll be done soon and she can rest again or eat, if she’s hungry.
Sister Monica reaches into a drawer under the bed and pulls out two purple latex gloves for me. I put them on while she gathers the supplies from below and pulls a trashcan near. She pulls down the blankets and carefully pulls up Janet’s gown and unfastens the diaper, folding it down on itself. Watery yellow stools leak out onto the bed pad, and I hold my breath automatically, but the smell isn’t overwhelming. It’s sour, milky, almost like a baby’s. Janet has been refusing solid food for a few days. Sister Monica asks me to hug Janet to me and rock her to her side. She passes gas with the shift of body, but Sister Monica doesn’t move away or make a face. She keeps working, steadily, gently. She disposes of the soiled diaper and pad quickly and cleans Janet’s backside while I cradle her upper body, her breath rattling out into my neck, sour and cold, my breasts pressed into the crater of her chest. I feel each of her ribs with every inhale, the vibrations in her trachea.
“Lucie will lower you back to the bed now,” Sister Monica says, and I do. “And now we clean the front.”
Janet closes her eyes as I slip my arms from under her shoulders. Sister Monica carefully wipes the pale, wiry hair clinging to the mons pubis, ashen pink labia pressed out, the crevasse below the hipbone, the inner thighs. I watch, listening to Sister Monica’s voice, the romantic tilt of her accent on odd syllables. I roll Janet again, to put on clean “trousers,” and when we’re done, I release her to the bed and pull her gown back over her knobby bird legs, pull her blankets back up, lift her arms so that they can rest atop the bedding. Sister Monica offers me the trashcan for my gloves, and when I turn back to the bed, Janet is staring at me.
“Have you been here the whole time?” she asks.
I look to Sister Monica, who just nods and smiles as if this is usual.
“I just got here,” I say. “How do you feel?”
“Has there been an earthquake?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you think they’ll remember to let me out when it happens?”
“I think so,” I say. I’m not sure what she means. Sister Monica has left us, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.
“I hate it here.” She has a look of disgust I’ve never seen on her before. On the island, she looked unflappable, joyous. In court she looked beatific and calm.
“I like it all right,” I say.
“You would,” she says, but her look has softened.
“Sister—,” I say, “Janet, why did you ask me to come? Why did you want me?”
She closes her eyes and sighs. There’s such a long pause I think she has fallen asleep again.
“Do you know who I am, Sister?” I touch her shoulder.
“I’m not brain-dead.”
“If you’re going to treat me like this, I’ll just go.”
“Go back to the woods. Go hide.”
“Okay.” I don’t move. I’m still holding her hand.
We sit in silence for some time. Sister Monica brings one tray of food for Janet and returns a few minutes later with a tray for me. The smell of cream of mushroom soup fills the room. We don’t eat.
“It’ll seem impossible for most of your life,” she says finally.
“What will?”
“Not running to hide.”
She slips in and out of consciousness all day. I leave her side only to use the toilet. After I send the cold, congealed mushroom soup away, uneaten, they send cold, congealed chocolate pudding. Janet won’t eat or drink, so I eat both dishes and ask Sister Monica for some coffee. My insides feel raw from the sugar and coffee, but I think about my peanut butter–cereal balls and beer by Cougar Lake and decided I’ve prepared my body for this kind of fast.
When she talks, it’s in snapshots of her life, some names and places I don’t know, some I do, all on a slow loop, certain words and phrases stressed for reasons I can’t decipher. When she talks about the Colony, it’s mostly about Maggie. Maggie was the one who was there for the dying. At the end, she was the midwife who ushered the living out of the world. But there’s more to it for Janet. I suspect there was only one bed in their cottage, and in the end they were separated; sent to different facilities.
“Is Maggie getting some rest?” she asks.
I wonder what I am supposed to say to a dying woman. Is this a time to play along with the delusion, or is that condescending? Is the lie worse? Will she realize that Maggie can’t be here? I think about what it might feel like, to be surrounded by women, but not the one woman you believed would be by your side when you went.
“Yes,” I say. “She went for a walk. And she’s having some tea and some of that cake with the honey and dried berries.”
She smiles.
“Good woman. It’s good of you to stay, Kate,” she says.
My heart catches in my throat; I haven’t heard about Kate since the sentencing, and even then, it wasn’t from her. She didn’t write me. My mom called to give me the news.
“Of course, Sister. I’m glad I could be here with you.”
“I thought you were gone for good.”
“You did?”
I watch her eyes focus on me—she’s struggling to make sense of something—and I wonder if I’ll be caught in the lie.
“You shouldn’t have run off like that. They’ll be looking for you all over those islands.”
“Why would they do that, Sister?” Kate’s in Bellingham with her parents: house arrest; community service. Tuck is serving fifteen to life.
“Because you told me in your letter.”
“I don’t remember what I wrote.”
She groans and closes her eyes.
“You wanted to die.”
“That was horrible of me. I’m so sorry if I gave you a scare.”
She looks more alert again, suddenly. Her eyes clear and I see Sister J. in them for a moment.
“Lucie,” she says,
louder. In her fatherly voice from the island, like she’s about to deliver a sermon.
“Yes, Sister.”
“I knew you’d come.”
“I’m here.” I sigh. This loop. This loop again.
“Kate is gone; she’s long gone,” she says. “She was going to bring me what I needed. She was going to tell them her name was Lucie, so they wouldn’t know.”
I wait for her to say more. She’s staring me down. I see her grasping at thoughts, but unable to speak them.
“She’s not with her parents?”
She shakes her head.
“Did someone tell you she was missing?”
A nod.
“How long ago?”
Nothing.
“You don’t remember how long?”
She squeezes my hand. She opens her eyes, and I can see she’s in pain. It’s been painful, remembering. Maybe she remembered everything at once—the whole picture of where she is and why, and what is left.
I pull the tin of mushrooms from my pocket and open it.
“I have something for you, Sister.”
She opens her eyes and tries to focus on what I’m holding in my hands. She lifts her head. She can’t focus her glassy stare, but she knows what they are. She nods. Her head falls back to the pillow.
She’s bereaved and she’s in pain. She’s as ready to leave this world as anyone I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t thought about how I would give them to her. She can’t chew them—she might choke if I just put one in her mouth. What might Maggie have done at the Colony with a patient who couldn’t eat, couldn’t swallow a pill? She reaches a mantis arm toward me, and I take her hand. I know what I need to do. I put them in my mouth and chew. I take a breath, close my eyes, and lean down to kiss her sunken mouth.
Sister Rosie brings me an extra blanket and some tea around 10 p.m. One sister at a time comes to sit at the end of the bed to pray, silently. Only the occasional rustle of cloth or mouth-breathing or jangle of the rosary breaks the silence. Janet stopped making any vocalizations some time ago, after the kiss, when the room lit up so bright I couldn’t stand it. Enough of the psychedelics had entered my bloodstream from my saliva that I was having a mild trip of my own. I watched her body glowing and shaking under the sheet, then she was calm. She was so hot, a fever of burning off what was left of her life. Janet’s eyes never open, but I speak softly in her ear. “You’re on your way, Sister. Do you feel it? Is this what you wanted?”
At some point I rest my head beside Janet’s and hold her hand, her arm laying cold against the inside of my arm on the sheet. I think of Maggie, asleep at the women’s penitentiary, sending my thoughts to her like beams of light, so that she can please, please, be with Janet in the end. I watch her chest rise and fall by the millimeter, every ten seconds, then every twenty, then the quietest fireworks I’ve ever seen and my head is on fire.
Early in the morning, I wake to Sister Monica’s hand on my shoulder. The priest has come for Janet’s last rites. I stand aside while he anoints her forehead, her lips, and she lies still as a saint. He speaks to her, quietly, right in her ear, but she says nothing. I want to tell him she’s already gone, that I saw what was left of her escape hours ago. Sister Rosie takes my hand and strokes it gently, awkwardly. When Father Peter has finished, the sisters file out of the room. Sister Rosie kisses my hand and says, “Bless you, child.” I wonder if any of them will know what I’ve done. I’m still blinking away the shock. She guides me to my chair at Janet’s side again. Her fingers have curled. I pick up her hand; it feels impermanent as a flower.
Eleven
The Islands
ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 13, 2014
CAREY AND I didn’t talk much on the crossing. I was holding fast to my cup of Oswego tea, riding the waves of seasickness like it was my only job. Without the energy to fight it, I decided to give myself to the feeling, to move with it, instead of fighting it. I watched Orwell and fixed my gaze on it, letting myself drift there on the sea welling up inside me.
On the dock, Carey asked if he could buy me a cup of coffee. We agreed to meet at the Nootka Rose, near the ferry terminal. In my car, the first thing I did was check my voicemail. There were two messages, both from Chris Lelehalt.
The first explained that my neighbor, Mr. Swenson, couldn’t be reached and didn’t appear to have been admitted to any nearby hospitals. His family had been contacted.
The second said that his family had been reached and was unaware of Mr. Swenson’s location. They wondered if I might come in to make an official statement.
I thought back to what I had seen at Rookwood: the windows, the lamps, the suitcase, his glasses and medications. I tried to tell myself that there could be a logical explanation—but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t remember if I had mentioned the red car under tarpaulins in the carriage house to Chris—had they checked it? I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay at the cottage by myself.
Carey was sitting at a table by the window at the Nootka Rose. I had spent many Saturday mornings eating pancakes with my dad at the same table. I always chose it for its view. When the waitress came, I ordered a full breakfast along with my coffee. Carey gave me an appraising look and did the same.
“My neighbor is missing,” I said to him, and told him about the lamp in the window, the scene at Rookwood.
“That’s troubling,” he said.
“I’m not sure what to do. It’s unsettling, staying out there alone.”
I wanted to tell him the rest—about the Swensons’ ownership of the Colony, and how Jacob’s disappearance would put their tenancy, and all their work, in jeopardy. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed likely that once the family knew what was going on out there—the remediation had increased the habitability and possibility for development—they would be evicted. But I still wasn’t sure if Carey could be trusted—if he told the wrong person in the government bureaucracy, they could use the information to get them evicted, too.
Our food came, and I changed the subject. We talked about Marrow, the meal the night before—his only real experience of the Colony.
“It’s interesting to me that they’ve given themselves to this environmental effort,” Carey said, “with such a religious bent to it.”
“You mean Sister’s sermon?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some earth-worshippers, hippies, Wiccans out gathering herbs during the new moon—but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group like this. I mean—they’re Christian, right? Sister J. is Catholic?”
“She was a Catholic sister, but she left the order. The Sisters of the Holy Family. They were the sisters who ran my high school. They’re pretty progressive, but Sister’s activism didn’t go over well with the archbishop. I think she was about to be excommunicated.”
“Well, it was a new one for me. What was your impression, after spending some time with them?”
I had been thinking about it, through the night and on the boat from Marrow to Orwell. Sorting through my feelings for Katie, her marriage, the devotion they all seemed to show Sister J. and her mission. And Marrow Island itself: a graveyard. It would always be a graveyard. And the Colony—Sister J.’s mission—it was a kind of salve to a wound that never healed. The resurrection Sister talked about didn’t feel real to me—using mushrooms to remediate the soil was out there, but it was still biology, science—there was no promise of Heaven in that. But it did make me feel something. Hope, maybe. That the event that killed my father wouldn’t be a footnote in the history of environmental science, but the beginning of a new field of research.
Carey was waiting for me to say something, watching me sort through these thoughts.
“I think they’re brave,” I said, finally. “I think that they’re doing something no one else would dare to do, and it’s this sense of . . . spiritual obligation that compels them to do it.”
Carey’s eyes narrowed. He knew I wasn’t telling him the whole story. I waited for him to ask me
what I knew, but he didn’t. He was waiting for me to tell him, so I changed the subject.
“I’m thinking of living out here for a while,” I told him.
“Oh?”
“I can write from here, and I can’t really afford my apartment in Seattle anymore.”
He asked more about the cottage, about Orwell Island. The more we talked, the more I liked him. There was something steady about him, an easy, thoughtful manner that told me he didn’t react rashly to anything. I needed that kind of energy; I craved it. My dad had that energy. At his wake, his people praised him for being level-headed, trustworthy. He was the kind of guy who didn’t run for help in an emergency, but examined the problem and stuck around to fix it himself. They said this is probably what got him killed. He probably died trying to put the fires out.
As soon as I made this connection—that Carey reminded me of what I remembered of my dad, what I missed about him—I felt my pulse quicken. I was conscious that I hadn’t showered in two days, had only brushed my unwashed hair back into a ponytail. I replayed the things I was saying, asking myself if they were true, if they were interesting. Carey was looking for a more permanent place to stay for the duration of the assessment at Fort Union. If the park reopened, he would likely stay on as the park’s ranger. The idea of staying at the cottage for a few weeks—even a few months—seemed like a real possibility, if he was going to be around. I tried to shut these thoughts down—the last thing I needed was a crush—but once I acknowledged the attraction, I couldn’t ignore it. I hadn’t been kissed in months, let alone touched with any romantic intention. Being around Katie again, remembering that first taste of desire—that charge of something new, of being on the brink of something—I wanted that again. I felt like I deserved it, as a reward for coming home again, finally, for being an adult and facing my past.
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