Marrow Island

by Alexis M. Smith

  “What poem was it?” I ask.

  He reaches in his pocket and pulls it out: a paper so worn and soft it could be a hanky. He carefully unfolds it and hands it to me. It’s T. S. Eliot, from Four Quartets. “A modernist,” I say, impressed. I was expecting Longfellow; Manley Hopkins. “Do you know about this poem?”

  “What about it?”

  “This page—it’s from a poem Eliot wrote about living in London before and after the Blitz. He was a Christian, Eliot; fire was complicated for him: it was death, but it was also the purification of the soul.”

  He’s silent, and I think that I’ve ruined it for him. That I’ve somehow belittled him and intruded on his love for these lines.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “it’s apt, is all I meant to say. It seems really—telling, that you kept this page with you.”

  The bats are out, feasting, their wings beating the air silently against the pale pink of the sky. Where we’re sitting, it’s already so dark, I can barely see his face.

  I reach my hand out to touch his chest, and he catches it and holds it. He kisses the inside of my wrist and my elbow. His lips linger over my skin. I haven’t shaved in weeks, but he buries his face in my armpit and pushes aside my tank top, tastes the tender side of my breast. My skin is covered in sweat and dust and DEET, and when we kiss, I taste it all in his mouth with the warm sour of beer. We spread the blanket out on the pine planks of the deck. We’re still wearing our hiking boots. He unhooks my bra, kisses my belly, unbuttons my shorts, and slips his hand between my legs. He’s pushing my shirt up with his face. The stars light up the treetops. When I close my eyes, I can still see them. And the shapes of the trees, too, the outline of them, flaring up in the night sky.

  Later he asks, “What are you doing out here, Lu?”

  I’m not sure if he means the woods or the lookout, or both. But I’m caught by that nickname. He just started using it, at the Dollar Save on our way back from Baker City. We were standing at opposite ends of an aisle, each hunting for something, distracted by the discount store oddities. “Lu,” he had called, softly; the store was eerily quiet. And I looked up. He was grinning, holding a can of Armour Potted Meat. I choked on a laugh and held up a package of Ekonomik Boy Cream Cake. It’s a moment I go back to in my mind now, instead of thinking of an answer.

  We’re lying naked in the cot, his ear pressed into my breast. I can’t lie to him.

  “I don’t want to be anywhere else,” I say.

  My first night alone at the lookout I am terrified, sleepless, listening to the sounds of a cougar prowling the deck. Maybe my period is coming. Thinking of the old wives’ tales about menstruation and wild animals, how the smell of blood draws the carnivores. I imagine there’s a niche market of erotica based on this superstition. A woman alone in the wilderness: so vulnerable, so delicious; she goes mad, consorting with the beasts.

  I convince myself I’m imagining the stealthy footfalls, the deep padded, furred tread, the velvety disruption of the air around its ears, its nostrils. It’s only the wind, blowing pine needles on the boards.

  I sleep late, for once.

  My coffee water is about to boil when I hear the sound of footsteps on gravel. It’s not early in the morning, but it’s not late. It seems early for a hiker. I know it can’t be Carey. The footsteps come closer. Not an animal, not the scurry of small mammalian feet, and not the soft waltz of deer hooves, the languorous 3/4 beat of their steps. I recognize the sound of thick rubber soles on the rocky terrain because they were just like mine, the echo of my own lone footsteps up and down and around this mountain. I freeze. I cannot imagine the person attached to them. A lost hiker, someone in need, perhaps. But what if it’s not? I feel the electric surge of adrenaline, and I turn off the burner, take the pan of boiling water by the handle for protection, and force myself to go to the door, to step out onto the deck, and peer over the side in the direction of the path.

  Katie stands below, shielding her eyes to look back at me.

  The pan of hot water splashes me, and I curse and run inside and put it down on the burner. Katie stands halfway up the steps when I come out. Her dark hair is shorter now, cut up around her ears, sticking out from a red bandanna. She’s wearing backpacking gear, but she’s cleaner than I am. I hug her and she smells like Katie, the way she smelled on Marrow, like vetiver and seaweed—but also musky from walking in the sun—oily hair, warm sandstone. Her nose and cheeks are burned.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked.” Her voice is a husk. She clears her throat. “I’m out of water.”

  “Come inside.”

  I pour some water from the jug for her, take her pack and set it aside—it’s lighter than it ought to be, for someone backpacking or traveling anywhere. She sits at the small table and drinks. I want to wait for her to be ready to talk again, but I can’t.

  “Sister J. passed away, two months ago.”

  She doesn’t look at me but only nods. She’s looking around the room, her eyes resting on the CB radio.

  “I was with her,” I say. “She was thinking about you.”

  She holds out the cup, and I get her more water. I notice now the circles under her eyes, how they’re lined with red inside the rims.

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  She looks directly into my eyes. “I am dead,” pulling off her bandanna, hair felted to her head. “I’m not here. If anyone comes looking for me, you haven’t seen me.”

  She lies back on the cot, and I remove her shoes. She groans as I pull them over her blistered heels. I strip her holey socks—she has one more pair in her bag—and see the swollen knobs of her toes. I roll up the leg of her jeans—they were Tuck’s jeans, I think—she has belted them; her legs are unshaven and pale, with blue and green bruises up and down the shins. I take the water I had boiled for coffee and pour it into my dish tub along with some cold water, set it on the floor beside the cot. She lets out a howl of agony and pleasure as I ease her first foot into the water; she’s breathing like a woman in labor.

  “If you can manage it, we can go down to the creek later and have a cold soak to bring down the swelling. Let’s just clean you up, now.”

  “Okay.” Her voice is small, an octave higher, like a child’s.

  I make oatmeal while her feet soak, and she lies, senseless, on the cot. I think she’s sleeping, but when she hears the bowls of oatmeal hit the table, she sits up. I put extra brown sugar and evaporated milk in hers. She lifts her feet from the basin and hobbles to the table. The oatmeal is scalding but she eats quickly.

  “Let’s bandage your feet,” I say. I take some Ace bandages and antibiotic ointment from the first-aid kit and attend to her sores and blisters. I don’t know that her boots will fit again so soon and I tell her so.

  “I’m fine,” she says, lying back on the cot. “I just need to rest.” Then I think she really will fall asleep, but I don’t want her to rest.

  “Okay,” I say. I’m afraid if I take my eyes off her, she’ll slip away.

  “Tell me about Sister,” she says, closing her eyes.

  I think about this, sitting at her feet, watching her drift away.

  “They sent a letter saying she asked for me,” I say. “She wanted me to bring something, but she wouldn’t say what it was. At first I thought she was just losing her mind. But that was my clue, the not naming: I knew it was something the sisters couldn’t give her, and that she couldn’t name in front of them.”

  Katie opens her eyes and watches me.

  “Did you figure it out?”

  “I did. Or I was pretty sure I did. I hiked every day, hunting for them.” Katie opens her eyes wide at me, delighted.

  “I lost my way, wandering off the trail, looking for the right fallen tree, the right pile of bark. I looked for bear scat and tracks and followed them to trees with the bark clawed off. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I found other kinds, I found them and picked them and brought them back and dried them, but they
were never the right ones. I thought about bringing them anyway. I thought,She’s dying anyway, what does it matter?”

  “But you found them?”

  “I went to visit Carey at the ranger station one day, and getting out of the truck in the parking lot, I saw them. Wavy caps, in the landscaping around the building. They had mulched with wood chips in the fall. When I was sure no one was around, I picked them all, wrapped them in a bandanna, and kept them until I could get back here. I knew they were the right ones because they turned blue when I pinched them, like the ones we picked off the graves on Marrow. I remembered what you said to me, when we were high in that field. That the best ones grew on the babies’ graves.”

  She smiles at this.

  “I went to see her after that.”

  “How far gone was she?”

  “I was almost too late, I think. She wasn’t eating. I didn’t know how to give them to her.”

  “How did you do it?”

  I swallow, feel the burn on my tongue from the oatmeal. Katie’s pupils are large and deep, her eyelids droopy, but she keeps her gaze on me. I look out the window at the cloudless sky.

  I tell her how I waited until she was somewhat lucid, not really lucid, but almost awake. About how she reached for them or for me. About how I broke down the bitter, gritty caps with my teeth, mixed them with my saliva. About the strangest kiss I’ve ever given.

  I look back to Katie. She is grinning.

  “You’re an angel of mercy, Luce,” she says. “And a badass.”

  She closes her eyes.

  “And she went peacefully?”

  “I saw the life leave her like sparks from a roaring blaze.”

  There’s nothing to do but watch her sleep in my cot, in my lookout. The breeze blowing through the window screens, the way they wave with it. The light on the leaves outside like the day of the earthquake, pure and unredeemable, the gift of the moment. She came back to me. And I wonder what this means, because I realize—it’s written all over her—I cannot keep her. I find my phone and take a picture of her sleeping.

  I cook bacon and eggs for dinner—using up more than I had rationed for myself, but knowing I could go down to the cabin for more if I needed. Every so often a transmission comes through on the radio—I keep it on to hear the weather. In the strange mechanical voice of emergencies, the robotic man declares that the National Weather Service has issued an alert for the area. Storms are expected tomorrow morning through early evening. The possibility of dry lightning. I’m waiting to hear from Carey, too. And anxious. I don’t know if he’ll believe me, if I tell him that Katie is here. Or if I should tell him. He never trusted her—he seemed relieved to hear she had taken off.

  Katie wakes up to the smells of cooking. She’s been living off trail mix. She’s been shitting it for days, she says. Every squat in the woods is like giving birth to a little granola bar. A Christian family who picked her up gave her a tuna sandwich and some potato chips, she said. And a generic cola. It was her first drink of soda in several years, and she said her eyes teared up from the syrup, and they thought she was so grateful she was crying. They prayed for her: the mom, the dad—who was driving—and the two kids in the back of the minivan, who were seven and ten. She swallows the eggs in under a minute, then takes her time with the bacon.

  “I never would have eaten bacon before,” she says.

  “But now that you’re dead, you can eat what you want.”

  I open two cans of beer and hand her one. She smiles for the first time.

  I let her borrow my extra shoes, and we walk down to the river. She’s used to walking on her sore feet, but she’s not used to resting. Her body protests being back in motion after the rest in the lookout. We walk slowly, and I take her arm or hand for the steeper parts. It’s only a mile to the creek, but it’s not always easy climbing.

  This part of the river is wide and shallow; the sun heats it, but there’s shade at the edges. I haven’t showered in a few days, so I strip off everything but my bra and underwear and wade in. Katie keeps to the bank and soaks her legs, watching me.

  “I can’t remember my last period,” she says.

  I sit on a rock in the middle of the stream, water just covering my crotch. I look down to my thighs, half expecting to see blood in the water.

  “I can’t remember mine, either. Maybe we’re both pregnant.”

  She looks at me and smiles.

  “Dead women can’t have babies, Lu.”

  “Oh, right.” We’re still pretending. But it’s making me uncomfortable.

  “You must have had at least one period since you left Bellingham, right?”

  She gives me an indifferent grunt.

  I count the days in my head, but I am counting my own. Thinking back to the Palouse, to Prairie City on my birthday, to the month before that. April. Washing bloodstains out of my panties in the morning, hanging them outside to dry in the sun.

  “I can’t be pregnant,” I say. “I don’t feel pregnant.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was, once. With Matt.”

  “You were?” she asks, like it doesn’t surprise her at all, her face blank.

  “We hadn’t been together long. I was in love with him, but I couldn’t tell him.” I’m staring at her body, her bony frame that carried a dead baby for weeks.

  “You couldn’t tell him you were in love? Or that you were pregnant?”

  “Either.”

  “What happened?”

  I remember it, the quiet but certain knowledge I felt. That it wasn’t right. It wasn’t time.

  “Motherhood seems like a dangerous experiment, in this world. How can you love someone and leave them with the mess you’ve made?”

  She watches me, then looks up to the trees.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she says, finally.

  There’s a washcloth and a little chunk of soap tucked in the front of my bra. I wash my underarms in the cool water, my feet, between my legs. A trout nibbles at my toe, and I kick it away, lose my balance, slipping off my rock perch and landing in the stream, sharp rocks on my ass and hip. I come up coughing, soap lost to the current. Katie laughs. I stay there, dunk my face and head and rinse the soap from my body. When I look up, Katie is still smiling. She looks content, calm. I try to understand how this can be: she ran away; she found me. But for once, I don’t want to question the joy I feel. She was my first love.

  “Come in,” I say.

  She wades in farther down, where the rocks dip, creating a small waterfall. Her back is to me, and she’s saying something, but her voice is lost downstream. I can’t see her face, her expression.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  She says it again. I can hear parts of the stressed syllables. I think she says, “I’m trying to save you.” But maybe it’s “The fire will save you.”

  “I can’t hear you when your back’s to me.”

  She turns, just to look over her shoulder.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she says.

  “You said something, just now. I heard you.”

  She shakes her head no, wades deeper into the current, up to her hips, sweeping her arms against it to stay upright.

  “It’s like limbo,” she says. I hear her this time, see her lips move.

  That night we lie in the cot side by side, and I tell her about the cougar I hear sometimes, how I think I can smell him marking the area around the lookout—sometimes the heady odor of cat piss wafts through the trees.

  “I talk to him a lot.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I sing him songs. I tell him stories.”

  “Which stories?”

  “About the islands, mostly. About what it was like before the quake and after. My dad going out in his boat, chasing me around with live crabs. ‘Crab hands! Crab hands!’ Remember? I tell it about the sound of the quake, the shapes it made, the geometry of it. Looking out the classroom window and seeing the earth rolling in, the trees t
ipping sideways. I tell it how I thought: I am going to die. Then I looked into your eyes and saw you were thinking the same thing.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be writing all of this down in a story?”

  “Yes. But I’m not sure I want to write it down.”

  “Does it help, telling the lynx?”

  “It’s a cougar.”

  “The cougar, does he respond?”

  “No. Wherever he is, he’s probably just thinking about eating.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “I had a therapist in Seattle. I used to tell her these things, thinking it would help. But she responded by asking if I was having suicidal thoughts.”

  “Were you?”

  “If I wanted to die, I’d be dead already.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Carey thinks I’m here writing it all down. My mom thinks I left the city to write. I go day by day, starting with the day I arrived on Orwell after twenty years. I write a page and it takes me all day, and then evening comes and I burn it up and bury the ashes.”

  “How many pages have you burned?” She is drifting off. My arm lays parallel with her arm, and she traces my index finger over and over with hers.

  “I’m not counting.”

  “Where are you in the story?”

  “Lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Yes.”

  It’s dark but I can feel her tense. She’s looking at me. The whites of her eyes glow.

  “I went looking for you,” she says.

  “You disappeared and I found Jacob in the barn.”

  “That was an accident,” she says, kissing my temple.

  “That I found him or that he was in the barn?”

  “Both. You were both accidents. He fell down the stairs; you had some bad mushrooms.”

  “That was not an accident. You didn’t take them—the Amanita,” I say, pleading. “No one else could have had that kind—only me. Why, Katie?” I just want to hear her say that she knew, that she gave them to me.