CHAPTER 24
AS SOON AS we’d closed the door behind the Crawleys, Oskar turned to me. “You have to show me that cave.”
“I told you she was interesting.” I couldn’t keep some irritation from my voice; he’d hardly paid attention when I first told him about her.
“You didn’t say she was an Indian. A wild Indian. An Indian unsullied by contact with whites.”
“She had contact!” I protested. “She was living here!” Exactly here, I thought, looking around the room with new understanding.
He waved one hand vaguely in the air, as if this fact were a fly he could brush away. “Before that.”
“Before that, we have no idea how she lived.” I began to gather the flotsam we’d scattered over the floor, separating the remains of the shipwrecks from the stuff of the sea.
“Exactly! Exactly! We have no idea. Don’t you want to know? She may show us things about her people that no white man has ever seen. Can you find that cave again, do you think?”
I, too, wanted to go back to the cave, though the idea of bringing Oskar with me made me nervous. While his renewed energy pleased me, I knew that it was a beam to be focused with care, and the Indian woman seemed a fragile subject.
“I think I can find it,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for drier weather.”
“Why? What’s a little wet? Are you afraid you’ll melt?” he teased.
“Oskar, please be careful!” He’d begun to help me tidy the room, but his hands on the delicate objects were far too eager and rough. Gently, I took from him a dried crab with all eight of its legs attached. “I just don’t believe it’s safe, that’s all. Anyway, she’s been there for years. I’m sure she’ll be there when the rain stops.”
Would she? It was difficult to see how she survived. I realized that until tonight I’d considered her almost a natural curiosity, more akin to the mussels and sea stars and octopi than a real human being who would feel the cold and grow hungry. Had she huddled in her cave for all these soaking days, much as we’d huddled in our houses? The logs I’d seen, tangled and bleached among the rocks, must have come sweeping down from the mountains like battering rams in churning rivers of rainwater, and I pictured them piling up at the entrance to the cave, trapping her. I could envision the water washing inside, the sealskin floor wet through, the acorns floating away, the pyramid of cans tumbled down, and a body, with the small black head that I’d glimpsed in the ocean, lying among abalone shells and fish bones in one corner, nearly dead, as the baby otter had been.
I started when Oskar touched my shoulder. He let his hand slip down my arm until his fingers interlaced with mine. “We have a little time,” he said, “before my shift.”
In our bed—had this been her bed, too?—I could tell it was not contemplation of me that had brought this on but the thought of the Indian woman.