Mama said once that dreams can only keep their sparkle when they stay far away. It makes me think about her and Lenore and the Cave of the Cup and looking for things that may or may not exist. Maybe the important thing isn’t the Grail, but that people looked for it in the first place.
I need to go out and see what I can see. I think the rest of the world is not as cold and lonely a place as you think. At least I have to hope.
I’m enclosing fifty dollars, to pay back what I owe you, plus inflation. It adds up to the cost of passage on a ship to Southampton, should you ever decide to use it. It’s another of my far-fetched desires, I suppose, to think you might let me save you instead.
I hope you get this letter. I hope one day you change your mind and find your way to Forest Row. I hope you miss me still. I hope you’ll meet me there.
Love, Catherine
ADRI
PART 3
CHAPTER 11
Lily and Adri sat on the couch, the pile of letters in Adri’s lap. Adri had just finished reading them out loud to Lily while she fiddled with the buttons on her sweater and stared into the fire.
“Do you think he went after her?” Lily asked, as if it were a romance novel they’d just finished reading.
“I think he buried her letters in a wooden box and married Lyla Pearl,” Adri said.
Lily looked at her, exasperated, her eyes filling with tears. “You have no soul,” she said.
“I think he went after her,” Adri said more seriously. “And left everything behind. I’d bet anything.”
“I don’t know,” Lily said.
Adri leaned back, spent. “Catherine lived. She saved Beezie. That’s enough for now. It’s more than I hoped.”
Lily tapped her nails together, turning serious.
“It’s nice,” Lily said. “To get these pieces of my mother—from when she was young. I always knew she was a firecracker.” She paused. “But she wasn’t related to them. I guess we’re the last in the family after all.”
“I hope you don’t need any perfect match transplants anytime soon.”
“Just the brain,” Lily said.
Adri still felt the pinch of grief, but she wasn’t disappointed. They were the last of a family line that had wound its way through a woman who cut her hair because it was in the way, and saved someone who’d needed saving, and brought a dead farm back to life.
It felt like a good history to own. Something to be proud of. And still it left something dangling—one piece still in need of tending to.
After a while, she said, “I think there’s something I want to ask Lamont for. But it’s really up to you.”
The aircraft they were to fly in, Lamont had said, would be a small Hover Freight, the size of a van. A biologist would come to meet them.
Lily kept swiveling around in the passenger seat the whole way to the airport, talking to Galapagos, whom they’d loaded into the folded-down back seat using a dolly and some ropes.
“I think she’s carsick,” she kept saying, but Galapagos’s face in Adri’s rearview mirror was the same as it always was—a little disapproving and a little curious. She did appear to be looking out the window.
The Hover Freight, the pilot, and the scientist who had come to meet them—Trevor—were already there when they arrived.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Adri,” he shouted as the pilot helped her and Lily on board, and two others lowered a stretcher to lift Galapagos.
“Thank you for doing this,” Adri said, shaking his hand before taking a seat beside him.
“We’re thrilled to have her,” Trevor said.
Lily, in the seat ahead of them, looked around the cabin, nervous. “Well put flying on this thing on the list of stuff I could have died happily without ever doing,” she said.
She gasped as they lifted off and pressed her hands to the window.
“It’s laying season right now,” Trevor explained, “so we’re very selective about when and how we come in and out. We like to give the animals their peace. This girl,” he nodded toward the back of the compartment, where Galapagos lay strapped to a pallet, hissing at them, “will be happy there, I think.”
In no time they were crossing the crisp line of the coast below, and then they were out over open water. It only took five hours to reach the crystal-blue water of the Eastern Pacific and for the Galapagos Islands to come into view—green grassy humps of land rising out from the water, verdant and pristine, no signs of human life anywhere in sight.
“It looks like mold,” Lily said. “But pretty.”
Adri surveyed the unspoiled landscape, the exotic, unimaginable beauty of it, and tried to picture James’s parents arriving here all those years ago. After sailing for months, it must have looked to them like they’d reached a paradise at the edge of the world.
“We’ve built a living barrier around the perimeter. We’re trying to keep it protected, along with its inhabitants. We’ll be checking in on her regularly,” Trevor said. “We’ll give her any help she’ll need to transition—food as she learns to forage on her own, things like that. We have a fair amount of experience rewilding tortoises that have been domesticated.”
They landed quietly on a beach, in a puff of white sand. “We can’t stay long,” their guide said. “We can’t disturb the laying mothers.”
Their helpers lowered the stretcher out of the back and carried it about a hundred yards down the beach, to a rolling dune that looked down on a gathering of tortoises, digging in the sand to lay eggs. Galapagos hissed as she was lowered onto the ground and released from the latex belt. She looked around at everything, and Adri tried to read her: was she scared? Did she remember the smell of the ocean?
They slid her off the stretcher onto the sand.
Everyone stood back but Lily, who stepped closer and knelt, with some effort, in the sand.
“Hey, old friend, do you remember the wild?” she asked. Galapagos just stared around. “Do you remember this is where you belong?”
“Would you like a minute alone?” Trevor asked.
Lily looked uncertain, like she was breaking a rule. “If I could . . . ,” she said.
“Of course.”
At first Adri thought it would be the three of them left alone, but then, looking at Lily, she realized she, too, was expected to back away. She walked back to the Hover Freight, and while the guys climbed inside, Adri stood and leaned against a rock, watching Lily and Galapagos in the distance.
Lily was rubbing the tortoise’s head and talking to her.
Finally, she stood, dusted off her knees, wiped at her face, and walked toward them.
Their eyes traveled to Galapagos, still poised on her dune, not moving yet, just looking around, like she’d landed on an alien world.
They climbed into the aircraft, Adri helping Lily and then climbing in herself.
Nobody spoke as they lifted off; there was no small talk like there had been flying in. Their companions seemed to realize what the moment meant to them.