“Why?” Apollo asked. “Why give me another chance?”
“Emma told me about you, Apollo. While she stayed with us, she and I spoke quite a bit. She told me you’d come here, but I didn’t believe her. I thought we’d done a pretty good job of hiding ourselves away. I told her no man could find us on our island, but here you are. Just like she said. She didn’t mention this one being with you, though, so I had to think things over for the night. That’s why I’m giving this second chance. You betray us again, and you won’t get a third. Now come on.”
She waved him out and adjusted her other arm one more time. Whatever she had there had almost slipped when she gestured. Apollo moved to the cell door. He didn’t look at William.
William shouted as Cal and the guards led Apollo away, but the words—if they were words—remained unintelligible. He sounded, instead, like an animal that knows its end is near and resists the knowledge as much as the death.
Apollo Kagwa would never see William Wheeler again.
CAL DIDN’T SPEAK to Apollo until they’d left the TB Pavilion. The twin guards, as before, said nothing. Apollo kept expecting one of them to bring a mace down on his head or for Cal to reveal a pistol, raise it, and shoot. He had little to say as he anticipated his execution. As soon as they were outside again, Cal reached into the deep pocket of her sweater.
“This is for you,” she said. She stopped him and turned him toward her.
“No way,” Apollo said. “No way.”
Cal held out a copy of a children’s book. Outside Over There.
“How did you get this?” he asked. “I left this in my home, on my bookshelf.”
She laughed. “You do know there’s more than one copy of this book in the world.”
Apollo took it from her and held it gingerly. He almost expected it to explode in his hands.
“I told you that Emma and I spoke. We had a lot of late nights together. She told me about your father, about this book and how much it meant.”
“What does it have to do with my father?”
Apollo opened the cover as if the answer would be written there on the endpapers.
“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about this book. This story. I want you to understand where you’ve found yourself.”
“This island?”
“For a start,” Cal said.
She took his arm and led him back toward the courtyard. She steadied him in the places where the land dipped or rose, and she pulled him when he nearly walked right into a tree. He couldn’t stop staring down at the book. Confusion threatened to drown him like the rising waters of a flood.
“You were in New York when you got on Wheeler’s boat, and for a time you were in the East River. You probably passed Rikers Island, maybe you went under the Whitestone Bridge or the Throgs Neck. But when you got close to us, when you approached our island, you crossed new waters, and when you beached that boat, you were on a different shore. The Amazons were said to live on the island of Themyscira, and the Yolngu people of Australia tell of Bralgu, the Island of the Dead. Magical places, where the rules of the world are different. You’ve crossed into such a place, Apollo.”
“This is North Brother Island,” he said. Ahead he heard the sounds of children now, laughter and squealing.
“It was,” Cal said. “But then we arrived here and remade it.”
As they stepped through the brush and into the courtyard, Apollo saw women and children out now, buzzing off in this direction or that. Young children were being led, or carried, down a path Apollo hadn’t seen last night. They moved toward a small building with a series of windows facing the courtyard. Apollo watched the kids go in. Their small heads disappeared as a woman inside the building gestured for them to sit. Behind this woman, there was a blackboard on the wall.
“A schoolhouse?” Apollo said. A one-room schoolhouse.
“It’s the library,” Cal told him. “But it serves as their school as well. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” Apollo said. He couldn’t stop watching the windows. He couldn’t even see the children, but he imagined them there, sitting cross-legged, attention on the teacher. There were so many commonplace events he had expected to enjoy when Brian was born. Peeking in on his child during class. Parent-teacher conferences. Helping with homework in the evening. He hadn’t understood what a luxury such drudgery would be until he lost the chance.
“We take our meals there,” Cal said, gesturing to another ramshackle building.
One of the twins brought a hand to his shoulder and pushed him forward. He drifted on just so he wouldn’t fall. He clutched the book tighter to his belly.
They’d reached a doorway. Cal stepped in first. Inside, women sat on the floor in small groups, plates or bowls in their laps. They noted him, every single one. More than a few of them tensed, even rose to their feet as if to rush him, but since he was being escorted by Cal and the guards, they returned to the pleasure of paying attention to one another rather than to him. To his surprise Apollo found himself scanning the faces, looking for William’s wife. He didn’t even know what she looked like, but he sought her out anyway. Did he plan to help William? He didn’t know.
“Me and you be sisters,” Cal said softly as she moved through the room, a kind of greeting perhaps. “We be the same.”
The women responded, all together. “Me and you coming from the same place.”
“How long was she here?” Apollo asked as Cal led him toward the one table in the room where a series of serving plates sat.
“Three months,” Cal said. “On and off.”
“On and off?”
“She went back to New York at least once a week. She’s the one who stocked our library. She was shocked when she saw how little we had. To her, a life without books wasn’t living. Even out here Emma wanted the kids to read. She couldn’t stop being a librarian. The kids appreciated it. Some of the other women felt judged.”
Apollo burned with hunger but had no appetite.
Cal filled a bowl with oatmeal. “This is good on a cold morning,” she said.
“How did she go back and forth? I’m sure the water taxi doesn’t make stops at your magic island.”
“We have our own navy,” Cal said. She sprinkled a spoonful of brown sugar on the oatmeal. “Navy’s an exaggeration. We have a trawler and one small watercraft, a creek boat. It’s built for one. You use a paddle. Emma brought books back in the creek boat.”
“She knew how to use a creek boat to cross the East River?”
“There were a few spills,” Cal said, leading him now to a corner where they could talk alone. “But your wife never gives up. Didn’t you know that about her? She’s got a will on her.”
“Yeah,” Apollo said. “That I knew.”
Cal squatted on the ground and patted the floor for him to follow. She set the oatmeal in his lap.
He placed the book down on the ground. Instead of eating, he scanned the story.