“It’s okay,” I murmur. “You’re going to be all right.”
As the wind on the water begins to quiet down, a shadow nears us—a beautiful cloak of dove gray, softer than velvet. Mother is all soft, blurred edges and she touches Hector’s forehead sweetly. I wonder if Hector’s mother touched him with such tenderness. I don’t want Mother so near me. So near him.
Hector’s eyes open, and Mother disappears in wisp of moisture.
“Anda,” he rasps.
“Yes, Hector,” I say. I lean closer.
“Don’t ever touch me again.”
Chapter Thirty-One
HECTOR
I know what I saw. I know what I have to do.
Anda leans over me, dripping wet. Even now, she’s so beautiful that I ache just looking at her. But I know what she is. I saw that old man’s face as he was drowning. That man is dead, and Anda killed him. Suddenly, I can’t see anything but his screaming face.
I turn to the side and vomit onto the stones of the rain-washed beach.
My body is sodden, and I have an exhaustion I’ve never experienced in my whole life, not even when I woke up after a night blacked out in my house in Duluth. I sit up, wiping my mouth and groaning. Anda watches me expectantly. Normally, I’d think we needed to get back to the cabin so she won’t get chilled. So she won’t get sick. But I know now that the whole time I’ve been worrying about her, it’s been a phantom worry.
I’m the one who has something to lose, and I’m not going to lose my life over this…thing.
I stand up, my legs shaking beneath me. “Don’t follow me. Don’t talk to me.”
She opens her mouth, her eyes large and filling with tears. I wonder if she cries lake water instead of salt. She starts to say something, but I cut her off. “Don’t.”
Fifty feet away, I find my boots and clothes. I stumble three excruciating miles back to the cabin. I don’t look behind me to see if she’s following. The truth is, I’m terrified that she will. That she’ll be there smiling for me in that cabin, waiting to throw me back into the lake and drown me with a little toss of her head.
God. “This can’t be happening,” I mutter, but saying it out loud makes it all more real.
By the time I get to the cabin, I can barely stand. Thankfully, she didn’t magic herself here somehow. Smoke stains the whitewashed ceiling. The couch is there, lumpy and soft, with the tossed blanket from last night. But I can’t rest. I can’t. I have to get out of here.
I take off my clammy, damp clothes and put on dry stuff. I find my backpack, and start stuffing all my belongings back in. There isn’t much. The few sets of clothing take up most of it. I roll up my sleeping bag tightly. I wish it were thicker. There’s my knife, which I attach to my waistband. One half-empty box of camping matches. My fishing gear.
I stand up to head to the kitchen, and white and black stars pop in my vision from dizziness. My mouth is dry and my throat raw and sore from screaming. Nausea hits me every few seconds, probably from having swallowed all that lake water.
Ugh. I gotta focus. Get out of here, Hector, I tell myself. Run. You’re good at that.
I sift through the stuff we stole from the camping store. She probably doesn’t even need food—God, it all makes sense, how weird she was about eating. But I shake my head. I’m not a dick, even if I’m going to die soon. I won’t take all the food.
I divide the now-very-small pile of camp food and energy bars in half and put my portion in the bag. I fill a bottle with the boiled water we’ve kept in a big pot on the stove. I take one of the water purifiers and the fuel canisters for the tiny portable stove. She’s got a propane tank and a cabin, after all. But the amount of food is laughably small. I could eat it all in one day, easily.
Maybe I can make it to the other side of the island. I’d been planning on going there with Anda, anyway. But now it’ll just be me. Surely there’s food in the lodge restaurant I can use.
Maybe Anda won’t follow me.
Maybe then I can get off this island in a few months, a free adult, free from my uncle.
It’s a lot of maybes.
Also, I’m pretty sure that I have a raging fever now.
I’m seriously fucked.
Chapter Thirty-Two
ANDA
I stay in the same position, kneeling on the shore at Middle Point. Mother stays silent—she knows how wrong my choices are. She has a glacial patience and will wait for me to return to my senses.
I will not.
Hours ago, Hector lay before me, alive, his heart beating so loudly in my eardrums, the most magnificent sound in the world. And then he left me.
I had forgotten what sadness meant, and human loss. The ending of one season, of one wolf—it brings about more life. Those endings are beautiful because of what might come next. But the ending of us, of Hector and me…nothing beautiful is born of this.
This is what you wanted. And now you see the consequences. It’s not too late—
She’s right. I’ve done this to myself, allowed myself to open a door I thought closed. I’ve invited in the possibility of an altogether different pain.
I weep, still kneeling on the shore.
Mother is coaxing me back into the water. There will be other boats. The whole month of November is still mine. But she doesn’t understand the nature of my keening.
I want this agony. I want to know that I can bleed red like Hector. I want to miss biting his lip when we kiss. I want to miss him making me breakfast. I still want to discover the best and worst of him, a little bit every day.
I inhale the lake air hard, and it hurts my lungs. And I cry for the happiness of the pain.
The waves have calmed, not completely, but their energy is diminishing. I know that Agatha is being airlifted into a helicopter, and that boats are patrolling the area for Thomas’s body, which they will find soon. I’m swirling the currents above the lake bed, and will lift his remains to the surface so Agatha may mourn her lover. Humans so adore lingering with their dead. I understand they even perfuse their bodies with plastic and preservatives so they can hoard their remains forever.
Finally, it grows dark. I think of Hector. I know he’s left the cabin, and he’s already on the Greenstone Ridge Trail to the other side of the island. He’s trying to flee from me. Satiated on Thomas’s death, I can think more clearly now, and my heart—my heart—it chafes and knifes at me on the inside with every beat.
I miss Hector.
But I must respect his wishes. Shouldn’t I? We were a story with no happy ending, and deep inside, I knew that. Hector had yet to learn, but he did. And yet I made sacrifices anyway.
Sacrifice.
The word reminds me of another one Hector knows. “Scarify.” To create scars. I think of the rounded burns on his arm, and I start crying again.
I miss Hector.
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