Little by little, I get better.
I wake up one morning, the most clearheaded I’ve been since I got sick. Anda is squatting by the campfire, cooking something. And in my memory, I can clearly see that boat sinking, and that lady screaming in the water when it pulled the man into the depths.
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
She stops stirring but won’t meet my eye. She knows exactly what I’m asking. There’s silence for a long time.
“I needed it. It was part of me,” she explains.
“Can you really stop?”
She goes back to stirring the pot on the fire, and her eyes well up. “I’m trying now.” And then another long silence. “If I try hard enough, will you still run away from me?”
I imagine what it would be like to have a lover kill for you. It’s asking the unaskable. And I realize that’s what Anda is doing, only the opposite. Maybe it’s just as awful, though in my world, it’s so obviously right.
I look down at my arms. They’re starting to heal again, a process that circles around to a fresh cut, inevitably. I’m so damn sick of inevitability. Anda stares at me, with patience, not expectation. It gives me enough energy to tell her, “I’ll try if you try.”
She smiles shyly at me. “All right,” she says.
...
The more I improve, the worse off I realize we are.
Two days later, before dawn and after a long and deliriously good night of sleep, I look around. Peachy-gold colors the horizon, slowly brightening the sky. A yawn nearly cracks my head in half, and I sit up and stretch before groaning. My whole body feels creaky and very, very old. Geriatric at seventeen. Excellent.
Anda is taking a bowl of something off the campfire a few feet away. The embers crackle and snap; the scent of smoke is soothing. She offers me an antibiotic pill, and then a sip of hot, steaming, delicious…water?
For the first time in however many days I’ve been sick, I’m ravenous.
“Do we have anything else to eat?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Her hair is really dirty. Mud is caked on a few locks, and some twigs have tangled in there, too. She must have been sleeping on the bare ground.
“None?”
“None.”
I think for a minute. “How far away are we from Rock Harbor?” I ask her.
“About thirty miles.”
I pause, and her eyes say exactly what I’m feeling. Fear. Isle Royale might kick our asses in a very un-royal way.
Chapter Thirty-Six
ANDA
Hector moves slowly, but he’s only able to walk in small bursts that day. Without food, we can’t go too far. Washington Creek is a short hike away, and I can sense the cool slither of life, sinuous in the water. Much of the green around us is dulling to a brown in anticipation of winter. The urn-shaped flowers of the bog rosemary have all disappeared, and the carnivorous sundew have retreated into their sleeping buds for winter.
Water is dangerous for me to be around. Temptation simmers in the liquid, its connection with other living things that ought not to be aquatic. Boats. Humans, especially. But luckily this little stream is hardly a danger. I am relieved that we are planning on hiking the Greenstone Ridge Trail to the other side of the Isle Royale. In the center of this island, I’m least tempted by the lure of the lake, by Mother’s influence.
Hector shows me how to cast the fishing rod a few times, and then I practice while he rests on a rise of drier land. He lacks confidence that we’ll catch anything, but we must. Thirty miles of hiking will take several days, especially in Hector’s state. He must eat.
The lure plops into the trickling water, and I gently urge the undulating water to tickle a trout from beneath a deep stone toward the dancing rubber worm. I yank on the rod with a jerk, responding more to my own knowledge than the nibbles on the line.
With a spray of silver water, the fish lurches out of stream and arcs over my head. It lands squirming and wriggling beneath the shadows of an ash tree. Hector gasps with surprise, then jumps up to grasp the fish in his hands, deftly removing the hook. He strings a forked stick through its gills. It’s only just over a pound.
“Wow. That was pretty lucky.”
I smile. It has nothing to do with luck, but he’ll figure that out soon enough.
Within twenty minutes, we have four fish. Hector’s look of surprise is replaced by awe, then relief.
“Looks like we won’t starve after all,” he says, holding up the catch of trout.
I beam at him.
...
We eat trout, pike, and perch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not to my liking, but the fish do their job. Hector gains strength back slowly, though not with the vigor he’d had when he first set foot on the island.
The weather is strange as we walk eastward on the Greenstone Ridge Trail. At times the wind tries to sting my face, and when I rebuke it, it listens to my commands less and less. Usually, the weather and the lake move through me, or I move through them, just as they do with Mother. It’s hard to discern. There is a word for it in physics: resonance. When an external force (me) drives another system (the weather, the lake) to something far larger.
But ever since I kissed this boy, ever since I decided to stop taking lives, the weather has become an altogether separate entity, chiding me. Pleading. Punishing me. It’s acting like a castaway lover. I’m finding that I can’t prevent the wind from roughly slapping at our backs. I’m losing my grip.
There are other signs, too. Dead birds show up on the trail, sometimes denuded of feathers, sometimes with their eye sockets eaten away by vermin that ought to be dead or insensate this time of year. We see anemones and columbine blossoming as if it were May, not November. And the radio tells me tales of rogue waves hitting shipping vessels on the calm, clear days recently. My sisters are not happy with my decision, either. I’m spending so much energy keeping my hunger at bay that the island is suffering.
It’s not the only one suffering, though.
My body hungers for loss. Letting Agatha go free, and Hector, too—it’s taken a toll. Weakness snakes into my limbs, wearing me down. I think through the shipwrecks dotting the island shoals, like memories of past desserts savored: the Emperor, Chester Congdon, America, Algoma, Glenlyon, Monarch, Cumberland, Henry Chisolm, George M. Cox, Kamloops…the list is a nautical graveyard lullaby for my dark heart.