“It’s getting colder. You’re tired. We should go back.”
We crawl back into the tent. It doesn’t seem quite as cold now, so we lie on top of our sleeping bags. Anda throws her leg casually over mine and closes her eyes, once again using her sandwiched hands as a pillow. I watch her until her breaths come shallow and regular. She’s dead asleep.
I wait for what feels like another ten or fifteen minutes, just watching her. Her eyelashes are a dark fringe, and her eyeballs zigzag occasionally as her slumber deepens. I wonder what she dreams of. Then again, maybe I don’t want to know.
I take a few huge, deep breaths. And then I whisper, “My father is six feet, four inches tall. He loves sportfishing, building model airplanes, and criticizing Hollywood war movies.” I lower my voice. “And he hates that I was ever born.”
Anda doesn’t move. She’s still unconscious, and I don’t know whether to be glad or sad that she didn’t hear me. But just as I start to drift off, I take one last sleepy glance at her face and see something shiny.
A wet streak on her face. And yet she’s still sleeping. How odd.
I don’t wake her.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
ANDA
Something in him broke open that night. I felt it as I slept. As we continue to hike the Greenstone Ridge that day, we barter back and forth. I tossed him the first morsel, climbing the dirt trail flanked by browning ferns. Casual as it seemed, I had aimed with a sure hand.
“My father was born in Canada, of Scottish and Spanish descendants. He came to the Isle in his forties. He met my mother and fell in love.”
And then Hector, tentative at first, offered this.
“He sends me one letter every six months. He always uses a fountain pen with blue ink.”
Every taste of information, I swallow whole. I start to know the seams of his life, the scents and textures of what it means to be cinched into his skin. His favorite cigarettes (Pall Mall, because they were always at the corner store near his mother’s apartment in Seoul). How he thinks macaroni and cheese has the unfortunate texture of glue. How he hates his thick, unruly curly hair.
The only things he seems to like are those most likely to kill him. I neglect to say that the things I like are the ones most likely to kill everyone else.
Sometimes the truths we shared were half hidden. Like mine.
“Father’s fingernails are always dirty. He hates to kill fish. He always forgives me.” But I don’t tell him what I’m being forgiven for. And Hector hides, too.
“He refuses to discipline me.”
Then who does?
“He trusts my uncle.”
But Hector doesn’t.
“He thinks he’s a good parent.”
He’s ruined this boy.
In Hector, there is something bitter, oily, and bubbling deeper below. A poison that he hasn’t mentioned yet. Neglect only partly injures; it’s what takes its place and fills the void that defines the impact. It has bloomed in the scars of his arms. I’m afraid to touch them, because I fear the familiarity. There’s a darkness that simmers deep within me, too.
Three days into our hike, Hector fishes in one of the streams off the trail. I think of his scars. In the shade of some spindly red oaks, I watch him cast and bring in our lunch. He motions for me to wait, so I squat under the shade and regard the knife he left there with his other tackle.
It is a large blade, with a jagged, toothy edge near the hilt for sawing branches. The tip is getting a little dull from usage. Perhaps it isn’t sharp enough. I push my palm against the edge to test it.
“Stop!” Hector rushes up to me, his face distraught. He’s tossed the fish and gear behind him. “What are you doing?”
This upsets Hector. I should stop. I move to drop the blade, but in standing up, the jagged edge skitters against my wrist by accident.
The pain is sharp, almost an itching sensation. I watch the red seep through the thin line, brighter than the bunchberry clusters by the trails in the summer. It’s beautiful, the scarlet against my smudged skin. Life, rising up against all odds. It is destruction and creation, all at once. And then I understand something that I didn’t understand before. I drop the knife to the moss. Hector kneels at my side.
“It’s only a shallow cut. It’ll heal okay,” he says.
“I know.”
He rinses the cut with clean water from his bottle, which stings. Hector stays quiet afterward. He’s troubled by my small wound.
It makes him think of himself.
Hector and I don’t speak of my cut for the rest of our trip. We’ve been dancing around the darkness of ourselves this whole time, like fingertips over a flame, promising a burn but always just out of reach. But not for long.
I’m learning this now. The less of myself exerted on the lake and the island, the more they fill the void—asking, needing, wanting. And lately, acting. The next morning, I sit down after breakfast and tune in to the NOAA weather station on the little radio.
Temperatures dropping to thirty degrees or less
Storm—force winds are expected, with winds forty knots or above
Very high seas on the coastal waters
I did not know about this storm coming within two days. It’s a big one. And it frightens me that I’m being kept in the dark now. I’ve seen other signs, too, that Hector’s all-too-human eyes haven’t. Ruddy Russula mushrooms sprouting monstrously from a dead fox that was perfectly healthy and shouldn’t be dead. Blue flag irises growing when the temperature is dropping. Splashes of warm summer rain in the middle of a night with freezing temperatures. And a murder of ravens—bare-fleshed, tangled in the skeletons of black ash trees.
This is all my fault. But this is what I wanted. It is what I chose, isn’t it?
“I guess we better hike a little faster,” Hector comments casually, but concern fills his eyes. The sky is thankfully still benign, with a loose, stippled pattern of clouds in the troposphere. “Those don’t look very dangerous,” he says, pointing.
Mother enjoys making these for me. She knows how I love them.
“Altocumulus stratiformis translucidus undulatus,” I tell him.
“Gesundheit? I’m sorry, what?”
I smile. “You’re right. Those clouds won’t bother us.” Though the sky is everywhere, I can’t help but feel like it’s trying to sneak up on me.
Hector and I don’t need to be told that a flimsy tent is not much shelter in a storm. At night, we cling to each other for very unsentimental reasons. He hasn’t kissed me since before his illness. We have, however, been chilled to the bone. Over the last two days, the cold has been seeping in through the protective wall I keep around us. Like water dripping inevitably between the crevices of a cupped hand, it finds its way through.