I think of the wind pelting me with rocks ever since I stepped on the island. The fact that Anda seems to be listening to someone else all the time, and it’s not me.
The air is even colder in the stairwell as I run down the steps. Wind is rattling the shutters. Anda squats by the fire, her eyes huge and fixed on the flames. She looks terrified. She must have heard everything. Her father is sitting in the corner on an overturned storage box, watching the shadows from the flames dance across the floor.
I head for the door and open it.
“Where are you going?” Mr. Selkirk barks at me.
Anda’s eyes take me in and she inhales, as if to capture a breath to last a lifetime.
The wildest theory pings around in my head. Maybe all the starvation has made my brain malfunction. But if this is the only way I’m going to get answers, then so be it. And if I end up on Michigan’s shoreline, maybe that’s meant to be, too.
I run out the door and down to the rocky shore of Menagerie Island, while Anda’s father yells at me to come back, what am I doing, have I lost my mind?
Anda says nothing.
The boat is right where we’ve left it. I pull the anchor in with a huge swing of metal and clanking chain, and turn on the engine. I don’t know a thing about boats, but I’m going to learn.
Right now.
Chapter Forty-Two
ANDA
I know exactly what he’s going to do.
It’s a test. An offering.
He’s looking for the truth beyond us alone. He’s searching for Mother.
Ah, take it, Anda. Take it, or I will. How can you say no, when it’s bestowed so willingly?
Father runs out the door and brings the lamp. I move to follow him and he stops me with an outstretched hand.
I gaze at him with my eyes wide open, seeing everything. Knowing everything. “Don’t pretend to stop me. You know you cannot,” I remind him.
Father shrinks in my presence. The terror that he always hides behind his eyes comes forth, a watery, soft energy that’s far too easy to push aside. I step past him and into the dark. I hear the boat motoring away. Hector is no sailor; he hasn’t turned on the navigation lights so there is nothing but darkness and sound in his wake. Father can no longer see him.
Mother, however, knows exactly where he is.
And I know, too.
I’ve stayed away from the water for so long that the lure of the boat is almost too much to endure. The buzzing in my ear that bothered me before clears as I turn my full attention to the water. The lake is alive with life, pulsing in hearts afloat, all scattered across 31,700 square miles of Lake Superior. My blood hums with the purity of knowing.
Winds at twenty knots. Eight-foot seas on the coastline.
Twenty boats are alive on the lake. Two tugs. Three lake freighters holding forty thousand tons of goods between them—two lakers and one saltie. The rest are crumbs, little powerboats and sailboats taking a foolish night ride to enjoy the stars on the lake.
Romantics. Easier for the taking.
That’s my girl.
But I don’t want them.
I want Hector.
I know exactly where he is. The small powerboat is tantalizingly close by. He’s running away yet again.
He doesn’t know exactly where to go, except away from the spinning beam of our lighthouse. He has no idea what risk he’s put himself in.
Even now, he’s already thinking his own decisions that brought him to the island were wrong, and hasty, and everything the matter with his life has come to this. Testing a girl and the greater unknown, using his life as bait. He’s realizing how much he doesn’t value what he owns, the very lifeblood that pulses like syrup through his wind-chilled limbs.
He knows, Anda. He suspects all. So sink him, or I shall do it myself. He’s only a pebble in your shoe.
I nod. I know what I must do. He’s looking for Mother, for answers, and she’ll do worse than reveal herself if I don’t stop him. I could stop him, too. I could end this boy, end everything that brought him here. Like blinking in the sun, it would be too easy. I take a deep breath of the November air. There’s incoming rain skulking across North Dakota, gaining momentum. The shoreline comes to meet me as I step down toward the ink-black water slapping against the rocks under my feet.
I splay my fingers out and feel the current thrumming in my arms. I can make an undertow with a kiss on the wind. This has to stop, because he knows.
Father has always said that he’s the only one who can carry the burden of the truth. Anyone else wouldn’t understand. They’d try to hurt me. They’d try to destroy me. People always destroy what they fear. But Hector isn’t doing that; he’s trying to hurt himself. I remember when he was sick, so sick, that everything that came out of his mouth was a puzzle.
“Pain is so easy. It’s what we do best.”
Hector hurts himself. I hurt others. But pain doesn’t have to be the only thing we are capable of creating. It cannot be.
Mother is pulling him out farther, trying to keep him out of my reach. She has stalled the motor, and Hector curses with despair more than anger. He looks around to the dark void, the lighthouse winking too far away in the distance. Rapidly, she tows it. Now the boat is moving on its own accord, away from me, and away from the safety of land. Mother pulls downward at the same time, and gallons of icy water pitch into the boat, half flooding it.
Hector is terrified.
He gave himself. It’s over, Anda. There is no choice.
Choice.
It’s what humans possess, and buy, and sell in both vast and minuscule quantities. And nature? A tree doesn’t choose to be burned, nor does it choose to fall and kill the life beneath it in an instant.
There are no choices in nature.
But half of me is born of my father.
I raise my hands, palms up. Extending my fingers just a little, I reach far, far into the lake water and try to force the cold air away from him, but something’s wrong. The air around him stays too cold. Mother’s watery fist is curled around the boat’s bow, but I try to slither under her grip to take the boat for my own. She tightens her hold and pulls the craft away from me, too easily.
Anda, don’t.
I don’t understand. I can’t seem to get any sort of purchase on the boat, and it’s filling rapidly with water. My eyes shut, squeezing tight with concentration. It takes every muscle of my body, tensed, to grip the waterlogged vessel. Even so, panting with exertion, I feel like I’m on the cusp of it slipping away.
I twist the tide into a rope to help me. But where I was once a conductor in such a scenario, it’s as if I must play all the instruments now, simultaneously, and it’s exhausting. I’m still so weak; the hiking and food and Hector have changed me, so much. But not for the better, and not forever. It’s only introduced new ways to weaken me.
Anda, don’t!