It’s her. This gigantic vision of a creature, with her waist encased in mist, hair made of storm clouds careering down her shoulders, and a gown made of the skeletons of sunken ships.
I’d heard of her through Anda. I thought I’d never seen her. And then I remember the skeleton in the lake that disappeared at a second glance. She’d made herself known, and I’d tried to ignore the sign. She’s always been there, waiting to show herself.
“Mother!” Anda screams.
Chapter Sixty
ANDA
She turns her massive body to look down at us, tiny as we are among the flotsam of the storm. Though tendrils of air and vapor surround the crown of her head, she has no face. No expression that I can read. But I don’t need a visage to understand what’s in her heart.
If you cannot do what’s in your nature, then I will. For both of us.
Mother swoops an arm toward us, a waterspout of tremendous force that pulls us out of the water. Hector and I are over and above the lake, ten, twenty feet, before she lets go and we plunge, screaming, back down.
As soon as we hit the surface, Hector’s hand is yanked out of mine.
No.
I churn my legs in the lake, trying to find the surface, trying to find Hector. When my head comes above the water, I see him, but he’s already twenty feet away. It might as well be a mile.
“Anda!” he hollers. “I’m coming!”
But as he reaches for me, the jagged stern of a huge boat sweeps toward him. I see it come so slowly, knowing what’s about to happen. Tons of metal, torn from the lake bed where it had been living for over forty years.
The George M. Cox.
As its broken stern slices through the water, it sighs, unhappy to be clawed from its resting place by the Rock of Ages lighthouse. It was happy there, an old man in repose on the lake bed. It enjoyed the curiosity of the divers that hovered about its wreckage, like children pawing at a grandfather’s knee. Now the steel plates of its hull groan and creak as Mother throws it with precise care, tearing the watery space between me and Hector.
It’s pushed too close to Hector. As it sinks back into the depths, it swallows the water nearby, sucking everything down with it, including him.
“Hector!” I scream.
But he doesn’t surface. He’s too far away, and I can’t swim fast enough to get to him, not with this useless body. I paddle through the greenish foam anyway, trying to grow closer, trying to paw the water, a feeble attempt at finding him. But it’s no use. I’ll never find him.
I won’t win, not like this. She’s forcing my hand on purpose.
Mother turns to me with her petticoat of wrecks flailing around her, the storm clouds gracing her empty brow. She’s won, and she knows it. This was always the plan. She would have me only one way, and she’s willing to show herself to do so.
I’ve felt the warring sides within me. I’ve let them push me this way and that, never realizing that I could change the terms. Never understanding that there were choices that could be made.
I close my eyes and exhale, letting my body sink into the depths. I splay out my arms and fingers, feeling the water at my fingertips, welcoming the energy there. The darkness. The light. The beauty and the horror. My vision blurs into one that sees far beyond the murky three feet before me. I see the ships pawing at my mother’s swirling skirts, the demineralized skulls skittering across the lake floor.
Black tendrils snake up my arms, and my heart ceases to beat. With a flick of a finger, the waters around me calm in an orb, and the winds above whimper in fear. I see her nod her head with approval.
Once you make your choice, daughter, there is no going back.
She thinks I’ve come to my senses. She thinks I’ve come back to her. She thinks I can divide myself, once and forever, when no division needs to exist. Hector has taught me this, too.
Deep within the water, I reach out and sense what I’ve often cowered from. The ancient lake sturgeon and hook-nosed trout; the mussels clinging with fierce tenacity to the lake beds; pines and cedars and birches that root into history itself. Always, their pain in fighting and living stung me; always, I ran away from it. But I’ll entangle this colossal strength in my embrace now.
Mother doesn’t realize that though I may be her daughter, I am not her possession. I never was. I am my father’s daughter, too. Mother may be the lake, and she may be so for centuries. But there is one more thing that outlasts mountains, and lakes, and rivers.
Time.
I am November.
This is my time. I can reach down, and up, and into the endless nothing in between, and take with me the strength of a million Novembers yet to come. I can stop splitting myself in two, and take strength outside of death, where life rouses itself in earthquakes, in cells, in seeds, in struggle. In my human imperfection, there is power that exists in no other being.
Time. Life. Death.
Human. Island.
All of it is me.
I am the Witch of November.
And Mother has made me angry.
Chapter Sixty-One
HECTOR
I can’t get loose.
The back of my life jacket is snagged on a piece of metal, on this huge wreck that is falling into the depths of the lake. The pressure on my ears is excruciating. It’s dark, and the cold is worse than anything, and I can’t breathe.
I wish I could help Anda.
I almost wish that I’d never come to Isle Royale, but that would be lying. I always knew at one point or another, I’d run away and not come back. And I don’t mean in the visiting sense.
I close my eyes and let the pressure squeeze harder.
No. You won’t run away, not this time.
My eyes fly open. I see nothing in the water, only the black depths of the lake. But something pushes against me. It’s powerfully strong, but doesn’t snap my bones. I’m forced upward as my orange life vest is torn from my body, still snagged on the wreckage. Just when my brain wants to burst from lack of oxygen, I break the surface—and find that the surface is broken.
The lake looks like nothing I could imagine. It’s frozen, rain locked into place as it hovers in heavy sheets above it. Large pockmarks litter the surface, which doesn’t seem liquid anymore. It isn’t frozen, or solid, or gas. It’s nothing that can be defined by any textbook.
The ships are locked in place, half submerged. In the air, Anda’s mother is still in her gigantic, unearthly form, but something’s wrong. She’s blurred at the edges, and she seems to be locked in a struggle with something I can’t see. Until I realize I’m looking in the wrong place.
A hundred feet away from Anda’s mother is a wisp of darkness, floating above the water. It’s almost like a smudge of smoke, hovering there for no good reason. But it shimmers and sways, and seems to be sucking the light and energy from everything around it. I peer harder and see arms, legs. The dark blob of head swivels and turns to me. The eyes pierce right into me, seeing everything.