But I know she’ll eventually understand that sometimes, there are gifts. There can be these inscrutable items of beauty and horror outside the rules dictated by nature. But to me, it doesn’t feel like a gift. It feels like robbery, like Father has committed a crime against those he loved. Father is gone. He is gone.
Mother envelops Father’s slackened body with her watery arms. She will rejoice over the flowers that will grow from his corpse. She will fall in love, heartlessly, with the blooms, before bringing the icy winds of winter next year to kill them. An encore of death. And the cycle will continue. Her joy and mourning will be reborn again and again. She would have it no other way.
The huge wave of Mother’s receding form reaches Hector, whose body is limp and tired, held above the waterline by a soaked, bobbing life vest. But even he can’t handle the power of the wave that comes, larger than the Three Sisters, larger than anything I’ve ever made, because this is born of the fury of Mother and her retreat. Its bitterness reaches him, turns him over and over, forces him down so low in the waters that even I fear I might not be able to bring him back in time.
But I find him.
And I find that I can’t touch him anymore. Not like this. Not like I am.
I push the water hard, below him, forcing him upward as fast as I can. As he breaks the surface, he gasps and flails, though his life vest will do the job of keeping him afloat and alive. More than I can right now.
Hector sees me, and in the glassy, perfect surface of his exquisite brown eyes, I see what he sees. A creature with darkness in her blood, sewn into her very bones, in so much of what she touches. Faintly, I know that the clouds have run from me as I’ve bidden, that a helicopter is in the air already. That the Coast Guard has launched three boats for the one that they lost contact with over an hour ago. They will search for the bodies that they hope are still alive in this world. They will find Hector, close to death, but still mercilessly, mercifully alive.
I look at Hector, and everything he has to live for. I think of Father, and his absence gnaws at my marrow.
I see myself, and there is no beauty in what I behold.
The water begins to envelop me and I recede into the depths, to a place he can’t follow.
“Anda—” he begins. He’s barely conscious now. This struggle and the cold have been too much for his body.
But I don’t listen to him. He calls for the Anda he knew.
I sink back into the water. It’s time to say my final good-byes.
Chapter Sixty-Three
HECTOR
Chapter Sixty-Four
ANDA
Chapter Sixty-Five
HECTOR
Death sucks ass.
That’s what I had thought when I first woke up in the ICU. Every bone, joint, and inch of skin suffered its own brand of misery. Sharp things bored into my wrists, my neck. I choked on objects that burrowed down my throat and into my chest, gagging me into silence. My brain was a mixture of cotton balls and sand, and my thoughts were a gluey mess. The drug dreams were too freaky to be enjoyable.
But then I got better. My breathing tube was pulled. I got to sit up in bed and eat vanilla pudding and green bean puree, which I’ve discovered is a type of hell in food form.
For a long time, I didn’t ask how I got there. I spent my recovery just thinking about everything that happened, up until the last moments in the lake. Someone says my dad visited, but I don’t believe it. He wasn’t here when I woke up. I didn’t watch the news or read the paper. Every time a doctor, or nurse, or psychologist, or physical therapist came into my room, they’d meekly ask, “Do you have any questions?” I knew what they were asking. They wanted to know if I wanted to know.
Finally, I couldn’t avoid it any more. Actually, it was the housekeeping dude who told me. He was dumping out the garbage in my hospital room late at night. I was busy coughing up a half pound of very nasty-flavored snot from my right lung.
“You’re that kid, right?”
I gave him the shifty eye. “I don’t know. Am I?”
“The runaway. The one who almost drowned in the lake.”
I nod, looking for yet another tissue to spit into.
“Well. Hope you recover fast. Your uncle, too.”
That’s how I found out that my uncle survived.
And I wept.
At first, I was angry with Anda. She had come this close to being with me when she changed to save me. But she couldn’t fix everything—and then I realized it wasn’t her responsibility to solve my problems. Or kill them, either. I wouldn’t want anyone I loved to carry that burden. Hell, I didn’t want it myself.
If he’d died, life would be different. But he’d still be around, in my thoughts and memories. I spent so much time running away that without him, I’d feel a little unmoored. But now I have a reason to get better. I could have a trajectory that doesn’t involve disappearing.
That week I found out about my uncle, I couldn’t keep away from the news. I inhaled it all, as best as my feeble, fluid-swelled lungs could handle. They said that three people died. The captain’s body was never recovered. One of the officers suffered a heart attack during the rescue and died three days later in the hospital. The other one went home already. And then there was Anda’s father.
Mr. Selkirk’s body was also never found. I shiver to think of where it could be, on the bottom of the lake. I wonder if Anda’s mother—Gracie—is keeping him as some sort of macabre consolation prize, or just using his bones as a toothpick. One day, the nurse was taking my blood pressure and temperature when she noticed me muttering as I scanned the paper.
“Gracie?” she said. “Who’s that? A girlfriend?”
She was trying to be nice, but I winced at her comment. “Nothing.”
“Aw, c’mon.” She had that irritating tone of voice that said Not leaving unless you tell me!
“Well,” I admitted, “I heard somebody call Lake Superior that.”
“Gitche Gumee.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s an Ojibwa phrase for Lake Superior. Didn’t you learn that in school?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I’d totally forgotten, of course.
I looked it up later. “Gitche Gumee” means “Great Sea” in Ojibwa.
Great Sea.
Gracie.
I find that my thoughts spiral around Mr. Selkirk, the moment he asked me to explain things to Anda. I try to remember them hard, play them back like a movie. That’s where he lives now, in memory, and I’m sad that he’s gone—and sadder that Anda’s lost her dad. I feel terrible for her. Jealous, even, that she had a parent worth mourning.
I think of the captain and that other guy, too. It’s a strange feeling, to be forever linked to death. The guilt weighs me down like an anchor. I know that much of this all happened because of me. Anda isn’t completely to blame.