Everything changed.
The first ferry back to Isle Royale is on May 3, 7:30 a.m. Right now, it’s almost December. If everything goes okay, I might be taking extra classes to make up for my lost months of school so I can actually graduate on time. One of my doctors asked me what I want to be when I graduate. Of course, the only thing that occupies my mind, 24-7, is the island. How the island, in its own way, needed taking care of. I like that, being needed by something so powerful as nature. I also liked being away from buildings and crowds of people and knowing that I could take care of myself without so many human trappings. So when the doctor asks me again, the freakiest answer comes out of this city boy’s mouth.
“A park ranger.”
The doctor chuckled at me. “Oh, I get it. You’re joking, right?”
“Right,” I say, but I’m not.
I spend too much time thinking. I’ve seen things in this last month that were never meant to be seen. Some days, I’m not even sure that I didn’t just imagine everything. Like, maybe I accidentally ate some weird mushroom my first week there and tripped the whole time.
Anda is something that wasn’t meant to live in my world. I know exactly what she’s capable of and it’s no fairy tale, despite my wishing. I don’t know if I can reconcile the Anda that spent the night with me in the lighthouse, the Anda that saved my life, and the Anda that could decimate a ship full of lives. Like that.
I promised Mr. Selkirk that I would explain things to her. The whys. Though I’m not sure what there is to explain.
I don’t know what I’m going to do on May 3.
Five months is a long time to decide.
Chapter Sixty-Six
ANDA
The lighthouse and I have an understanding.
We don’t agree on everything, but we at least know each other. One by one, I go to make peace with the others. The Rock of Ages lighthouse, Rock Harbor Lighthouse, and even Passage Island lighthouse. Their very foundations shudder when we meet, but it doesn’t last for long. They sense the change in me. I make my apologies, and they do, as well.
Someday I will visit them again. The proper way, in a boat. I will have to learn how to use one. Transportation is a clunky, hefty word that fits into a human world. One I’m learning to live in, without constantly snagging myself on sharp corners of common sense. It’s not easy. I’ve been bruised pretty badly, but I like the marks they’ve left on me. Like Hector. He’s a bruise that reminds me of violets in the shade.
Hector.
I’m not ready to think of him yet. Wait, just wait, I tell myself.
I listen for advice from Mother, but my choices are making it harder to hear her.
I listen for Father, but the vacant silence only upsets me. I’ve added a lot of salt water to the lake this month. For so long, we’ve lived in each other’s periphery, even when we’re only feet apart. But that distance mattered little when he was there. Now that he’s gone, the emptiness that’s filled his place is yawning and enormous. I bounce around it, not knowing which way is north. Not knowing where the center of the earth is anymore.
But there are some things I know. There’s a darkness inside me that won’t ever go away, but I cannot be a slave to it anymore. It hurts to rearrange myself, the devotion to this other side of me, the light. Reaching into the growth of the island and finding that it can nourish me if I let it, if I accept the struggle. It’s strange, not running away from the wealth of strength there. I had annulled the choices before in accepting November as the only time when I could truly renew myself, through the carnage of sinkings.
The lighthouse was right.
November is not the only answer.
It will always be a struggle. But I won’t partition myself off anymore, and there is no more Father to beg it of me. After all, the extremes pushed to their furthest limits away from each other have wreaked havoc. There is light and darkness in life, and in death. Neither is purely good. Neither is purely bad. But it’s taken me this long to understand, and it is still a fight, every minute. But that is what I get for nurturing this humanity inside me. The constant testing of oneself; the constant effort of being better than I was only minutes ago.
At the end of December when the last of the police and park rangers left the Isle, I left my hiding place on Menagerie Island. Once again, it was just me and our little house near Windigo. Once again, Isle Royale sat there like the queen it is, the eye of the wolf. She lay half immersed in water and continued to sleep the winter away.
I was alone. I was safe. But not from everything.
The house was full of ghosts. I’d see Father folding clothes into the drawers, putting a pound of butter into the small refrigerator, warning me not to break the weather radio. I’d see Hector scraping fish scales on the back porch, and Mother’s voice enticing me to join her in the lake’s oblivion.
I’d sometimes spend an entire week, just studying the stones on the shore by our house. Sometimes, I cook food and expect Father to come indoors, sniff the air with surprise, and thank me for a plateful. But the door never opens. He never comes.
Oh God, he never comes.
I ask why, and I get no answers.
Sometimes, I weep for days on end.
But I also know where he is. I’ve dreamed about it. I see Mother embracing his inert form, cradling him and bringing him to the shore, spent and sagging. She pushes away at the earth and places him in there, replacing stone and soil as if each were a gift, weighing his corpse down with adoration. She lets the lake water rain over the spot, and kisses it with her winter’s wind.
In the spring, crocuses will crack through the top layer of cold earth. It won’t be Father, back in anyone’s arms, will it? But when I let my soul quiet down and stop my own whimpers of loneliness, I can feel his warm smile on my cheek.
What I can’t sense anymore is Mother. She’s noted the change in me. She’s aware of the battle. Several large storms come to the island, coaxing me back to the water, but I don’t go. My thirst for death is slowly slackening, but it’s there. I understand it is necessary, and it will never truly go away. But I also understand that I can parcel it out in a way that makes more sense. Not having to save it until November means I can be gentler with what I take and when I take it.
When I grow too weary of my dreams, I go back to the water. I need it less than before, but I still need it. I allow the winter lake, drowsy at dusk, to swallow me whole. My arms reach west, toward the coordinates that play a crooked tune in my head.