Hillsinger did not quite believe it, Wilkie thought. He wanted to believe it, but he was trying to rule out his own worst hypothesis—that the boy was just making it all up. Hillsinger must have a good idea of what time high tide was, Wilkie reckoned, and therefore he knew how fast, how dangerously, and in what direction the water would have been moving through that channel at any particular time.
“I woke up at dawn and left right after,” Catta said.
“Where did you land on Seven?” Billy said.
“The Long Beach.”
“From Baffin to the Long Beach is a long way to swim.”
“The current was fast. I thought it was going to take me out into the ocean, but in the bay it slowed down and then just dropped off, and I swam for it. I was lucky. The water’s cold there. It’s much colder than the harbor.”
At that, Lila left the room. Hillsinger watched her go.
“The tattoo,” Hillsinger said, turning back to Catta.
“I used the fish hook I brought with me,” Catta said. “And a squid washed up on the beach still had its ink sac. I don’t know if it’ll last.”
They would never believe him about the squid, but it didn’t matter. He was sure the tattoo would last.
“By the way,” Catta said to his father, almost too casually, as if he were telling him the time, “there are owls on Baffin.”
80
Down in the orange bucket, the lamb was making feeble sucking sounds that James did not like. He’d rallied the small boys, and they were hiking to the usual meeting place in the woods behind the Cottage. James walked behind the rest of them—they didn’t know he was bringing something special, and James wanted to produce an effect. The boys were astonished when he pulled the lamb from the bucket, even the ones who had seen it before. James fed it some milk from the kitchen, with a spoon, and each boy took a turn holding it. One of them asked James what Sheila had said when he took the lamb away.
“It’s the Migration,” James said. “Whoever the staff leaves behind is cut off. This lamb is sick. He’s in pain.”
The small boys were silent. None of them knew what sickness looked like in animals, certainly not in sheep. One of the Templeton boys had seen Sheila just twenty minutes ago through the bunk room window. She had been running frantically along the tree line back behind the Cottage, calling out for Colt. At the time, the boy thought, it had seemed ridiculous.
James asked them: did they want to be part of something important—something extraordinary? They did. Did they believe, James asked, in the supremacy of kindness? Heads nodded. And did they believe animals had souls, that a lamb too would ultimately live forever? Murmuring. Yes.
Holding the orange bucket in one hand, James led the boys in a line through the forest to the shoreline, and then around two headlands to the empty Seven dock. The clearing was empty. It was low tide, and the seaweed was exposed on the rocks. James walked into Cyrus’s workshop and cut a long piece of twine. Out on the dock a flat stone weighed down the top of the floating lobster pen, and James tied one end of the twine to that stone. He wrapped the other end around the lamb’s belly and knotted it before putting both lamb and stone back into the bucket.
“This is the only way,” James said to the boys, and he emptied the orange bucket into the harbor.
81
Sheila was confused. It was bright inside the barn and the angle of the sun was higher and there was a copper taste in her mouth. She must have been asleep, which was bad. It was a miracle that anything or anyone survived infancy.
When she looked down, eight black-and-white puppies were lined up in a row, sleeping. All was well. Her second thought was that the anomaly was missing. She could not see Colt. Sheila stood up and shook her head and turned around to remove any sleep-related blindness. She counted to ten. She looked down again. Colt was still gone.
There were so few options: someone might have taken him, but the staff and Betsy were all gone to North Island. Something feral might have grabbed him, but why him and not a puppy? There were barn cats and possums, but they did not normally attack anything in the barn. Colt could not crawl out on his own. She had been afraid enough of all these possibilities to stay awake for hours at a time, but she also believed that her vigilance itself was a strong talisman that would keep those threats away. Cyrus would not have approved of either her actions or her thinking, but that was what she believed. It had protected all of them so far.
She avoided the thought of retribution—the idea that the taking of Colt was the result of her refusal to go to North herself, or to allow him to go. That this was damnation. Cyrus would say her offense was mysticism, what he called the belief that any one person’s experience was more essential, more enlightened, or more direct than that of the congregation as a whole.
Sheila went through each part of the barn in widening circles, lifting everything that moved: saddles, tools, blankets, anything within ten yards of Betsy’s box. She searched farther and farther out, in all the stalls and closets and upstairs in the hayloft where Penny and George had slept. There was no Colt. With rising panic, she walked and then ran along the tree line by the barn, lifting branches and running her hand through shrubs, calling out for Colt although she knew he couldn’t speak.
82
Since her marriage Lila had, for reasons she did not fully understand, let lapse the talent for self-laceration that had marked so much of her youth. When they met she had been overwhelmed by the sense of being chosen, not by Jim necessarily although that, too, but rather by some larger, deeper, more transformative logic. What luck, she had thought then. More than luck, really,—What luminous signs, she’d thought. Emboldened, Lila had—she and Jim had, both separately and together—set out toward a life lived at a scale and intensity equal to their omens. At that time, in New York and Washington, with the rising Soviet threat, the CIA had seemed to answer that extravagant demand.
But now this other thing came flooding back. This excavation of herself, of what she had done and still hoped to do: now she was again the Lila Blackwell who, in the long-ago days when she had worn a white coat to church, had been loved so often from afar. The contradiction was intoxicating.
Across the lawn, Sheila was shouting into the tall grass.
Lila could not comfort or heal Catta as she was now—afraid to touch him, afraid that he was irretrievably changed, afraid that Jim might have been right to send him—so she walked toward the sad girl and was startled to hear her calling “Colt! Colt! Colt!” in all directions, as if the little lamb were playing hide-and-seek.
“Sheila!” Lila said.
Now the poor girl was crying uncontrollably. She could not speak except to say Colt.
“How long has he been missing?” Lila said.
“An hour,” she said.