“My mom didn’t talk about him much. I came across information about the settlements by accident when I was eighteen.”
“But you didn’t want to come back here until now?”
“Has Katie ever talked to you about what it was like — the earthquake? the aftermath?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, sure of himself. He was confident that his wife wouldn’t keep anything from him.
But she wouldn’t have told him everything. How we slept in the school gym that first night, yes. How we were always within arms’ reach of each other, or how we concocted a plan to trick our harried teachers and find our own ways home, maybe. But how her menses had started the week before, how she worried the earthquake might make it start again? Or how we had our first kiss under the blankets in the dark, my hand on the small of her back, her hand on my cheek? She wouldn’t have told him. No one would ever know. My father was missing in the burning refinery; her house had been crushed under a hundred-year-old cedar. It would always be our secret, the things we did to comfort each other after the quake.
“Without Katie, I don’t know how I would’ve coped. My mother was in shock. Everyone was in shock.”
“I understand that it was traumatic.” He sounded less confrontational now, more sympathetic. “I’m just wondering why now? Why not ten years ago? Weren’t you curious? About Kate? About the house?”
I swallowed. “I guess enough time has passed for the—” I stopped myself. Guilt. I was going to say guilt. “For the trauma to subside,” I finished.
Half a mile from the barn, we came to a paved road: the only one on the island, laid by ArPac when they built the refinery; used by almost no one then and absolutely deserted now. Perhaps ArPac once had development plans for the rest of the island, after the costly investment in the refinery; in any case, the road, much like the electricity, was never viewed by islanders as the gift it was purported to be. The earthquake had wrinkled and warped the blacktop, leaving a deep cleft down the center through which weeds and saplings thrust their bodies. Tuck stepped onto the road and placed a hand tenderly around a fir sapling that barely scraped his knee.
“Conifers take their time,” he said. “A human year is only a few weeks, a month for a fir tree. I’ll never see the day this tree is taller than me.”
An airplane droned overhead, a small one, loud and low. I wondered what we looked like standing there on the reclaimed blacktop. We watched it fly away toward Vancouver, then crossed the road and picked up the trail again.
We both fell silent for a while. My headache waned, then returned, several times along the walk. It made organizing my thoughts difficult. My head felt clearest when we were just walking or stopping for water. I noticed fading blazes on some of the trees and the occasional cairn trailside. I asked how old the trail was, but Tuck didn’t know — he guessed it predated the Colony, though, because it was a favorite of the few deer on the island.
“How are there still deer on the island?” It seemed crazy to me that they could have survived when the island was covered with oily ash and chemical flame retardants.
“We think they swam over from Orwell.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ve seen them swim at super low tides.”
“I grew up on these islands, and I’ve never seen a deer swim that far.”
“They survived, they swam — whichever: they mate. They have young. They love our berries and veggies, so we watch them. Right now we think there are around six to ten on the island. We don’t know much about the health of the population — maybe your park ranger friend will look into that — but we have found dead deer around the island over the years. No natural predators on the island though, so right now we hunt one or two a year, in season.”
“The dead deer — the dead animals you find — Maggie mentioned them. Do you know how or why they’ve died? If it’s not predators, is it toxicity?”
Tuck didn’t answer at first.
“You’re eating the deer, right?”
“It’s as safe as eating factory-farmed hamburger regularly, I’m sure.”
“No, it’s not. The two are not analogous. Hormones and antibiotics in farmed meat might contribute to disease in humans, but they’re not directly tied to carcinogenic activity.”
“Contribution to disease and carcinogenic activity are analogous.” He seemed irritated. “You can find levels of carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins in all the farmers’ market heirloom produce and grass-fed cattle you eat in Seattle. There’s aluminum and mercury in breast milk. There’s no escaping it.”
“But proximity to contamination increases toxicity to more immediately dangerous levels. I get that a couple generations of ‘better living through chemicals’ has affected the food chain everywhere and concentrated in human bodies, too, but you chose to come here, where it’s not just possible but verifiable that the level of contamination is higher and more of a threat.”
Tuck’s jaw tensed; he wanted to argue, it was obvious, but he held back. Why? Why not let me have it?
My temple throbbed and my hand went on its own, massaging the vein there. He handed me his water bottle and I took a swig.
“You will see,” he said, quietly. “Just follow me.”
The forest of the outer island became denser and the undergrowth more diverse, Oregon grape, salal, sword ferns, and hillocks of dense mosses and liverworts. The recent rain, followed by a stretch of unseasonably warm days, had combined to bring out the fungi — many more of them than I ever remembered seeing in the woods on Orwell. The topography of the island was like Orcas, with variations in elevation as the rocky, uneven shoreline rose to small peaks, sometimes with vistas of the entire sound. We climbed steadily up the forested hillside, and I asked more questions about the island’s plant and animal life. I asked questions that I knew the answers to, just to see how Tuck would answer them. I couldn’t tell if he was putting on a show for me. His answers were confident and not economical, so that there were large spaces of time when I tuned him out entirely. He had studied the ecology; he had spent his few years on Marrow building better graywater and waste systems, studying the way forest health affected the well water. He had earned his confidence but not his patronizing tone. I was more and more disgusted that Katie had ended up with a guy who was so deeply a chauvinist.
He quickened his pace up the hill we were climbing, seeming anxious to get to the other side. I heard running water ahead and climbed after him, following as he crested the hill and stepped aside at the top, stood on the stump of a fallen tree. When I arrived, he reached out his hand. I stared at it for a moment, then took it and let him pull me up, joining him on the stump, stepping over the ebullient orange fungi that oozed from the edges. We were looking down into a gully. Every tree still standing on the hills around us was rusted to black over the trunk and branches. The ArPac smokestacks loomed, almost as tall as the trees here, but farther down the creek. The fire — or at least the oily smog of it — had been funneled into this gully. The long, narrow impressions of fallen tree trunks — the ones that would have fallen in the quake, as the topsoil was shaken and roots unearthed — were prostrated over the opposite hillside, pointed straight down into the creek bed. But the forest floor was alive; up and down the hillside, ferns, mosses, grasses, and young trees issued from the singed earth beneath, a vivid chartreuse layer over the decay.
I almost didn’t see them at first — what Tuck had brought me there to see. I stepped down from the stump and carefully made my way down the steep path to the creek. I slipped, skidding down the embankment into a fallen tree, my boot gouging into the red-tinged soil, revealing underneath a network of spidery white threads exposed. I sat up to get a closer look, and there they were, right in front of me: mushrooms — buoyant clusters of chocolate caps on slender, eggy stems. From the ground I could see them everywhere, up the hill behind me, off the trail, farther into the undergrowth. Tuck came down to help me, but I shooed his hand away. I crawled along the ground. Grasses and weedy, spent flowers towered over them, sheltered them, in many places, but lifting fern fronds revealed dozens of them, hundreds. I climbed up and scanned the forest floor all around me. Now that I knew to look for them, I could see them everywhere. Across the creek they grew in the slender trenches of dead wood laid by the fallen trees, like rows of vegetables growing neatly in a garden.