I stared into the bottom of the sack. The rabbit’s broken neck folded up, its milky eyes looking somewhere above me. Was this what she was thinking about when she rested her head on my shoulder?
She reset the trap and we walked on.
Not all of the traps were the same, and not all of the rabbits were dead. For the living she had a BB gun, also in the sack. I tried not to look alarmed when she pulled it out. She raised it and aimed squarely between the terrified animal’s ears. I forced myself to watch the life twitch out of them. Katie closed her eyes briefly after each one, looking less pained by the act of killing than I would have expected. How many rabbits had she killed?
One trap had only a back leg left in it — a fox had eaten it, maybe. Or it had torn itself free. Katie freed the furry little foot, a grim, satisfied smile on her lips.
We took the rabbits to the kitchen, where Katie, one man, and another woman showed me how to cut off the heads and the back legs at the joint, skin, and gut them. The sound of the skin tearing free made me feel my own skin in a way I never had.
Washing blood from my hands in a basin full of stone-cold seawater didn’t feel like praying. It felt like penance.
Eight. THE RIVER
HANFORD REACH, WASHINGTON
MAY 7, 2016
IT’S OVER SIX hours from the Malheur to Spokane. I told Carey I would wear the GPS watch the whole time, and here it is on my wrist, tiny red light flickering in the dark. I imagine him watching it beat like a tiny red heart on a screen somewhere, in the middle of a digital Palouse.
As I crossed from Oregon to Washington, I gassed up in Kennewick. There were signs for the Reach — this long stretch of the Columbia River near the Hanford Site. It was twenty miles out of my way, but I wanted to see the place where the retired nukes go.
A broad expanse of river on a plain, a wetland alive with birds and insects, a distant cluster of concrete buildings, an alien city surrounded by volcanic hills as desolate as the surface of the moon. It surprises me, how beautiful it all is; how calm I feel, sitting on the banks of a river rumored to harbor radioactive effluent. No one believes in containment, despite the Department of Energy’s official statements. But people still live here, raise children downstream.
I think about how we keep making these beds, and the only real choice is choosing which one to sleep in. The one with the loveliest view? The cheapest cost of living? The vibrant nightlife and culture?
Sister J. is lying in her bed over a hundred miles from here, still alive.
My hand is in the pocket of my sweater, resting on a small metal tin. In the tin are a dozen dried wavy caps, Psilocybe cyanescens. They’re the only things I could think she might want from me.
Nine. THE ISLANDS
MARROW ISLAND, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 12, 2014
“WE’RE ALL STILL waiting for the ‘Big One,’ aren’t we?” Sister J. was walking the shore with me before midday meal. We gathered seaweed, which they washed and dried and stored for food and medicine. The tide was low and the beach widened into mud flats.
“The big earthquake? I guess we are,” I said. “Or any other earthquake, with all the faults we’re living on.”
“Your father died here, didn’t he?”
“At the refinery, yes.” I wasn’t sure where these questions were going, but it didn’t feel like Sister was just trying to get to know me.
“And it took you some time, but you came back. To see the place where he died, to be here.”
I didn’t respond. I busied myself cutting a bunch of bladderwrack from a rock. She tromped over to me with a bunch of her own and put it in the basket beside me.
“Does it feel safe here to you, now?”
“Not when I’m being interrogated by women religious,” I said.
Sister cackled and slapped her knee, then fell into a coughing fit. I put a hand on her back and held her arm to steady her. We each had a small, sharp foraging knife in one hand. She finished her deep hacking and chuckle-coughed some more. When she was done, she was out of breath. I settled her on a rock and sat beside her, dropping our tools in the basket. She seemed older than her fifty-seven years.
“I admire your boundaries, Lucie,” she said when she had regained her breath. “I know it’s not easy to talk about loss, even years afterward.”
“I don’t mind talking about what happened, but I feel like there’s a riddle here, like this conversation isn’t really about me coming back,” I said.
“I apologize. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying until I’ve talked my way around it for a while.”
We sat for a moment, watching a pair of gulls squabbling near the water’s edge.
“What does my father’s death have to do with earthquakes? Besides the fact that he died after one?”
“I’ve noticed, over the years, that people are much more comfortable talking about the tragedies that have passed than the tragedies that are to come.”
“That’s probably true.”
“After the May Day Quake, people rebuilt, despite knowing that there would be other earthquakes, even bigger ones. Why? Why, when you know untold danger is imminent, do people stay? Invest time and money in a city that may crumble again?”
I thought for a moment and said, “I think we trick ourselves into believing we are safe, that we’ve learned from the past and can survive what comes, so that we can continue to live in the world, have relationships with each other.”
“What if we’re not tricking ourselves at all, though? What if we choose to take great risks so that others can continue to live in the world and have relationships with each other?”
“You’re talking about the Colony?”
Sister J. took a deep breath and let it out.
“Smell that air,” she said. “When I smell that air, I think, God is good.”
She lifted herself from the rock and picked up the basket.
“Sister, is the island making you sick? Has it been making others sick?” I stood so that we would be face to face.
“The island sustains us as we have sustained it.” There was sadness in her eyes, though she smiled faintly. “And that is what we want the world to know.”
Sister J. didn’t join us for midday meal. We parted ways at the fork in the path; I headed up the hill to meet Katie, and she went down to meet Maggie. The colonists seemed subdued at the lunch tables; conversations were quiet and contemplative. No one mentioned the dying woman.
Katie and I sat alone at the end of a table. I told her about the conversation I had just had with Sister. She chewed her greens and stared at a knot in the woodgrain.
“What do you think she was trying to tell me, Katie?”
“When I wrote you — four months ago? — things here were a little different. We were feeling confident that our method had been successful, that after twenty years, we might be able to share what we had learned. I thought that you might come and write about us — about Sister J.’s mission — and that maybe it would bring some donors our way, so that we could expand the cleanup to the refinery site itself.”
“So you do want me to write about the Colony?”
“I thought that you might.”
“If you wanted me to come to write a story, why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I wanted to see you, too. We haven’t seen each other in so long, I didn’t know, I guess, if this would work. And Sister wasn’t sold on the idea.”
“She didn’t want me to come?”