“I have something for you, Sister.”
She opens her eyes and tries to focus on what I’m holding in my hands. She lifts her head. She can’t focus her glassy stare, but she knows what they are. She nods. Her head falls back to the pillow.
She’s bereaved and she’s in pain. She’s as ready to leave this world as anyone I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t thought about how I would give them to her. She can’t chew them — she might choke if I just put one in her mouth. What might Maggie have done at the Colony with a patient who couldn’t eat, couldn’t swallow a pill? She reaches a mantis arm toward me, and I take her hand. I know what I need to do. I put them in my mouth and chew. I take a breath, close my eyes, and lean down to kiss her sunken mouth.
Sister Rosie brings me an extra blanket and some tea around 10 p.m. One sister at a time comes to sit at the end of the bed to pray, silently. Only the occasional rustle of cloth or mouth-breathing or jangle of the rosary breaks the silence. Janet stopped making any vocalizations some time ago, after the kiss, when the room lit up so bright I couldn’t stand it. Enough of the psychedelics had entered my bloodstream from my saliva that I was having a mild trip of my own. I watched her body glowing and shaking under the sheet, then she was calm. She was so hot, a fever of burning off what was left of her life. Janet’s eyes never open, but I speak softly in her ear. “You’re on your way, Sister. Do you feel it? Is this what you wanted?”
At some point I rest my head beside Janet’s and hold her hand, her arm laying cold against the inside of my arm on the sheet. I think of Maggie, asleep at the women’s penitentiary, sending my thoughts to her like beams of light, so that she can please, please, be with Janet in the end. I watch her chest rise and fall by the millimeter, every ten seconds, then every twenty, then the quietest fireworks I’ve ever seen and my head is on fire.
Early in the morning, I wake to Sister Monica’s hand on my shoulder. The priest has come for Janet’s last rites. I stand aside while he anoints her forehead, her lips, and she lies still as a saint. He speaks to her, quietly, right in her ear, but she says nothing. I want to tell him she’s already gone, that I saw what was left of her escape hours ago. Sister Rosie takes my hand and strokes it gently, awkwardly. When Father Peter has finished, the sisters file out of the room. Sister Rosie kisses my hand and says, “Bless you, child.” I wonder if any of them will know what I’ve done. I’m still blinking away the shock. She guides me to my chair at Janet’s side again. Her fingers have curled. I pick up her hand; it feels impermanent as a flower.
Eleven. THE ISLANDS
ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 13, 2014
CAREY AND I didn’t talk much on the crossing. I was holding fast to my cup of Oswego tea, riding the waves of seasickness like it was my only job. Without the energy to fight it, I decided to give myself to the feeling, to move with it, instead of fighting it. I watched Orwell and fixed my gaze on it, letting myself drift there on the sea welling up inside me.
On the dock, Carey asked if he could buy me a cup of coffee. We agreed to meet at the Nootka Rose, near the ferry terminal. In my car, the first thing I did was check my voicemail. There were two messages, both from Chris Lelehalt.
The first explained that my neighbor, Mr. Swenson, couldn’t be reached and didn’t appear to have been admitted to any nearby hospitals. His family had been contacted.
The second said that his family had been reached and was unaware of Mr. Swenson’s location. They wondered if I might come in to make an official statement.
I thought back to what I had seen at Rookwood: the windows, the lamps, the suitcase, his glasses and medications. I tried to tell myself that there could be a logical explanation — but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t remember if I had mentioned the red car under tarpaulins in the carriage house to Chris — had they checked it? I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay at the cottage by myself.
Carey was sitting at a table by the window at the Nootka Rose. I had spent many Saturday mornings eating pancakes with my dad at the same table. I always chose it for its view. When the waitress came, I ordered a full breakfast along with my coffee. Carey gave me an appraising look and did the same.
“My neighbor is missing,” I said to him, and told him about the lamp in the window, the scene at Rookwood.
“That’s troubling,” he said.
“I’m not sure what to do. It’s unsettling, staying out there alone.”
I wanted to tell him the rest — about the Swensons’ ownership of the Colony, and how Jacob’s disappearance would put their tenancy, and all their work, in jeopardy. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed likely that once the family knew what was going on out there — the remediation had increased the habitability and possibility for development — they would be evicted. But I still wasn’t sure if Carey could be trusted — if he told the wrong person in the government bureaucracy, they could use the information to get them evicted, too.
Our food came, and I changed the subject. We talked about Marrow, the meal the night before — his only real experience of the Colony.
“It’s interesting to me that they’ve given themselves to this environmental effort,” Carey said, “with such a religious bent to it.”
“You mean Sister’s sermon?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some earth-worshippers, hippies, Wiccans out gathering herbs during the new moon — but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group like this. I mean — they’re Christian, right? Sister J. is Catholic?”
“She was a Catholic sister, but she left the order. The Sisters of the Holy Family. They were the sisters who ran my high school. They’re pretty progressive, but Sister’s activism didn’t go over well with the archbishop. I think she was about to be excommunicated.”
“Well, it was a new one for me. What was your impression, after spending some time with them?”
I had been thinking about it, through the night and on the boat from Marrow to Orwell. Sorting through my feelings for Katie, her marriage, the devotion they all seemed to show Sister J. and her mission. And Marrow Island itself: a graveyard. It would always be a graveyard. And the Colony — Sister J.’s mission — it was a kind of salve to a wound that never healed. The resurrection Sister talked about didn’t feel real to me — using mushrooms to remediate the soil was out there, but it was still biology, science — there was no promise of Heaven in that. But it did make me feel something. Hope, maybe. That the event that killed my father wouldn’t be a footnote in the history of environmental science, but the beginning of a new field of research.
Carey was waiting for me to say something, watching me sort through these thoughts.
“I think they’re brave,” I said, finally. “I think that they’re doing something no one else would dare to do, and it’s this sense of… spiritual obligation that compels them to do it.”
Carey’s eyes narrowed. He knew I wasn’t telling him the whole story. I waited for him to ask me what I knew, but he didn’t. He was waiting for me to tell him, so I changed the subject.
“I’m thinking of living out here for a while,” I told him.
“Oh?”
“I can write from here, and I can’t really afford my apartment in Seattle anymore.”
He asked more about the cottage, about Orwell Island. The more we talked, the more I liked him. There was something steady about him, an easy, thoughtful manner that told me he didn’t react rashly to anything. I needed that kind of energy; I craved it. My dad had that energy. At his wake, his people praised him for being level-headed, trustworthy. He was the kind of guy who didn’t run for help in an emergency, but examined the problem and stuck around to fix it himself. They said this is probably what got him killed. He probably died trying to put the fires out.