“Of course I do.” I said it softly, baffled by her tone, by the viciousness. “I meant at the Colony. This is — it’s shocking, Katie, to come across a funeral procession like this. And a burial ground; this is like a pioneer cemetery — is this even legal? Is this part of Sister’s mission?” I followed her across the plots, careful not to walk over any of the graves.
“People die everywhere, all the time,” she said. “Death isn’t part of the mission; it’s part of life. We found a way to deal with it — a safe, humane, natural way. It may not be legal, but it’s what they wanted — to return to the earth, to continue to be part of the island, not pumped full of chemicals and artificially preserved.”
She stared at her feet. We were standing at what would have been the back of the house, in the west corner.
A bedroom, I thought. We’re standing in the bedroom. This is where the window would have been, looking out at the sea.
I stood there and watched the clouds darken behind Waldron Island, until I noticed that Katie was still staring at our feet. I looked down. At first I saw nothing but milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, then I made out the indentation in the earth, the small black mushrooms pushing up at the edges, the tiny cairn, nearly swallowed by the grasses. But this one was so much smaller than the rest; it was the length of a shoebox. There was another to my left, only slightly longer. I searched the grass to the right, turned around to look behind us. This entire corner of the plot was marked with small graves. Some of them looked very old; only their cairns stood out.
“Oh my god, Katie.”
She wept and said nothing.
“Are these graves?” I started to count them but stopped myself. “Katie, what the hell? Are these animals? Tell me they’re animals.”
Nothing. Silence. She held her breath and wouldn’t look at me.
“If they’re not animals…?” I was shaking.
“They’re babies.”
I let this thought settle, the jaded journalist in me sorting through all the plausible reasons why they might have so many dead babies on Marrow.
“How many are there?”
“Six. This is Sucia. She was the last one. Her heart stopped beating at six months’ gestation. Her mother carried her for three months after that and delivered her dead.”
“Who’s her mother?”
“Me. She was mine.” She wasn’t crying anymore, but there was a distance in her eyes, her body and her mind were on different islands.
“Jesus, Katie, why didn’t you tell me? When did this happen?”
“In the spring, right before I wrote you.”
I looked at her baggy overalls and sweater. The way she had grown into a woman’s body since I’d seen her last.
“We were hopeful; conditions had improved so much. But all the early exposure must have built up. Ten years here, plus living on Orwell for the years after the quake — all the dispersants that washed ashore, you remember?” She looked at me again and I nodded. Her voice was low, firm. “The early exposure was the worst, before the remediation. Maggie was really careful about charting cycles. After a year or so, periods were irregular among almost all the women. Skipping months or bleeding every other week a little bit. Everyone was supposed to be practicing birth control, but accidents happened. Miscarriages are common everywhere, so it didn’t alarm anyone for some time. Maggie has herbal recipes for abortions, too. Some chose to go that route. But when the babies started dying in the womb or coming too soon — there weren’t that many, but enough — they knew. They knew.” She squatted and plucked the mushrooms from the grave. Put them in a small basket she’d carried shells in, for Sarah’s grave. She crawled around on her knees, plucking the mature mushrooms from all the graves.
I got down on my knees to help her. Most of the graves had the small, wavy-capped brown mushrooms, but others, the older ones, had only a few shaggy-topped white and brown fruits. I gathered as many as I could hold, then crawled over to Katie and added them to her basket.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“Medicine,” she said, not looking up. “At the end of life, they help with pain.”
She stopped, sat on her butt, and stared at Sarah’s grave. I joined her.
“Sarah had cancer?”
“Yes.”
“Does Sister have cancer?”
She nodded.
“This is fucked up, Katie.”
“You have no right to judge,” she said, shaking her head calmly. “No one knows when or how they’ll die — no matter what choices they make. The Big One could wipe us out tomorrow, thousands of us at once. We’re killing ourselves slowly with carbon emissions, melting glaciers. At least we want to do something with the time we’ve got.”
“But you’ve been selling honey from your bees, milk from your goats, eggs from your chickens. Do the people buying these things know the risks they’re taking?”
“We only started doing that recently. The water and soil samples for the last few years have shown levels of heavy metal contamination better than soil in sample gardens off the island. Water from the wells has come up clean, again and again in the last two years. Cleaner than water you drink in Seattle. It’s working. It worked.”
“So you were crying because the experiment worked and you have no regrets?”
She picked up her basket and stood up.
“Just because I have no regrets doesn’t mean I can’t grieve what we’ve lost and what we’re losing.”
She was standing over me, crying again. I reached a hand out to hers, but she wouldn’t hold it. She shook it off, wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“Katie, I don’t know what to do with all this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I came here.” I stopped, my fingers digging into the dirt and grass. “I thought I could write about this place and find some way to be okay with it — with what happened here.”
“And what, Lucie? What? Now you can’t write your stirring memoir? Your redemption in the wilderness piece? Did we fuck that up for you?”
I saw in her eyes a Katie I had known before — one I didn’t like to remember. There was pity and disgust. And fear. This was the Katie who would say anything to hurt me, to see how much she could say to me before I walked away. This was the Katie who had looked me in the eye when we were eighteen and told me that she had never loved me the way I loved her, that she had only been practicing with me.
“I know something about Tuck,” I said.
She was silent for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“I know that his name is Alex James Tucker.”
She stared down at me, bleary-eyed.
“Okay,” she said. “What are you trying to say?”
I found it hard to believe that in a place with so many secrets, she wasn’t also in on this one.
“I’m saying I know who he is. And I think you knew I would find out, eventually.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know anything. He’s not the man they say he is. He didn’t hurt anyone. They were set up.”
“I get it, Katie. The government has it in for radical environmentalists — you don’t have to tell me.”
“You won’t say anything.”
“There are too many secrets here, Katie. The Colony has been operating under the radar for a long time. If you know what happened to Jacob Swenson, you need to tell me. They’re looking for him, and it won’t be long before they come asking you questions.”
“You’re sitting there by my child’s grave, accusing me of keeping secrets? Killing our landlord?”
I looked down at my hands. I was still holding one of the mushrooms, which had turned blue under the pressure of my fingers.
“Where is he? What happened to him?”