“We didn’t do anything, Lucie. We have no reason to hurt him.”
I stood up.
“I can’t unknow any of this, Katie. I don’t know how to help you or the Colony. I’m just worried about you — you can’t stay here.” I gestured to Sucia’s grave.
She turned abruptly and started walking between the graves back to the path. I followed.
“Katie, please,” I called after her.
She walked faster.
“I’m sorry.” I was crying. I would’ve said anything to stop hurting her. “I won’t say anything.” I knew I was lying when I said it.
She stopped in her tracks but didn’t face me. She let me catch up to her.
“I love you,” I said.
She had stopped crying. She took my hand and started walking.
“I love you, too.”
We were both lying.
Tuck was sitting on the steps of their cottage, waiting. When she saw him, Katie looked back at me, her face a calm veil. She dropped my hand and adjusted her basket. He waved as we came closer, stood up to hug Katie. He didn’t look angry, just grim. He didn’t seem like the violent type. I was willing to believe that he had been young and stupid, involved in a direct action campaign gone awry, and that he hadn’t intended for anyone to get hurt.
Katie would tell him, of course.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told him, holding out my hand. Katie pulled away from him.
“We appreciate that,” he said, and pulled me in for a hug. His affection — if that’s what this was — was disorienting.
“Sister wanted me to ask you to have tea with her,” he told me. “She’s waiting for you in her cottage.”
I wanted to be alone for a few minutes, to sort my thoughts. Part of my brain was trying to find a way out of knowing what I knew; the other wanted to try to get a cell signal and call Carey. But I didn’t know what I’d tell him. That there had been a funeral? That they had a burial ground? It was unnerving, yes, but I didn’t actually know if it was illegal. They were skirting the county coroner and avoiding the scrutiny that would no doubt come their way if a medical professional autopsied their dead. There were probably regulations on where cemeteries could be, and how bodies had to be prepared for interment. When I thought about it, their method made more sense to me than embalming or cremation: let the mushrooms do their work and turn the bodies into dirt.
I just wanted to hear the sane, clear voice of someone who wasn’t drinking the Marrow Colony tea. I checked my phone. It was still charged, but I had no signal.
Sister’s cottage was nearest the chapel. It was easily the oldest structure still standing on the island. The front door was open so I stepped inside. I could hear rattling in the kitchen and found Sister loading a tray with three cups and a teapot. She was stronger than her frame suggested, but I offered to take it from her when she turned around, and she passed it to me with a gracious smile.
“That’s kind of you,” she said. She followed me into the living room, where I set the tray on a coffee table between a loveseat and two armchairs. “Thank you so much for coming to see us.” The authority of her voice, the undulating rhythm of the oratory, was gone. I sat on the loveseat.
“Us?”
“Maggie will be back from her walk soon.”
I nodded. I couldn’t remember if someone had told me they lived together or not.
“I’m so sorry for the loss of your friend, Sister.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “She must have meant a lot to all of you.”
She watched me very carefully. “Some people come into your life at just the right moment, and without any awareness of it themselves, they bring something you never knew you needed. Sarah was one of those people.”
We sat in silence. Sister leaned forward to pour the tea just as Maggie walked through the door. She closed it behind her. She stomped off her boots and hung her field coat on a hook. She looked tired, but her cheeks were flushed from her walk in the island air. Her gray hair was pulled back into a messy bun, strands blown about around her face.
She reached out for my hand, took it in both of hers firmly, then sat in the other chair opposite me, next to Sister.
I repeated my condolences. Maggie smiled gratefully but seemed resolved to carry on with some sort of business.
“Your visit happened to coincide with our loss.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Sister said. “Lucie is here for a reason, like all of us.”
“I don’t know about that,” I demurred.
“You lost your father on the island.”
There was a familiar sinking in my chest, but I knew how not to react. I had many years of practice, hearing the pity in voices, the oblique references to my failings, my brokenness, as a result of my deep, untamed sadness. Everything I did, good or bad, for years after the quake was traced back to that loss, by everyone who knew.
“It was a long time ago.” I didn’t want them to use my father against me.
“And yet, here we all are,” Sister said. “Brought together in grief.”
I said nothing.
“How did Sarah die?” I asked, finally.
“Cancer,” Maggie said. “But you guessed that.” The ebullient woman I had met in the dairy was gone.
“Your tea is getting cold,” Sister said, to either or both of us.
Maggie and I looked at her. Sister picked up her own cup and drank it down. I watch the steam rise from our cups on the table. I could smell mint, other herbs, and an underlying bitterness — some root, maybe? I picked up my cup and took a sip. It was lukewarm, not pleasurably hot anymore. The mint was there and something lemony, but there was a dirty undertone, something gritty and fermented, like rotting apple.
Maggie saw the look on my face.
“Reishi mushrooms,” she said, flatly. “That’s what you’re tasting. We drink them, we eat them: they’re in everything. The Chinese have used them for thousands of years medicinally.”
“For cancer,” I said. I was aware of the reishi sold in supplement form and the health claims.
“And fertility, and the circulatory system, and the liver…” Maggie said.
“But Sarah’s cancer — the reishi didn’t save her?”
Maggie looked disgusted. “It’s not magic. Not everything works for everybody, for every illness. Sarah tried many different treatments. We did everything we could.”
“So everything here is part of the project? Even your bodies?”
“We have an opportunity to use the oldest of the earth’s medicines against the newest of the world’s diseases.”
“What happens when they don’t work?”
“We manage the pain,” Sister cut in. “Just like the doctors in hospitals do, after they’ve irradiated and poisoned all the cells in a body and the cancer returns.”
“But you knew that you would make yourselves sick. There are babies in that graveyard, burial ground, whatever you call it. Women lost their children. You lost another generation. You put yourselves in the way of certain suffering and death.” The cup was getting colder in my hands, the taste of the tea sour on the sides of my tongue.
“Lucie.” Sister’s voice was soft, pliant. She wasn’t the orator now; this was a plea. “We have nothing but this. We have one life each and one death. What comes between birth and death is up to us. You put yourself in the way of death every time you get in a car, every time you drink alcohol or eat hamburger. The entire population of the industrialized world is putting itself in the way of certain death and suffering. The only choice for us is to live in service to each other and to the planet itself. That’s how we put ourselves in the way of God’s love.”
“What am I supposed to do, Sister?” I searched her face, her expression. She searched mine. She was the kind of woman who would be ignored, written off, invisible to almost everyone outside this island: fertility gone, beauty gone, vanity — if she ever had any — gone. But her eyes shone; her heart and mind certain. She had no doubt, no fear. She would walk into the fire whether anyone followed her or not.