What did she see in me? Would I walk into the fire with her? Or would I turn and run?
“You can do whatever you want, obviously,” Sister said. “You could stay here with us awhile longer. Spend more time with us, with the project. If you wanted to write about this place, it would be unfair to do so in haste. We’ve been here almost twenty years. We’ve invested our lives. Give us the time to show you.”
Sister looked to Maggie, who stared out the window, across the boundary waters, miles away.
“Whatever you do,” Sister said, “I would ask you to think of the harm it might do to our work here, all the work we’ve done to honor your father’s resting place.”
The tide was out, the muddy flats stretched away from the shore around the island, seaweed and driftwood and shells. The sun was trying to burn through the clouds, but the wind was blowing in more, bringing in darker clouds from the northwest. I had pulled on a sweater, but the wind blew right through the wool weave. I had packed so quickly, in the darkness before dawn. My windbreaker was hanging in the closet at the cottage, next to my dad’s field coat.
Everyone took the afternoon off from their work. Meals were makeshift — leftovers and bread and cheese and shellfish cooked over the fires they were making on the beach. They would stay as long as they could, on the shore, into the evening and night, Katie said, so they could send off paper lanterns and driftwood boats. If anyone boating saw us on the shore, we looked like late-season vacationers having a clambake.
I wandered the shoreline, looking for agates, moving my body to keep warm between sun breaks. There was a wet chill in the air; a portent of winter. Voices carried occasionally, a word here and there of conversation. Everything felt fractured. Where I had felt part of the gathering before, now I felt outside of it, outside of myself.
Katie came up behind me and took my arm. She didn’t say anything but walked with me for a while. I had seen her talking to Tuck, to Maggie. They seemed to agree to something — to leave me to Katie. I didn’t know how to talk to her. Something between us had gone astray — unapproachable but watchful, scavenging our scraps of conversation, feeding on our feelings. We sat on a log and watched the boats pass, the gulls pecking at the bull kelp and crab carapaces. I shivered and she put her arms around me, squeezed me tight. I tried to relax into her, but I felt a tug in my gut, like this was the end of us.
She released me and pulled out a flask.
“Thirsty?”
“What is it?” I asked. I realized I hadn’t eaten much that day. I hadn’t had anything but Maggie’s reishi tea in hours.
“Birch liquor. It’s like gin.”
I took the flask and drank. It was sharp and herbaceous, astringent. “It’s good.”
“Have it,” she said. “I have another one.” She patted her pocket.
I took another sip and felt it burn its way into my stomach.
I needed to eat something, I told her. So we made our way back to the others and found mussels in broth and chunks of sourdough. We sat there quietly, dunking our bread into a cast-iron pot of broth. I had been sure the lack of conversation was about my presence — they didn’t trust me now, they didn’t want to say anything in front of me — but now I thought it was just another of their silent observances, like the work prayer.
I drank from the flask and gradually felt warmed, inside and out. Others passed around a bottle of dandelion wine, then a bottle of elderberry. When the alcohol had sunk in, there was more talk. When I caught the voices, I heard only words that soothed me. The sounds of words like anemone and caldera and parish—or maybe it was perish? There was a languorousness to everyone’s movements. Hymns begun in mid-verse then ended, minor chords suspended in the air around us then swept away by the outgoing waves. Jen looked at me, her eyes both dark and shiny, like stars. She took my hand in both of hers, looking at it, feeling the weight of it, then she placed it tenderly back in my lap. I looked to Katie, who was stretched out at my feet. Katie smiled warmly at me, but we didn’t speak.
My stomach started to ache.
“I think I’ve had too much,” I told Katie. I felt the sudden need to shit. I started quickly up the beach to the Colony. It seemed miles away. I felt lightheaded. I didn’t notice Katie following me, but when I reached the closest toilet, behind the chapel, she was there behind me.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said, and I heard her feet trod off up the path.
I emptied my bowels but the cramping in my stomach continued. I tried to take deep breaths, but every inhale caused a stabbing pain.
I left the toilet and started walking. The fresh air and movement seemed to help. Katie caught me halfway up the hill to the bluff. She handed me a canteen, like the kind we carried as Girl Scouts. I stopped and looked at the pattern on the side for a moment—chevron, I thought — and Katie nudged me and told me to drink. The water was so cold going down my throat, but it didn’t help the pain and nausea rising. I kept walking, but slower.
“Katie, I feel really strange.”
“It’s okay. Keep walking. It’ll feel better in the woods. It always feels better in the woods.”
She took my arm and led me up the path, away from the Colony. I knew I had been on this path before, but I couldn’t place it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
“I don’t feel right, Katie.” All the plants looked like they were lighting up at the tips, flickering with green flames. Long fronds of fern vibrated, giving off waves.
“Do the trees seem taller to you?” I stepped off the trail and walked up to a cedar; its bark was warm to the touch and responsive like human skin.
“Katie! Come here!” She came and I reached for her, pulled her to the tree. “Feel this.”
And she did, stroking the bark like it was fur. She was wearing a sweater so I reached a hand under her shirt at her hip to feel her skin. She looked down at my hand curiously. With one hand on her body and the other on the tree, I felt a humming run through me. I pulled away.
Ravens called, loud and various, sometimes speaking in English.
“Katie, what’s happening?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s part of the grieving process.”
“What is?
“We all do it.” Her voice came rolling toward me, soft, then loud, then louder, then crashing into my ear. “It reminds us how connected we all are. We give them to the dying, too, to ferry them along to the lights.”
“Am I dying?” I asked, but I wasn’t angry with her — I felt unreasonably calm. I knew that I should be mad, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt the parts of my brain that reasoned, that wanted to make sense of everything, falling back, into the shadows. I noticed things, but I stopped forming coherent thoughts about what I saw or felt. I couldn’t feel the pain in my stomach anymore, though I sensed that something was happening there. I could feel the movement of the organ, its machinations. And the nausea — it was still there, still rolling and rising up through me in the same seasick waves I was so used to, but I wasn’t alarmed. It was a sensation that was happening in my body that made me want to move, so I pushed on through the trees.
I heard Katie behind me — heard her breathing in my ear — but when I looked back, she seemed so far away, down a long tunnel of green. I took her hand for a moment, but we slipped apart. We weren’t on the path anymore. I was pushing through bushes that scratched and spiderwebs that could choke me — I was sure of this — if I didn’t hold my breath.