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He’d been poised there in the doorway, urgent and impatient, and his face told her what should have been evident from the moment they boarded the ship or before that even, when Ida had come to her to say she was leaving because she was going to have a baby nobody wanted. There were three men in the household and one girl. Or woman. She was a woman now, by default. And he didn’t care if she never saw the inside of a schoolroom again. He needed a cook. And she was elected.

But the stove wouldn’t light and the food hadn’t been sorted or the dishes washed or the floor swept. She looked round her grimly. There was no water. No apron. Every pot and pan was blackened and crusted over and what was she to scrub them with? Where was the soap? The washcloth?

And cook? Cook what? She’d never cooked a thing in her life, not even an egg. For as long as she could remember, they’d had a cook in the house. Before Ida it had been Mrs. Hedges, who’d served as nanny as well, and on the cook’s day off her mother would boil a handful of potatoes to go with the cold roast Mrs. Hedges had set aside the night before. If she was hungry, there was always food, and sometimes, when she was little, Mrs. Hedges would indulge her by allowing her to climb up on a stool and use the spatula to turn her own cheese sandwich in the pan so that it browned evenly on both sides. She’d baked cookies with her mother, of course, like any other girl, and after her mother fell ill she liked to sit in the kitchen feeling blessed and warm and protected while Mrs. Hedges fussed about and the smell of baking bread or corn muffins filled the room, and then later, when Ida took over, she’d drift into the kitchen to gossip as Ida stood at the counter rolling out dough or peeling potatoes or measuring out rice in a cup, but that hardly qualified her as a cook or even a cook’s helper. And Ida was gone. And so was her mother.

She got to her feet and wiped her hands on her coat. The kindling just wouldn’t seem to catch, each match igniting a ball of paper in a quick crackling bloom that sent up pale snaking tendrils of flame and then died as it reached the wood above, and now it had become a challenge, a contest between her and the powers of the universe. She was angry, frustrated, cold, lonely, hateful, but she set her brain to it. She tried the handle on the flue — it should be straight up and down, shouldn’t it? Another ball of paper, another match. Nothing. She crumpled more paper, opened the vents and separated the individual sticks of kindling to widen the gaps and admit more air, blew on the wavering tentative flame till she ran out of breath, and still nothing. Maybe the kindling wasn’t dry enough, maybe it had somehow absorbed the dampness of the house. She removed it all, stick by stick, set it beside her on the floor and reached into the box beside the stove for more — and this was dry, certainly it was, dry as the paper itself. Painstakingly, she set one stick across the other, beginning with the smaller ones and working her way up.

She was bent over the open door of the stove, her lips pursed, fanning the ghost of a flame and blowing softly till it quivered and rose and died again, when the back door swung open and Jimmie came in out of the dark. Crouched there on her knees in the dirt, her hair in her eyes and her skirts and petticoat filthy already, she could only scowl at him. “It won’t light,” she said.

“Won’t light?” He gave her a smile that was like a tic, formed and fled before it registered. His arms hung loose, his jaw went slack. This was the first good look she’d had of him since they landed, and if she was miserable, if she hated the sight of this place and of him too because he was part and parcel of it, the presiding spirit, Caliban, she was curious at the same time. He’d changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him last. There seemed to be more to him. More breadth to his shoulders, a firmness to the legs she remembered as being so scrawny and shapeless she wondered how they’d managed to keep him upright. He wore the spotty beginnings of a mustache over his lip, twists of dark hair like plants stuck randomly in the soil of a frost-killed garden. His hair crawled down his neck. His clothes were worn to threads. Jimmie. He was Jimmie all the same.

“I’ve been trying for the past ten minutes.” She stood, brushing her hands on her skirt. “I twisted the flue back and forth and I’m sure it’s open—”

“Let me have a look,” he said, going to his knees so fast it was as if he were diving for cover. Balancing on one hand, he thrust his head through the open gap of the stove, peering upward. “I don’t see nothing,” he said, his voice echoing in the pipe. In the next moment he was on his feet again, standing beside her, and she felt a pulse of satisfaction: he was still shorter than she was.

“Could it be the pipe? Is the pipe stopped up?”

“Could be,” he said, bending to pluck a length of stovewood from the box. “I couldn’t say, really, because I’ve been doing my cooking out in the bunkhouse since Mr. Reed that was here come out to the island. Here, let me try this”—and before she could think to slam shut the door he hammered the pipe with the length of wood, the pipe gave back a corresponding thump and rattle, and there was soot everywhere. “There,” he said, and he sneezed three times in rapid succession, “that ought to do it. Go ahead and light it now.”

She waited a moment till the air cleared, then bent again to the stove and the kindling there and put the match to it. This time it took and the next thing she knew she was feeding the fire with progressively thicker sticks and it was already rising and snapping and throwing off heat. “Thank you,” she said. “I should have thought to do that myself.”

There was a silence. She warmed her hands at the fire and he moved in beside her, holding out his palms to the blaze. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello? What do you mean, ‘hello’?”

“Well, we didn’t have a chance — I saw you at the beach, of course, when you came in, but I didn’t, not till now… What I mean is, we haven’t seen each other in such a long while and I thought I’d just say hello. Again. After all this time. How are you? Are you well?”

“I was well,” she said, “till I came out here.”

“You look beautiful.”

She heard him as if from a great distance, as if she were in the dining hall at school and his voice was carrying across the waves all the way up the coast and over the rooftops, and she despised him, she did, but she was already thinking of what he might be worth to her and what he might do for her and how she could use him as an ally in the war she was already engaged in, whether she was ready for it or not. She brought her eyes up. Her voice went soft. “Hello,” she said. And then: “It’s nice to see you again.”

Graveyard of the Pacific

So she became a cook. Not a dancer, not a singer, not a student, but a cook. On an island that was known, if it was known at all, for its wrecks, for the fogs that sucked it into invisibility, the winds that sheared round Point Conception to snap masts and tatter sails and drive ships up on its rocks, for the shriek of rending wood. People called it the Graveyard of the Pacific. She called it Nowhere. At night, when she lay in her damp bed — everything damp, always damp, mold creeping over the mattress like a wet licking tongue and the walls beaded with condensation — she listened to the wind, to the distant tolling of ship’s bells and the fading ghostly cries of the foxes that were no bigger than a cat, and her mind spun away into fantasies of escape. She wished she had a boat. Wished she could swim like a fish. Or just walk across the water like Jesus, but then Jesus never faced such surf in the Sea of Galilee. Or wind. Or sharks. Or the ghost of the Chinaman you could hear wailing on nights when the moon was dark because he’d had to sever his own hand with a rusty knife and leave it there wedged between two rocks or drown with the tide.