Forest shook his head. “I don’t care why you took them.”
Most of my blood seemed to be trapped in my head. I was sure that my face was glowing like sunrise.
“Mick wasn’t the father,” Forest said, gesturing toward my stomach. “He said he would lie for you, and I went along with it. So we’re on the same page now,” he ended, his voice getting thick. “You know, and I know.”
These words seemed to cost him everything he had. His head sank, his arms falling to his sides. It was strange seeing him like this. He looked and moved exactly like the Forest I remembered, but everything about his manner was different. His posture. His level of focus. The emotion radiating from him. I felt as though I were meeting him for the first time, on this sunny, breathy afternoon, after living under his roof for a year.
He passed a hand across his brow, like a man waking from a dream.
“I should go,” he said. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk right now.”
I nodded. Gripping the corner of the desk, I hauled myself to my feet. But Forest was already out the door. I watched him leave, silhouetted against the sea.
THAT NIGHT I got down on my knees and looked under my bed for the first time in ages. There were my watertight tubs of photographic equipment. There were my work boots. There were dust bunnies, and sweaters, and a hat, and a rock, and a few sad, bent coat hangers. At last I found the camera. I sat up again, the baby kicking irritably at my groin. I worked the button with my thumb, flicking the pictures along. The moon. The coast guard house. A gleam against a black window. A shimmer of bodies in motion. Two torsos touching and parting like dancers in a pas de deux. Faces turned toward each other, a line of darkness between them. Inches away.
Resolutely I got to my feet. I knew that Forest was in the kitchen. I could hear him talking to Galen, their voices rising up the staircase along with the smell of cinnamon tea. Moving quietly, I hurried down the hall. I eased into Forest’s room without turning on the light. I set the camera in his desk drawer. Before I slipped back out of the room, I took one last look at the image that was still visible on the screen. Two faces, iridescent profiles, poised on the verge of a kiss.
39
I SPENT MY LAST day on the islands indoors. It began raining at dawn, a gentle misting, the sort of drizzle that seemed likely to blow over. An hour later, however, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain picked up, a steady, roiling gush. The landscape was blurred by curtains of silver. I could barely pick out the gray expanse of the ocean through that downpour.
Still, Galen was in an exhilarated mood. He had taken the boat out early, at sunrise, before the storm had settled in. He described the morning, which had still been fine then. The sea had been flat, opaque. He had been fired with a distinct impression of sharks nearby. He had felt them coming. It was getting to be their time, the warm weather drawing them back from their winter vacation homes. Any day now, the first kill might be glimpsed from the lighthouse.
After breakfast, the biologists elected to walk to the murre blind. The men bundled themselves up beneath ponchos and sweaters. Lucy had a swollen wrist; she had fallen on the rocks and caught herself at a bad angle. (I had helped her to bandage the joint. Lucy and I will never be friends — I will be glad to see the back of her when I leave the islands for good — but we get by. While I wrapped the gauze, she had gently guided my movements.) The three of them barged onto the porch. Through the window, I watched as the downpour swallowed them up.
Once they were gone, I decided to sneak into their rooms. To intrude on these private spaces, I knew, was a flagrant breach of confidence. Full-grown adults did not normally live in this kind of collegiate community, without privacy. As a rule, we did the best we could to maintain what boundaries we had.
But I was in a mood. I entered Galen’s sanctum first. I wanted to see his famous — infamous — collection before I departed. As I had suspected, his room was as tidy as his mind: immaculately organized, a place for everything and everything in its place. His museum of relics and specimens was all that I’d hoped for. A length of twine hung above his window, and rows of gleaming feathers were pinned there like beads on a chain. Shells of various sizes glimmered on the nightstand. There was a glass jar filled with what at first seemed to be buttons, but on closer inspection turned out to be dead beetles. The desk had been taken over by the half-assembled skeleton of a bird, an array of slim white bones. I knew there was more hidden in boxes and drawers, but I did not dare to pry too much. Galen might glean I had been there.
Still, I was curious. I poked through the wastebasket and got on tiptoe to examine the bureau top. Galen had told me that he had a broken teacup somewhere. It had been flung at the wall many years ago by a visiting researcher during a heated debate. Galen had swept up and saved the pieces as a souvenir. He had told me that he had a scrap of elephant seal skin. It had been torn off one male by another’s teeth during a battle over territory. Galen had peeled it from the rocks and carried it home, pinning it to his bulletin board. He had told me that he had a human rib bone — a relic, he believed, from the battling eggers, some poor man’s corpse. He had told me that he had the skull of a seal pup, a human tooth, and the talon of a falcon.
Galen had told me that he gathered and kept anything that spoke to the nature of life on the islands. He did not discriminate between the mundane and the vital, the human and the animal, the tragic and the wonderful. He had told me that the greatest illusion of the human experience was the idea that we were outside of nature — that we were not a part of the food chain — that we were not animals ourselves.
Soon I headed downstairs. The rain lashed the walls and splattered the windows. The air was heavy with the smell of wet birds. I stepped into the living room and paused. I had not been inside Lucy’s room — Andrew’s room, as I still thought of it — since my first days in the cabin. For a while I stood in the doorway, edgy and tense. The space looked different than I remembered. Lucy had reorganized it months before, switching the positions of the bed and dresser, hanging curtains, and removing the rug. It was a homey little area, shabby but warm. She had a lot of knickknacks scattered around — a ceramic paperweight, a snow globe, a tiny, bronze statue of a cat. I glanced through the papers on the desk: a bill, a half-completed letter. I tugged open the drawer of Lucy’s night table. There was something in there, swathed in cloth.
It was a picture of Andrew. I had unwrapped it and was holding it in my hands before I registered this fact. I stared down, mesmerized. I had forgotten what Andrew looked like. My memories of him were all tactile in nature: heavy calves, moist skin, breath. It was strange to see another human being looking back at me. A weak chin. A mischievous smile. He had not, after all, been a monster. That was the way he usually cropped up in my dreams: a ghoul with glaring red eyes, exhaling sulfur and steam. Instead, he had been a man. No more, no less.
I wrapped the picture in the cloth again and tucked it back where I had found it. My fingers were unsteady, but otherwise I was calm. I hurried into the hall. I sat down on the stairs. The rain was falling in torrents, splashing against the roof and hammering the porch. I could not see outside; the windows were as blind as stained glass, patterned with a mosaic of water. I don’t know how long I sat there. The downpour was unabated. It was amazing to me that there was this much rain in the world. Surely the sky would empty itself out eventually. A telltale drip was coming from somewhere in the house. The roof, or the walls, or the windows had been penetrated. After I was gone, the others would have to spend a few hours with the caulking gun and spackle, trying, yet again, to do the impossible — to contain the wildness here, to pretend they had control over nature, to mitigate what it might do to them.