She’s there now, lying down in the back room at the field station, trying to close her eyes. Just for a minute. It’s six-thirty in the evening and dinner is about ready, judging from the inescapable scent of sizzling garlic, ginger and green onions arising from the kitchen where the two remaining fox girls — Marguerite and Allison — are concocting a tofu and rockfish stir-fry. She can hear the murmur of voices in the main room, laughter, somebody strumming a guitar. There’ll be a dozen or so for dinner — Frazier, Annabelle, an assortment of hunters (pig boys and fox girls, they’ve been pairing off for the past year now and who could blame them?), the odd biologist, archaeologist, maintenance man, the whole thing very collegial, catch as catch can, tonight you cook, tomorrow I cook.
They’ll be drinking wine. Wine is the sacrament here, and after tramping the backcountry all day, it’s a necessary sacrament. She can picture them there, sprawled around the room, tipping the bottle over a makeshift assortment of glasses, joking, buzzing, gossiping, talking field biology, talking politics and scandal and sex and anything else that comes into their heads in the absence of TV and cell phones. Her friends. Her family. The people who’ve worked with her and under her to pursue rigorous lines of scientific inquiry and not coincidentally eliminate 5,036 feral pigs in just fifteen months, with no sign of a single survivor detectable anywhere on the island. In a minute, she’ll push herself up and go out to join them. She’ll eat — she can’t remember ever having been so ravenous as she’s been the past few weeks — but she won’t join them in a glass of wine, not even the smallest most innocuous little drop.
It’s a struggle, elbows, arms and wrists as weak as if they’ve been de-boned, but she works herself into an upright position and in the next moment her feet are finding their way into the sandals, though the Velcro straps are too much for her and for now at least they’ll have to remain unfastened. She sits there a moment watching the flies gather at the window, their world turned alien on them, the sweet generous air that floated them on its wafting currents to soup pots and trash cans and tender bits of carrion gone as hard and impermeable now as rock, and how could this have happened, what mystery has intervened? They can’t know. They can only fumble and buzz and die, paradise right there before their eyes and unattainable for all that. If she were in Guam still, there’d be a gecko to climb the wall and feast on them, but here the reptiles are more circumspect. But dinner’s ready, definitely, and in the next moment she’s on her feet and moving across the parched floorboards, through the doorway and into the main room, where everybody looks up as one and everybody seems to be grinning.
“Jesus, Alma,” Frazier roars out, his face red and getting redder, “we thought you’d gone and given birth to triplets back there — just toughed it out and bit off the umbilical all on your own.” He mugs for the others, shifting the glass from his right hand to his left as he crosses the room to her, spreads his fingers wide across the swell of her abdomen and crows, “Nope, they’re still in there, folks. And I don’t blame them — what baby in his right mind would want to come out and face this bloody bunch of drunks and bush crazies?”
“Speak for yourself,” somebody says, and the laughter is general.
Annabelle floats in to intercede, playfully pushing Frazier away from her and holding up a bottle for Alma’s inspection. “Sparkling cider, non-alcoholic. Thought you might want a glass — do you?”
“Yes, that would be nice,” she says, her voice soft and delicate, a flutter in her own ears. “If anybody left me a clean glass, that is.”
A hoot from A.P., who makes a show of throwing back his wine in a gulp, then getting up to wash the glass at the tap and elaborately dry it with the one semi-clean corner of the dishtowel before handing it to her with a flourish. Annabelle is right there on cue, moving in with the bottle to fill the glass and call for a toast. “To Alma,” she says. “And the baby!”
“Or babies,” Frazier puts in.
“Easy for you to say”—Annabelle bends to refill her own glass from the nearest bottle of pinot grigio—“but you’re not the one who has to carry all that weight around.” She pauses, reconsidering, and reaches out to pat his midsection. “Though on second thought. .”
“Not me, I swear I’m not pregnant.”
“Sextuplets!” A.P. shouts. “Anything less is, is”—he’s weaving, grinning, trying to drink from the neck of the bottle and make sense at the same time—“insupportable. Or unsustainable. Or, or — whatever.”
She’s due in two and a half weeks. Everyone’s aware of that, even Freeman Lorber, who tried his best to assert his authority over her and for the first few weeks after she began showing kept insisting he’d be best man at the wedding till she let him know that there wasn’t going to be a wedding and it was none of his business in any case. All you need to worry about, she told him, and she’d let her voice harden till there was no coming back, is who’s going to look after things when I’m on maternity leave — which is only going to be a week, five working days, so don’t get that look on your face. If there are any surprises — if she should go into early labor and she happens to be here on the island — there’ll be plenty of time to get back to the mainland, if not by boat, then helicopter. But that’s not going to happen because she’ll be back at home for the last week and her mother will be there with her. And Ed. Ed, with the car gassed and tires inflated, already primed to floor it all the way to the hospital.
After dinner, she takes a chair outside to sit and watch the light change over the rise behind the bunkhouse. Her book is back on her bed, but she doesn’t need a book, not here, not tonight. Everything is still, the swallows back in their nests, the grasshoppers that the foxes so love to crush between their teeth settling down in the high yellow grass, the colors of the buildings and the fields and the chaparral shifting and melding in exactly the way of the Diebenkorn paintings hanging in the main house — and Diebenkorn stayed here, right here, walked this very ground, a friend and guest of Carey Stanton in the time before all this became public land, or at least held in trust for the public. She’s thinking about that, about capturing this scene, the sweep and solace of it, in oils or even pencil, how very nearly impossible that must be, and of her last attempts at figurative art, in the seventh or eighth grade, which wound up looking more like abstract expressionism, when one of the fox girls, Allison, comes out to join her.
The light has begun to fade, bats careering across the open spaces, a cool current of sea air creeping up the pass from the ocean. Allison — a smoker — settles in on the ground beside her, resting her back up against the rough stucco wall. “Do you mind?” she asks, waving the unlit cigarette at her.
“No, go ahead,” she says, but she can’t help feeling the slightest tick of annoyance. Couldn’t she smoke out back? Up on top of the ridge? On one of the buoys in the channel? Anywhere but here?
“I mean, I’m downwind of you, I’m pretty sure.” There’s the flare of the match, the pursed lips, the sharp assaultive odor of charred weed, and then it’s gone, drifting along the base of the house like a spirit summoned and dismissed.
For a moment they’re silent, Alma staring off across the expanse of the yard to where the compost bin rises up like a building itself, Allison absorbed in her cigarette. The bats ricochet off nothing, the shadows go one degree denser. Then, just to say something, to be gracious and welcoming instead of merely old, pregnant and bearish, Alma says, “Dinner was great. You guys really outdid yourselves.”