Chapter Twenty-Six
ANDA
After Hector leaves, I look around the house. The sofa and the braided rug are empty and forlorn, wanting someone to touch them. The kitchen has crumbs on the counter from the granola bars we’ve eaten. A glob of jam smears the countertop, and I wipe it off with my finger and onto my tongue. The sticky gel of tart fruit and sucrose dissolves as I press it up against my palate. I close my eyes.
How could I have forgotten that I liked this? I mourn that I’ve forgotten.
While Hector fishes, I pace around the house. Something is amiss. What am I to do, to make this house into a home? I think of Hector’s mouth pressing against the crook of my neck. Yes, this. And no, not quite. Maybe more food. More blankets. I gnaw at a fingernail.
Father knows. He brings food and things that he believes I ought to like, such as broken geodes and rare pieces of beach glass. He thinks I’ll be bewitched by these pretty objects, by the lure of food laden with sugar or salt. Sometimes he brings flat, circular lake stones with holes he’s chipped into the middle. He thinks these will keep me safe somehow.
But none of it fits. He only knows the human way to care. I am made of storms and corpses, of granite and paper-white birch. Trinkets and morsels of food haven’t comforted me since I was a child.
I’m not the one who needs to be kept safe. It is everyone else.
Then why do you let this boy stay?
I don’t know.
Why do you need food now?
I don’t know that, either.
You need to make it stop. You are losing the balance, and that way lies despair.
I understand, but I wonder—did I ever have balance? Or did I simply veer so close to her axis that the pull nullified everything else? I’m terrified. And yet I’m too weak to banish it all, to make Hector go away. I need a storm, not calories. I know this.
It is November 7. It has been 348 hours since the sinking of the St. Anne. My body knows this, too, feeling light and airy as dandelion fuzz. I need grounding, the way lightning hungers for a good, tall tree.
I’ve stood in the middle of the kitchen for over an hour, motionless, just considering these things. Finally, I loosen the stiff air about me and reach for one of Father’s cookbooks. Hector will be back soon, and the morsels of breakfast have since dissolved away into my blood. One book has a recipe for quick breads. It calls for flour, butter, and baking powder. Also salt. There is no flour left, but I crush the remaining crackers to use instead. I don’t bother to clean the bits of dust on the floor, instead letting my bare feet push them around, here and there.
I turn on the NOAA radio to keep me company.
Temperature dropping to forty degrees.
Waves of eight feet or more.
Forecasts are for ice-free areas.
No, that can’t be right. The NOAA voice is wrong. It’s not that cool, nor are the waves that large. I go to the window and splay my fingers against the glass, startled at the coldness of the glass. Between the branches of dead, lichen-covered birch trees, I see the waves of the lake. They are far larger than I sensed.
I’ve always been finely attuned to the air pressure and moisture, the vectors of wind and penetration of the judging sun. A radio can be fixed, instruments recalibrated. What do I do with myself if I am already becoming so broken?
Well. I can make other things, I think. It’s a practical thought, and I readjust my spine to this new sensation of practicality. I snap the radio off, turn away from the windows, and busy myself in the kitchen, taking the ingredients down. I’m wrist-deep in the sticky mixture when static begins to tug at the cut ends of my shorn hair. The chimney begins to moan, and raindrops patter the roof. Such wonderful, delicious music. My eyelids have closed, so I can listen with heavy intention.
My mind begins to swim. Deep within, my spine and long bones ache for the storm. My heart beats, and with every pulse, there is a yawning need.
My hands squeeze the dough, and it oozes between my clawed fingers. I scrunch my face, breathing long and hard, opening my eyes and concentrating. That’s right. I’m making biscuits, aren’t I? Hector will be hungry. I am hungry, too.
You need something else to feed you, Anda. Not wheat, nor butter.
“Shh,” I hiss.
I wish I could distance myself from her. I’m almost out the door when I stop. I’m making food for Hector, I remember, and shake my head. I grab a handful of sticky, needy dough. I try to drop it onto the cookie sheet when the wind whistles for me. It creeps under the eaves, through the cracks of the wall, and circles my ankles, coaxing me.
“Stop it,” I whimper.
I drop irregular handfuls of dough onto a metal sheet. Mechanically, I put the sheet of lumpy dough in the tiny kitchen stove, the insides glowing red as hell. My vision swims. I see blood, not the heating elements of the oven.
Before I can wipe my sticky hands on a kitchen towel, the tug inside my belly grows too insistent and irresistible. It’s a rope, tied to my spine and pulling hard. It would pull hard enough to rend me apart, I know.
Sustained winds of up to thirty knots.
Small craft should exercise caution.
The last storm was “large in size.” A rather bland way to put kinetic energy, wind speeds, rain, cubic kilometers, and vortices of current into one measure of size. Words never suffice for much anyway. This storm, however—it’s far larger than the last, in that I can feel the pull deep in my marrow.
It is November 7. It has been 349 hours since the sinking of the St. Anne.
“No,” I gasp.
Yes.
My hands twist the doorknob to exit the house before I know it. My feet fly across stone and pine needles. The water is so close, and the rain makes my skin burn with a fury. The shore coaxes as only it can. In a blink, I’m at the lake’s edge. The stones of the lake dig into the soft soles of my feet. I don’t ignore the pain. Instead, it makes me smile. The stones don’t hurt me; they’re crying out for having touched me.
The water is up to my knees when I see the white sailboat in my mind’s eye.
It’s no longer within sight of the Upper Peninsula. Everyone who touches the lake knows that the silhouette of Lake Superior resembles a wolf, and Isle Royale, its vengeful eye. The sailboat is in the throat of the wolf, about to be consumed. Through the splash of white water, I see the name on the boat.
The Jenny.
Thomas and Agatha are on board, panic showing as white rings their blue irises. The boat is named after their only daughter, safe in landlocked Colorado. They thought the storm would not come up so quickly; they were wrong. They thought it would be the last good day to sail before winter set in; they were correct.
It will be the last day they ever sail.
They are mine for the taking, if I’m willing to take them. My fingertips touch the lake water. To me, it is warm as new milk. Remotely, in my brain, I remember there was a boy. And that there is a stove turned on in a house somewhere, but I don’t care.
Nothing matters when death is calling for me.
It is November 7. It has been 350 hours since the sinking of the St. Anne.
It has been too long. The Jenny calls for me.
Good girl.