Chapter Thirty-Five
HECTOR
It’s not the most glamorous thing to say when you wake up in the arms of a stunning girl. A girl who does unspeakable things.
Anda leaves me so I can stagger to some trees and relieve myself. When I stagger back, I’m more than happy to be lying down again. My head swims and my mouth tastes like a dead fish, but I’m alive. Barely.
I close my eyes, and she sighs, as if relieved that I’m going back to sleep. But I can’t let it go.
“You sank that ship, didn’t you?” I say quietly.
She’s quiet for a long time. I wait. I have nothing but time, after all. Finally, she whispers her answer.
“Yes.”
“And that man, you drowned him.”
Another long pause. “Yes.”
“There was another person in the water, an old lady. What happened to her?”
“I let her survive. The Coast Guard rescued her.”
My eyes quickly snap to her face, searching. “You did? Why?”
Several emotions flit over her face. Panic is the overriding one. But sadness and confusion are there, too. Her mouth opens to answer, but she says nothing, instead picking up an aluminum mug at her side. “You should drink more water, Hector. It will make you feel well.”
I sag back onto my sleeping bag. There are a lot of things I want to say, but right now, none of them include asking Anda to go away. I love being alive too much for that. And as much as she may be a monster of some sort, she can’t completely devalue life, right? After all, she just saved this pathetic one.
The last time I got this sick was five years ago. Strep was going around and gave me a raging fever and throat that killed so bad, I couldn’t swallow anything solid. Dizziness forced me to stay in bed for days. I remember being fed oatmeal from a spoon. I remember the taste of the nasty, bubble gum–flavored antibiotic syrup, and my uncle on the phone with the pediatrician every day. He took a week off from work to make sure I didn’t croak.
I remember these things, but I don’t want to. Because it makes me feel like I’m doing something really wrong by running from him. But I have to run. All the other memories tell me to.
In the next few hours, my fever returns along with that warped feeling in my brain. Anda makes me take an antibiotic pill and offers me bites of a granola bar between her fingers. There’s an aluminum cup of hot water, too.
I take the pill, but when she offers the food, I don’t open my mouth. I don’t touch the mug of steaming liquid.
Her face contorts with confusion, corrupted within my fever. It’s a grimace. Before Anda, I refused to take drinks or food from people. I didn’t trust them. Now I can’t trust her anymore.
“It’s only food, Hector.”
But I turn away, feeling the sweat drip off my temples.
Anda leans closer. “It’s not poisoned. Poisoning is complicated. There are far easier ways to kill people.” She looks down. “I won’t do that. It’s why I’m here. I came to help you and to get away from her.”
Her. I don’t know who she’s talking about, but I can sense that she means what she says.
“I don’t want to kill, Hector,” she says. “Not anymore.”
“I’m not afraid of dying,” I whisper, eyeing the mug of water.
“I know that. So what are you afraid of?”
I close my eyes.
...
My body is such a damned sellout. I get so delirious that eventually, I don’t turn away the food.
I’m so used to taking care of myself. Of making my own dinners (frozen, but still), of earning money, of making my own scars. Being completely cared for is altogether alien. And wonderful. And awful, all at the same time. Awful, because it doesn’t seem real, or that it will last. I keep thinking that at any moment, this will all disappear, and I’ll be back in Duluth.
Or that I’ll be back in that lake.
I dream of weird things. I see my father, my uncle, and my mother, all discussing me while sitting around the fireplace. When I yell at them to shut the fuck up, they ignore me. Even in my dreams, some things don’t change.
Anda wipes the sweat from my face and chest. She’s dressed in filthy jeans and a sweatshirt big enough for a linebacker. There are smudges of mud in her white hair. It doesn’t matter. Funny how clothes and hair only matter when you don’t know someone, when they’re all you have to judge someone on.
The silvery color in her irises is muted, maybe because it’s dark now. Her eyes concentrate on me and are small with worry. I miss that wide-eyed look she had before. Care and concern have brought her back to earth. She’s closer to me now, and yet something is missing, too.
I remember once flying a kite in school, the day before summer vacation started at the end of fourth grade. It was sunny and gorgeous, and the June wind was strong. My science teacher took us out to fly kites, and he’d flown a red-and-orange butterfly kite up in the sky when he handed me the string. The wind began to die down, and I had to reel it in more and more to keep the tension strong so it would stay aloft. But all the while, I was desperate to hold that kite in my hands, to feel the balsam wood parts that kept those wings wide and stiff, and to touch that fluttering tail of red and orange stripes.
Before long, it was in my hands. That kite was incredible to hold, but I was acutely aware that half its beauty was gone now that it wasn’t flying anymore.
“You’re the kite,” I tell Anda. Like it’s obvious that she should know what the hell I’m talking about. She looks at me quizzically, and then understanding shadows her face.
“Yes.”
She rubs my back, as she’s often done since I’ve been sick. It reminds me of my mother. When I was ill, she’d do the same thing—rub my back in endless, comforting circles. No matter how cold our apartment was, or how sad she was, her hand was always warm and strong. It showed the strength of her love. But it wasn’t stronger than other things, like hate. And fear.
During my few wakeful moments, I catch Anda staring out at the horizon with longing. Like she actually wishes the gales were back, or that she could run back into the lake and sink more ships. I don’t understand why anyone would crave that kind of awful. Then again, I have my own scars to prove their worth.
“You want what’s possible,” I say to her, inside one of my fever dreams. Or am I awake? I can’t tell. The fir trees wave merrily above us, or maybe dancing in anticipation of our doom. It must be nighttime, until I realize that my eyes are closed. “Pain is so easy. It’s what we do best.”
“Yes, Hector,” she says. “Yes.”
...
Little by little, I get better.
I wake up one morning, the most clearheaded I’ve been since I got sick. Anda is squatting by the campfire, cooking something. And in my memory, I can clearly see that boat sinking, and that lady screaming in the water when it pulled the man into the depths.
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
She stops stirring but won’t meet my eye. She knows exactly what I’m asking. There’s silence for a long time.
“I needed it. It was part of me,” she explains.
“Can you really stop?”
She goes back to stirring the pot on the fire, and her eyes well up. “I’m trying now.” And then another long silence. “If I try hard enough, will you still run away from me?”
I imagine what it would be like to have a lover kill for you. It’s asking the unaskable. And I realize that’s what Anda is doing, only the opposite. Maybe it’s just as awful, though in my world, it’s so obviously right.
I look down at my arms. They’re starting to heal again, a process that circles around to a fresh cut, inevitably. I’m so damn sick of inevitability. Anda stares at me, with patience, not expectation. It gives me enough energy to tell her, “I’ll try if you try.”
She smiles shyly at me. “All right,” she says.
...
The more I improve, the worse off I realize we are.
Two days later, before dawn and after a long and deliriously good night of sleep, I look around. Peachy-gold colors the horizon, slowly brightening the sky. A yawn nearly cracks my head in half, and I sit up and stretch before groaning. My whole body feels creaky and very, very old. Geriatric at seventeen. Excellent.
Anda is taking a bowl of something off the campfire a few feet away. The embers crackle and snap; the scent of smoke is soothing. She offers me an antibiotic pill, and then a sip of hot, steaming, delicious…water?
For the first time in however many days I’ve been sick, I’m ravenous.
“Do we have anything else to eat?” I ask.
She shakes her head. Her hair is really dirty. Mud is caked on a few locks, and some twigs have tangled in there, too. She must have been sleeping on the bare ground.
“None?”
“None.”
I think for a minute. “How far away are we from Rock Harbor?” I ask her.
“About thirty miles.”
I pause, and her eyes say exactly what I’m feeling. Fear. Isle Royale might kick our asses in a very un-royal way.