Chapter Forty-Two
ANDA
I know exactly what he’s going to do.
It’s a test. An offering.
He’s looking for the truth beyond us alone. He’s searching for Mother.
Ah, take it, Anda. Take it, or I will. How can you say no, when it’s bestowed so willingly?
Father runs out the door and brings the lamp. I move to follow him and he stops me with an outstretched hand.
I gaze at him with my eyes wide open, seeing everything. Knowing everything. “Don’t pretend to stop me. You know you cannot,” I remind him.
Father shrinks in my presence. The terror that he always hides behind his eyes comes forth, a watery, soft energy that’s far too easy to push aside. I step past him and into the dark. I hear the boat motoring away. Hector is no sailor; he hasn’t turned on the navigation lights so there is nothing but darkness and sound in his wake. Father can no longer see him.
Mother, however, knows exactly where he is.
And I know, too.
I’ve stayed away from the water for so long that the lure of the boat is almost too much to endure. The buzzing in my ear that bothered me before clears as I turn my full attention to the water. The lake is alive with life, pulsing in hearts afloat, all scattered across 31,700 square miles of Lake Superior. My blood hums with the purity of knowing.
Winds at twenty knots. Eight-foot seas on the coastline.
Twenty boats are alive on the lake. Two tugs. Three lake freighters holding forty thousand tons of goods between them—two lakers and one saltie. The rest are crumbs, little powerboats and sailboats taking a foolish night ride to enjoy the stars on the lake.
Romantics. Easier for the taking.
That’s my girl.
But I don’t want them.
I want Hector.
I know exactly where he is. The small powerboat is tantalizingly close by. He’s running away yet again.
He doesn’t know exactly where to go, except away from the spinning beam of our lighthouse. He has no idea what risk he’s put himself in.
Even now, he’s already thinking his own decisions that brought him to the island were wrong, and hasty, and everything the matter with his life has come to this. Testing a girl and the greater unknown, using his life as bait. He’s realizing how much he doesn’t value what he owns, the very lifeblood that pulses like syrup through his wind-chilled limbs.
He knows, Anda. He suspects all. So sink him, or I shall do it myself. He’s only a pebble in your shoe.
I nod. I know what I must do. He’s looking for Mother, for answers, and she’ll do worse than reveal herself if I don’t stop him. I could stop him, too. I could end this boy, end everything that brought him here. Like blinking in the sun, it would be too easy. I take a deep breath of the November air. There’s incoming rain skulking across North Dakota, gaining momentum. The shoreline comes to meet me as I step down toward the ink-black water slapping against the rocks under my feet.
I splay my fingers out and feel the current thrumming in my arms. I can make an undertow with a kiss on the wind. This has to stop, because he knows.
Father has always said that he’s the only one who can carry the burden of the truth. Anyone else wouldn’t understand. They’d try to hurt me. They’d try to destroy me. People always destroy what they fear. But Hector isn’t doing that; he’s trying to hurt himself. I remember when he was sick, so sick, that everything that came out of his mouth was a puzzle.
“Pain is so easy. It’s what we do best.”
Hector hurts himself. I hurt others. But pain doesn’t have to be the only thing we are capable of creating. It cannot be.
Mother is pulling him out farther, trying to keep him out of my reach. She has stalled the motor, and Hector curses with despair more than anger. He looks around to the dark void, the lighthouse winking too far away in the distance. Rapidly, she tows it. Now the boat is moving on its own accord, away from me, and away from the safety of land. Mother pulls downward at the same time, and gallons of icy water pitch into the boat, half flooding it.
Hector is terrified.
He gave himself. It’s over, Anda. There is no choice.
Choice.
It’s what humans possess, and buy, and sell in both vast and minuscule quantities. And nature? A tree doesn’t choose to be burned, nor does it choose to fall and kill the life beneath it in an instant.
There are no choices in nature.
But half of me is born of my father.
I raise my hands, palms up. Extending my fingers just a little, I reach far, far into the lake water and try to force the cold air away from him, but something’s wrong. The air around him stays too cold. Mother’s watery fist is curled around the boat’s bow, but I try to slither under her grip to take the boat for my own. She tightens her hold and pulls the craft away from me, too easily.
Anda, don’t.
I don’t understand. I can’t seem to get any sort of purchase on the boat, and it’s filling rapidly with water. My eyes shut, squeezing tight with concentration. It takes every muscle of my body, tensed, to grip the waterlogged vessel. Even so, panting with exertion, I feel like I’m on the cusp of it slipping away.
I twist the tide into a rope to help me. But where I was once a conductor in such a scenario, it’s as if I must play all the instruments now, simultaneously, and it’s exhausting. I’m still so weak; the hiking and food and Hector have changed me, so much. But not for the better, and not forever. It’s only introduced new ways to weaken me.
Anda, don’t!
But there’s enough of my old self to firm my grip and pull him the final hundred yards to shore. She can’t fight what I’ve already won, though barely. When the waterlogged craft lands with a crested wave onto a flat stone of the beach, my father hollers. This is enough to free him from his fear, and he carries the lamp with him as Hector trips and falls out of the boat onto dry land.
He just kneels there, gasping. He’s been hyperventilating since the motor stalled, and with good reason. Triangles of light through the punched tin partitions of the lamp mark his wet skin and soaked pants. He shivers violently. After a few minutes, he stands up and refuses Father’s offer to help him up.
He won’t look at either of us. We stand there, a trio on the brink of something that will change everything, waiting for his sentence to ring out.
“I’ll go back to the mainland without a fight,” he whispers. “I promise. If you swear you’ll tell me everything.”
Mother brings a soft breeze that caresses us all.
Do you understand the worst thing about making choices? There are consequences.
...
I wait outside while Hector and my father go in the house. I think of the ordinary tasks that must happen. They comfort me, almost as much as a soothing low barometric pressure.
He’s changing out of his cold clothes.
Father puts on water to boil for a hot drink.
They find two crates to sit on, flanking the fire.
But that’s all I can imagine. These are the limitations I have; the bit of normal life I’ve had only carries me so far. Want and need grate at my heart, making it beat erratically. It’s not in tatters, not yet. But it’s growing more ragged by the hour. What do I want? Still, even now, I’m not fully sure.
But I do know that I’m not capable of hurting Hector.
That’s a lie. Now you’re capable of more hurt than you can even begin to fathom.
I stare out at the darkness of the water, the oily black sky. I know she isn’t trying to upset me. She only tells me truths that I need to hear.
After a stretch of fifteen long minutes, I knock on the door. It creaks open, and Hector’s face meets mine.
“May I come in now?”
“He wants to talk to me, alone. We’re going to the lighthouse for a while. We’ll be back soon.”
Of course. No one could explain it better than Father. He was there in the beginning, before there was an Anda of flesh. He can tell the whole story, without me and my clumsy attempts at kneading words into useful sentences. And it makes perfect sense to go to the lighthouse—the one place on this island that I’m loath to follow. It hurts my teeth just to know they’ll be climbing that iron staircase soon.
I wait another hour. Then I open the door to the house. They’ve already gone. The room inside is empty, and the light from the camp stove is dead.
I shed the boots and the clothing that were never anything but a disguise. I find a white eyelet nightgown in my bag—one of my favorites, with the hem so frayed and worn that its softness lulls me with familiar comfort.
And then I walk to the lake. It’s been too long. Any energy I had, I used bringing Hector to shore. I’ve never been so drained. The jealousy of the wind and air has settled into neutrality that relieves me. They’ll let me pass without more bickering. The coming storm hasn’t arrived yet, but there’s enough energy in the depths to nourish me just a little. I’ve spent entire weeks in the water in November, but during this month, I’ve never spent so much time on land before. It has taken a toll.
And I’m finding that it’s a toll I simply can’t pay.
I’ve been trying to ignore the consequences of turning away from my witch side. But the island tugs and heaves with rot where there ought not be decay, wheezes in unblinking awakeness when it should be resting. And my own hunger is becoming something I’m terrified will be uncontrollable. Around Hector or Father, I might commit something so monstrous, it would fracture me forever.
I have to be one Anda. I cannot live in halves or quarters or broken pieces. How? How am I going to do this?
Come to me, Anda.
I hate her. I love her.
But I cannot say no, not right now. And so, with water in my eyes, I answer the call.