Chapter Sixty-One
HECTOR
I can’t get loose.
The back of my life jacket is snagged on a piece of metal, on this huge wreck that is falling into the depths of the lake. The pressure on my ears is excruciating. It’s dark, and the cold is worse than anything, and I can’t breathe.
I wish I could help Anda.
I almost wish that I’d never come to Isle Royale, but that would be lying. I always knew at one point or another, I’d run away and not come back. And I don’t mean in the visiting sense.
I close my eyes and let the pressure squeeze harder.
No. You won’t run away, not this time.
My eyes fly open. I see nothing in the water, only the black depths of the lake. But something pushes against me. It’s powerfully strong, but doesn’t snap my bones. I’m forced upward as my orange life vest is torn from my body, still snagged on the wreckage. Just when my brain wants to burst from lack of oxygen, I break the surface—and find that the surface is broken.
The lake looks like nothing I could imagine. It’s frozen, rain locked into place as it hovers in heavy sheets above it. Large pockmarks litter the surface, which doesn’t seem liquid anymore. It isn’t frozen, or solid, or gas. It’s nothing that can be defined by any textbook.
The ships are locked in place, half submerged. In the air, Anda’s mother is still in her gigantic, unearthly form, but something’s wrong. She’s blurred at the edges, and she seems to be locked in a struggle with something I can’t see. Until I realize I’m looking in the wrong place.
A hundred feet away from Anda’s mother is a wisp of darkness, floating above the water. It’s almost like a smudge of smoke, hovering there for no good reason. But it shimmers and sways, and seems to be sucking the light and energy from everything around it. I peer harder and see arms, legs. The dark blob of head swivels and turns to me. The eyes pierce right into me, seeing everything.
It’s Anda.
Her mother notices me at the same time Anda does. Everything unfreezes with a roar. Her mother raises a mass of solid water that pushes toward me with terrific speed. I barely have time to inhale before the water hits—when it doesn’t. The water pauses in a thick wall, like boiling glass only feet from me. Anda’s hand is raised in my direction. With a twist of her wrist, the wall of water dissipates into a cloud of vapor.
A piece of stained wreckage floats nearby, a newer piece of boat with the fiberglass hull still intact. I grab on to the smooth surface, trying to buy myself time to catch my breath. Over my shoulder, Anda’s tiny dark shadow of a figure continues to hover, while her mother’s vast body of wreckage and clouds tries to pummel her.
Every assault that Anda’s mother sends my way, Anda blocks, almost too easily. But she can’t stop the storm, and I can’t hold on for much longer. The waves are still high enough that they douse my head over and over again, and the burning in my forearms becomes agonizing. The cold is numbing my brain. My hands begin to slip, when I wonder. Why am I trying? What could come out of this that could possibly be worth living for? I think of my uncle, wonder if he’s still alive. Wonder if there will really be an Anda for me to ever come back to. My fingertips make helpless squeaking noises as they lose purchase on the wreckage, and Anda’s head turns toward me. Though a mile away, I can see her expression of hurt and fury.
Don’t you dare, Hector.
I understand. This life isn’t just mine to throw away anymore. She knows it, and I know it. I hyperventilate, trying to get oxygen into my limbs, then kick my legs anew to get a better hold on the piece of fiberglass. There’s a broken chunk of metal above me, and I reach for it, dragging myself higher. I have a better grip. This time, I’ll hang on for a bit longer.
I don’t know if that will be long enough, but I’m not planning that far ahead right now.
While Anda fights off another enormous rogue wave that comes my way, I hear the faint buzzing of a noise, barely above the din of the rain and roaring wind that’s buffeting my head. I think maybe it’s a helicopter, which would be madness in a storm—especially this storm. But there’s nothing overhead but gray swirls of condensation. Faintly, a single voice forces it way through the chaos.
“Gracie!”
I turn around. In the distance, a small boat is churning through the rough waters, headed toward me. It’s Mr. Selkirk, with eyes on nothing but the unstoppable force that is Anda’s mother. I scream at him when he’s only forty feet away, and he slows the motor down, just enough to scan the choppy waves. Bobbing up and down, it’s a miracle he sees me, stuck to this piece of junk. He steers closer to me, and my body sags with relief. I let my cramped hands slide off the wreckage as Mr. Selkirk draws closer.
I hold out my arm, but he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t throw a line.
His dark blue eyes are snapping with intensity behind his wire glasses. He still wears the old wool hat that encases his white hair. I sigh with relief when he bends over to drop anchor, but to my surprise he only tosses a big orange life vest. I catch it, but my face says everything I want to. Why won’t he let me on board? My exhaustion is ten years old, my muscles cramping painfully, and even with this vest, I won’t last long in the frigid water.
Mr. Selkirk yells at me. “You tell her why.”
“What are you talking about?” I sputter lake water, clinging to the life vest.
“She won’t understand. You tell her.”
I try to yell at him to stay, to let me get on his goddamned boat, to make sense. But Mr. Selkirk drives the boat at full throttle toward the two warring elements—the mother, the daughter; the lake and the storm. He becomes a smaller spot of white and silver on the sine-like waves, appearing and disappearing between swells. He drives the boat—which wasn’t small but now looks like a tiny white dash—right between them. Anda is still just a smudge of coal in the sky, her arms conducting the air and water around her, fighting to keep her mother from sending me to my death at the bottom of the lake, where her mother believes I deserve to be.
I don’t think they even register that Mr. Selkirk is right there until it’s too late. He drives between two sailboat wrecks climbing the column of water on Anda’s mother. The angle is impossibly steep, and the boat too large to turn quickly. Anda and her mother suddenly become aware of him at the same moment.
But it’s either too late, or Mr. Selkirk knows exactly what he’s doing. The boat can’t handle the pitch of the wave, and I watch with horror as the bow of the boat climbs, climbs, climbs—until it can’t go any farther. It hesitates and begins its descent in reverse, before flipping over. Mr. Selkirk’s dot of a body falls through the air as the wall of water collapses on top of him and the craft.
Mr. Selkirk is gone.