The Light Pirate(24)
“I know,” she says. He turns to go just as Kirby appears in the doorway.
“Ready?” their father asks, and Lucas nods. Kirby squints at Wanda to see if she’s awake. “Don’t get into any trouble. And when you open that cooler—”
“I know,” Wanda says. She’s heard all this before.
“Ah. Well. Have a fun day. Be good.” Kirby and Lucas leave. She can hear the front door slam, then the truck doors, one, two, then the engine, then quiet. Be good. She is mostly good. But being good and having a fun day are not the same thing. There’s a particular rule she’d like to break, one she’s been toying with ever since her time became her own—but it’s a big one. She’s not sure she’ll get away with it. To be good or not to be: This has been the week’s soliloquy. Each night, she resolves that tomorrow is the day she’ll ride her bike to the Edge. And each morning, she talks herself out of it. Except—today might be her last chance. The return to school looms. She dozes, thrashing around until the sheets feel sticky.
When the sun is up she stalls some more, lying on the grass to read her novel, in which a boy detective hunts a killer in a blustery ski resort. The book makes her unbearably curious about snow, a phenomenon she has never seen in person. In this heat, even imagining the cold seems impossible. And again, her mind drifts to the Edge. It would be cooler there, at least. Around eleven, she retrieves the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Lucas made her, defiantly leaving the cooler open while she takes her time digging beneath last night’s leftovers for the right kind of soda to go with it (grape), and then wanders through the stifling house as she eats. All the secrets that are here for her to find have already been found, but she likes to visit them when she’s alone. She checks on the milk crate in the back of Kirby’s closet, full of relics from her mother. She isn’t supposed to know that it exists, but she discovered it a few years ago. Wiping her jellied fingers on her shirt, she sorts through its contents—a few books about architecture, a neatly folded bedspread someone sewed by hand, a wedding ring that doesn’t fit any of her fingers. At the bottom, a nylon flag, so sun-worn the black is turning brown, a jaunty skull and crossbones smiling back at her. A photograph of Kirby and Frida in front of the house, and another of Frida with her own mother, the two of them young and happy on the deck of a sailboat. There is a spiral-bound notebook here, too. Handwritten, barely legible. Wanda has already scanned its pages for passages she might be able to decipher, but there isn’t much she can make out besides a few sketches of something that looks like a tree house. This is how her mother’s presence feels—near, but unknowable.
Frida’s dresses still hang, pressed back against the wall, smelling of a woman Wanda never knew but likes to imagine. In her mind, Frida is so beautiful it’s impossible to look at her head-on. She’s just a warm feeling that surrounds Wanda with a pair of strong, pillowy arms. This is all Frida will ever be to her, but the absence is too ubiquitous to be acute. Wanda sits on the floor of the closet and finishes her sandwich, then presses her face against the soft hems of Frida’s clothes, imagining what she might have been like. Kirby and Lucas both look sad when Wanda asks about her mother outright, so she’s learned to acquire information sideways, in fragments: the name of the boat Frida grew up on, the university she went to, her skills in the kitchen, a bridge she designed but never built. In this fashion, she learns bits and pieces about Flip, too, but she doesn’t ache for the idea of a brother in the same way. She has Lucas.
She tires of these fantasies about her mother and goes back outside to ponder whether today is the day she breaks her father’s biggest rule. She started by breaking smaller rules this week, just to see what would happen. A few days ago, she climbed a tree she is not allowed to climb and sat up there reading until she heard Kirby’s engine on the road. Yesterday, she sat in the forbidden mustiness of the shed and carved her initials into the floorboards under the workbench, then pawed through every drawer, every bucket, opened every toolbox. Afterward, she anxiously awaited her punishment for these trespasses. All during dinner last night, she anticipated discovery—but nothing happened. Kirby and Lucas sat at the table and exchanged condiments and shoveled food onto their plates and into their mouths, but nothing was said about Wanda’s vandalism in the tool shed, or her adventure skyward. She isn’t sure what she’d expected. Maybe an unseen camera, or a supernatural sixth sense. But apparently Kirby has neither. Unchastened, she contemplates a new pinnacle of disobedience.
She’s not often allowed to stay home by herself, but the woman who runs the daycare evacuated before the storm and still hasn’t returned. Wanda hopes she won’t come back at all, and the truth is, she might not. That’s not unusual these days. The population thins with each passing year. Every time the schools close, a few more students are missing when they reopen. The inhabitants of Rudder are slowly catching on that the time to cut their losses has arrived. But Wanda doesn’t think of it in these terms. She has been watching the town empty, the water rise, the storms pummel, as far back as she can remember. This is the rhythm she was born to. Kirby is old enough to remember arguments about whether climate change was real. Lucas is old enough to remember when tourists still came. But to Wanda, these things are only stories, so distant they might as well be fiction.
She would have preferred to be on storm duty this week, playing in the cab of the bucket truck while Kirby and Lucas work on the downed lines, but Kirby got in trouble after a surprise visit from the city manager the last time he brought her along. So here she is, home alone, forced to be either bored or bad. She squints up at the sky, trying to determine the time. Lucas told her you can tell by the position of the sun. One o’clock? Two? She can’t remember which position is which. Clouds are piled high against the flat land, billowing layers of whipped cream that taste like warm, wet earth. She decides that today is the day after all.