The Light Pirate(32)

At lunch, the sixth graders who accosted her by the Edge stare and whisper but do not talk to her. This is uncomfortable but better than the alternative. Even the possibility that they might approach, the fact that Corey’s pale blue eyes have found her at all among this thinning crowd of children, is enough to frighten her. She remembers his hand on her head, the salt water rushing up into her nostrils, down into her lungs. And the other thing—the thing she can’t describe. She still doesn’t know what that was.

After the final bell, Wanda gets on her bicycle and allows her jaw to unclench as soon as her tires hit the asphalt, feeling more and more herself the farther away from the school she gets. She isn’t looking forward to spending the rest of the afternoon at the blue house—Phyllis is old and boring, as far as Wanda can tell—but anything is better than school. She pedals slowly, trying to prolong her freedom.

When she reluctantly knocks, Phyllis answers the door with a pair of waders slung over her shoulder and a large tackle box in her hand. It isn’t at all what Wanda was expecting. Wanda stares at the waders—tall rubber boots that ascend and become trousers, knocking together where they dangle against Phyllis’s torso. She wears a green shirt with bleach stains all over it, and her mostly white hair is piled into a bun on top of her head that has gone lopsided. “I thought we could check on some things,” Phyllis says, and lets the screen door slam behind her.

“What kind of things?” Wanda asks, suspicious but also curious. It occurs to her now that, upon closer examination, she has no idea who this woman is. All she knows is that when her father encounters Phyllis in the grocery store, he gives her a solemn nod, and when they pass her on the road he lifts his hand from the steering wheel. This is Kirby’s way of saying hello without saying anything.

“Plants, mostly.”

“Check on…plants?”

“Dirt. Water. Sediment. Trees. That kind of thing.”

Wanda stares at the tackle box. She points. “What’s that, then?”

“For collecting specimens.”

“Of…”

“Plants and dirt and water.” Halfway down the porch steps, Phyllis stops and turns to Wanda. “We can do something else if you want,” she says.

“No,” Wanda replies quickly. “This is okay.” As it happens, checking on trees and dirt and water sounds like exactly the kind of thing she’d like to do. Her reticence forgotten, she accepts the piece of jerky Phyllis hands her as they walk to the salt-splattered Toyota, once dark blue, now a pale and uneven gray, parked in the shade of a cypress. “What kind?” Wanda asks, the jerky already in her mouth.

“Alligator,” Phyllis says.

“That’s the good kind.”

“I know.” Phyllis puts the waders and the tackle box in the back seat, and as they drive along the bank of the Intracoastal, toward the causeway, Wanda stares out the window at the flickering river. “Did you know,” Phyllis says, “that the Intracoastal is three thousand miles long?” Wanda did not know this. “It has lots of different names, depending where you are, but it’s all the same water body.”

Getting closer to Beachside, Wanda becomes tense. There is that tang of salt coming in through the open windows. She thinks again of Corey’s hand on her head, of the sensation of water occupying spaces it wasn’t supposed to: inside her, trickling into her eardrums, her nose, her throat. The burning in her chest, the sting in her sinuses, but another sensation, too—a different kind of pain, like bones growing in the middle of the night, a body expanding a little too quickly for its own comfort. She’d rather not think about any of this. She isn’t sure how to categorize it, whether it is a big deal or a small one, a secret she must keep or a thing she should tell. It’s easier to pretend it never happened, but even that is hard.

When they get to the embankment of the Intracoastal, Wanda knows roughly where they are but doesn’t recognize the pullout as a place she’s been before. In the distance, she can see the causeway stretching over the river, connecting Beachside to the mainland. She can glimpse it through the wilderness that grows along its edge. Water levels have ebbed somewhat since yesterday, but not much. The river is still choppy and high. Phyllis pulls on her waders, snapping the suspenders over her shoulders, and takes her tackle box from the back seat. Wanda watches as she navigates the underbrush, moving easily among the mangrove roots and across the marshy shore. This fluidity surprises her. Adults never seem to know how to walk in the wild. Even Lucas is clumsy. Kirby especially. But Phyllis moves like she belongs here.

“You come here lots?” Wanda asks when they reach the water at the same time. Phyllis kneels among the underbrush and sets her tackle box down, notched in between two roots, then slips seamlessly into the rushing water. A few steps and she’s already waist-deep. She takes a little notepad out of the bib pocket.

“Sure do,” Phyllis says, writing something down. Wanda studies her.

“How old are you?”

“Old.”

“How old?”

“Old enough,” Phyllis says. “How old are you?”

“Ten.” Phyllis slips the notebook back into her pocket and wades back over to where Wanda sits, fiddling with the latch on the tackle box. It suddenly occurs to her that if she’s in the company of a scientist, she’d better be exact. “Almost. My birthday is in nine days.”