The Light Pirate(43)
The jungle is thick around Phyllis’s house, even thicker now than it was back then, like all this time it’s been trying to swallow her home whole. One day, he thinks, it will succeed, and this house will disappear completely. He honks and waits in the truck, hoping he won’t have to go to the door to collect Wanda. He doesn’t want to climb those steps, or to use his fist on the thick door, or to stand on the long wraparound porch. Just imagining it is already too much.
Sweat soaks through his shirt. The flow of air in his throat shortens, tightens. No, no, no, he thinks, not now. Not again. He thought he was past all this, but his body tells him otherwise. His lungs seem to shrink. He forces them to open and close, to fill and deflate, like working a stiff, unwieldy bellows. He sees Phyllis opening the door—it isn’t today, but it’s so suddenly vivid it might as well be. He’s on the porch and it’s ten years ago. He’s feeling her drape a bath towel, pink and worn, around his shoulders, hearing her tell him to breathe deep, to hold each breath carefully, like a fragile butterfly: Imagine the gentleness of its wings inside his lungs, she says, the feathery tips of its antennae, the tiny curl of its proboscis. He does this now, leaning his head against the cool cradle of the window. Wings with indigo diamonds painted on velvety black, the dim shimmer of a compound eye, legs as thin and delicate as an eyelash—
The tightness in his chest slowly subsides as the butterfly takes form in his mind. The rain keeps pounding. The door stays shut. Finally, after what seems like hours but surely isn’t, surely couldn’t be, except who can tell when the sun has left them so completely, he gets out of the truck and climbs the steps. He knocks. Is this really the first time he’s been on this porch since that day? Before he can think too hard about it, the door swings open, and there’s Phyllis, the bright spatter of her white hair appearing like a lighthouse on this gloomy afternoon, a warm glow spilling out behind her.
“Lucas!” she says. “You’re early. Come in.” What can he say? He hesitates, then steps inside. The house is the same, but just different enough to soothe his sparking nerves. The couch he sat on with the pink towel wrapped around his shoulders is in a different place, with a different slipcover. The living room seems more open, less cluttered. Phyllis calls Wanda down from upstairs. “She’s in my study,” Phyllis explains. She looks toward him, but not at him—staring absentmindedly past his shoulder. “Wanda is a special girl, you know,” she says.
“I know,” he replies.
“But—maybe even more than we thought.”
Lucas tries to make sense of this, but his adrenal system is too heightened to absorb it. He’s about to ask what Phyllis means by that when Wanda gallops down the stairs, coming down so fast it’s like she’s falling. He forgets his question. Leaving this house is the only thing he can think about now. “Put your shoes on, Wan,” he says. “Time to go.”
These days, Wanda is always bringing something home from Phyllis’s. Vegetables from the garden, still covered in dirt; a fistful of wildflowers; a dozen shit-stained eggs; glass jars packed with jam; a loaf of bread, even. Things she’s gathered or harvested or made from scratch under Phyllis’s careful tutelage. Somewhere along the way, Phyllis taught her what to do with all of these spoils. As if overnight, Lucas notices that Wanda has learned to cook. She makes salads with the fresh, gritty lettuces; she boils pasta and stirs in Sungold tomatoes and olive oil and cheese. She makes stir-fries and soups and even, on occasion, a chocolate cake, which is a recipe he begins to suspect she knows by heart. He watches her make it one Sunday afternoon to be sure, and it’s true. It is a poem she’s memorized.
Lucas sits at the table and pretends to read something while Wanda leaves behind a glorious mess, skipping around the kitchen, climbing up on her little step stool and then hopping off it, measuring flour, shaking salt into the palm of her hand and then brushing it into the mixture. He wasn’t even aware they owned cake pans. It makes him think of Frida—the way she moved so easily in this kitchen. The meals he should have appreciated but didn’t. Half an hour later, Wanda’s cake emerges from the oven in two layers, and after it cools he watches her fill the middle with cream she’s whipped herself and jam she brought home from Phyllis’s.
She’ll be okay without him, he realizes with a little jolt. Not just that; she will thrive. Slowly, steadily, the idea of an envelope carrying an acceptance—an invitation that he might possibly receive but also, also, one that he might actually accept—solidifies. She spreads another layer of whipped cream on top and for the first time, he allows that his penance—for Frida, for Flip—might one day come to an end.
He looks at Wanda placing a ring of huckleberries around the edge of her cake. Everything he and Kirby told her about where her name comes from, it’s all true. He didn’t know that when he said it, but he knows now.
Chapter 41
All winter, Phyllis and Wanda have been experimenting with different bodies of water. They’ve discovered the organisms Phyllis found in the lagoon’s water sample everywhere they look—the Intracoastal Waterway, the swamps, the creek, even the ocean itself. Wanda knows this is strange because of Phyllis’s incredulity, but she is too young to be truly surprised. What’s more, the organisms come out only when Wanda is near. They flock to her, glow for her, and then they dissipate. Perhaps it explains why Phyllis has never found them before, but it hardly satisfies her desire for a scientific explanation. These mysteries have consumed them both for months, lending a certain vitality to their time together. Wanda is thrilled by the hunt for an explanation, but she doesn’t require one. To her, these organisms are a magic she doesn’t need to name. To Phyllis, they are science that requires categorization. And who is to say they cannot be both?