The Light Pirate(55)
Wanda paddles for hours. Her arms are strong and sinewy. She will tire eventually, but she likes to think she could persevere forever. She imagines that her muscles could go on without her, cutting the paddle down on one side and then the other, over and over, until she reaches the Gulf. It’s her mind that quits first. A sort of cinching around her neck when she strays too far from home. She rests, the grip pulled into her chest, her breath a little ragged. She should wait for her body to cool after this much exertion, but she’s so close. Just a little farther. She rotates her crackling wrists and takes hold of the paddle once more: a soft splash as one blade slips beneath the water, and then the other. She can just barely discern the mangrove islands from the open water, and just barely is enough. Roots and fallen trees scratch at her hull, but she is agile in the water. The shades of darkness speak volumes to her practiced eye. She finds the opening through the cypress trees, guided by the sound of the chimes hung in the branches. She didn’t hang them there; whoever did is either very kind or very foolish. Marking this place for oneself is also marking it for others. A risky thing. She leaves the chimes alone, even though they make her uneasy. The sound of them tinkling here in the darkness reminds her: This place does not belong to her.
With a practiced flick of her paddle, Wanda glides down the swampy corridor, sawgrass whispering as she passes. The sound of the chimes grows faint behind her. She enters the lagoon, and there, in the center—movement. Wanda feels for the knife she carries on her hip and flicks the blade open. Dangerous creatures lurk in these swamps; she is one of them.
Chapter 49
After Kirby died, Phyllis cleared out her study and told Wanda it was her room for as long as she wanted it. They never did find his body. The water washed a great many things away that day. Lucas, already in California by then, came straight home when he heard. He arrived in the middle of the night while Wanda slept upstairs, delirious from driving straight through. Phyllis was waiting for him. She took his arm, steered him inside, and held him on the couch while he bawled into her shoulder. She could feel him dissolving into that twelve-year-old boy she’d found on her doorstep, gasping for air, pressing his face hard into her.
“Forewing…hindwing…” he whispered into her blouse. A lepidopterist’s prayer.
“What’s that now?”
“Butterfly parts. Like you said.”
The last time she held him like this came rushing back to her. She hadn’t known what to say to him then, the hurricane raging just outside, but she’d been worried that that aching boy would seize and convulse in her arms if she didn’t manage to distract him a little, so she taught him butterfly anatomy. How devastating that he held on to it all these years. How perfect. “That’s good,” she told him, rubbing slow circles on his back with her palm. “Real good.”
When he managed to gather himself, they talked about what would happen to Wanda. Lucas hurried to sacrifice—to move back home, to drop out of school before he’d even begun and give up his scholarship—but there were holes in this plan. Phyllis pointed them out. Kirby wouldn’t want that. Wanda wouldn’t want it. And besides, how would he earn? He said he could go to college and make a home for her at the same time, a fresh start for them both in California. Phyllis nodded. “Could do,” she said. “Let’s sleep on it.” She made up the couch for him as soft and deep as she could, but the effort was lost on him. He was asleep before she could turn out the light.
In the morning, she gathered these two tearstained children that weren’t hers at the table. Lucas, not really a child, but not quite a man, either. And Wanda, her little protégé. “I’ve been thinking,” she told them, “that if Wanda wanted to, and you agreed, she could live here. With me.”
Lucas shook his head. “No, we’re family. We’re going to California like Pop wanted us to.”
“I don’t wanna leave,” Wanda said, a whine creeping in. “I never even wanted to go to California. Why can’t I stay with Phyllis?”
“I could move back—” he said.
“Just think it over,” Phyllis said. “There’s time.”
The three of them sat and filled their mouths with Phyllis’s biscuits, smeared with butter and jam, so that they had an excuse not to talk for a little while. True, there was time—but not much.
The question of what to do about Wanda went on in murmurs and late-night conferences between Phyllis and Lucas. They had the same conversation, again and again, but there was no easy solution. Lucas had only a week before the beginning of his first semester. Just a few days to decide. He and Wanda spent their time splashing through the inches of water that still rippled across the low roads, wandering this town that would never be the same again. Phyllis watched them venture out each morning: solemn, hand in hand. She could see Lucas trying to be older than he was, braver than he was. It’s unfair for one family to lose so much, she thought, standing on the front porch as they disappeared behind the cypress trees. In the end, Lucas relented to Wanda’s impassioned plea to stay with Phyllis. Of the three of them, she was the only one who seemed certain. They agreed that they’d try it for a year.
On Lucas’s last evening in the blue house, they made a feast. A crawfish boil, with Phyllis’s own sweet corn and potatoes, and crawdads that Lucas and Wanda caught themselves. They spread it out on the newspaper-covered picnic table in the backyard, next to the garden, but it was impossible to forget the deep sadness lurking on either side of this perfect hour—the absence of Kirby, Lucas’s impending departure. They studiously spoke of neither while Blackbeard whined at their feet and Wanda fed her pieces of claw meat dipped in butter.