The Light Pirate(58)
“Why’s he angry?”
“Most of the time when people are angry, they’re also sad.”
They pedaled on in silence and Phyllis thought the conversation was over, but then Wanda said, “I can understand that.”
“I know you do, sweet pea.”
The realization of just how much she needed to impart to Wanda had been on her mind for months—that was what the syllabus was for—but now, confronted with the rage of a man left behind by civilization, it occurred to her that while teaching Wanda how to sterilize canning jars and purify water and identify the many varieties of epiphytes was useful, there was a subject she had neglected. Maybe the most important instruction she could offer: on the people who stayed and how to survive them. In this respect, she was a student herself.
Chapter 50
Wanda holds the blade down. She doesn’t want to use it, but she will. It wouldn’t be the first time. The movement in the center of the lagoon is just shadows, but she can hear the water parting and rippling, slapping against the tree trunks and their roots. It’s too late to slip away unseen, so she coasts into the lagoon as quietly as she can, trying to discern the source of the water’s disturbance as her canoe glides closer. But the night is too dark, even for her. A clouded curtain has slipped over the stars, and whatever dim glow they offered is gone. The shroud of foliage around the lagoon is pitch black. Impenetrable. If she wants to see what or who is here with her, there’s only one option left. But using it has its own consequences.
The thing that will happen if Wanda touches this water is familiar to her now. A light will spread in all directions: a quiet, brilliant sunburst with her at its center. It will move of its own accord. A living thing, awakening. More accurately, a million living things. A billion. Another impossible number. When she was small, turning on these lights was an accident. They saved her, surprised her, warned her, and then they failed her. She could feel them nearby when her father got out of the truck on a watery night and never came back. Why didn’t they help her then? Why didn’t they save him?
Over the years, Phyllis taught her to think of the light as a tool. She taught her to use it sparingly. Carefully. But what Phyllis struggled to comprehend—what Wanda has always just known—is that the light is more than a collection of single-celled organisms. It is more complex than she has words for. Phyllis needed it to be science, and so for her it was. But for Wanda, the light has always defied categorization. Now, with the knife in her hand and the water at her fingertips, she prefers the knife. The knife is a tool she has mastered. The water…is not.
There is another flicker of movement in the center of the lagoon. She can feel the ripples rolling through the hull of her boat. Whoever is here with her is large and unafraid. It could be a gator, which is manageable—or it could be a human. A human would be much worse. Either way, she realizes that she has to see what she’s dealing with. There’s no way around it. The knife is useless until she knows what she’s using it for. Reaching down toward the water, knowing as she does that the cost of summoning these creatures is never straightforward, she rakes her fingers through the wet and tightens her grip on the weapon. She will see and be seen. This is the bargain.
The light begins at her fingertips and spreads, quickly, smoothly, across the face of the water. It radiates in all directions, pulsing through the lagoon, darting along its surface. Wanda sees the source of the movement then—and it’s neither alligator nor human. It’s a pair of manatees, playing. She folds back the blade of her knife and the tension goes out of her shoulders. The manatees roll through the water, under and over, caressing each other with their bulk, flitting away and then circling back. The lights please them, and it seems that the feeling is mutual: the glow burns brighter where the manatees play, a luminous ribbon entwining their smooth curves.
“Hello,” she whispers.
She fills her water bottles with the fresh water that flows into the lagoon from the spring below, and when she’s finished, she sheds her clothes and slips into the clean, clear water. The lights spin all around her, shimmering and rippling, as if they are trying to speak to her with their patterns. It’s been a long time since she woke these creatures; she’s missed them.
When she was young, Wanda couldn’t get enough of being surrounded by this cool, shimmering intelligence. It felt like being held by a friend so old she didn’t remember meeting them. Like coming home to swim in her own primordial fluid. She didn’t question them back then, she just accepted their presence. But acceptance was not Phyllis’s way. She busied herself trying to define the light, poring over everything she could find about bioluminescence and single-celled organisms—about their evolution and chemistry, about their ability to regulate the color, intensity, and regularity of the glow according to specific needs. And in the end, Phyllis became convinced that they had discovered a new species.
She remembers the progression of Phyllis’s shock, then her curiosity, then her excitement. She remembers how special she felt, knowing that the lights only came out for her and no one else. In the beginning, it never occurred to Wanda to doubt their whispers, their brightness. But that was before Kirby died. She’d like to trust them now, to feel that same easy faith she did when she was young, except that nothing is easy anymore.
She swims toward the manatees and they surface for her, rolling their bellies up toward the night sky so that she’ll scratch them, taking turns, circling. She usually washes with a bucket in her tree house, or just waits for rain. It’s been a long while since she allowed herself this luxury of submersion, but the presence of the manatees makes her feel safe. The water is cooler here, where it bubbles up from a crevice in the earth. She can feel the salt on her skin dissolving. The lights whisper, an indecipherable hush. On either side, the manatees nudge up against her, gently butting her with their round heads, rubbing their slippery gray skin against hers. One of them swims beneath her feet, tickling her toes. She looks down, and through the glimmer of the lights, she can see into the underwater caves, where the spring is hidden. A submerged staircase is visible—a remnant from the days when tourists came and swam in the spring or went scuba diving in the caves. There are reminders everywhere, but this rippling vision of the staircase touches something she’d forgotten. The last time she saw these stairs she was standing on them, descending into the caves with one hand on the decaying railing, the other lost in Lucas’s palm, their father a few steps behind.