The Light Pirate(60)
“I’d stay longer if I could, but the crew is shorthanded as it is.”
“I understand.”
“Wanda…” he began, then stopped. They stared at one another and Phyllis waited for him to claim his sister. “I asked her what she wanted to do,” he continued. “Where she wanted to live. And…she doesn’t want to come to California with me.” His voice fell ever so slightly as he said this.
“Oh.” Phyllis waited.
“I know what it feels like to be snatched away when you don’t want to leave. And I don’t want to do that to her. But I also…I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back. It’ll be a while. And I—well, let’s be honest, Florida cell towers are running on borrowed time. Either they fall apart on their own or they shut down. What happens when they go? This place just disappears, Phyllis. I’m not sure I can spend two weeks just getting here every summer. If I can even count on the fishing boats next year. And how the hell do I get back? How long will that take? I don’t know what to do. She’s my responsibility, I can’t just leave her. And I can’t drag her off, neither. But I can’t be in two places at once. It’s either California or…this.” He swung his hands around, as if he were holding all of Rudder in his arms for just a second, then he let them fall into his lap. “And I don’t…I don’t want this.”
“It’s okay. I do,” Phyllis said, patting his arm. “We do. Want this.”
“I see what you mean now, about it getting worse out there. I really do. It’s just going to be Florida all over again. Slower, maybe. Or faster, who knows. It’s not like one is better than the other when it’s all headed down the same road.”
There was no satisfaction in knowing she’d been right.
Wanda stayed. She wanted to. Phyllis wanted her to. And Lucas had finally seen that the rest of the world couldn’t offer her anything better. He couldn’t offer her anything better. They both impressed upon Wanda what staying could mean, and Phyllis was pretty sure she understood. As much as any of them understood. They found a military passenger truck heading north on Phyllis’s CB radio. It was already filled with refugees, but they were happy to add another. These trucks were a fixture now; Phyllis saw them driving around, week after week, announcing their presence on bullhorns. Rounding up as many people as they could convince to go.
The three of them met the truck at the old school. The auditorium had caved in since the last time they’d been here. When Phyllis told the driver it was just Lucas leaving, he frowned and gave her next week’s schedule of passenger vehicles passing through this part of the state. Wanda started to say that they didn’t need it, but Phyllis shushed her. Let him assume they’d follow. It was easier that way.
“How much longer will you be making trips?” Lucas asked, climbing up into the back of the canvas-covered truck. The driver slammed the tailgate behind him and gave it a stern pat.
“Till the end of the year. January first and we’re outta here. Hear that? Don’t wait too long, ladies.” He trudged around to the front of the truck. Inside, Phyllis could see more than half a dozen people huddled on the bench seats. They looked tired. Worn. Bereft, like the world had just ended. Which, for them, she realized, it had. Lucas looked down from his perch in the truck, his rucksack between his knees, all the hesitation and fear he’d confided in her evident on his face.
“We’ll be fine,” Phyllis called up to him. Lucas gripped the edge of the tailgate, and for a moment he looked like the little boy she remembered so vividly.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she lied. A scientist knows nothing is ever certain. Phyllis and Wanda watched Lucas disappear, waving until the truck turned the corner, and then they trudged home through the ankle-deep floodwater, the sheen of oil slicks swirling around their muck boots.
Phyllis’s feelings regarding Wanda’s light had spanned a broad spectrum since that day in the swamp when she first saw it. She’d begun this exploration with utter disbelief, moved into cautious experimentation, then swung over to obsessive curiosity and a constant, feverish excitement. The world was crawling with undiscovered species, but she’d never imagined that she might find one herself. Ever since that first glimpse, she’d been reading and thinking and hypothesizing. She’d gathered all the books in the house that touched on bioluminescence, either directly or circuitously, and methodically reread each of them late at night. It was an extraordinary discovery, but what to do with it—she wasn’t entirely sure. There was so much she didn’t know. So many resources she didn’t have.
In the evenings, after Wanda went to bed, Phyllis began to tinker with a scholarly paper. It felt almost unethical not to share this with a wider audience, but at the same time, without the kind of rigid, supervised experimentation she no longer had access to, her findings would be a laughingstock—if they were even published. Still. She could not ignore the data, and the data showed that the organisms glowed only in response to Wanda’s presence. They clustered around her, sensing her in the water, sensing her even when she was near the water. It was unmistakable. Phyllis had tried every variable she could think of to disrupt this pattern, but the creatures were steadfast in their attraction.
Was it an oil on her skin? The pitch of her voice? Phyllis couldn’t make sense of it. It was beyond the scientific tools at her disposal. Her most educated guess was that somewhere along the way, Wanda had acquired an intestinal bacterium that was either related to or the same as the organisms they found in the water and this was how they recognized her as one of their own. Maybe she was the origin, spreading new specimens to each suitable body of water she interacted with. Maybe it was a supernatural gift, an infection, a genetic mutation. Maybe, maybe, maybe.