The Light Pirate(71)
She glides deeper into the swamp instead, westward, where the water is fresher and the alligators like to cluster. Going in circles, keeping her eye on the stars through the web of mangrove branches so she doesn’t lose her way, she pours herself into the thrust of her paddle and stays vigilant. Every sound is a threat, every creature an enemy. Every splash is Bird Dog, come to finish her off. Surely that is her plan. How could it not be?
Only when dawn nears does she head for home. By now, her thoughts have settled somewhat. It’s next to impossible that someone has managed to follow her this far without her knowing. She is beginning to process, to dissect what happened at the flagpole. To discern how keen the threat is, how imminent. She must be invisible for a time—no more fishing, no more trips to the spring. She’ll drink rainwater and make her food stores last. The real question is whether her home is still safe. Wanda glides toward the tree house on the warming water. The paddle grows heavy in her hands. A feverish dawn approaches. Sweat pools along the ridges of her collarbones and drips from the backs of her knees, landing softly on the bottom of the canoe. When she met Bird Dog at the spring, it felt like a kind of reward for all this time alone since Phyllis died, a new chapter, a way forward. But now it is just confirmation of everything Phyllis ingrained in her. All the suspicion, all the fear. She chastises herself for not recognizing Bird Dog sooner. It’s been years since she last saw her, but even so. It’s not the kind of thing one forgets.
At home, Wanda goes through the motions of getting ready for bed while the sun’s tendrils creep up over the horizon and charge the air with the kind of heat that sends living things scurrying for cover. The tomcat is back, asking for food, but she has nothing to spare for him, especially not now that she must be wary of fishing on the open water. If she could be a little girl again, she would go hungry on his behalf in an instant. She would have starved for the kitten her father gave her just before he died. Blackbeard, who rode around on her shoulders, peeking out from under her curls. Blackbeard, who stalked the nature reserve with her when she was young, and later, the rooms of abandoned homes Phyllis told her never, ever to enter. Blackbeard, who walked into the swamp one day and didn’t return.
She can’t afford to coddle these feral cats that roam the mangroves, these creatures that stay for a while but always disappear eventually. Always leaving her. Everyone always leaving her, no matter what she does, vanishing into the dark and never coming back. She forces herself to eat some of the dried fish before bed. She doesn’t want it, but her body gave everything it had to work all night. She must bolster her strength. Chances are, she’ll need it soon enough. Before she lies down, she can’t help but give the tomcat the tiniest sliver of fish. It disappears into the pink curl of his tongue and he looks at her, pupils so wide in the dark they’ve swallowed the green: two mirrors, pleading for more. He will leave, too, she knows. The only mystery is when. It’s always just a matter of when. He butts his head against her palm. For now, though, he stays.
She doesn’t sleep that day, just lies there, staring up at the ceiling, palm fronds woven together and lashed to the frame of salvaged wood that is notched among the branches of the mangroves. The blue house still stood when she found this place. It was a sort of hideout at first, just a cluster of trees she liked to sit in. The place she came when she wanted to be alone. A few months after Lucas left, she built the first platform using a patchwork of materials that she salvaged from the house where she grew up. She took the sheets of plywood her father used to cover the windows, the half-rotten porch railings, the paint-peeled siding. Nails from Kirby’s flooded toolshed. His rusty hammer. It was just a distraction back then. Something to do with her hands. A shrine to the family she had lost. It was only later that it became her and Phyllis’s home—but Wanda doesn’t like thinking about the night they left the blue house.
What she thinks about instead, as she contemplates the knots in the rope and the layering of the fronds, is the fact that the thatch will need replacing soon. She remembers the last time she replaced it. It was hard enough to do on her own, but then her foot got caught in the crotch of the tree trunk and twisted on the way down. She spent two days on her back, hungry, thirsty, wondering if it was broken. If a snapped ankle would be the thing that killed her. By the third day, the swelling began to go down and her panic subsided. Life went on. And if it hadn’t healed fast enough? If it had been her back instead of her ankle? The takeaway was that only one of a million things needs to go awry to upset this teetering balance of survival. Just one.
Lying here, thinking of all her other close calls now, it occurs to her that the entire structure she inhabits feels suddenly unsteady. The physicality of it, the wood and the nails, but also the intangible framework: the beliefs she holds, the rules Phyllis set out. She has begun to suspect that somewhere deep in the foundation of this life she is living, a mistake was made. She can’t quite discern what it was, or how she knows this, or how to fix it, but that makes it all the more disquieting. Something doesn’t add up, and Bird Dog is part of it somehow. Why didn’t she give chase? If Wanda had glided into her trap, then why is she here, safe and sound? How did she escape so easily? There is something that she doesn’t understand, and it nags at her.
The more Wanda thinks, the farther from sleep she gets. The tomcat has retreated to the edge of the platform, but he’s still there—far enough that she can’t reach out to touch him and close enough that she can hear him chuffing occasionally as he grooms. He licks his grizzled paws, and together they bear the hottest part of the day until it passes and a cool front arrives. The smell of rain floats in off the ocean. The tom stops his licking and looks at her, eyes glinting green in a single sliver of sunlight that punctures the thatch. He cocks his head. And she realizes she’s already made the decision she spent the day circling. Hiding herself away here will achieve nothing; she needs to know more.