The Light Pirate(78)

“I saw the light between the trees. You don’t forget that kind of thing. I knew it was you.”

“You could have told me then, who you were.”

“Maybe should have, but didn’t wanna scare you away, did I?”

“Don’t see why you’d care.” Outside, the sun has risen past the waterline, a yellow morning spreading across the water, thick and stifling. The rags over the windows flutter, letting shards of brightness in. She can see Bird Dog clear and up close for the first time in more years than she can account for: forehead high and worn, cheekbones too sharp to touch. The blue eyes, boring into her from across the room.

“I care because I’m sorry. For when we was kids. And I’m sorry for later on. It was me that tracked you from the old Walmart. Corey couldn’t keep a trail to save his life, that was my job. That’s how we did things, us three. I didn’t like it, but I did it.”

“We always wondered how they found us.” They are quiet for a long while then. Nearby, a gull cries. Just one. A rare bird now. Wanda sneaks a look at Bird Dog. Her eyes are closed and her forehead is creased, as if she’s in pain.

“I reckon I got a lot to make up for,” Bird Dog says.

Wanda realizes that this is the moment to say that she was the one to pull the trigger. Bird Dog may know more than Wanda thought, but she doesn’t know everything. And if this is real, this kindness she’s offering, this absolution, this acknowledgment of harm done, then it means nothing without an exchange. Isn’t this what it is to exist alongside another person? It’s been so long, she isn’t sure how. She tries to say it, but the enormity of what she’s done is hard to articulate, and Wanda has never been good with words—especially not now, when it’s been years since she had the opportunity to use them.

Then she remembers that day the twins must have followed them home. She remembers Phyllis resting across from her while she wielded the paddle, leaning into the wind, savoring the sun and the salt and the feeling of being on the open water. She remembers the two of them hauling the canoe into the bushes, unloading their spoils, and carrying them inside just as the afternoon thunderstorm landed. She remembers how safe it felt inside the house, rain beating against the windows, thunder pounding its palm flat against the sky. Then she remembers all of this being taken away a few nights later. And she doesn’t feel sorry. She feels vengeful.

“It was me,” she says. “I killed them.”

Bird Dog is quiet, looking at her for a long time. Finally, she says, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Wanda wants more than this. She wants, she realizes, a fight.

“Makes us even, don’t you reckon? Was they gonna kill you if you didn’t kill ’em first?”

Wanda nods.

“Then okay. It was a long time ago, Wanda. We both done things we had to. But it’s done. Can’t change none of it.” And somehow, that is all there is to say.

Bird Dog eventually sleeps—or at least, she does a good job of pretending. Wanda doesn’t. She listens to Bird Dog’s slow, deep breath and lies still, sweating and reexamining every memory she has of the younger Brie, trying to reconcile the past with the present. Thinking back that far requires her to exhume an entire life in which she had a brother and a father, a friend and a pet, a bicycle with a basket, an abundance of solid ground to walk on, and a verdant, sunlit wilderness to explore and enjoy. The old conviction that these things she had would go on being hers, that she might grow up to accumulate even more—the ordinary pillars of lives children were so carelessly promised back then: jobs, houses, loves, families.

She has none of this. It doesn’t occur to her to feel cheated very often, but she feels it now. Who is left to blame?



When Bird Dog finally wakes, the sun is going down. They wait for darkness and then board their vessels. Wanda is torn between trusting her and not, joining her and not, but in the end, she is too curious to turn back. There is more to know. This, at least, she is certain of.

In the remains of another town, a few miles south, Bird Dog shows Wanda how she scavenges: quietly moving from one ruin to the next, assessing what is visible in the moonlight, but also maybe sensing what isn’t. What’s left of this town is mostly beneath the surface of the water. It’s a strange landscape of gentle waves and crumbling roofs and cockeyed streetlights. In one house, or what remains of it, Bird Dog dives and resurfaces with an old toolbox covered in algae. Inside, a treasure trove of hand tools. Wanda picks through the jumble, much of it worse for wear but still useful. Metal is always useful. She inspects with her fingers and the soft rays of a nearly full moon illuminating the bounty in front of them. She weighs a pair of needle-nose pliers, fused shut with rust, in her palm. “How do you know where to dive?”

“I just look till it feels right. Sometimes there’s nothing. Sometimes there’s something. Depends. Why don’t you try?”

Wanda’s head jerks up involuntarily. She puts the pliers back in the box, and the clatter of metal on metal is too loud for this quiet place. The echo is enormous. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“’Cause the lights? There’s no one to see. I’d know if there was.”

“No.” Wanda doesn’t intend it to sound so harsh, but the word is brittle and sharp in her mouth.