The Light Pirate(80)
Going slowly through the dark canals and the moonlit rivers, she heads for home and tries to understand how she got here—exhausted, dehydrated, stinking of sweat, and weighed down with a mantle of emotions she’s forgotten the words for. She goes slowly, her muscles barely able to do their work.
She gets home and ties off and hauls up the warm glass jugs she keeps suspended underwater so that their contents stay at least a little refreshing and drinks deeply—not too fast, her stomach can accept only so much. Then she lies down, lets loose a long, shaky exhale, and waits to feel relieved that she’s made it. Instead, a crushing sadness washes over her. There are too many losses to grieve: Phyllis, Blackbeard, Lucas, Kirby, the Rudder she knew as a child, Frida and Flip, who she never even got a chance to meet. And now Bird Dog, this woman whom she is too broken to join. She understands that it isn’t enough to have made it home. It isn’t enough to be alive after all these years. There is a deficit here that she is unable to reconcile. Life costs more than it gives.
For the first time in a long time, she cries—big, choking sobs—the whole time worrying about her tears. She needs that moisture for other things, she tells herself, this is a waste, an extravagance, a careless use of precious resources. But even so, she cries, and even so, the price of these tears is tangible, exacting, steep.
Chapter 59
The place Wanda chose for them was a good one. Phyllis recognized it as the lagoon where Wanda fell in back when they’d just begun to spend their afternoons together, but so much had changed in the years since she was last here. The land was gone, to start, replaced by ripples and a cloudy sheen. Many of the trees she’d tagged had succumbed to the brackish water, their rotting trunks still teetering among the living like pale ghosts. Others had flourished, crowding out their malnourished neighbors and sending down seedlings by the hundreds.
At first glance, Phyllis mourned all the delicate mosses and ferns that had been lost beneath the rising water, but she was soon distracted by a riotous new generation of aquatic plant life. Everywhere she turned she found something new to admire: sugarcane plume grass and duckweed, cattail and maidencane and bulrush; water hyacinth, water spinach, water lily, water shield. Little yellow lantana flowers that sprouted wherever they could. Wild coffee that grew in the cracks of tree trunks and staghorn ferns that hung from their branches. And others, plants she didn’t even recognize. It was, in many ways, a hopeful place. A little platform, barely wide enough for the two of them to lie side by side, was already there, built into the trees. She remembered all the times Wanda had disappeared with the canoe. So this was where she’d come. Always a few inexplicable steps ahead.
“Yes,” Phyllis said, taking in the clumsy platform, the verdant new growth, the strategically hidden entrance. Additions were already taking shape in her mind. “It’s good. It’s what we need.”
For all its beauty, it was most importantly a practical place. A safe place. Many of the trees were sturdy enough to take on plywood and nails and human weight. The water was deep enough for them to come and go in the canoe. The canopy was thick and the underbrush rose up like an impenetrable, snarled screen to deflect unwelcome eyes. There was little chance of anyone happening upon them by accident. As much as any wild place could, it welcomed them and it held them. It became the refuge they needed.
The longer they spent in the swamp, the more Phyllis realized that she had no idea what she was doing. The certainty she had felt watching the house burn, then seeing this place for the first time, the clarity of what was to come, did not last. How could it? She was a woman accustomed to planning, to knowing what came next and being ready for it. This—this she was not ready for. This she had not planned. But here it was anyway.
They started by widening the platform Wanda had already built, and from there, Wanda began to expand into the trees, building more platforms as high as the boughs would allow, while Phyllis sat down below and worked on weaving thatch and cutting wood to size. She was frequently nauseous and dizzy, plagued by migraines that lasted for days on end, but she kept her pain to herself. She knew what a traumatic brain injury was, and she knew there was little she could do about it. There was no need to add to her young friend’s burden, which, in the aftermath of the invasion, was visibly substantial.
The work was good for Wanda. Good for them both. The tree house took shape. In many ways, the trees were their architects, showing them where they could build and where they couldn’t. How high. How heavy. And the ruined town gave them their materials. Their nest among the boughs made sense in a way the homes of Rudder never had. It belonged here. And on some days, they belonged here, too. On others, not so much. Their first week, a torrential rainstorm washed away a few of the lighter hand tools, a ball of twine, and an entire box of batteries. During their second, Wanda encountered a colony of fire ants living in one of the trees she’d planned to build in and fell at least fifteen feet into the water as she scrambled to escape them. The stings lingered for days, but the water caught her gently. More weeks went by. Then months. Then a year.
A great many creatures watched as these two humans settled in, their eyes wide and mirrored in the dark, hanging from tree branches or lurking among the exposed roots or peering up from the warm murk of the water: curious and wary. Even as Phyllis and Wanda grew more comfortable with the shape of their lives here, the wild continued to remind them that this place was not theirs: an alligator heaving itself up out of the water to snatch a string of fish Phyllis set down while she went to fetch her knife, Wanda waking up to find a snake slithering across her legs. They learned to share.