The Light Pirate(81)
Phyllis stored a pile of blank notebooks she didn’t remember packing in a plastic tub and began to record the daily happenings of the lagoon. It was an extravagant thing to have brought, but it felt good to return to this habit. She hadn’t realized that she missed it. The years since Kirby died and Wanda came to live with her had edged out her careful documentation of local ecology—all that time spent exploring and noticing was time she’d suddenly no longer had. But now, without the careful cultivation of the garden, the chickens, the house, as Wanda grew more and more capable, as the demands of life in the swamp became ever simpler, she found that there was once again space for such things.
In her previous life, these observations had been carefully measured, recorded, compared, always with an eye toward the scientific method, an aim to collate her findings and perhaps one day to publish. In this life, her note-taking looked very different. She still collected some hard data, but in between the numbers were thoughts, feelings, sketches, little details that had no place in a research paper but that meant something to her. Details like a clumsy moth, drawn to the beam of her flashlight. The congregation of egrets that habitually descended in the very early mornings, standing in the shallow water and pecking at tiny fish that tried to dart past their spindly black legs. A thick carpet of pink water lilies blooming, making the water’s surface blush with their flowers; the black aphids and grass carp that arrived soon after to munch on all those beautiful petals. There was so much to notice.
But of the lagoon’s many inhabitants, Phyllis continued to observe Wanda most closely of all. It was miraculous, how much she had grown. How tall she was, how strong. How capable. How many years had it been since she’d made space in her life for a curious little girl in men’s T-shirts? It felt like just a moment ago. But here was this woman—brave and ruthless and tender all at once. Wanda was doing the work of building the nest and then maintaining it, of fishing, trapping, fetching water, and foraging. Phyllis helped where she could, but her headaches got worse, not better. The nausea, too. And lately she couldn’t seem to remember the smallest things: how long since she last ate, where they kept the sewing kit, what task Wanda had asked her to complete. Her memory was becoming a gap-toothed smile.
During their third summer there, a heat wave settled over the swamp like a thick blanket and never lifted. They didn’t have the tools to measure heat in degrees anymore, but Phyllis wrote down her guesses anyway: 103? 105? They began to rise earlier and earlier, trying to capture the coolest hours for their work. In the middle of the day they rested, then resumed their chores in the darkness. Even as the seasons changed, the heat didn’t ebb. If anything, it increased, thickening the air until just breathing was a task. Eventually they transitioned into an altogether nocturnal life. In the dark, Phyllis found a whole new world to observe—bats and insects, opossums and raccoons, night-scented orchids and evening primrose and moonflowers. Feral cats stalked the trees, growing ever wilder, drawn to this pair of humans but terrified of them at the same time. Once she was almost sure she saw a Florida panther loping through the underbrush, a species long thought to be extinct.
As much as she loved the nights, they disoriented her. The headaches continued to squeeze her brain so tight she thought it might burst from the pressure, and her memory was growing more and more porous. She couldn’t tell if it was her age or her injury, but it didn’t really matter which—there was nothing she could do but adapt. At night, she lost track of time in a way that unrooted her completely. Duration was impossible to discern; one night and the next bled together. She tried to hide her confusion, not wanting to weigh Wanda down any more with the slow decay of her mind, but there were some things she couldn’t hide.
One evening, Phyllis took the canoe out to gather mushrooms. She often went on foraging trips as dusk settled, taking stock of what was growing in the fading light, seeing how many delicacies she could find before turning on the precious flashlight. Both she and Wanda knew that their little stockpile of batteries wouldn’t last forever, but the longer they lived in the dark, the less they needed to use them.
The surface of the water parted for Phyllis like silk, the smoothness of it catching the fading dusk and holding it. She made her way slowly through the narrow streams, paddling between young mangrove islands and old cypress roots. A great horned owl looked down at her from a bough overhanging the water and she stopped to write down the sighting in her journal. She was sure she’d seen him before—there wasn’t much in this swamp that could escape her attention. The owl cooed at her and cocked his tufted head as she wrote. It wasn’t until she took up her paddle once again that Phyllis realized she’d lost her bearings. It seemed silly at first, a momentary lapse that would be easily corrected, but as the minutes slipped past and she turned this way and that, letting the canoe drift, she began to understand that she was lost. The swamp she knew so well had tricked her somehow. She didn’t recognize it anymore. She saw the owl again, but as if for the first time, and suddenly it scared her—the severity of its face, the sharpness of its beak. Frightened, she chose a direction, but the farther she went, the more unfamiliar the landscape became.
Soon, night swallowed her. She turned on the flashlight, swinging it wildly across the trees, frightening the creatures with her bright light and ragged breath, sending them scampering back into the shadows. She called out for Wanda as loudly as she dared, worried about attracting the wrong kind of attention, remembering the twist of the intruder’s mouth as he looked down at her and feeling suddenly like a lost child. A little girl, alone in a dark wood, more frightened than she’d ever been.