The Light Pirate(82)
When Wanda finally found her, Phyllis was curled up in the bottom of the boat. The flashlight was dead, clutched against her chest, and her face was streaked with tears, white hair coming undone from its thick braid. Phyllis heard the ripple of something moving in the water nearby and shut her eyes tighter. It wasn’t until she heard her companion’s voice calling her name that she dared to look. She saw a distant brightness coming nearer and nearer, spreading across the water, birthed from darkness, Wanda at its center, swimming toward her.
“There you are,” Wanda said.
Somehow in the glow of this living, ambient light, a glow that brushed the bottoms of the palm fronds gold and drew the night creatures close to see what was happening, the swamp once again revealed itself to Phyllis. She knew exactly where she was, and the shame of her lapse, of her childish panic, nearly crushed her. Even amid all this beauty, she felt sick. Wanda, still in the water, pushed the canoe over to a spit of mud so that she could climb in. “Are you all right?” she asked, sitting down on the bench seat, luminous and dripping. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Phyllis snapped. “It’s not safe for you to be in the water. Anyone could see. No wonder they found us the first time.” All around them, the light diminished. Wanda took up the paddle in silence and used it to push them away from the rushes. She was drenched, a puddle forming in the bottom of the boat that still shone ever so slightly. The water that dripped from her hair and her clothes shimmered in the darkness and then went out.
Wanda said nothing as she propelled them back to the tree house, but the wounded look on her face spoke for her. Phyllis’s head was pounding, her thoughts smashing against the inside of her skull. She knew she needed to explain, to take back this horrifying insinuation that the intruders had been Wanda’s fault, that all this time she’d held her young friend responsible for what had happened—but she couldn’t find the words. Her brain pulsed. Her stomach churned. All she could do was put her head between her knees and wait for the spell to pass. And by the time it did, she had forgotten she’d said anything at all.
Years passed—or was it just a moment? Hard to say. Phyllis’s cognitive mind slipped farther and farther away and a different kind of awareness bloomed. The swamp breathed and she breathed with it. She saw everything: the creatures, the flowers, the tender shoots of green and the towering trees, the depths of the water. All that was dead and dying. All that was bursting with life. Her notebooks, tucked away in their plastic container, were gradually forgotten. The urge to record, to quantify, left her. Instead, she returned to the inclination that had guided her through all the years when her mind was sharp. The root of her curiosity: a simple and enduring desire to notice. There were moments during this last stretch when she occupied herself so completely that she forgot there had been any other time than now, any other way to exist but this. And there were also moments when she fought against the ebbing of logic and analysis, feeling adrift and upset, as if something precious had been taken from her that she would never have again. All of this was true. All of it was right.
Memories of childhood dusted her skin like pollen. All it took was a brisk gust of wind to send it all scattering. She remembered learning—the crispness of a washed blackboard, a good mark on her paper, the perfect loneliness of a library; she remembered men she’d known and she remembered intimacy; she remembered her parents, having them and losing them; she remembered her sister, pretty and harsh and unwilling to imagine the future Phyllis had foreseen; she remembered teaching—the way her hands shook at the start of every term, her students and their litany of excuses; she remembered her research—working in the field, working at her desk, the minutiae of life glimpsed through a microscope; she remembered every forest she’d ever walked through; she remembered every city she’d ever visited; she remembered preparing, preparing, preparing. And then all of this was gone. Piece by piece, Phyllis said goodbye to each part of her life that had come before.
She held on to Wanda the longest. As long as she could. She replayed every moment they had spent together. She repeated Wanda’s name to herself when Wanda left her alone in the tree house, reciting it like a chant, a prayer, so that when she came home, it would already be on her tongue. This didn’t always work. Sometimes Phyllis arrived in a moment she hadn’t been aware of—like time travel, hopping from one place to another with smooth, easy leaps. It was only when she saw the exhaustion on Wanda’s face that she realized she had missed something in between.
“I’m sorry,” Phyllis said. “I think I…was somewhere else.”
“That’s all right.”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re weaving nets. Do you want to help?”
“Yes. Yes, please.”
They sat together and they weaved in a soft light that was either just beginning or just ending—Phyllis couldn’t tell. Her net looked misshapen and full of too-big holes. How could she ever catch a fish with this? She looked at Wanda’s—tight and controlled. That’s good, she thought. The girl knows things.
But then, a leap, a landing—“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“I think…I think I’ve forgotten what we’re…”
“We’re weaving.”
Phyllis looked down at her lap. “So we are.”