The Light Pirate(86)

Chapter 61




Wanda is very old now. The number doesn’t matter. Her skin is etched and loose. Her hair is pale gray, curling past her shoulders like vines. She can’t move as quickly or as deftly anymore, but she doesn’t need to. She has earned the right to rest.

The treetop home she built has grown. All around the lagoon, new dwellings are tucked in among the mangroves. Their community builds where the trees make room for them. Some of these nests are perched up high in the foliage, where they can wait out floods; some are low, nestled into the roots. There are no walls in this place. No doors. Where Wanda sits, she can see the flickering of bodies moving among mangroves, going about their work. It’s dark, but also bright. In the center, the water is lit, by her own hand, as it is every night. There is a shared language that passes between the light and its keeper. A whisper; a thought. Without speaking, she asks it to glow brighter and it does. She asks it to shine until morning and it will. She no longer worries that someone might see. She hopes they will. There’s room for newcomers.

Beside her, Bird Dog eats mayhaw berries that one of the foragers brought them. It is a simple gift to sit side by side with her beloved and watch the night unfold. She wordlessly offers Wanda a handful of these red jewels, cupping them from one gnarled palm to another. They eat, quiet, enjoying the sour flavor. The platform that holds them is old, Wanda’s first, made of materials she salvaged from the house she was born in. When a surge comes, the platform disappears altogether. But tonight it’s here for them to sit on, their backs propped up against a thick tree trunk, their legs intertwined. The luminous water laps at its edge. Wanda crushes the berries between the teeth she still has, savoring the tartness, enjoying the heat where Bird Dog’s skin touches hers, losing herself in the playful movement of the lights skimming across the water.

She wonders what will happen to the lights when she dies. They are hers and she is theirs—but belonging slips in and out like a tide. Maybe they will find a new keeper. Maybe they will dim and darken. Either way, she trusts that this place will go on changing long after she is gone. The elderly die, and the old ways die with them. The young are born, and fresh traditions begin. One of the children here sees through the darkest nights as if it were day. Another can hold her breath underwater for a long, long time. Another has learned to hear the fish chattering beneath the waves. They do not call these gifts magic and they do not call them science. They call them what they are: change.

Wanda isn’t scared of the ending she feels nearby, but she worries about how Bird Dog will cope when she’s gone. Someone is always left behind; it gives her no peace knowing that this time it won’t be her. Bird Dog finishes the berries and crawls forward to rinse her fruit-sticky hands in the water. Specks of light still cling to her skin as she sits back. They both watch them smolder and then go out. “I was just thinking—do you remember taps?” Bird Dog asks. Her voice has grown deeper in her old age. Raspier. But it’s still the same voice Wanda heard calling out to her in the dark all those years ago.

“Taps?”

Bird Dog mimes the turning of a faucet. She opens an invisible channel of hot water and cups her hands to her face. “Taps. I think that’s right.” Wanda laughs at this pantomime. She does remember. She remembers how she and Lucas used to share the bathroom sink at night, brushing their teeth side by side. She can just make out the shape of him in the mirror—young and mountainous. And she remembers her father, on his knees, running a bath for her, making sure the temperature was right. How easy it used to be. But also—how excruciating. They fought so hard to keep a world that was not meant to stay the same.

“Strange, isn’t it. How different it was.”

“Strange,” Bird Dog agrees. She slides her hand into Wanda’s, their brittle fingers laced together. “You’ve been quiet the past few nights.”

“Just…thinking.” She can’t bring herself to say the goodbye she feels coming out loud. They are so old now—maybe it doesn’t need to be said. Maybe it’s already woven into each moment they share. Someone will be left behind; this is what love costs. Wanda steals a glance at Bird Dog. Over the years, her angles have softened into slopes. Her skin hangs in luscious folds, a delicate necklace of wrinkles around her throat, an intricate crosshatch on her cheeks. Her lips are still stained red from the mayhaw berries. Wanda has memorized this face many times over the years, but it’s always changing, so she memorizes it again.

Across the water, children have gathered to hear a story. A nursery rhyme. Wanda can’t make out all the words, just fragments, but she thinks it’s her story. Their story. A lonely pirate and her light. A seeker and her sight. There are other stories, too—the one about waking with the sun and sleeping with the moon, the one about miles and miles of something called sand, the one about how people used to live their entire lives in boxes. It won’t be so long before these stories are all that’s left of that time. She’s passed on what she can remember. Bird Dog has, too. And there are Phyllis’s notebooks—while the paper lasts. These women haven’t shared their genes, but they have given freely of their memories. Their ideas. Their skills. There is more than one kind of legacy.

A little dinghy cuts through the lagoon, captained by a young woman Wanda remembers arriving a few seasons ago. It used to be that Wanda knew everyone’s name, everyone’s history, but she can’t keep up anymore. That’s someone else’s work now. The fisherwoman whose name she can’t quite reach has come home with a good catch—Wanda can tell from the hint of satisfaction flickering across her face. She rows with an easy mastery, extending the oars and pulling them in as if they are part of her, but Wanda can tell that not much else has been easy for her. There is a heaviness on her face. The kind of loss that seeps into the bone. It is a weight Wanda recognizes. The lights spin around the hull of her boat, thickening where the blades of her oars slip into the water, showing Wanda how much they like this woman. They don’t usually pay attention to boats passing through.