Wilder Girls(16)

At last the woods start to thin, and ahead I can see the open stretch of the salt marsh. In the distance, maybe a half mile out, the ocean is gray and rough, the horizon empty like it always is.

   “Oh,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Welch frowns at me. “What?”

“I just thought they’d be waiting for us.”

Nobody answers me, so I swallow my disappointment and fall into single file with them, me between Carson and Julia, as Welch leads us out of the cover of the trees. Immediately, the wind is stinging, so strong it just about knocks me over. I shove my hat in my coat pocket and edge closer to Julia, hope she’ll take some of the worst of it for me.

The road here is scrubbed flat, and on either side the ground drops off into reeds and soupy pools of mud. To the right I can see the remains of the boardwalk that used to lead from the pier to the visitors’ center, winding through the marsh and the woods, dotted with informational plaques that don’t seem to be there anymore. I want to ask what’s happened to them. But the answer would be the same as everything else: the Tox.

We stay on the road, and it’s a slow walk until we hit the start of the ferry pier, ragged old red tape fluttering across the entrance. Everybody said at the beginning that they were planning a wall, a real one, with metal and plastic to see through, but this was the most they ever did. Some tape and a sign that says “Wait until area has been cleared.”

We stop here, and Welch drops her bag on the ground and digs around in it. She comes up with a pair of binoculars, stares through them at the horizon.

   “What do we do now?” I say, knocking one foot against the other to shake off the cold.

“Usually,” Carson starts, “we have to wait a while. But so—”

And then a bird chirps. I whip around, checking the trees, my depth perception slipping as my eye fights to adjust. “What the hell was that?”

The birds stopped singing right when we got sick, went quiet like they’d never been there at all. As the days passed we watched them fly away, herons and gulls and starlings flying forever south. I haven’t heard one in so long I’d forgotten what they sound like.

“Oh, good,” Welch says. “They’re almost here.”

I’m still wondering why the bird doesn’t seem strange to anyone else when a foghorn kind of noise blasts from out on the water. I jump, my heartbeat ratcheting up, breath sharp in my lungs.

“Where is it?” I say.

It’s a clear enough day, the sun up somewhere behind the gray sky. You can see the shore from here, a smear way out across the waves. And in between, no boat, no ship.

“Just wait.”

“But I don’t see.”

Another foghorn, and the others look ready, like this is the way it’s supposed to be, and then, out of the gray, like it’s pushing through some great fog, the prow of a ship.

   It’s a tug with a blunt nose and a faded hull. Too big to get close on our side of the island, but the ferry pier is just right, jutting out over deep water. I recognize the ID stamp as the tug swings closer, the white number and the stripes of yellow and blue on the stack. I saw these sometimes in Norfolk. Navy-issue, they mean, from Camp Nash on the coast.

The wake is just hitting the shore as the ship turns, and if I squint, I can make out two people, bigger than they should be in bright-colored suits, moving around on the flat tail of the deck. The ship is turning, the motor getting louder and louder until Carson crams her fingers in her ears. There’s a big orange crane near the back—I can make it out now—and it’s lifting, extending, and we watch it hoist a pallet from the deck, over and out across the water, to the end of the pier.

The crane releases and the pallet crashes down. Under us the pier boards shudder. I take a step forward, but Julia throws her arm across my chest.

“They have to give the all clear,” she says.

The hook has released and the crane’s retracting, and the two people are just standing there on the deck, looking at us, and I’m waiting for one of them to wave or something when the horn goes off, and it’s so close and so big that we just stand there, mouths open, let it wash over us.

Eventually, it stops, and I take a gasping gulp of fresh air.

“Now we can go,” Julia says.

   The water’s slapping against the supports as the wake gets bigger, now the tug is moving fast again. Two seagulls land noisily on the railing of the pier. They’re watching us, watching the supplies the boat left. Here to scavenge, to get what they can. They must follow the tug from the mainland.

Now that we’re closer I can see that there’s a lot in this delivery. And I mean a lot, more than what they usually carry back. The pallet is covered with wooden cartons, all nailed shut, and on top of those are five or six bags, the kind Boat Shift always come home with.

“What is all this?” I ask. I know the push of Byatt’s ribs too well. She needs this food. We all do.

“It’s between us,” Welch says. “That’s what it is.”

“It’s okay,” Carson is saying, and I fight to tear my eye away from the pile of cartons. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.”

“Is this all food? This could feed us for a week.”

“Longer, probably,” Julia says dryly.