Wilder Girls(38)

She tucks the whiteboard in alongside me, folds my fingers around the marker, and then pushes me out of the ward. I try to hang on to everything, every turn we take. The small lobby we pass through, pale squares on the wall where something must have hung, and the hallway Paretta wheels me down, shabby carpet and stale air. But they slip in and out of my head, and I’m not I’m not I’m not as here as I thought I was.

   I think I might throw up. Fold over, press my hands to my forehead, and I feel the brush of Paretta’s suit against my shoulder, but it’s barely anything. I shut my eyes, try to disappear.

When I open them again I’m somewhere else. At first I don’t know what I’m looking at, and then I blink and it separates out, floor from ceiling. Stacks of boxes, carts of folding chairs, and everything covered in thick plastic tarps. The floor is the same peeling linoleum as everywhere else, but carved into the walls are two deep alcoves. Empty, but lit like something used to be displayed inside.

I reach for the whiteboard, hold it up in front of Paretta to get her attention before I write.

What is this where are we

“Some of it’s storage,” Paretta says, which doesn’t really answer my question, but I think it’s all I’ll get. She wheels me down a narrow path between two shelving units, each draped over with clear plastic so thick it looks cloudy. Here, another part of the room, this one almost like a lab, two tables set up with equipment I don’t recognize. On one table I think I spot the remains of a Raxter Blue, shell broken up in bits, but we turn away, and Paretta wheels me up to another alcove cut into the wall, one I didn’t see from the doorway.

   This one is layered with earth, built up more than a foot deep, and blooming there, in this room, in this building, is a quartet of Raxter Irises.

Tears prick at my eyes, and I blink, startled. But I miss it. I miss Hetty and Reese, but more than anything, I miss the dawn coming through the trees. I miss the north side cliff and the waves below, and I miss the way the wind steals your breath like it never belonged to you in the first place.

I’m reaching out to touch one of the flowers before I realize it, and Paretta snatches me back, her suited fingers catching my wrist.

“That,” she says, “would be being a bit silly, I think.”

Why do you have these, I write.

Paretta spins my wheelchair around so I’m facing her. I wish she wouldn’t. I miss the sight of the irises already, the familiar indigo, the satin drape of their petals.

“We’ve been studying them,” Paretta says, crouching down in front of me. “The irises, and the blue crabs too. All of this is something we’re calling the Raxter Phenomenon.”

A phenomenon. Not a sickness, not a disease. It burns through my heart—that’s the word I’ve been looking for—but there’s something about the way she says it. The name too familiar, too easy on her tongue.

   “Did they teach you about Raxter Blues at school?” she asks. “About what makes them special?” I nod.

You mean the lungs

“And the gills,” Paretta says. “It’s pretty amazing, right? So it can survive anywhere. And I think it’s pretty amazing, too, that you girls are part of it now.”

Part of it. The way our bodies alter and bend. The way our fingers darken just before we die, pure black spreading up to our knuckles. I used to stare at my hands in the dark, Hetty asleep next to me, and try to will them to change color.

“Imagine how we could use this.” Her voice is urgent, confiding. “Imagine the people we could help.”

I think of the bodies we’ve burned, of the pain we’ve endured.

I don’t think it’s helping anyone right now

“Right.” She rests her gloved hand on my knee. “You’re absolutely right. To help anybody with this, we have to be able to cure it, to control it. And to do that, we need to understand why it’s happening.”

Good luck with that

She shakes her head, and I think I can make out the shadow of a smile through her mask. “I know,” she says. “I’ve been studying this for years now, Byatt. First the Blues, and the irises, and now you girls, and I’m not any closer.”

For years, I think, as she stands up and starts wheeling me over to the table where the crab is laid out in pieces. She must mean she was here before the Tox found us. We learned in bio that the Blues were worth studying; it never occurred to me that somebody actually was.

   She positions me in front of the table, still talking about something, but I don’t hear her. There’s the Raxter Blue splayed out, limbs snipped from its body, shell carefully set to one side to lay the inside bare. I wait for my stomach to turn, but instead, all I can feel is the sea spray from that day on the rocks with Hetty, the crab turning black in my hands. It was still alive as it broke apart.

I wonder if I will be too.



* * *



—

“I have something special for you,” Teddy says. The clock tells me afternoon but not the day. Same blue plastic suit, the same surgical mask. I like his eyes, I think. They look like mine.

First the left strap undone, then the right. Whiteboard in my hands, a cramp in my fingers.

Good special?

“Is there any other kind?” he says. “We’re going outside.”