Wilder Girls(81)

Inside, then, and down hallway after hallway. I’m fading, strength leeching out of me, and every step we take is slower than the last until we reach the main lobby, noon sun sneaking through the boarded-up windows. We stop, lean Byatt up against the desk so I can rest for a moment. I can feel Reese watching me. She’s waiting for me to say it, for me to leave Byatt behind, but she’ll be waiting a long time.

“Come on,” I say. “Now or never.”

Out across the marsh. There’s our boat on the beach, and it’s so far and I’m losing my will, but Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.

A whistle, and a huge rush of freezing air. “Get down,” I have time to say before a trio of fighter jets comes swooping overhead. It’s so loud I can’t think, can’t do anything but endure it. They’re flying too low. We have to go now.

They disappear then, circling around for another pass, and I hoist Byatt farther up with my good arm. “Come on.”

At last, the pier, and we scramble down the shore as fast as we can, Byatt’s feet dragging in the sand. Carefully, we drape her body between the seats, and her eyes are closed, but she’s breathing. She’s alive.

   “Get in,” Reese says. “I’ll shove us out.”

The sway of the water, the rev of the engine, Reese at the stern as the boat eases away. A quick turn and we’re skimming along, the island blurring until it’s lost in the spray. Farther, farther, until I can’t hear the jets.



* * *



—

The snow stops and the day grows warm, the ocean throwing shimmer across my sight, the hull of the boat spangled with waterlight. I lose minutes, hours, staring at the horizon, trying to make out the low-slung buildings of Camp Nash. But the mainland blurs and it never seems closer, no matter how Reese steers us against the waves.

We’re still miles away from shore when she cuts the engine with a frustrated groan. I start, rubbing at my blind eye. “What are you doing?”

“Current’s pulling us away from the inlet. We won’t gain any ground like this.”

“So we’re just stopping?”

“Until the tide changes.” She pushes her hair out of her face and gets to her feet, the boat sloshing to one side. “We only have so much fuel. It’s a waste to use it now.”

Reese steps over Byatt’s prone body to sit next to me at the bow of the boat. Byatt looks so strange, her face slack, her eyes closed. There was always something sparking about her, even when she slept. It’s gone now, or different somehow.

   “What’s he like?” Reese asks suddenly. “Your dad, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” It falls out of my mouth before I can stop it. It’s true, really, but I know that’s not what she’s looking for. “He comes home from deployment and he goes away again.”

Reese tilts her head. “And you love him?”

“Of course I do. I just don’t know him.” It doesn’t make sense to her, I know, and I want to explain, to tell her how he doesn’t live in my heart the way her father lived in hers, but I don’t get the chance. My body twists, chest wrenching to one side, and I feel my throat thicken with spit.

“Hetty?”

The fever in the marsh, outside the visitors’ center. The one Byatt’s body burned out of my mind. I should’ve recognized the sign. It sizzles through my body and settles in the pit of my stomach, and there’s something heavy inside. I gag, lean over the side of the boat, and spit out a watery mouthful of bile. I can feel an object in my throat, but I can’t get it out.

“Help,” I manage, and Reese is tugging me around to face her, eyes wild. “I have to—” Another racking shiver, blood trickling down my chin. “You have to get it out.”

She looks at me blankly, and then I see it click. “Okay.”

I sit astride the bench, and Reese mirrors me. My hand braced on her thigh, her silver fingers gripping the back of my neck.

   “Tell me if you want me to stop,” she says.

I shake my head. “Not until it works.”

I open my mouth. And Reese sticks two fingers as deep into my throat as she can.

I can’t breathe. A cough building in my chest, but I can’t get it out, can’t swallow, and a wave rolls through my body as it tries to force Reese out. My eye waters and the world is hazy, distorted, but something is moving, stuck halfway down.

I smack at Reese’s arm, and she pulls her arm back, dragging strings of spit. First one heave, and another, until finally, I vomit, pain everywhere like my insides have been torn out. Something fleshy and pulsing splatters onto the deck of the boat.

I wipe my mouth on my sleeve. Whatever it is, it’s covered in blood, but it looks familiar, like I’ve seen the shape of it somewhere before. In a textbook, in a body, in the woods with Mr. Harker.

“It’s a heart,” Reese says. “That’s a human heart.”

This one shrunken, shriveled, and mine still beating in my chest. I look away, collapse against Reese, head spinning. She loops her arm around my waist.

“Doesn’t someone at school have that?” she says.

“Sarah,” I say. “Two heartbeats.” But two hearts instead, and if her body kept hers, why couldn’t mine?