Teeth(3)

And the two and a half years of sheltering that came after mean that my goofy-ass little brother completely lacks social skills. My parents keep him cooped up because they’re afraid someone will cough on him, but I do it because not everyone is as receptive to endless talk about octopuses and body fluids as we are, you weird kid, come curl up and tell me and leave the normal people out of it.

“Dylan can come,” Mom says. “Maybe it will be easier to breathe, with the altitude.”

“I think it works the opposite of that.” I palm Dylan’s head, and he makes this big show of trying to squirm away.

“It’s only another hundred feet up, anyway,” Mom says. “And she promised to show us a new fish recipe.”

The rest of us usually only sample it, but Dylan eats nothing but fish—not just any fish, but fish, the kind people here mean when they say fish—technically Silver Enki Fish: fat glittery balls of scales that hide in the darkest water and under rocks in the marina. They’re rare here but nonexistent everywhere else in the world. The Delaneys are the ones who discovered the fish, I’m pretty sure. Way back, decades ago, one of them was sick. And then they never left the island.

It’s somehow still a fairly well-kept secret that the fish here keep people healthy, probably because it sounds so f*cking fake. I had to lie to my friends about why we were going. I used the same lie people migrating here have used for generations—we think the sea air might help.

There’s a reason seventy percent of the island’s population is over sixty-five. This is a place for last resorts. The fish add years and years and years.

Being here is a good thing.

Dylan crawls off Mom’s lap and onto mine. I let him stay until Dad comes out with breakfast. Omelets for us. Boiled fish for Dylan.

I eat as quickly as I can.

“Going for a run,” I say.

Dad says, “Put some shoes on.”

I have some mental block about shoes. I don’t know. I’m always cold and I just won’t put shoes on unless I’m forced to. I have no explanation. But I’m not going to put shoes on.

I stand up and Mom says, “Rudy, can you stop off by the marketplace, pick me up a bottle of milk?”

“Sure.” I think she does that on purpose. Gives me goals. I like it.

I hop off our bottom step and make my way to the thick sand by the rocks, the damp stuff that takes a half second before it gives under my feet. The grains creep underneath my toenails. We are on the edge of the island and we have the longest walk of anyone to the marketplace, but we don’t complain. My mom, I think, has this secret fear that if we piss anyone off, they’ll stage an uprising and kill us, and no one will ever know. This island does feel like the perfect place for a murder.

I jog by one of my favorite places here—a long dock surrounded on either side by jetties of rocks. It’s impossible to see if you aren’t at a specific angle. My father fishes there sometimes, but he’s never caught anything. There are tricks to catching Enki fish that nobody knows.

I think that dock is where the real fishermen used to work, but now they have a camp not far from our house, in the opposite direction of the marketplace. We hear them grunting and cursing at the fish and their massive nets, when the water isn’t too loud.

The Delaneys’ mansion sits above all of this, at the top of its dune, all its doors and windows shut tight. That house could be hit by a tsunami and never budge. Ms. Delaney rarely comes to the marketplace. I’ve seen her once. She has this guy who does the shopping for her. I don’t think he’s sleeping with her. He looks too happy for that.

The marketplace is only open on Tuesday mornings, and it’s the highlight of everyone’s week. A lot of the houses are clustered around here, the ones that aren’t hideously cheap, like ours, or hideously expensive, like the Delaneys’.

The peddlers, who are just neighbors most of the week, but peddlers now, drive hard bargains as they hop from their stand to the others. The whole place sounds like the eggs and bacon frying at the farmer’s station, and my mouth is almost shaking from the smell, but I don’t have cash with me for anything but milk. I’m still not used to a world where credit cards are useless.

I nod at Ms. Klesko selling jars of jam and shake hands with Sam as he hands me a milk bottle. “How’s your brother?” he asks.

“He’s good. Eating well.”

“Always a pleasure,” he says.

Fiona the fortune-teller stops me with a hand on my arm as I start to go. She looks at me, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she searches my face. I don’t think Fiona touches anyone as much as she touches me. This should probably bother me more than it does. To be honest—and this sounds really stupid—I feel sometimes now like I’m actually starving for someone to touch me. God, it sounds even more stupid than I thought it would.

“The ghost is with you,” she says.

I kiss her cheek so she’ll let me go and then I head home, the bottle of milk cold and tempting in my hand. Halfway home, I give up and take a sip. Milk here is so heavy and thick. My mom used to tell me that milk was a food, not a drink. I never believed her before.

So I guess what I do is eat half the bottle. Mom is going to kill me.

To distract myself from the rest of the milk, I follow the path of the shoreline, looking for sand dollars. Today is too cold to even touch the water, but even when it isn’t, I rarely go in past my knees. I’m not a strong swimmer. I don’t think I’ve put my head under since we’ve moved.