The Island(50)

There was a lot of garbage on the floor but the paper waste was mildewed and fit for nothing. There were a few crushed beer cans with liquid inside. She was so desperate she was tempted to pour the contents into her mouth. She decided that if she couldn’t get into the house, she’d risk being poisoned and do just that so she could have at least some liquid in her system for the journey to the beach.

Back into the courtyard.

The waning sickle moon slipped out from behind a solitary cloud and for a moment she got a really good view of the old guardhouse. There were no bars on the floors of the upper windows. If she could find a way up there to that second floor…

She wondered what time it was. How long she had been away? One hour? Two?

On the north side of the guardhouse there was a narrow veranda with a rocking chair and a wicker chair. The rocking chair was useless, but perhaps she could stand on the wicker chair and climb up one of the columns to the second-floor balcony. From there it would be comparatively easy to get to one of the windows, break it, open it, and enter the guardhouse.

Heather picked up the wicker chair. It was not as light as she’d been expecting and she had some trouble carrying it around to the side of the veranda. She pushed it down hard into the sandy soil and leaned it against the wooden pillar holding up the balcony.

She estimated the distance from the top of the seat to the iron railing on the second floor balcony as about six feet. If she stretched her arms and didn’t fall off the chair and was strong enough, she could pull herself up.

Standing on the seat, she tentatively put one foot on one armrest and then the other foot on the other, and when she was certain that the chair was not going to slip from underneath her, she placed one foot on the back of the— The chair slipped and she tumbled backward into the sand with a mild whump. “Ow,” she said and put her hand over her mouth.

It wasn’t as bad as falling off the tree into the red dirt.

She lay there in the sandy grass and looked at the stars. She stared at the starless space called the Coalsack. You couldn’t see that in the Northern Hemisphere. At Uluru, a guide had explained that it was a nebula, a vast dust cloud many light-years across. To the Aboriginal peoples, it had looked like the head of an emu. She closed her eyes. She was alone here in the nothing, but it was OK. Solitude was an old friend that welcomed her after all these months with kids and their friends and their mommies. It would be so easy just to keep her eyes closed. Just to lie here on the sand all night. Eventually, without water, all her systems would begin to shut down. Her kidneys would stop working and her heart would slow, and maybe, if she was lucky, it would just stop completely.

None of this was her responsibility.

She was just a kid herself.

She was twenty-four, but really, she was younger than that. She’d left home only a few years ago. She hadn’t really wanted to come to this island. The kids wanted koalas and she’d been trying once again to get them on her side.

The kids were not her kids.

They didn’t like her very much. In fact, they barely tolerated her. They weren’t her problem.

What was the difference anyway between dying here and dying in some trailer in the woods decades from now. It was all the same groove. The universe wouldn’t even blink.

Just lie here.

Drift.

Dream.

Fade away on the current.

She thought of Seattle. She thought of Goose Island and the Sound. Of her father and looking west through the yellow of seven p.m. She thought of “Into Dust,” that song by Mazzy Star that her mom liked.

The moments ticked slowly past.

So easy…

Too easy.

Your body is a longbow carved from hickory, her father said.

Your body is a blade sharpened by tears, her mother said.

Heather sat up.

She stood and brushed the sand off her jeans.

She righted the chair and steadied it in the sand and, after achieving equipoise, she put her left foot on the right arm. So far, so good. She put her right foot on the back of the chair. The chair began to list, so she jumped and grabbed one of the iron railings of the second-floor balcony. The chair fell from under her. She pulled hard on the railing. Her arms felt impossibly weak. This wasn’t going to work. If she could hook a leg up, take some weight off her— She swung her torso to the left and right; on a final leftward swing, she managed to lift and land her foot on the lip of the balcony. She hung there precariously for a second or two.

“Come on,” she growled and pushed off on her foot. She rose almost vertically, like the vampire in Nosferatu, and somehow found herself standing on the narrow part of the veranda on the other side of the railing. She stepped over the rail, and there she was on the second-floor balcony. Just like that.

“Oh God,” she said and caught her breath.

She walked to the door and pulled the handle, but it was locked. There were no windows open.

Heather had no idea if this building had a caretaker or not. There was definitely space for a couple of bedrooms up here but there were no signs of occupation. No hum of an air conditioner, no creaking boards, no snoring, no noises of any kind.

She stood there considering for a moment and then shoved her elbow into the glass panel above the door handle. It broke and fell out in two big pieces that shattered inside the house.

She went back to the rail, ready to jump and run.

She waited.

And waited.