The Island(81)

“Hey, I found it!” Olivia said, grabbing it back.

“Can I see?” Heather asked.

Olivia brought it over, stood on tiptoes, and handed it to her. Heather caught a glimpse of herself. Her tanned face was caked with blood and dirt. Her hair was matted and wild. Her eyes were deep set, and her right eyelid was swollen. She had a yellow bruise on her forehead, a cut across her left eyebrow, and another cut on her cheek she didn’t even remember getting.

“Wow, I look terrible,” she said with a laugh as she handed it back to Olivia.

“Oh my God, look at me,” Olivia said. She was sunburned with matted hair and red eyes.

“Let me see me,” Owen said.

The sunburn did nothing for his appearance either.

“How did all this happen? How did we get so…lost?” Olivia said quietly, sitting down on the ground.

“We’re not lost. We know where we are,” Owen said.

“You know what I mean.”

Heather climbed out of the tree. “We came to another world and we were driving too fast and we hit a woman. That’s all,” she said softly.

“Yes,” Olivia said.

Heather sat down and put her arms around Olivia’s waist. Owen sat down, and Heather put her arms around him too.

“We’re not really lost, are we?” Olivia asked.

“No,” Heather said. They were before, maybe, but not now. They knew this place. This strange continent in February without any snow. In all this orange. In all this red.

“Did you live your whole life on Puget Sound?” Olivia asked.

“I was actually born in Kansas,” Heather replied.

“Where?”

“A place called Fort Riley. I don’t remember much about it. We moved when I was little.”

“What kind of a fort was it?” Owen asked.

“It was a big army fort. Both my parents were in the army.”

“Were you in the army?” Owen asked.

“No.”

“What jobs did you do?” Olivia asked.

“After I left Goose Island, I did a few things. I was a waitress. I worked reception at the VA hospital. I tried to be a singer. I told fortunes using the I Ching at the Pike Place Market. I was homeless for a while. And through a friend, I trained as a massage therapist. That’s how I met your dad.”

“How come you ended up on Goose Island in the first place?”

“After my father got back from the war, he had a lot of problems and a lot of issues. The whole VA mental-health system is a labyrinth…anyway, my mom knew the Sound pretty well. She’s originally from Neah Bay. Do you know where that is?”

“No,” Olivia said.

“You know the mountains that we can see from our house?”

“Back in Seattle?” she asked, as if that were an imaginary place.

“Yes. Well, that’s Olympic National Park and beyond there, right at the edge of America, there’s a place called Neah Bay, where my mom’s mom is from originally. It’s a reservation for the Makah people. After her parents divorced, my mom lived there for a while. When she turned eighteen she left to join the army and that’s where she met my dad. After the war a lot of veterans were coming out of the army and moving to the Pacific Northwest, and a lot of them had problems and my mom knew about the community on Goose Island where they could sort of heal together. And it sounded good to my dad, so we moved there and that’s where I mostly grew up.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know any different. But like I say, when I was a teenager, I knew I had to leave; I had to see the world. I couldn’t stay there forever.”

“And now you’ve seen the world. You know the world, like, totally sucks,” Owen said.

Heather laughed. And then Olivia laughed. And then even Owen laughed.

The sun continued to rise over the bay, over the island, over the other islands, over the continent. It had had practice. It had been doing this here for millions of years.

“Can you take a look at my arm?” Olivia said.

“It’s a mosquito bite. Don’t scratch it,” Heather said.

It looked worse than a mosquito bite. It looked like some kind of botfly bite. There might be larvae in a day or two, but there was no point in worrying Olivia about that now.

She cleaned the wound with the Leiden University T-shirt, patted Olivia’s head, and said in the voice mothers have been using for ten thousand generations, “Shh, baby, it’s going to be OK.”

“Where are we going to live when we get back to America?” Owen asked.

“We could go live with Grandpa John and Grandma Bess. You don’t have to look after us if you don’t want to,” Olivia said to Heather.

“Do you want me to still look after you?” Heather asked.

“Do you want to do it?”

“I really do,” Heather said.

Olivia smiled and then Owen smiled. “I want to visit Grandpa John but I don’t want to live with them,” he said.

“We can do whatever we want,” Heather said.

“Let’s go check this thing out,” Owen said, and the kids went over to play by the ruined bus.

Heather watched them.

The day was beautiful. The swaying grass. A blue-silk sky. Pink herons over the mirror sea.