Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

We sat on the hillside in the breeze and looked out at the water.

“I can’t explain it. Things have changed. For a while after the earthquake, when we were teenagers and going into college, it seemed like there was energy around dealing with big problems. Reconstruction, earthquake mitigation, energy efficiency, affordability, and quality-of-life issues. There were people willing to do the work. But something shifted in the consciousness a few years ago. It was like people had reached this level of comfort and didn’t want to give it up. They stopped wanting to fight and started to accept that we would never win the fight. That the forces against us were too great, the problems too out of control. People smart enough and caring enough to see the danger the planet was in, but too — I don’t know — too overwhelmed? too complacent? to do anything about it. We started losing benefactors.”

“What do you mean by ‘benefactors’? Jen mentioned them, too.”

“There were some liberal Catholic supporters of Sister’s mission who donated supplies — solar panels, yurts, goats, farm equipment, money for mycelium spawn — which doesn’t come cheap when you’re cultivating them large scale like this. Everything, at first, came either from benefactors, bartering, salvage, or voluntary labor. It hasn’t been easy, keeping this level of support for the last decade. There are sexier movements out there.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking about my ex and his orchards. “But I’d write about it.”

Katie looked at me like she was measuring the distance between my eyebrows.

“How does a nun get into mushrooms?” I asked.

Katie left me at my cabin to rest while she finished her chores for the day. Of all the houses, all the buildings I had seen so far, this one was most like an old summer cabin. Logs for walls, stone fireplace, one room with a kitchen at the far end and a door out to the privy and shower. The door to the left off the living room led to a small bedroom, a door on the right to a screened-in porch just wide enough for a twin bedstead, no curtains. It was simply furnished, like all of the buildings I had seen so far. A rug in the main room, but otherwise bare floors, swept clean, a love seat, and a coffee table. In the kitchen, a wooden table and two mismatched chairs, a ceramic jug of fireweed and meadow rue in the center. I leaned down to smell them and saw that pollen and black aphids had fallen all over the table. An earwig shimmied under the pottery.

I plugged my phone into my solar charger and put it in the window. I had a message I couldn’t retrieve because of the shaky signal. Chris Lelehalt, maybe, with news about Jacob Swenson.

I opened the windows of the sleeping porch, took off my shoes, and laid myself down on the bed. The sun was low in the sky. I hadn’t felt so weary in a long time. My body sank into the soft mattress; the heat sank into the room. The breeze lifting the thin muslin curtains, a bee throwing its body at the screen. Hum-tap. Hum-tap-tap. Hum.

I should let it out, I thought. But I felt weighted to the bed, wooden-limbed. What was in that tea?

Training my eyes on the trees outside, the way they seemed to bend over the cabin, over the bed itself. I thought my eyes were open, but the way my thoughts turned, I knew I was starting to dream. I was falling backward through the day, details large and small, floating forward. I was searching the cabin’s kitchen for a jar, a cup to capture the bee. I was at the window, cupping it in my hands. When I opened my hands at the back door, it was gone. I walked into a field of fireweed, listening to a lecture by a famous ecologist — I knew she was famous — on the first plants to return after a fire. That’s why it’s called fireweed . It looks like a fire on the hillside, those waist-high red fronds licking at the wind; it’s the ghost of what came before it. It brings the bees back, and they make the best honey from it, Katie was saying to me, holding a stem of it up to my face even though the bees were all over it. I was trying to take notes for an article or a book — a book I was going to write about Marrow Island resurrected. I could see my hand scrawling notes, but the words made no sense. I tried again: furweed, friarweed, friendweed . I can’t get the fire . I write it over and over again. My hand numb, my letters loopy, drunk. In the pictures I’ve taken, the lens is buttery soft. Is it the camera or my eyes? Muscles twitched, my hand reaching, but only my fingers lifting, and I was aware, for a moment, that I was still lying on the bed and the sun was lower in the sky. I heard singing somewhere nearby, like a choir, that sent goose bumps along my arms. But I’m dreaming, I told myself. The distant conversation of ravens, harmonizing with the wind chimes. I pulled the blanket over me and sank, again, into the bed. An unkindness of wind chimes.

Asleep in the broad window seat at Rookwood, the one that looked out on the wraparound porch, on the lawn, and the view of the sea. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there this time. Someone would find me and I’d be in trouble. They couldn’t know that I knew. But I was so tired I couldn’t move. I forced my eyes open, and out the window there’s a man, walking down the steps, across the yard. I could see everything beyond him: Marrow, ArPac, the cottage, the Salish Sea, rising in huge waves under a bright sky. And there was Jacob Swenson, getting into a boat as the tsunami approached. He couldn’t see it. I dragged myself up from the window seat. One leg wouldn’t move; my voice was muted, a whisper though I knew I was screaming. My eyes dropped shut like curtains — I ran my hands along furniture and walls to get to the door. I’m dreaming —I knew I was dreaming — but I had to make it to the door. I had to stop him. What happens if I stop him? I wanted to see what happens when I save a life. So I say to myself: You’re dreaming. You can fly, you’re a ghost . So I willed myself to fly through the wall to the porch and around to the other side — but he was so much farther away than he seemed. I was floating over the lawn, over the drive, down to the shore, but slower, slower. But I’ll never save us both . The wave rose; it washed over everything. Breathe! so I did. And the wave washed away. There he was at my feet, beached, like a seal; he was dead. More than dead. He was leftovers for the rooks. And I wrapped my arms around him and wept because it wasn’t Jacob Swenson; it was my dad. My dad’s face, falling apart all over the beach. I clutched at his clothes as his body dissolved.

I jerked awake, sweating, hair stuck to my face. The day outside was almost unchanged, the sun still bright gold, angled low through the trees, casting shadows on the walls of the sleeping porch. I heard the creaking of the front door — I had left it open wide for the air.

I took my phone from the charger and checked the time. I had slept for less than two hours. Why did I feel like I was clawing myself out of a season of hibernation? My eyes wouldn’t adjust to the light, my insides felt drained. I was parched and ravenous. A breeze rustled through the trees outside and through the screens. The air smelled like everything — wilderness and the sea and life and decay. It was almost enough to revive me. I kicked off the blanket and let the air through the screens blow over me, let my eyes adjust to the light outside, stretched out between the trees. I listened to a bird calling in the trees, a long, complicated refrain, trying to pick out its different parts. I slowly became more conscious, forcing the synapses to spark, feeling different parts of my brain waking. The bee was on its side on the window ledge, dead.