Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

First, I think I’m seeing things again. But my visions don’t flicker — they ignite. The kitchen window remains dark. I step from the car and approach the cabin. The front door is wide open. I stand at the threshold. There’s no more radio twang, just fitful cabin sounds, old wood shifting and settling, the drip of the faucet. I stare into the dim rooms, wondering if I am alone. Did she walk up from the river, sneak in the back door? Is she hiding in the shadows? I uselessly flip the switches near me on the wall. The circuit breaker is behind a landscape on the far living-room wall. The fire has caused a power outage, I tell myself. But I go room to room, saying quietly, under my breath, “Where are you? Where are you?”

I call Carey from the hotel room. I tell him I’ve brought his favorite belt, clean underwear. The innkeeper is letting me use their washer and dryer. Carey’s heading to the Sunshine Guard Station to hose it down. There are several old lookouts and cabins in the path of the fire. They’ll try to save as many as they can. He reminds me to call my mom and tells me not to wait up for him.

I start a load of laundry and take the service stairs back to our room on the third floor, the way the innkeeper showed me. When I explained the situation over the phone, she put us in the honeymoon suite at the discounted “fire season rate.” I remember the last time we were here, jumping on the bed, doing a striptease, deflecting Carey’s concern. I can’t muster the shame I think I should feel, for not saying what I should have in that moment. But I dig through my backpack for the GPS watch. It blips a greeting. I put it in my back pocket and walk to the post office.

Prairie City looks like a ghost town most days, even in the summer, but today it’s bustling. There are cars everywhere with official logos on the doors and license plates. In the three-minute walk to the post office, I see all of the uniforms of the major agencies affected by the fires: U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State Forestry, Parks and Recreation, Fish and Wildlife, and the Bureau of Land Management. They’re mostly men; the few women among them seem tense and miserable. They’re probably being treated like secretaries. I gather our mail, stuffed into the small PO box; we haven’t picked it up in a while. I go through it next to the trashcan, tossing out junk mail — how it follows you wherever you go, even all the way out here, I’ll never understand. In the end there’s an Audubon magazine, a few bills, a card for Carey from someone with his last name, one of his four younger sisters probably, and a small manila envelope for me, with a Spokane postmark and the shaky handwriting of one of the sisters Rose. I won’t open it here. I put the envelopes inside the magazine and tuck it under my arm.

On the way back to the hotel, I stop into the gas station/country market. It’s the only grocery in town, with a room full of DVD rentals in the back and soft porn behind the counter. I pick up a basket and wander the aisles, staring at things I’m sure I’ve never needed: cookies shaped like elves, canned yams, off-brand toothpaste. Everything has a neon sticker with a price on it; it’s a throwback I find oddly comforting. Somehow I come to an arrangement with myself, so that I will pick one thing from each section of each aisle. I fill the basket with packages of things that appeal to me; sometimes I choose the thing that seems least like me, just to feel the thing in my hand, to see it among the things that I’m buying. I feel a surge of power every time I make a decision. I choose onion crackers and strawberry-flavored instant oatmeal, fudge-striped cookies and powdered donuts and honey-roasted mixed nuts, a yellow legal pad and Irish Spring soap, a six-pack of Rainier and a quart of chocolate milk. When the basket is full, I unload it at the counter, trying to decide if I should choose something from behind the counter, too. The owner, a taciturn, crusty old booger in a flannel shirt, doesn’t even give me the once-over. Not even when I ask him for a Western Family pregnancy test. He pulls it down from the pegboard behind him without looking and types in the price.

“Can I have one more?” I ask him. “Please.”

I dump my mail on top of the groceries and carry the paper bag back to the hotel in my arms.

You’re supposed to test your morning urine, but I take the first test as soon as I get back to the room. I leave it on the edge of the bathtub and sit on the bed. I don’t feel pregnant, I think, opening a beer and the cookies. I unpack the groceries and put everything in the mini-fridge, even the things that don’t really need to be refrigerated. The soap I inhale as I flip through the five channels on the television, waiting it out, thinking about calling my mom and what I will say. I promised her I would always keep in touch; I promised her I wouldn’t give her another scare. I assume that she has heard about the fires, that she has been worried.

By the time Mom made it to the hospital in Anacortes, Katie was in police custody. Not charged, just being questioned. But I wouldn’t see her again for months. Carey had gone, too, though he would come back almost every day until they let me out. I was alone in a room with three beds, bars and curtains between them. They put me by the window, though there wasn’t a view of anything but gray sky.

“What the fuck happened out there, Lucie?” It was her I’m-not-yelling voice; a soft shriek.

“Mom, you said ‘fuck.’” I was loopy with morphine.

“It’s a ‘fuck’ kind of situation, Lucinda. I don’t ever, ever want to get a phone call like that about you again.” She was trying hard not to cry.

I learned how to swear from my mom, a longshoreman’s daughter. She may have remarried into a higher social class, but she let it slip sometimes. Even her pearl earrings could look pissed off. She gave me a good chewing out while she gripped my free hand in both of hers. Greg was at a job site in Lake Chelan, and she had driven herself up to the hospital, earning two speeding citations and a lecture from a trooper young enough to be her grandson. I dopily marveled at her ability to mask her fear with anger. I knew if she was swearing this much, she was terrified.

It hadn’t occurred to me to call her. That first night in the hospital, I thought the worst had passed. Within sixteen hours, my guts were on fire. Piercing pains ran along my spine and under my ribs. I had an unrelenting urge to piss molten lava. When Carey came back to check on me, he found me having emergency dialysis. The doctors were mystified — lab results were slow, and no one knew to look for mycotoxins — so Carey told them what he had gathered from my rambling voicemail. Of course neither of us knew what kind, or how much, I had ingested. He asked the nurse to call my mother, so they dug through my bag and found my phone. They had to interrupt dialysis to ask me her name. I had her listed as “Marie,” not “Mom.”

The next day, I woke to a nurse prepping me for surgery. They removed a portion of my right kidney. A lab in Seattle examined the dissected tissue and discovered the culprit: amatoxin, which concentrates in the liver and kidneys twenty-four to forty-eight hours after ingestion of Amanita smithiana . Also present: traces of psilocin, from the wavy caps, which were likely in the broth with the mussels, likely why everyone was so strange at the wake. The Amanita, though, was for me alone. No one else on Marrow had fallen sick. It must have been in the birch liquor Katie had handed me, given me. I couldn’t prove it — the flask was lost. Later dried Amanita were found in the apothecary, along with samples of hundreds of other hallucinogenic and toxic species.

Mom paced the halls fretfully while I gave a statement to the state police — I insisted on doing that alone.