Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Shortly after Olivia’s death, my parents started traveling regularly in the Third World. No children allowed. Granana lives on the other side of the island. She’s eighty-four, I’m twelve, and Wallow’s fourteen, so it’s a little ambiguous as to who’s babysitting whom. This particular summer, our parents are in São Paulo. They send us postcards of bullet-pocked favelas and flaming hillocks of trash. “GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE! xoxo, the ’Rents.” I guess the idea is that all the misery makes their marital problems seem petty and inconsequential.

“Hey!” Wallow is directly below me, clutching the rails of the ladder. “Move over.”

He climbs up and heaves his big body onto the pier. Defeat puddles all around him. Behind the diabolical goggles, his eyes narrow into slits.

“Did you see them?”

Wallow just grunts. “Here.” He wrestles the lady-goggles off his face and thrusts them at me. “I can’t swim with this cast, and these bitches are too small for my skull. You try them.”

I sigh and strip off my pajamas, bobbling before him. The elastic band of the goggles bites into the back of my head. Somehow, wearing them makes me feel even more naked. My penis is curling up in the salt air like a small pink snail. Wallow points and laughs.

“Sure you don’t want to try again?” I ask him. From the edge of the pier, the ocean looks dark and unfamiliar, like the liquid shadow of something truly awful. “Try again, Wallow. Maybe it’s just taking a while for your eyes to adjust….”

Wallow holds a finger to his lips. He points behind me. Boats are creaking in the wind, waves slap against the pilings, and then I hear it, too, the distinct thunk of boots on wood. Someone is walking down the pier. We can see the tip of a lit cigarette, suspended in the dark. We hear a man’s gargly cough.

“Looking for buried treasure, boys?” Gannon laughs. He keeps walking towards us. “You know, the court still considers it trespassing, be it land or sea.” Then he recognizes Wallow. He lets out the low, mournful whistle that all the grown-ups on the island use to identify us now.

“Oh, son. Don’t tell me you’re out here looking for…”

“My dead sister?” Wallow asks with terrifying cheer. “Good guess!”

“You’re not going to find her in my marina, boys.”

In the dark, Gannon is a huge stencil of a man, wisps of smoke curling from his nostrils. There is a long, pulsing silence, during which Wallow stares at him, squaring his jaw. Then Gannon shrugs. He stubs out his cigarette and shuffles back towards the shore.

“All right, bro,” Wallow says. “It’s go time.” He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there’s no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier—

“Ayyyyiii!”

— and launch over the water. It’s my favorite moment: when I’m one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I’m flying, I’m rushing to meet my own reflection — Gah!

Then comes the less beautiful moment when I’m up to my eyeballs in tar water, and the goggles fill with stinging brine. And, for what seems like a very long time, I can’t see anything at all, dead or alive.

When my vision starts to clear, I see a milky, melting light moving swiftly above the ocean floor. Drowned moonbeams, I think at first. Only there is no moon tonight.

Olivia disappeared on a new-moon night. It was exactly two years, or twenty-four new moons, ago. Wallow says that means that tonight is Olivia’s unbirthday, the anniversary of her death. It’s weird: our grief is cyclical, synced with the lunar cycles. It accordions out as the moon slivers away. On new-moon nights, it rises with the tide.

Even before we lost my sis, I used to get uneasy when the moon was gone. That corner of the sky, as black as an empty safe. Whatever happened to Olivia, I hope she at least had the orange residue of sunset to see by. I can’t stand to think of her out here alone after nightfall.

The last time we saw Olivia was at twilight. We’d spent all day crab-sledding down the beach. It’s the closest thing we island kids have to a winter sport. You climb into the upended exoskeleton of a giant crab, then you go yeehaw slaloming down the powdery dunes. The faster you go, the more sand whizzes around you, a fine spray on either side of your crab sled. By the time you hit the water, you’re covered in it, grit in your teeth and your eyelids, along the line of your scalp.

Herb makes the crab sleds — he guts the crabs and blowtorches off the eyestalks and paints little racer stripes along the sides. Then he rents them down at Pier 2, for two dollars an hour, twelve dollars for a full day. The three of us had been racing down the beach all afternoon. We were sunburned, and hungry, and loused up with sea bugs. Wallow had stepped on a sea urchin and broken his fall on more urchins. I wanted Jiffy Pop and aloe vera. Wallow wanted prescription painkillers and porno. We voted to head over to Granana’s beach cottage, because she has Demerol and an illegal cable box.

Olivia threw a fit. “But we still have half an hour on the sled rental!” A gleam came into her eyes, that transparent little-kid craftiness. “You guys don’t have to come with me, you know.”

Legally, we did. According to official Herb’s Crab-Sledding Policy, under-twelves must be accompanied by a guardian — a rule that Herb has really cracked down on since Olivia’s death. But neither Wallow nor I felt like chaperoning. And Olivia was eight and a half, which rounds up to twelve. “Stick to the perimeter of the island,” Wallow told her. “And get that crab sled back before sundown. Any late fees are coming out of your allowance.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she assured us, clambering into the sled. The sun was already low in the sky. “I’m just going out one last time.”

We helped Olivia drag the sled up the white dunes. She sat Indian-style in the center of the shell, humming tunelessly. Then we gave her a final push that sent her racing down the slopes. We watched as she flew out over the rock crags and into the foamy water. By the time we’d gathered our towels and turned to go, Olivia was just a speck on the horizon. Neither of us noticed how quickly the tide was going out.

Most people think that tides are caused by the moon alone, but that is not the case. Once a month, the sun and the moon are both on the same side of the globe. Then the Atlantic kowtows to their conglomerate gravity. It’s the earth playing tug-of-war with the sky.

On new-moon nights, the sky is winning. The spring tide swells exceptionally high. The spring tide has teeth. It can pull a boat much farther than your average quarter-moon neap tide. When they finally found Olivia’s crab sled, it was halfway to Cuba, and empty.

“What do you see, bro?”

“Oh, not much.” I cough. I peer back under the surface of the water. There’s an aurora borealis exploding inches from my submerged face. “Probably just plankton.”

When I come up to clear the goggles, I can barely see Wallow. He is silhouetted against the lone orange lamp, watching me from the pier. Water seeps out of my nose, my ears. It weeps down the corners of the lenses. I push the goggles up and rub my eyes with my fists, which just makes things worse. I kick to stay afloat, the snorkel digging into my cheek, and wave at my brother. Wallow doesn’t wave back.

I don’t want to tell Wallow, but I have no idea what I just saw, although I’m sure there must be some ugly explanation for it. I tell myself that it was just cyanobacteria, or lustrous pollutants from the Bimini glue factory. Either way, I don’t want to double-check.