I’ve always been able to hold off until November, when Father can be gone, and when my need and the wind knit into something bigger, more satisfying. But now, my want seeps past the confines of what I’ve done in the past. I’ve been changing more than I realize.
She wants me to cooperate. To do what I do after holding back all year for his sake. And for the first storm of the season, I’m lost.
I don’t know how to be, when this boy is so near.
He came down from the ridge to escape the lightning and found me instead, fifty feet away. Too far; too close. I couldn’t hide in time. Because I had followed him again, like I have every day. Quietly, from within the shadows. It has become my normal, something I never owned before.
But I’ve found that I own many things now. Possessions. Things like cooking fish in spattering butter every day. Finding treasures to give to the boy. I’m not collecting diamonds or gold. I am not a greedy human who tries to surround herself with glitter and jeweled beauty, so these things don’t count. When I find things with weight, like a lovely, spotted, red-capped mushroom—Amanita muscaria, only somewhat poisonous—I don’t keep it. I blink at it fondly, and then leave it for him. Because when you own things, that’s the beginning of the end.
He’s beginning to own you, Anda. And you belong to me.
I pause. With every give and take with this boy, is something more accumulating? Perhaps I just don’t know what to call it. But I can feel it, and it’s beginning to consume me. It’s different, being consumed, instead of being the one who takes and takes, every November, without mercy.
The storm is strengthening because of my presence. The invisible bell jar that keeps the wind from touching me is thinning. My toes tingle, and my hair crackles with electricity. I’ve felt the weakening, the draining of my self, for weeks now. I’ve held it at arm’s length for too long. I am weak. Too weak.
“Wait, wait!” I cry out, only to find that my lips are closed. But there is no more waiting. The invisible bell jar around me turns to nothing. The boy’s eyes lock onto mine, but soon I can’t see him anymore, because I’ve already closed my eyes to him. To everything.
With a single sigh, I let the storm take me.
Chapter Eleven
HECTOR
She stands there on the rocky shoreline for a few minutes. When I get close enough, I see her eyes. They’re black as wet lake stones. It confuses me, because I swear they were gray. She seems to focus on the trees behind me, like I’m not even there. But the oddest thing is how the wind doesn’t seem to touch her. I’m squinting because of the dead leaves flying through the air, swirling around my head, threatening to scratch my eyes out.
But nothing’s touching her. Not a hair on her head moves. The hem of her nightgown doesn’t even flutter.
What the hell.
“Hey. Hey! Are you okay?” I yell, which is a joke, because between the two of us, I’m way, way more freaked out. And then suddenly, it’s like a veil between us rises and she sees me. Her eyes latch on and it makes me shiver, because everything feels wrong. Like my eyes have just committed a crime. And I open my mouth to yell louder, when the laws of physics decide to suddenly function again.
The wind swirls her nightgown around her pale legs and her hair goes science-experiment-static-wild. Her eyes close and she turns to step into the water.
Oh, Jesus.
The girl takes one deliberate step after another, until she’s thigh-deep in the freezing water. She doesn’t even flinch. Her nightgown darkens from the lake water. She’s still going.
“What are you doing? Hey! Hey!” I yell at her, but she’s still not listening to me. I crash through the brush, trying to reach her, but I’m not fast enough. She’s already waist-deep when I jump into the lake, the icy water knifing up my legs and making me gasp. “Stop, stop!” I scream at her, but the wind has picked up and she can’t hear me.
The cold water weighs down my boots as I slog closer when the wind hits me like a body slam. I stagger back, falling backward into the lake, wet to the shoulder. When I shake the water out of my eyes, I catch a glimpse of the girl’s white hair disappearing beneath the surface. She’s twenty feet away, too far away. It’s just like a nightmare, when you can’t move fast enough.
No, it’s worse than a nightmare. Because this is really happening.
Chapter Twelve
ANDA
The storm is immense. I’ve been paying so much attention to the boy that I’ve become distracted, not even realizing how large it’s become. The lake is releasing its captured summer warmth, mixing with cold air from the north, sodden air from the Gulf. It twists and coils about the lake. I don’t need the radio to tell me what I feel.
Winds are rising to thirty miles per hour.
Waves at six feet along the south coastline.
It’s a vicious song in my head, the twisting winds that gather strength when I sigh.
A heartbeat pulses near me. Vaguely, I remember the boy. His rapid pulse is too small a quarry for me right now. It isn’t the salty warmth within his blood vessels that attracts me.
It’s the St. Anne.
She’s a beautiful laker, she is. A longboat, with a narrow waist and smooth lines. Small for a freighter, only six hundred feet long. With a belly full of dolomite, she’s only just passed through the Soo Locks yesterday evening. She’s a mere nineteen miles from the Isle, still visible to human eyes from here. If all goes well, she’ll be in Duluth’s port by evening tonight.
All will not go well.
The St. Anne has been lucky enough to escape the fate of many of the freighters her age. Her steel is more brittle than the bones made by steel mills today. She creaks with tiredness. She aches for the scrapyard. But scrapping is the tidy way for a freighter’s life to end. Beaching the ship ashore, where her captain will shake hands with the hangman and turn a blind eye to the coming feast. A crew who’s never known her will gnaw her apart like ants on a carcass. There is no glory in scrapping.
I swirl the wind tighter about her, bringing them closer to sixty miles per hour. Twenty-nine hearts beat faster. Hands are on deck and below. Water is entering through a crack in her hull that they’ve yet to discover. I smile and force the water in. The crack widens. The ship lists to the side, ever so slightly, and more water comes on board, into one of the hatches.
Twenty thousand pounds of dolomite isn’t that much, but the St. Anne’s middle is hogging now, sagging from the weight as it did at port. But with the winds and the water, the stress is too much. The captain issues a distress signal.