The children were going home.
They stood on the dock, hands shielding their eyes, watching the postman approach. Jinx gave him two short barks and reared up.
Pretty rough out here, didn’t I say? he called, taking them in.
They were slumped in their packs. Their hair was twisted and slick. Elsa’s pits were furry. Nolan was purplish beneath the eyes. Their legs were scabbed over and dirty. The dog smelled. They were pretty rough.
As the children loaded their bags onto the boat, the postman went about slipping a few slim envelopes into the cubby slots for the Reversalists. He returned with one envelope left in his hands. The children were already sitting in the boat, ready to leave, the dog panting between them.
You want this? he said. It’s for your dad.
Sure, Elsa said. It was junk mail. A glossy brochure for an academic conference it was a miracle Ian was still invited to.
And we’re off, the postman said. He revved the motor and they drifted away from the dock.
The motor whined, and they picked up speed, everyone’s hair whipping around. Jinx tossed her snout in the air currents.
Elsa unzipped a side pouch of her pack to tuck in the brochure and found that there were already envelopes in there. The mail from a week ago. She pulled it out and opened the letters. A report from a lab in Louisiana. Another from Georgia. She held the pages up to get a better look and the wind almost snatched them.
Nolan, Elsa said. She handed him the letters.
Nolan skimmed the reports on the Paradise Duck, struggling to understand their meaning. The boat shifted beneath him.
No one had believed Ian. Nolan hadn’t. His family and his friends and his colleagues, they’d all written him off. Even on Leap’s, Ian’s theories had been unwelcome. But Ian believed in what he was looking for. Had wanted to believe that the world he was leaving for Nolan and for Elsa was worthy of them. That they would be okay. Would be better, even, than their parents.
It was enough, for Nolan, that Ian had wanted this to be true. The sheer optimism of the enterprise floored him. The totally unscientific hope. If this was Ian’s hypothesis for their outcome, Nolan could live with that.
Over the roar of the motor, it was too hard to tell his sister everything, so he just handed the envelopes back. She nodded, zipping them into her pouch.
Elsa watched the wake of the boat. The way it channeled deep, then foamed itself shallow again. Her father, she knew, had been down there somewhere. Soggy, sodden. She imagined an underwater tea party with the fishes. Underwater explanations. Underwater eulogy. Underwater apology, apology, apology. She wished they had not found his body. Ian would have liked to have wound up back in the primordial soup of the sea.
The postman shouted over the motor, You get a sense of the folks out there?
We did, Nolan said.
That place gives me the creepers, he said.
It was just a week, Elsa shouted. But she and Nolan both knew this was not true. A week had almost been long enough for them to make the same mistakes all over again. A week had almost not been long enough for them to find what they were looking for.
They were just fifteen minutes off the shore, and Leap’s spell had been broken.
From this distance, the children could see the whole of the island.
It looked small.
Up close, you can’t tell that an island is finite. Up close, an island seems like everything, because you are on it. It can feel as if it will go on forever. But the drag of a boat across the space of waves and time can help you see. With time, most things grow smaller. Trees and rocks become less articulated and significant. You draw away and the island narrows to become just one thing, among many. The farther you go, the more an island blurs, until it looks less like a place you lived and more like a muddied landscape. Just someone’s landscape. Maybe not even yours.
As they approached Watch Landing, Nolan felt anxious at the noise and bustle coming upon him. Music from the bars. Boat engines. A popcorn machine. People happily shouting at each other over the noise of their own drunkenness. Mitchell, he remembered, had spent his whole life on the island before going to the mainland as a teenager. How frightening this must have seemed to him. How too-much.
They thanked the postman and gave him a forwarding address for Ian’s mail.
When they disembarked, Jinx hesitated, nervous to jump out of the boat.
You’re a wolf, Elsa told her. You’re a ferocious wolf. Jinx leapt and made the dock.
As the children walked along the boardwalk, several young girls stopped to coo over Jinx, petting her despite the smell.
As they reached the end of the pier, Nolan turned to Elsa. We could find someone to show them to. The reports.
They could lose the island.
I know. But I mean, that’s not our problem.
But can you imagine?
If Mitchell was forced to sell the island and send the Reversalists away, where would they go?
The children saw Esther in a cheap condo, installing twelve birdfeeders on the patio and ignoring complaints from her neighbors when the spilled seed drew rats.
Mick and Jim would work at some urban food co-op, or buy back their farm, but they would get trapped in a feedback loop of their brotherhood and brilliance until it drove them to loneliness.
Gates they imagined living in some college town where she’d teach a required intro bio class to apathetic undergrads for the rest of her life, drinking instant soup from a thermos and writing cruel things on their papers.
St. Gilles could write the final book of the Asterias series and receive ungodly amounts of money, but he wouldn’t. They imagined him in a small London apartment, writing and rewriting, trying impossibly to solve for the future of Earth.
Mitchell would take the money from the sale and build an enormous house somewhere remote. Somewhere he could wall off and live in, as if it were an island.
This was what the children imagined for the Reversalists if they were trying to be hopeful.
Hopeful and honest didn’t always go together.
If they were trying to be honest, what the children really imagined was that, if the Reversalists were kicked off the island, very few of them would survive the next five years. The children would google the Reversalists late at night (they would not be able to resist googling) and they would find news of their deaths, that they had killed themselves, one by one, or maybe all at once in a kind of Jonestown Kool-Aid debacle.
The children imagined this for all of them except Gwen.
Because the children imagined Gwen maybe pregnant. Gwen, if pregnant, maybe happy. Gwen, maybe a vet again, traveling late at night with her baby strapped to her chest, to barns where she’d catch cows warm from the womb. Snipping the cords between them and their enormous lumbering mothers. Setting them loose on the world.
When does the bus get here? Nolan asked.
Elsa looked at her watch, the black rubber crusted with salt. Four, she said.
I think we should stay, Nolan said.
Nolan—
He gestured at the Landing, the bars and restaurants. For one night.
This place is awful.
Then go.
What could we possibly want to do here?
Everything, Nolan said, and Elsa sighed.
Nolan hugged Elsa. Her pack made it difficult, but he stepped in and threw his long arms around her full circumference.
That night, Nolan and Elsa walked the waterfront with Jinx on her lead and they ate everything. They ate fried dough and sausage and peppers. They ate candy apples and a bag of garlic boiled peanuts. Nolan thought of all the times he and Janine had resolved to eat clean because they needed to detox themselves. Their food was poison! They were afraid of chickens with fat breasts and of Monsanto genes in cornflakes. But today Nolan was ravenous. He would eat it all. He ate fried alligator on a stick, and Elsa ate a sack of deep-fried Oreos. They both ordered enormous plastic cups of lemonade with bendy straws and walked around sipping.
Jinx grinned and panted, her pink tongue lolling out. She sniffed and pissed on things, and this seemed like a joyful kind of thing to do. Her way of saying this is mine and this is mine and this is mine.
It was dark out, but there was neon everywhere. On bar marquees and waterfront stands and boardwalk games. There were clubs that thumped noisily, and as they passed by them, they felt waves of body heat from the collective human pack inside. Elsa squeezed Nolan’s hand, because they were here, among people, and it was awful and glorious and they were not ruined by it.
There was an outdoor bar on the thin spit of beach at the north end of the landing, and Nolan and Elsa sat on bar stools there. Nolan looped Jinx’s lead around the stool leg and she lay down and set her chin on his foot. Was she was afraid he would leave her? Could she smell that he was like Ian? A man who disappears. Nolan was careful not to move his foot. To let her chin rest just so.
Just look at this, Elsa said.
The place was kitsch. A string of seashell Christmas lights ran the length of the bar, and a glowing orange scallop covered the electric outlet next to Nolan. There were TVs showing ESPN, and the bar was a mix of men watching sports and nomadic young people getting smashed for a hot instant before they moved on to another stop. The bartender mixed Elsa a Dark and Stormy. He made Nolan a vodka tonic. Nolan squeezed his lime and stared at the orange scallop light until he saw spots.
What are you going to do when you get home? Elsa asked.
Nothing. I don’t know, Nolan said. He considered his job, Janine.
I’m sure Ingrid would love to see you sometime.
Yeah? Nolan said.
She’d be embarrassingly happy if you visited. Holidays or summer. Whenever. The lake isn’t full of snakes. You could swim.
Nolan nodded. But won’t you be on Mars? he said.
You’ve made it very clear that you don’t believe in Mars, Elsa said.
I believe in Mars, I just don’t believe in you going there. He sucked his drink. In fact, Nolan said, I’d definitely prefer it if you stayed. I’d like to share a planet with you, I think. The occasional Thanksgiving.
Okay, Elsa said.
So what about now, Nolan said.
What about now?
I think I’d like to visit Ingrid now, Nolan said.
Now is good, Elsa said. And it was not impossible to imagine. The three of them together in the lakehouse.
Elsa people-watched. Nolan sipped his drink. The lime tasted off, but it was sweet. He rummaged in his bag and pulled out his phone and charger. The bartender was tending to a group of young men who were all competing for the attention of the one girl with them, and Nolan pulled the scallop light from its outlet. He plugged in his phone.
So soon, Elsa said. Nolan let the red battery symbol blink at him as he drank.
There was a bang, and Jinx started, jumping up and barking. Elsa shushed her. You are a ferocious wolf, she reminded her. The fireworks had begun. Pale violet flower bursts. Streaking red tails. Nolan pushed Jinx’s rump down and patted her head and told her it was alright. Jinx settled into a crouch and projected a low wookiee rumble of displeasure.
From the island, the fireworks had seemed violent. An interruption of their peace. But here, they were brighter. Gleefully loud. A celebration.
It’s quite a show, Elsa said. She ordered another drink and set off for the bathroom.
Nolan’s phone came to life, bleeping furiously. A week’s worth of texts, alerts, updates, emails, and voicemails made themselves known. Scrolling through the screen of things he’d missed, Nolan felt tight and anxious in his chest. He wanted to chuck the phone into the sea. But then there was the little green blink of Janine having called. Having called several times. Nolan scrolled through and saw that there were exactly seven calls and messages. One for each day he’d been gone.
He listened.
Janine’s messages were calm. They said she was calling to see how he was doing. They said he didn’t need to call back until he was ready. They said that she missed him and wished he wouldn’t do this, but she got it. She said she would be there when he came out of his cave. That she hoped she could go with him to the funeral. To let her know if he needed anything.
There were bursts of music and scuffling in the background of these messages, and Nolan knew Janine was calling from dance rehearsal. Their new show was opening this weekend.
A welling up. A little gasp that got choked in his throat and was drowned out by the fireworks. And then it was over. Jinx nudged his ankle again, worried over Nolan’s failure to notice the explosions in the sky.
Two drunk men in jerseys began whooping from down the row of stools. Loudly ordering more drinks. Nolan looked up at the TV. The Rockies had just beat the Giants, 8–7. The Giants were at home, and they panned over the stadium. Dejected fans were standing and shaking their heads. But Nolan knew it was only June. The lights played over the field and even on the tiny screen, Nolan could make out a bird swooping past the glow of the lamps. As the leftfielder walked off, the lights cast a long shadow behind him in triplicate. A giant’s shadow. Nolan watched the spot he had left. His spot. He felt the pull of it.