2000
The sun has already set—the daylight barely lasts until five thirty in the spring here—when I burst out of the front doors of the VFW into the darkening island. The streetlights on the north end of Division are few and far between, but the ones that are there light up the bumps and cracks in the sidewalk so I can run without tripping. Partygoers whoop and holler—their sounds coming from everywhere and nowhere—and groups of them pass piled high on golf carts, headed in the opposite direction, toward town. The headlights are small and blinding. I look away as they pass.
When I reach the campground, the streetlights disappear altogether. I weave through the park and find a dirt trail that skirts the coast. I don’t know where I’m going, but I keep moving. For a while, I am lost, following deer trails, and trying to keep the lake on my left. My eyes adjust again to a much-darker world with only the moon to light the coastal path. My camera bounces on my lower back, my breath catches in my throat.
An hour must pass before I realize I am at the north entrance to the quarry. I am unsure of how I got here, but I am wheezing and sweating and more than a little glad to recognize where I am. I wipe at my cheeks with the backs of both hands and wish I were wearing something other than tights and a dress. I push my sleeves up above my elbows. I don’t stop moving to catch my breath but instead search for the slim dirt path that cuts through the massive snarl of honeysuckle toward the quarry.
The path is muddy with the thaw of spring, and I walk slowly toward the obscured quarry entrance. Tendrils of honeysuckle reach out and grab hold of my dress, my tights. They tug at me, pulling me back from where I want to go. I swing my camera to the front of my body to make sure the lens cap is securely on—an almost unconscious habit that I’ve developed over the years. It’s darker than the road but I know this path. It may have grown skinnier, but its twists are familiar, as are the spots where the limestone pokes up to trip your toes. If I got down on my hands and knees, I’d be able to find our old footprints with my fingertips, follow the drag of our heels, the rush of the pads of our feet as we ran in and out—B.B. and Henrie forever.
Japanese honeysuckle is not a native island plant, but once it found Fowler, it thrived. It can root anywhere, even in the shallow soil atop the limestone, and its roots weave baskets under the ground, stretching and growing to thicken the land. B.B. calls them carnivorous plants, but they are evergreens, conifers of a sort. Their green leaves linger on into the winter, lending color to an otherwise dying rock. My mom taught me how impossible they are to kill. She went after them as if it were war. Pulling young ones up, their long hairs holding on tight to the ground, spilling soil in trails and tendrils as she insisted. She’d cut the older ones close to the ground, then paint the stubs with poison so the plant would drink it into its roots. I understood her desire to eradicate them, especially when I saw them reach out greedily to strangle trees in our backyard. They are beautiful though. They burst yellow, white flowers in the spring that smell like vanilla, like hot sugar cookies.
My gaze is on my feet as I try to keep my face from being scratched by branches. We used to use this path to exit the quarry when we didn’t want Mom or Dad to know we were heading to town. It was the long way around, the farthest entrance and exit from our house and from downtown, but you could get to the dime store and buy loads of penny candy without anyone being the wiser. And, back then, we had nothing but time.
Because my head is bent, because I am only looking down, I don’t see the fence until something cold and solid and sharp slices my forehead. A small warm cut that I dab with my palm.
Chain link. Old enough to be a little rusty. A sharp pain cuts across my chest, enough to draw a gasp, and I press my palms to my chest, curving my fingers over my clavicles. The pain recedes but the feeling is still there, as if something thinks it can keep my head from my heart.
“What the fuck,” I say.
I loop my fingers through the fence, stare up at its height. Seven feet, maybe eight, with a curl of barbed wire at the top. A serious fence, the kind meant to put the fear of god into trespassers. The honeysuckle has already begun to wind itself through the metal, melding with it in some spots. The fence doesn’t belong here. It deserves to be ripped up, shredded with force, and left to melt back into island skin. There is no way my father would have let anyone build a fence on his property. The rage bubbles up in me. I wrap my fingers around the mesh and pull. It barely moves, so I pull again. The mesh twangs back into place. I kick at it, push my whole body into it.
You can’t keep me out! A waft of the cool air, the kiss of the water somewhere beyond and below, reaches up to twirl through the octagons of the fence, thick and certain as the honeysuckle’s vines.
I imagine how the limestone stretches out into nothing. It’s the highest point in the quarry. A jump from that spot into the pond means death. The thirty-foot drop is only part of the problem. What lies beneath the water at the base of the jump is the other. Down there the rocks poke up, spiky and ragged, ready to pierce. Something the innkeeper said flits through my head: “Like what happened to that woman.”
I put my camera on my back once more so that I can keep my belly close to the fence as I follow it. I move sideways, ducking over and under branches, raising my feet high over vines. The fence makes this dress even more foolish, and although I don’t look down, I can tell my black tights are shredded. If it were later in the season, I’d be worried about poison ivy, another plant that thrives here, but today such things are still slumbering.
I find a spot where someone has cut the wire down low and peeled it back a bit, a triangle that I can lift farther to squeeze through. Beer cans are on the other side, and I imagine island teenagers coming here at night, risking the edge of the world.
I move to the edge. Let my toes pair up with the dark that stretches out past the limestone and look down. The drop is steep. Bottomless. B.B. and I would come here, dangle our legs over the edge, and put our backs to the rock. This spot made us feel like queens, brave enough to tease the drop but not dumb enough to plunge, yet I can feel what it would be like. To leap. To point my body to the water. To hit rock and somehow still swim out.
The moon is bright now. The clouds clearing. I swing my camera around to the front and remove the lens cap. I look out over the land through this third eye. The tear of land is like a long snake, the pond its head, stretching out in front of me. The pond occupies the north side, below my feet, where the quarry is at its deepest. This is where Seth Volt and company started digging way back when, and when they got so far down that there was nothing left to find, they started digging southward toward where he built our grand house. By the time they were done, the house, meant to be some distance from the pit, sat at the edge of the shallowest part of the dig, precariously perched above the last efforts of the Volt dynasty.
The pond water shines up like a big black mirror. Farther out the quarry is dry—the Flatlands stretching out for a while, only interrupted by the tall jut of the rock we call the Watch Tower—the shadows of plants there push up, shallow and starved toward the moonlight.
The faint background noise of masqueraders finding their way to the bars on Main hits the quarry floor and bounces around before finding its way back out. The quarry itself gathers all the island noises but remains strangely empty of people. Then again, it always felt empty when we were kids, as if we were the only ones in the world who knew it was there.
The soft lull of the water, the echoes of parties gearing up, the frogs moaning. I’m beginning to shiver. My sweat has dried a salty layer on my skin, and the chill will dig deep inside me soon. I’ll be dangerously cold, but I can’t stop now. I need to touch the water, the place B.B. and I would wade in. The run from the funeral, from that frilly cocktail-party version of B.B., will only be over once I’ve put my palm to quarry floor, dipped a piece of myself into the icy water.
I put my camera behind me again and use my hands to hold on to rock as I make my way down. At first, I only hear a soft whistle above the other sounds, and I know it immediately, the noise the wind makes as it moves through the quarry and hits the cliffs.
I’ve arrived at the quarry floor and the water sits in the dark, reachable with one shift of my feet. The tiny indents and ledges and cliffs are visible in the moonlight, more velvet black than the rest. I watch. Listen. Stand still.
The pond is murky from winter, full of leaves and branches, swarming with the detritus of the previous seasons. It won’t be clear until late May and not warm until July, but we would have gone swimming as soon as we could.
I squat down, reach out my hand, and touch the edges. The water feels like ice and the rocks underneath are slippery with slime. My teeth are chattering, but I hold my hand to the water. I know I need to get back to the inn, take a hot shower, get back into my present life. I know too that leaving my mother behind was unkind. I’m sure she is worried.
But, instead, I close my eyes. Feel the cold and the camera on my back. I listen. With my eyes closed, the whispery noises disappear entirely, and no matter how I strain to get them back, it is only me and the island. Birds cawing, wind through tree branches, far-off music. The chill of April.
I open my eyes and I suppose it is the moon and the shadows and my tired brain, but the water seems to be moving away from me, sucked inward toward the cliff wall, then lapping up it as if trying to reach the cave. My eyes follow in the dark, up from the water to limestone.
The moon lights up the edge of the cave, and I use my camera to zoom in; threads of something soft hang from the cavern toward the water. I see a full white shine that it takes me a minute to recognize. A face bent back, eyes pointed in my direction, neck at an impossibly sharp angle. A body.
My breath makes a sucking sound against my teeth. I lower the camera, clench my eyes shut, open them again. Without the zoom lens, I can see the shadow of dark hair moving in the breeze, her face, round like the moon, pointed toward me, eye sockets hollow with dark. Her arms are stretched out in a T, the rest of her body in the cave. A smell of rot that I had not noticed before or had mistaken for quarry life seems so strong now that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t all I could smell as soon as I arrived. My stomach grumbles. I feel weak. Hungry.
I raise my camera to her face once more, zoom as close as I can get, and think I see the shine of her white teeth through parted lips. She hangs there, a sacrifice, twisted and grown out of rock. I open my own mouth, stretch my jaw. The world goes black.