Judith
April 1975–December 1975
“You’re focusing too much on the physical part of it,” Gina said, handing Judith another glass of their limited fresh water. Judith swallowed all of it in one go. Her throat was on fire, and her tongue was shriveled like a piece of dried beef. “It’s not the taste that you want; it’s the feelings attached to it. The memories. Each movement of the water carries a memory with it, which dictates where it goes, how it flows, what it seeks.”
“Muscle memory,” Judith said, voice raspy.
“Something like that.” She dipped a jar over the side of the pier and handed it to Judith. “Try again.”
She drank. She gagged. Still nothing. She was starting to think it was all made up, something to amuse a woman who’d been alone and bored for too long. There were times Judith caught Gina looking at her with a curious expression. It made Judith feel like an animal behind glass. And now with these lessons…was she learning to protect herself? Or were they just party tricks?
“Why are you even showing me this?” Judith asked, her tongue barely able to form the words. “What if I can’t?”
“You can. And you will.” Gina sighed. “You need to protect yourself.”
“I still don’t understand—”
“There’s a reason she hasn’t gotten to me. I live on an island no bigger than the cape, alone, and somehow I’ve managed to keep alive. That thing you thought you saw? The terrifying green eye? It was in your head. She put it there to scare you, to drive you mad, away from the house and into the water so she could drown you. There are few things in the world stronger than a desire for revenge. You have to trust me.”
But Judith didn’t trust her. Not completely. She’d mentioned once that she wanted to visit the cape. Just for a day. An hour. She needed to know that her mother was alive. But Gina refused.
“You can’t,” she’d said. “You’ll endanger us both.”
She didn’t understand how leaving the island would put Gina in danger, but she knew better than to argue. Arguing with Gina only made the days with her more difficult. And the nights… Sometimes she wondered if, after an argument, it was Gina who made the walls creak, who whispered under her door in the darkness. Who terrified her into keeping her feet firmly on dry ground.
***
It went on for days. Weeks. Judith drank her weight in seawater, and it still wasn’t enough. It clicked one late evening while they sat on the pier. Gina had an old newspaper on her lap and sketched a design in the margins for a lighthouse. It would help, she’d said. Liza doesn’t like the light.
But today, Gina wouldn’t speak to Judith until she was able to read the water.
A jar sat in her lap, sloshing with each rough rock of the waves. The air was biting, and the tips of her fingers and nose were numb. There’d be a storm soon.
She studied the water in the jar. The way that it moved, the sediment that swirled snow globe–like even as she sat perfectly still. Like it felt the thrash of the waves, called to them, even from the jar. She could see the connection like a web, sticky and flexible. Even as her stomach clenched, she cupped some water from the jar and tipped it into her mouth. As she held it there, in her mind’s eye she felt the sudden shudder of an ocean wracked by wind and an unexplained desire to dive deeper and deeper, to where the sea was calm and cool and comforting. She saw a shadow lurking beneath the water, tendrils of impossible smoke drifting closer. Closer. Her tongue burned, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she spat over the side.
Gina laughed. “Finally.”
Judith frowned and the cracks in her lips tore.
***
When they weren’t studying the water from the safety of the pier, they moved around each other like planets in their own orbit. As much as Gina tried to encourage her to make the island and her little house Judith’s home, Judith was never comfortable, never off her guard. “Reading” the water, as Gina called it, helped some. There was something about feeling the ebb and flow of the water that was like a door to Liza in a way. A grounding line. She could feel her here in a way she hadn’t been able to on the cape, and when there was a surge, like an undertow in her mind when Liza tried to reach inside her head and pull Judith toward her, Judith could, mostly, fight it. But a door could open both ways. Had Gina given Judith a view into Liza, or had Gina shown Liza how to find her?
***
Judith woke up one morning in June feeling…off. She wasn’t in pain or sick, but her body felt alien. Wrong. She walked carefully through the house, studying her own steps, the twist and jerk of her skin, the sudden pop in her ankle. She went straight for the outhouse. When she finished, she realized she hadn’t bled since leaving the cape. She thought of the nights she spent in the house on the hill with Jackie and her insides convulsed.
I’m pregnant, she thought.
What do I do?
What happens now?
I want my mom.
It’d always been there, this ache of wanting to see her. To make sure she was okay. To see if she missed Judith. If she was looking for her, or if she’d accepted that she was lost. That Liza had claimed another of their family’s daughters. But now it was like a sharp pain. How could she do this without her mom?
Back in the kitchen, Gina whistled as she poured hot water into a mug. She caught Judith out of the corner of her eye and smiled. “I know it’s still early, but I was thinking we might decorate for Christmas this year. I never do, so the trimmings will be sparse, but I thought because we’re together, it might be a nice thing for…” She turned and, seeing Judith full on, frowned. “What’s wrong?”
Judith’s hand went to her belly, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. It was like being dared to touch a live wire or a white-hot burner.
“Tummy troubles?” Gina asked. “Here. Have some tea.”
Her stomach lurched. “I don’t want tea.”
“Hmm.”
Gina pulled Judith into the kitchen and fussed over her, placing the back of her hand on her forehead, then her cheek, then her lips. Her sharp fingers prodded Judith’s throat and underarms. She barely touched Judith’s belly before Judith yelped and pulled away.
“Oh.” Gina’s eyes traveled the length of Judith’s body, her arms crossed. “I see.”
“I’m fine,” Judith said, more to convince herself than Gina. “Just… Oh God.”
She ran to the front of the house, barely two steps off the porch before she vomited.
Gina patted her back, muttering there, theres, still patting and muttering and staring into the water when Judith stopped.
Gina’s eyebrow twitched, like something had just occurred to her.
Judith stood and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She still felt nauseous.
“It’s normal.” Gina kicked some sand over Judith’s sick. “It’ll pass.” Then, “What do you want to do?”
At first, Judith didn’t know what she meant. She wanted to lie down for a hundred years and never eat again. Then she realized.
“You want me to—”
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.” Her eyes told another story.
Judith was sixteen. What was she going to do with a baby? What would her mom say?
She knew there were ways around it. Cassie told her about a boy she slept with her first (and only) semester in college.
“It was like I was trying to see how many mistakes I could make in six months,” Cassie had said. “Getting knocked up took the cake, though.”
Abortion had been legal for all of a few months, and hospitals were still hesitant to perform the procedure. Her mom took her to a clinic in Oregon that’d been conducting abortions, under the table, since the fifties.
“I won’t lie,” Cassie had said. “It sucked. And I was in pain for a while. But it’s what was best for me.”
Cassie had always been able to make the hard choices. Judith missed her.
It seemed like every decision she had made over the last year had gone from bad to worse. She wasn’t fit to be a mother and wasn’t even sure she wanted to be one at all.
“I don’t know,” Judith finally said. “I need to think about it.”
“Take some time, but”—she placed a firm hand on Judith’s belly—“not too long.”
***
Judith couldn’t sleep. Part of her wanted to find a way home, to fall at her mother’s feet and tell her she messed up and beg her to fix it, but there was also that voice in the back of her head, warning her of what would happen if she went back.
Every gassy stomach rumble made her hyperaware of her body, too scared to move too much or too fast in case it triggered another deluge. The only thing she could keep down was hot water with a little mint.
She was so hungry.
Gina asleep in her room, Judith carefully moved around what passed for a kitchen—there were no appliances, and the sink was really just a bucket attached to a pump. An old trader’s outpost, Gina had told her. A lucky find. She’d made improvements over the years. Added more space. Cut out a window. Occasionally fishermen would find the woman on the island, and she would barter for labor. Judith never asked what she bartered—seemed the only things the island offered were inedible flora, water birds, and sickly looking turtles.
A pantry held their rationed supplies for the week. The rest of their stores Gina kept somewhere away from the house. Safe, she’d said when Judith asked her where exactly.
“Another mouth to feed,” Gina had said as she prepared a meager dinner of sardines and tomatoes from the garden, none of which Judith ate. “But I’m sure we could make it work.”
Judith grabbed a sleeve of crackers she was pretty sure were out of date and settled back on the blanket that had been serving as her bed. She gnawed on them, a chipmunk, until a growling, gurgling sound drifted from the back of the house. Her skin pinched and her heart dropped.
It’s not real, she reminded herself.
A breeze fingered her hair, the back of her neck. The rush and fall of the ocean echoed in her ears, a lullaby.
But the windows were closed.
I should open them.
Still carrying the crackers, she walked to the closest window, suddenly tired. She couldn’t find the latch, and there was something dark outside, darker than the night, sucking the light from the moon and stars. She wondered if she could drink the moon faster than the dark thing outside.
The window opened, and she leaned her face out into the cool night air. She could climb out and onto the roof, and then she could reach the moon and drink the light and—
Her stomach wrenched and she tasted bile. Still leaning out the window, she gagged, nothing but soggy crackers left to bring up. Slowly, the fog over her mind cleared, and she realized what she’d been about to do.
As soon as she caught her breath, she fell back inside, slamming the window shut. The dark thing was gone.
But it’d almost had her.
For the first time since realizing she was pregnant, Judith touched her stomach. It didn’t feel any different, not really, but she gently prodded, seeking out something substantial.
“You saved me,” she whispered.
***
It was late July or early August—it was hard to keep track of time on the island—when Judith started to show. The clothes Gina gave her weren’t exactly tight, but with the sun unforgiving and so few windows to allow a breeze through the house, by midmorning, her clothes were sweat soaked and clingy. Most days, she found a shady spot and spread out on a blanket, naked. More than anything, though, she wanted the coolness of the water.
She didn’t dare.
Because if she thought about it too hard, if she let her gaze linger too long on the waves, she felt a pull deep in her belly that was getting harder to ignore.
This morning she woke up early, the first time in months she hadn’t felt queasy, and went for a walk. By the time she got back, she’d made a decision.
“I’m keeping it.”
Though Gina hadn’t tried to push her into a decision one way or the other, Judith felt the stares across the room, heard the muttering from her bedroom.
Gina was bent over a pair of underwear, stitching the elastic back to the cotton. She didn’t look up. “Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I told you it was your decision.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Judith.” Gina looked up from her stitching, her expression hard. “Enough.” Then, “If you want to see this through to the end, you’re going to have to grow up.”
Judith straightened, more of a task as her body thinned and her belly grew. “I am grown up.”
Turning back to her work, Gina said, “Not yet.”
***
A few weeks later, while Judith was bathing, she felt the baby move. She froze, thinking she might have imagined it, but then it happened again, and she held her breath until the fluttering stopped.
Until now, she’d only thought of being pregnant in the vaguest of terms. Her belly would grow, and she would be sick, and at some point in the future there would be a baby. But as she sat in the tub, water chilling on her skin, she realized she knew nothing about pregnancy. What to expect. What to do. Her chest tightened, and she had to coach herself to breathe. How was she going to get through this?
She didn’t care if Liza was out there waiting to drag her to the bottom of the ocean. She needed to get home. To her mom. She’d find a way to protect her. But the only way she was going to get there was if she took Gina’s ancient rowboat. Gina had claimed it was the one she came to the island in, that it was barely fit for firewood, but Judith assumed it was another of Gina’s half-truths.
That evening, she ate dinner across from Gina, helped her clean up, and then curled up on her mat to wait for Gina to fall asleep.
Night came, and Judith waited until she could hear Gina’s gentle snores drifting from the hall, and then she waited a little longer. She didn’t leave a note. Gina would understand. And if she didn’t, then Judith would rather Gina believed she’d drowned.
The boat was grounded on the beach near the beginnings of a dock. She’d never seen Gina take it out, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t. Though it was difficult to see in the dark, Judith ran her hands along the bottom side of the skiff and didn’t feel any holes or soft places where the wood had rotted. Inside, leaning against the seat, were the oars. They looked in bad shape, but they would have to do.
As she started to push the skiff toward the water, movement in the corner of her eye made her pause.
No. Don’t think about it. Just keep moving.
But her hands shook, making it hard to keep a grip on the skiff. Her feet slipped in the sand, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out when sharp shells cut her feet. An ache started in the back of her head, like a hand closing over it, nails digging in. Her vision swam, and it was hard to keep her eyes open. She just wanted to lie down.
But Gina had taught her how to put up walls, how to find the red light through the mist. Judith had Gina’s Thalia tea running through her, a protective charm she wished she could have shared with Cassie. And then it was Cassie’s face in her mind, her mother’s… She clung to them, focused on them when Liza’s voice threatened to break through.
Gritting her teeth, she dragged her nails along her arms, her legs, her face, the pain breaking through the fog just enough to keep her moving. One step at a time. Closer. She could feel the spray of the water as waves lashed the shore. Liza was angry—or excited.
The bow touched the water, and as the rest of the skiff moved onto the damp sand, it became easier to push. She was almost there. She would row until she reached the cape. Until her arms fell off.
She had one foot in the boat when something yanked her back by the hair. She was too shocked to move. Her foot got caught under the seat and trying to wriggle it free only lodged it deeper into the shallow opening.
“Ungrateful. I can’t believe…” Gina huffed angrily in Judith’s ear.
“My ankle! It’s—”
One hand still tangled in Judith’s hair, she wrapped the other around Judith’s middle and pulled. There was a sickening crack, and her foot, now throbbing and swelling, came free.
Water rushed at them, waves bigger and stronger than they’d been only seconds before.
“Keep moving,” Gina ordered. “Get away from the water.”
Nausea broke over her, wave after wave. It was like being tossed in a storm. She struggled to get her good foot beneath her as Gina tried to drag her away from the boat.
But the water reached farther up the beach now, and as it washed over their feet, she felt Gina’s grip start to loosen. Liza was in her head. Another moment and Judith would be able to slip free, but what did that matter if Liza was just beyond the shallows, waiting for her?
Gina’s nails dug into Judith’s skin as her whole body trembled. Every movement was muscle memory, her body fighting against her mind. Judith pushed them farther away from the lapping waves, up the beach, until finally they were far enough that the water couldn’t reach. Still, Gina’s breath came in hard, fast bursts, and she clung to Judith like a life raft.
A few moments passed, and Gina groaned. Her breathing slowed, and Judith could no longer feel Gina’s heart pounding against her back.
Wheezing, Gina said, “Don’t ever do that again.”
“I want to go home,” Judith said. “Please, I just want to go home.”
Gina wrenched Judith’s head back. “You are home.”
***
For several weeks, Judith couldn’t walk. Gina made a splint of small pieces of wood and an old shirt with too many holes to be salvageable, but Judith could tell it wouldn’t heal right. Winter settled in at the tail end of November, and she still couldn’t put much pressure on it.
“You’re lucky it was just your ankle,” Gina had said. Then, when the words had sunk in, “I was so afraid I would lose you.”
Judith didn’t want to believe Gina had broken her ankle on purpose, but she was careful not to test it when Gina was around. Instead of sleeping, she hobbled around the house, belly out to here, working up the nerve to try to leave again. She was running out of time.
***
December brought freezing cold and storms that shook the little house. The windows fogged, and smoke from the wood-burning stove lingered like a haze on the ceiling. Their food supply was running low, so they’d been cutting their rations. They hadn’t seen any fishermen in over a month—Vik was the last to visit, trading a cooler of pollock, some beef jerky, and a bag of too-soft lemons for an hour in the garden with Gina.
The pollock was almost gone, ditto the jerky, and they’d finished off the lemons in a week, Judith sucking the juice until her lips pickled.
“Winter is tough,” Gina said, “but we’ll get by.”
Except it’d been days since Judith last felt the baby move, and there were mornings when she woke up feeling a shroud over her body, overcome by an impossible sense of dread. There was no point in asking Gina because she was all don’t worry and everything’s fine. Judith’s mom would have been honest. She would have taken her to the doctor when blood dotted her underwear. She would have bought her vitamins and books and hugged her when she was scared, which was all the time. With each day that went by, Judith became more convinced this had been a mistake, that she’d put herself and her child in danger and she couldn’t get them out of it alive. And maybe that was the answer. Most of the time, she couldn’t tell if, when she imagined drowning, it was her own dark thoughts or Liza peering in.
***
Her water broke in the early morning. She’d been better on her feet over the last few days and got up early to take a few laps around the house, testing her ankle. She had a sudden feeling of having pissed herself, then worried because she hadn’t felt it and what that meant for the baby and started toward the outhouse only to stop in the doorway as pain and pressure circled her middle like a vise.
Not yet, she begged.
But for the next couple of hours, the pressure got worse and the pain clawed her back and her legs. Sweat pooled under her arms and dotted her forehead.
She couldn’t do this. She needed help. She needed—
“Gina!”
Gina came running from her bedroom, pulling a sweater over her head. “What happened?” She took one look at Judith lying on the floor, clutching her middle, and nodded. “Right. Okay. Relax. Everything is going to be fine.”
A contraction hit, and Judith howled, her nails dragging scratches in the floor.
Outside, waves crashed.
Gina made quick work of getting Judith out of her clothes and then sliding a sheet beneath her. The cold pinched at her skin, but as another contraction came, so did the heat.
“Breathe,” Gina ordered.
Judith was breathing. Breathing did nothing. It was like her body was caving in and ripping itself open at the same time. She tore at the sheet and rolled her head on the ground, tears streaming into her ears.
For a moment, Gina disappeared and then returned with a bowl of water, a rag, and their sharpest knife, the one they used for butchering the few rabbits they found on the island. She lined them up next to Judith and dipped the rag in the water.
“What do you need the knife for?” Judith asked.
“Just in case,” Gina said without looking up. “Spread your legs.”
Judith obeyed, her hips popping with the movement. She barely caught her breath before pain shot up her back and the vise clamped down harder on her belly. Gina probed between her legs, and Judith bit back a sob.
“Not quite,” Gina said. “It might be a while.”
She balanced her hands on Judith’s knees. One of them was covered in blood.
“I’m gonna die,” Judith said.
Gina frowned. “Listen to me. I have a plan. If you want to live, if you want to go back home, you have to do exactly what I say.”
Buoyed at the idea of seeing her mom, Judith nodded.
“I can feel her out there. You can too. I see it on your face.”
In my head, the waves rolling, rolling, calling, calling.
“I’m fine,” Judith said.
Gina’s fingers dug into Judith’s knees. “I said listen.” Then, “If we can…distract her, we might be able to make the crossing. I know how it feels to want to go home, Judith. Do you think I’ve enjoyed myself? Living hand to mouth, always knowing, always seeing her? I want to go home too. I want to live.” Her voice broke. “I gave and gave only to have my life taken away from me. I deserve my life back. And you’re going to help me.”
Judith’s heart hammered. “How?”
“You’re not suited to be a mother. You understand that, right?”
While a shameful part of her agreed, another flared. “You don’t know that.”
“I do, Judith. If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have survived your little dip that day. How do you expect to care for a baby when you can’t care for yourself?”
“That wasn’t my fault. Vik and his father—”
“Enough. This baby is coming. You need to listen to me. I know what’s best for you. For us. And what’s best for us is to give Liza this child. She’ll calm for a time, and we’ll be able to pass.”
When Judith didn’t immediately agree, Gina leaned over her, a scowl etched on her face. “I took you in. I fed you. You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you my child.”
Gina’s scowl deepened. “How dare—”
Biting through another contraction, Judith snatched the knife off the floor, and as Gina fell on top of her trying to get it, Judith swung, slicing through Gina’s cheek. Blood wept down her face and onto Judith’s belly. Screaming, Gina thrashed, but Judith was able to shove her away. Breathing hard, Judith scrambled to sit up, to stand, but the pain was extraordinary. She was able to get to her knees before Gina came at her. Judith didn’t think. She stabbed blindly, feeling a second’s resistance before the knife plunged into Gina’s side.
Gina fell back, gasping. “Y-you…”
Not knowing how badly Gina was hurt, Judith stood and hobbled to the door. Blood and fluid dripped down her legs, and with each crush of the pain, her knees nearly buckled. She had to get off this island.
The cold was like a wall outside, and she immediately began to tremble. Blankets covered patches of the garden; she grabbed the thickest one and wrapped it around her shoulders, but it was stiff in places with ice.
There was no way she was going to make it.
She had to try.
The skiff wasn’t far from where it’d originally been kept. After breaking her ankle, Gina must not have been worried that Judith would try to leave again.
As Judith staggered across the sand, gripping the chilly blanket to her body, she heard a wail come from the house. Would Gina come after her? Would Judith be fast enough?
Wind whipped her hair as she pushed the boat toward the water. As wave after wave of pain gripped her, she dug her fingers into the wood, driving splinters under her skin. Tears blurred her vision, twisting shadows in the corners of her eyes.
Then her toes touched water, and it was like lightning shot up her legs. She could do this. She was going to do this.
But her legs shuddered, and she felt a drop in her belly, and the contractions that came after were harder, longer. She could barely breathe. Somehow, she lifted both legs into the boat and used the oars to push herself away from the shore. The waves were strong, and she struggled to row into open water. Fog swirled around her, and she didn’t know which way she was going, whether she’d even reach the cape. If she could keep Liza out of her head long enough to get there.
She spread her legs, bracing her feet on either side of the boat. She tried not to look at the blood.
She couldn’t do this.
The fog was too dense. Darkness rubbed her head and back.
Between her legs felt like fire. She gripped the oars so hard her fingers locked.
Gina shouted from what sounded like far away, a high-pitched shriek that sounded more frightened than angry. Judith chanced a look over the side of the boat, and her breath caught as a shadow swirled beneath her.
A small voice told her to push.
Her screams echoed across the water.