Even now, five years after she’d gotten sweet, curly-haired young Dr. James to sew her back together, Sophie couldn’t get walking quite right. She could walk, okay, but weirdly: lurch, shuffle, lurch-tilt, drag. As though her lower half were a balky remote-control car she was driving instead of part of her, and subject to whims. Frustrating as that could be, it had also become its own sort of fun, adding unpredictability even to the most pedestrian activities, keeping them fresh, because she never knew when those neurons wouldn’t quite make it through their kinked pathways to muscles and tendons. And that meant that every now and then, at the most unexpected and amusing moments, she found herself sitting down, or turning into a wall.
That was yet another reason she’d come to love the night ferries. On open water, even when it was calm, she could lurch, tip, catch herself, and when she looked up there’d be someone else recovering from doing the same thing, some sauced-looking grandpa splashing coffee drink all over his Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt or a windy-haired twelve-year-old who’d lost her balance, then her cell phone as she came unmoored from the deck. They’d grin at one another, then, grandpas and kids and Sophies. As though they were all in the same boat.
See what I did there? she’d think, imagining actually saying it aloud to herself or Natalie. Same boat? Occasionally, on the weirdest, loneliest nights, she even imagined saying things like that to Jess, of all people. Then she’d imagine Jess’s scowl and give herself a little wriggle of pleasure.
Eventually, she’d find her way to a rail, especially if it was raining, which was most of the time. She’d watch islands materialize out of the mist, dissipate into it. On clear trips, she saw container ships and fishing boats clustered on the horizon, sprawling across the expanse between oil derricks, creating what looked like the skyline of some seaborne ghost city. A magical, mist-wreathed place where she might settle someday, if she could ever actually reach it.
But for now, whenever she needed to get off the island, or needed people, for one reason or another, the ferries more than served. She loved the little casual interactions: smiling at random fellow passengers, some late-night business mom or kissing college couple or track-marked street kid; tugging them along behind her for a while like cans on strings as she lurched into the dining cabin, up to the view deck, back toward the stern to watch the white wake in the black, black water; cutting them loose, eventually, leaving them unharmed, shivering and stranded in the misty starlight, a little hungrier and lustier and lonelier than they’d already been, because now they’d seen their deep dreams walking. Lurching, anyway. Because they’d glimpsed possibilities they’d maybe imagined but never imagined possible. Because she’d let them glimpse their deaths and then let them live.
Mostly, almost always, she let them live.
She’d come to love the ferry so much that she even enjoyed the cold, in a way. Not that she had a choice, because she was always cold, even before the boats shrugged free of their lines and docks and harbors, got out from under the lee of the land and leaned into the wind to run. Even indoors, on wet nights, the cold circled and swarmed at the windows, erupted through the cabins and up and down stairwells like a pack of screaming six-year-olds every time some idiot opened a door. Sometimes, the chill got so ferocious that it pinned her to the walls. Sometimes, it seemed so elemental and gleeful that she wanted to throw open her arms and embrace it.
Inevitably, dealing with the cold became another of Sophie’s ferry-games, a constantly changing challenge. Some nights, she tried lurking indoors without collecting onlookers or unwanted attention. Some nights, she prowled the decks outside for warm spots, steamy places where the engines vented, or bench seats a couple or family had just vacated, leaving their heat in handprints on the railings and their scent in the air. She’d sit or stand in their absence and watch seabirds skim the wake, which is what those birds mostly did. Only rarely did they dive, snag whatever it was in the water that had caught their eye at just that wrong moment, and rise with their prey dripping and flapping in their long mouths.
They were her, she realized. She was them. Sophie Seabird, skimming the Strait or the Sound.
Was that why she’d stayed in the Northwest so long? Because she’d at least found other living things to identify with? Why had she even come? There were whole stretches of time she genuinely couldn’t remember, now, when her mind really did go blank as a seabird’s and she just rode the rumbling engines through waves and wind. They scared her, those times, when she stirred from them. Though while they were happening, and she was just gliding …
Later, eventually, when she did stir and remember, she’d sometimes laugh at the flukiness of it all. The serendipity. Unless it was fate, or God’s hand, or even Natalie’s. Maybe sweet, stony Natalie was guiding her still. Sophie’s mother would have called that idea flat-out blasphemy. At least, she would have during one of her dried-out times, when she could talk sensibly at all. And even back then—at age eight, say, in their rusting trailer with dead flies and Cheez-It crumbs for carpet—Sophie would have challenged her to explain the difference.
Because it really had seemed so strange. Almost miraculous.
There she’d been, not twenty-four hours removed from finally giving in and giving Dr. James—poor, curly-haired Dr. James—the reward he’d craved, had begged so pathetically for, had certainly earned, and hadn’t deserved. Regretful in a way she rarely let herself feel, unsteady on her twitchy legs, fully expecting to topple off them with every step, Sophie had caught a midnight bus back to East Dunham, New Hampshire, to collect what remained of her things from the locker where she’d stored them. She’d particularly wanted the bag of cassettes Jess had made of Natalie speaking. Not only were those cassettes the closest Sophie would ever get to the one true friend she’d had, she suspected they were the closest she’d get to anyone, ever again. Ever, in this case, meaning a very long time indeed.
When she’d emerged from the bus station, weaving and wobbling her way toward Campus Avenue with the taste of Dr. James still slicking her tongue and strands of his hair coiling on her palate and around her tonsils and making her gag, she’d paused for a single moment by the side of the road in the drizzly, late-September dawn. The very first car to pass her was a police cruiser, with the big, reedy black guy from Rebecca’s orphanage—Joe, she thought his name was, or Joel—riding in the back.
That had stunned Sophie, at first. She’d assumed they’d all fled months ago, right after that night in those woods. And indeed they had, it turned out. Joel had been brought back as a witness, and also a potential suspect. A Person of Interest. Pretty amusing, that. Sophie could have told them he just didn’t have the teeth for it, if anyone had asked her.
Eventually, of course, the police had let Joel go. And for lack of anything better to do—or maybe because that guiding hand was propelling her yet again—she’d trailed behind him as he left the station, followed him right onto the bus to Boston, and hopped his plane to the wet and windy west. She’d tracked him north from Sea-Tac under a mercifully overcast sky, through Seattle and up the coast, onto a boat and out to the island Jess had somehow already found, where her surviving clan and the new strays she’d collected could hole up together.
That very night, without really considering why, Sophie had set up camp all by her lonesome on the other side of the island. And so she’d gotten to see orcas, and stars whose reflections glinted way down in the depths of the Strait, as though everyone and everything that had ever lived was floating around in those waters. And because that sight had transfixed her for so long, and because she had nowhere else to be or go, she’d decided to stay. And because she’d stayed all this time, she’d finally met Eddie. Re-met Eddie.
Natalie’s child. Whose weight had once felt as familiar in her arms as her own baby’s. Whose heavy-lidded, brooding eyes were his mother’s, but whose smile was very nearly Sophie’s. Wide as the world.
That was interesting. Getting more interesting every time they met.
Meanwhile, she had ferries.
Because she really did have all those things to occupy her, now, she only hit nights like this occasionally. They always seemed to be lurking, though, anytime she let herself become undistracted. Every time she fully surfaced behind her own eyes, in her own skin. Sophie Seabird, returned once more to her nest. Even then, the worst thoughts only seized her at particular instances: when she was alone on deck, with rain banging on the windows of the passenger cabin or sweeping in and around her, the cold so cold she no longer felt it, really, more dissolved into and became it, the way water became icicle. Or Sophies became seabirds.
These were the times—the only ones—when the Emerald City and its star-strewn, whale-haunted surrounding isles didn’t glow, when the mist stopped sparkling and instead just closed off her view of mountains, moon, sky. Sometime in the midst of her four or five or fifteen crossings on nights like tonight, she’d look down into the spray, over the water, and there the wake would be. The only bright and winking thing left in her world, flung wide on the black surface of the Sound like open arms.
Those were the only times Sophie actually considered just letting herself topple over.
What stopped her, every single time—at least, it had stopped her so far—was the sight of just one of her fellow passengers, in the midst of one of those things they always seemed to be doing to pass time or acknowledge it or avoid acknowledging it. She’d catch a glimpse of a pilot or crewwoman up in the window of the bridge house, staring right out over the prow of the boat into the misty blackness with her chin in her hand, a Silver Surfer comic book clutched against her chest like a bible. Or some sad homeless woman muttering or singing to herself inside the cabin, just on the other side of the window from Sophie, as she tried somehow to tuck her sopping newspaper-blanket more tightly around herself without shredding it. Or a kid and his dad, out way too late, on their journey home from some secret adventure, playing iPad checkers. Sometimes, the kid or the dad would even look up and smile at her. Sometimes they did that so fast that Sophie realized she wasn’t even making it happen.
Other times, of course—rare, and getting rarer, which made them that much more satisfying when they did come—she just got hungry. She’d cut down so much, these past years. It amazed her how much she’d found she could. Her hunting evenings occurred quarterly, now, maybe less.
When the Hunger did come, her main challenge, just as Natalie had predicted, had turned out to be choosing. So far, Sophie hadn’t so much solved that problem or developed a system for dealing with it as rejected its problem-ness.
How did she choose? The only way she could. The only way that seemed fair. Meaning, the same way people chose packs of chicken at the market, or seabirds selected fish: she simply picked the one who presented an opportunity at the moment the need became acute and the circumstances appropriate. She’d tried to take looks or smiles or any sort of attraction out of it, poor Dr. James being the notable exception. She still preferred indulging people she was drawn to, or who were drawn to her, rather than devouring them. She’d toyed with the superhero thing, seeking out shitheads in the midst of trashing other people’s lives, but that had proven too much work when the need got on her, and involved too much frantic prowling around. And in the end, picking meals that way had felt just as random and prone to unintended consequences—for herself, her victims, her victim’s victims—as any other.
She also tried not to be vicious about it. She never sought to enjoy or prolong it. She had in fact taken to thinking of herself as a sort of kosher predator. Humane. If, when the need finally swamped her, she could find someone lost … someone sleeping … someone too focused on being a shit or a psycho to someone else on a cell phone … and if those people were alone, out in the fog or by themselves in their cars down on the auto deck …
Sometimes, it was that easy.
Regardless of circumstances, she always tried to imagine herself appearing in a shimmer of sea mist, lurching, moving wrong, her arms spread wide and her smile wider. She’d hover in their presence, lure them rather than dive down on them. She’d give them what she could, whatever they seemed to want, time and surroundings permitting. That was only right, and also fun, in assorted ways, for all concerned.
Then she’d take what she needed. Afterward, she’d wrap whatever was left in whatever was nearby and handy and heavy, and nudge it all gently over the side into the sea.
She’d vanish, too, along with her victim, and make sure that her next victim came from one of the hundreds of other ferries cruising the waterways between Tacoma and Vancouver.
It was a good system, or not-system. The best thing about it, for Sophie, was that it had a sort of rhythm, a narrative. It had become a story she was living rather than an endless, circular skein of nights. When the time came for her to leave the Northwest, as it inevitably would—when there was no longer a reason to stay—she’d already decided she would send a sort of accounting to The Stranger, her favorite regional alternative paper, since this whole area seemed to love its monsters even more than most places. Everyone here still talked about the Lady Killer, and the Green River Killer.
Ha.
In her accounting, when she wrote it, she’d include whatever details she remembered for as many specific victims as she could, hopefully providing an extra bit of closure for any still-mourning survivors.
And she’d give them her new name, which she’d come up with herself. Maybe she’d even sign it across a selfie. An appropriately blurred one, haloed in sea shimmer.
With Love, she’d write, because she had loved them all in her way, and still did. From the Ferry Godmother.