THEY TURN FIVE intact cafeteria chairs upright and take seats at the only functional table, resting forward on their elbows. Through heavy eyelids, Karalee observes that the table is not exactly clean but is at least free of dust. She wishes to say the same for herself, but feels creeping indifference. Over the course of less than eight hours on the island, residue from the ruined buildings has laid a coating upon everyone’s skin and hair. She drags her tongue across her front teeth to remove a film of grit, and shudders.
“I feel grungy,” she admits to Estela.
“Do not expect a shower today,” Estela slurs back, her Spanish accent now grown especially heavy. “I try hard to think of this experience as camping out.”
Karalee scans the destroyed cafeteria with its missing tiles and cracked plaster and piles of discarded equipment. “More like squatting,” she says. “But we have a roof at least.”
“There’s the espirit.”
Estela has donned the T-shirt she dragged through the woods, having waved it in the air when she remembered to. Still not completely dry, it is less damp than the others as a result of her efforts. A spare that Josh brought along, it says: JOIN THE ARMY, TRAVEL TO EXOTIC PLACES, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE, AND KILL THEM. Estela tugs up the front of the collar and sniffs it, scrunches up her nose.
“Bad?” Karalee asks.
Sheepish grin. “A lot better than some things around here.”
“You noticed that, huh?” Karalee whispers. “And we’re eating with her.”
“I think the ludes suppress the gag reflex.”
“Funny.”
“I mean it.”
The moon has shifted along its arc, casting less light through the cafeteria windows. Karalee can’t bear the intense effort required to look into anyone’s face. She lets her eyes lose focus, her jaw go slack.
Chick leans in. “You hear that?”
There’s a voice filtering through the kitchen door. “It’s just the homeless woman,” Gerard says.
“Talking to who?” Josh asks.
Karalee strains to listen. She hears only one voice. The woman must be conversing with herself.
The others have drawn the same conclusion. Their speculation retreats back into silence.
“She’s nuts,” Chick says after a while. “Batty as a bedbug.”
“Don’t say bedbug!” Josh says. “We still have to sleep tonight.”
“Of course she’s insane,” Estela says. “Who else lives like this but a crazy person?”
“She may be crazy,” Gerard says, “but smell that dinner. Even crazy people can have skills. Think Vincent van Gogh. I’m betting the woman in that kitchen can cook.”
Gerard puts a can of Budweiser on the table. “Last one.” He holds out a fist and opens it to reveal more pills. “And last ones.”
They each take their share without further consideration.
Karalee has begun to see colors without clarity in the darkness, some even resembling human forms. Her imagination must be in hyperdrive.
The woman strides in. “There will be rabbit stew if it suits you.”
“Rabbit stew? Where do you get your meat?” Josh asks.
She lifts an eyebrow. Can Karalee see that in the dark? She thinks she does, even as she thinks not.
“From the forest. Where else?” Once again, the woman appears to study them. Her look, Karalee suspects, is one of mistrust. “We’ll need to scare up some utensils and such. If you’ll follow me, a couple of you.”
They come to their senses long enough to exchange glances, deciding without a word that they all should go, leave no Sewer Rat behind.
The woman leads them through a door and to the top of a stairwell. “It’s the basement,” Chick says. “How will we see?”
“I’m used to it,” the woman admits. “One grows accustomed.…” But when she sees them hesitate further, she concedes. “I do keep some candles for emergencies.” She produces a stocky yellowish one from a pocket of her skirt. Finds a box of wooden matches. Lights the wick. “Shall we?”
“You first,” Josh mutters.
The woman presses the lit candle upon him. “You take this, then. You all need it more than I.”
Without further pause, she disappears into the gloom. When she’s almost completely out of their sight, she does stop and peers over her broad shoulder. “If you want to eat in any civilized fashion, you’ll have to come. I’m the cook, not the maid.”
“I like her spunk,” Chick whispers drunkenly. They all choke back a laugh, and he takes the candle from Josh and follows first, with the others close behind.
The basement, from what little Karalee can see in the deep shadows and through her own fog, is a mass of cast-iron pipes and steel beams. It smells of mustiness, and mold grows on the walls, but the space is relatively uncluttered. The woman leads them around several sets of pillars, Karalee thinking of their explorations earlier this afternoon and how much ground they covered. This woman must have every inch mapped in her head.
Still leading them, she comes up short at a storage room deep in the bowels. Chick holds up the candle. Organized chaos lies within, heavily battered objects stacked and sorted on warped wooden shelves. “It looks like a junk shop,” Gerard whispers.
The woman mumbles to herself. “Aha. There. I knew I remembered.” She points. “See the boxes of plates and forks?”
When Gerard and Josh step forward to gather what the woman needs, Karalee feels her ears pop, as if the air pressure has dramatically shifted. The woman looks at her, cocking her head, working her jaw side to side with her mouth open. She must feel it, too. But what changed exactly? Nothing Karalee can pinpoint.
Her ears begin to ring. She perceives the objects in the shadows as if through a veil of thin gauze. There are life preservers, coffee urns, ladders, instrument dials, brass musical instruments, metal serving platters—all even grayer than they ought to appear in the poor light. There is a wrought-iron music stand, misshapen, Dalí-like, as if frozen in mid-melt. A bent tin sign that says GENTLEM—the last two letters obscured by soot.
She’s about to ask where all of it comes from when the woman turns on her bare heels and walks out. Gerard and Josh carry plates and eating utensils in two open wooden boxes. The others follow empty-handed. Karalee stands alone for a moment, her ears still ringing but in psychedelic waves of sound that she attributes to the drugs, yet almost as if there were something hidden behind the noise that she should be able to decipher. It sounds like the murmuring clamor of voices, like what they heard from the woman in the kitchen, but a hundred times over.
The candle left the room. Karalee blinks in complete darkness. She sees people standing there, dressed as for a turn-of-the-century Sunday outing, full color, in contrast to the sooted grays and blacks of the items on the shelves. But she can’t make out their features or describe their clothing to herself in detail, only has a vague sense of it. They are shapes without form, colors without lines of demarcation. They dance before her in the clamor. Or do they not dance, but writhe? Her breath clutches and a feeling of panic runs through her that nearly collapses her knees and threatens to knock her onto her back. Just then, she feels a tug on her arm from behind … someone attempting to drag her.
“What the hell are you doing, Kiki?” It’s Chick. “We almost left you.”
* * *
THE SAVORY AROMA of rabbit stew fills every inch of the large kitchen, and Karalee’s stomach tightens with anticipation. The meal that the woman’s putting together looks hearty. In addition to the stew, she has managed to bake a loaf of bread, presumably from the flour in the big pantry. Karalee wonders how long this woman could feed herself from the bounty that others left behind.
Working as a team, they create place settings at the table, the candle burning in the center. It casts a modest circle of light in the vast cafeteria, scarcely extending past the backs of their chairs. They sit down, whispering stoned and semi-coherent among themselves, and wait for the cook to produce.
“So,” Chick says, “how are we gonna get out of here tomorrow? Any ideas? You think the woman can help us?”
“You kidding?” Josh adjusts himself in his chair. “A homeless woman is going to help us get off this island? If she knew how to get off, would she be here?”
Karalee fights to focus her mind, wondering how the woman arrived in the first place. Shipwrecked? A former worker in the rehab facility who never left? At any rate, she made mention of having seen other people pass through here. She might have opted to depart with them. “Maybe she chooses to stay,” Karalee theorizes, half to herself.
“Fine,” Gerard argues. “But if she chooses to stay, she can’t be putting much thought into how to get off. Which means she’s unlikely to have an idea that can help us, which puts us on our own again.”
Chick leans back in his rickety chair, eyes half-closed. “Can we pause for a second to consider how surreal this all is? We’re about to be served a candlelight dinner by a hermit woman who lives in an abandoned hospital.”
“Yeah,” says Josh. “The way our luck’s going, she probably learned to cook in the hospital cafeteria.”
They follow that thought where it’s bound to go.
“Stop and slop?”
“Mystery meat?”
“C-section rations?”
“Shit on a shingle?”
Chick shakes his head slowly, rubs his jaw. “You think there really will be rabbits in this stew? Or is that just her imagination?”
“She keeps a helluva garden,” Gerard says, “must know something. And, man, the smell of that food!”
“Anything smells good next to her,” whispers Estela.
Chick leans forward with a finger over his lips. “Shh! Don’t jinx it. We play our cards right, we’ll have a story to tell.”
“If we ever get home to tell it,” Josh says.
“Stop being a killjoy,” blurts Karalee, still shivering from her encounter in the basement. As much to convince herself as anyone else, she quickly adds: “We’ll send up a signal in the morning and everything will be fine. We’re surrounded by civilization here.”
“So’s Alcatraz,” Josh mutters.
The woman bumps through the swinging door with her pot in two bare hands. She places it on the table with a look of satisfaction and immediately begins to spoon stew onto everyone’s plate.
Gerard, following his success with the Yodels, doesn’t hesitate to take a bite. “Hey, this is good. Excellent, in fact. Thank you very much!” He sops up some gravy with a piece of bread.
“The pleasure is mine,” the woman says without smiling. “It’s not every day I have visitors.”
“How long have you been here?” Estela asks.
The woman sighs. “Long as I can remember, it sometimes seems.”
“Well, you want to be here, right? Otherwise, we can help you get off the island.”
“Don’t be silly.” She presses her hands into her thighs as if to stand, but instead takes up her fork and begins to eat.
With the heat of the stew combining with the drugs, Karalee feels as if her head balances on a string. As it wobbles, her gaze desperately seeks a point of concentration. It settles on the woman’s fork, which appears to be different from all the others. She lifts her own above the plate and examines it more closely, holds the handle to the candlelight and sees a large S engraved near the top. Next to her, it looks as if Chick’s fork has the same S. She assumes all of those from the trove downstairs have it.
“If I may.” Gerard attempts to scoop more stew from the pot. There isn’t much left.
The woman works her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “I didn’t expect anyone,” she says, “and two wild rabbits look pretty scrawny next to your young appetites.”
Karalee spots a glint in her eye, maybe a reflection of the candle flame, maybe an illusion—the drugs firing off in her own brain.
“No sweat,” Gerard says. “We’re grateful for your hospitality.” Except that his tongue gets tangled on the last word and he almost bites it off. He looks into his plate, puzzled.
“I can make it up to you with dessert,” the woman says. “There’s cans and cans of provisions.”
Karalee knows it’s true, having participated in the raiding of the pantry. At the mention of dessert, she thinks also of the ice cream she’s brought. It might still be cold, as no one ever popped the top on the cooler. She mentions it, and the woman nods slowly in acceptance.
Gerard and Chick embrace the idea of finally getting at that ice cream. They light a second candle and run upstairs to fetch the cooler. When they return, Karalee throws open the lid. The first thing she sees is the big barbecue fork resting atop several packages of Hebrew National hot dogs. She flushes with shame. They might have contributed these to dinner if she hadn’t been such a hoarder. She mutters something about a cookout as she grabs the fork and packages and sets them aside.
Whether anyone notices, she can’t say. Her head swims as she straightens up, and she has to place a hand on the table to keep herself from falling. When she recovers, she sees that the ice cream, which was tightly packed and surrounded by ice, appears mostly still frozen. The woman hunches over it with her hand resting atop one of the containers, a look of astonishment across her face. She holds that pose for so long that Karalee wonders sleepily whether she’s having a stroke. “Are you okay?” she asks.
The woman recovers herself. “Ice cream. I can scarcely believe it. There’s nothing at all frozen to eat around here, except what I put out on the coldest winter nights—and who wants ice then?” She looks off and cocks her head, as if listening for a train whistle from far away.
“So much there … we can each take a container,” Gerard says, reaching down.
“Oh, no!” The woman swats his hand away. “We’ll do something special with this. We will! Leave it to the cook.”