PEERING AT THE upper story of the building on North Brother, Karalee perceives a flash, like the brief reflection of sunlight reflecting off a twitching mirror. She lifts her Nikon, wondering what could have thrown such a light from this island said to be abandoned. The zoom lens helps only a bit—still too great a distance. There are birds around that she can see with the naked eye. Perhaps one of them did something that briefly changed the light. Perhaps a Mylar balloon was caught in the trees, but she doesn’t spot any, and wouldn’t the thermals have carried it high enough to cross the river?
She decides it must come from a casement window in motion, likely swinging in the breeze. But none of the casements looks loose from what little she can see. Maybe a gust caught the window and slammed it shut in just such a way.
Or perhaps she saw nothing at all. None of the others seems to have noticed, their attention still fixated on a plan for scoping out the Bronx fire. “They probably have fireboats out there,” Chick says, looking over his shoulder at the others studying the map. “If so, they won’t allow us to get very close.”
But Karalee can’t take her eyes off the island. Anyone who knows the history—admittedly very few these days—knows that North Brother once housed a notorious prisoner but most recently hosted an ill-conceived rehab facility for young drug addicts, as if the idea of shipping such addicts to an isolated island didn’t defy every public health lesson America should have learned a hundred years ago.
The island’s notorious prisoner died in 1938. Thirty years later, when the rehab facility closed, the authorities finally gave up on the hospital. The island, only twenty acres and serviced by no bridge or ferry, was deemed a vestige of another age, trapped in the rushing channel known as Hell Gate. It was best left to the birds and critters, and so the authorities left it. Since the last city employee boarded the last boat out, not a soul has rested his head there overnight. Karalee read that fact not long ago in a Life magazine article. And some of the buildings have been disused for even longer than the intervening fourteen years.
She wonders what’s to be gleaned today beyond those trees, having peered many times into grainy black-and-white pictures of the place, one in particular drifting back to her now: an isolation ward lined with beds—patients cocking their heads toward the camera as if to project themselves and their misery onto the photographer’s attention. Karalee turns her own head in that manner, and her eyes lose focus past the edge of the boat. The scar on her left ear itches, and she becomes light-headed. She feels not at all herself and wonders whether it’s seasickness. But there are no waves—and, besides, she’s never been ill a day in her life.
Sweat beads on her brow. Of course it does, she thinks, because the air is hot and humid. But she knows there’s much more here to disturb her. There is that worshipped ancestor, his relationship to this island, and the source of tension between Karalee and her father.
She recalls—as if she could forget for a second!—that when her father threw the camera at her, they were arguing over her career plans. Oh, her father—so sure about everything. “That Soper certainty,” her mother calls it. And it might serve some people, Karalee is the first to admit. Her grandfather, after all, had leveraged that stubbornness into a career as a successful defense attorney. Yet for that man’s son—her father—certainty always leads to financial disaster. And don’t they have a garage full of Soper Soap to prove it? SOPER SOAP CLEANS CLEANEST! Will she ever escape that misbegotten slogan? Clean, it did—nearly cleaned them out of house and home. From which event Karalee’s father concluded that his only child must make a safer choice than a career in the arts, which left unsaid something Karalee knew for certain: his conviction that women ought only to make safe choices. And as usual, her mother agreed.
More than a year ago, with her camera in pieces, Karalee acceded to her parents’ wishes and used her biology major to obtain admittance to the Graduate School of Public Health at Havermeyer. She was following in the footsteps of famed public health advocate George A. Soper, the great-grandfather she never knew but ever heard about, the man who first came to North Brother—here in front of her—in order to deposit his quarry: the wayward cook, Mary Mallon.
The island lies within easy reach of the Flagellum now, no more than a quarter mile away. A flock of birds rises above the tree line and settles back down among the branches, calling to one another. Maybe it was in fact a seagull she spotted moments ago—a flash of white wing, not a man-made reflection.
In any case, she aches with sudden curiosity.
She knows the island is largely a ruin. Might she bring back some pictures to show her father, let him see for himself that he clings to a relic? And if at the same time she could make the photos beautiful, he might yet come to appreciate her unique talents.
“That’s North Brother,” she hears herself saying to her friends. When no one responds, she leans over Gerard’s broad shoulders and plants the tip of an index finger on the map. Louder she says, “North Brother, where they isolated Typhoid Mary. Wouldn’t it be interesting to go there instead of chasing some stupid fire? It’s right in front of us. There.” She straightens up and points across the water.
“Typhoid Mary,” Gerard says. “I forget sometimes she operated in this area. I always think of her as a person from another part of the world.”
“She was Irish originally. But an immigrant to America. She spent more than a third of her life on that island. My great-grandfather, George, tracked her down and put her away.”
“Tracked her like a dog,” Chick says, almost with glee.
“She died there,” says Karalee. “Unattached. Childless.”
Estela rakes her gaze over the trees and what little she can see of the buildings. “Is she buried there?”
Karalee firms her chin. “She’s interred at Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. They say only a couple of people attended the funeral.”
“Afraid to catch something?” Josh asks.
“No. Just her only friends, I guess. One other patient … the priest … a couple of nurses who worked there.”
Estela nods, the left corner of her mouth curling up. “Yes, more interesting than some crazy fire,” she agrees.
Karalee is happy to have an ally. Her friend, who began on hands and knees over the map, now struggles to her feet. The dead right arm, a birth defect, has an accompanying right leg in the same condition. As a result, both limbs hang awkwardly and get dragged along by the larger working muscles, manifesting as a twitch when she is in motion. Gerard offers a hand and she takes it. “We’re students in public health, after all,” says Estela, sucking a breath. “And her case is iconic.”
Gerard turns to Chick. “Interesting. Can we land there, Captain?”
Chick studies the landscape, assessing. “The dock is shot.” Nothing remains but rotting remnants of wooden pylons, extending like an archipelago into the river. “We could try directly for shore.”
“But the place is off-limits to the public,” Josh protests. “Could be it’s a biological hazard.”
“Nonsense, man.” Chick is a broad-shouldered bear with furry arms and knuckles and kinky shoulder-length hair gathered into a ponytail. He throttles down the motor, but keeps one hand on the wheel, the bow still knifing into the current. He twists around, his eyes meeting Karalee’s, and turns to Josh. “Who do you suppose enforces that public restriction?”
Josh picks up the map and folds it sloppily. He snaps and waves it. “How would I know? The United States Coast Guard? The NYPD? Whoever does, it’s clearly off-limits. Even marked on the map that way. It’s a bird sanctuary.”
Karalee wonders whether she’s leading them into an argument. They’ve had a great summer together, light class loads, plenty of room for fun. Why ruin it to prove something to her dad? But before she can offer to withdraw her suggestion, Gerard smirks at Josh and says, “The enforcers of the rules are all at the fire, Mr. Adventure.” He stoops to retrieve his paperback book from the floor, fumbles and drops it, picks it up again.
“Gary Gilmore.” Josh flicks a finger at Gerard’s book. “That’s what happens to people who don’t follow rules in America.”
“What? Shot through the heart for trespassing?” Chick laughs.
“Dude, Gary Gilmore murdered people,” Gerard says. “They didn’t get him for a misdemeanor.”
“Maybe he was the last man killed by firing squad, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be the last person to be killed by the system,” Josh says.
“Are you serious? Grow a pair,” Chick suggests, brushing his ponytail off his shoulder.
He’s always been more of a risk taker than Josh, who in Chick’s position wouldn’t sleep with a student if she were the last woman on earth. “The worst that happens … they escort us off the island with a warning. Besides, they’ve got their hands full today. Out there.” He points with two fingers. “That fire’s just as bad as it was an hour ago.”
“We don’t know that. It’s all smoke.”
“Stop being such a pussy, Josh.” This from Estela. “You didn’t have cancer in med school and you won’t get shot for trespassing on an island that belongs to the City of New York.”
She’s referring to the hypochondria that caused him to abandon medical school. Most first-year medical students begin to think they have half the ailments they’re studying, but then the feeling passes and they return to their senses. Not Josh, who spent two miserable years convinced of his imminent demise before dropping out.
He swallows hard. “It was real. A lipoma. They couldn’t be sure it was benign until they took it out.”
“Took it out?” Estela will never allow Josh to save face. Probably, Karalee surmises, because she’s secretly in love with him. “They aspirated the tumor, Josh, didn’t even have to cut you open. Everyone has those fatty tumors. Want me to show you mine?”
Josh clams up and blushes. He’d probably love for her to show him what she’s hiding under that skimpy bathing suit, but not in front of others.
Gerard says, “You’re not talking about those mosquito bites on your chest, are you, Estela?”
She smiles, easy to tease, in her forwardness even joking about her arm and leg on occasion. She passes up further engagement with Gerard and pats Josh on the wrist. “Can’t you see that Karalee really wants to go?”
Karalee thinks of her father and the anger it takes to throw a heavy object at your daughter’s head, let alone using as ammunition the very thing he knew to be her favorite and most valued possession. At once she sees him in her mind’s eye, standing in their Pelham kitchen, his spectacles askew, his red face resisting self-examination or contrition. When she was a girl, he hit her mother in that kitchen at least twice that she can recall, maybe three times, maybe others. She hasn’t thought of that for a long time—has put it out of her mind since high school. When she did think of those moments, they were challenges to be struggled through, not analyzed, so she never attempted to understand the specifics of her parents’ disagreements. Just a feature of childhood, albeit a terrifying feature that erupted on an irregular basis as if from nowhere and then subsided as quickly as it arrived.
Now, suddenly, looking down at the cooler full of beer, it occurs to her that her father must have been drunk each time he hit her mother. He took a few pops of booze each day without much effect, but once in a while he tipped past the point of no return. In such circumstances, his stubborn streak transformed into a violent one, especially if he perceived that his wife intended to defy his wishes. Karalee, if she’d been older, might have more thoroughly documented the damage.
She picks up her camera again—the new camera. It is better technically than the Canon ever was, but no more loved in her mind. She lifts it to her eye and uses the backs of her friends’ heads to frame the peak of the dilapidated hospital building that pokes up from the treetops on the island. There is no way to achieve clarity on the entire field of vision, so she lets their heads go blurry and draws sharp focus on the gable of the tall brick Victorian building in the distance, where she thinks she saw the flash.
It requires little effort for her to imagine that the peak points the way forward. Like an arrow.
* * *
TAKING UP HIS friends’ challenge and that of the river, Chick steers the Flagellum hard to port, circling the island clockwise, his intense beetle-brown eyes studying the water’s surface for flotsam. A summer spent largely outdoors has bleached his thick long hair with mahogany streaks. He didn’t shave this morning, and velvety stubble already casts a shadow across his round weathered face. Karalee, who harbors something close to an obsession with cleanliness, wishes he wouldn’t ever go without shaving. She also wishes he would cut his hair, but he won’t be swayed.
They’re close enough to see real detail on the island for the first time, at first just the wooded shore, but then it opens up. On the west side, a brick industrial building hulks near the splintered remains of the old dock. Two giant chimneys, higher than the tallest trees, still stand so tall and proud that Karalee finds it hard to imagine they no longer have a role to play in this world.
After some consultation, Chick decides to steer hard for that building, thinking the current will force them past it and deposit them on the small beach just south of there. But as the Flagellum’s bow closes in, the current carries them nowhere near, pushing them sideways back out to the middle of the waterway.
“Wicked resistance in this section of the river,” Chick says half to himself. “That’s why they call it Hell Gate just south of here. It’s one thing in open water, quite another when you’re trying to land a small craft.”
“Maybe quit while we’re behind?” Josh suggests.
“Nah. I’m learning. I think I’ll give it another go.”
Chick swings the boat around again and throttles up. Wind generated by their motion courses through everyone’s hair, and Gerard’s San Diego Padres baseball cap goes careening overboard, end over end. He moves to grab for it, but it settles with a small splash into the river. “Hold it!” he shouts over the roar of the engine.
The cap floats upside down. Chick reduces the throttle and takes a starboard turn with Gerard leaning out, Josh bracing his other arm. Gerard’s fingertips graze along the water and catch the bill of the cap, but his touch seals the cap’s fate. It spins once and goes under, disappearing.
“Capsized!” Gerard says, playing good sport. “Oh, well.”
They share a laugh over it; then Chick turns his attention back to the landing, his jaw set, more determined than ever. He’s a bull when he gets a goal within sight, and Karalee has seen him achieve the seemingly impossible through sheer pigheadedness—academically, professionally, and elsewhere. He got her into the sack on the third try, even though it felt all wrong to her at the time, round-shouldered Chick physically built the exact opposite of what usually attracts her. Now, at the end of summer, he’s more familiar to her but probably no more appropriate as a boyfriend, violating Havermeyer’s ethics code. Given the air of irrepressibility he cultivates, she knows he hates to lose this assault on the island with everyone watching, feels his manhood at stake. Without another word, he swings the boat in a wide arc with the throttle open as far as he’ll dare, the hull up out of the water riding one edge, all those aboard tipping themselves against the force of it.
When he flattens out and guns for the big building, planning to run it dead on at the risk of catching a hidden pylon, Karalee’s gut clutches. He’ll kill us, they all sense for a brief second. But he doesn’t hit anything, although again the river refuses to cooperate. The current pushes the little boat sideways and tosses them out again into the middle.
She sees Chick’s tanned and furry arms trembling, no doubt fatigued from wrestling the wheel. He lets out a cry. “Hoo-ah!” Intones in mock voice-over: “It’s like fighting the invisible force fields of a Star Trek episode.” He’s scared, trying to make light, Karalee thinks—or is he overselling the challenge just to build himself up?
Feeling the strength of the water, Karalee imagines the sheer underwater cliffs that camber to the bottom of Hell Gate. For sure, the currents here don’t quite derive from nature. The engineers made a trade-off when they dynamited these channels. In any case, the island opposes an approach from this side, at least by a boat like this one, with so little ballast.
“Isn’t this fun,” Estela says, exhilarated. “Like the log flume, only more real. My mother never let me go to amusement parks.”
“My mother made me go,” Josh says. “I hated it.”
Karalee fights a frown, knowing she must look disappointed. Gerard, staring right at her, says, “Let’s try to land this thing one more time, Chick.”
But Chick tells them he won’t dare. With the slightest unexpected shift in direction by the current, any approach more oblique than the one he just took might crash them into the remains of the dock. Karalee thinks of Gerard’s cap, upside down in the water, carried out of sight. Estela, in particular, for all her bravado, won’t fare well if they have an accident of that kind. And even the strongest among them, pitched overboard, might easily get swept away by the force of the river.
They have no life vests, and the water has a will of its own. It doesn’t want them to land here.
Karalee sidles up to Chick and puts an arm around his waist. “It was just a thought. I can live without this.”
“But you had your heart set, Kiki. I can see it in your eyes. There must be a way onto this damn island.”
“You’re going to need a bigger boat,” Gerard says, laughing at his own jokey reference. They rented Jaws just the other night, flopped on couches and beanbag chairs, smoking grass and barking out the best lines before the actors got to them.
“The hell I will,” Chick says, shrugging Karalee off. “We’ll just go around to the other side.”
“But the cops,” Josh says. “That’s the side facing all the action.”
Chick ignores him, just steers. He looks long and hard at Karalee, his eyes saying, This is what my woman wants, and I’m a man who delivers.
In spite of herself, she makes no effort to redirect him. There are so many things drawing her to this island that she can’t catalog them all in her own mind. She wants to see the former isolation wards in living color, three dimensional. She wants to step into a bit of the history she’s studying and document what’s left with her own camera. She wants to resist the father trying to impose his will upon her and to connect with the great-grandfather she never met, the famous George A. Soper.
They have almost completely circled the island. As their course along the northernmost bulge carries them again within sight of the conflagration near Hunts Point and closer to it, they snap their heads around and look eastward. Near the confluence of the Bronx River, dozens of boats cluster like herd animals. Thick smoke still rises from the fire, but it’s hard to grasp what the rescue boats and working craft can achieve. They look like children’s toys under a cataclysmic shadow.
* * *
ON THE EAST side of North Brother, an old seawall defends the shore from the unyielding river, which has already won part of this struggle, breaching the concrete in a number of places.
Karalee zooms in with her camera and snaps a quick picture, but doubts she captured anything interesting. She observes as Chick considers the seawall, its presence indicating that the prevailing current comes from this direction. Rather than drive them off, as it did on the other side, the river here encourages them toward the island. Rising to the invitation, Chick guides the boat closer, searching for an opening in the structure that doesn’t look too dangerous. But the current pushes with such force in this direction that it scares him. He turns the wheel sharply to starboard, throttles up, and pulls away. Not that he’s giving up. In a moment, he swings the boat in a wide arc and makes once again for shore.
The boat comes around, and Chick finally succeeds in finding the right approach. The river has seized his stern and they’re on a straight line for a significant break in the seawall. Eyes fixed on that goal, he throttles down and turns the wheel hard to starboard again.
This time the current shoves them in a perfect line, one that will carry them between two shattered blocks of concrete with rusty rebar sticking out like wild hairs.
At once they are twenty yards from shore, but Karalee senses a sudden loss of control, their approach feeling too fast to land them safely. She must be right because Chick quickly reverses throttle to fight it, and when that has too little effect, he reverses harder, the engine roaring. Large stones and smaller rocks and broken concrete lie about the riverbed in front of them, along with assorted flotsam: splintered wood and disintegrating plastic and treadless car tires.
Many of the obstacles are sharp, and clearly Chick has little command of the Flagellum. He might easily dash her upon the broken seawall, and then they’d all be in real trouble. But he has passed the point of no return, nothing to do but work the throttle and steer like his life depended upon it, riding out the current into the shore.
When at last Chick eases up, the river fully takes over the boat like wind seizing a kite. There’s a terrific scraping sound as they surge into the rocky shore, lurching to a sudden stop, everyone thrown forward. Gerard goes down hard. Josh and Estela, grabbing at one another for support, end up in a tangle of limbs. Even Chick, with a hold of the wheel, nearly takes out a tooth.
But Karalee perceives all that as if in a dream. Feeling the surge under her, she attempts to sit back on a large cooler stuffed with pints of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream and hot dogs intended for a wiener roast. The cooler lid, made slick from a coating of condensation, offers little purchase, and when she compensates for the inertia that throws everyone forward, she ends up pitching over backwards, clocking herself in the head.
Her eyes roll back. The sound of the engine and the voices and the pain in the rear of her skull all fade out at once, leaving only the sensation of a sideways drift. Then she plunges into blackness, like a rock falling down a well.
* * *
SHE JERKS AWAKE, claws of harsh vapor shooting up her nostrils and making her eyes water. By reflex, she slaps Chick’s hand away from her face, sending a small canister flying.
Then she identifies the sharp odor. Smelling salts. Ammonium carbonate.
“Well, that’s gone forever,” Chick says, looking overboard. “I suppose we got our use from it.”
The other Sewer Rats surround her on the suddenly still boat, but all she can focus on is Chick’s jowly countenance. Then her eyes roll back again and she sees her bespectacled father. He stares at her through bars of some kind, his face twisted in irate satisfaction. It’s a familiar sight, as she has been seeing it in dreams of late—nightmares where she shrieks for dear life until swimming up to consciousness with Chick shaking her awake. She fears her father in these dreams, but can’t get a handle on why. Over her shoulder across the room, her trembling mother, unkempt thicket of coffee-colored hair, frowzy in a tattered housedress, kneads her own hands and weeps, making no effort to step forward and intervene.
In the dream, as in life, it is her father who rules the situation. Karalee puts three tiny fingers through a gap between bars and he touches them gently, with the suggestion of genuine affection.
“Oh, Kiki,” he says, his expression transforming from anger to pain. “If only you would cooperate.”
But she doesn’t know how. He lets go her tiny fingers and growls like a predator and reaches to the air around her, and the earth rattles with violence, a quake that shakes every cell in her body down to the viscera. He is himself a force of nature. Her mother whimpers as Karalee screams for it to stop.
And she awakens completely, smell of ammonia lingering in her nostrils. The diffuse brightness of summer sky hurts her tearing eyes.
She sits up and shoves Chick away. Gerard and Josh and Estela hover over her, and she clambers to her feet and pushes through them, reaches a hand for the back of the cushioned pilot’s seat to steady her dizziness.
For another long moment, she can’t place herself, though she knows her friends well enough. She sees the first aid kit lying open on the dashboard shelf, materials strewn about, a sign that someone dug through it with urgency. Their possessions lie in a heap behind the pilot’s chair, the two coolers they brought—hers with the food and the other with the beer—thrown together but intact.
Now that the crisis has passed, it’s time for tongues to sharpen. “Nice soft touchdown, Skipper,” Estela gibes.
“On the bright side, you cleared my sinuses for a week,” Gerard says.
Josh studies the deck. “You think she’s all right?” He means the boat.
“The Fledge? She’s fine,” Chick says. “The Boston Whaler is a warhorse.” He grabs the anchor and throws it overboard onto the edge of the bank before tying the line to a cleat.
“What’s that for?” Gerard asks.
“In case a tsunami comes,” Chick says irritably. “The next Krakatoa. Did that affect your people back in the Orient?”
Gerard makes a face like, What the fuck?
Karalee, who feels most responsible for Chick’s behavior on account of their relationship, tells Gerard to forget about it. Just Chick being Chick. And, after all, he did get them to the island in one piece.
The boat rests aground in two feet of water. Chick appears to notice for the first time that the engine is still idling away. He reaches around Karalee to turn the key, and in the ensuing quiet asks, “You really all right?”
“Never better.” She touches the bruise at the back of her skull and examines her fingertips, but sees no blood. The head doesn’t hurt much, but she still feels foggy, remembers the dream, almost expects to find her father among them, standing on deck. Then comes a horrifying realization: “My camera!”
They find it under a wayward seat cushion. Fortunately, she’d stowed it back in its case minutes before Chick gunned it for shore. She feels the padded case for signs of damage, then opens it and caresses the camera body. Next she lifts the viewfinder to her eye and selects the nearest tree trunk, bringing it into focus. The woods have a misty quality. For a moment, she thinks she espies people standing there and twists the lens to focus beyond the tree, but then she sees nothing but murkiness. She pulls the camera down and peers between tree trunks, biting her lip. There’s nothing there. And no picture worth taking.
Gerard gazes back at where they came from. “We lucked out,” he says. “This spot doesn’t only shelter us behind the seawall. Also, from out there, no one can see that we beached on the island.”
Chick pulls the key from the ignition. He explains that they’ll all have to pitch in eventually to turn the boat around in these close quarters. Karalee, coming more fully to her senses, supposes that Estela would take the wheel in that case, can hardly be expected to apply brute force to anything, not that she’d ever admit as much. But no point in raising the issue at this moment. They can just as easily turn the boat later as now, so they decide to wait, recover from the shake-up.
After a few deep breaths, Karalee does feel her strength surging back. She doesn’t know for sure how the others feel, but the adrenaline rush of their crash landing seems to have forced sobriety upon them, their enthusiasm for adventure flagging. Yet no one wants to engage the river again just now, either. Josh pops open a can of Budweiser and takes a sip with a trembling hand.
Inspired, Chick and Gerard dig through the cooler and produce their own.
“Tastes great!” Chick says.
“Less filling!” everyone echoes, even though they have the brand wrong.
Gerard offers both women a beer, but they shake their heads.
Karalee is first to leave the boat, helped down by Chick and Josh. Then Gerard goes over the side. Next Josh. They all help Estela off, and Chick follows after raising the propeller out of the water with a motorized switch. Grainy mud drips off the blades, which have a few scrapes but appear to remain functional.
Ankle-deep in the river, Karalee finds the water colder than expected but not unpleasant. Between two scrubby bushes, a large spiderweb glistens in rays of sunshine. She takes a picture of the spider—long front legs poised in a stretch, plump abdomen. It’s a big one. It might be the most well-fed spider in all of New York.
The shore is rocky and unwelcoming here, forest growing right down to the banks. Karalee follows Gerard onto solid ground, scrambling over a monkey puzzle of fallen limbs and branches and tree roots, penetrating the edge of a surprisingly thick forest.
It takes more than a minute for Karalee’s eyes to adjust to the deep shade of the forest. And even once they do, she finds it difficult to see contrasts. Gloom sits thick among closely spaced tree trunks, as if some great force snuffed out the light of day.