Dawn broke soft and clean on that island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of their passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand. Morning glories opened on the dunes. A fisherman tossed out his line. A wet anhinga sat on the beach, drying out its wings. In the mangrove swamps, an alligator surfaced, a lizard jumped for a branch and missed, and a lamb woke up crying for his mother.
The blind man could not see his room fill with light, but the rising heat released the odors of the island, even the ones that existed only in his mind. The smell of the woman who haunted him came through the bars of his windows. The bullet had damaged one of his tear ducts, so that it leaked at inopportune moments, and evidently it had cried in his sleep, cried over an unremarkable dream, and now his face was sticky to the touch.
Morning arrived as it always did for the old woman who refused to be a widow. She turned on the bed and kissed her husband on the cheek, then smoothed back his white hair. He mumbled something. A few more kisses would bring him to life. Her imagination was so perfect that the form his body made under the sheet was a faithful replication, and she kept the rose from the top of his coffin and threw the rest of his funeral away.
Dr. Cowell awoke next to Mary. He did not want to get up. Doctor, father, husband, dreamer. He had failed at everything. For the first time in many years, he was not sure how to begin the day. Where he belonged in it. He was heartbroken and destroyed. His boy wasn’t talking to him and neither was his wife.
Iris had slept fitfully, a rhythm that recalled the haystack and meadow sleep of her nights as a fugitive, when something as simple as a drop of dew forming on the face or a star going out in the back of the universe could trigger a sudden waking. By the time the light came in she’d been up for hours, pacing her room. What if something terrible happened? What if they were caught, or lost at sea?
She chose the same dress she’d worn when she arrived on the island. She had washed it in her basin several times, so that it had lost the scent of doomed cattle. She would worry about other clothes later. The bag of sugar would fetch money for food and shelter. She would have time for vanity when other needs were filled.
Ambrose was running out of blue. Blue tears, blue windmill in a Dutch painting, blue teacup, old blue horse in an open field. He grabbed the bars and soaked in the blue sky, all of it, drinking in the blue like his last drink, he gulped and gulped and gulped. He did not know if he would make it, but he knew his victory or failure started from within, and he could not think of Seth anymore, could not think of what he’d done to his friend; he had to go forward, forget, forget, the sky hurt his eyes, he shut them tight, face pressed to the bars, I love you I love you I love you.
The doctor’s last patient came in at midafternoon. The man had terrible fears that his penis would fall off in his sleep; that all his math schooling had been off by one digit and everything was subsequently wrong, including the time of day; that he had accidentally buried his mother when she was not quite dead; that the staff urinated in his cucumber soup. He was afraid of certain sounds. He was afraid of wading in the ocean, sure that the seaweed would come alive. He was afraid that all the spiders he had killed in his life had joined forces and were waiting for him behind a tree. He knew these fears were delusional, and yet the feeling was so real and so insistent. His feelings were stronger than his thoughts. That was the problem . . . The man looked over at something on the doctor’s desk and gasped. “Where did you get that?” He pointed at a spiral shell with brown checkered marks.
“I found it on the beach. It’s odd, isn’t it?”
“Don’t you know what that is? That’s a junonia! A rarity! I’ve only seen one in my life!” The man’s eyes filled with light, and all the insanity went away for an instant, leaving him with the face of a boy.
“It’s special?” the doctor asked.
“Indeed!”
After the man had left, Dr. Cowell studied the prize. Now he had a gift for his son that no one else could offer him. He took out his handkerchief, breathed on the shell, polished it, and held it to the light.