CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 15JULIA’S HEAD IS A DEADWEIGHT, and there’s a throbbing pain that shoots down her spine. She’s lying on her side, and her body shudders, her stomach heaves, but she’s able to lean forward just enough so that when the vomit rises, it lands on the soft earth by her head.
The rain has lightened. The wind has died down. Birds call out to each other. She’s alive.
She forces her eyes to open, the light sending another shock wave of searing pain, and it takes a few moments for her blurry vision to become clear.
The girl sits cross-legged in front of her, idly twisting a small branch in the dirt. Mud caked in her hair, on her hands, her arms, her legs. A fly lands on her forehead but she doesn’t brush it away. Her face is narrow, elfin, and it’s hard to tell how old she is. Julia guesses around ten. Maybe twelve. She’s a dead ringer for how Julia had pictured Agnes, Irene’s assistant. The congregation, closed off as it is from the rest of the world, must be running dangerously close to some of the effects of a limited gene pool.
Julia manages to sit up. The girl doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe just doesn’t give a damn.
At least it’s still light out. Unless . . . could it be the next day? Julia pulls her backpack off, inspects it. Muddy as hell, and when Julia unzips it, mucky water pours out.
Oh shit.
Julia pulls out what’s inside, takes an inventory. The paper map is so soggy it tears in half, the ink blurred beyond recognition. Knife just needs cleaning, one specimen jar is broken, which she unfortunately discovers when a shard of glass cuts her palm. The GPS phone is still functional—she remembers Bailey telling her it’d been engineered to survive anything, even a sixty-foot drop—and it tells her it’s the same day, only about an hour later. Down to a ten percent charge. Not enough to get her back to the path leading to the resort.
But this girl must know the way.
“What’s your name?” Julia asks. Her tongue is still swollen, but it’s functional at least.
The girl doesn’t answer, just stands instead. She reaches into her pocket, pulls out something that’s clasped tightly in her hand. Turns her hand over, opens her fingers to reveal M&M’s. She picks out three, pops them in her mouth, crunches them with obvious satisfaction.
Slowly, with the caution of a feral cat, she edges closer to Julia. Holds out her hand with the M&M’s.
A gift. An offering. She’s so slight, this girl, Julia wonders if they’re feeding her enough.
Julia reaches out her hand—carefully, so she doesn’t spook her—and picks out two, leaving the girl three. She puts the M&M’s in her mouth, even though her stomach is still queasy.
This seems to satisfy the girl, who gives the faintest hint of a grin.
“I’m lost,” says Julia. “Do you know how to get back to the resort?”
The girl doesn’t respond, just turns around and walks a few feet into the brush before stopping. She glances back and beckons.
Not allowed to speak to the guests, obviously. But maybe there’s a way to build something of a relationship. She imagines the girl might know the location of the corpse flower, too.
Julia staggers to her feet. Dizzy, wet, exhausted, but she manages to stay upright. She picks up her sodden backpack, slings it over her shoulder. The girl turns back around and walks into the jungle.
Julia follows.
The girl keeps about five yards between them, slipping under and through the dense vegetation with remarkable ease, while Julia has to keep one eye on the ground in front of her at all times, breaking branches and occasionally tripping. The palm of her left hand throbs with a steady pain. She’d wrapped it with a strip of muslin to stop the bleeding, noticed blisters forming too—from the caustic plant?—and not being able to use it to help keep her balance is slowing her down considerably.
Every question Julia’s asked so far has been met with silence. How old are you? Have you ever been off the island? Do you play by yourself in the jungle a lot? But Julia knows the girl is listening.
“I have a daughter myself,” Julia says. “Her name’s Evie. Well, Evelyn, really, but we call her Evie for short. She’s six. Almost seven.”
No response.
“She lives in New England now, with her father. I haven’t seen her in almost six months. It’s hard, being so far away from someone you love.”
Slightest turn of the girl’s head. She slows down, just a little.
Julia tries to think of something that might pique her interest. “It’s going to be snowing soon, where she lives. She’s never seen snow before. Well, far away, on the tops of mountains. Which is funny, because my husband—ex-husband—always said he hated it. Not just the cold, but the actual snow.”
“Snow is where rain falls from the sky, but it’s not wet,” says the girl. “It’s dry, like small white leaves.”
“Yes,” says Julia, surprised and pleased with herself. “But when you go inside, the snowflakes on your clothes melt, and then they’re wet.”
The girl nods, as if this is what she’d surmised. But her own response seems to spook her, because she picks up her pace again, quickly climbing a small knoll and adding an extra two yards between them.
Progress, thinks Julia.
She doesn’t push it further, not yet. She has to give the girl time to acclimate to this subtle change in their relationship. Instead, Julia tries to figure out which direction they’re headed in, which is truly impossible. It’s definitely not the way she came—the jungle here is even more bizarre. Things that look like small snails cling to trunks, the shells a mottled green. Black, oblong pods hang above; others have fallen, revealing bloodred fruit with tiny black seeds—a fragrant scent like papaya, or mango. There are small, stubby trees that look like gnarled potatoes, massive ferns that form perfect spirals, and everywhere that white lichen which creeps along the jungle floor, up and along the trees, over and around rocks and roots.
She trips over one such root and has to reach her right hand out to one of the stubby trees to keep from falling. Her fingers register something strange—smooth and hard—so she turns to look and sees what appear to be rough teeth embedded in the tree’s bark. She runs a finger along them, and yes, they feel exactly like teeth, some kind of animal’s, with yellowed enamel. They look like they got a lot of use. And then just below are two small tusks.
Something small and hard hits her shoulder—an M&M.
She tears her eyes away from the trunk, and finds the girl staring at her in a way that makes her seem older than eight, or ten, or twelve years. More like a hundred. More like a thousand. Maybe even older than that.
A strange thought. Again, the sense that it isn’t her own.
“Are these teeth . . . ?”
The girl gives a sly smile, turns, and walks ahead, running her hand through leaves.
They must be deep in the oldest part of the island, because here the tall, massive, old-growth trees have thick trunks the size of small vehicles, branches and leaves completely obscuring the sky above, making it darker below, a kind of twilight. More kinds of fungus here too, rippled like clamshells and clinging to fallen limbs, poking up out of the soft earth with long stalks that almost reach Julia’s kneecaps—bulbous, white caps that look soft and spongy. The wind has picked up again, causing the branches above to clatter against one another, and along with the rain, leaves fall.
There’s less brush here, which makes it easier to walk, but the wind sounds ominous. Maybe that wasn’t really the storm that hit, just the precursor.
“How much farther to the resort?” Julia asks the back of the girl.
No answer. For the first time, she wonders if the girl is in fact taking her back, or is leading her off somewhere else, to a hidden, secret fort only the children know. They’ll keep her like a pet, bringing scraps from their table, prodding her for stories. She’ll grow old and withered and pale, like the witch in any good fairy tale.
It unnerves Julia, how her thoughts are bleeding in odd directions. Julia shifts her bag over her left shoulder. Her right shoulder aches, as do her calves, her lower back. She feels like she could practically curl up under one of the trees, fall asleep, rain and storm be damned.
“Hansel and Gretel,” says the girl. She swoops down to grab a fallen vine about the length of her arm, starts to twirl it like a toy.
“You know that story?” Julia asks.
The girl cracks the vine like a whip. “There’s nothing to eat, so the mother tells the father to take the children into the deepest part of the woods and leave them there to starve. Only Hansel leaves behind bread crumbs, to follow back. Like the candy. Only the birds eat the bread crumbs. And I ate the candy.”
An interesting correlation. Julia smiles. “So does that make you a bird?”
“No. I just like candy.” She takes the vine and coils it around her hand, like a rope.
“Then they find the house where the witch lives, made of cake,” the girl continues. “But the witch wants to eat them. Why does the witch want to eat them when she has cake?”
“Huh, I never really thought about it that way.” But Julia knows that this answer won’t suffice. Children always want a passable explanation. “Maybe she was tired of cake, because she could have it every day.”
The girl nods, slows down just a bit so that she only walks about a yard ahead. “People get bored of the same thing every day. Even if it’s a good thing.”
Something about this strikes a nerve. Did Ethan just get bored with her? Click, click, clack go the branches overhead. The light seems to darken a shade.
“Did you read ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in a book?”
The girl shakes her head, runs the vine through her slender hands. “I heard it. I hear stories, and I remember them.”
“What’s your favorite story?”
The girl looks at the ground, thinks a moment. “I like new stories. Ones I haven’t heard before.”
Julia smiles, bemused. “Because hearing the same ones over and over again—”
“Boring,” says the girl. A vine hangs low from one of the branches, and she drops the one in her hand to grab it. She runs a little, then lifts her legs off the ground, swings back and forth. Julia wouldn’t doubt that she could shimmy up the vine too with her wiry little strength, agile as a monkey.
A loud crack of thunder, then a menacing rumble. Julia has a feeling the real storm is about to start in earnest.
“We should hurry and get back,” says Julia.
The girl swings hard one last time, throwing her weight into it so that it lifts her high off the ground. Then she lets go, landing with a soft thwuft. A branch overhead creaks menacingly, and tiny leaves fall.
“Maybe we should have left pebbles,” says the girl. “Hansel was smart, leaving pebbles. They glowed when the moon came out, and the birds couldn’t eat them.”
Does she even know how to get back?
It never occurred to Julia that the girl might be as lost as she is.
Julia stops, pulls out her GPS, checks the power. Five percent. But the way the girl has taken her must be some kind of a shortcut, because it looks like they’re not far away at all from the resort. There’s a chasm of some kind, or a gulch up ahead.
“What’s that?” the girl asks, pointing to the GPS.
“It’s like a map. It can tell me where I am, and show me how to get to where I want to go.”
“Did a witch give it to you?”
Actually, one did, Julia thinks. “It’s just a device. Like cell phones.” But then, the girl might very well not know what a cell phone is. The contamination of culture and all that.
There’s another, louder crack of thunder, and she can hear heavy rain falling again, but the canopy above is so thick that not much reaches them. A natural umbrella. The storm clouds cause the light to ebb, too, what little there was, which makes it feel like they’re on the cusp of night.
“I don’t need a map, not here,” says the girl. “I know where everything is.”
An opening. “There’s a red flower I’m looking for. I’m told it smells like rotting meat. Have you ever seen it?”
“Oh yes,” says the girl. “It really stinks.” She pinches her nostrils with her fingers for emphasis.
Julia feels her heart catch in her throat. Tries to keep her voice even when she asks, “Could you take me to it?”
The girl pirouettes on her right foot. “You’re not supposed to go there.”
“Says who?”
The girl just smiles, skips ahead a few paces, while the light under the canopy continues to darken.
She hears the rush of the river long before she sees it, a distant, thunderous roar. The girl has fallen back into her five-yard lead. Maybe Julia asked for too much, too soon. Pressed it too hard.
Her stomach rumbles, and she can’t wait to get into a shower to soap all the muck off, be dry again. It feels like she left the resort an eternity ago and she’s practically a different person. They’re back now in relative normal jungle brush, which means the canopy is less dense, which means there’s no protection from the warm rain that is soaking her again.
Another crack of thunder, then a flash of lightning illuminating everything in stark relief. She catches sight of two large birds, maybe vultures, huddled together on a thick branch overhead. Beady black eyes staring with an uncomfortable intensity. Why is everything on this damn island so intent on looking at her?
The girl steps through low brush, and beyond her, Julia can see the gulch, a soft mist hanging over it. As she approaches the clearing, the river becomes louder, as deafening as a waterfall.
And then she sees it.
The river is completely engorged, flooding the gulch with a torrent so violent it’s taken down low-lying trees. Without the jungle’s cover, the wind whips the rain sideways, hitting Julia’s face with a force that almost takes her breath away. Ahead is a rope bridge in bad shape spanning the chasm, the dangerous waters about fifty feet below. Strong gusts blow the rope bridge, making it swing from side to side. Wet planks maybe spanning two feet wide max, rope railings, the entire thing secured to trees on either side, a structure that, on a sunny, balmy day, would be iffy at best.
The girl turns to Julia, meets her eye expectantly.
“That?”
The girl points to the left, and Julia can see it—the steep, peaked roof of the dining pavilion. A short distance downhill, if she was actually able to make it to the other side of the bridge. Sure it’s the shortest, most direct route, but . . .
“There has to be another way,” says Julia, raising her voice so she can be heard over the rushing waters.
The girl shakes her head. “It would take too long,” she says loudly. “It’d be night. You wouldn’t survive the jungle at night.”
Julia notes you, not we.
Without much hope, she looks at the cliff that runs along their side of the gorge down to the ocean, tries to imagine a safe path. Even if she somehow managed, she’d still have to traverse the river, which is probably even wider closer to sea level. Which means she’d have to wait, and hope, for the weather to clear, or trudge back to the Reverend’s village.
God, the raw power of that river. Deadly and magnificent. Julia approaches one of the trees holding up the bridge, runs her right hand over the rope that’s tied around its trunk. It’s the good seafaring kind, and at least the knot is tight. But her left hand hurts so much it’s practically useless.
The girl steps closer to her. “I don’t know why they went back.”
Julia doesn’t know what she means, and her confusion must be apparent, because then the girl says, “Hansel and Gretel. They went back to their father, even though he left them to die in the woods, twice. They had the witch’s jewels. They could have lived anywhere.”
Julia racks her mind for an explanation.
“Life is empty when you’re far from your family. Even if your family does things to you that you don’t like, you forgive them. You stick it out.”
“You don’t live with your family.”
The truth hurts. She tries to think of a way to explain to a girl who doesn’t know about divorces and attorneys, courts and prenuptial agreements.
Julia gives the rope a good hard tug. It holds. “Let’s just say I have to get the jewels from the witch. My husband left me in the woods to starve, because he wants Evie all to himself. I need the jewels to get her back.”
“Ethan,” says the girl. “Ethan left you all alone.”
“Yes.” Her heart clenches with a pain that still, even here, so far away from it all, nearly breaks her.
This the strange girl seems to understand. Julia gets the sense that it settles something in her mind. “I will take you to the red flower tomorrow,” the girl says. “And you will give it to the witch and get her jewels.”
It’s remarkable that the girl made the intuitive leap that the flower is the price she has to pay. Julia lets go of the rope and turns back to the gorge. If she doesn’t slip and fall, it might just be possible to get across, storm or not. If. Just the thought of it though makes her queasy.
“But,” says the girl, “you will give me your map device.”
This she wasn’t expecting. “Why do you want it?”
“Because I want to walk the island and see it the way a bird sees it, from the sky.”
“It won’t work for much longer,” Julia says. “It needs to be plugged in, like—”
“Like the computer. I know.”
“The church has a computer?”
“No.”
One of her competitors? Someone else on the island entirely?
Beth?
Noah?
She needs to know. She can’t truly protect herself if she doesn’t know who to protect herself from.
“The GPS . . . map device needs a special plug. One that fits in here.” Julia takes it out from her sodden bag, and the girl steps forward, curious. It’s insane, beyond insane to be standing in the beginnings of an approaching tropical storm, talking about plugs, but she can’t, of course, seem desperate in what is about to be a transaction.
The girl leans in, peers at the bottom of the phone. “The hole is tiny.”
“Exactly. So how about this: I take this back with me and plug it in, and then tomorrow when you take me to the red flower, you can use it. And when I leave, you can have it. But you’d have to keep it where the Reverend won’t find it.”
“Oh, he won’t,” says the girl, in a tone that makes her seem much, much older. “He never sees anything I don’t want him to.”
An unusual confidence. Julia waits, not daring to say another word.
The girl looks off for a moment, then decides. “I will accept your offer.”
A strong gust blows the rope bridge completely sideways. Great. But Julia is on this side, and the bridge is what’s required to get to the other. She needs to do it quickly, though, before the worst of the storm rolls in.
“Where should we meet?”
“I will find you, when it’s time,” says the girl.
“Of course, if the storm really gets bad—“
“Then we’ll get wet.” The girl smiles, like Julia is being ridiculous to even consider it a possible problem. She pirouettes on one of her muddy bare feet, and heads back into the jungle without another word.
Julia watches her disappear into the brush like a sprite. Wonders at her Zen-like calm.
She could use some of that calm herself, to get over that goddamn bridge. She should have packed at least one of the Jack Daniel’s.
Not a particularly helpful thought. So Julia does the only thing she can, which is to put the GPS back in her backpack, zip it shut, sling the pack over her back, securing it as best she can with the straps, and then walk toward the bridge.
She pauses at the gulch’s muddy edge.
Odd. The girl used Ethan’s name. She doesn’t remember mentioning his name.
Something to wonder about later. The storm is worsening, and she needs to get across soon. So she reaches out for the rope railings, such as they are, and takes the first step.
Her weight keeps the bridge from swinging quite as wildly, and she tries to focus on the plank in front of her, then the next plank, then the next, her survival a moment-by-moment affair. Right hand, left foot, left hand—ignore the pain, don’t think about the pain—right foot. Below, the waters rage.
Julia has never liked heights. Ethan surprised her once with a Napa Valley hot air balloon excursion, back when they were dating. She’d pretended to enjoy it, trying to impress. But being that far above the ground, held aloft by a flimsy bit of fabric and invisible gas, was not exactly her idea of fun. She’d held onto the gondola rail for dear life, white-knuckled.
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
Such a simple equation in front of her. Either she’ll slip and fall, or she won’t. Either the rope bridge will hold, or it won’t. The only thing in her control is her own focus.
Control. Such a seductive idea, to have control, dominion over one’s self, one’s life. Almost as terrible as losing Evie was losing the sense that her life was her own, that the construction of the world she’d built with Ethan was something she’d had an equal say in. But it had always been at his pleasure. She’d deceived herself into thinking otherwise.
A quarter of the way across. The rain hits her face like small pebbles.
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
Will the girl keep her promise to show her where the corpse flower is? Again, not in Julia’s control.
Her boot slips on the next plank; she feels it hover over empty space for three heart-pounding seconds, and the sudden shift of weight causes the bridge to swing. Her left hand can’t hold on, so she grips the rope tightly with her right hand, feels a surge of vomit rising at the back of her throat.
A bright burst of lightning over the ridge, behind the jagged peak of Kapu, then the crack of thunder.
She swallows. Holds on.
Evie, short for Evelyn. The name had been Ethan’s idea, after his grandmother, a woman on the cusp of death with a large fortune to bequeath. Not that he didn’t have enough of the green stuff himself, but there never seemed to be an end point of satiation, or to the competition with his wealthy compatriots. Always a bigger yacht to own, more houses scattered across the globe to buy, places to travel, the desperation of cramming several lifetimes’ worth of experiences into one. The fear that someone had something he didn’t.
The gust dies away. It’s hard, almost impossible, to get her hand to let go of the railing for even a second, but she has to. Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
The constant anxiety that he would lose it all. A market fluctuation across the world could keep him up nights. Once she’d suggested they live slightly under their means, if he was so worried. Downsize to a smaller house. He’d reacted like she’d suggested he shoot himself.
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
Halfway there. Aunt Liddy’s fortune is a supernova to his star, and yet in the last, lingering days of her life, Aunt Liddy is still trying maintain control of it, or at least her legacy. The same sense of desperation.
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot. Only a few more yards until she’s on the other side.
Her grandfather trying to control the genetic destiny of humankind.
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
Control an ancient human desire, from the beginning of Genesis. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea . . .
God, the sound of the water below her. She imagines the free fall that could happen at any moment, the short plummet, the deathly impact, washed out to sea.
Her body freezes. She wills her right foot to move, but it won’t. Tries to loosen her grip on the rope, but it’s like it’s been grafted there. Her breath comes faster, and she realizes she’s utterly petrified.
. . . and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth . . .
The wind, a manifestation of pure fury. She tries to move her left foot, but it won’t.
. . . and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth . . .
So many creeping things creeping on Kapu. Each with its curious sentience. Her chest tightens, and her teeth start to chatter.
I can’t.
I can’t. She stares at her right hand, wills it to move.
I can’t.
Utter helplessness washes over and around and through her. But the Reverend said that dominion didn’t work on the island. Maybe the trick here is to relinquish control. Give in.
It’s with that thought that all the others seem to fall out of her mind, or the ability to think, and instead she just feels . . . peace. Calm. A sense that whether she makes it to the other side of the gulch or falls into the waters below doesn’t matter much. The wind isn’t blowing against her; it’s blowing through her. She’s vapor. Empty. A ghost.
Ghost, most, host.
She registers, distantly, the tree across the way that the rope bridge is tied to yielding to a strong gust. The tree bends. She feels a momentary drop, watches idly as her fingers clutch the rope railings, instinctually, no need for her to think, or fear, or direct. She’s inside and outside, everything is the same, nothing is separate.
Coast, roast, post.
Her right foot edges a quarter inch forward.
You’ll never get her back, says Ethan’s voice. Or not his voice, her mind using his voice. She doesn’t want or need you, just like I don’t want or need you.
This is the thought that percolated under her skin, caused her to buy a box of wine when she should have bought a loaf of bread. Turned her into the lost, helpless person Ethan said she was.
Everything around Julia is watching her. Waiting. Some kind of test presenting itself. Maybe it’s time to let the island decide, relieve herself of the responsibility. What the hell. If she makes it across, she makes it. If she doesn’t, then it won’t matter much anymore. A coin toss.
It’s not logical, but it is.
She lets go of the ropes, lets her hands hover above them. The wind blows the bridge to the right, but her balance accommodates it, naturally. Is she in control of her mind, or not? Is she in control of her body, or not?
She doesn’t know.
This is madness.
Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. Walking like an acrobat along a tightrope, arms outstretched. She could laugh. She could cry. Her eyes suddenly feel heavy, so very, very heavy, that she actually closes them. Takes another step forward.
She remembers buying Evie a Russian nesting doll for her fifth birthday, how her daughter loved to pull it apart, find the next doll inside it, pull that apart, find the next doll, and so on and so on until she got to the smallest doll that was a single, solid piece of painted wood.
Right foot, left foot.
Kapu has things within things within things. It’s not a thought but a certainty, like her certainty that her hand is connected to her arm, that her arm is connected to her shoulder. But the center, the heart, is fuzzy, indiscernible.
Right foot, left foot. She doesn’t fall. She doesn’t die. Another crack of thunder, and she doesn’t even shudder.
What’s the girl’s name? It’s hard not to think of her as Agnes, because she fits the description so perfectly, but Julia can’t let her mind make assumptions, not here.
Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot . . .
. . . and then there she is, stepping onto ground that is solid, immobile. Julia opens her eyes. The path down to the resort is in front of her, and she hears the roar of the waters behind her. She made it.
“I spy with my little eye,” she says.
Why did she say that? Think that?
She’s about to move forward, but doesn’t. Like there’s another Julia inside Julia, with a different idea. And it’s this inner Julia that raises her head to the sky, lets the droplets fall into her mouth. Water in the sky, water below in the churning river, water in the ocean and in every cell of her own body. Deadly in places, life-giving in others.
She doesn’t know why, but she suddenly gets the sense that the girl, this stranger, is made entirely of wood, nothing else inside of her. No heart.