Chapter 34
The floor seems to rush at me. I catch myself on the rough beams, breathing hard.
A baby was here.
A baby lived here, in the same cove where my father died.
On the bottom corner of the cradle, tiny letters have been painted in black:
Truth-fully, I will give you the sea. —Harry, 1900
My breath comes hard, and my neck has begun to tingle. A ringing sets up in my ears. Lots of men are named Harry, and lots of babies were born in the year 1900. But how many babies born in the San Juan Islands in 1900 had fathers named Harry?
I’m philosophically opposed to coincidence because it feels a little lazy, Nash whispers in my head.
The Harry who made this cradle had to be my father.
He made it for us, even though I’d barely had time to use it.
Tears spring to my eyes, then spill down my cheeks, hot as embers.
Piece by piece, a picture of my father has been emerging.
But this glimpse is most meaningful of all: this tiny wooden ship made just for me, to see me through my first storms. He knew about me before he died.
What would he think of me if he saw me now? I scrub my grubby face with the sleeve of my crumpled shirt. I am not exactly the picture of demure girlishness that would make most fathers proud.
Truth-fully, I will give you the sea.
So who was my mother, the woman with whom my father had been “besotted,” a face now even more opaque than his? Were they living here together when he was murdered? I doubt it. As his best friend, Mr. Sanders would’ve known where my father lived. Which means this was my mother’s house.
My father must have spent time here, taken his meals.
I imagine the two of them sitting on the chairs, sharing their dreams. That would explain why he was here the day he was killed—to visit her.
She’d have been pregnant. I was born a month after my father died, maybe right here in this hidden house big enough for a tiny family.
Something squeals. This time it doesn’t come from behind the stove, but from the entrance. That is definitely not a rat. I scramble to my feet, heart at full throttle.
A beast with bristly dark hair and wicked-looking tusks fills the door frame.
The wild boar screams, and all the fibers in my body seize.
The rats start squealing again. Only they’re not rats; they are the boar’s litter.
And I am the trespasser. She paws at the ground, dust rising in choking clouds.
“Go away!” I scream, recalling the boar on Jawbone Beach. My hand dives into my false pocket, finding the cold grip of the Double Dee. If she charges, I will die here—die in the very place I was born.
Even without consuming China blue, wild boars are dangerous.
If I were a Rifle, I would’ve shot already.
It is kill or be killed. But as I stand in this broken house, watching the light throw gold highlights in the boar’s bristles, all I can think about is that if I shoot, I will kill a mother.
Unlike the erratic creatures on Mount Consternation and Jawbone Beach, this one has a focused energy about her. A ferocity common to all mothers.
My fingers shake as I pull back the hammer. “Please, stay back,” I beg. A sea wolf might understand, but how about a boar? For a moment I am struck by the perfect triangles of her ears, twitching slightly.
She charges.
I fire purposely wide. The boom rattles the broken walls, and the piglets squeal louder. But she doesn’t falter. The pistol slicks in my grip, sweat turning the iron to soap. Before I can cock again, she slams into me, teeth biting deep into my hand. Pain explodes and I scream.
Or maybe that’s Eva, who has run in after the boar, holding a branch.
Somehow I discharge the second bullet, and this one hits. The sow convulses, her weight jerking free of me, crimson blooming in her side. The piglets scatter.
I crawl back, clutching my ruined hand. Dropping her branch, Eva catches me, holding me fast. People think her cold and aloof, but right now she is crying along with me.
“She has babies,” I sob.
The boar writhes, blood darkening the floorboards. I wasted the first shot trying to scare her, when I should’ve just hit her and saved the second shot to end it.
“You didn’t have a choice. Please, let’s go.”
Somehow, holding each other, we make it back to the still-empty dock. Fog has moved in, and the water, once blue, has gone the gray of dishwater. The dock sways.
Nothing ever stays still long enough for us to make sense of it. Violence always waits beneath the surface, and either we are the victims or we are the victors. I take a huge gulp of air, knowing I am neither. Only some miserable gray in-between.
We sit on the dock, and Eva lifts my injured right hand. The boar left several bloody puncture wounds. My skin swells around them.
She tugs the end of her hair bow, and the silk comes untied. She stretches it taut, pressing out the wrinkles with her fingers.
I gape at her hair as it spills loose about her shoulders like a glossy cape. It’s straighter than mine and so black, it is almost blue. Eva notices my interest in her hair and smiles. “Were you expecting a snake to fall out?”
“It’s a bit of a letdown,” I say through my gritted teeth. “So why do you always wear the bow?”
She begins wrapping my hand with the silk. “We got our mouths scrubbed with soap every time we spoke our language at the Stark Indian Boarding School,” she says calmly, though there’s pain behind her luminous brown eyes.
I am not surprised to learn that, like Cookie, she’d attended one of those boarding schools set up by the government for “civilizing” the Native populations.
Cookie told me the truth of them. That they stole children from their parents.
That they broke apart families, ruined entire cultures. It seemed savage, not civil.
“We weren’t allowed to laugh or cry, either,” she says, tucking the end of the ribbon snugly and securing it with the pin from her pocket watch.
“One of the older girls saw my misery and took me under her wing. She showed me how to take notes, to use the typewriter, to sort the magazines and books. Putting matters in order helped me. When she moved away, she gave me this ribbon to remind me we would always be connected.”
Watching her, I can’t help thinking of the yew tree. It is one of the smaller conifers, but its roots run deepest, something you could never judge by height alone. The knowledge that Eva has felt the pain of losing family too makes me feel a kinship with her.
“Where are your parents now?”
“They have journeyed to the next life. I never saw them again.”
“It is hard not to feel robbed,” I say, now thinking about my own parents.
Her lips offer a fraction of a smile. “I have spent too much time feeling robbed. Now that I am rich, I will buy the Stark School and shut it down.”
I don’t know how one shuts down a school set up by the government, but I have no doubt Eva can get it done.
She inspects my throbbing hand. Red speckles have begun to show through the temporary bandage of her white bow.
“You should leave the bloodstains,” I say. “Imagine how the stories will grow.”
Our laughter dulls some of my pain. I have never had a girlfriend before, but somehow having one makes the world less gray.
The hum of a motor makes itself known. The Lady Vee approaches, but without Prosper. Nash brings the speedboat right up to us, surprise giving way to horror at the blood down my front. He ties up quickly, then grabs me by the shoulders. “What happened?”
“Where’s Prosper?” I ask him.
“I dropped her back in Eastsound. Now out with it—what the devil happened? You’re shaking.” He helps me into the boat.
“We found a cabin with a baby’s cradle signed by my father.” My breath begins to feel tight in my chest. “And then I shot a boar, but… she’s not dead.” My eyes begin to leak, and he offers me a handkerchief—Prosper’s. “I didn’t have another bullet for her, or her litter.”
“Where?” His mouth becomes a grim line.
“The cabin behind those trees,” I tell him.
He removes a box from the boat cabinet, takes out a pistol and cartridges, and steps back onto the dock. “Be right back.”
Watching him jog away, I try not to think about the violence he will inflict. Instead I climb onto the back bench and lie down, letting the boat rock me.
Not long after, several shots rip through the air, and I close my eyes. I don’t open them until I feel Nash boarding the Lady Vee again. Eva is holding her stomach and looks green around the gills.
“Trade places with me and close your eyes,” I tell her. “It will help with the seasickness.”
We switch, and soon ocean spray is misting my face as Nash bears us home.
Eva pillows her head with the blanket and curls up on her side, hat over her face.
Trying to ignore the fire in my hand, I focus on the trees streaking by in green-and-brown jags.
There are no birds in sight. If I could fly, I’d rise above those ominous clouds too.
My thoughts return to my parents. Did my father live in the log cabin with my mother?
If they couldn’t officially marry, perhaps they were “living in sin,” as the priest calls it.
He says that cohabiting without marrying shows moral depravity and dishonors the woman.
But I doubt any man who would inscribe such hopeful words could dishonor the mother of his child.
How can you know yourself without knowing the parts that made you?
Roots hidden underground still feed what grows above, but I can’t see where mine begin.
Nash glances at me, slumped in my seat. “I got the code word out of Prosper. It is ‘sakura.’ She doesn’t know what it means.”
“ ‘Sakura’ means ‘cherry blossom.’ ” Mr. Kagaoka’s favorite tree, with its dark trunk and elegant branches full of green leaves, plants itself in my vision. What’s the significance of the tree to the bosses? It is not a native species.
“Maybe it is just a word,” he says.