“Lucas!” she says. “You’re early. Come in.” What can he say? He hesitates, then steps inside. The house is the same, but just different enough to soothe his sparking nerves. The couch he sat on with the pink towel wrapped around his shoulders is in a different place, with a different slipcover. The living room seems more open, less cluttered. Phyllis calls Wanda down from upstairs. “She’s in my study,” Phyllis explains. She looks toward him, but not at him—staring absentmindedly past his shoulder. “Wanda is a special girl, you know,” she says.
“I know,” he replies.
“But—maybe even more than we thought.”
Lucas tries to make sense of this, but his adrenal system is too heightened to absorb it. He’s about to ask what Phyllis means by that when Wanda gallops down the stairs, coming down so fast it’s like she’s falling. He forgets his question. Leaving this house is the only thing he can think about now. “Put your shoes on, Wan,” he says. “Time to go.”
These days, Wanda is always bringing something home from Phyllis’s. Vegetables from the garden, still covered in dirt; a fistful of wildflowers; a dozen shit-stained eggs; glass jars packed with jam; a loaf of bread, even. Things she’s gathered or harvested or made from scratch under Phyllis’s careful tutelage. Somewhere along the way, Phyllis taught her what to do with all of these spoils. As if overnight, Lucas notices that Wanda has learned to cook. She makes salads with the fresh, gritty lettuces; she boils pasta and stirs in Sungold tomatoes and olive oil and cheese. She makes stir-fries and soups and even, on occasion, a chocolate cake, which is a recipe he begins to suspect she knows by heart. He watches her make it one Sunday afternoon to be sure, and it’s true. It is a poem she’s memorized.
Lucas sits at the table and pretends to read something while Wanda leaves behind a glorious mess, skipping around the kitchen, climbing up on her little step stool and then hopping off it, measuring flour, shaking salt into the palm of her hand and then brushing it into the mixture. He wasn’t even aware they owned cake pans. It makes him think of Frida—the way she moved so easily in this kitchen. The meals he should have appreciated but didn’t. Half an hour later, Wanda’s cake emerges from the oven in two layers, and after it cools he watches her fill the middle with cream she’s whipped herself and jam she brought home from Phyllis’s.
She’ll be okay without him, he realizes with a little jolt. Not just that; she will thrive. Slowly, steadily, the idea of an envelope carrying an acceptance—an invitation that he might possibly receive but also, also, one that he might actually accept—solidifies. She spreads another layer of whipped cream on top and for the first time, he allows that his penance—for Frida, for Flip—might one day come to an end.
He looks at Wanda placing a ring of huckleberries around the edge of her cake. Everything he and Kirby told her about where her name comes from, it’s all true. He didn’t know that when he said it, but he knows now.
Chapter 41
All winter, Phyllis and Wanda have been experimenting with different bodies of water. They’ve discovered the organisms Phyllis found in the lagoon’s water sample everywhere they look—the Intracoastal Waterway, the swamps, the creek, even the ocean itself. Wanda knows this is strange because of Phyllis’s incredulity, but she is too young to be truly surprised. What’s more, the organisms come out only when Wanda is near. They flock to her, glow for her, and then they dissipate. Perhaps it explains why Phyllis has never found them before, but it hardly satisfies her desire for a scientific explanation. These mysteries have consumed them both for months, lending a certain vitality to their time together. Wanda is thrilled by the hunt for an explanation, but she doesn’t require one. To her, these organisms are a magic she doesn’t need to name. To Phyllis, they are science that requires categorization. And who is to say they cannot be both?
The more Wanda interacts with these bodies of water, and by extension, the creatures living within, the stronger her sense grows that they are trying to communicate with her. She describes them to Phyllis as whispers, but it isn’t something she hears. Not exactly. Maybe it is more accurate to say that she feels them, but even that is not quite right. Phyllis encourages all of Wanda’s observations, no matter how strange or unscientific. Privately, she is skeptical. The human mind inevitably reaches for personification to soothe the shock of forces or creatures it doesn’t understand. This is all well and good for a child. But Phyllis is a scientist. She relies on the data.
That spring, Wanda and Phyllis stop at a tag sale on the way home from surveying a forest plot. Wanda’s never been to a tag sale before. Kirby calls them junk stores whenever they pass one and refuses to stop. On either side of the driveway, knickknacks are laid out on top of big blue tarps, the corners held down with rocks or chipped furniture. A middle-aged woman with inky dyed hair and skin too pale for Florida inspects a pile of china, picking up each plate and turning it over in her hands before she decides whether to buy. A man in a lawn chair smokes and reads a magazine, holding reign over the yard with a cash box at his feet, a baseball cap tipped back on his head.
“If you see something, just make an offer,” he calls out without looking up. Phyllis nods and begins perusing. Wanda slyly watches the man, sure she knows him. It’s Arjun—he came to her birthday party last year. The red plastic fireman’s hat he gave her is still on her dresser. She has faint memories of the softball tournaments he and Kirby used to put on every year, for the firemen, the linemen, the cops, and the EMTs. Arjun was the master of ceremonies at these gatherings, the center of everything, as if the games and the grilling and even the placement of the picnic tables radiated out from him in a burst of activity inspired by his presence. There hasn’t been one for years. Now—she looks at the array of broken treasures carefully arranged on the ground. This is a moving sale, an everything-must-go sort of affair. He is not an epicenter of people anymore, but of things. She hovers, picking up an old lamp with no shade, then putting it back down. Arjun finally raises his eyes and recognizes her, too. She remembers how much he used to smile; now he just looks tired, emptied of the charisma that used to overflow.
“You’re Kirby’s kid,” he says. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s okay.” The fire chief nods and lights a fresh cigarette with the one he’s still smoking. Takes a deep, sharp drag. “You’re going?” Wanda asks.
“I’m going,” he says.
“Where?”
He shrugs. “My sister lives in Montana. It’s supposed to be better up there. Anyway, have a look around. Whatever you want, just go on and grab it, okay? Call it a birthday present. I won’t be here for your next one.”
“Okay.” Wanda feels sad that Arjun is leaving. He has always been kind to her. She sees Phyllis inspecting old books in the garage and she moves to join in, but something stops her. A glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye, except there’s nothing there. Arjun has lost interest in her. Phyllis is preoccupied. But there it is again, another flicker—whether it’s a thing she sees or hears or feels is hard to determine. It wants her to follow—she understands this much at least—and so she does. Past a card table laid out with empty picture frames and old bedsheets and a milk crate full of records, past a bicycle with a worn seat, past a little wagon piled with stuffed animals, to the narrow space between the house and the garage. For a moment, she thinks she’s mistaken. There’s nothing here but weeds and rusty garden tools and—ah. She immediately knows it’s meant for her.