With a practiced flick of her paddle, Wanda glides down the swampy corridor, sawgrass whispering as she passes. The sound of the chimes grows faint behind her. She enters the lagoon, and there, in the center—movement. Wanda feels for the knife she carries on her hip and flicks the blade open. Dangerous creatures lurk in these swamps; she is one of them.
Chapter 49
After Kirby died, Phyllis cleared out her study and told Wanda it was her room for as long as she wanted it. They never did find his body. The water washed a great many things away that day. Lucas, already in California by then, came straight home when he heard. He arrived in the middle of the night while Wanda slept upstairs, delirious from driving straight through. Phyllis was waiting for him. She took his arm, steered him inside, and held him on the couch while he bawled into her shoulder. She could feel him dissolving into that twelve-year-old boy she’d found on her doorstep, gasping for air, pressing his face hard into her.
“Forewing…hindwing…” he whispered into her blouse. A lepidopterist’s prayer.
“What’s that now?”
“Butterfly parts. Like you said.”
The last time she held him like this came rushing back to her. She hadn’t known what to say to him then, the hurricane raging just outside, but she’d been worried that that aching boy would seize and convulse in her arms if she didn’t manage to distract him a little, so she taught him butterfly anatomy. How devastating that he held on to it all these years. How perfect. “That’s good,” she told him, rubbing slow circles on his back with her palm. “Real good.”
When he managed to gather himself, they talked about what would happen to Wanda. Lucas hurried to sacrifice—to move back home, to drop out of school before he’d even begun and give up his scholarship—but there were holes in this plan. Phyllis pointed them out. Kirby wouldn’t want that. Wanda wouldn’t want it. And besides, how would he earn? He said he could go to college and make a home for her at the same time, a fresh start for them both in California. Phyllis nodded. “Could do,” she said. “Let’s sleep on it.” She made up the couch for him as soft and deep as she could, but the effort was lost on him. He was asleep before she could turn out the light.
In the morning, she gathered these two tearstained children that weren’t hers at the table. Lucas, not really a child, but not quite a man, either. And Wanda, her little protégé. “I’ve been thinking,” she told them, “that if Wanda wanted to, and you agreed, she could live here. With me.”
Lucas shook his head. “No, we’re family. We’re going to California like Pop wanted us to.”
“I don’t wanna leave,” Wanda said, a whine creeping in. “I never even wanted to go to California. Why can’t I stay with Phyllis?”
“I could move back—” he said.
“Just think it over,” Phyllis said. “There’s time.”
The three of them sat and filled their mouths with Phyllis’s biscuits, smeared with butter and jam, so that they had an excuse not to talk for a little while. True, there was time—but not much.
The question of what to do about Wanda went on in murmurs and late-night conferences between Phyllis and Lucas. They had the same conversation, again and again, but there was no easy solution. Lucas had only a week before the beginning of his first semester. Just a few days to decide. He and Wanda spent their time splashing through the inches of water that still rippled across the low roads, wandering this town that would never be the same again. Phyllis watched them venture out each morning: solemn, hand in hand. She could see Lucas trying to be older than he was, braver than he was. It’s unfair for one family to lose so much, she thought, standing on the front porch as they disappeared behind the cypress trees. In the end, Lucas relented to Wanda’s impassioned plea to stay with Phyllis. Of the three of them, she was the only one who seemed certain. They agreed that they’d try it for a year.
On Lucas’s last evening in the blue house, they made a feast. A crawfish boil, with Phyllis’s own sweet corn and potatoes, and crawdads that Lucas and Wanda caught themselves. They spread it out on the newspaper-covered picnic table in the backyard, next to the garden, but it was impossible to forget the deep sadness lurking on either side of this perfect hour—the absence of Kirby, Lucas’s impending departure. They studiously spoke of neither while Blackbeard whined at their feet and Wanda fed her pieces of claw meat dipped in butter.
In the morning, Wanda had to gently but firmly put Lucas in his car and insist he go. They all agreed again that Lucas would get settled in California and when it was right, maybe in a year, maybe two, Wanda would join him. At the time, they believed it. Phyllis and Wanda stood in the driveway and watched his car disappear while Blackbeard mewed at their feet, throwing herself against their legs, begging for their hands in her fur. Wanda bent down and obliged her, carefully attending to her nose, then ears, then chin, then belly. Phyllis watched, brushing tears from her eyes, suddenly struck by the newfound gravity of her own choices. The stakes were so much higher now.
Just like that, Wanda became hers. Her burden and also her joy. The blue house seemed to expand. It breathed. With Wanda inside it, the house lived. And so did Phyllis. She hadn’t been unhappy before Wanda came into her life. Not in the slightest. Phyllis had always found great fulfillment in her own self-determined research projects, and before that, when she taught, in her students, and before that, in her own schooling. Her life pre-Wanda had been a full one. Forestry work, academia, her research, a few lovers here and there, but most of all, caretaking the land she lived on. Her garden, her chickens, the slow, satisfying task of removing herself and her home from the grid entirely. Of becoming utterly independent from a failing system. She’d had everything she wanted out of her years on this earth. And then Wanda came and she got something she had never even known to yearn for—a companion.
Phyllis had tried living with a man twice and neither time suited her. There was Gabriel, when she was young, who taught her about guns and prepping and eventually left with another woman, and then there was Julian, who wanted her to put research aside to raise a family with him. She said no and he left, too. She liked the sex well enough—it was the rest of it that she was ill-suited for. The demands on her time, her attention, her space. She’d always been this way. Even as a child, she’d reveled in being left alone. Her parents didn’t understand her, and neither did her sister. Eventually they gave up on convincing her to join in, and let her be. She’d always been a satellite, orbiting out beyond the gravitational pull of family and community and togetherness. It was a peaceful way to exist. A good vantage point from which to learn. She’d never dreamed that she would find so much joy in the very thing she’d always been certain she did not want: a child. Then again, Wanda was not just any child.
Florida’s infrastructure limped along through the tail end of that summer after Kirby died. Rudder was bankrupt and Miami was under mandatory evacuation orders by then, but other pockets of the state continued to function. It was an in-between time. The flooding of Lake Okeechobee had hastened certain changes that might have taken decades otherwise. But here it was: happening more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Florida, returning to herself. Swamps that had been dredged and drained and developed reappeared, bubbling back up to the surface in parking lots and on highways and in gated neighborhoods. Sinkholes opened up and swallowed entire blocks whole. Houses and roads and crops disappeared into the edges of the ever-encroaching wild. Power was unreliable but it still flowed in some places. Cell and radio towers still stood. The question was, and always had been: For how much longer? Hurricane season had a slow start, but its peak was brewing. At sea, pockets of hot, moist wind formed, whirled, fed. They grew, waiting to be named. It wouldn’t take much to push the places that still functioned past their brink. And after—well, after was what Phyllis had spent her life preparing for.