There was no satisfaction in knowing she’d been right.
Wanda stayed. She wanted to. Phyllis wanted her to. And Lucas had finally seen that the rest of the world couldn’t offer her anything better. He couldn’t offer her anything better. They both impressed upon Wanda what staying could mean, and Phyllis was pretty sure she understood. As much as any of them understood. They found a military passenger truck heading north on Phyllis’s CB radio. It was already filled with refugees, but they were happy to add another. These trucks were a fixture now; Phyllis saw them driving around, week after week, announcing their presence on bullhorns. Rounding up as many people as they could convince to go.
The three of them met the truck at the old school. The auditorium had caved in since the last time they’d been here. When Phyllis told the driver it was just Lucas leaving, he frowned and gave her next week’s schedule of passenger vehicles passing through this part of the state. Wanda started to say that they didn’t need it, but Phyllis shushed her. Let him assume they’d follow. It was easier that way.
“How much longer will you be making trips?” Lucas asked, climbing up into the back of the canvas-covered truck. The driver slammed the tailgate behind him and gave it a stern pat.
“Till the end of the year. January first and we’re outta here. Hear that? Don’t wait too long, ladies.” He trudged around to the front of the truck. Inside, Phyllis could see more than half a dozen people huddled on the bench seats. They looked tired. Worn. Bereft, like the world had just ended. Which, for them, she realized, it had. Lucas looked down from his perch in the truck, his rucksack between his knees, all the hesitation and fear he’d confided in her evident on his face.
“We’ll be fine,” Phyllis called up to him. Lucas gripped the edge of the tailgate, and for a moment he looked like the little boy she remembered so vividly.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she lied. A scientist knows nothing is ever certain. Phyllis and Wanda watched Lucas disappear, waving until the truck turned the corner, and then they trudged home through the ankle-deep floodwater, the sheen of oil slicks swirling around their muck boots.
Phyllis’s feelings regarding Wanda’s light had spanned a broad spectrum since that day in the swamp when she first saw it. She’d begun this exploration with utter disbelief, moved into cautious experimentation, then swung over to obsessive curiosity and a constant, feverish excitement. The world was crawling with undiscovered species, but she’d never imagined that she might find one herself. Ever since that first glimpse, she’d been reading and thinking and hypothesizing. She’d gathered all the books in the house that touched on bioluminescence, either directly or circuitously, and methodically reread each of them late at night. It was an extraordinary discovery, but what to do with it—she wasn’t entirely sure. There was so much she didn’t know. So many resources she didn’t have.
In the evenings, after Wanda went to bed, Phyllis began to tinker with a scholarly paper. It felt almost unethical not to share this with a wider audience, but at the same time, without the kind of rigid, supervised experimentation she no longer had access to, her findings would be a laughingstock—if they were even published. Still. She could not ignore the data, and the data showed that the organisms glowed only in response to Wanda’s presence. They clustered around her, sensing her in the water, sensing her even when she was near the water. It was unmistakable. Phyllis had tried every variable she could think of to disrupt this pattern, but the creatures were steadfast in their attraction.
Was it an oil on her skin? The pitch of her voice? Phyllis couldn’t make sense of it. It was beyond the scientific tools at her disposal. Her most educated guess was that somewhere along the way, Wanda had acquired an intestinal bacterium that was either related to or the same as the organisms they found in the water and this was how they recognized her as one of their own. Maybe she was the origin, spreading new specimens to each suitable body of water she interacted with. Maybe it was a supernatural gift, an infection, a genetic mutation. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
A guess is not the same as knowing. Phyllis had spent her entire career seeking knowledge in one form or another, but the pursuit itself taught her infinitely more about the absence of knowledge than its presence. What is magic but science that is not yet understood? What is science but magic with an explanation? In the matter of Wanda and the local water bodies, she continued to collect data but acclimated to the idea that there were many, many more questions than answers. In this matter, and in every other. When she had been young, this truth had unsettled her. The older she got, the more she allowed it to soothe her.
Whatever secret aspirations she might have harbored to publish one more paper, to share one last thing with the outside world, laughingstock or no, they fell by the wayside as the following spring approached. The nearby cell towers were finally decommissioned after the refugee trucks ceased their evacuation efforts, and Rudder’s separation from the rest of the country became complete. She was ready for the logistics of all of this, but she wasn’t ready for the grief that slammed into her when she picked up her cell phone one morning and saw that the signal was gone. The final tether: cut. This was it. The beginning of the end. How quickly it all unraveled.
Chapter 52
Wanda lets the water slip over her head like a seamless veil without waiting to see who is coming. She doesn’t trust these whispers, but she trusts the swamp’s human remnants even less. Beneath the surface, the bulk of the manatees glimmer deep in the caves. She looks around for the curve of her boat’s hull, finds it, swims to it. On the way, she takes stock of a new vessel coming into view. A raft, by the look of its underside, a flat square sliding out into the openness of the lagoon through the channel. They’ve only just arrived, she thinks, that’s good. They’re still getting their bearings, probably transfixed by the glow of the water. There’s a chance they haven’t even seen her canoe yet. She surfaces as quietly as she can, on the opposite side of the canoe, and pulls herself aboard. This maneuver is impossible to do silently—but she does it quickly, and that’s what matters.
“Ahoy there,” the newcomer calls out. It’s as if they’re teasing her; that word, “ahoy,” that isn’t a serious word, is it? She hasn’t spoken to another person in a long time. Certain nuances have begun to drift away from her. “Don’t be scared,” they say, “I’m just here for the fresh water.”
She isn’t reassured by this, but what choice does she have? There is no way out of the lagoon but past the raft, and scrabbling up into the tangled mangroves that enclose it will only make her an easy target. Besides—the canoe. Without this vessel, she wouldn’t survive. She cannot just leave it behind.
“Hello,” Wanda ventures, still catching her breath on the bottom of her canoe. Her voice comes out crackling, a plastic bag caught in the weeds. She’s drenched; the pools of water she’s brought aboard with her are still glimmering, but faint. By the time she sits up, the lagoon has darkened. Just a strange sheen on the surface lingers.
“Did you swim?” Their voice is low and smooth. A woman, she thinks, but she’s not sure. Nuances again.