“Yeah.”
“I never seen the water do that here. It’s pretty.”
“It’s probably just the bacteria,” Wanda says, surprised she can find that word after all this time. One of Phyllis’s old theories. It occurs to her that this is almost a conversation now. The stranger asks her name, and without thinking, she answers: “Wanda.”
Even this, an exchange of greetings, of observations, the offering of her name, this is the closest she’s come to another person in a long time. A living person. Bodies gone crisp in their boats do not count. She’s missed it. She knows what loneliness is—how could she not?—but the absence of loneliness has become less familiar. The sensation of closeness frightens and thrills her at the same time.
“Wanda,” the woman repeats softly. “Like the hurricane.” Wanda forgot how much her name means, how clearly it marks her. It’s never been just any name. The thrill curdles to fear. It would have been so easy to swim into the swamp grasses and hide until the stranger left—but again, no, she couldn’t risk someone taking the canoe. She did what she had to. And she will do more, if she must. She feels again for the knife on her hip.
“I’m Bird Dog,” the woman says. The strangeness of this name is eclipsed by everything else that makes this moment strange. None of the fear coursing through Wanda is present in this person’s voice. The opposite. She is calm, nonchalant. As if this—a meeting of drifters—is not notable. Wanda can hear that she’s already started filling her bottles. She lets go of the knife. The water has returned to its customary blackness. “I was going to eat something before I turn back,” Bird Dog continues. “There’s enough, if you wanted. It’s just papaya. I could cut you a piece.”
Wanda squints through the dark, but there is nothing more her eyes can tell her.
Even though she knows she should leave, she stays. She does want something to eat, actually. But more importantly, she wants to keep talking. She wants to not feel afraid. She wants this feeling to last a little longer: of speaking aloud and being spoken to. Phyllis would not approve. She always taught Wanda that if you see another person on the water, you hide. And if you can’t hide, you run. But Phyllis isn’t here anymore; she couldn’t have known how much it would hurt to be so alone.
“All right. Thanks.” Wanda paddles toward her and after a minute, she hears the stranger finishing with the water bottles, then cutting into the fruit. Wanda can smell it. The juice drips onto the deck, sticky. She already knows it’s perfectly ripe.
“Here it is,” she says. Wanda collects the offering by touch, trailing her fingers along the raft, following the trail of fruit juice to the flesh that sits, waiting for her in a sweet, mild crescent on the edge of the stranger’s deck. She tries to eat it quietly, but she’s hungry, and the silence is not thick enough to mask her urgency. Bird Dog eats, too, the smack of their mouths against the fruit filling the lagoon. Bird Dog cuts another slice. Wanda can hear her blade sawing into the skin, then slipping through the fruit flesh.
“There’s more,” Bird Dog says when she hears the wet plop of Wanda’s rind, sucked clean and dropped into the water. A treat for the manatees. A second later, there’s a break in the water’s surface as the two manatees rise in unison, chuffing out through their nostrils, inhaling deeply. A leisurely crunching as one of them snacks on the rind. Wanda can almost smell its breath, warm and earthy and a little sour. She feels Bird Dog go tense on her raft.
“Only manatees,” Wanda says.
Bird Dog relaxes and Wanda takes the second piece of fruit. They listen to the manatees splashing around near the musk grass and the water lettuces that grow at the edges of the lagoon. “They’re hungry, too,” Bird Dog says, and laughs. It’s a good laugh. Belly-deep and slow. The kind of laugh that starts low down and bubbles up—pure, like spring water. “You remember what folks used to call them?”
Wanda thinks, but her memory of the Before time is cloudy. “Sea…something.”
“Sea cows.” Bird Dog laughs again, because it’s just another saying, nickname, object, idea that is obsolete. Cows don’t exist here anymore. Or pastures, or grain, or milk. A shorthand that is now too long. “Someday we’ll call cows land manatees, don’t you think?”
“That sounds right,” Wanda says. “Or unicorns.” Bird Dog laughs even harder. Wanda allows a smile that no one can see, pleased with herself for making a joke.
“You been out here a long time?” Bird Dog asks.
“Since the start of it.”
“Alone?”
“Not…” Wanda pauses. Admitting solitude is admitting weakness. “Not always.”
“I’m fishing tomorrow, near the old marina.” Bird Dog rinses her knife. “If you wanted, you could come.” Her invitation is spoken softly, as if to speak it any louder would be to reveal how much she wants Wanda to say yes. But Wanda can hear it anyway. The wanting. As if Bird Dog shouted it. She can hear everything in this lagoon: the scamper of tiny feet in the branches of the mangroves. Manatees snacking among the grasses. The lapping of the water against the hull of her canoe. Mangrove leaves rubbing up against each other. Frogs, singing in the backs of their throats. And the faint, fast thrum of Bird Dog’s pulse. If you wanted, you could come. She does want. But wanting and surviving do not always go hand in hand.
“I could, I think,” Wanda replies. She isn’t ready to leave, but there’s nothing left to do here. Her water jugs are full. The papaya has been eaten. Even the manatees seem to have departed. Everything Phyllis ever taught her about how to survive, how to stay safe, swirls, sinks. And overlaying it, this new feeling, warm and soft and expansive. The spaciousness of wanting something she doesn’t need. It feels good, but she is afraid that when she finally dips her paddle back into the water and propels herself toward home, away from Bird Dog, it will fade.
“After the sun goes down,” Bird Dog says. “The flagpole?”
“The flagpole,” Wanda agrees.
They leave the lagoon together, through the channel, foliage drooping down over their heads, roots reaching up to grab at their boats. Bird Dog goes first and Wanda is impressed with how she handles her vessel; the shape of a raft is hard to manage in these narrow spaces, but what little Wanda can see looks effortless. They say goodbye near the wind chimes. Wanda waits to make sure Bird Dog is gone and there’s no one else lingering in the shadows to follow her home before she departs. Phyllis taught her to suspect such tricks. Remembering this, she also remembers how dangerous humans can be.
Heading back to her nest, she tries to convince herself not to go tomorrow, firmly assuring the Phyllis that lives on in her mind that she would never take such a risk. But even as she promises her dear dead friend she won’t, a part of her knows she will. Something is awake now, some part of her that will not, cannot, go back to sleep.
Dawn is creeping close by the time Wanda returns home. A growing light sizzles against the horizon. Heat rises from the water. She leans into the last stretch, pushing herself harder, paddling faster, driving the blades down like she is trying to punish the water, or herself, or both. The fullness of the night follows her no matter how quickly she goes—the forgotten sensation of a human being’s company, of using words, sharing food, making plans; the manatees’ skin on hers, moving so slowly, so gently, touching her like she was one of their own; and being surrounded by the glow that has been chasing her since childhood, cool and kaleidoscopic and fearless. She has been empty for so long. It’s strange to feel this full.