“Ready,” she said.
And in the center of the clock, inside the now—choices gather, waiting to be made. The swamp is alive with information. Dangers and saviors. Lovers and predators. The lie is in the separation. The truth is always growing.
Chapter 58
Wanda returns to this carefree community again the next night, and the next. As the moon waxes, she watches these people leave and return, work and rest in its light. She listens to them talk. And the more she watches and listens, the more baffled she feels. They are kind to one another. Sometimes they argue, but mostly they discuss fishing and trapping, harvesting fruits and tubers from the swamp, repairing boats, sewing clothes, child-rearing, cleaning, building…they are engaged in the work of survival, not plunder. Just as Wanda is. But they do this work together.
Wanda counts six of them. There’s an older man with very dark skin and a shock of silver hair—he’s the one who Bird Dog called Freddy. He moves slowly getting in and out of the little rowboat, but he knows a great deal about fishing. Wanda can tell; he never comes back empty-handed. A pale woman with fiery red hair that spills out in a wave from beneath her ball cap has a son who is quiet and goes everywhere she goes. Her name is Gem, and his is Dade. The boy is young, Wanda guesses a few years younger than she was when Kirby died. It’s good, she thinks, that his mother is with him in this place. He seems fragile, like he wouldn’t last very long on his own. The mother is good with traps, always coming home with squirrels and possums hanging from her fist by their tails, and the boy is good with knots. Wanda sometimes watches him sit on the roof and toy with bits of rope: tying, untying, tying again.
There’s a couple: a man and a woman. The woman’s belly is as round as a melon. Wanda sees how everyone likes to touch her stomach, how much she enjoys the attention. Her name is Ouita, and she sings quietly when she’s alone in the house, which is rare—songs that tickle Wanda’s memory but that she doesn’t know the words to anymore. Her man is loud and smiles often. They call him Skipper, and it’s clear that these two belong to one another. Ouita comes to kiss him when she hears his boat brush up against the house, before he’s even had a chance to disembark. She leans out the window while he leans in, and in these moments Wanda suddenly feels that she shouldn’t be watching, but it’s hard to look away. She’s never seen love like this, nor has she ever seen a boat like his—wooden and hand-carved, the lines of it as smooth as the curve of a tree trunk, rippling through the water like living things do. Ouita made this for him, Wanda learns. It has never occurred to Wanda to make such a thing.
And then there is Bird Dog, who comes and goes. Sometimes she disappears for days, but she always comes back. When she does return, she brings all kinds of treasures—old fabric, hand tools, a spool of wire, wild mushrooms and herbs, sometimes even bright plastic toys for Ouita’s baby. Wanda understands now why they call her Bird Dog. She is their seeker. The longer Wanda watches, the more she wishes to be found also. Her suspicions of this little clan gradually fade. Now she envies them. She goes on watching, night after night, neglecting her own chores so that she can be close to this strange family—unable to join them, unwilling to stay away.
When she’s not spying from among the ruins, she wanders and thinks about the night Phyllis put a gun in her barely awake hands. The night she left any vestiges of childhood behind. It was either kill Corey and his father or watch them murder Phyllis. She would have been next. She knew this then, and she knows it now. Even so. It changed her. She’s always wondered what happened to the other twin. The boy and the girl; the cruel one and the quiet one. When they were young, Wanda feared the first and was fascinated by the second. Little has changed. Corey may be gone, but the kick of the gun, the sound of the shots, the gore of bullets entering bodies—these things are not forgotten. In the years after, Phyllis tried to absolve her of these deaths, but taking a life, two lives, wasn’t something she could just wash away.
And the sister. Brie. Bird Dog. The girl with the sunburn and the pale blue eyes. How different she looks now. For the first time in many years, Wanda wonders if she looks different also. Touching her own face, she can’t tell. The two men must have left Bird Dog behind that night—but why? Wanda imagines her, somewhere halfway between the child she remembers and the woman she sees now, waiting for her father and brother to return. Just waiting and waiting. How long did it take her to realize they weren’t coming back? And how did she survive all these years alone? Wanda catches herself. Not alone, that’s how.
The next time Bird Dog leaves on one of her trips, Wanda follows. She can tell from the way they all say goodbye that Bird Dog will be gone for longer than one night, and without really thinking too hard about it, she lets her get a head start and then pushes off after her. Her ears are sharp and the moon is almost full; in this way she follows easily, at a distance. They paddle through the night, and it isn’t until dawn nudges up against the horizon that Wanda worries about where she’ll weather the daylight. It occurs to her that she isn’t sure where they are. This is beyond her radius, a direction she rarely ventures in.
There’s something familiar about the ruins they pass, but she can’t remember what they used to be. When the sun is beginning to crest, Bird Dog heads for the only building still standing above the water line and disappears inside. Wanda looks for nearby shade, but there aren’t many options: a young mangrove island growing up out of the middle of a parking lot, decrepit streetlights looming above it, or a more mature canopy back the way they came. The young mangroves aren’t thick enough to shade her yet. It’ll have to be the older grove—it doesn’t have a clear line of sight to where Bird Dog is resting, but Wanda is out of options. She’s about to circle back toward the mature trees when a voice rings out across the water.
“Wanda,” Bird Dog calls. “You can sleep here.”
Her thoughts whirl. How did she give herself away? She was so careful. So quiet. It’s been a long time since anyone got the better of her in the swamp.
“I figure you been watching me long enough to know I ain’t my brother.” Wanda is still so shocked she can’t move, but she gathers herself enough to assess this statement and find it logical. “Come on, if I was gonna hurt you, you’d be hurt by now. I’m the one should be scared.”
Hesitant, Wanda paddles toward Bird Dog’s voice. The sun is beginning to edge higher, the sky coming alive with soft lilac brushstrokes. She can just barely see Bird Dog’s face, propped up on her hands in the second-story window, the first floor almost entirely full of water. “You knew I was watching?”
“Sure I knew, just didn’t see any need to rush you. You got a right to make up your own mind about us. About me.”
Wanda considers this. “Don’t know what I think, really.”
“So then stay,” Bird Dog says. “Find out.”
Here, the opening she yearned for, the invitation, being offered to her. It’s impossible to say no, not after all that wanting. So she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and says yes.
They sit on opposite sides of a room that used to be someone’s office. There are three windows, hung with rags cut in strips to let the breeze pass through. Two face north, one east. Good ventilation, not too much solar gain. Wanda realizes that Bird Dog has chosen this place carefully, has probably stayed here many times. Reading her mind, Bird Dog says, “This is my stopover when I go south.”