For the first time in a long time, she cries—big, choking sobs—the whole time worrying about her tears. She needs that moisture for other things, she tells herself, this is a waste, an extravagance, a careless use of precious resources. But even so, she cries, and even so, the price of these tears is tangible, exacting, steep.
Chapter 59
The place Wanda chose for them was a good one. Phyllis recognized it as the lagoon where Wanda fell in back when they’d just begun to spend their afternoons together, but so much had changed in the years since she was last here. The land was gone, to start, replaced by ripples and a cloudy sheen. Many of the trees she’d tagged had succumbed to the brackish water, their rotting trunks still teetering among the living like pale ghosts. Others had flourished, crowding out their malnourished neighbors and sending down seedlings by the hundreds.
At first glance, Phyllis mourned all the delicate mosses and ferns that had been lost beneath the rising water, but she was soon distracted by a riotous new generation of aquatic plant life. Everywhere she turned she found something new to admire: sugarcane plume grass and duckweed, cattail and maidencane and bulrush; water hyacinth, water spinach, water lily, water shield. Little yellow lantana flowers that sprouted wherever they could. Wild coffee that grew in the cracks of tree trunks and staghorn ferns that hung from their branches. And others, plants she didn’t even recognize. It was, in many ways, a hopeful place. A little platform, barely wide enough for the two of them to lie side by side, was already there, built into the trees. She remembered all the times Wanda had disappeared with the canoe. So this was where she’d come. Always a few inexplicable steps ahead.
“Yes,” Phyllis said, taking in the clumsy platform, the verdant new growth, the strategically hidden entrance. Additions were already taking shape in her mind. “It’s good. It’s what we need.”
For all its beauty, it was most importantly a practical place. A safe place. Many of the trees were sturdy enough to take on plywood and nails and human weight. The water was deep enough for them to come and go in the canoe. The canopy was thick and the underbrush rose up like an impenetrable, snarled screen to deflect unwelcome eyes. There was little chance of anyone happening upon them by accident. As much as any wild place could, it welcomed them and it held them. It became the refuge they needed.
The longer they spent in the swamp, the more Phyllis realized that she had no idea what she was doing. The certainty she had felt watching the house burn, then seeing this place for the first time, the clarity of what was to come, did not last. How could it? She was a woman accustomed to planning, to knowing what came next and being ready for it. This—this she was not ready for. This she had not planned. But here it was anyway.
They started by widening the platform Wanda had already built, and from there, Wanda began to expand into the trees, building more platforms as high as the boughs would allow, while Phyllis sat down below and worked on weaving thatch and cutting wood to size. She was frequently nauseous and dizzy, plagued by migraines that lasted for days on end, but she kept her pain to herself. She knew what a traumatic brain injury was, and she knew there was little she could do about it. There was no need to add to her young friend’s burden, which, in the aftermath of the invasion, was visibly substantial.
The work was good for Wanda. Good for them both. The tree house took shape. In many ways, the trees were their architects, showing them where they could build and where they couldn’t. How high. How heavy. And the ruined town gave them their materials. Their nest among the boughs made sense in a way the homes of Rudder never had. It belonged here. And on some days, they belonged here, too. On others, not so much. Their first week, a torrential rainstorm washed away a few of the lighter hand tools, a ball of twine, and an entire box of batteries. During their second, Wanda encountered a colony of fire ants living in one of the trees she’d planned to build in and fell at least fifteen feet into the water as she scrambled to escape them. The stings lingered for days, but the water caught her gently. More weeks went by. Then months. Then a year.
A great many creatures watched as these two humans settled in, their eyes wide and mirrored in the dark, hanging from tree branches or lurking among the exposed roots or peering up from the warm murk of the water: curious and wary. Even as Phyllis and Wanda grew more comfortable with the shape of their lives here, the wild continued to remind them that this place was not theirs: an alligator heaving itself up out of the water to snatch a string of fish Phyllis set down while she went to fetch her knife, Wanda waking up to find a snake slithering across her legs. They learned to share.
Phyllis stored a pile of blank notebooks she didn’t remember packing in a plastic tub and began to record the daily happenings of the lagoon. It was an extravagant thing to have brought, but it felt good to return to this habit. She hadn’t realized that she missed it. The years since Kirby died and Wanda came to live with her had edged out her careful documentation of local ecology—all that time spent exploring and noticing was time she’d suddenly no longer had. But now, without the careful cultivation of the garden, the chickens, the house, as Wanda grew more and more capable, as the demands of life in the swamp became ever simpler, she found that there was once again space for such things.
In her previous life, these observations had been carefully measured, recorded, compared, always with an eye toward the scientific method, an aim to collate her findings and perhaps one day to publish. In this life, her note-taking looked very different. She still collected some hard data, but in between the numbers were thoughts, feelings, sketches, little details that had no place in a research paper but that meant something to her. Details like a clumsy moth, drawn to the beam of her flashlight. The congregation of egrets that habitually descended in the very early mornings, standing in the shallow water and pecking at tiny fish that tried to dart past their spindly black legs. A thick carpet of pink water lilies blooming, making the water’s surface blush with their flowers; the black aphids and grass carp that arrived soon after to munch on all those beautiful petals. There was so much to notice.
But of the lagoon’s many inhabitants, Phyllis continued to observe Wanda most closely of all. It was miraculous, how much she had grown. How tall she was, how strong. How capable. How many years had it been since she’d made space in her life for a curious little girl in men’s T-shirts? It felt like just a moment ago. But here was this woman—brave and ruthless and tender all at once. Wanda was doing the work of building the nest and then maintaining it, of fishing, trapping, fetching water, and foraging. Phyllis helped where she could, but her headaches got worse, not better. The nausea, too. And lately she couldn’t seem to remember the smallest things: how long since she last ate, where they kept the sewing kit, what task Wanda had asked her to complete. Her memory was becoming a gap-toothed smile.
During their third summer there, a heat wave settled over the swamp like a thick blanket and never lifted. They didn’t have the tools to measure heat in degrees anymore, but Phyllis wrote down her guesses anyway: 103? 105? They began to rise earlier and earlier, trying to capture the coolest hours for their work. In the middle of the day they rested, then resumed their chores in the darkness. Even as the seasons changed, the heat didn’t ebb. If anything, it increased, thickening the air until just breathing was a task. Eventually they transitioned into an altogether nocturnal life. In the dark, Phyllis found a whole new world to observe—bats and insects, opossums and raccoons, night-scented orchids and evening primrose and moonflowers. Feral cats stalked the trees, growing ever wilder, drawn to this pair of humans but terrified of them at the same time. Once she was almost sure she saw a Florida panther loping through the underbrush, a species long thought to be extinct.