A little dinghy cuts through the lagoon, captained by a young woman Wanda remembers arriving a few seasons ago. It used to be that Wanda knew everyone’s name, everyone’s history, but she can’t keep up anymore. That’s someone else’s work now. The fisherwoman whose name she can’t quite reach has come home with a good catch—Wanda can tell from the hint of satisfaction flickering across her face. She rows with an easy mastery, extending the oars and pulling them in as if they are part of her, but Wanda can tell that not much else has been easy for her. There is a heaviness on her face. The kind of loss that seeps into the bone. It is a weight Wanda recognizes. The lights spin around the hull of her boat, thickening where the blades of her oars slip into the water, showing Wanda how much they like this woman. They don’t usually pay attention to boats passing through.
Wanda leans into Bird Dog, and Bird Dog wraps an arm around her. They watch the fisherwoman tie off and disappear into the shadowy mangroves with her fish. “She reminds me of you,” Bird Dog says. Wanda replies with a gentle pat on Bird Dog’s thigh. Some things don’t need to be spoken aloud when two bodies have become one shape.
Wanda closes her eyes, and maybe she dozes a little, her head tucked into Bird Dog’s neck. It’s hard to tell the difference between sleep and wakefulness lately. It feels like she’s always in the process of drifting away—a tethered vessel wandering the waves until the line goes taut and tugs it back. One of these days, the line will slip its moor and she’ll keep drifting.
Bird Dog feels it, too. “Are you sleeping?” she asks, hungry for more moments.
“No,” Wanda replies, although maybe she was.
“Liar. Look.” Bird Dog points and Wanda sees one meteor, then another, darting across the exposed sky overhead. There are murmurs as others come to the edges of their platforms to watch. She can hear the children getting excited by each new streak, can see the dim outlines of their little arms pointing. This meteor shower falls every summer; she’d forgotten to look for them this year, but here they are anyway.
“Phyllis woke me up in the middle of the night to see this, once. When I was a girl.” Thinking of her old friend, Wanda feels tears prickling in the corners of her eyes. After all this time, the aches have grown softer but also deeper. They both know the looping shape of pain—it changes and quiets but never ends. There is a strange comfort in its constancy. Memories of what was lost are also reminders of what was held. She feels that tug again, a current asking her to follow it into new waters. She’d like to stay, but she isn’t scared to go.
Across the lagoon, Wanda notices the young woman reappear. She sits cross-legged on one of the platforms close to the water and begins to clean her fish. She glances up at the meteor shower from time to time, but she is intent on her knife work. She doesn’t notice Wanda watching her, and the beauty unfolding above does not distract her from her task. It’s familiar, this focus. Wanda remembers when the labor of survival was all she had.
As the young woman works, the lights slowly begin to congregate at the edge of her platform, forming a deep band of brightness in front of her. Focusing on her cuts, she doesn’t see them at first. They drift toward her from every edge of the lagoon, their luminosity gathering until finally she notices. She puts aside her knife and watches, uncertain at first, then curious. When their collected radiance is undeniable, she slowly kneels down to lay the palm of her hand against the water. An introduction is made. Wanda can’t see her face, but she can feel the young fisherwoman’s longing—to be part of this awareness that is deeper than she can imagine. And her fear—of what it might mean to join. The meteors fall, thicker, faster. The water-bound lights spin and brighten, asking the young woman if she is willing to do this work. To keep them, and to be kept by them. The whole swamp pauses, held between two palms of light, above and below, listening for her answer, but Wanda doesn’t need to hear it. She already knows how this story ends.
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Gratitude to—
Jen Gates, my beloved agent and friend, who has been my champion since the beginning, and whose patience and insight and support have seen me through the last decade.
The entire team at Aevitas, but especially Allison Warren and Erin Files.
Karen Kosztolnyik for giving The Light Pirate a home. Also, Rachael Kelly, Ben Sevier, Luria Rittenberg, Laura Cherkas, Andy Dodds, Theresa DeLucci, Alexis Gilbert, Andrew Duncan, Joe Benincase, and everyone else at Grand Central who made this book what it is.
The Kerouac Project and The Studios of Key West for the time and space to work on an entirely different novel that was not meant to be, but which gave way to this one instead.
Chuck Peters, Jessy Van Horn, and Michael Jordan for advice on ecology/forestry, data collection, and ham radio emergency services, respectively. All the errors are mine.
Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.
P. C. Cast—I shudder to think how many years it took me to fulfill this promise, but I did not forget. Thank you.
Lauren Smith, with the impeccable taste and keen eye. Meredith Hall and Shane Abrams, for thoughtful reads and profound insights. Yana Tallon-Hicks, Malia Márquez, Sally Clegg, Amber Schaefer, Devin Conroy, and Nikita Gale, just because.
My mother, for help with plants and spreading serenity wherever you go. My father, for knowing how things work and always being prepared.
Ofurhe Igbinedion, for all of it.
The many climate activists, frontline communities, and environmental & economic justice organizations who are on the ground, doing the work of protecting our natural resources and imagining a sustainable future.
A different kind of acknowledgment, one that I feel is particularly important for a story that, at its core, is about land: This book is set in a fictional town but also in the actual locale of southeastern Florida, a place that was violently stolen from the Indigenous tribes who have lived there for thousands of years. The setting of this story is the unceded homeland of the Seminole and Miccosukee people, who live there to this day, and was also the ancestral home of the Tequesta, Calusa, and Jeaga Native nations. I want to honor these people and their communities—past, present, and future—for their work as stewards, activists, and visionaries. My profound gratitude, respect, and a portion of my proceeds from this book will go to the Indigenous Environmental Network. Visit www.ienearth.org to learn more about their work.
READING GROUP GUIDE FOR
THE LIGHT PIRATE
Discussion Questions
The English word “hurricane” is adopted from the Spanish word huracán, which is derived from Juracán, the name the Taíno, the Indigenous people of the Caribbean, bestowed upon their God of chaos and destruction. Hurricane Wanda, however, is depicted as a powerful yet impersonal force: “The hurricane takes what yields. Nothing more; nothing less.” How do these two interpretations affect your personal feelings about natural disasters—and their consequences?
The novel unfolds in four parts: power, water, light, and time. How does The Light Pirate’s unique structure mirror Wanda’s journey from childhood to adulthood while also speaking to the changes taking hold of the natural world?