The pellet in the arm wasn’t hard to find. It was embedded in the fat just above the elbow. Petra rummaged with her finger and got it out easily. “One gone,” she said.
The shoulder pellet, however, would have to be dug out with the penknife.
For some reason, Petra was talking about the Sex Pistols now. “And that is why Johnny Rotten talks about England’s Dreaming. England has to reimagine its own mythological future and…”
Heather took the twig out of her mouth and panted like a dog.
Petra continued talking to distract her. “What do you do, Heather?”
“I was a massage therapist. I was pretty good at that.”
“And how did you end up here?”
“My husband was in Melbourne for a conference. About knees.”
Petra began to laugh. “My husband was here for a conference too! About old cars. He’s writing a book. He thought we might find some interesting specimens on the island.”
“Husbands.”
“Husbands.”
“I only really came here for the three-hour tour,” Heather added, weakly singing the three words of the Gilligan’s Island theme, which, of course, Petra had never heard.
“Are you sure you want me to keep going?” Petra asked.
“Yes.”
Heather bit down on the twig again. She bit down hard. The pain was everything. The pain was the path.
The ball in the shoulder was lodged in the muscle. Petra worked on it with her fingers and then the penknife for fifteen minutes.
Heather was drenched with sweat. She had bitten two sticks in half.
“I got it!” Petra said.
Heather gasped for breath in the sand.
She was weak. So weak.
She went down to the sea to bathe the wound.
She was her mother’s favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.
The water was warm. It cleansed her. Floated her. Helped her. She wished she could stay in the ocean, but most sharks were night feeders.
She waded out of the water and sat on the beach with her knees tucked under her chin. Petra placed a poultice of wet sand and eucalyptus leaves over the wounds.
“Are you OK?” Petra asked.
“How are the kids?”
“Fine. Sleeping,” Petra said.
“Sleeping? Really?”
“Sleeping.”
Heather nodded and found that she wanted to cry some more, but crying was a luxury and there were no tears left.
25
A black iron nothingness. An ellipsis of time. Perhaps a minute; perhaps ten thousand million years.
A nimbus of yellow goblin light.
And from the nothingness, a poker stirring the cold gray ash of sentience.
Pain, diffuse and weird. A surrender to a more urgent, primal logic. The rawness of now.
“He’s awake.”
“I see that. Will he live?”
“I doubt it. Who knows? I’ll put a couple more milligrams of morphine in his drip.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Do you want to take over?”
“No.”
Diminishing pain.
More darkness.
Another ellipsis.
26
The sun, never tiring of the human comedy, was coming up on the eastern side of the island.
Blue-dirt sky. Red-dirt sky. Yellow-dirt sky.
Heather was up on the mesa, sitting in the long grass, keeping watch.
No vehicles yet.
No movement from the ferry.
Clouds under the fading final stars.
The sea shape-shifted from rough to smooth, from black to dark green to a brilliant magenta.
It was Valentine’s Day. Tom would have remembered to get her something. He never forgot anything. He remembered big chunks of every book he’d ever read. Could recite fifty lines of poetry at a time. He had helped so many people with his knowledge of knees and ankles and everything in between. And those scumbags had killed him like he was nothing.
She looked out across the water. It was amazing to think that less than ten miles away were the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Police, lawyers, doctors, churches, hospitals, and everything you needed for civilization to work. Just across that little strip of water and over those fields. Help.
But it was no good thinking about that. The ferry was on the other shore, waiting. Waiting for the men with dogs. Trying to raft it or swim the channel with the kids would be suicidal.
She watched a plane fly toward the city. How long until someone realized that they weren’t coming home? How long until someone figured out where they’d gone? The O’Neills wouldn’t deny that they’d come over to Dutch Island; there were witnesses who would corroborate that. But that wouldn’t bother them.