Marrow Island (8 page)

I had toast and coffee and listened to the radio while I waited. After a while, I heard the wheels of a car coming down the lane and pulling in the drive behind my car. Chris Lelehalt stepped out.

“Shit,” I said. I took a breath and met him at the door.

He nodded at me. “Hi there, ma’am.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and read, then looked up again. “Lucie Bowen?”

“That’s me.” He didn’t seem to remember me. He nodded again and looked over his notes, then half turned and looked over his shoulder toward Rookwood. He was a handsome guy—clean-shaven, so you could see his features—broad-nosed, dark-eyed, high cheekbones. He looked like he drank plenty of beer and probably had been doing so since he was fourteen, like a lot of the kids on the islands, but he still looked like the boy I had known, too. He looked back at me.

“You’ve gotten older,” he said.

“You, too.”

He shrugged.

“Actually, I wouldn’t have recognized you, but Marla Sharpe told me you were back to check on the place.” He indicated the cottage.

“Ah.” I nodded. “She’s the lady with the low-down on Orwell, I guess.”

He smiled. “She means well. The old-timers, you know. They keep track.”

I let him inside and offered him coffee, but he declined. It was almost ten o’clock. He was working a split shift; another deputy was on maternity leave. So I walked him across the road to Rookwood. On the way he asked me questions about when I arrived on the island, how long I was staying, how my mom was doing. I couldn’t tell if this was an official interrogation or just small talk.

When we reached the door, he raised his hand to knock, then stopped himself and asked, “Why did you go in, again?”

I explained about the light, about not seeing any sign of Jacob Swenson all day. I played up the family connection: my grandparents had been caretakers of Rookwood; I had run in and out freely as a child. He seemed satisfied with this answer and knocked hard, opened the door, calling inside.

“Mr. Swenson, it’s the Sheriff’s Department.”

The second visit went more or less as the first visit had gone, except that we turned on the lights. I led Chris on the route I had taken up the staircase, along the hall, and to the bedroom where the lamps were still lit. Chris looked over everything in the room, then he asked me to stand in the front entry while he looked over the rest of the house. It was a large house and I stood there for twenty minutes, listening to his footsteps, doors opening and closing. He had stopped calling out Jacob’s name.

When he came back through the entry, turning off lights behind him, he said, “He’s not here.”

We walked back to my cottage.

“Does it look suspicious to you?” I asked.

“I can’t say,” he said. “But I’ll make some calls tomorrow and try to track him down. We’ll come back over if we need to.”

I wasn’t satisfied, but I knew I wouldn’t get a better answer. Even small-town police were tight-lipped about investigations.

I spent the next day at the coffee shop on Anchorage Street with my laptop, looking for information on Jacob Swenson. I found out more about the Swenson Trust, Maura’s foundation. She had donated land all over the San Juan Islands to the state and county for parks, for wildlife conservation. The foundation still held private acreage on several islands, including Marrow and Orwell, which could be accessed for study with a letter of interest. The address listed was a PO box in Orwell Village. There was a picture of Jacob Swenson on the foundation’s website, a polished and combed man in a tweed suit, younger than I had imagined, in stylish tortoiseshell glasses. He looked like the template for a male humanities professor. But as for personal information, I found little. Two articles in the
Island Times
mentioned him in relation to cultural events on Orwell. He had been on the town council for a time and was referred to as “the dapper councilman” and an “inveterate bachelor.” (Code for
gay
in the passive-aggressively discreet vernacular of small towns.)

When I tried to research Marrow Colony, I found only passing references on the blogs of Northwest environmentalists and Evergreen students. A few cruising guides mentioned that the Colony welcomed day visitors on their shores but discouraged campers. Their small harbor couldn’t accommodate anchorage for many boats. Their lavender goat cheese was a favorite at the Orwell farmers’ market.

I called the number for the Colony that Katie had written at the bottom of her letter and was sent directly to voicemail. The soft voice of a young woman with a Canadian accent told me that Marrow Colony messages were checked once a day, but that calls might not be returned immediately, due to the intermittent reception.

“This message is for Kathryn Paley,” I said. “Please tell her Lucie Bowen is on Orwell, and that I’m coming to see her as soon as I can find a boat.”

That evening I packed my backpack and an overnight bag with clothing for three days. I found after some inquiries in town that Joshua Coombs, an old captain from my dad’s days of working at the refinery, still ferried people to Marrow. I called his number and spoke to his wife, who told me the boat was already going to Marrow in the morning and I needed to be at the marina at 6:30 a.m.

I didn’t hear back from Katie. I barely slept all night, knowing I had to be up early, thinking about seeing her again, half worried that she wouldn’t be there, for some reason, that she had left in the time between her letter to me and my arrival.

Joshua Coombs squinted at me as I handed him my bags. It was just getting light.

“What’d you say your name was?” he asked.

“Bowen,” I said. I knew this was the name that interested him. “Lucie,” I added.

He stowed my bags but said nothing.

I looked up at the tops of the trees on the shore. Just standing on the dock made me queasy. I had forgotten about seasickness. Smaller boats had always set me off, my internal ballast shifting with the waves. I had thrown up on every boat my parents ever took me on as a kid. It was a family joke to hand me a sick bag with my life jacket and see how long I lasted before my breakfast came back up.

I had been so absorbed in my thoughts about seeing Katie again, I hadn’t thought about taking a pill for the boat. Katie’s visits to see me in Seattle during summer vacation had always brought on anxiety—an acid ache in my guts—my mind and body absorbed in the anticipation: What would she look like? How would she have changed? Would I still feel the same about her? It was the same every time; I was never sure if I wanted that heart-punched love to have vanished, or if I could stand to carry it around for another year. Every time I saw her again after some time, it was the same, though: she lit me up inside. It was a feeling I wouldn’t know again until I met Matt, though that fire had burned out within two years. What could ten years have done to my feelings for Katie?

Coombs gave me a hand, and I stepped up into the boat, a twin-hull catamaran, smaller than the older monohull he had captained to ferry the ArPac workers but decent: big enough for eight to ten, with a galley, some bunks, and a head below decks. I wondered whether the seasickness would still be a problem—casting my mind back over the years, looking for times when I had been on anything smaller than a commuter ferry since I was twelve, when we left the islands. I hadn’t been on a fishing boat; I hadn’t been sailing.

I was watching the shore, trying to get my sea legs, when Coombs handed me a cup of tea from a thermos.

“Going to pay your respects to your pa, are you?”

I looked at him blankly, not as surprised by a local with a long memory anymore, and said nothing. He poured himself a cup. I sat down and sipped the tea; it was scalding, faintly minty. I took deep breaths to calm rising nerves and blew them out over the steaming cup.

“My wife makes this tea from herbs in her garden,” Coombs said, pronouncing the “h” in
herbs
and drawing the word out. He took a swig from his enamelware mug, though it must have burned as it went down, because he coughed.

“Oswego tea,
she calls it. Settles the stomach,” he said, after choking down the rest, somehow managing to sound both skeptical and proud of his wife’s command of folk wisdom.

“Thank you, I appreciate it,” I mustered.

“I remember your dad,” he kept right on. “I remember every one of the nine who didn’t make it, but especially the few I didn’t ever bring back.”

“There were only three,” I said, and he grunted. “You brought most of them back.”

I looked away. There was a man walking up the dock now, with a pack and a sleeping roll. It took me some concentration to recognize my companion at the clerk’s office.

“Is this our other passenger?” My voice caught in my throat on the word
passenger
. I took another sip of tea. I felt forlorn: I didn’t want to be on this boat with him, making small talk while I tried not to vomit. Why would he be going to Marrow?

Coombs hollered down to him, and Carey tossed him the sleep roll and hauled in the bag himself. When he saw me, he looked surprised and looked to Coombs—for an introduction, maybe. But Coombs just handed him a cup of steaming Oswego tea and went about pulling up anchor. Carey looked at the cup in his hand as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“Good morning,” he finally said to me.

I lifted my teacup in acknowledgment and took a deep breath as the anchor came up. Carey sat down next to me. He was wearing a uniform this time, and the patch on his nylon parka said
FOREST SERVICE
. A park ranger. There was a park on Marrow Island, Fort Union, closed since the earthquake. We watched Coombs alternately whistling and cursing, carrying on a conversation with the boat’s various instruments.

“This is strange,” Carey said after a minute.

“It is,” I said. “You shouldn’t sit so close to me.”

“Oh—I’m sorry.” He moved to the bench opposite me. “I didn’t mean—”

“No—that’s no good either,” I said, imagining losing it on the deck between us or, worse, right onto his official khakis.

He stood up, but the boat was moving now, and he looked around, unsure of where to go. I could feel a rise in my throat every time I swallowed. My chest felt heavy.

“I’ll just sit up here.” He gestured to the cabin. “I apologize—”

“It’s not you,” I managed to get out. “I get seasick.”

He stopped and looked at me.

“Oh. That’s not strange,” he said matter-of-factly.

“If you say so.”

“I understand. Don’t worry about it,” he said. He was earnest, but there was a languorous undertone to everything he said, as if nothing could surprise him. He stood looking at me, then sat next to me again, but with about two feet between us. I didn’t object.

“It feels like the water knows I don’t belong on it, and it’s trying to toss me back on land,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on words, on talking to him and talking myself out of the feeling.

The engine picked up speed as we left the harbor, and the forward motion became more rhythmic. When the wave of nausea passed, I realized that I had been leaning over at an awkward angle, with my head practically between my knees. I straightened up and leaned back. Carey stared off into the distance. After a moment he glanced back at me. I must have looked green, but he had the decency not to notice. He offered his hand. I switched my cup to the other hand and took his with my warm one.

“Carey,” he said. “We didn’t meet properly yesterday.”

“Lucie,” I said. His fingertips were cold, but I felt an urge to hold on to his hand. Tethered to him for that moment, my insides calmed, steadied by another body.

“You’re a park ranger?” I asked as I let go of him, hoping he hadn’t noticed my hesitation, the way my hand fell to the bench between us, bracing.

“Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”

“Journalist,” I answered, watching his expression. He seemed undeterred, which wasn’t always the case with government employees. “I write about the environment.”

He nodded. “What are you doing out here?”

“An old friend lives out here, at Marrow Colony,” I said. “Have you heard of it?”

“It’s a farm collective or something like that, right?”

“Something like that—we’ll see. This is my first time.”

“Strange place for a farm—given the history. I suppose the land came pretty cheap . . . ?” He trailed off. He seemed to expect me to fill in the blanks.

“I guess so.” I shrugged, but I was thinking about it myself. How the Colony had ended up on Marrow, and how they had managed to live on the island for so long, after the devastation that occurred there.

Orwell was getting smaller and smaller in the wake behind us. My eyes started to tear up from the early morning chill, my cheeks and ears burning. I was wearing a wool sweater under my life jacket, and under my jeans and cotton T-shirt, an old pair of silk long underwear that had belonged to my mother. She had loaned me the long underwear for a camping trip in high school, and I had kept them, remembering how she used to wash them by hand and hang them to dry in our little bathroom on Orwell.

Coombs hollered something over his shoulder, but I couldn’t hear. Carey went to have a word and came back. He sat down and leaned down, closer to my ear.

“He said it might be rough ahead. Almost there.”

The swells hit. I felt it in my lungs first, in the cavity of my chest. A sudden vacancy, then a swift welling up. Empty, then full. Brimming. I broke a sweat and my vision perforated into thousands of pricks of colorful light, like pixels. I managed to turn and lean as far over the edge of the boat as I could to throw up. We hit another swell and I lurched forward. I felt Carey’s hands on my waist, holding me in the boat while I puked.

When I was empty and the worst passed, Carey helped me back to my seat and put his coat around me. He poured me more tea from Coombs’s thermos. Then he sat right up next to me and started talking, like a voluble stranger at a bar.

He was new to Washington, he told me. He had been in Montana before, at Glacier. I leaned over with my elbows on my knees, and he did the same, so that I could hear his voice, right next to me, over the motor. I sipped my tea and listened, tried to concentrate on what he was talking about: wildland firefighting, forestry school, working for the government. Chris Lelehalt had deputized him that day at the clerk’s office; most park rangers are deputized; many carried firearms.