Swamplandia! (48 page)

Unlike me, Osceola spent that first year on the mainland sleeping like a paralytic in our new apartment bedroom and going nowhere at night, never entertaining a single ghost. Her “powers” did not interest her anymore, because she was drugged. When we started at Rocklands High, a psychiatrist put Ossie on a variety of helpful, beekeeping-type medications, yellow and root-beer brown tablets that were supposed to thin the ghostly voices in her head to a pleasant drone. “Let’s try Osceola on this prescription,” he said confidently. “I get great results with patients I try on this medication.” And I remember that the verb “to
try” in relation to my sister really bothered me, as if the psychiatrist had magical dice that he could keep rolling until we got a saner version of Ossie. I remember her doctor’s office as a logged woods of glossy oak end tables, sofas, “antique” chairs. It did not strike me or impress me in the least. Loomis was just like this. Our new apartment was carpeted and wallpapered in rusty browns, a palette that reminded me of dead squirrels. I don’t know if those pills helped my sister. Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.

One regret that I still keep alive is that I never showed anybody the red Seth. Not even Ossie; why didn’t I tell Ossie or Kiwi about the miraculous hatchling right away? Sometimes I’ll let myself wonder: Where might she be right now, if she survived? In what cave or slough, on what grassless island? It’s an unlikely idea but it’s not impossible. Alligators in the wild can live for seventy years, and possibly even longer. By now she would have reached her full adult weight and length. Maybe she swam back to the island that we used to call Swamplandia! and is floating her scarlet eyes around our old canals. When I’m awake, I can’t seem to draw a stable picture of the red Seth in my mind’s eye anymore—it feels like trying to light a candle on a rainy night, your hands cupped and your cheeks puffed and the whole wet world conspiring to snatch the flame away from you. But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.

I think the Chief was right about one thing: the show really must go on. Our Seths are still thrashing inside us in an endless loop. I like to think our family is winning. But my brother and my sister and I rarely talk about it anymore—that would be as pointless as making a telephone call to say, “Kiwi, are you there? Listen: my blood is circulating,” or, “Howdy, Ossie, it’s today, are you breathing?” We used to have this cardboard clock on Swamplandia! and you could move the tiny red hands to whatever time you wanted,
NEXT SHOW AT ___:___ O’CLOCK!

During the years that I spent lost in the swamp, sometimes the only thing that kept me pushing forward was the thought of making it to this acknowledgments page. It’s a joy at last to get to thank the following people:

Huge love and gratitude to: Karina Schmid, Alexis Vgeros, Sharon Bowen, Victoria Bourke, Christopher Shannon, Jessica MacDonald, Kate Hasler-Steilen, Laura Storz, Stefan Merrill Block, Lucia Giannetta, Jess Fenn, Scott Snyder, Stu MacDonald, Dan Chaon, J. R. Carpenter, Stephen O’Connor, Bradford Morrow and
Conjunctions
, Karen and Jim Shepard, Andrea Barrett, Barry Goldstein, Larry Raab, François Furstenberg, Sam Swope, Andrea Libin and John High, Rivka Galchen, John Tresch, Putney Student Travel and my Putney kids, Becky Campbell and the staff at Symphony Veterinary Center, and to my teachers, my former classmates, and my students, for being a solar source of inspiration.

To Carey McHugh, Kim Tingley, Lytton Smith, Michael White, Brandon Freeman, Lauren Russell, Kent Russell, Vince Ruiz—thank you to the moon for being my first readers and for the lifeline of your friendship. And thanks to Rob, Carey, New Rob, and Russell Haus for my many fellowship stints on your fine sofas. If I could somehow make this page interactive, I’d give each of you an ovation and a Cadillac.

I’m very grateful to the UCross Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Jean Strouse, and my fellow Fellows for the wonderful gift of time and community. Special thanks to Mary Ellen von der Heyden for her friendship and generous support.

Enormous thanks to my incredible agent, Denise Shannon, and to my boundlessly encouraging editor, Jordan Pavlin, for their faith in me and for their tremendous help with revisions. Thanks to the great Leslie Levine and the staff at Knopf. And to the brilliant and indefatigable fiction editor Carin Besser, for parachuting into this novel and helping me to find a way through—
thank you
.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Janice and Bruce Russell, with all my love and with a special thank-you to my dad for helping me with the Florida research; to my bro and my sis; to Alan and Fran Romanchuck; and in loving memory of Alex Romanchuck. The Bigtrees’ story owes a huge debt to many authors but especially to Katherine Dunne, George Saunders, and Kelly Link. And a final thank-you to the readers of this book.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in
The New Yorker
’s debut fiction issue and on
The New Yorker
’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of
Granta
’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation for excellence in fiction writing for writers under thirty-five years of age. Her short story collection,
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
, was published by Knopf in 2006 and released in paperback in 2007 by Vintage. It was named a best book of the year by the
San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times
, and
Chicago Tribune
. Her short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Granta, Oxford American, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story
, and
Conjunctions
. Three of her short stories have been selected for the
Best American Short Stories
volumes (2007, edited by Stephen King; 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie; and 2010, edited by Richard Russo). She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Williams College and is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College.