Lost Children of the Far Islands (2 page)

“Now,
Ila
,” the woman had crooned, “show me your nice bear?” When she said
bear
, she stretched the word out so that it sounded like two long words, the second one a question.

They were in the living room, having tea and cookies. Ila, who was three at the time, was playing on the rug with the first of her many bears. She ignored the woman.

“Ila,” their father said, “say hello to the nice lady.” His voice gave away what he really thought of the nice lady. Ila ignored him as well.

“Hmmm,” the woman said, making a note in the spiral notebook that she pulled out of a large canvas bag. The bag also held toys, which she offered, one by one, to Ila. Ila ignored them all in favor of her bear, who was now practicing headstands on the living room rug.

After a while, Leo drifted out, no doubt to go to his room to read or to continue training his turtles, one of whom he claimed could pick between a blue string and a red string almost 100 percent of the time. Gus had stayed, sitting quietly on one end of the couch, hoping not to be asked to leave. Gus loved listening in on adults’ conversations, even when they were boring. And she sensed that
this conversation, while slightly boring at the moment, was very important.

The behavior specialist had been talking at great length about something called early intervention.

“With the right training,” she said, leaning forward as she spoke, “Ila can even learn to interact with regularly-abled children!” She sounded delighted at her own prediction. “We will need to do more testing, of course, to see where Ila falls—”

“No,” their mother interrupted.

The woman looked startled.

“I’m sorry,” their mother said, “but I’ve been doing a fair amount of research, and Ila just doesn’t fit the profile. She makes perfect eye contact, for example. And she plays with Gus and Leo, doesn’t she, Peter?”

Her voice rose just a bit as she said his name. Their father put an arm around her shoulders. Ila played quietly at their feet. Gus sat as still as possible.

“She makes eye contact!” their mother said again. She sounded like she might cry. “She’s just—quiet. Quiet and a bit sensitive. We don’t want her subjected to any more testing. We—”

The woman leaned forward again, and Gus’s mother stopped speaking. “Ila,” the woman said, and her voice was suddenly quite normal. “Can you come over here, Ila?”

The room went very still. Gus found herself holding her breath as she waited for her little sister to respond.
Go on, Ila!
she wanted to say, but she forced herself to keep quiet.

Ila looked up at the behavior specialist, her eyes shining in the light from the lamp behind the couch. She smiled and waved one chubby hand.

Their mother said—and now she really was crying—“You see! Well done, Ila! Go on over, honey.”

Ila obediently toddled over to the woman, who scooped her up. Gus braced herself, but Ila seemed content to sit on the woman’s lap. She examined the string of pearls that the woman wore around her neck. Everyone in the room relaxed. Gus’s mother wiped her eyes. But then the woman made the mistake of pulling a tiny penlight from her shirt pocket and shining it in Ila’s eyes, making the starbursts at the center of them glow a dangerous, vivid green.

“What unusual eyes! I’m just going to track her pupils,” the woman said brightly, shining the light back and forth. Ila’s face grew pink, and then red.

“Oh dear,” their father said. The corners of his mouth twitched.

Gus clamped her hands over her ears just as Ila shrieked and pulled away from the woman, who made the second mistake of taking hold of her wrists.

When it was all over—the spilled tea mopped up, the crushed cookies swept, the lamp put right, and the behavior specialist shown politely but firmly to her car—their father had called a family meeting.

“Your sister is just fine,” he’d said sternly, looking
from Gus to Leo and back to Gus. Ila was in bed, having exhausted herself with screaming. “There will be no more talk of this ism or that ism,” their father continued.

“Ila is who she is,” their mother added, “and that’s final.”

Gus and Leo looked at one another, bewildered. They had decided a long time ago that their weird little sister was just that—their weird little sister. Why talk about it more?

“Duh, Dad,” Leo said finally.

“Personally,” Gus said, “I think Leo’s weirder than Ila. I mean, he trains turtles.”

“They’re very underrated,” Leo said complacently. “It’s clear from Ditmars’s
Reptiles of the World
that they have much more complicated family structures than most people think.”

Gus looked pointedly at their father.

“Well, OK, then,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Let’s have some lunch.”

As it turned out, Ila did have to have more testing, but none of the tests ever turned up anything actually wrong with her, other than her silence. In the end it was decided that she had something called selective mutism, which meant that she could understand language perfectly well and could, and probably would, speak someday. Her sensitivity to lights and noise decreased as she got older. She went to kindergarten, and her teacher admitted that she seemed to be learning everything along
with the other children. She’ll talk when she is ready, their parents said, and so, for the time being anyway, that was that.

If they had lived in a bigger town, Ila might have been teased, or worse. But in their tiny town, where everybody knew everyone else, she was simply known as the Brennans’ quiet child, in much the same way that Gus was known as the fastest swimmer on the team and Leo as a bookworm.

Leo was also frustratingly good at chess. Luckily, he rarely paid attention long enough to beat Gus.

“Mmm,” said Leo now, moving a horse. He was not looking at the board. Behind him, Ila laid her bear on the rug and tucked a blanket around it for bedtime.

“Leo!” Gus scolded him. “That leaves your king open!”

“Sorry,” Leo said, moving the horse back. “I was reading this cool book about wolves last night. I was just thinking about pack families. Did you know, Gus—”

“Whatever,” Gus said. “Just
go
.”

Leo slid a pawn forward, saying, as if Gus had not interrupted him, “So then the alpha female—the mother wolf
—pukes
up her food for the cubs—”

Gus sighed. “Check,” she said, and took his queen.

Their mother came down for dinner. Her face was pale and she had dark circles under her eyes, as if she had been sick for weeks rather than just one day.

“Feeling better, Rosie?” their father asked gently, and
she murmured, “Oh yes, thanks, darling,” as she took her seat, folding into the chair.

All through dinner she was remote and tense. When the wind banged a shutter at the back of the house, she actually jumped from her chair with a slight scream. Their father was up and at her side immediately.

“Rosemaris,” he said, and then when she did not answer him but continued to look wildly about her, as if expecting intruders to burst into the kitchen, he said, “Rosie! It’s just the wind. It’s fine.”

“I’m sorry,” their mother said. “I’m just a little tired, I think.”

“How’re the tides, Dad?” Leo asked, pushing up his glasses on his nose.

Their father was a physical oceanographer. He studied something called Alexandrium cells, which are organisms that cause the algal blooms known as red tides in the Gulf of Maine. Red tides, he had explained, are dangerous because the algae can build up in the tissues of shellfish, poisoning them.

But in the last month, their father had been pulled off the red tide project to study a new problem—the tide markers in the Gulf of Maine were showing unusually high tides. The phenomenon was erratic, happening only every few days or so, but it was troubling.

“Still happening,” their father answered Leo. “It’s really strange. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to them.”

“But it could be underwater earthquakes, right?” Gus asked.

“Well, it could be, but it’s not very likely.”

“What about a tsunami?” Leo said eagerly. “Starting small, you know, way deep, and just building, building, building.” He crept his hand along the table to demonstrate. “Then,
whoosh!
” He reached over to Ila, who was watching his approaching wave hand with fascination, and tickled her, making her giggle.

“It’s not funny, Leo,” their mother said, her voice unusually sharp.

Their father gave her a look and said in a softer voice, “It’s probably related to global warming. We’re looking into the melting ice at the polar caps as a possible cause. But even if that is the case, there’s only about a one—”

“I know,” Leo said gloomily. “A one-in-a-thousand chance of a tsunami ever hitting Maine.”

“Cheer up,” their father said, grinning at Leo. “Maybe we’ll have a bad hurricane season.”

“What about those missing fishing boats?” Gus asked.

Their father stopped smiling. Three fishing boats had been lost in the Gulf of Maine since April. All three had gone down during freak storms that had risen out of the sea with no warning and then vanished as quickly as they had come. No traces of the boats, or of the fishermen who had been aboard them, had been found.

“Nothing,” he said very quietly.

“But fishing accidents have always happened, right, Dad?” Gus said.

Their father nodded, but his expression was grim.
“Yes, but not like this. Maybe two, three incidents a year, but not three boats in one spring. That’s nine men missing now.”

Their mother stood up abruptly, her chair squeaking as she shoved it away from the table. “I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Peter?”

Their father got up quickly and took her arm, helping her to the stairs as if she were an old woman. As they went upstairs, the children could just hear their mother’s voice.

“You’ll only frighten them,” she was saying.

“I’m not scared,” Leo said. “Are you, Ila?”

Ila shook her head firmly, her red curls bouncing against her cheeks.

“But Mom is,” Gus said. “It probably reminds her …” Her voice trailed off. They all knew the story of their mother’s family, although it was never spoken about. Her parents had drowned in a boating accident when she was just seventeen. Rosemaris had been on the boat as well, but was saved when a boy, out fishing early in the morning during his vacation from college, found her clinging to a lobster buoy. She was half dead from hypothermia, but she survived. She had no other family, so the boy’s parents took her in. She waited tables at LuLu’s Diner until the boy finished college, and then they were married. A year later, they had twin babies. They named the girl Gustavia, after the boat that Peter had been driving when he found the half-drowned girl. Leo’s full name
was Leomaris, which means
lion of the sea
, something that Leo pretended to be embarrassed by but secretly thought was pretty cool.

“Maybe,” Leo said, suddenly thoughtful. “I mean, it is kind of weird, you know, that they haven’t found any wreckage or anything, right? It’s a little freaky.”

“Charlotte says her dad hasn’t been taking his lobster boat out,” Gus said. “Her mom won’t let him. She says they’ve been fighting like crazy about it, ’cause you know they have to pay for that special school for her little brother, and they’re going to run out of money if he doesn’t go out.”

“Well, freak storms are, by definition, anomalies,” Leo said. He reached for the bread plate. Since there were no grown-ups at the table to stop him, he jammed two pieces into his mouth and then followed them with a spoonful of butter. “I’m thure it will all be thine,” he said.

“Gross,” Gus said. “Gross, gross, gross.”

“Yum,” Leo said as Ila grinned delightedly.

But it wasn’t fine. In fact, it got worse quickly after that.

As the days went by, their mother seemed to withdraw further and further until she was no longer
there
, in some sort of indefinable way. Her face grew thinner, and her gaze more remote. Gus felt like shaking her just to see if she would notice her daughter standing in front of her. At first, Gus was angry with her mother. But by the second week of her illness, she wasn’t angry anymore. She was frightened.

When the three children came home after school, their mother was usually in her studio. She was a quite famous painter. Her work sold all over the world. The paintings were always of the same subject, shining flat and green in sunlight, kicking up white splashes in the wind, churning with black waves in a storm. The Brennans’ backyard sloped down to rock ledges and then to the sea. Their mother’s studio had an uninterrupted view from its long windows, so that she could stand at her easel and paint the changing ocean landscape.

But these days, although she was in her studio, she was not working. Instead, she simply sat in the rocking chair at the window, staring out at the Atlantic Ocean where it curled and broke and sprayed below the yard.

“She’s just trying to work out some problem in her head with that new painting,” their father explained. “It’s a big deal, you know.”

“I know,” Gus muttered impatiently. “But, Dad, she wouldn’t even tell me if I could go to Anna’s Friday night. I mean, can’t she just snap out of it and let me know if I can have an overnight?”