This Is the Story of You (18 page)

“Come on,” I finally said.

She hooked the purse of the hermit crab cage over one wrist. Went down first, hand over hand.

I watched the part in the dark of her hair.

It was Deni up ahead.
Deni, who'd been waiting for me at the rock and had started running as soon as she'd seen me, then pulled up short when she realized that the tall girl in the borrowed getup wasn't just near me but with me. The glasses on Deni's head reflected the Brillo Pad clouds. She'd traded her brother's sweatshirt for a nubby pink turtleneck her mother used to wear on Sundays. Her combat boots were dark with ocean and mud. She extended her good hand like the minister's daughter she was. She had something to tell me about Cinnamon Nose; I knew it. She had news of another kind as well, and it wasn't news for strangers.

“Deni,” she said.

“Gillian,” Gillian answered.

“I found her,” I said. “In my room.”

Deni's eyebrow arched high. She was beside me as we walked toward the rock, Gillian just a little behind and the key around my neck beating the bruise. A toaster. A chaise lounge. The spinning wheel Darlene kept in the front of her house. The music stand that Mr. Friedley used for important all-school occasions. The green awning that Cammy Vaughn rolled out each spring, so that she could sit and test the inaugural mint juleps of her crowd. The birdbath that had sat outside the How to Live store for as long as I could remember.

The things on the beach weren't only things.

They had once been somethings to someones.

Deni had something to say, and even then, after that storm, some things were private.

I glanced over my shoulder. Gillian walked, her eyes cast down. She was cautious among all the shards and splinters.

At the rock Old Carmen looked up, shielded her eyes from the sun, took a long, startled look at Gillian—a head-to-toe look, saying nothing. She looked at Deni and she looked at me and then she stood up and rearranged the rock so that the castaway would have a place on it. Just like that. Special privileges for a girl who'd shown up in my bed. Like Old Carmen had done for me, she was doing for the girl. Deni got that look on her face. The kind that said,
Whoa. Hold on. Be careful.

“Gillian,” I said, furthering the introductions. “She fishes.”

“That right?”

“Yes, ma'am. So she says.”

“You a fisherwoman, Gillian?” Old Carmen asked.

Gillian shivered. She nodded. Deni rocked back and forth in her ocean-squeaky boots. She crossed her arms across her chest, barely holding on to her news now, hardly polite anymore, eager for us to get away. Just the two of us. The bright sun of morning had not yet returned. We were little people under a gray-blue Brillo Pad. I told Old Carmen I had business with Deni, and Sterling, pacing the edge of the rock, took an all-flying leap into my arms and licked my cheek with her sandpaper tongue.

“Hey,” I said. “What did I tell you, Sterling? Jealous looks good on no one.”

I gave Sterling a kiss between the ears, ran my hand across her back, over her tail. I whispered truths into her ear. I said my best friend Deni needed me.

She settled back quick. I gave Gillian a look. I told Old Carmen I'd be back as soon as I could and she said:

“No shenanigans.”

We left Old Carmen there, by the beach with Gillian, Sterling in charge of them both.

“It's Eva,” Deni said.
“Eva's been found.”

“Tell me. Everything.”

But it was hard for Deni to start, hard for her to get the sequence right, and now she was running, and I was, too, following behind in her footsteps, catching the words that flew.

“She's not dead,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” Breathing out.
She's not dead.
The story's only good part. The clouds seemed to be dropping to earth. The waves and the gulls were crashing, too. The sand was squish. We ran.

“Slow down,” I told Deni, but now her story came out in a rush, pieces of it out of order, erased and replaced and starting over. Eva had been found out at the lighthouse beneath a ripped-from-its-own-bolts bench. Unconscious. Broken. The bones in both legs snapped. The twins, Deni was saying. Becca and Deby, who had gone out in the night. Said they couldn't sleep. Maybe they were scavenging, Deni didn't know. They were the ones who'd found Eva. Thought she was just some pile of clothes at first, but then there was Eva's hair. Glowing gold.

Deni herself, she hadn't been sleeping. She had been lying there in the dark and then she heard those jingle bells that Becca wears and she stood up and went to the window and knew. Saw Becca running. Heard Becca calling. Turned around and said, “It's Eva,” and everyone was on their feet in minutes, up in the dark—out of their broken houses and into the dark and some of them rushing to the lighthouse, running behind Becca, leading the way with her jingle bells, toward Eva, Deby, the lighthouse. Some of them getting ready to triage on a porch.

“Eva's not dead,” I said.

“No,” Deni huffed. “She's not.”

But Eva wasn't talking, either, not opening her eyes, and what she needed, Deni said, was the mainland hospital, where Jasper Lee and Mickey were—a broken bridge and two hours away and nobody knew, besides, how the hospital had fared in the storm. Eva needed care and she had the brigade but that wasn't enough. No X-rays. No anesthesia. No sterile environment. Hardly enough clean water. Two nurses and a doctor and the First Aid and Rescue instructor, Rosie's sister, who had taught us counting with blue Slurpees.

My stomach sickened. I couldn't catch my breath. I wanted to stop and cry, but Deni was all-out running now, the clouds on her head, and I was running, too. We had a long way to go. Eva wasn't dead.

“One more thing,” Deni said, calling back to me, the gap between us lengthening, and I needed my skates more than anything. I needed a straight stretch of asphalt.

“Yeah?”

“She was wearing Shift's hoodie. She had her binoculars back.”

“What?”

“We have to hurry.”

I couldn't hurry any faster than that.

Like an open-air camp.
Like a Civil War scene. Like
M*A*S*H,
the TV show Mickey would watch in late-night reruns, when, after four jobs and us, she still couldn't sleep. I didn't know the nurses or the doctor, but I knew Rosie's sister, Andra—her long blond hair up in a ponytail and her eyes so blue and her hands busy unwinding and rewinding gauze, as if she didn't know what else she could do.

Chang and Mario and Taneisha were there, like a mirage. Becca with her jingle bells and Deby, with her eyes behind her bangs, and Ginger, who had lost her tiara and the orange burnish of her hair. It was some kind of miracle, lost and found, the O'Sixteens reconstituted, who knows how. They'd found the warped plane of a dining room table that still had two of its legs. They'd set the legless end down on the shoulders of a La-Z-Boy chair and wedged some roof shingles beneath the table legs to help the horizontal—all under the guidance of Deni, I'd find out later. Deni, who always knew what she could do. By the time I arrived, Deni had cleared away room, asking Becca and Ginger to step aside, so that I could get up close to Eva, hold her right hand, which weighed nothing, as if the sea had leached her bones. Then Taneisha stepped away from the other side and gave Deni Eva's other hand and we both stood there, breathing hard and out of breath and looking down at our best friend.

Don't let go
, I thought. Eva.
We're here.

“We're hoping she can hear you,” someone said, and I looked up and there was Dr. Edwards. His beard had gone shaggy. His bangs were in his eyes. The dark part of his hair had turned a sudden white. He had on somebody's Christmas snowman sweater and his neck seemed swollen, his Adam's apple huge, as if he hadn't swallowed once since the monster blew. I thought of class, a lifetime ago:
I believed that I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.

But that guy, whoever he was, had not perished, and Eva had not perished, either, and now, when I looked away, past Eva, across Deni's shoulder, I saw Cinnamon Nose in the corner of the porch, his legs cut free of the rope and wrapped in gauze, his snout down on his paws.

“Eva,” I said. “We were looking everywhere.”

I tried to play back what I knew, put the story together, figure out just what had happened here. Eva had gone out with Shift. She was found in his hoodie. Her binoculars were there, around her neck. They had gone to the lighthouse, and she'd been found alone, and where the hell was Shift?

Eva, beautiful Eva, heart-too-big-for-the-world Eva. It was as if a shadow had crept in under her skin—all those worlds she saw that none of us could see all stacked up high and dangerous inside her. Her eyes seemed stung—two purple welts, thin broken lashes. There was seaweed stitched into her curls, the broken leg of a starfish, the bones of fish. They'd drawn a sheet up to her chin, and I was glad, for I couldn't bear to imagine her legs.

“Eva,” I said. “Wake up.”

I looked up and there was Dascher, now, with her anchor healed. There was Tiny Tina blocking the sun that was starting to climb above the clouds, and there was Becca beside Deby, the two unalike twins who, standing side by side after the night they'd had, looked suddenly like sisters. Straight across from me Deni stood, Eva's hand in hers, her dog behind her, a big tear rolling down her cheek. None of us on Haven could afford to lose another thing.

“We're all here, Eva,” I said, and maybe I imagined it, maybe you will say that I did, but I felt a tremor in my hand and I believed that it was coming from her, and now, when I looked up again, I saw Deni untangling the curls of Eva's hair. I saw Taneisha and Tiny Tina at the opposite end, rubbing the soles of Eva's feet, the decals all gone from her toenails. Hung from a makeshift post, I saw that hoodie and those pink binoculars.

Down the street, I saw the blown-apart living room of some poor person's home—only two walls up, the floral wallpaper dripping. I saw people dressed in February clothes and garden gloves, a working unity. It was the food brigade, I realized, turning its attention to the meal of the day, to the cartons of things taken from McCauley's, the cans of things that had rolled around, then back, with the tide, the things they could do to make a difference.

I thought of Old Carmen down at Mid, and her own brigade. I thought of Gillian, who said she could fish, the fake-crystal toe rings on her bare feet, no boots, her crab bright as a clown fish. I thought of Sterling, patient and respectful and learning not to be jealous. I thought of Mickey and Jasper Lee and the bridge of light between us.

Only thing not replaceable is people. Order. Family. Genus. Species. We were the kingdom unto Haven.

I leaned down again to kiss Eva's pale forehead. I combed a fishbone from her curls with my fingers. I looked over my shoulder at Dr. Edwards and Andra and the doctor whose name I didn't know, who were hovering near, who had done what they could—cleaned the wounds, set the bones beneath the sheet, made Eva comfortable.

“Wake up, Eva,” I whispered again. “We're all here.”