by ​​Gwendolyn Maia Hicks

---

Lake McDermott was a volcanic lake—a remnant of the Pleistocene, or so it was said. It had formed millennia ago in a fluvial valley and was now surrounded on all sides by conifers; it was the only natural lake on the McDermott Open Space Preserve. Its shoreline, a thick band of cobble and pebble, was roughly six miles around. It was two miles out from the town of Deerneck, accessible by a dirt road and parking lot and overlooked by the South Shore Trail, and on a clear morning one could see all the way from one end to the other. There was not an island there, until there was. 

Carrie Derkins first heard the news in the middle of the breakfast rush at the diner, balancing three plates of flapjacks on her forearm. It was a Friday morning in mid-December, 1993. The last time she’d been anywhere near Lake McDermott was for swimming; she was 31, in her recollection, and there was certainly no island then. Her youngest daughter, CJ, had not yet been born; her husband, Glenn, had not yet been dead. Nobody swam in Lake McDermott anymore. It was mostly frequented by local fishermen now, so Carrie wasn’t surprised that a local fisherman was the first to make the discovery. 

It took until the afternoon for word to get around that no, nobody knew where it had come from. Mayor Cline didn’t know, and the Sheriff’s Office didn’t know, and the U.S. Geological Survey didn’t know. Carrie didn’t know either, even though the diner patrons had plenty of ideas: ghosts!—aliens!—ancient curses! It was not on any map or road atlas. It had no name. 

By Saturday morning, Mayor Cline called an emergency town hall meeting for folks to air their concerns and discuss practical approaches to the issue. We ought to at least give it a name, she said at the press conference. 

So Carrie went—though naming things had never been her gift. That was Glenn’s forte, like ornithology, like pitching tents. He had known the names of everything, even their two daughters. He would have known the island’s.

---

“Do you see anything?”

When CJ did not answer this question, her friend Dana Seong wrenched the binoculars from her hands and lifted them to her own face. The strap was still around CJ’s neck, so CJ’s head knocked into Dana’s, but not very hard.

“Ow,” CJ said anyway.

It was a cold, overcast Saturday afternoon, and the higher up the South Shore Trail they’d gotten, the wetter the air had become, until a full drizzle was misting their faces. At this elevation, the moisture in the air was making it just slightly more difficult to see, blurring the elm trees and the winding path behind them in a silver haze. A chorus of frogs warbled restlessly from a nearby creek.

Dana surveyed the island through the binoculars. CJ presumed that Dana saw the same things that she had seen a moment ago: a single threadbare ponderosa pine, some shorter evergreens, shrubs with cluttered leaves, boulders and jagged rocks instead of a beach. The fog rolling down from the hills made it hard to spot much else. CJ couldn’t shake the feeling that the island looked familiar, somehow, but that was impossible.

CJ inched closer to her in the hopes that they could maybe each take an eyehole and study the island simultaneously. Dana’s cheeks exuded a persistent warmth—it hovered in the empty space between them.

Since they’d started the seventh grade, CJ had found her mind more frequently occupied by the various aspects of Dana’s face. It was weird. 

“What kind of trees are those?” CJ asked, accidentally pointing not to trees but to a bush, because she was too caught up in trying not to think about Dana’s warm cheek and all the work that her body was doing to make it that way, the whole ephemeral Rube Goldberg machine of being alive that was going on right next to her. 

“Tsuga heterophylla,” Dana said decisively. “Sorry, western hemlock. Juvenile. Salal—typical. Serviceberry all over… Douglas fir, ponderosa pine. Your basic cold-climate coniferous ecosystem, suitable to our montane forest biome.”

CJ’s dad, Glenn, had always liked Dana, for obvious reasons. He would have liked this island, too, but CJ would never get to tell him about it. There was that familiar twinge in her chest, like a wishbone getting pulled open, about to snap. 

Finally, Dana lowered the binoculars and passed them back to CJ. The two of them stood in place and looked silently over the island—its dark treetops, its innocent stillness. There weren’t even any birds. The fog, when it touched the water, seemed to encircle the island rather than rush through it as it did everything else. It filled the rest of the sunken valley like a bowl, but still the island’s shape cut through it, the skinny ponderosa wavering in a silent wind.

CJ had definitely, definitely seen it before—or aspects of it, maybe… in a book? A photo? 

“I need to go home,” Dana said. 

CJ blinked. When had it gotten so dark? Was the sun already setting? 

When at last she turned away from the view, her head took a second to follow her body. She met Dana’s eyes determinedly. 

“We are totally and for sure coming back.”

Dana waved her hand. “I think I’m good.” 

CJ frowned. “You think you’re good on a scientific discovery that could potentially win us the Nobel Prize?” 

“I don’t think they give those out for ecology.” Dana sniffed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her windbreaker. She kept glancing at the island warily, like she was expecting it to sprout legs and walk over to them Baba Yaga-style. “I just feel like it’s not mine, dude. Like, that it doesn’t want me. Don’t you feel like that?” 

CJ stared at her. She couldn’t imagine feeling like that. 

She plucked her way past a tangled undergrowth of wild blackberries to sidestep CJ and start down the trail. CJ straggled behind, fingers going slack around the binoculars at her chest, and looked at the island a little longer. Something in those trees and stones compelled her to linger in a way that might have frightened her or might have thrilled her; she was not entirely sure. 

She wondered what the island would say if it could speak. She wondered if islands even had a language. Looking at this one, she kind of felt like they did.

She jogged to catch up to Dana’s retreating back. They fell into step beside each other.

“Oh, yeah,” Dana mused at the bottom of the hill as they were clambering onto their bicycles. “Rachael’s back for winter break, right?”

CJ rolled her eyes. “I already know what you’re gonna ask. There’s no way she’d let us use her kayak.”

“No, I mean, is she…” Dana paused, pretending to test the brakes on her handlebars—CJ knew, because she wasn’t squeezing them very hard—and avoiding CJ’s eyes. “I mean, like, I don’t know, is she okay?”

CJ faltered for only a moment. Her fingers slackened their grip on the frame and allowed the bike to fall lightly against her hip. She couldn’t remember the last time her sister could have been even charitably described as okay. Or normal. Or nice.

When Dad died, Rachael had taken it hard—the way somebody took a hit-and-run hard. Rather than being sad about it like the rest of them, she’d just gotten habitually angry. She hadn’t wanted to say anything at the funeral, hadn’t wanted to go with Mom and CJ to scatter his ashes over Lake McDermott. She was now halfway through her first year of college, three states away, and CJ barely ever heard from her, except through Mom, who also barely ever heard from her. 

“Who cares?” She shrugged, tossing one leg over the frame and settling onto the seat. “My sister’s a world-class jerk, Dana. And even if she’s not okay, she’d rather die than have to look like she has feelings for five seconds. Not my problem.”

Dana craned her neck back to survey the trail from which they’d come. In profile, her face looked older, or at least CJ thought so. 

“Home?” CJ prompted her, and after some deliberation Dana nodded, mounted her bike, and took off down the trail. 

CJ followed close behind, even as the island seemed to tug at her insides, imploring her to stay. The thought of somebody else showing up and stomping all over it made her almost sick to consider. 

They wouldn’t understand it like she did. It wasn’t theirs. 

---

Rachael had forgotten, not living in Deerneck, just how cold a night could get. Her fingertips were numb. She held the last stump of her joint between her lips for too long and struggled to suppress a cough when she withdrew it. She was supposed to have gotten better at smoking in college. 

It was Sunday—not quite dawn. Blue smoke streamed from her nostrils and over the empty street; her lungs burned from its release. She had been home from college for two days. Stephen Holland, whom she had known since the sixth grade, was a couple of feet away from her, huddled in on himself from the chill and something more habitual. She did not offer him the joint. 

Rachael had heard about the island on the car radio the day before, driving aimlessly around the suburbs in Dad’s old Land Rover. An island, said Jerry Toober, who had run the local channel for twenty years, an island in the middle of the lake, as plain as day. Investigations pending. Neighbors baffled. She hadn’t been able to help it—she’d doubled over the steering wheel and laughed. Lake McDermott, of all places—she was pretty sure Dad’s ashes were scattered there, not that she had gone to watch it happen. 

It had made her too sick to think about back then—that ashes could belong to people. 

Now, as she and Stephen were standing on the grass in front of someone else’s house, he asked her, “Have you seen it?” It was his third attempt in the past half-hour at making conversation.

Rachael could see that he was looking at her, but she resisted the instinct to look back. Her eyes were on the house across the street—her house—and the dark window of her bedroom, which seemed from this distance like it could belong to anyone. Stephen lived three blocks away.

She blew the dregs off the end of the joint, watching them fall. It had been dark when she had gone to the lake. The island had barely been visible, but it was there. She had watched it awhile, sleep-deprived and alone, with her arms folded on the arc of the steering wheel. 

It had been watching her, too. But she didn’t want to tell Stephen that part.

“Yeah,” she said. “I drove over as soon as I heard about it.”

Stephen shuddered. “Couldn’t be me. What’s it look like?”

Rachael considered this and at last turned her head to look at him. His corduroy jacket was brown; his short hair was also brown, even in the faint light of the empty street. It had always been brown, and he’d had that jacket since high school, but still Rachael found herself focusing on these incidental details, committing them to memory, as if something had rendered them remarkable. Grief, she remembers reading in some stupid book the campus counselor had given her, recontextualizes life. This is normal. 

“Look like?” Rachael repeated. “Tough to say. It looks like an island, that’s for sure. Kayak-able. If you want an inventory of the whole ecosystem, you can ask my sister.”

CJ was twelve and cared more about The X-Files and geodes than she did about anything in the entire world that actually mattered. The two of them had been close once, but when Dad died, it had become clear to Rachael that their six-year gap in age made her kid sister a poor confidante. CJ hadn’t even cried about it, at least not that Rachael saw, so she was either tough or she just didn’t care. 

Stephen coughed out a laugh. He knew CJ, and knew how she could get about ecosystems. He then hesitated a moment in that way that everyone did these days, the one that revealed how obviously he was holding something back; Rachael was too tired to be insulted and instead settled for a kind of stale affection. 

“Do you, um… Do you want to go back?” Stephen ducked his head, toeing the edge of one of the sprinklers in the grass. “I kinda wanna see it.”

Rachael made a face. “What, you can’t go by yourself?”

“Yeah, great idea, I’ll just go kick back at the haunted island alone, Rachael.”

“What do you want to go with me for?” She was at least 40% sure Stephen had other friends.

Stephen said, in a fraught and sudden way, “Because…”

Rachael met his eyes by accident, on an old, unassailable instinct, and felt her next breath hitch in her chest. His face was cast in a shape she couldn’t interpret. It was like a sentiment was trapped inside him, his whole body tensing around it, in preparation for some unknowable pain. He opened his mouth, curled his long fingers into fists. And then—

“Because,” he said, and all at once his hands slackened and his expression unraveled, a retreat. “Because you have a car.”

“Oh,” Rachael said, feeling suddenly stupid and adrift on her neighbor’s lawn. “Okay.”

Stephen tilted his head, imploring.

“Tonight? Maybe?”

That she’d have no other plans was unspoken. Still, to save face, she said, “Maybe.”

No conversation sprouted after that. She and Stephen existed in silence. When the first traces of daylight breached the rooftops, she made something up: that she should probably get home before her mom woke up.

“See you later,” Stephen said. Rachael almost asked him how he could be so sure of something like that, how anyone could ever be sure enough of something like that to say it. But she didn’t. She said, “Later, man,” and crossed the street back to her house.

She hadn’t known how to tell Stephen that the idea of getting any closer to the island than she already had felt like the idea of walking straight into water and not taking a breath. What she’d known how to tell him even less was that there was something exhilarating about that—the not-knowing, the opening of eyes, peering into a dense and silent darkness from which any shape might emerge. Or face, she thought, and felt like her lungs got sucked in. 

She made sure to close the front door quietly when she went in. Dad’s old Audubon calendar still hung in the entryway, a year old, on December—marked by a cardinal on a snow-laden branch. Rachael tried not to look at it. 

---

CJ wanted to go to one of the public forums at Town Hall so badly that Carrie was sure she was on the brink of trying to sneak in through the air vents. 

“Eighteen-plus, kiddo,” Carrie told her on Tuesday afternoon. CJ had cornered her at the front door before she could drive over to the two o’clock meeting and was staring up at her with pleading eyes. “Mayor Cline cares about your vote, not your curiosity.” 

“What are people voting on?” CJ asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “A name?” 

Carrie considered this. Any discussions about a name for the island thus far had only ambled into halfway suggestions about just letting it be, taking it for what it was. Local interest was waning, even as Carrie’s waxed: she kept dreaming about it, about walking into the lake barefoot until she could no longer touch the bottom, and letting the island pull her close and remake her. 

“Maybe. We’ve been talking about it.” 

“Why don’t people want to investigate?” CJ badgered her. “We should be sending scouts, botanists, geologists, cartographers! We should be calling National Geographic!” She gasped, gripping Carrie’s sleeve. “We should tell David Attenborough!” 

“I think people are mostly worried about how it’s going to affect steelhead season,” Carrie said, and ruffled her hair. “May I go now, please?” 

She met up with some old friends in the lobby, congregating with them around the coffee machine—blissfully half-present in the conversations, waiting for the invariable moment when Glenn’s name would come up and everybody would second-guess themselves. 

In the past year, she had grown more accustomed to hearing Glenn’s name trail into nothing than to hearing anything follow it—as if it was self-explanatory, the condolences implicit. Had it ever been said differently, like it wasn’t something fragile and unseemly? She honestly couldn’t remember.

Why didn’t people talk about the fact that he was a birdwatcher—that cardinals were his favorite—and a scaredy cat, and that he knew the perfect way to fry garlic? Why was it that the only thing of note he’d done, according to Deerneck, was die? Why did her name sound so out of place alone, broken off from the rhythm of Carrie-and-Glenn, Carrienglenn? Those were the kinds of questions that occurred to her these days. But she guessed she ought to get with the program and ask where the hell an island in the middle of Lake McDermott had come from—but nobody in this town ever looked at the right things. She was just playing along. 

Maybe it was better, she thought, not to name the island. Some things just couldn’t be made sense of, couldn’t be packed into a name, rendered ordinary by syllables. 

Her island was better than that.

---

CJ went with Mom to work on Wednesday afternoon. Everybody at the diner knew her, and Thelma, who owned the place, was always happy to let CJ spread out all her books and doodles at one of the booths in the back corner. CJ hauled all of Dad’s old road maps and atlases with her in a sagging green messenger bag, planning on marking the island’s approximate shape in each one in pencil. 

At around lunchtime, two men came into the diner: Fred Minks, the fisherman who had first discovered the island, and his brother Ben. They both walked through the door with dazed, perplexed expressions, sat down at the counter, and ordered patty melts (Fred’s on rye, Ben’s on Texas toast). They chewed on their sandwiches thoughtfully, every now and then exchanging grave glances, shaking their heads, and looking away again with matching furrowed brows.

CJ, like everyone in Deerneck, knew the Minks brothers. Mom liked to say that they were only ever quiet in a church and sometimes not even then. This taciturn behavior was extremely out of character. 

CJ peered at them from over the top of her county map.

When they finally finished eating—wiping their hands finger-by-finger with their crumpled paper napkins, readjusting their khaki hats, and slumping over the counter with identical sighs—CJ thought that she was going to burst. Luckily for her it seemed like Thelma, who had owned the diner and been serving them patty melts for the better part of fifteen years, couldn’t contain herself either. 

“What the hell’s gotten into you two?” she demanded.

“They saw something, all right,” an old man chimed in from table six. “They sure as hell saw something.”

Mom came up to them and offered them each a cup of coffee, but they refused it. 

Her voice was soft, almost preemptively forgiving, when she asked them, “You went to the island, didn’t you?” 

The story came out piecemeal. Yes, they’d rowed there. No, they hadn’t run into any trouble. Yes, the water had been fine, like a dream, like glass. Yes, they’d come ashore. Yes, they’d gotten out of the boat, stepped onto that pebble beach, split up with their rifles in hand, and seen—

“Nothing,” Fred said with a bewildered shrug. “Thing’s damn near the same as any old island.”

Ben said, “No fish, no birds, it’s quiet as the grave, but there’s nothing there. Nothing.”

CJ couldn’t take it anymore. She leaped up to stand on the booth seat. 

“Are you going back?!” she asked excitedly. There would be no need for the kayak if two experienced sailors like the Minks brothers could escort her. 

“Not ours,” said Fred.

“It’s not ours,” Ben agreed.

No one could make heads or tails of that. The words came out in subdued, disbelieving tones, like they were talking about something fragile and unseemly. CJ sank back onto the seat. They gave Mom a much more generous tip than usual, ten one-dollar bills wrinkled together beside the napkin dispenser, and walked back out into the rain without a word. 

Mom was silent on the drive home. Her eyes were aimed at the road, but CJ could tell that she wasn’t really looking at it. CJ watched the dark trees lose their shape through the window, the Minks brothers’ words playing over and over again in her head. Not ours, not ours—what did that mean? The island was everyone’s, wasn’t it? It belonged to Deerneck; it belonged to the world. CJ wanted to go back in time, grab them both by the sleeves on their way out the door, and ask them, If it isn’t yours, then what is? Whether or not we like it, doesn’t everybody belong to everybody else? 

She knew what kind of look that would have gotten her, though. Probably the same kind she got when she talked about Dad—like she was yelling from behind a pane of glass, and they couldn’t quite make out the words. 

---

“I’m over it, man, let’s just go,” Rachael said, with a laugh to disguise that she was serious. “You and me. Right now—dog paddle race. First one there gets to name it.”  

Stephen looked at her, aghast. “The water is forty degrees.”

It was Wednesday morning. Rachael had picked Stephen up at his house an hour prior and driven them to the only parking lot on McDermott Beach. It was the third time that she had brought Stephen here since Sunday. They were sitting on the hood of the Land Rover, side-by-side under a plaid blanket that smelled of charcoal, watching the island from a distance, their legs an inch or two from touching.

Rachael had not said this out loud, and she had no real plans to, but the longer she stared at the island, the more a night-cold sadness began to open up in her chest, until it was almost blocking her throat. And she had felt plenty of things since Dad died, but no matter what all the stupid pamphlets her school counselor had given her said, sadness hadn’t shown up yet—real sadness, soul-swallowing, a deep ache in her solar plexus. Anger had taken priority, mostly. Still did. Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Bargaining, Anger. But it was here now, and it was kind of freeing, in that way where, like, if she was sad, she didn’t have to be anything else—and she was excavating that feeling on her own terms: surrounded by the scent of mountain hemlock and old weed and Stephen, curled next to her with his arms hugging his knees. 

She shoved Stephen lightly with one hand. He took the hit with no resistance, weight shifting. She’d know that weight with her eyes closed. 

“You don’t think it’d be fun?” she needled him. 

“No.” Stephen didn’t look at her when he said it.

Rachael was suddenly annoyed, though she couldn’t pinpoint why. “What, are you scared?” 

“What does it matter?” Stephen retorted, and Rachael understood, then, what annoyed her. The ownership of fear. The self-righteousness. Some luxury. 

She bit softly at the inside of her cheek, every muscle tensing as she looked back into Stephen’s brown, unassuming eyes—wary, forgiving Stephen; Stephen, who had walked around the block with her eighteen times after Dad’s funeral, and who had never changed, and who would never change. 

The whole world, she thought, should have changed—it shouldn’t have had the nerve to look like a place that she could recognize anymore. But it hadn’t moved at all—not by an inch. 

“Because being scared of an island is stupid, Stephen.” She pointed to it, trying to make him look at her, and after a second he yielded. “Why do you keep looking away?! It is right there, man. And it was not there a month ago, or even two weeks ago.”

“Why are you so obsessed with it? Why do you need everybody else to be obsessed with it? Can’t it just—be yours? Can’t that be enough?”

Rachael imagined that dunking her hand in acid would sting less. Humiliation burned on her face, and she didn’t know what the hell for. “Mine? What does that even mean? People keep saying that, ‘mine,’ ‘yours,’ it’s gibberish. It’s an island in the middle of the lake! It’s public land, Stephen! It belongs to everybody!” 

“I can’t explain it,” Stephen said. He dropped his chin onto his knees, eyes searching the parts of the island delineated through the mist with a kind of yearning. “I can just feel it, you know? It’s not mine because it—it—it doesn’t want me.” The words sounded like nonsense, but there was a conviction in his voice that twisted Rachael’s gut. “If you don’t feel that, too, then maybe… maybe it wants you.” For a second, he covered his face with both hands. “Guess that’s something we’ve got in common. But hey—hey!” He sat up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted to the island: “You can’t have her, asshole!” 

“Stephen, shut up—”

“Nobody can, haven’t you heard?” 

“What is your problem?!”

“No, yeah, I should be happy,” Stephen said, a little desperate. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His voice was cracking. “What kind of a moron gets jealous of an island? Congratulations on finally finding something to care about, Rachael. I sure wasn’t good enough, but hey, who’s keeping score?” 

The words landed on Rachael like a downed power line, and maybe that was the intention. She stared mutely at Stephen, frozen in place, unable to conceive of a reason to move or argue. She could still perceive the island at the edge of her vision, its watchful figure lingering half-seen like an apparition.

She wanted, more than anything, to run to it. And live on it. And die on it. 

Stephen rolled his head to the side so that she could not see his face. Something in her throat folded in on itself and crumbled. Over the emerald hood of the Land Rover, she curled her cold-stiff fingers into fists.

“Get in the car,” she muttered, and climbed down.

She settled into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut behind her, and waited. Her heart was raw inside her chest, its multitudinous injuries clamoring for her attention so insistently that all she wanted to do was put her fist through the windshield, let them free. She gripped the steering wheel, knuckles blanched and shaking, to keep her hands in place. Haltingly, Stephen slid off of the hood, bunching up the blanket under his arm, and did as he was told.

On the way back to town, it began to rain, numerous inconsolable drops clattering against the windshield and warping the world into a blur. The silence in the car was ponderous. Rachael thought of Dad fiddling with the radio, always foraging for something better than the songs it chose. She would listen to the static between and pretend it was a language, ghosts or aliens or something, their secrets and desires dangling between lyrics about summer, about leaving home. Dad would play along. He would tell her that she had an incredible mind. She didn’t listen to the radio anymore. 

She braked too hard in front of Stephen’s house; he jerked forward in his seat, one hand slamming onto the dashboard. She knew that he chose not to yell at her for it; she could see the possibility of it straining his jaw. A part of her, the childish part, wanted him to just do it, to give her an excuse to do it back—furiously, wordlessly, at the top of her lungs, until it shook the stars. But Stephen was nice. He was nice. Ultimately, he unbuckled his seatbelt and heaved himself away from her without another word. 

---

The coroner’s report on Glenn Derkins, dated January 18, 1992, identified the cause of death as acute hepatic failure due to complications from gastric cancer. The coroner had often gone birdwatching with Glenn, and his hand had shaken on the word failure; he had scratched out that attempt and written it again more clearly.

Carrie had read those words only once, with painstaking care, in the off-white stillness of the kitchen. They had seemed like a foreign language—too many syllables, too much to carry. She had wondered if she would be expected to regurgitate them anytime someone asked her what he died of. She had wondered if she ought to start practicing.

She recited them to herself now in her head, setting the table for Friday dinner with Rachael and CJ. She laid the silverware beside the last plate, watching the prongs of the fork glint under the chandelier. Acute hepatic failure due… she forgot the rest. That morning, she had driven to McDermott Beach before dawn, because the island had been in her dream. In the dream, it had said something, or maybe her bones had, and some part of the island had harmonized with it, as if they were a pair of crossed signals on the radio, between stations, garbling parallel broadcasts until the half-words were almost whole. What had it said? Why had it sounded so familiar—an echo, a cadence, that was just within reach?

Carrie had made a roast chicken—the one bird I’ll eat, Glenn used to joke—and the tried-and-true accompaniments. Asparagus. Rice pilaf. A morbid part of her had wanted to set a place for Glenn, but surely that would injure the girls, rub salt in all the wounds she couldn’t see, so there were only three chairs at the table. 

CJ and Rachael were sitting next to each other and not saying anything. CJ had braided her brown hair and dressed up a little, in that nice navy chenille sweater that Carrie had bought her last month. She was fiddling with her fingers in her lap. Rachael, tawny hair in a ponytail, wearing her black turtleneck, was staring vacantly at the tablecloth with her chin propped in one hand. Carrie couldn’t stand that stare, so empty and formless.

“Well,” Carrie said when she sat down in her chair at the head of the table, “it’s just the three of us this year.”

Rachael muttered something under her breath that sounded like, “Newsflash.”

Carrie pretended not to have heard it. “I know that this is our first winter without Dad.” She searched herself for the right words, for the right way to say them. “It just doesn’t feel the same.” It doesn’t feel right. No, she shouldn’t say that; then they’ll think that things are wrong. “And it won’t be. But…” We have each other. We are strong. He loved us. “But I think he’s watching over us with a smile today and all days. I think I can feel him here, a little. Can you?”

CJ closed her eyes, brow furrowing in concentration. 

Rachael’s eyes stayed open.

“Screw this,” she said.

Carrie looked up in shock. All that she could think to say was, “Rachael.”

Rachael rose swiftly from her chair, shaking the table; Carrie reached out to steady her glass. 

“Of course we can’t feel him here, Mom,” she said harshly. “He’s dead.”

Carrie flinched. It wasn’t so much that she minded the truth of it, but rather how vicious it sounded in her daughter’s voice, spoken as frankly as one might speak of hating traffic. She’d always sort of hoped that neither Rachael nor CJ would ever have to learn that sad, brutal word—but then again, she’d hoped for a lot of things.

“You could be a little nicer about it,” Carrie said, too hurt to hold it back. 

Rachael jerked her head to the side, scoffing, and crossed her arms. Her elbows were just like Glenn’s. All angles. CJ’s brown eyes darted from her to Carrie and back again, already welling with instinctive tears. That was so like Glenn, too—crying before she even knew what was wrong.

“Please don’t fight,” she said in too small a voice.

“Sorry, is that too much of a bummer?” Rachael asked Carrie. She’d really become so grown-up—those fierce eyes, those once-dark freckles on her nose now faded; that sharp, clever face. Mixed with the anger, Carrie felt an inexplicable flare of pride. “I don’t feel anything.”

“How?” Carrie blurted out, because she felt it every day. She felt the presence more than the absence. The things that he might say, the shirts he hadn’t folded, the tax documents in the filing cabinet with his handwriting all over them, the side of the mattress that dipped just slightly down after bearing his weight for so many years. The cardinal songs, the pines in the rain. He was everywhere. 

“Who are you so angry at?” she pressed her, hoping that it didn’t sound as desperate as it felt. “With me? With him?”

“With him?” Rachael laughed spitefully. Her voice broke, straight down the middle: “I could never be angry with him, Mom.”

“Then who? Who is there in this world, Rachael, to blame for this?” 

“God, you don’t get it,” Rachael said. Then, with a vengeance: “He would. Dad would.”

Just as it was intended to, it struck Carrie in the heart. She imagined a spray of blood, a scream of horror, but all that she had were the clean dishes that Glenn had always laughed at and their impossible daughter, Rachael, looking at her so hatefully that the wound turned into an anger.  

“Well, I’m sorry that I’m not your father,” Carrie said before she could think the better of it. “I’m so sorry for making that crucial mistake! I’m sorry that he’s gone and that you’re stuck with me instead. Is that why you’re acting this way? Ever since we lost him, you—”

“Ever since he died, Mom!” Rachael screamed back, slamming both hands onto the table on the word died, as if to crush it into fragments. “Ever since my dad—fucking—died!”

Glenn, Glenn, what would you say? Now listen, kid, I hear you loud and clear but we can’t just go dropping cuss words when Mom’s got the nice plates out. Would you be wearing that blue flannel shirt right now? Would you be holding your fork in the wrong hand?

“Please don’t fight,” said CJ, wet and pitiful.

“What way, what way am I acting?” Rachael laughed again, that harsh, hateful thing, scrubbing a hand over her face. “Like—like it ruined my fucking life? At least I can admit it! At least I’m not acting like he was never even here! Why won’t anybody in this town ever look anything in the eye? Huh?” She seemed to be confronting more people, right then, than Carrie—aiming her rage at the whole sky. “What are you all so scared of?! Even with the island—am I the only one who even sees it?!”

“I see it,” CJ sobbed, wiping at her running nose with her sleeve, just as Carrie always, always told her not to.

Rachael stormed for the hallway, and for a moment Carrie was certain she would leave, right out into the rainstorm without a jacket, but instead she ran up the staircase to her bedroom and slammed the door. In the aftermath, Carrie gazed up at the ceiling, her neck craned all the way back, and laid a hand over her diaphragm. She was breathing more heavily than she’d realized, the way she did when she wept, so raggedly that it burned.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” CJ whimpered, struggling even now to withhold her tears, to be brave. “I-I’ll go talk to her; I—”

“No, leave her be,” Carrie said. “You don’t need to be sorry.” She lowered her head, put together a smile. “You just… you just need to eat your dinner, and be you. Okay?”

But of course she needed more than that. She needed Glenn. Carrie thought, Get in line, kiddo.

“I can feel him,” CJ blurted out. “I really can.”

“I’m glad,” Carrie said, even though she could tell that she was lying.

---

Rachael’s bed had always been a twin. It was tucked against the north wall of her bedroom, under the window. She had slammed the door behind her as hard as she could, like one sound could force the truth of how she felt into the house, into Mom, into the universe—but of course all it had done was make a sound. And then it was over. 

She tried to force herself to cry. Shut her eyes tight until they hurt, until her eardrums shook, like she had done so many times before. How did people do it? Where did it come from? She swore she used to know—used to do it over movies, bruises, boys. Countless tears for a guy she’d kissed one time in ninth grade, but at Dad’s funeral she’d just sat there, not good for much of anything but staring at a patch of grass where someone’s feet had bent the blades and thinking she was thirsty. If a memory would come to her, she’d look away. 

But on her childhood bed, with the lights off, she couldn’t look away anymore. Those worthless memories flickered in her brain all at once, jumbled up, home videos without sound. 

Dad in the living room. Dad in the backyard. Dad in the Land Rover. Dad in the baseball field. Dad in the parking lot. Dad in the cereal aisle. Dad in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. Dad with the oranges. Dad with the pink apron. Dad with the piggy bank. Dad with the oar. Dad with the razor. Dad with the binoculars. Dad with her middle school diploma, with her high school diploma—crying. Dad driving. Dad shouting. Dad laughing. Dad planting the apple tree. Dad pitching the blue tent. Dad covering his eyes during The Thing. Dad carrying firewood. Dad carrying CJ. Dad carrying her. Dad talking about cardinals. Dad talking about spring. Dad talking about winter in Minnesota. Dad talking about the rings of trees. Dad talking about Mom. Dad, talking.

What had the talking sounded like, again? 

What had he said? 

She turned her face into the pillow, her heart bending like grass under the weight of something twenty times its height. Don’t be so hard on yourself, the Dad that she conjured up at times like these told her. I’ll bet that island can’t cry either. 

---

Rachael was doing the dishes. CJ could hear it. Mom had gone up to bed half an hour ago, silently and decisively, and asked CJ to please clear the table. CJ held a single glass in her hand, the last thing on the table that she hadn’t been able to carry on the previous trip. Rachael must have come downstairs while she’d been folding the tablecloth.

CJ gripped the glass a little tighter. A part of her had been counting on being able to sneak out tonight, go hide out at Dana’s—but that wasn’t happening now. Not while Rachael was awake to watch her leave. 

Not this time. 

Rachael’s back was to her. She was wearing her pajamas, a matching pink set that Mom had given her a year ago, and a black sweater. The water was running, and CJ could see the rote movements of Rachael’s elbows as she dipped each plate and piece of silverware under it.

“Hi,” CJ mumbled.

Rachael inclined her head slightly, nothing more than a signal that she’d heard her. CJ walked forward with some hesitation and set the glass down on the counter nearest to her, gripping the hem of her sweater and staring at the floor.

“I can’t even remember him how I want to,” she blurted out. 

The words had come from nowhere, with wants and wills of their own. Rachael looked over at her too quickly, stuttering on a breath. The faucet continued to run, rushing soundlessly down the drain. 

“Nobody told me I’d have to someday. It’s so unfair. That’s why you’re mad at me, isn’t it? Because—because you remember everything and I don’t.” 

Haltingly, Rachael reached for the faucet and turned the water off. The remnants dripped into the filled dishes four times, plink-plink-plink-plink—and then it was quiet.

“I just mean,” CJ said into that taut, wounded quiet, “I just mean…”

What she meant, of course, was that since the appearance of the island she had found herself wanting to miss him, desperate to miss him, but not sure how, not sure what it would feel like. What she meant was that Rachael had always seemed the best of them at missing Dad, in ways CJ had never seen Mom grasp and in ways she herself could scarcely fathom. What she meant was that since the snowstorm a year ago, and since watching Mom put one hand over her face in the dimness of the kitchen as the voicemail from hospice played back, she’d been going through life with the quiet but persistent feeling that she’d missed her bus.

“I just mean I don’t want you to hate me,” CJ croaked. 

Rachael breathed out and bowed her head, using one hand to lay the dishtowel on the counter and the other to cover her face, fingers moving up until they threaded through her hair. Outside, a car coasted by, its headlights shuttering her features through the blinds.

CJ felt an ache growing in her chest like that of a strained muscle: a horrible, profound yearning. 

“I just thought I was supposed to be strong,” she said, her voice thickening. “Like you.” 

Just like that, she started crying. She’d wanted to be better about it; she’d practiced. And yet, now, standing in their dimly lit kitchen in her pajamas, the smell of dish soap and moldy sponge gathered in the air, she unraveled into heaving, whimpering tears. 

Rachael’s reaction was immediate, well-practiced. In two strides, she crossed the floor, tugging CJ close to her. CJ bawled into her sweater, clutching it with shaking hands.

“I want him back,” CJ sobbed. She spoke that impossible wish with everything she had, and it was only then that she realized how much that truly was. She burrowed her face further into the wool over Rachael’s shoulder, snot bubbling in the threads. “I want him back, Rachael, I want him back. I hate this. I hate this.”

“I do, too,” Rachael whispered, turning her head quickly to kiss CJ’s temple. She spoke softly into her hairline. CJ was not even sure whether she was agreeing with the hating or the wanting. “More than anything.” 

After a moment, she squeezed CJ more tightly, all but crushing her against her chest, and let out a wet, breaking sigh. 

“You look a lot like him, you know,” she said hoarsely. “Your nose.” 

CJ pulled away, wiping that red, leaking nose with her knuckles. The tears still thick in her eyes made Rachael’s outline glossy. 

“You look like him, too,” CJ told her. “When you smile.” 

That smile began gently on her sister’s face, a little crooked, with a dimple on the right. She smoothed down CJ’s sleeves with both hands.

“I know what he’d say right now,” she whispered.

“What?” 

There was the rest of the smile: every inch, a tribute.

“Let’s go for a drive.” 

---

“Don’t hang up.” 

Rachael’s fingers halted in the tangle of the phone cord. From the bathroom upstairs, she could hear water running; CJ was washing her face. The car keys were dangling from Rachael’s pinkie, and she had fished one of Dad’s old shirts out of the closet. She gripped the front of it now. In the speaker, Stephen’s voice was tense and low, and having it so close was arresting; she felt the lowness move through her, one dark ripple, vibrations and electricity.

“Look, if you’re there, I’m—” he said, and halted, started over. “Rachael, I’m sorry.”

Rachael was silent. She set her head against the doorframe, feeling the wood’s ridges dig into her temple. Three blocks away, Stephen let out a breath. A living breath.

Rachael let the sound trail into her, losing itself in the parts of her that were reddest, softest. She did not know how to tell Stephen what it was like, right then, to hear him breathe. 

“The island,” he murmured. “It came all this way. Just for you.” 

Rachael couldn’t hold it in. She laughed. Halfway through, the laughing forgot itself and turned into crying, and it sounded hoarse and ugly, and Stephen stayed on the line until she was finished—until CJ came down the stairs, her eyes red-rimmed and bright—until Rachael said good-bye. 

---

It wasn’t a long ride to Lake McDermott. CJ had gotten accustomed to the distance, the turns, the slopes and descents. When Rachael turned the Land Rover into the parking lot, CJ’s breath snagged in her chest like a paper bag under a tire; the island seemed larger, almost, more vivid. She’d been coming to visit it every single day with Dana by her side, watching it for hours—even after Dana fell asleep, her head balanced on CJ’s shoulder, her breathing soft and even—but this was the first time it had ever surprised her. 

An excursion—an excursion! She would have to tell Dana in the morning, and beg for forgiveness. 

Maybe she would tell Dana something else, too.

Rachael had put the kayak on top of the car. CJ’s blood was buzzing as she stood on her tiptoes to help get it down; she wavered a little under its weight, but Rachael righted it just in time. They traipsed down the beach in the dark, stumbling, giggling. 

The closer she came to the island, the higher in her throat her heart seemed to rise, until she could nearly taste it, name it. Rachael’s hair was down, fanning across the flannel shirt she’d thrown around her shoulders. The shirt was too big, the sleeves too long, the shoulders too low. It looked familiar, but CJ couldn’t quite place it. 

There was only one oar for the kayak, and Rachael took it. CJ was perched on the nose, balancing carefully as they cut across the smooth water. The kayak made no sound when it ran up on the shore. CJ clambered out first, then Rachael behind her. CJ reached back her hand and Rachael took it and squeezed it, and they walked up the narrow beach together.

As they slipped past the serviceberry and into the trees, the sky began to faintly lighten overhead. The air smelled fresh and wet, like mud, like life sleeping below the mist. CJ breathed it in until it filled her up. 

She heard a clear, clean cry from somewhere to the right—a bird? She craned her neck, heart quickening. 

They were passing the ponderosa pine. The branches were bright with innumerable cardinals: the crimson males, the red-beaked females, their plumage striking in the winter dawn. They were chattering amongst themselves, like they’d all convened from far away and were swapping travel stories; every now and then one would lift its crested head and call out, two gleaming notes and then the burbling, and the rest would join in—gathered in the tree and singing. 

CJ had never, ever seen so many. 

Ahead of her, Rachael stopped walking. Her hand tugged faintly on CJ’s. She was looking at something CJ couldn’t see. 

“What’s that?” she whispered.

---

Carrie parked the Civic next to the Land Rover, eyes scanning the surface of Lake McDermott before she even stepped out of the car. She could make out a bright yellow speck bobbing closer to the shore—Glenn’s old kayak. CJ was on the bow, and Rachael was rowing. 

Her breath lost its way inside of her. On the still surface of the lake, in the newborn morning, there was no mistaking it. The island was gone.

A sweet birdsong rose above the silence of the lake—cheet-cheet-choochoochoo. Cardinals. Carrie lifted her head. A massive scarlet college of them was rising up from the lake, scattering into the naked dawn overhead—one great departure, a pilgrimage’s end. 

Carrie watched them go. When they had all taken their leave—when the flapping rush of movement was over—she stepped onto the shore and waited.

Glenn had always liked rocky beaches best. They had more character, he said; he said you could sense the ancientness in them. Carrie thought that she could sense some ancientness here, if she concentrated: in the settling fog, in the island’s absence, in the ache in her chest in the shape of a fist. Things that had been there for so long, she thought, that they opposed language. Things without names.

Glenn had taught her the names for so many things. Pleistocene and fluvial and conifer. Rachael and Charlotte Jean. Cardinalis cardinalis—so perfect that you’ve got to say it twice, he would tell her. She wondered, as she often did, what names he might have learned from her, and if they had been buried with him, taken back into the earth where their cells would nourish something new. 

When the kayak ran aground, CJ left it first—one leg and then the next. The rocks were coarse against the hull. CJ reached for Rachael’s wrist, pulled her out. Rachael was wearing Glenn’s shirt.

As her daughters, explorers both, half-ran up the shore to meet her, Carrie thought of what to say. She thought of what she, Carrie, would say—and realized that it was not the saying that they needed, but the asking.

“So?” she asked them when they reached her, two flushed faces in the waxing dawn. “Did it tell you its name?”

CJ turned her head up to Rachael, panting. Some of her hair stuck to her temple, dark with sweat. Rachael, with her hands in her armpits, stared back for a moment. She was shivering.

She met Carrie’s eyes then, and held them. Something like joy shifted across her face, tidelike. In the December day beginning, she opened her mouth around a word. The first word.

---

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