Marrow Island (28 page)

On the way back to the hotel, I stop into the gas station/country market. It’s the only grocery in town, with a room full of DVD rentals in the back and soft porn behind the counter. I pick up a basket and wander the aisles, staring at things I’m sure I’ve never needed: cookies shaped like elves, canned yams, off-brand toothpaste. Everything has a neon sticker with a price on it; it’s a throwback I find oddly comforting. Somehow I come to an arrangement with myself, so that I will pick one thing from each section of each aisle. I fill the basket with packages of things that appeal to me; sometimes I choose the thing that seems least like me, just to feel the thing in my hand, to see it among the things that I’m buying. I feel a surge of power every time I make a decision. I choose onion crackers and strawberry-flavored instant oatmeal, fudge-striped cookies and powdered donuts and honey-roasted mixed nuts, a yellow legal pad and Irish Spring soap, a six-pack of Rainier and a quart of chocolate milk. When the basket is full, I unload it at the counter, trying to decide if I should choose something from behind the counter, too. The owner, a taciturn, crusty old booger in a flannel shirt, doesn’t even give me the once-over. Not even when I ask him for a Western Family pregnancy test. He pulls it down from the pegboard behind him without looking and types in the price.

“Can I have one more?” I ask him. “Please.”

I dump my mail on top of the groceries and carry the paper bag back to the hotel in my arms.

You’re supposed to test your morning urine, but I take the first test as soon as I get back to the room. I leave it on the edge of the bathtub and sit on the bed. I don’t feel pregnant, I think, opening a beer and the cookies. I unpack the groceries and put everything in the mini-fridge, even the things that don’t really need to be refrigerated. The soap I inhale as I flip through the five channels on the television, waiting it out, thinking about calling my mom and what I will say. I promised her I would always keep in touch; I promised her I wouldn’t give her another scare. I assume that she has heard about the fires, that she has been worried.

By the time Mom made it to the hospital in Anacortes, Katie was in police custody. Not charged, just being questioned. But I wouldn’t see her again for months. Carey had gone, too, though he would come back almost every day until they let me out. I was alone in a room with three beds, bars and curtains between them. They put me by the window, though there wasn’t a view of anything but gray sky.

“What the fuck happened out there, Lucie?” It was her I’m-not-yelling voice; a soft shriek.

“Mom, you said ‘fuck.’” I was loopy with morphine.

“It’s a ‘fuck’ kind of situation, Lucinda. I don’t ever,
ever
want to get a phone call like that about you again.” She was trying hard not to cry.

I learned how to swear from my mom, a longshoreman’s daughter. She may have remarried into a higher social class, but she let it slip sometimes. Even her pearl earrings could look pissed off. She gave me a good chewing out while she gripped my free hand in both of hers. Greg was at a job site in Lake Chelan, and she had driven herself up to the hospital, earning two speeding citations and a lecture from a trooper young enough to be her grandson. I dopily marveled at her ability to mask her fear with anger. I knew if she was swearing this much, she was terrified.

It hadn’t occurred to me to call her. That first night in the hospital, I thought the worst had passed. Within sixteen hours, my guts were on fire. Piercing pains ran along my spine and under my ribs. I had an unrelenting urge to piss molten lava. When Carey came back to check on me, he found me having emergency dialysis. The doctors were mystified—lab results were slow, and no one knew to look for mycotoxins—so Carey told them what he had gathered from my rambling voicemail. Of course neither of us knew what kind, or how much, I had ingested. He asked the nurse to call my mother, so they dug through my bag and found my phone. They had to interrupt dialysis to ask me her name. I had her listed as “Marie,” not “Mom.”

The next day, I woke to a nurse prepping me for surgery. They removed a portion of my right kidney. A lab in Seattle examined the dissected tissue and discovered the culprit: amatoxin, which concentrates in the liver and kidneys twenty-four to forty-eight hours after ingestion of
Amanita smithiana
. Also present: traces of psilocin, from the wavy caps, which were likely in the broth with the mussels, likely why everyone was so strange at the wake. The
Amanita,
though, was for me alone. No one else on Marrow had fallen sick. It must have been in the birch liquor Katie had handed me, given me. I couldn’t prove it—the flask was lost. Later dried
Amanita
were found in the apothecary, along with samples of hundreds of other hallucinogenic and toxic species.

Mom paced the halls fretfully while I gave a statement to the state police—I insisted on doing that alone.

“When did you notice you were hallucinating?”

“In the woods, the trees were talking to me. I remember thinking that was strange.”

“Was this some sort of . . . ritual or something? Was everyone hallucinating?”

“No. That’s—no. Katie was hallucinating too, I think—I’m not sure. But I think that was just the wavy caps. We picked them off the graves earlier.”

“You picked hallucinogenic mushrooms earlier in the day?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think so, yes.”

“Off of graves? Which graves would those be?”

“I’m not making this up.”

“I don’t believe you are, ma’am. I just need to clarify.”

It went on like that until I pushed the button for the nurse and told her I was experiencing a seven on the pain scale. Mom told the detective to take a hike and called a lawyer. She stayed at a hotel nearby until the hospital released me, a week later. Greg came eventually, showing more fatherly concern than he ever had. And I was genuinely grateful when he brought me tabloid magazines and Peanut Buster Parfaits from the Dairy Queen up the street. Carey brought my car back from Orwell, along with the things I left at the cottage. My mother’s eyes lit up when he walked in the door. I shooed her from the room so that he could tell me what was happening, but I’m sure she only went because she thought we were making out.

They had found Jacob Swenson’s remains the second day, and a search of Rookwood turned up traces of his blood on the stairs and floorboards. The theory was murder, possibly manslaughter. Tuck was the primary suspect, because of his past, and because he was known as Jacob’s occasional handyman. But how many accessories were there? Why had they left the body in the barn? No one from the Colony would say, so they were all implicated.

Carey said, “I know, I get it. But it looks bad, Lucie. Really, really bad for all of them. They didn’t even bury him in their own cemetery.”

“It was probably part of the experiment, like the whale—maybe they were trying something new,” I said. “He wanted to be a part of the project. But the only ones who knew about it were Tuck and Katie, Sister and Maggie.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” I snapped. “I’m trying to understand. They couldn’t bury him in the usual way, or everyone in the Colony would have known.”

“You were wandering around hallucinating and you found him. Someone else would have found him.”

“Between the mycelium and insects, I don’t think he would’ve lasted very long.”

I don’t know why I wanted to spare my mother the details. She saw it all on the news in her hotel room anyway.

“That cult could have buried you alive on their mushroom farm!” she said.

“Stop it, Mom. It’s not a cult.”

“Jesus Christ. You have Stockholm syndrome, Lucie. It may be some kind of eco-cult, but it’s still a fucking cult.”

If I had just told her everything from the beginning, would it have made more sense to her, how easily the fight for something fundamentally good can go astray in human hands? It’s still a fight; fights get bloody. She accused me more than once of still being under the influence of the psilocybin. She tried to talk the internist doing rounds into ordering a psych evaluation.

“That’s good, Mom, just ship me off to therapy again,” I hollered at her.

Months later, in a deposition, Elle would tell what she heard one night: Maggie and Tuck having words. Sister J. had asked Tuck to check on Jacob. Jacob had been drinking a lot, going on and off his meds. They had all been worried. He found Jacob at the bottom of the stairs, bloody but breathing, barely conscious. He panicked. If Jacob’s family took over the Trust, the Colony would face eviction and worse, when someone found the graves, the psychedelics they’d been growing. Tuck wanted to get Jacob back to the Colony to clean him up. He had loaded him into the Colony’s boat, taken him back to Marrow, to Maggie. But on the way, Jacob started convulsing. He died in the night. They knew his injuries looked suspicious. What could they do, but protect the others from culpability by hiding his remains, disposing of them away from the rest of the Colony’s dead? But by then, everyone had made up their minds. Tuck, Maggie, and Sister all pleaded no contest in exchange for an end to the investigation. No contest. They didn’t have any fight left in them. Tuck was extradited to California to face the arson and attempted murder charges. Katie, Elle, and Jen pled down and received house arrest and community service.

When the next commercial comes on, I take my beer into the bathroom and pick up the test. Only one pale pink line; not two. I bury the stick under toilet paper in the trashcan. I drink the rest of the beer and pull the phone onto the bed. My urine may be unreliable, with my kidneys the way they are now, so I’ll try again in the morning.

I pick up the receiver and dial Mom’s landline, staring out the window at the main street, burly men piling out of a van at the town’s only diner. She picks up on the third ring.

“Hi, Mom.”

I hear her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Lucie, I’ve been calling every day.” Her voice is strained but soft, spent, like she has been crying.

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.” I’m tense already, hearing her voice. “I’ve been up at a fire lookout. Carey’s been staying at the station a lot. The fires are really bad right now. But I’m in Prairie City now; we’ve evacuated the cabin. You don’t need to worry.”

I hear her measured breathing.

“So you haven’t heard?”

“What? Heard what?”

“Oh, Luce. I’m so sorry.”

I know what she’s going to say before she says it. Her voice gets younger, all of a sudden. It’s her voice from years ago, when she was telling me that Daddy wasn’t on the boats coming back from Marrow.

“They found Katie on Marrow. She killed herself, sweetheart.”

I feel something pull my insides to the floor; then I draw back up as if on a spring and fly right up into the air over my body, on the hotel bed, holding the phone to my ear. My mother is saying something else now, and maybe I see the words in my mind’s eye, as if in a thought bubble above me, but they don’t mean anything yet, as if I’m not reading them.

Then I’m saying, “When?”

And I’m hearing her answer, “Yesterday.” And I’m counting back in my mind, trying to find some measure of the distance between here and there, on foot, by car, by bus, by train, by ferry, by whatever means necessary. How?

“She was here,” I’m saying, and my mother is protesting.

“How is that possible? When?”

“It’s not that far away,” I say. “It was . . . a few days ago. I can’t remember when exactly. She could have taken a bus . . . How did she do it?”

“What?”

“
How
did she kill herself?”

“Oh, Lucie. It was with her father’s handgun.”

“What? That can’t be right, Mom. Why?” But I know why. She didn’t want to be found, to be revived. Like I was. I go numb. I hardly hear my mother’s voice.

“Lucie, you can’t be alone right now. Call Carey. Is there anyone else you can call?”

The mail is spread out on the bed. The manila envelope is slipping out of the magazine. My fingers are wooden; my limbs are numb. I lift my hand, watch myself pull the envelope from the magazine. Inside there is a note from Sister Rose Gracemere, along with another envelope, addressed to me, care of Sister J., in Katie’s hand. The note explains that the letter came recently, dropped in the prayer box at the end of the driveway. I’m shaking and slice my finger across the paper as I open it, watching the blood appear in the crevice. I hear her voice.

Dear Lu,

I know this letter won’t be what you want it to be, but I don’t know how else to say goodbye. A letter seems so dramatic. And one that won’t find you until it’s too late—god! If there were a hell, I’d be going there for this letter alone. I’ve never given you what you wanted. I don’t know why. It just always seemed that if I did, we’d have nothing left between us. I was always a part of you, and you were always a part of me. No matter how far apart we were. But now you’re so far away that I don’t know how else to reach you. I know the sisters will get this to you, if I can get it to them. They’ll probably even throw in a prayer for us both, no questions asked.

I won’t drag it out: there are so many tumors they won’t be able to find them all. They want to take everything out of me—all the lady parts—but the cancer is everywhere. It’s so strange, that the body can look so normal when the insides are a cellular clusterfuck. But here’s the beautiful thing: when they showed me the scans, all lit up on the screen in the dark room before the surgery, the tumors looked like
Clavaria
—like coral fungi. They are growing in me, breaking me down, sending me back to the earth. I could feel them, then, so hungry, so efficient. I just stared at them thinking: I know you, I know you.

You know them, too. You’ve seen what they can do.

Life and death, they’re always together, hand in hand, like inseparable friends, like sisters. And the space between them is an endless cycle of growth and decay. This is nothing to mourn. The whole fucking thing is a celebration. Every moment of it.