Marrow Island Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The Islands

  The Woods

  The Islands

  The Woods

  The Islands

  The Woods

  The Islands

  The River

  The Islands

  The Palouse

  The Islands

  The Islands

  The Woods

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Alexis M. Smith

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, Alexis M, author.

  Title: Marrow island / Alexis M. Smith.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037467 | ISBN 9780544373419 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544373426 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Secret societies—Fiction. | Cults—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.M538 M37 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037467

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  v1.0516

  for Amy K.

  Prologue

  This was my last glimpse of Marrow Island before the boat pulled away: brown and green uniforms clustered on the beach, tramping up the hill to the chapel and through the trees to the cottages of Marrow Colony. The boat wasn’t moving yet, but the uniforms already seemed to be getting smaller, receding from my sight, shrinking into a diorama, a miniature scene of the crime.

  Carey had helped me into the boat. I sank to the wheelhouse deck and curled into myself, sitting knees to chest, spine to prow. Joshua Coombs was calling out on the radio, requesting an ambulance to meet us in Anacortes. Katie tried to come aboard, but Carey hollered something to her and she ran back up the dock. He squatted next to me and spoke softly, just by my ear.

  “We need to take off your clothes.”

  They were soaked through; I wouldn’t be warm until I was dry. I understood that this was first aid; I understood that he was doing his job as the park ranger. I just didn’t have it in me to participate in my own rescue. I was spent, scraped, and bruised. I leaned into him, eyes closing.

  “Stay awake, Lucie,” he said. “A little longer. Listen to my voice.”

  He lowered me carefully to my back, his parka under my head, and called to Coombs for scissors.

  Carey kept talking, narrating as he undressed me, threading one arm through a sleeve, gently rolling me, tugging the shirt up my torso, lifting my head. I knew his hands were on me, but through my cold flesh they felt like the mitts of a giant, huge and heavy. He took off my socks—my shoes were long gone, in the field? in the ruins? in the woods?—and cradled my heel in his palm as he lowered it to the deck. My thoughts had stopped making sense; I tried to visualize Carey’s words as he spoke, I have to cut these off. Then he slid the small sharp scissors up the outside of my leg through my jeans. He hesitated around my hip.

  “Please try—can you be very still?” he asked.

  I was shivering uncontrollably. He rubbed my legs up and down under a blanket, telling me about circulation, about blood, about heat. I drifted.

  “Stay awake, Lucie.”

  Coombs was starting the boat. Katie came back with more blankets. Carey told Katie to get down on the deck and wrap herself around me. She lay down beside me on Carey’s parka, pulled me into her body, and rubbed my arms and back. He covered us both with the two blankets.

  I breathed into the wool as the boat lurched through the swells, nausea rising up instantly. Katie seemed never to stop panting from her run up the shore. The bass beat of her heart, the thrust of the boat through the waves, and the feeling of fullness at the back of my throat. I wanted to purge everything inside me, but my bearings held.

  “Don’t let her go,” I heard Carey say.

  At the hospital in Anacortes, they treated me for hypothermia, but they were confused; I was going through more than one kind of shock. Carey told them I’d been lost on Marrow Island overnight—he didn’t know the rest of it yet—and they saw his uniform and took his word. When they asked me what and when I had last eaten, I shrugged, though I remembered my last meal well—the mussels, the heady broth, the bread, the wine, and the birch liquor—and the cramps in my stomach that started not long after. The memory of food brought on the first hunger pangs; the craving for energy, for heat, my metabolism waking up. They were so strong they stabbed at my guts, but the nausea lingered. I couldn’t imagine putting something in my mouth, tasting, swallowing.

  Katie told the intake nurse she was my sister, and I didn’t correct her. They let her sit by my bed all night.

  “I’m not leaving you alone with her,” Carey told me. She was standing right beside him when he said it, but she didn’t defend herself. I didn’t know what to say; I wanted them both.

  Katie held my hand for hours, while my temperature rose and patches of my flesh became livid. I could feel the drunken movement of blood and plasma through my body, my cheeks throbbing, my toes and fingers buzzing. My breasts felt like meat cold from a locker. Eventually Katie slept, head next to mine, nose to my cheek, like when we were girls, like that first night after the quake, clinging to each other under a Mylar sheet in the gymnasium. I listened to her sleep; I felt her moving through her dreams.

  Carey sat in a chair by the door, waiting for the sheriff, though he shouldn’t have—he should have been back on Marrow at his post, taking the state troopers through the woods, writing official reports. Soon enough everyone would be looking for all of us, with questions. But they would find what they were looking for at the Colony without our help. And by the time they asked me to tell my part, they would have a story of their own and they wouldn’t veer from it, no matter the details I offered.

  My notes were probably already in the sea or burnt to ashes. I tried to reconstruct the days in my mind, building a timeline, sorting details, drawing up the images of pictures I had taken, of things I had seen. I cataloged the different scents in the layered stench I gave off: conifer needles, stump rot, burnt lichen, fungi spores—all washed with the yeasty brine of bodies. Mostly my body. But other bodies, too.

  In the weeks after, back in the city, I woke alone in my third-floor apartment every morning. Outside, buses lumbered down Fremont Street, shopkeepers turned over their Open signs, people drank their coffee, checked their phones, walked their dogs. The city repeated its relentless, noisy cycle just like it had every day before and after that week I spent on Marrow. I listened, I watched. After the May Day Quake, over twenty years before, Seattle had rebuilt itself, from concrete rubble heap back to silver city, lessons learned, so we tell ourselves. Otherwise, what was the point of it all? What unlikely comfort we find in the refrain build, destroy, repeat. There are always survivors left to pick up the pieces. There’s always someone to tell the tale.

  I had my own refrain: I told the story of those days on Marrow hundreds of times in the first few months—to the state police and the FBI, the grand jury, to my fellow journalists, to the editors who wanted me to write a book, even—because of Sister J.—the archbishop of the Seattle Diocese. I answered their questions honestly, and all the details were true, but the telling began to feel like a betrayal. I told them the story and they typed it up and it became tabloid-
television lurid. Marrow Colony as cult. Marrow Colony as failed utopia.

  Build, destroy, repeat. From my hospital bed, from my apartment, from the courtroom, I saw Marrow Island and Sister’s Colony pillaged, and all the people there who were scraping out a little space for themselves—their only hope to live gratefully, daily, in the service of the planet—they were evicted, displaced, incarcerated.

  Now I am five hundred miles away in the dry, pine-scattered forests of eastern Oregon, but every time I dream, I find myself back on the islands. In some dreams, I relive the events as they happened. In others, I realize I’m dreaming, and I try to undo the past, to make different choices. Either way I wake up feeling lost. How did I get here? How did this happen? I might be the only one left who knows.

  The newspapers have moved on to other catastrophes. The Colony’s history will fade into the archives; the colonists will become ghosts. No one will remember the names of those who performed a miracle on Marrow Island. I have never said so to anyone—not even Carey—but I forgive them. I forgive them for trying to kill me.

  One

  The Islands

  ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON

  OCTOBER 8, 2014

  THE SUN HAD just set. I turned down the lane to the cottage, arrows of light shooting from clouds on the horizon. The air was warm, with a chill settling at the edges. Tall trees darkened the driveway. I could see the shape of the house but few details. My phone lit the way through the front door and kitchen to the fuse box. I switched the breakers, heard the fridge rattle and an encouraging tick from the water heater, turned on a few lights. Faded notes in my mother’s hand were taped to everything—on light switches and cupboard doors and appliances—explaining how and what to do to revive the place. I read each one, not ready to rely on my memories. Mom had been renting the cottage out to friends and acquaintances for years. But this was my first time back since I was twelve.

  As I hauled my bags from the back seat of the car, I heard sputtering chirps echoing in and out like synth beats at a club. Then, realizing the incongruity, I remembered the time a bat the size of my palm had become entangled in my hair one summer evening, just a few feet away, in the garden. I looked up to see them sweeping the air overhead, feasting on the moths and other insects attracted by the porch light. I shuffled up the driveway as fast as I could, luggage raking the gravel.

  On my way back for the box of groceries, I noticed a glow among the swaying trees—not the moon, which hadn’t risen yet. A light in an upstairs window at Rookwood, the big old house across the lane. I wasn’t completely alone on the far side of the island.

  Weary from the drive and the long ferry ride, I went straight to bed, up the ladder to the loft in the eaves. The ceiling was so low, I crawled to the pallet bed on my knees.

  When I was a kid, I could walk upright if I tucked my head. Every night I read until I fell asleep with the lamp on. So Dad started calling it my lighthouse. He could see my windows from down by the shore where he cleaned crab pots or smoked salmon or drank beers with Mom and talked about the things they didn’t want me to hear. When they came back to the cottage, he would climb up the ladder to kiss me good night and turn off the light. I remembered the smell he brought in with him: night, alder smoke, an abalone wetness.

  I woke early. Woolly fog wrapped around the small windows, and condensation dripped down the wooden sills, the white paint puckering and peeling away. The ceiling was still blue, with faded golden stars painted all over the slats. Once there had also been paper stars hung from the beams with fishing line. I listened to the muffled lap of the waves against the dock below and guessed that the tide was high.

  As I climbed down the ladder as gracefully as I could, creaks sounded out from the rungs that I used to flit up and down like a chickadee. In the morning light, I saw everything I had missed the night before: Grandma Lucia’s lace curtains still hanging in the east windows, a row of agates along each sill, the wool rag rug in the living room—worn to threads in places. The smell of wood smoke was in everything. It had already seeped into my hair, though I hadn’t built a fire. I knew by the note Mom had left on the closet door that there were extra coats, hats, etc. inside, but when I opened it, I took a step back. They were Dad’s coats, boots, vests. A box full of knitted caps, rain hats, work gloves. Some of them had been Grandpa Whit’s first. I closed the door and tore the note down. Then I went around tearing all the notes down.

  After the earthquake and Dad’s funeral, it took all the money we had to get to Seattle to Mom’s parents’ place. Mom signed up with a temp agency as soon as we unpacked our things. There were ruins everywhere and plenty of work in reconstruction. She did anything they offered her, directing traffic for utilities crews, sorting salvage at warehouses where people could haul loads of debris. Eventually she worked in the office of a property developer. She supported us with that work, within a few months finding us an apartment, acquiring health insurance, sending me to the parish school, Our Lady of the Lake. And repairing the cottage. Making sure the county didn’t condemn it and tear it down, like so many other buildings rattled by the quake. She used what she learned working for the developer to sidestep occupancy requirements, to get waivers and stays, to hold on to Dad’s childhood home. It hadn’t been ruined, just abandoned. Not abandoned, she had told them, just temporarily vacant. Reconstruction all over the region took years, but it wasn’t long before people wanted to get away from the city and the glassy, haunted look it could have, when everything new just reminded them of what had been there before. Mom started renting out the cottage to pay for taxes and utilities. Occasionally a friend of mine would report that she had slept in my lighthouse room. I would change the subject. I would avoid that friend for a week.

  There was a new mirror above the sink; the old medicine cabinet had come off its rusted hinges and crashed in the quake. I had not been tall enough to see most of myself in it then. I was unrecognizable now, eyes cottony with sleep, hair flared up on the pillow side, ponytail askew. I had fallen asleep in long underwear and a wool cardigan with elbow patches. I looked like the morning after a wild L.L. Bean catalog shoot. I had friends in Seattle who cultivated this look. They showed up to work like this—wherever they worked: hair salons, universities, butcher shops, ad agencies. I preferred to look like I had my shit together, even when I didn’t.

  Mom sometimes told me I looked like Grandma Lucia, Dad’s mom, with her wavy black hair—she wore hers in a bob—and big brown eyes and high cheeks. I understood this to mean that I looked like my father, too, but that she couldn’t bring herself to mention him. I combed out my hair with my fingers, washed the sleep from my eyes.

  I sat in front of the stove on a cedar stump, staring through the dark opening into the cold iron belly. My mother had insisted (House Rule #2: Replenish Supplies) that the fire box always be full, and it was: dry kindling, extra-long strike-anywhere matches, and a Sunday paper from over two years ago, wrinkled and crisp.

  A fire needs three things, I told myself. My dad used to say it all the time.

  I rifled through the box and pulled out the paper. Seattle headlines: the new socialist mayor, raising the minimum wage, the lawn wars, the first of what would be several years of summertime droughts, the year of the worst wildfires in Washington’s history. It was the year protesters camped out on golf courses and organized the guerrilla gardening of food plants and fruit trees all over the city. I had reported on it for The Stranger. I had followed a group of anarchist gardeners as they planted by night, with work gloves and headlamps, hauling old pillowcases full of homemade compost and worm castings to weedy parking medians and abandoned lots all over the south end of Seattle. In the light of day, their gardens were sloppy but darling; touring the city in the morning, you never knew what you would see, what formerly trash-dotted roadside scab of broken concrete and dirt would suddenly be speckled with squash seedlings and hand-painted signs in rainbow colors with slogans like FOOD NOT LAWNS and OCCUPY THE SOIL.

  It
hadn’t been my first feature, but it had been my first to lead the region’s media coverage of anything. The paper in my hand had come out a full month after my article. I turned to the inside page and there he was: Matthew Cartwright, the locavore chef and food activist who asked me out over a bucket of homemade fish head fertilizer. His handsome, bearded mug—the same one that led my own story—had sold urban homeowners all over the city on tearing up their lawns and starting worm bins. We had been lovers for over a year after that, and during that time I had stopped reporting on anything related to the movement. I had spent weekends tearing up blacktop, amending soil, digging holes for a public fruit and nut arbor on Beacon Hill, and hours helping him with the onslaught of media that came in the wake of my piece.

  After all that work, all that time on his projects, I didn’t measure up. When I let go of my own work, my own priorities, I lost the qualities he had been attracted to in the first place. That’s how he put it. He loved the woman I was before I was in love with him.

  Since the breakup, I had worked for two papers and been laid off by both. Freelancing and adjunct teaching were not paying the bills. I couldn’t afford my apartment anymore.

  I tore the article into long strips, visualizing my dad’s method, twisting handfuls into long bunches with flares at each end. I shoved Matt’s smug face to the back of the stove with a stick, piled other sticks around it. For a full minute, the fire scuttled through the paper, licking at the wood. The kindling crackled but didn’t catch. Smoke swallowed the log. I could almost hear my dad sucking air through his teeth the way he did whenever I insisted on doing something without his help, even if I didn’t really know how.