Lost Children of the Far Islands (7 page)

Leo looked so hurt that Gus felt bad almost immediately.

“I’m not an idiot!” he said angrily to her. “And something
is
going on, Gus! Why doesn’t anyone know what’s wrong with Mom? Why won’t Dad talk about it to us? What’s going on with Ila, who, by the way, is not weird?”

Both of them looked down at Ila. She was sound asleep. All that was visible were her curls, spilling over the pillow.

“I don’t know,” Gus said miserably. “I don’t know anything.”

Leo turned over, his back to Gus, and pulled a thick book from under the bed. As Gus fell asleep, she could see Leo, still reading by the light of his bedside lamp.

She woke up to the sound of Ila screaming. She threw back the covers and jumped out of bed. Leo was already on the floor trying to wake Ila, who was sitting up with her eyes shut, her face as red as her hair. As Gus sat down
on the floor, she pulled Ila onto her lap and tried to rock her, but the child’s body was tense and she arched away from Gus.

“Ila!” Leo shouted. “Ila, we’re here. Stop screaming, Ila.”

“Wolves,” Ila sobbed, burying her head in Gus’s shoulder. “Wolves.”

“What is it?” Gus asked her.

Ila lifted her head and looked at her sister. “Wolves,” she said, and then she started to cry again, letting out great, heaving sobs while Gus and Leo petted and soothed her. Mrs. Moore, who had appeared in a flowered nightgown and fluffy slippers, fluttered around them.

“I told you it was wolves,” Leo said to Gus, but she shot him a look to be quiet in front of Mrs. Moore.

They gathered around the kitchen table. Mrs. Moore had made hot chocolate, even though it really was almost summer.

“It will help us all feel better,” she promised, and the thick, chocolaty drink
was
making Gus feel less panicked, although she was still shaken. She was used to Ila’s silence. This newly speaking Ila was a stranger to her.

Ila sat on Mrs. Moore’s lap with a cup of warm chocolate. She looked tired now, holding her cup in two hands but not drinking from it. She yawned and let her head slide onto Mrs. Moore’s shoulder. She would not talk again, no matter how much Gus and Leo coaxed her. Finally, they stopped trying and sat in silence as well, sipping their drinks.

* * *

The next morning, while Ila was drawing at Mrs. Moore’s kitchen table, the twins slipped out and went next door to their own house.

“I checked the wolf book,” Leo said over his shoulder to Gus as they walked.

“I figured. What did you find?”

“Well,” her brother said grimly, “it sure wasn’t coyotes leaving those tracks. Remember the size of them, Gus? Way bigger than my hand.”

They were at the house now. They went without speaking to the area under the kitchen window. Gus could see a few green strands of seaweed still clinging to a rough spot on the windowsill. It had not rained since that night, so the tracks would certainly still be there. Only they weren’t. The soft dirt under the kitchen window was smooth and blank. There were no prints. But when Gus knelt down, she could see that the dirt
had
been disturbed. There were long furrows cut into the soft surface, as though a rake had been drawn over it.

“Someone wiped them out,” Leo said behind her. “And look, Gus.” He pointed over her shoulder to the right, where there was another mark in the dirt. This one was a design of some sort, a circle cut into the ground. The lines were sharp and clear, as if someone had dragged a stick through the dirt very carefully and with a lot of pressure. The circle was cut into four sections by a cross. The quartered circle reminded Gus of something,
or someone—the memory hovered just outside her reach. Bending down, she put her hand out to touch the strange symbol, but Leo grabbed her sleeve and stopped her.

“Don’t,” he said. His voice sounded strained. Gus took her hand away reluctantly.

“We need to talk to Dad,” Leo said, sounding very unlike the easygoing brother Gus was used to. He sounded angry. “Enough secrets.”

Leo pulled Gus to her feet and across the lawn. Gus let herself be pulled, but her head was whirling with the strangeness all around them, and something else. It wasn’t possible, couldn’t be possible, but just before Leo yanked her hand away from the circle cut into the ground, Gus could have sworn she felt heat rising from it.

That afternoon, when their father walked in the door of Mrs. Moore’s house, Leo, Gus, and Ila were waiting for him.

“Ila’s been waking up screaming about wolves,” Leo said as soon as the door had closed.

“Wolves,” Ila agreed, nodding.

“I know,” their father said, running one hand through his sandy hair so that it stuck up like Leo’s. He didn’t even seem to notice that Ila had spoken. “Mrs. Moore and I have been talking about it.”

“But what are you
doing
about it?” Gus demanded.

“It’s just a nightmare,” their father began, but at the stubborn look on Gus’s face, he cleared his throat and said, “Tonight, guys, OK? Dinner at home, just us.”

So that night they ate supper at their own house, with their father. In the morning he was to return to the hospital, but for one night at least, he was home and they could all sleep in their own beds. Their father ate
his dinner distractedly, without looking at his food, so that every few forkfuls came up empty. Their old father would have laughed at himself, wiggled the empty fork, and made a joke about being too busy to watch himself eat. This new father just shook his head and put his fork back down to his food.

When they finished eating, their father pushed his chair back from the table but did not get up. He seemed to be thinking about something. Eventually, he laid both his hands flat on the table. Taking a deep breath, he looked in turn at each of them: Gus, then Leo, and finally Ila.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, “and I need you to listen closely.”

Gus’s stomach began to roll over and she felt as though she might be sick.
Please, not Mom
, she thought.
Please, please
.

“I’ve made a decision,” their father said. Leo nodded. Gus did not. Their father cleared his throat. “That is, your mom and I made a decision. We made it a long time ago. Just in case …” His voice trailed off. “Just in case this time came.”

“I don’t understand,” Gus said. “What do you mean, you made this decision a long time ago? Did you know Mom might get sick?” Her voice rose. “Has she been sick all this time, and you didn’t tell us?”

Her father reached out and put his hand over hers. “Gussy,” he said. “There are some things we haven’t told you about your mom’s family. About where she comes from.”

“She’s an orphan,” Leo said. “She was drowning and you saved her—”

Their father interrupted. “We haven’t told you everything. We—your mom and I—hoped that we would never need to. It’s old history, nothing to do with our lives here. It should be behind us.” He shook his head like someone with water in their ears after swimming.

“We thought it
was
behind us,” he said again. “But it’s not. And your mother and I both feel that no matter what, the most important thing is that you three are safe. And yes, we talked about it, before your mom got sick, and”—he stopped and cleared his throat—“and after,” he said quietly. “And we agreed that you three must be kept safe, no matter what.”

“She wants us to go to someone,” Leo blurted out. “A woman, right?”

Their father looked at him, and Leo blushed. “We heard you,” he said.

Their father nodded. “Yes. Your grandmother.”

“Grandma Brennan’s dead,” Gus pointed out.

“Your other grandmother. On your mom’s side.”

“What other grandmother?” Gus and Leo said at the same moment.

“Your Móraí,” their father said, and all of the hairs on Gus’s arms stood straight up, the way they had once just before lightning struck the chimney of their house.

“That’s the word Ila was saying,” she said. “Moray.”

Their father pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote it right on the cloth napkin.

“It’s spelled M-ó-r-a-í,” he said. “It’s Irish.” He sighed heavily, and placed both palms flat on the tabletop, spreading his fingers wide and studying them. “She lives on one of the Far Islands.”

“No one lives on the Far Islands,” Leo said promptly.

The Far Islands were islands in the Gulf of Maine, except they weren’t, not really. They were just rocky heaps, the tips of undersea mountains that had been covered by the water many thousands of years ago. They were uninhabitable, visited only by seagulls and napping seals.

There were fishermen’s stories about the Far Islands, though. It was said that they were wreathed in strange, thick fogs that appeared and disappeared at will. Some of the islands, the fishermen claimed, moved at night and could never be found in the same area twice. And the creatures that had been seen on the islands—seals, but also stranger creatures that walked upright like men. Fishermen fished all around Georges Bank, the deepest part of the Gulf of Maine, but none would go out after dark, even with radar, for fear of running aground on one of the Far Islands.

“Your mother’s family lives on one of them, or at least they did,” their father said shortly. “Only the Móraí is left now. But it doesn’t matter. You’re not going there.”

“What?” Gus began hotly.

Their father held up one hand for silence. “Your mother’s side of the family,” he began, and then stopped, took a breath, and began again, awkwardly. “Your mother’s people, they’re—they’re not like other people. They’re
half wild, I guess you could say, and they’re dangerous. I don’t want you mixed up with them. I’m going to take you to Pop Brennan’s instead. I have to be at the hospital, but you guys can stay with Pop for a little while, until your mom’s better and this is all over. It’ll be fun.”

“But, Dad,” Gus said, “I don’t want to leave Mom. And why do we have to go anywhere? And what about her family? And what—”

Leo interrupted her. “When do we leave?” he asked.

Their father looked at them with such love and such intensity that even Gus was silenced.

“Now,” he said. “We leave now.”

Things happened very quickly after that.

“Run upstairs and pack one bag each,” their father said. “Just one each—that includes books, Leo. Bring a couple of warm sweaters.”

Their father sounded so strange, so frighteningly unfamiliar, that they did not ask any questions. They just went upstairs and packed. Gus went into Leo’s room to get her favorite sweatshirt—well, Leo’s sweatshirt, really, but after stealing it for more than a year, she considered it hers. Leo was putting his book about wolves into his backpack. Then he pulled another book off his shelf and put it in as well. Gus was able to read the words
Mythical Beasts of the
before he yanked the flap closed, glaring at her.

“Whatever,” she said quickly, pretending not to care. “Don’t forget to feed Bilbo and Gimli,” she added, knowing that would distract Leo.

“The turtles!” Leo said in dismay. Grabbing a notebook, he crouched on the floor to write a lengthy note on turtle feeding and training for their father. While he was writing, Gus was able to grab the sweatshirt from his closet and get it back to her room, where she stuffed it into her pack.

She added an extra sweater to her bag, and a flashlight.

Ila packed her bag full of bears.

“Sorry, Ila,” Gus said grimly. “And no time to fight about it either,” she added.

Ila sat glumly on the bed while Gus unpacked her backpack and refilled it with clothes. At the top of the bag, she jammed in Ila’s favorite bear, the soft brown one with floppy ears. Ila took the backpack huffily and rearranged the bear so that its snout was poking out of the top of the pack, and then followed Gus downstairs, where they found their father waiting in the hallway, holding their water bottles. They each took their own bottle and then stood for a moment, waiting for Leo. He came down the stairs clutching his turtle care instructions, but when he saw the look on their father’s face, he simply put the sheet of paper on the hall table and took his water bottle from their father’s outstretched hand.

“OK, then, fish, let’s swim,” their father said, trying to sound jolly and failing miserably. “OK,” he said again, more quietly. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Their grandfather lived inland, in a little town by the border with Canada. They drove north on the coastal highway rather than cutting over, which made Gus glad—this way she could keep the ocean in sight as long as there was light.

The car was quiet. Leo and Ila slept in the backseat, Ila in her booster and Leo with his head mashed into the space between the window and the seat back. Gus didn’t sleep. She had so many questions that she had given up even trying to ask them. She felt that she was in some sort of strange dream, where the only option was to follow along. She pressed her forehead against the cool of the window and watched the colors leave the landscape, leaching out as they drove until all she could see was dark shapes that were trees and sleeping houses.

After a while, she turned to watch her father drive. He was wearing a baseball cap with
Eppies
written in curlicue script across the front. He drove intently, with both hands on the steering wheel. They looked strong, the knuckles square and battered from his years of hauling in lobster pots as a young man. She suddenly had a feeling that she was not going to see him for a long time.