The 100 Year Miracle (14 page)

She had moved on to the crackers when she heard footsteps on the deck over her head. She stayed were she was, listening as the feet, moving too fast and with too much assurance to be Harry’s, went from the house to the stairs and then all the way down to the sand. The young woman, carrying two buckets, one in each hand, passed within fifteen feet of Tilda without ever seeing her. A Fish and Wildlife officer called out, but the woman waved him off. Tilda stopped chewing, watching as Dr. Bell skirted the work site, dipped her buckets into the water, and returned, moving more slowly, the weight of the buckets pulling at her arms.

When the woman had gone back into the house, Tilda put away the crackers, took another sip of soda, and fished around in her other bag. Adjusting the elastic band, she pulled the small headlamp onto her head, fitting it over her knit cap. All the weight was in the front, forcing her to adjust how she balanced her head on her neck, not something she had given a lot of thought to in the past. She dropped her shoulders, rolling them back, and settled into this new position before reaching up and pressing the small button once, which turned it on, and then again to make it brighter. The light was small, but the beam it cast was broad. She would have to remember not to look directly at anyone while wearing it. Reckless blinding was going to be a real possibility.

That done, she reached back into the bag and pulled out a pack of pens. She freed one and hooked it into the spiral of the small notebook she’d bought. She shoved that into the back pocket of her jeans, reached again into the sack, and came up with a stubby flathead screwdriver that she shoved into her other pocket.

With both hands free, she approached the boat. She approached it like she might have approached a strange dog, careful when reaching out her hand. Someone had built this boat, an actual someone, not an assembly line of someones. She could see it in the imperfections, lines not quite straight, paint that had gone on too thick and settled into the pebbled appearance of an orange skin. Across the back, obscured by the rudder fin that was flipped up for storage, was the boat’s name,
Serendipity
. Not the name she would have chosen, but it would do.

She ran her light over the hull, the aft arm, the float. Her beam, the bright white of LEDs, cut a sharp line. The sun, somewhere behind the asbestos clouds, had risen, but its light was far too weak to penetrate the cave where she worked.

Tilda moved to the port side, opposite the outrigger. Standing dead center, she put her hands on the cockpit wall and pressed down hard, testing the jacks that held the boat in place. Nothing moved. She pressed harder, lifting her feet up off the sand. When the whole thing did not topple over on top of her, she tipped her weight forward and swung a leg up over the side. The boat shifted slightly, creaking. One jack dug deeper into the sand, and Tilda froze, her muscles tense, ready to fling herself clear of whatever imminent tragedy was about to occur. But none did. She gave it a full fifteen seconds, which she judged to be the maximum amount of time a tragedy could hang
in potentia,
before sliding the rest of her body into the boat.

A single bench spanned the cockpit near the rudder. She wrapped her hand around the tiller. It felt solid and smooth, as smooth as the driftwood that littered the beach around her, and she imagined the builder sanding it again and again and again, imagined the hands that gripped it, darkening the wood over time. Steering with a tiller was both rudimentary and counterintuitive, push left to go right and right to go left, shifting the rudder below accordingly.

Above her, the mast stretched up no more than twelve feet, and down by her sneakers was the sail bag. Whoever had stored it last—and a good part of her doubted it was Maggie—had had the sense not to wrap the sail around the boom and call it a day, which meant that just maybe it would not be in terrible shape. She lifted one end. It was like lifting a snake filled with sand, awkward and heavier than it looked. She eased her end over the port side and let the whole thing drop to the beach below. She would deal with that later. Underneath the sail had been a single orange life preserver that looked nearly as old as Juno. She tossed that over the side, too.

Ducking under the boom, she got on her hands and knees and got to work. Pointing her light with her forehead, Tilda looked first for a mud line, the high-water mark that would’ve been evidence of flooding. Finding none, she reached into her pocket and took out the screwdriver. Inch by inch, she worked her way over the boat. Anything that looked the tiniest bit suspicious got a good poke. Rot would give way easily, coming apart in splinters under pressure.

Inside the cockpit, Tilda found two sections, each a few inches across, that failed her test. She used the screwdriver to pry away the bad wood, working each spot until she had excised it all like a surgeon removing a tumor. Neither went all the way through the hull, and when she was satisfied, she stood, stretched, and dropped herself down to the sand. She took out her pen, made her notes, and then got back to work, performing the same test on the rest of the boat. She found more rot on the float and on both of the hiking boards, but the pivoting centerboard seemed in working order.

When she stepped back, shoving the notebook once again into her pocket, her relationship, their relationship, the one between her and the
Serendipity,
had shifted. They knew each other now. Not like they would. Not like it would be when she got it off the jacks and into the water. But they had begun things. They had been honest with each other about their faults and agreed to work on them.

With one more touch to the hull, Tilda reached up and turned off the headlamp. The sudden darkness blinded her and made her unsteady on her feet as she picked her way out from under the deck toward the relative light of the outside. She gathered up her plastic sacks, unscrewed the cap of her soda, and took another drink, this one deeper, her stomach having settled.

She was going to need epoxy, a lot of epoxy.

17.

When she’d first arrived, Rachel had refused to put her tanks in the dining room. While the room had no windows, it also had no door. It was out of the question. Mr. Streatfield had tried reassuring her that no one in the house would touch her equipment, but that wasn’t the point. Although, once he’d brought up the possibility, Rachel added it to her list of worries.

She carried the tanks up the stairs to her bedroom and lined them up on top of dressers and bookcases. The tanks were large and heavy. She’d had to arch her back too far and feel each step carefully with her foot before ascending because she couldn’t see around. The dose she’d taken earlier had worn off. She’d dry swallowed three of her white pills, the strongest ones she had, before leaving the cabin, but they’d been just enough to take the edge off. After the first tank, she was shaky with pain, so much so that her teeth started to chatter.

It went this way for all three tanks plus the algae setup, then the boxes and duffel bags full of her other equipment, and another trip with the cooler full of new water samples. It wasn’t an ideal work space, but it was private—more private than the dining room and much more private than the camp—and that was the important thing. She’d set everything up as quickly as possible, but her temperature gauges showed the bay water had warmed by seven degrees.

“Shit.”

She did a visual check to confirm what she already knew. The samples had crashed. Rachel blamed the extended transport. She’d have to go back out and collect more before she showered or slept. She could, at least, do that from the house with relative ease and, with a view of the beach, could determine when her arrival would be undetected.

But she could deal with none of that until she got her pain under control. Rachel consulted her notebook and followed the procedure from the day before, measuring and grinding the dead
Artemia lucis
into a paste. This time she increased the dosage by fifty percent and swallowed, chasing it with a handful of raisins left at the bottom of a bag of trail mix.

“Gah.” Rachel stamped her foot and pulled a face, sticking out her tongue, which was still covered in semi-chewed bits of raisin.

Once she’d collected herself, Rachel checked her notebook again. Yesterday morning, she had estimated the amount of time between taking the dose and noticeable pain relief was twenty minutes. She looked at her watch, noted the current time, and set about making herself at home for twenty minutes.

The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in wood panels that had been painted white, the same creamy white as the headboard and dresser. The comforter was plush and, when Rachel squeezed it, she realized, full of down. The fabrics in the room, including the two area rugs, were softly patterned with pinks and greens and yellows. The bedspread had tiny rosebuds, the curtains featured birds, and the rugs were printed with leaves and vines. It was the natural world as imagined by Beatrix Potter. It was the sort of room that could have been in a magazine or a bed and breakfast. It would’ve been the ideal room for a little girl—or at least it would have until Rachel had turned it into a laboratory.

She rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t remember how much sleep she’d had in the past few days, but it wasn’t much. When she stopped moving, her eyes pulled shut. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she was in danger of falling asleep. She got up and did her fifteen careful jumping jacks then went to hang up everything in her duffel bag, even though that which wasn’t fleece was wrinkled beyond hope already. Then she checked her watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed. Rachel bent forward. She’d thought it would be fine, and so she’d done it quickly.

She let out a loud gasp and punched her thigh, her knees threatening to buckle. God, it hurt. It hurt. It hurt. Jesus. Why did it hurt? There was no reason, not with a fifty-percent increase in dosage, that it should still hurt. She pushed air through her teeth and forced herself to stand, feeling around desperately for a logical answer.

Rachel grabbed two of her sealed transportation containers from the cooler and ran down the wooden stairs as best she could, her shoes clomping too loud. Harry stood at the door of his library leaning on his cane and shuffling toward the source of the commotion. She had not bothered to grab a coat.

“What happened?” he asked.

But Rachel did not answer as she raced past to the back sliding glass door. She did not see anyone down by the white tents. They could be between shifts, on a break, collecting at another location. Wherever they were, they could come back and at any moment.

Rachel yanked twice before her shaking hands could make sense of the tiny flip lock. When the door opened, she threw herself out onto the deck as though making a dramatic escape. She was down the stairs and under the yellow tape, waving off the Fish and Wildlife officer fifty yards away who shouted something at her that she couldn’t and didn’t try to hear.

It is hard to run in sand. It is harder to run in sand with the December wind blowing in off the water and into your face, rocks and bits of driftwood reaching up their gnarled fingers to trip your toes. The wind whipped Rachel’s hair in front of her eyes while her feet sank into the sand. She couldn’t keep up her pace and had to goose-step, wasting energy and time. She needed to slow down. Rachel knew that, but knowing and believing are different. No amount of training in what was empirical could do anything against the adrenaline sloshing through her bloodstream. At the water’s edge, her heart rate topped out, and she began to gasp.

She swallowed gulps of air. Standing there on the edge of the island on the edge of the continent with nothing but air, she still couldn’t get enough. Water pooled in her eyes and dripped from the corners, which might have been from the wind.

“Go,” she told herself before she was ready. “Move!”

Rachel waded into the water. It was too cold. Her nerves rebelled, turning temperature to pain. The joints in her toes ached. Her skin, right up to the crown of her head, shrunk tight to her body and broke out in goose pimples. Her muscles contracted. Her back—there were no words for her back. It was as if the wounds were happening all over again, happening on a loop she could not stop. It made her light-headed, sick to her stomach. It was hard to move, but she did. Through it all, she did it anyway because there was nothing else she could do, no one to turn to, nothing that could help. She went into the bay and skimmed her clear, plastic collection tubs across the water.

She had not brought the smaller containers that attached to the bottom of plankton nets. These were, instead, large tubs not unlike what off-brand rainbow sherbet might come in. She had to move more slowly on the way back. Water is heavy, and she was shivering and unsteady. She had to pay extra attention to her feet to keep from tripping and spilling. She made her way back up the beach, over the rocks and the driftwood and through the brambles near the stairs and back up the tiers of expensive decking.

Harry was waiting, standing just outside the door, which stood open, cooling the house and raising the heating bill. He was watching her with an intensity she did not appreciate.

“Excuse me.” Rachel tried to step around him, but he filled too much of the space. “I really have to get these samples in the tanks,” she said.

He was trying to back up and make way, and Rachel worried for a moment that he’d catch his house slipper on an uneven board or that his right leg, turned in at an awkward angle, would simply give way. But she didn’t have time to help him. As soon as he’d moved just enough, she slid past, taking small but quick steps through the house, her eye always on the samples, careful not to spill. Up the stairs she went and into her room. She set the tubs on the floor.

Straight from the tubs, she harvested the
Artemia lucis,
measured, ground the paste, and swallowed it. She did not make a face this time nor did she wash it down with any sort of chaser. She did not have room in her mind for considerations like that.