The 100 Year Miracle (38 page)
Read The 100 Year Miracle Online
Authors: Ashley Ream
Tip still lived next door. Tilda rarely saw him, and when she did, she pretended that she didn’t. He had tried to speak to her shortly after the accident, but she had dismissed him, and he’d made no further overtures.
Now the world had entered the lull between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, and Tilda knew she would soon need to go through things. Harry’s clothes would need to be donated to charity, the medicine cabinet cleaned out. Tilda had a whole household of her own things in storage, as it was, and she would need to reconcile that with everything that was already here. But all of that would have to wait. She wasn’t ready to do it now.
She had, in fact, made only two changes to the house. The first was to clean up the guest room, which had taken some doing. Whatever had happened in there—and no one seemed to know what, including Harry and Juno—had ruined the hardwood. She’d had the floors refinished, the rugs replaced, and the bed disassembled and stored. In its place, she’d ordered a crib, making it known that she expected a goodly number of visits with her new granddaughter.
No one else knew about the second change. It was very small and, at the same time, not small at all. Tilda had removed the picture of Becca from Harry’s side table here in the library. It was a beautiful picture. Becca had so loved that red coat, insisting on wearing it long after it truly fit her. It had been cool the day the picture was taken. Tilda remembered it. Cool but not as cold as the picture made it seem with all the clouds and the gray, which was why Tilda had allowed her to go out without her gloves. Tilda had taken the photo in the heavy silver frame and moved it upstairs. Now it sat on the small stool that served as her nightstand, and she found she quite liked having it there.
For however real they seemed to me during the writing of this book, the 100-Year Miracle,
Artemia lucis,
Olloo’et Island, and the Olloo’et people are all figments of my imagination.
Residents of the San Juan Islands know that oars slapped against the water will cause a fleeting bioluminescent effect, much to the delight of children. Countless creatures, from cephalopods right down to bacteria, produce this “cold light,” so called because it creates no heat. However none of these animals give off quite the display described in this book.
The genus
Artemia
is real and includes arthropods, such as brine shrimp. The
Artemia lucis
in this book are very similar to their real-life brethren, although consuming them is not recommended.
Olloo’et Island is, likewise, similar to several of the San Juan Islands off the northwest coast of Washington state. I borrowed heavily from Whidbey (not technically of the San Juans) and Orcas Islands and am indebted to the various bar and shopkeepers, ferry workers, inn owners, residents, and waitresses who welcomed me. There is even a YMCA camp to be found on Orcas, which bears only some resemblance to the one the research team inhabits. Nonetheless, the 1943 advertisement quoted in chapter 7, “A training in self-reliance is a Godsend in wartime,” is a real advertisement for the camp used during World War II. That said, large swaths of Olloo’et are entirely fictional and aren’t to be found anywhere but in these pages. Similarly, bits of the mainland, too, have been rearranged to my liking.
The Olloo’et people—and the character of John in particular—were inspired by historical photos, accounts, and stories of several Pacific Northwest tribes, which I reference with the greatest of respect. The Olloo’et themselves, however, do not now, nor have they ever, existed. I’m grateful to the Burke Museum in Seattle and innumerable libraries and digital archives for giving my fictional account some loose basis in history.
I am also grateful to Katharine Berry Judson for her 1910 book
Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest
(reprinted in 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press, introduction by Jay Miller). And while it is true that Catholic missionaries, especially from France, were working in the Pacific Northwest at the appropriate time, none so far as I know ever recorded accounts of a phenomenon like that which is described here.
A particular nod is due Brian Gilbert for his book
Fix It and Sail: Everything You Need to Know to Buy and Restore a Small Sailboat on a Shoestring
(International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2005), which, along with innumerable manuals and training videos, got Tilda and me through.
And finally, I am grateful to the Seattle Symphony. For although they did not know it at the time, I was perched in third-tier seating with a set of opera glasses against my face and a notebook in my lap.
Gratitude is due in untold quantities to three women, in particular. Thank you to Dr. Cheryl Van Buskirk and Dr. Ashley Wright, molecular biologists, and Beth Lenz, marine biologist, who each did their utmost to keep me from the most egregious scientific errors, answering dozens of questions, sending me literature and inviting me into the lab. I did not make it easy on them.
Thank you to Dr. Cynthia Strathmann, a San Juan Islands native, for her invaluable insights into life on the islands. Thank you also to Cameron Brown and Amy Lee, lifelong friends who welcomed me in Seattle, and the Wright family, who opened their beachfront home to me in Oregon.
And to those who rolled up their sleeves to make this book the best it could be, thank you always to my first readers, Janice Shiffler, Jessica Staheli, and Eric Stone, and to my agent, the incomparable Barbara Poelle. May your coconuts always be full of rum. I am especially grateful to the team at Flatiron Books and to my editor, Christine Kopprasch, who pushed me and the book further than I imagined possible.
And as always, the deepest gratitude is due my husband, Austin Baker, who, above all, points north.
The Bembo
®
design is an old-style humanist serif typeface originally cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 and revived by Stanley Morison in 1929. The original Morison typeface contained only four weights and no italics.
Also by
Ashley Ream
Losing Clementine
Ashley Ream
got her first job writing for newspapers when she was sixteen and has since followed her career all over the country. She is now happily settled in Seattle, where she lives with her husband, runs ultramarathons, and is finishing her next book. Her debut novel,
Losing Clementine
, was short-listed for the Balcones Fiction Prize. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE
100
YEAR MIRACLE
. Copyright © 2016 by Ashley Ream. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-08222-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-08802-4 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250088024
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First Edition: May 2016
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