Wednesday was the same, and Thursday — she stayed out all night. When she came home she slept through most of the day. On Friday, I did the usuaclass="underline" fed our gharials, visited the red Seth and brought her fresh water, checked on the incubators, gave Judy Garland her raw tarpon and berries, went back to the house to make myself a jam and jam sandwich. When I got to the kitchen I saw a white paper rolled small as a cigarette — someone had pushed a note through a rip in our screen door:
PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RENDERED REQUESTED—
Yrs, The Bird Man
“You don’t think some tourist left it?”
“A tourist from what planet? Ossie, the ferry hasn’t even been here today.”
We were in the cypress dome, gathering petals and roots for one of her spells. The interior trees in a cypress dome are one hundred feet tall, with roots, or “knees,” that stick out of the water and breathe for them; with their veins of vines they look like petrified rain. Really, it feels like you’re walking through the weather of the dinosaurs. The gray-blue fossil of a storm, now dropping small leaves. I watched my sister stand The Spiritist’s Telegraph against a live oak, her mouth full of flowers.
“Anyways, that doesn’t make sense, Os. Why would a tourist want payment from us?”
“Well, Gus will probably know what to do.” My sister yawned. Her eyes watered behind a flume of swamp violets and orchids.
“Hey, P.S., you look super really ugly,” I said. Ossie was wearing all of our mom’s makeup at once. “Your eyelashes look like spider legs.”
“You don’t own her, Ava. Anyway, you’re too young to wear mascara.” She blinked her clotted eyelids and shook the note. “ ‘The Bird Man,’ ” she laughed. “How silly. Maybe Uncle Gus is playing a trick on us.” She handed it to me. “Write one back.” She shrugged. “Put the Chief’s mainland phone number on it, let him deal with this.”
Once you exited the cypress dome, you followed a little dip in the elevation of the island and wound up in a swampy meadow on the banks of a brown canal that was often more mud than water, a place we called the Last Ditch. It was about two miles from the touristed park, at the extreme end of our wanderings; you couldn’t penetrate the mangrove scrawl on the opposite side of that canal without a machete. Osceola was wandering around the Last Ditch, picking a bouquet for herself. She kept reaching up to them on her tiptoes, huffing like those ladies in neon unitards we sometimes watched doing Stretch for the Stars! on Grandpa Sawtooth’s rabbit-eared TV. She’d amassed an armful of cowhorn orchids, an epiphyte species that grew on the sunlit side of these trunks.
We’d been collecting the orchids all afternoon and we were both panting and crosshatched with scratches when Ossie spotted a cowhorn orchid wrapped serpentlike around the uppermost branch of a live oak.
“That one,” Ossie said, pointing at the lone blossom on a spindle of raveling bark almost twenty feet above our heads. “That’s the one the ghost wants.”
“Of course it is,” I muttered, wedging my sneaker into the crotch of the tree and hoisting myself onto one of the strongest-looking branches near the trunk’s base.
“Hey,” I hollered. “Tell the ghost to pick another one. That branch won’t hold me.”
“I didn’t ask you to do it,” she called up to me. “He did.” And here she jerked her thumb at the black wreck of the Model Land Company dredge.
“Ossie, I can’t,” I yelled, already halfway up the bald cypress. A fist of wood broke off under my hand, and for a second I saw long stripes of ants run like wet paint; I swung my leg horizontally as high as I could manage, huffing air. A prong of little ants went running over my left hand. The world swooned below me.
Now I made the time-honored, biblical and mythical and TV mountain-climbing movie mistake of looking down: my sister was small as a rag doll. Birds whirled like paper scraps around the bottom of the trunk. I saw where a long metal blade from some quartered machine was sunk into the earth like an ax head buried in some giant’s green scalp. The dredge rocked gently on the canal.
I tipped my chin skyward: the yellow orchid was two feet above my outstretched hand. The wind lifted the tiniest hairs on the back of my neck and I was reaching blindly, clumsily for the yellow orchid, hugging the trunk with one arm and swinging wildly with the other, scraping the same tough nub of bark and getting fistfuls of air. On the third grab I got it. Something shuffled the air below my feet and a cormorant streaked cobalt mere inches from my face, upsetting my balance; I righted myself, panting.
“I almost fell,” I screamed down at Ossie, wanting to get credit for this. It had started to rain lightly. Below me, I could hear it landing on the roof of the dredge barge with a tinny drub-drubdrub. I began my one-handed descent down the tree. Lightning cracked the sky and then I did fall, crashing down the tree. My T-shirt rolled up as branches snapped, Ossie squealing at me at top volume. For a crazy second I worried that my belly was going to peel away, torn off by the rough bark. Then it was over; I was a jumble of limbs in the marl. Somehow I managed to hang on to the thin stem all the way to the bottom.
“Here!” I screamed, thrusting the crushed orchid at Ossie. “Your ghost is a jerk. Do you want me to die and haunt you? Because I swear I will.”
If I were a ghost I would ride that pointer around her Ouija like a little white Cadillac, giving her so much grief! I would—
Something flashed inside the dredge cabin — half a man’s face. His nose and neck and lips were plume-thin. Then he disappeared into the glare on the porthole.
“Did you see that?” I asked softly.
“Yeah, wow. That fall looked like it hurt. You okay?” She gave me a squeeze and dropped my hand. “Thank you for doing that. But look, the spell said we needed tree-growing orchids. See? Nothing terrestrial.” She tapped at a line from a torn page of The Spiritist’s Telegraph.
I looked back at the dredge porthole and saw nothing and no one behind the dirty glass.
“Ava, will you hold these for me?” she asked, handing me a bunch of loose spells with titles that seemed to have come straight from the headlines of a woman’s magazine (sleep enchantments, 479; a spell for happiness in marriage, 124; magic herbs to enhance beauty, 77). Ossie lifted and winged the hem of her dress so that her yellow orchids slid into the middle. Fat raindrops were sliding down both our noses now.
“Okay, Ava. I have to go.”
“It’s time for your date?”
Ossie nodded. In the compromised light of the Last Ditch my sister’s skin took on a watery, greenish cast, like the palest rings around a watermelon.
“Don’t wait here, okay?” she said.
“Okay,” I said, as I leaned against a swamp oak to wait for her.
“Ava …”
“You go. I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll save your place here,” I said, and drew a little X with my sneaker toe where she had just been standing.
“Ava, listen. You have the Chief’s number? You remember where he left the money for us?”
I nodded. I thought we were talking about this Bird Man’s debt and I was annoyed that Ossie was going to leave me to deal with that.
“I—”
Then she swooped in and hugged me. Coming from Ossie, a hug like this was very unusual, but I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell. All that I suspected in that moment was that we loved each other, and that things between us might soon return to what they’d been before. I threw my arms around her neck. Stay in your body, Ossie. She kissed my cheek and then released me with a little push.