Trumbull and Harry started shaking their heads in alternating rhythms. I felt my head beginning to join in, stopped it. I was still shocked by the cool and even feel of tile under my bare feet; the ranger had taken my ruined shoes from me, and was making some quiet arrangement on the telephone in the next room.
“You guys surprised me, too. I thought you guys were ghosts,” I offered. I stood on the fault line of the men’s laughter and everybody seemed surprised when I started laughing along with them. For a second I had a flutter of the old after-show feeling and I thought, Oh my God, what if it’s really over?
At that juncture, I wasn’t talking about the Bird Man. The ranger didn’t ask me any questions about how I’d wound up on the drift slough, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to volunteer.
“When you go back to your camp,” I asked them, “will you keep an eye out for a red alligator? She’s a Seth from my family’s alligator-wrestling park. She has this, ah, this special condition, I don’t think it’s a mutation, exactly, my brother will know …”
Harry made a little noise in his throat and looked around the room, like he wished the ranger would come back.
“Now you are not going to believe this …” The ranger returned from his desk with two more water bottles for me and a funny expression, a grimace that kept itching up toward a grin and collapsing. It made me think of a bent fishing rod, as if his mood were some monster fish that he couldn’t reel in.
“You said your name is Ava Bigtree? Do you by any chance have a relative named Oh-see-oh-la? Because she got picked up not five miles from where we found you, kid. They got her just this morning …”
He slid a paper toward me: NOTICE JULY 29 SEARCH AND RESCUE UPDATE, BIGTREE, OSCEOLA RECOVERED BY SEAPLANE PILOT …
My eyes flew down the column and came to rest on the little ledges of their names: “Bigtree, Osceola” and “Bigtree, Kiwi.”
“I would love to hear what you girls thought you were doing out there,” the pale ranger said, raising a scabby eyebrow at the gator hunters. Harry stared at Trumbull with a hangdog expression, as if to say that he’d been ready before they even got here to go, and Trumbull, who was eating a bag of white potato straws that he’d purchased from the vending machine near the latrine, didn’t have a lot to add. He read a few lines and shrugged.
“That’s a funny name,” said Trumbull, jawing on a potato straw. “Bigtree. What were you all doing way out here? Family vacay-shun, or something?”
Kiwi, Ossie, and an older white couple named Mr. and Mrs. Pelkis were waiting for me at the ferry dock. We talked over one another while the older couple watched from the dock’s edge, babbling about Seths and Louis Thanksgiving and the Chief in what must have sounded like a foreign language — behind us, Mrs. Pelkis started sobbing for some reason, her husband loudly shushing her. And I folded into my sister’s grief and heat. My brother’s wet face. I kept closing my fingers around the secret, enfleshed stones of their wrist bones and breathing in the strange smells of them — Ossie’s mangrove dank and Kiwi’s hotel scent of aftershave and shampoo — to verify that they were truly alive.
Nobody spoke on the car ride into Loomis. Kiwi had written out directions to the place where our dad was staying, the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, on a card from Mrs. Pelkis’s purse. After that brief exchange with us, she’d slammed a cassette of classical music into the tape deck with the attitude of someone turning a door lock. The huband, Dennis Pelkis, was snapping blue gum like he was trying to generate electricity or something. I’d been testing him: every time I asked a question he put another stick of blue gum in his mouth, which meant he had four sticks in there right now. Which was fine by me — nobody seemed capable of speech just then. Ossie and Kiwi watched the rainfall through their respective windows, and because I was squeezed in the middle and I didn’t have a window I watched the changes on their faces.
The farms came first. The Seths’ country gave way to green and yellow tractors that looked like imperial carriages on their huge tires, and great gusty sprinklers throwing water everywhere. We passed the last gas station before the city began in earnest and Osceola started to cry a little. I leaned over her and pushed the lock down on the car door.
The whole time I was thinking about the buoyancy that saved me. I know that I am a pretty biased interpreter of the events that led to my escape, but I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have lent me some of it, because the strength I felt then was as huge as the sun. The yellow inside you that makes you want to live. I believe that she was the pulse and bloom that forced me toward the surface. She was the water that eased the clothes from my fingers. She was the muscular current that rode me through the water away from the den, and she was the victory howl that at last opened my mouth and filled my lungs. I didn’t want to tell my sister anything about this in the Pelkises’ car — I didn’t see how I could manage it with words — but I wished I could at least give Ossie a picture of where I had been, what had been in me. I wished she could bob with me for one second in that air. Black bay trees had lined the sky behind the lake and I was furiously alive around the bubble of our mother.
Was that fullness what Ossie had meant when she talked about her possessions? If so then I had been very wrong, I decided. I was wrong to have laughed at her in our bedroom, in the beginning, back when we’d said that her ghosts weren’t real, or her love.
The road spun behind us like something the car was secreting, yards and yards of black filament. I reached over and squeezed my sister’s hand.
“Hey,” I said. “I believe you.”
The bowling lanes at the Bowl-a-Bed hotel stay open until 2:00 a.m. From the lobby, you could hear the belly-growl of the balls hurtling down the lanes and the clatter of the pins. The Bowl-a-Bed’s bellhop and concierge was a ghoulish young man wearing orange-and-ruby bowling shoes on his size 13 feet. He was a kid, younger than Kiwi, with braces and thick black eyebrows, eyebrows so muscular and expressive they looked almost prehensile to me. They shot up when he saw us.
Ossie and I stood before him with mud-stiffened hair falling into our burned faces. I was shivering inside the ranger’s long T-shirt, and she had on one of Mrs. Pelkis’s kitten-printed nightgowns. Our faces in the lanes 1–9 scoreboard glass looked sewn onto our necks with scratches. Kiwi at least was wearing zippered pants.
“No bags?” the bellhop asked us with a practiced little smirk. His big shoes waggled on the desk.
“Fuck you, clown,” said my brother with astonishing ease. Ossie and I exchanged glances; he’d lost his accent. “Tell us where Samuel Bigtree is staying.”
The Chief was in room 11, just behind the last gutter-ball alley. This would have warranted a joke at some earlier Bigtree epoch but we were BE now, Beyond Exhaustion, and I just wanted to see my dad. The stunned bellhop had given Kiwi a little key, which he turned in the pale blue door to room 11 with a just-audible click.
“Stee-rike!” Kiwi whispered. Then he called out, “Dad. It’s us.”
On the car ride over, Kiwi had told me in a slow and urgent voice that he was sure the park would go into foreclosure. We would lose our home, the Seths. But it was going to be okay, he kept saying, it would really be okay, because he was almost a pilot and the Chief had a job and we would find an apartment on the mainland …
My father’s face filled the door frame and his shock was a wonderful thing to behold. The whole hotel was filled with bowlers’ thunder at that hour. Pins were falling everywhere around us and I watched my dad’s eyes widen to take us in. When my father stepped forward it didn’t matter that we were nowhere near our island. All of us, the four of us — the five of us if you counted Mom inside us — we were home. We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.