“She shouldn’t have gone up alone.”
Still, I said nothing. Galen’s glance flicked my way. He was frowning. There was tension in the air, running beneath the casual conversation.
WHEN THE HELICOPTER arrived, I was in my bedroom. I watched through the window as Forest and Galen hurried across the grounds. The helicopter glinted in the sun. It had the look of an aerial ambulance, a red cross painted on the door. Awash in déjà vu, I watched it settle on the helipad.
Two figures emerged from inside, hefting a stretcher between them. I had been expecting more federal agents — more badges, more clipboards, more holsters tucked discreetly out of sight — but these men were clearly medics. They wore hospital green. I had been expecting, too, to see the same doctor who had attended Andrew. Now, though, I realized that he must be a medical examiner, specializing in the dead. This time the mainland had sent along two older gentlemen, one with gray hair, one black. Galen and Forest approached them and shook hands. The group made its way toward the cabin.
With some trepidation, I left my bedroom. There was a bustle at the front door. Lucy was heading outside for a little bird-watching. (Later on, she would justify her actions, claiming that she’d seen an albatross landing near Indian Head. More likely the incident had reminded her of the loss of Andrew. She couldn’t stick around for that.) I stepped into the living room in time to see the doctors negotiating their stretcher down the front hallway. One bent over Charlene, checking her pulse and peering beneath her eyelids. Mick was hovering against the wall, chewing on his fingernails as though he intended to gnaw them right off his hands. Forest and Galen were standing at attention. They had the demeanor of athletes on the bench during a key game.
With great efficiency, the medics hefted Charlene from the surf-board onto the stretcher. They held a conference, standing close together. Their aspect was unhurried. They clearly did not perceive Charlene to be in any immediate danger. The black-haired doctor tugged a notebook from his pocket. He stared at Mick, frowned at Galen, and examined me as though taking my measure.
“Sit,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed. “Sit there.”
I sank onto the couch. It was not a time to argue. The doctor peered at me a moment longer, then turned to Forest and beckoned him over.
“I need to know everything,” he said. “When did the accident happen?”
Forest began to speak in cool, thoughtful tones. On balance, I was glad to be seated. I felt dislocated, outside myself. Tiny details seemed of immense importance to me. The hum of the radiator. The scratch of the medic’s pen on his pad. Outside, the sea was breaking against the shoreline. The spray was wild, casting up a mist that glittered with rainbows like a sprinkler in the sunlight.
A sound caught my attention. The second doctor — a gray-haired fellow with a generous paunch — had left his post at Charlene’s side. He was approaching Galen. There was a diffident quality about him. I gave him a long glance, summing him up: gentle, bespectacled, a teddy bear of a man. Though he kept his voice low, I could hear every word.
“You look familiar,” he said. “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so,” Galen said.
“I’m good with faces. Are you from San Francisco originally?”
For a moment, I thought Galen wasn’t going to answer. Then, unwillingly, he said, “Yes, I am.”
“Are you married?” the doctor said.
Galen blushed. There was no mistaking it. He went pink all the way up to the tips of his ears. Seated on the couch, I shifted in surprise. I had never thought that Galen could be capable of such a human response.
“No,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes,” Galen said, with a look of pure dislike.
The doctor took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully. “For a moment there, I thought I had it.”
Galen’s blush had begun to curdle, turning an angry red. I was amazed at the doctor’s pluck — or else his obliviousness. I would never have dared to antagonize Galen to this extent.
A hand touched my shoulder, making me jump. Mick was sinking onto the couch. He pushed a glass of water toward me. I drank it down without registering much beyond the iron taste of the pipes. On the other side of the room, Forest was in midflow, pointing to Charlene’s prone form, and the window, and the sea. His reedy voice filled the small space. On her stretcher, Charlene gave a little, fluttering sigh, like a sleeper in the middle of a not unpleasant dream.
LATER ON, I watched the helicopter zipping across the water. The sun was still high, pinned to the silken air like a brooch on a collar. The helicopter moved at a brisk pace. I squinted, trying to keep track of its dark frame, the whir of the rotor.
Gradually, before my eyes, the sea began to change. Something was happening far out, scarcely visible. I caught a splash of spray, a gleam of silver. Shapes were bursting through the surface and ducking under again. Eventually I realized that it was a pod of gray whales. They were passing to the east of the islands, frolicking in the deep water. In the manner of their kind, they had all come up to breathe at once. I saw a shiny torso, a fat snout. Charlene’s helicopter passed above them, and their bodies shifted in concert, fins and tails in motion, as though waving goodbye.
26
I COULDN’T SLEEP THAT night. I lay awake for a long time. My ceiling has become unpleasantly familiar; I know every stain, every scrap of peeling paint. One crack trails out of the corner and sketches a shape that, from a certain angle, looks like a horse’s head. I stared up at this equine outline, my mind in a tumble. I could not shake the image of Charlene on the hill. Charlene stumbling, falling. The lurch of her hands. The spray of her red hair. The impact of her body on the granite slope. I could see it as though I had been there. The way her flesh must have skidded and torn. The ground crunching and cracking beneath her. The look on her face as the lights had gone out — blank, empty.
Earlier on, Mick had tucked me into bed. He had brought me a hot water bottle, insisting that I put it against my spine. “Back, not belly,” he repeated several times. He did not seem terribly concerned about Charlene. He had explained, as though to a child, that these things happened. In his tenure on the Farallon Islands, he had seen bruises, twisted ankles, and concussions. I myself had gashed my stomach. I had been with Forest when he had sliced open his calf. Once, another intern had fallen so badly that he’d suffered a compound fracture — nasty, nasty, Mick said, refusing to go into detail. What happened to Charlene had been an accident, he said.
I fell asleep with that word in my head—accident, accident. I must have dreamed. There was another sound. A mewling. A baby’s cry. I wrenched myself out of sleep, bewildered, reaching instinctively for the lost seal pup.
The stillness was deafening. The islands had settled, the sea bedding down, the wind heading off to do its wailing elsewhere. Even the elephant seals seemed subdued. For the first time in my memory, they were inaudible. Lucy was not humming in her sleep downstairs. Galen was not snoring. The only thing I could hear was a mouse inside the wall, tearing at something. The cabin was so quiet that I could differentiate between the individual noises of its teeth and its claws.
I hefted myself out of bed and threw on a sweater. I would hunt through the living room for a reference book of some kind. There was no better cure for insomnia than one of those brick-sized tomes, full of Latin names and anatomical terminology, guaranteed to bore me back to sleep.
On the stairs, however, I was brought up short. A lamp was burning in the living room. I bit my lip. Nobody would have left the lights on needlessly; we did not waste electricity on the Farallon Islands.