It took her a long while after that to get her courage up, because she knew now what she had to do though her whole being revolted against it. She kept praying that someone would come for her, that the prow of a ship would ease out of the fog or a rope come hurtling down from above, anything to spare her getting back into that killing water. The funny thing was that she’d always liked swimming — she’d joined the swim team in school and trained so relentlessly her hair never seemed to be really dry her whole senior year — but now, as she climbed down from the rock, clutched the ice chest to her and fought through the surf, she hated it more than anything in the world. Instantly, she was cold through to the bone and thrashing for warmth, then she was fighting past the breakers and out into the sea.
Here was the nightmare all over again, but this time there was a difference because she was saved, she’d saved herself, and she kept close to shore, trembling, yes, exhausted, thirsty, but no longer panicked. There wouldn’t be sharks, not this close in, not with the sea full of seals, armies of them barking from the rocks and sending up a sulfurous odor of urine and feces and seal stink. The sea was calmer now too, much calmer — almost gentle — and from time to time she tried floating on her back, head propped on the chest and elbows jackknifed behind her, but invariably she had to roll over and pull herself up as far as she could in an effort to escape the cold. Fog clung to her. Great fields of kelp, dun stalks and yellowed leaves, drifted past. Tiny fishes needled the water around her and were gone.
As the morning wore on, the world began to enlarge above her, birds uncountable lifting off into the fog and gliding back again like ghosts in the ether, the cliffs decapitated above skirts of guano, shrubs and even flowers so high up they might have been planted in air. She let the current carry her, periodically forcing herself to unfurl her legs and paddle to keep on course, telling herself that at any moment she’d come upon a boat at anchor or a beach that spread back to a canyon where she could get up and away from the sea. How far she’d drifted or how long she’d been in the water, she had no way of knowing, the cold sapping her, lulling her, killing her will, every seal-strewn rock and every black-faced cliff so exactly like the last one she began to think she’d circled the island twice already. But she held on, just as she had when the Beverly B. went down a whole day and night ago, because it was the only thing she could do.
It must have been late in the morning, the sun lost somewhere in the fog overhead, when finally she found what she was looking for. Or, rather, she didn’t know what she was looking for until it materialized out of the haze in a cove that was no different from all the rest. A rust-peached ladder, so oxidized it was the color of the starfish clinging to the rocks beneath it, seemed to glide across the surface to her, and when she took hold of it she let the chest float free, pulling herself from the water, rung by rung, as from a gently yielding sheath.
The universe stopped rocking. The sea fell away. And she found herself on a path leading steeply upward to where the fog began to tatter and bleed off till it wasn’t there at all. Above her, opening to the sun and the chaparral flecked with yellow blooms that climbed beard-like up the slope, was a shack, two shacks, three, four, all lined up across the bluff as if they’d grown out of the rock itself. The near one — flat-roofed, the boards weathered gray — caught the flame of the sun in its windows till it glowed like a cathedral. And right beside it, where the drainpipe fell away from the roof, was a wooden barrel, a hogshead, set there to catch the rain.
She was in that moment reduced to an animal, nothing more, and her focus was an animal’s focus, her mind stripped of everything but that barrel and its contents, and she never felt the fragmented stone of the path digging into her feet or the weight of the sun crushing her shoulders, never thought of who might be watching her in her nakedness or what that might mean, till she reached it and plunged her face into its depths and drank till she could feel the cool silk thread coming back up again. It was only then that she looked around her. Everything was still, hot, though she shivered in the heat, and her first thought was to call out, absurdly, call “Hello? Is anybody there?” Or why not “Yoo-hoo?” Yoo-hoo would have been equally ridiculous, anything would have. She was as naked as Eve, her blue jeans gone, Till’s sweater jettisoned, her underthings torn from her at some indefinite point in the shifting momentum of her battle against the current and the waves and the sucking rasp of the shingle. When she touched herself, when she brought her hands up to cover her nakedness, they were like two dead things, two fish laid out on a slab, and she fell to her knees in the dirt, hunched and shivering and looking round her with an animal’s dull calculation.
In the next moment she rose and went round the corner of the house to the door at the front, thinking to clothe herself, thinking there must be something inside to cover up with, rags, a bedsheet, an old towel or fisherman’s sweater. But what if there were people in there? What if there was a man? No man on this earth had seen her naked but for the doctor who’d delivered her and Till, and what would she say to Till if there was a man there to see her as she was now? She hesitated, uncertain of what to do. For a long moment she regarded the door in its stubborn inanimacy, a door made of planks nailed to a crosspiece, weather-scored and unrevealing. Beside it, set in the wall at eye level, was a four-pane window so smeared as to be nearly opaque, but she shifted away from the door, cupped her hands to the glass and peered in, all the while feeling as if she were being watched.
Inside, she could make out a crude kitchen counter with a dishpan and an array of what looked to be empty bottles scattered atop it, and beyond that, a sagging cot decorated with an army blanket. A second window, facing north, drew the glare in off the ocean. She tapped at the glass, hoping to forestall anyone who might be lurking inside. Finally, she tried the door, whispering, “Hello? Is anybody home?”
There was no answer. She lifted the latch and pushed open the door to a rustle of movement, dark shapes inhabiting the corners, a spine-sprung book on the floor, shelves, cans, a sou’wester on a hook that made her catch her breath, fooled into thinking someone had been standing there all along. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, the shapes manifesting themselves all at once — furred, quick-footed, tails naked and indolently switching, a host of darkly shining eyes fastening on her without alarm or haste because she was the interloper here, the beggar, she was the one naked and washed up like so much trash — and she let out a low exclamation. Rats. She’d always hated rats, from the time she was in kindergarten and her mother warned her against going near the garbage cans set out in the alley behind their apartment building—“They bite babies,” her mother told her, “big girls too, nip their toes, jump in their hair. You know Janey, upstairs in 7B? They got in her cradle when she was baby. Right here, right in this building.” Her father reinforced the admonition, taking her by the hand and probing with one shoe in the dim corners of the carport so she could see the animals themselves, the corpses of the ones he’d caught in spring traps baited with gobs of peanut butter. In secret, in the dark, they would lick and paw that bait — peanut butter, the same peanut butter she ate on white bread with the crusts cut off — until the guillotine dropped and the blood trailed from their crushed heads and dislocated jaws. Rats. Disease carriers, food spoilers, baby biters. But what were they doing here on an untamed island set out in the middle of the sea? Had they swum? Sprouted wings?