Half-buried shells and coral lay scattered by the waves, like the remains of writing mostly wiped away. The sand above the waterline still held a jumble of footprints, mine and Irene’s—her prints pushing deeper when she’d been carrying the girl. I looked for the print of another foot altogether, the girl’s bare, injured foot, but she must have been crawling. That’s why her tracks were odd, which was why I even noticed them.
I climbed into the grass. In the sunlight where she’d lain was a tiny place, just a flattened circle. In a day or two, the grass would spring back and nothing would be left to tell what had happened. Then I saw, half hidden in the grass, a green nylon bag. It was dusted in sand, which fell off like powder when I picked it up. It was the size of a big book, with a zipper and a strap. I unzipped one side and peeked in. Then I sat down in the grass and unzipped it all the way.
The bag was stuffed full: a wadded cotton shirt, short nylon pants, a pair of plastic flip-flop shoes, a tube of sunscreen, a deck of playing cards, a string of green beads, and a small hard plastic square with buttons and a little dark screen. Last was a zipped-up rubber pouch with seven photographs. The water hadn’t gotten in, and they weren’t stuck together. I laid the pictures on the grass, as if seeing all seven would tell me more than looking one by one.
The first picture was taken from a boat, looking at a dock much bigger than ours and covered with boxes and crates. Leaning against the crates were two men, taller than Robbert, with bare feet and dark skin, smiling at the camera. It felt like meeting new people, because the men were smiling right at me, even though I knew they were actually smiling at someone else, at whoever was holding the camera, and however long ago that was.
I wondered if feeling these two things at once was like Caroline’s dreams.
The second picture was also from the boat, but aimed over a metal rail across the water and beyond, at a jagged green line on the horizon, an island. The sky was gray, and the top of the island crowned with fog. I noticed the wedge of foam on the water and realized the boat had been moving.
The third picture showed a big blue and yellow parrot in a cage.
The fourth picture was from an island because it showed a beach, with palm leaves hanging into view. But most of the picture was of the ocean, facing west, because of the sun setting bright orange.
The fifth picture was a man holding a fish. He was knee deep in the ocean, and smiling. His skin was dark, and he had a round stomach that poked from under his T-shirt. The fish had a silver belly and green fins.
The sixth picture must have been inside the boat: a little room, with bunk beds and a foldout table, lots of shelves, and a hanging lamp. The man holding the fish in the fifth picture sat at the table, still smiling, with a plate of food.
The last picture was the girl herself, sitting on the wooden deck of a boat. She wore a green shirt without sleeves and was showing her finger, which had a bright pink bandage wrapped around the tip. Her hair was tied back. Her eyes were brown. Her teeth were small and white. Her skin was dark, with darker freckles in a stripe below each eye and across her nose. It was a face unlike any I had seen.
The bandage made me think of her insides. We’d seen Robbert cut himself from shaving, and Irene cut herself on a can, so we knew about blood, but what had happened to the girl in the ocean was a door opening wider—not that we hadn’t been told, but just that we hadn’t been told everything.
I looked at the pictures again and again, laying them in different arrangements, and began a list of questions so I had something to say to the others, to Robbert and Irene, or to the girl when she woke up and needed to know who’d found her things. That made me think about what she might say about her boat, or about being in the water, or what she’d say if she went on one of our walks. What would her voice even sound like? Like Irene, or like one of us?
I had too many thoughts and no idea how to put them in order. What was the name of the parrot? Who was the man with the fish? Who were the men on the dock? Who cooked the food on the plate? What was the name of the boat? Which bunk belonged to the girl? Did she eat the fish? What was the name of the island? What was inside the crates and boxes? What had she done to her finger? What was it like on a moving boat? Was the man on the boat her father? What had he said to make her smile?
A shadow fell over the pictures. I looked up to see Irene, blocking the sun. I said hello and began to show her the pictures and the bag. She stopped me and asked if I knew what time it was. I said it was more than forty-five minutes. She asked me how much more, and I answered that it had been almost ninety minutes. She said she’d been watching me from the beach, just to see if I’d notice, but I hadn’t. I told her that part of me had noticed, but that the other parts were concentrating very hard.
“You were supposed to come back forty-five minutes ago. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Irene.”
“Then why are you still here?”
I didn’t know. I’d just done it. I’d found things I’d never found before, but how did I choose they were more important? How did I choose without even noticing the choice?
I began again to tell her about the pictures and the bag and the beads. She told me to stop talking. She watched me for a moment, then gathered all the different things back in the bag. She looked through the photos once, slowly, and put them back in the rubber bag, zipped it, and then put that in the green bag, too. Then she handed the bag to me and told me I could carry it back. Irene walked slowly on the uneven sand, staying with me.
The others stood on the kitchen porch. When I saw them I waved. They waved back. When we got a little closer I waved again. They waved, too. I looked over to Robbert’s building. The door was shut.
Irene led us into the kitchen and, without a word, started making dinner. We watched her open a can of soup and pour it into a pan and put it on the stove. We listened for the clicks before the burner caught, and then the rush of the flame. Irene called over her shoulder.
“Aren’t you going to show the others, Veronika?”
As soon as she spoke, I realized I’d been waiting, but not for what. Irene’s permission? Or did I want to keep thinking about the girl’s things for myself? Why?
I put the bag on the table and unzipped it, placing each item on the table.
“It was in the grass,” I said. “Covered in sand.”
The others nodded, staring. Isobel picked up the flip-flops, and then handed them to Caroline, who handed them to Eleanor, who put them delicately back in their original spot. They went through every object, passing them along, not saying a word, just like I hadn’t said a word. When Eleanor set down the string of green beads, they looked up at me again. I unzipped the bag of photographs and laid them on the table, feeling all my own thoughts compound inside the others’ minds with each new image.
Before I could talk, Irene placed a hand on my shoulder. She wanted me to wait. She nodded at the others, and I understood I was supposed to watch—that this was another new thing, right in front of me. Once again we were becoming different from one another, or I was becoming different from them.
Or I was already different, just like Caroline, except in my own way?
All three kept flicking their eyes from picture to picture, like birds hovering over something they hadn’t decided how to eat. They were forming questions and putting things together, but again I knew something more. I knew how hurt she had been and how far she had crawled. It was a difference I could only compare to spending ninety minutes on the beach instead of forty-five. I still didn’t know how that could happen, I just knew that it had.
The others were still staring at the pictures when we heard Robbert on the porch. We all turned to see him step inside, looking at Irene.
“She’s awake,” he said.
3.
Irene asked Robbert if he wanted to eat the rest of her soup. He glanced at us—we were all looking at him—and took her place at the table. We heard Irene’s feet go down the stairs and her steps o
n the path and then, because we were listening, the hinges of Robbert’s screen door wheeze open and clack shut. Robbert poked his chin at what I’d found, spread out on the table.
“What’s this?”
It took a long time to tell, though now the others could tell it, too, and so they helped. Robbert had questions, just like Irene, but his questions were different, like between a sandwich with mustard and without, or a wet stone and a dry one, or the sounds of night compared to day. Partly this was because Irene had seen all the girl’s things for herself, out in the grass. But even so, Robbert’s questions weren’t about his own thinking—though we could all see that he was thinking—but about the words we used to describe each object, and most especially the pictures.
When he finished his soup he set the bowl down with enough of a noise that Caroline, who was comparing the boxes in the picture of the dock to the boxes from our supply boat, stopped talking. Robbert wiped his lips on the back of one hand and took off his glasses. He blew on them, held them to the light, and frowned. Whenever he did this, we stared at his face, as if his eyes were naked. I had never seen Robbert naked, or Irene, but I knew what we looked like without our smocks, and whenever I saw Robbert’s unprotected eyes it felt like I was looking at the same uncovering—but even more so, like a crab flipped on its back, showing the seams in the shell where the birds stick their beaks in.
He put his glasses back and coughed. “The first picture.” He picked it up, so we all faced him in order to see. “Describe it in one word. No repeats. Start with Isobel.”
The first picture showed the two men on the dock piled with boxes.
“Dock,” said Isobel.
“Supplies,” said Caroline.
“Friends,” said Eleanor.
I was last, thinking of what hadn’t been said. “Girl.”
Robbert sniffed high up in his nose and coughed again. “Good. Each of you chose a word for just part of the picture, one that hadn’t been named. Except for Veronika, who described the picture being taken.”
“Is that allowed to be part of the picture?” asked Eleanor.
“What do you think?”
Unlike Irene, Robbert’s questions almost always had a wrong answer. Instead of saying anything, we had learned to wait a moment and then nod.
“All right,” said Robbert. “Let’s try again, with the next picture. . . .”
The second photograph showed the line of green across the water, taken from a moving boat.
“Island,” said Isobel.
“Ocean,” said Caroline.
“Wind,” said Eleanor.
“Boat,” I said.
“Good,” said Robbert. “Eleanor, why wind?”
“Because of the moving boat,” said Eleanor. “Because of how cold it looks and since you said only one word.”
Robbert nodded. He picked up the hard plastic square with the dead screen. He turned it over and, then with both hands, snapped open the back of the square. He blew on the thin piece that had come free and tipped the rest of the square, smiling at the little stream of water that dribbled into his bowl. He set both pieces down.
“We’ll let it dry. All right. Next picture.” This was the big parrot in a cage.
“Parrot,” said Isobel.
“Cage,” said Caroline.
“Feathers,” said Eleanor.
“Prison,” I said.
“Good. Better. Veronika, if you’d been first, would you have said parrot?”
I nodded.
“Is that the best word? Is it better than ‘prison’?”
“It’s more of the picture.”
“That’s not what I asked. Is it better? Which would you say first—not then, but now, now that you know both of them?”
“I would still say ‘cage,’” said Caroline.
“Good. Why?”
“Because there’s a cage.”
“No. That’s wrong.”
“But there is a cage,” protested Caroline.
“And that’s the wrong reason. Eleanor. Why would cage be right?”
“Because the cage is between the camera and the parrot—you see it first.”
“Wrong.”
“But you do.”
“And that isn’t the right reason, either. Isobel?”
“I think cage is wrong because I already said the best word which is parrot.”
Robbert smiled. “Almost. Almost, but just exactly wrong. Veronika. If you were alone and had to say one word and the word you said was cage—why would that be right?”
He looked at me through his glasses, impatient for the answer but also impatient at being with us at all, to be spending time asking questions whose answers he already knew when there was so much other work, so many answers he didn’t know waiting in his building. This was why, while Robbert was never as nice and we much preferred Irene’s company, we always tried harder to please him.
“Because the parrot is the biggest thing in the picture,” I said.
“Explain.”
“Because it’s the one word you don’t have to say. So if you say cage it’s like you’re already saying parrot at the same time.”
Robbert looked at each one of us in turn. “That is correct. Do you understand? Who understands? Caroline.”
“We have to pretend that all four of us are answering the question even though it’s only one of us. We have to sort through.”
“Exactly.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why?” repeated Isobel. “Why do we have to pretend there’s only one of us.”
“Because that might be the case,” said Robbert. “Just like on a thirty-minute walk. Just like when Veronika found our guest. There may only be time to do one thing. You need to know what that one thing is, and you do it by thinking.”
We all nodded, but no one asked what they wanted to ask, which was to ask Isobel’s question again, because no one felt Robbert had answered it—not what she had really asked. But no one thought, if it was asked again, that Robbert would get anything but snappy.
“What is Irene doing?” Caroline had her head cocked, like when she woke up from her dreams.
“I’m sure she’ll tell you when she’s done.” Robbert looked at his watch, then yawned. “Maybe it’s time for a nap.”
We didn’t want to take a nap and as it turned out we didn’t have to. Instead, Robbert rubbed his eyes and announced we would go for a walk. He shooed us in front of him and stumped down the stairs, the dangling tips of his shoelaces tapping the wood. We stood in the yard, waiting for Robbert to tell us where to go, but he yawned again and stood staring at the classroom. We stared, too.
“What are all you looking at?” he called. “Let’s go. This is a thirty-minute walk. Thirty minutes exactly. Alone and in different directions than you’ve gone before. Everyone should be thinking about parrots and cages. Stay away from the water. Go.”
We all looked at one another, taking half steps and changing directions again and again until we were sorted. Eleanor went to the cliff, Caroline to the beach, and Isobel toward the dock. I ended up walking between the buildings toward the woods. Since both the beach and the cliff could show new things washed up from the storm, and Isobel would be at the dock, I wondered if any of the others would decide to forget about time, too?
I kept to the path until I reached the palms. The wind rustled the leaves and the treetops waved against the sky. I went to where the trees stood tight together, the ground between piled with branches and old husks. Birds lived in the tops of the palms, and other things lived in the dead branches and husks, rats and lizards and all kinds of bugs. If it was quiet you could hear them move.
I looked at the pile, trying to think of parrots and cages. There were parrots in the trees—probably right then, above me—but that wasn’t what Robbert meant. If I was looking at palm trees, I should be thinking something else. But I couldn’t think of anything. I turned around. On the far side of the meadow stood Robbert’s b
uilding.
Halfway back I left the path and entered the grass, bending until it rose above my head. Crickets launched themselves around me. At the edge of the grass, I squatted lower. Robbert’s building stood on cinder-block stilts. I crept behind a stilt so no one on the other side, if they looked underneath, could see me. Most of Robbert’s back windows weren’t windows anymore at all, but mesh-covered exhaust vents, for machines. The only window left was right where I stood. I looked in.
This was the back room, all cabinets and boxes, but the door was ajar, and beyond it lay the foot of Robbert’s bed. The white sheet had been kicked away—which I knew because I could see the foot that had kicked it, now strapped with white bandages. I heard different machines, and I wondered if any of them were helping the girl.
Irene came through the door and I ducked down. I heard her flipping switches and peeked up. She held a dark page up to the light, and the page became a picture of a gray arm with white bones. The girl’s arm, though it wasn’t really gray. We’d seen bird’s bones, and fish, even rats. But those bodies had feathers or scales or fur, a covering. Were the bones inside her really white? Were there the same dark pages of me? Irene snapped off the lamp and walked out. I retreated to the grass. It was almost time.
• • •
I reached the yard almost exactly when Eleanor and Isobel did. Robbert rose from where he’d been sitting on the kitchen steps, swatting dust off the seat of his pants. When he saw Caroline wasn’t there, he looked off toward the beach, then climbed onto the porch and looked again.
“Stay here.” Robbert jumped off the steps and broke into a jog. “Stay!” he called over his shoulder, and disappeared.
We stood in the yard, thinking about where he’d gone.
“If something was wrong he would have called for Irene,” said Eleanor. “But he didn’t. That’s because of Veronika not coming back before. Caroline might have decided something new was more important, too.”