“You see, your island is so isolated, things have come to live here that don’t live anywhere else,” he explained. He told them about the animals in England. But mostly he talked about things of the spirit.
He said God meant things. So when a baby was lost in childbirth, he said God had meant it. To the villagers, this seemed to indicate that God had meant for Aunt Fire to die too. So everyone began to fear God was a vindictive spirit, but Phillip said that wasn’t correct, that he was protecting everyone.
“It’s all part of a plan,” he said, and smiled. “Our reward isn’t here on earth. Earth barely matters. It’s just practice. This life is only a passing place, a stopping point, on our journey.”
Tiger Lily thought about Peter and his wild ways and wondered if he ever suspected he was just inhabiting a passing place, and whether those ways would keep him from going to heaven. Though even with all the danger that seemed to surround him, it was impossible to think Peter could ever die. She shivered at the idea.
There were a few things that Phillip said God didn’t like. He didn’t like naked women running around in public. He didn’t like people thinking about other gods. And he didn’t like people loving objects. So the Sky Eaters packed up their beloved carvings and engraved rocks and trundled them off to bury them so they could come back and find them later should their entry to heaven be assured. God didn’t like that Tik Tok wore women’s clothes, either, though Phillip hadn’t said this. Still, everyone began to guess.
Phillip scratched his bald head and smiled often at these gatherings. His baldness glinted in the sun. Tiger Lily wondered that God didn’t whisper to him about her visits to Peter, because he seemed to talk to God often, and to know exactly what God thought and wanted, whereas the villagers never knew what the gods wanted at all, though they had listened and listened and still found that the gods’ wills were always a mystery.
Like Pine Sap, Tik Tok did not stay for these talks. He escaped to the nearby meadows to gather roots. One afternoon, Tiger Lily went to help him. She had missed the last two times he’d gone. Every time she looked up, he was watching her, and then he quickly looked down at his work again.
“Tik Tok, why don’t you listen to the stories?” she asked.
Tik Tok leaned back on his haunches, and thought for a moment. “Everyone wants to be sure, but I never am. I’d rather sit here and not know things. It’s bad of me, I know.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. Tik Tok had limitless patience, but he was a poor listener when he didn’t like what he was listening to.
They stopped to eat two strips of deer meat he had brought in his sack. He’d misplaced the bigger sack in which he’d packed a fuller meal.
“You look happy,” he said suddenly, and met her gaze. She quickly looked down at the roots again, sorting them into her leather waist pouches. “But tired.”
Her late nights with the boys, and her duties during the day, were taking their toll. She walked through the village oblivious and even clumsy. She’d dropped a wooden bowl on Red Leaf’s head the previous morning. She had nicked Giant while cutting his hair, and infuriated him to the point where he struck her in the face. Moon Eye had stood watching like a statue, and then insisted on taking the knife up instead, because she said she had more sure hands, even though they’d trembled the whole time.
“For someone who is marrying someone she hates, you look very alive.”
She silently chewed her food. Tik Tok studied her—but his gaze was so open that it didn’t make her uncomfortable.
“Pine Sap is a nice boy, and he loves you, but remember, you are engaged to someone else.”
Tiger Lily looked up, shocked. “Pine Sap?” She watched the expectation on Tik Tok’s face. “I wouldn’t think of it. And he wouldn’t think of me.”
Tik Tok stared at her a long time, then shook his head, as if to himself. He allowed himself to be befuddled for a few moments, and then he gathered himself and spoke.
“Whatever you’re doing, whatever is making you so happy, I’m glad about it. But if it’s something that can’t fit with your marriage, if you’re not honoring yourself and us, you’ll have to give it up. What are we if we aren’t people who keep our promises? We’re nothing. We’re like bugs,” he said, pointing to an ant on a piece of bark, scurrying along mindlessly.
Tiger Lily looked down at her dirty hands. Her fingers trembled, just slightly, but enough for a loving, observant man like Tik Tok to see.
“Oh, my little beast, I’m sorry.” He suddenly looked uncertain. “I trust you. I want you to be happy. Maybe I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe I’m not so wise.”
I’ll tell you a terrible secret. I was down at the water washing my wings that evening when I saw two figures, just as the sun was going down. Moon Eye, going down to bathe when she thought she would be unwatched, and Giant, a moment later. She struggled, but this time she didn’t get away.
After he was gone, she dipped herself in the river—a shivering, frail, skinny creature—resolved to hide better, to stay farther away. But over the next weeks, there was nowhere he wouldn’t find her.
She never told.
TWENTY-THREE
Sometimes Peter and Tiger Lily fought. A fight between them looked like this: Peter, head swirling with anger, waving his arms around and expressing five thoughts at once about why she was wrong and he was right; Tiger Lily, curling up inside like a rock, stone-faced, listening but at the same time refusing to hear. She hated his need to always win and he hated her coldness during their arguments. They fought about the exact color of the sky and which path they should take on a hunt. They disagreed passionately about whose fish was the best tasting. They could work up extreme hatred for each other at a moment’s notice. “I’m nothing to you, am I?” Peter said once in a particularly intense argument about where to find wild turnips. To these kinds of accusations, Tiger Lily would reply that he was trying to make her into his little chicken, and that she would never be anyone’s “little obedient chicken”—as if there were such a thing as an obedient chicken. The lost boys were befuddled by these fights, but came to roll their eyes and sigh and make themselves disappear at the appropriate time. I, too, learned to ignore them, even when one of them stalked off in the opposite direction of the other one and headed for home. When they made up, it was as if nothing had happened at all. In fact, it was like they were stuck even closer together, like they had gotten even more tangled in each other.
One night, after making up, they found themselves across the lagoon, on a thin slip of ground between a bubbling hot spring and the lagoon’s flat water, lying on their bellies, staring at their reflections in the water. Throwing rocks onto lily pads.
Steam rose up and coated their faces with moisture. Phosphorescents floated under the water. I sat on a dead leaf and relaxed, keeping an ear to the night noises.
The heat of the water made Tiger Lily feel like the night air was cool. A breeze gave them goose bumps. They could see the stars above, between the branches of some thin trees. Here, Tiger Lily felt for the moment safe, like nothing could ever touch her or them. But Peter spoke of the pirates.
“They’ve been coming too close to the burrow,” he explained. “Just one set of footprints. We’ve never seen them get so close before. They’ve tracked us as far as the edge of the glade. They can’t know where we are. But we want to know what they’re up to. Don’t worry. I’m not scared of them.”
It comforted me that he had noticed, at least, that someone had been nearby. But he didn’t seem concerned. He was more preoccupied with Tiger Lily.
Peter liked to look over every part of her: her wrists, the strands of her hair, her ears, the tiny creases in her lips. And she was no better. She memorized the tiny constellation of freckles to the left of his nose, and the scars on his knuckles, the fan of his eyelashes, the many expressions of his face. I knew them almost as well as she did, because watching him love Tiger Lily was better than not watching him at all.
She stared in
to the still surface of the lagoon. Nowhere near her village was the water so glassy, and she could see her face in the surface—her broad cheekbones, her strong nose, the black line of her hair. Beside her, Peter was fairer.
Peter twirled his finger into the water image of his face, making it break apart and reassemble itself over and over again. He had promised the mermaids would leave them alone on this side of the lagoon, though she expected a jealous, slimy hand to rise out of the dark wet and grab her by the neck at any moment. Still, if Peter was going to brave such proximity, so was she.
“What’s the Englander like?” he asked finally.
“He is old. He has no hair on his head.” She smiled.
Peter sighed into the water, and his breath sent a small circle of it into tiny ripples. “It seems cowardly, getting old. Don’t you think?”
She rolled onto her side to look at him, pillowing her ear with her right arm, and letting her fingers dangle in the water beyond her head. “How is it cowardly?”
Peter kept his eyes on his reflection. “You just curl up around yourself, and sit by the fire, and try to be comfortable. When you get old, you just get smaller inside, and you try not to pay attention to anything but your blankets and your food and your bed.”
“Being comfortable is not a bad thing.”
Peter shrugged and turned his head to look at her as if it was a matter of fact. “Of course it is. Old people lock out all the scary, wild things. It’s like they don’t exist.”
She wanted to say that she would have liked for those things not to exist, either, but she held her tongue, because she didn’t want to sound like a coward. She had been thinking of Giant, and the pirates. Sometimes she wished she could lock them out and just be secure.
“It’s like now, we could be in our beds, safe. Or we could be here, staring into the black water of the lagoon, listening to the sounds of the insects, with the twigs pricking our stomachs and the danger of death by mermaid at any moment.”
Tiger Lily shook her head. “But the English can’t help it if time passes and they get old.”
Peter wrinkled his nose. He yawned. “There’s no such thing as time passing. That’s an excuse.”
“No it’s not.” She sat up, smiling at him. “It’s true.”
“You can’t prove that.”
She thought. There was no way, she supposed, if you didn’t believe getting older was part of time getting older too. And then she remembered. “Yes.” She nodded. “Tik Tok’s clock. It’s a machine that tracks time with its hands.”
Peter looked suddenly curious. “What’s it like?” he asked. Everything Peter asked, his body asked too. At this moment it slumped, in defeat, at such a beautiful idea, and also leaned forward eagerly.
“The clock has little hands that point to the minutes, very steadily. It keeps a perfect record of time.”
She could see he was trying to grasp that the moments in life and everything in it could be held in a little wooden box.
“Can I see it?” he said, his face lighting up.
“I could never get it from Tik Tok. He wouldn’t let it out of his sight. It’s his most prized possession, besides his hair.” She smirked at him.
Peter sank. “I’d give anything to see time.”
She grew silent, because what could she do?
“You’re so quiet when you don’t know what to say. Always.”
“You don’t even know me always,” she said. But he was right.
She slid next to him.
Peter put his hand on her rib cage. And just looked at her. He swallowed. “I love you so much, Tiger Lily,” Peter said. Tiger Lily stiffened, stared at the ground, and said nothing. A smile spread across her face, but she didn’t show him.
They just sat in silence for a long time, until finally Peter stood, looking uncomfortable. “I’ll walk you to the bridge.” She was startled to see, about ten paces on, a lump in the water that, as the moon passed from behind a cloud, showed itself to be Maeryn, watching them. The mermaid sank silently and quickly underwater.
“Meet me at the bridge tomorrow night?” Peter said. “I don’t want you to come to the burrow, until we figure out what’s happening with the pirates.”
“Yes.”
“Are you cold?” he asked. She nodded. He pulled off his fur vest and gave it to her.
He rubbed her arms with his hands, stood his warm feet on her cold ones for a few moments so he could take the cold and she could take the warmth. “It’s okay. I’m always warm.” Then he shivered as he walked.
Up above, I listened to them. I could hear their hearts. Tiger Lily’s, I knew well: her unsure, stumbling happiness, her fear of knowing about something so beautiful as Peter. But imagine my confusion at listening to his—Peter, so perfect and courageous—and hearing a fear in him that seemed to dwarf hers.
If there was a true moment that Tiger Lily fell so in love with Peter she could never turn back, it was that night, when he shivered and walked and told her he was warm, and told her he loved her so much. She was fierce, to be sure, but she had a girl’s heart, after all. As she walked home that night, she was shaking from the largeness of it. I didn’t know why she seemed so sad and happy at the same time. To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together.
She began to plan how she would give him up.
TWENTY-FOUR
She waited for Peter at the bridge the next night, turning over what she would say, and I played tag with the fireflies. But Peter didn’t come. Since he had asked her not to go to the burrow without him, she walked just to the edge of the lagoon to see if she could spot him.
Tiger Lily noticed Maeryn after I did. She stepped closer to a tree, defensively. The mermaid was sitting in the mud just at the shoreline, staring at her. She had a skull cradled in her arms. “Pirate,” Maeryn said, smiling, as Tiger Lily lowered her hand near her hatchet.
“I don’t want to kill you. I’m curious about you.” She was the very picture of feminine mystery. All sharp teeth and soft lips.
“Watch that boy,” she said. “You’re stronger in many ways, but that doesn’t mean he can’t take you apart.”
The first thought that went through Tiger Lily’s mind was that she was not stronger than Peter. “He wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“He won’t mean to. He just won’t be able to help it. It’ll be an accident. It’s in his nature, just like it’s in my nature to live underwater.” Tiger Lily knew she couldn’t trust Maeryn. Wasn’t she the mermaid who supposedly loved Peter most of all? And now Peter loved Tiger Lily. Still, she couldn’t help being fascinated.
Maeryn eyed her, then seemed to ascertain something surprising. “You’re keeping a secret.”
Tiger Lily stepped back, halfheartedly shook her head.
Maeryn waved a hand above the water carelessly. “Oh, I don’t care. It doesn’t concern me. Only Peter does.”
She glanced in the direction of the burrow. “Peter loves to make promises. He has the best intentions of keeping them. It makes it worse, somehow, that he doesn’t know how to. He thinks he’s a nice boy, that’s the worst part.”
Tiger Lily didn’t understand. Instinct told her to go back the way she’d come, and she did. But before she was out of earshot, Maeryn said, in a low, perfectly confident voice, “I’ll be here if you need me. And you will.”
Almost everyone was down at the river the next afternoon, catching salmon. The island had slipped into the thick of the hot season, a time when the salmon swam upstream and it was easy to catch them. You could dip your basket into the water and it would come up filled with fish, which the villagers would then spend the next several days smoking and drying.
Down on the banks, everyone who wasn’t fishing was gathered around Phillip. The village seemed to have forgotten their fear of him completely. He was talking about how only fish should be eaten
on Fridays, and how Tiger Lily’s marriage should happen indoors, in a chapel they would build. People laughed at first, because they thought he was joking. How would God see them if they were indoors?
Tiger Lily came across Moon Eye sitting on a rock off the path to the water, with her needle and thread, Midnight ensconced beside her and hanging on her every movement with his yellow wolfy eyes.
“Why aren’t you down at the river?” Tiger Lily asked.
Moon Eye usually liked to do her work by the water, on a fallen tree where she could watch the fish and listen to the hawks eat their midday meals. She shrugged. “Why aren’t you?” she asked.
Tiger Lily looked down at where Giant sat by the river, part of the group and apart from it. She didn’t need to say why.
Moon Eye made a spot beside herself for Tiger Lily. Tiger Lily sat and studied her beautiful work: a long suede skirt, adorned with a bird flying skyward.
“It’s your wedding present,” Moon Eye said. The bird looked like it was escaping, transcending earth. But Tiger Lily’s attention was drawn to Moon Eye: she looked disheveled, as if she hadn’t bathed for a few days. She was usually as meticulously clean as Tik Tok.
Moon Eye looked down at the group by the water. “You should talk to them. It seems they want to believe anything that man says. I don’t trust him.”
“You sound just like Pine Sap,” Tiger Lily said. Their eyes traveled to Pine Sap, who was in the river up to his waist, fishing. His chest was so skinny and frail compared to all the other boys’.
“And why would I be the one to convince them not to?” Tiger Lily asked.
“People are nervous about you, but they respect you.”
Tiger Lily shook her head. “No.”
“And you’re Tik Tok’s daughter. They respect that. Though …,” she added, “they turn to Phillip for advice now.”
Tik Tok was not near the river; Tiger Lily didn’t know where he was. But she had a feeling he wanted to be somewhere away from Phillip’s lessons.