“It’s not that they don’t know how,” Mimi said. She grabbed every opportunity to be the expert. “It’s that they don’t need to. Food appears. Why should they slave over a hot stove?”
“But what do they do?” Luisa said. “What do they talk about all day long?”
“Do they ever watch the pigs?” Andrew asked.
Natasha gulped and puffed out her toddler cheeks.
Nobody had the courage to ask. When Natasha fell into the gray water and came out covered in spots and filled with an unquenchable thirst for a parent that even Mimi couldn’t solve, the grown-ups flinched at the sight of her.
“What are they here for?” Luisa said. Sometimes she thought, “Maybe we should just feed them to the pigs.”
Ships passed by from time to time. Usually large cargo ships, but sometimes ocean liners. It was possible the island looked beautiful from a distance. When a ship edged onto the horizon, the children ran to the top of the highest rock and waved. They made Andrew take his shirt off, and Mimi circled it above her head. They didn’t shout—they knew their voices weren’t strong enough to carry all that way, and they didn’t really want the grown-ups to hear them, not that the grown-ups had ever shown they’d cared. But this was private, and they’d agreed to do it in silence. Only once it seemed that they’d been sighted, but the only difference it made was that a barrel washed up on shore instead of the usual junk. They spent an entire day trying to pry it open, and when they finally got inside, all they found was another child. Sleeping.
His name was Eddie. If there had been a mirror, Luisa would have known immediately that he was her twin. As it was, she had to rely on the other children to tell her, and even then, she couldn’t believe she looked anything like this pale, sleeping kid. His hands looked like they were made of wax. She couldn’t imagine him ever doing work. It took him a long time to wake up. He didn’t know how he’d gotten inside the barrel. He had a hard time remembering how to talk. He was even more afraid of the water than the rest of them, and when the pigs saw him, they went absolutely wild.
“Don’t get too close,” Luisa told him. “They think you’re food. They don’t know you yet. Stand back and throw this over the fence.” She handed him a stale turkey sandwich, but instead of tossing it, he opened his mouth and took an enormous bite.
Mimi hit him hard across the head. “Are you crazy?” she said. “You don’t eat what’s meant for the pigs. My whole time here, I’ve never seen a kid stupid enough to do that. Spit it out. Spit it out right now and see if you can fix the idiot thing you’ve done.” She held her hand out. He turned away from her and kept chewing.
The pigs were rushing back and forth, throwing themselves against the fence. Natasha started crying. Andrew picked apricots off the closest tree and threw them in to try to calm the pigs down. They jumped for the fruit, and it seemed they jumped higher than anyone had ever seen them jump before. They practically looked like ballet dancers. Any higher, and they’d be over the fence.
“Throw them the sandwich,” Mimi said again. But Eddie stuffed the last piece in his mouth, turned his back to the pigs, and headed up the path to the hut.
When the other children got back, they found him trying to push the boards of the barrel back together. In their rush and difficulty to get it open, they had pulled out nails and splintered the wood. Now Eddie seemed to think, incorrectly, that there was some possibility of repair.
“You can’t leave,” Mimi said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Luisa tried to speak more softly. After all, they told her he was her twin. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “I’ll take you for a walk this afternoon. There are a lot of nice things to see. And you can tell us what it’s like off the island. You can tell us what we’re missing.”
Eddie shrugged. He walked into the hut and curled up and went to sleep.
Luisa muttered under her breath that she’d been trying to be nice. She stamped her foot on the ground and yelped when she twisted an ankle.
The grown-ups were even less interested in the new boy than in the other children. They didn’t seem to think he’d last. They glanced at him sideways, lit new cigarettes, reapplied lipstick, poured themselves martinis, and continued with their conversations.
“In Costa Rica, can you believe it?”
“An ecolodge? Are you kidding me? You should see her in shorts.”
“They say nobody goes to Paris anymore.”
“Who does? Paris is immortal.”
Their talk was as constant a murmur as the lapping of waves from the ocean. Like the ocean, it often sparkled. And like the ocean, it had gray moments from which the children knew they must stay away.
“She said I looked fat.”
“What should we do to her?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But something.”
When the tone shifted, the children knew to run.
There was a cave at the far end of the island. The children didn’t think the grown-ups knew about it—why would they? The grown-ups never scurried through the underbrush. If they couldn’t reach a place using carefree, elegant strides, they didn’t go. It was a rule among the children not to wonder out loud about what the grown-ups did when the children were hiding in the cave. If they’d been brave enough to use their voices in the dark there, they might have said pedicures. Or maybe salsa classes. Or yoga. But hunting? The children might think it, but they would never let the words pass their lips. If they didn’t say it, it probably couldn’t be true.
The cave was long and narrow, black as a heart inside, cold and hollow and dense, and it offered shelter against the shifts in the outside world. A gray ocean? Head to the cave. A sea-change in tone? Head to the cave. A loose pig? It had never happened, but if it did, the cave seemed the best bet. The pigs probably wouldn’t eat stone. They’d probably eat all of the island’s vegetation before sinking their teeth into the boulder that the children had ready to roll across the opening. Each child had a space to sleep in the cave, the way they each had a space to sleep on the floor of the hut. They brought clay jugs filled with water and hid them in the darkest part. The grown-ups didn’t notice the jugs were missing, and that made the children feel subversive and dirty, but it also made them feel safe.
“We need the water,” Mimi said. “They’re not going to help us if the pigs get loose. They must have some escape plan without us. If one of those pigs gets out, we’d be done without a plan.”
So there it was: a cold dark security blanket hidden at the island’s far end that they treasured as much as they treasured whatever other secrets were buried in each of their hearts. The grown-ups might control them. The grown-ups might sit back while they worked. The grown-ups might laugh when they were in pain. But the children had a plan. They had a shelter that they could hide in forever, if it came to that.
They couldn’t decide what to tell Eddie about the cave. He didn’t seem trustworthy. He didn’t seem anything at all, actually, with his big silent sandwich-chewing mouth and his nose sprouting the first traces of acne and his hands that had clearly never done work in their life and his eyes that looked back at Luisa’s with a gaze she hoped she didn’t have herself. It was empty. She didn’t feel empty. She felt as though everything she’d ever fed to the pigs had settled inside her as well. Maybe she wasn’t seeing him accurately—every day the world seemed blurrier even than it had before. But it was hard to mistake emptiness, no matter how bad your vision.
It turned out that they never actually had to make a decision because Eddie made it for them. Three days after he arrived, on a gray, cloudy day, he took a long stick and carried it to the ocean and started poking at the water. He probably thought he was looking for crabs. He might have been watching ripples spread