He could have watched that fire forever. The flames twisted like dancing girls. They shook their hips and jumped over coals and dipped down low, their hair streaming out like water. He could make fire. He was practically a god. He’d never let it die.
The flames formed shapes beyond the dancing girls. A soccer ball. A ring. A bird. The bird’s chest was wide and its hips were narrow. When it stepped out of the fire it was the ash gray of coals gone cold. It turned to look at him, black eyes glittering. It cooed. His heart shifted sideways and the bird lifted its wings and circled up, over the sand, and away. He rubbed his eyes and took a sip of water.
Otis remembered watching birds with his son. They’d lived close to the ocean, and when his boy was just a toddler, he’d take him for walks so Alice could get work done around the house. They’d go out in all weather. If it was winter and the wind was blowing, he’d wrap extra blankets around the boy and wheel him out in the stroller. The boy would be nothing but eyes, glittering eyes surrounded by a pile of blankets, watching anything in the world that Otis pointed out as interesting. He’d take him on the same walk every time: through a couple of blocks lined with houses to a stone gate that opened to a park that overlooked the sea. He’d push the stroller through the gate and onto the cobblestoned path, and the world would turn to nothing but wind and salt air and birds. He’d crouch down next to the boy and point out gulls and cormorants and occasionally a pelican. When he shut his eyes now, the boy’s eyes glowed in his memory as bright as the coals at the bottom of the fire.
He had to get home. There had to be a way to get home.
Otis’s stomach growled and he looked out to sea, and he wondered if he’d missed a ship passing while he’d been watching the flames. Just like him to get so entranced by beauty that he’d forget the purpose for which it had been created. The locket was hot against his skin, its metal surface heated by the fire. He didn’t notice when the pictures on the ground, picked up by a gust of wind, circled once and settled in the coals.
The girls blamed Andrew for everything—was it his fault that he sometimes fell asleep in the afternoon? Was it his fault that he’d been dreaming when they dragged the nuclear waste to the pigs? He’d tried to apologize, but as usual they wouldn’t listen. They were in the hut right now, Mimi wrapping gauze around Luisa’s missing finger, Luisa kicking the ground and muttering about how it was his fault the world was so messed up, not the world’s fault at all. Neither of them would look at him. Not surprising. They made him the scapegoat every single time something went wrong. He thought Luisa might even blame him for Eddie. It was true. He could have been friendlier. But even though he was a boy and Eddie was a boy, that didn’t mean Andrew had to like him. What was there to like about that kid? Anyway, he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been friendly. They all could have made more of an effort.
It was the day that followed the nuclear waste, and Andrew could still see a soft glow across the sand. It would fade soon. He looked at his hands and almost felt guilty that he hadn’t lost any of his own fingers yet. The girls probably blamed him for that, too. They’d probably say something like he didn’t spend as much time feeding the pigs as they did and that was why he’d never lost a finger—that he just didn’t place himself in a position of vulnerability in the same way that they did. Right. He climbed up on a rock. The wind pressed against his chest. A lone ship was halfway across the horizon. Had he seen it before? Were all the ships that crossed their line of vision the same?
Andrew brushed some dirt off his knees and stretched. He hopped down and walked to the water. He jumped from rock to rock between wide pools, crouching to find flat stones, standing up to hurl them out to sea. After a while, he stopped looking for stones and started simply wandering. Up one rock, down another, the sea to his right, the curve of the island up ahead. The girls had no idea what it was like for him, being the only boy. He hurled a stone out into the ocean. He kept on walking.
Past the children’s hut, the island grew wilder. There were rocks by the water, but then a cliff stretched up beyond the rocks. In places the water came so close to the cliff that Andrew had to lean his left hand against its earthen wall for balance. In some places flowers burst out of the vertical surface. In other places dirt broke away beneath his fingers. He got his feet wet from time to time, and the blue water felt warmer, sometimes, than the air.
Just before a curve in the shoreline, he heard a rustling sound that seemed to come from the center of a burst of thorny flowers growing straight out of the cliff. He stopped and looked at it closely. The flowers were pink, and the nearer he got to them, the more their petals looked like leaves. The rustling sounded again, and, looking harder, he saw a small brown dove, wings folded tight against the thorns. It seemed to be stuck in a hollow—it didn’t look like the thorns were pricking into it, but it also didn’t look like there was any way out. Andrew couldn’t tell if it even wanted out. The dove shut its eyes when he looked, and cowered backwards, as if by cowering it could make itself unseen.
“I’ll help you,” Andrew whispered. “Just stay still.”
The bird puffed its feathers, so now it looked like a soft, gray ball. Andrew reached his hand in. The thorns were as long as the first knuckle of his thumb, and sharp. He unwound the trap twig by twig, almost as if he were unwinding a willow basket. He’d never woven a basket, or unwound one, either, but he found he liked the in and out, the following of one strand to its home. The bird ignored him and he worked to free her. His fingers were so nimble that he managed to avoid all the thorns but one.
When he’d cleared a passage to the bird, he reached his hands in. He’d never been in a church, but the space he’d created had a church-like feel. Soft light filtered through the tangles of vines, and the interior of the space was dark and mysterious, but also had a kind of glow. The roof of the space arched up to a peak. It was narrow, and the bird crouched in what would have been the nave, if a small hand-sized hollow cleared in a tangle of thorny flowers could have a nave.
“I’ll help you,” Andrew said again. The one thorn he hadn’t managed to avoid was stuck firmly in his right wrist. He could see that a little blood was dripping from it, and he could feel the ache of the pierce down to his joints.
The dove flapped her wings as his hands got closer, and the only thing he could do, even though he hated himself for doing it, was pounce and hold her wings tight to her sides and yank her out.
“Don’t be scared,” he whispered. “I won’t hurt you.” He pulled her right to his chest. He felt her feathers, and the thorn in his wrist, and her heart beating against his sweaty skin. Then he turned his back to the hollow so she wouldn’t scuttle back inside, and he put her down on the ground and let her go. She opened her eyes and blinked. The rest of her body stayed frozen.
“You can move,” he said. “You can go anywhere you’d like. You’re not stuck here like me.”
She blinked again. Then she turned her back to him and waddled along the rocky path. Water pounded on the sea-facing side. Dirt crumbled off the cliff. The farther she moved away, the more her feathers took on the color of the wall. He’d just begun to think she’d vanished when she spread her wings and flew up to another thorny flowering burst, out of the dusty blur her movement created. She landed on its edge and then waddled her way inside. The new thorns looked just as vicious as the thorns he’d cleared away to let her out. The dove crouched inside, tucked her head under her wing, and pretended Andrew wasn’t there. He could feel her willing him to move on, and he almost cried.
He stood up and dusted himself off. He went back to walking. To hell with the bird. He didn’t even look back at her. He’d never have to see her again, and that was fine with him. He was so thirsty. Why hadn’t he thought to bring water?
It was just a short walk now to the place where this cove ended and the next cove began. He marked it in his mind and said he’d turn back when he got there. The beaches formed two crescent moons and were separated by a jutting point of land with a boulder at its tip. Andrew clambered across the sand to that large rock. Its pitted sides made it perfect for climbing.