The Highest Tide (22 page)

They, of course, insisted they weren’t reporters—hree called themselves Eleusinians—but they repeated the same boring questions. And I said as little as possible until all of them lost interest except for the intense, long-necked, black-haired man who resembled a cormorant at feeding time.

“Do you believe some higher force is guiding you?” he asked.

“No.”

“What about visions? Do you have visions?”

I shrugged.

“Do you talk to God?” he pressed.

“I talk to myself at times, and maybe He overhears some ofthat.” Phelps snorted behind me.

“Then how did you hear about that extraordinary tide on September eighth?” He sounded urgent. “Who or what made you predict that?”

“Someone I trust.”

“A voice?”

“Yes.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Like an old lady.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Has that voice steered you right before?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He bent toward me, unblinking, his nose packed with so many black hairs I was surprised he could breathe. “Do you believe this bay has healing powers?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Are you a child of faith?”

“I don’t know.”

“But—”

“That’s enough.” Phelps stepped forward. “Sorry, but Mr. O’Malley is answering so many questions that he isn’t getting a chance to make new discoveries. You understand. Thank you for your interest.”

Phelps ushered me away, carrying himself in a way that you didn’t notice he added up to just 118 pounds. “That fucker was freaking me out,” he said. “We’re charging for interviews fi-om now on. Ten bucks a pop. No discounts.”

“We?” I said.

“Everything’s fifty-fifty with us,” Phelps replied. “Deal’s a deal.” He lit a Kent and popped two smoke rings through a larger one over water so calm they hung in the air like thought bubbles.

We waded farther out as the tide continued falling on its way to a minus-two-point-seven. There were far more people watching us than I’d realized. Spencer Spit twitched with spectators, and I counted three kayaks and two canoes gliding our way.

“Keep the riffraff off our lordship here,” Phelps instructed Blister and the rest of our posse, then urged me to do something freaky. So I squatted, spread my arms out as if performing some martial arts warm-up and started slapping the smooth water top. I drummed hard. It made a more interesting sound than you might imagine. Once Phelps and the boys stopped laughing they mimicked my stance, and soon all six of us were splashing the same rhythm. “Skoo-kum-chuck!” I chanted. They joined me in their deepest cannibal voices. “Skoo-kum-chuck! Skoo-kum-chuck!” Binoculars and cameras popped out along the shore. Two canoes closed on us, and someone jogged out on the flats with a television camera. “Skoo-kum-chuck!”

After our arms tired, I watched the water recover around us, waiting for it to clear and the sun’s reflection to settle until I realized it wasn’t the sun’s image at all. It was orange and shimmered on the surface, but its light came from below.

The closer I got the brighter it looked. I assumed it was a sunken fluorescent buoy or a bottle of orange soda until I saw how it waved in the current like a giant foot-high feather.

Bugeyes was the first to notice what I was marveling at. “What the fuck is that?”

Two canoes unloaded and the jogging cameraman puffed to within fifteen yards of us. Others scampered—three limped—more easily across the mud now that it was less than an hour before low tide.

“Here we go again, ladies and gentlemen,” Phelps said in his best circus voice. I looked up at an audience thick enough to block the sun. TV cameras rolled. I recognized some of the heart-attack faces as cult members.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“A
Ptilosarcus gurneyi
,” I said, and smiled.

“Would you repeat that?”

I did, and spelled it too.

“So what exactly is that?”

“It’s also called a sea pen, because, I guess, it looks like one of those old-fashioned pens.”

“Tell us more,” someone with a microphone pleaded.

“Well, for starters it’s an animal, not a plant.” People hummed and tittered. “And it’s actually dozens of animals in one. Each one of its little branches is an independent mouth. So it’s kinda like a bunch of sea anemones who got together and decided to dress up like a colorful plant so they could trick small fish and other sea life into swimming close enough to grab them. And all the mouths share one digestive system.” I smiled and heard camera shutters. “Weird, huh?”

It was probably my speeding heart, or the way people blocked the glare, but the closer everyone huddled the brighter the sea pen looked. “And this is the biggest and orangest one I’ve seen,” I said, “although all the others have been at aquariums.”

“What led you to it?” someone asked.

“I thought it was the reflection of the sun.”

“Is there a voice in your head telling you where to look?”

I didn’t answer that.

“How old are you?” someone else asked.

I didn’t answer that either. I didn’t want to hear murmurs about how I looked younger than someone’s ten-year-old when I was a month and a half away fi-om fourteen.

I waded to the far side of the sea pen so everyone could see it, then squatted behind it. I reached down slowly, stroked it gently and it gave off a green light, a sudden, unmistakable green flash.

People swore, the cormorant crossed himself and my scalp tingled the way your foot does after you sit on it too long.

“Why’d it turn green?” someone demanded.

The sun sparkled through the crowd and blinded me, so I rested my eyes in the other direction long enough to make out the red sea star, poking three legs out from beneath sea lettuce fifteen feet from the sea pen. It wasn’t a big star, but big enough. I waded toward it, waved the lettuce aside and pointed it out to more gasps.

“What kind of starfish is that?” someone demanded.

“A
Master aepualis
,” I said. “It’s one of the few stars that eats sea pens.” I smiled again for the cameras. “They smell like firecrackers if you hold them up to your nose.”

I handed it to some lady who looked like she had the chickenpox.

“Why’d that plant turn green?” someone asked again. Others echoed the question.

Through a gap in the mob, I saw Angie and the judge shufling along their waterfront, their somber gaits making them look like impostors. When Angie turned, I waved theatrically, but got nothing back and instantly felt ridiculous. And selfish. And motherless.

It surprised me to already miss her, though not in the way I expected. It was more like the hollowness you feel when you’ve misplaced something important.

I was so distracted I didn’t hear the questions other than what to do with the sea pen. “Leave it alone,” I said, “and keep that star away from it.”

I strode, head down, toward Florence’s house, hating myself for not having checked on her all day, ignoring the pleas to coax me back, questions and demands flitting around me like bats.

My eyes blurred counting shoeprints on the flats. People were everywhere. I didn’t recognize the bay or anyone on it, including myself.

CHAPTER 25

T
HE BAY CONTINUED
to attract strange crowds for days, so I either collected clams in Chatham Cove with Phelps or hid behind curtains with Florence to avoid the questions. My father got so fed up he chased a herd of reporters off our doorstep and shouted: “It’s over!” He also posted No Trespassing signs in the driveway, and one of the Dons staked a poster with a red slash through the word
media
. And the story finally eased away from me to the sudden pilgrimage of Russians to Skookumchuck Bay.

There were still curious cult members and locals wandering about, but we increasingly saw old cars full of people who crawled out speaking some loud language with voices that could motivate sled dogs. The old ladies wore huge scarves on their heads, and the men were wide-boned with large faces. TV told us most of them were Russians and Ukrainians who’d settled south of Seattle and who routinely drove across the state to Soap Lake, where even some doctors claimed the lake’s silky mud and mineral-rich water healed certain skin conditions.
AU
sorts of other people showed up on the bay too, including Canadians who’d heard things were
happening
here, that the mud or water had cured gout, and that people were
seeing things
. One of the most-repeated stories, unfortunately, was about a little boy who not only discovered a giant squid but turned a large underwater sea plant from orange to green just by touching it.

The murmurs kept people coming, and no announcements or denials or TV reporters explaining the color-changing capabilities of sea pens discouraged them. Skookumchuck Bay turned into the last stop on the summer road trip for people hoping to see miracles or to find relief from psoriasis, arthritis and everything from cancer to diaper rash. Caravans of dusty cars filled the meadows and sandy lots around the tavern and packed the overgrown driveway leading to the cabin rented by Hal Clinton, better known as Hallelujah Hal because of the way he routinely prayed beneath a massive cross he’d built out of four-by-fours and hung from a cedar limb near the beach.

It was obvious Hal had welcomed the visitors because whenever the wind and traffic died, we could hear Russian voices praying beneath his cross. We also saw the strangers in front of his cabin, splashing into our cold, muddy bay as if it were a community pool, swimming aimlessly or wading to their hips and dunking their heads and especially their babies until their cries blended with the whining gulls and the scolding herons.

But that wasn’t the weirdest part.

The Russians started it, but soon there were others wading to their knees, scooping up the slickest, stinkiest, blackest mud they could find, and rubbing it over themselves and each other as if it were sunscreen. Some covered their entire bodies, then baked in the sun along the scrubby lip of the shore. Once they were stiff and flaky dry, they waded back out, rinsed off, lathered up with a new batch and did it all over again—no matter how ridiculous it looked or how many television cameras watched.

My reports on all that revived Florence, or perhaps her growing fear of nursing homes scared her body into improving. Regardless, she was a different lady for a few days: joking, shuMing with confidence and even eating more. But when I swung by that Thursday to make lunch, Julie Winslow opened the door as if she owned it.

“We were just talking about you,” she chirped. “I’m delighted you’re here.”

Florence was in her chair, forcing a smile, smelling like pee.

Julie Winslow showed off the new equipment she’d brought: an elevated toilet seat, a walker, an aluminum shower seat and even new silverware with oversized handles.

She also told me Florence’s “team” now included a nutritionist, an occupational therapist and an equipment specialist. The hardest part of it for me was watching Florence fake gratitude.

“She seems nice,” I said, afler Julie Winslow left.

“Exactly,” Florence said. “
Seems.
”

“You still don’t trust her.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

So I talked about how I was dreading the dang “BioBlitz” that was supposedly coming to town in less than ten days. I couldn’t even stand the name of it.

We kept hearing about what a huge deal it was going to be. Never before had more than seventy scientists agreed to assemble to survey the biology and botany of a public waterway on such short notice! And never before had the findings of one child galvanized such a grand response from the scientific community! That one killed me. What if they went to all this trouble and didn’t find anything the slightest bit unusual? What if I’d already found the few peculiarities in our bays? What if these superimportant scientists interrupted their mankind-saving work just because some stupid reporters wrote some ridiculous half-true stories about me?

“Stop it!” Florence snarled. “Quit being so childish.”

I would have rather been slapped.

“You are not responsible for what happens on this bay, or for what people do based on what you find or what you say about what you saw. Do you understand?”

I didn’t risk a response. I just waited for whatever else she had for me.

“Julie Winslow is determined to put me in a home,” she announced.

“She said that?” I whispered.

“Of course not.”

“Then why’d she bring out all this stuff to make it easier for you here?”

“To create a file. She can’t just send me to a home, thank God, but if I ever take a ride in an ambulance the hospital discharge officer will review her file on me and recommend assisted living. And you know what that is, don’t you? That’s a nice way of saying
nursing home
, which is a place where people sit in wheelchairs shitting themselves. You do realize I eventually won’t be able to talk, right?” Her voice strained. “How am I going to tell them what I need if I can’t talk?You’re smart, Miles. You know me. Don’t look away! You think I haven’t seen the way this ends? Eventually I won’t be able to swallow! You think I would allow that?” Her big eyes twitched. “Have you told anyone about my falls?”

I was blown back by her question and frightened by her tone. “You told me—”

“Yes, I know what I told you, but perhaps you asked your parents or Norman what to do, and one of them called the state.”

I wanted to tell her what the judge had said about calling her neurologist, and remind her of the reporter who’d written about her living conditions. Most of all, I wanted to ask her how she could doubt me.

Her glassy eyeballs reflected light from everywhere. “I’m sorry, Miles.” She reached for me, and I flinched. “The books will be yours,” she said calmly. “So will the cabin and the land.”

I wasn’t about to argue with her or thank her.

“There might be something to clean up,” she said after a sigh so long it made her slouch. “I’m sorry about that. I truly am. It’s unfair for me to burden you, but I already have and I’m not through yet.” She slowed her breathing and drifted into her half-lidded state.