The 100 Year Miracle Read online

  Feeling as though the boat watched her as much as she watched it, Tilda dropped her sacks in the damp sand under the deck and pulled her knit hat around her ears. From one bag, she pulled a box of cheese crackers and a diet soda. Not strictly boating necessities, they were medicinal. There had been a lot of moving around that morning for a middle-aged woman with a hangover. Tilda rarely drank more than a glass of wine. She couldn’t remember the last time she had drunk too much, but whenever it was, she felt certain she had recovered more quickly than this. She unscrewed the lid from the soda and took small sips.

  She had moved on to the crackers when she heard footsteps on the deck over her head. She stayed were she was, listening as the feet, moving too fast and with too much assurance to be Harry’s, went from the house to the stairs and then all the way down to the sand. The young woman, carrying two buckets, one in each hand, passed within fifteen feet of Tilda without ever seeing her. A Fish and Wildlife officer called out, but the woman waved him off. Tilda stopped chewing, watching as Dr. Bell skirted the work site, dipped her buckets into the water, and returned, moving more slowly, the weight of the buckets pulling at her arms.

  When the woman had gone back into the house, Tilda put away the crackers, took another sip of soda, and fished around in her other bag. Adjusting the elastic band, she pulled the small headlamp onto her head, fitting it over her knit cap. All the weight was in the front, forcing her to adjust how she balanced her head on her neck, not something she had given a lot of thought to in the past. She dropped her shoulders, rolling them back, and settled into this new position before reaching up and pressing the small button once, which turned it on, and then again to make it brighter. The light was small, but the beam it cast was broad. She would have to remember not to look directly at anyone while wearing it. Reckless blinding was going to be a real possibility.

  That done, she reached back into the bag and pulled out a pack of pens. She freed one and hooked it into the spiral of the small notebook she’d bought. She shoved that into the back pocket of her jeans, reached again into the sack, and came up with a stubby flathead screwdriver that she shoved into her other pocket.

  With both hands free, she approached the boat. She approached it like she might have approached a strange dog, careful when reaching out her hand. Someone had built this boat, an actual someone, not an assembly line of someones. She could see it in the imperfections, lines not quite straight, paint that had gone on too thick and settled into the pebbled appearance of an orange skin. Across the back, obscured by the rudder fin that was flipped up for storage, was the boat’s name, Serendipity. Not the name she would have chosen, but it would do.

  She ran her light over the hull, the aft arm, the float. Her beam, the bright white of LEDs, cut a sharp line. The sun, somewhere behind the asbestos clouds, had risen, but its light was far too weak to penetrate the cave where she worked.

  Tilda moved to the port side, opposite the outrigger. Standing dead center, she put her hands on the cockpit wall and pressed down hard, testing the jacks that held the boat in place. Nothing moved. She pressed harder, lifting her feet up off the sand. When the whole thing did not topple over on top of her, she tipped her weight forward and swung a leg up over the side. The boat shifted slightly, creaking. One jack dug deeper into the sand, and Tilda froze, her muscles tense, ready to fling herself clear of whatever imminent tragedy was about to occur. But none did. She gave it a full fifteen seconds, which she judged to be the maximum amount of time a tragedy could hang in potentia, before sliding the rest of her body into the boat.

  A single bench spanned the cockpit near the rudder. She wrapped her hand around the tiller. It felt solid and smooth, as smooth as the driftwood that littered the beach around her, and she imagined the builder sanding it again and again and again, imagined the hands that gripped it, darkening the wood over time. Steering with a tiller was both rudimentary and counterintuitive, push left to go right and right to go left, shifting the rudder below accordingly.

  Above her, the mast stretched up no more than twelve feet, and down by her sneakers was the sail bag. Whoever had stored it last—and a good part of her doubted it was Maggie—had had the sense not to wrap the sail around the boom and call it a day, which meant that just maybe it would not be in terrible shape. She lifted one end. It was like lifting a snake filled with sand, awkward and heavier than it looked. She eased her end over the port side and let the whole thing drop to the beach below. She would deal with that later. Underneath the sail had been a single orange life preserver that looked nearly as old as Juno. She tossed that over the side, too.

  Ducking under the boom, she got on her hands and knees and got to work. Pointing her light with her forehead, Tilda looked first for a mud line, the high-water mark that would’ve been evidence of flooding. Finding none, she reached into her pocket and took out the screwdriver. Inch by inch, she worked her way over the boat. Anything that looked the tiniest bit suspicious got a good poke. Rot would give way easily, coming apart in splinters under pressure.

  Inside the cockpit, Tilda found two sections, each a few inches across, that failed her test. She used the screwdriver to pry away the bad wood, working each spot until she had excised it all like a surgeon removing a tumor. Neither went all the way through the hull, and when she was satisfied, she stood, stretched, and dropped herself down to the sand. She took out her pen, made her notes, and then got back to work, performing the same test on the rest of the boat. She found more rot on the float and on both of the hiking boards, but the pivoting centerboard seemed in working order.

  When she stepped back, shoving the notebook once again into her pocket, her relationship, their relationship, the one between her and the Serendipity, had shifted. They knew each other now. Not like they would. Not like it would be when she got it off the jacks and into the water. But they had begun things. They had been honest with each other about their faults and agreed to work on them.

  With one more touch to the hull, Tilda reached up and turned off the headlamp. The sudden darkness blinded her and made her unsteady on her feet as she picked her way out from under the deck toward the relative light of the outside. She gathered up her plastic sacks, unscrewed the cap of her soda, and took another drink, this one deeper, her stomach having settled.

  She was going to need epoxy, a lot of epoxy.

  17.

  When she’d first arrived, Rachel had refused to put her tanks in the dining room. While the room had no windows, it also had no door. It was out of the question. Mr. Streatfield had tried reassuring her that no one in the house would touch her equipment, but that wasn’t the point. Although, once he’d brought up the possibility, Rachel added it to her list of worries.

  She carried the tanks up the stairs to her bedroom and lined them up on top of dressers and bookcases. The tanks were large and heavy. She’d had to arch her back too far and feel each step carefully with her foot before ascending because she couldn’t see around. The dose she’d taken earlier had worn off. She’d dry swallowed three of her white pills, the strongest ones she had, before leaving the cabin, but they’d been just enough to take the edge off. After the first tank, she was shaky with pain, so much so that her teeth started to chatter.

  It went this way for all three tanks plus the algae setup, then the boxes and duffel bags full of her other equipment, and another trip with the cooler full of new water samples. It wasn’t an ideal work space, but it was private—more private than the dining room and much more private than the camp—and that was the important thing. She’d set everything up as quickly as possible, but her temperature gauges showed the bay water had warmed by seven degrees.

  “Shit.”

  She did a visual check to confirm what she already knew. The samples had crashed. Rachel blamed the extended transport. She’d have to go back out and collect more before she showered or slept. She could, at least, do that from the house with relative ease and, with a view of the beach, could determine when her arrival would be
undetected.

  But she could deal with none of that until she got her pain under control. Rachel consulted her notebook and followed the procedure from the day before, measuring and grinding the dead Artemia lucis into a paste. This time she increased the dosage by fifty percent and swallowed, chasing it with a handful of raisins left at the bottom of a bag of trail mix.

  “Gah.” Rachel stamped her foot and pulled a face, sticking out her tongue, which was still covered in semi-chewed bits of raisin.

  Once she’d collected herself, Rachel checked her notebook again. Yesterday morning, she had estimated the amount of time between taking the dose and noticeable pain relief was twenty minutes. She looked at her watch, noted the current time, and set about making herself at home for twenty minutes.

  The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in wood panels that had been painted white, the same creamy white as the headboard and dresser. The comforter was plush and, when Rachel squeezed it, she realized, full of down. The fabrics in the room, including the two area rugs, were softly patterned with pinks and greens and yellows. The bedspread had tiny rosebuds, the curtains featured birds, and the rugs were printed with leaves and vines. It was the natural world as imagined by Beatrix Potter. It was the sort of room that could have been in a magazine or a bed and breakfast. It would’ve been the ideal room for a little girl—or at least it would have until Rachel had turned it into a laboratory.

  She rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t remember how much sleep she’d had in the past few days, but it wasn’t much. When she stopped moving, her eyes pulled shut. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she was in danger of falling asleep. She got up and did her fifteen careful jumping jacks then went to hang up everything in her duffel bag, even though that which wasn’t fleece was wrinkled beyond hope already. Then she checked her watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed. Rachel bent forward. She’d thought it would be fine, and so she’d done it quickly.

  She let out a loud gasp and punched her thigh, her knees threatening to buckle. God, it hurt. It hurt. It hurt. Jesus. Why did it hurt? There was no reason, not with a fifty-percent increase in dosage, that it should still hurt. She pushed air through her teeth and forced herself to stand, feeling around desperately for a logical answer.

  Rachel grabbed two of her sealed transportation containers from the cooler and ran down the wooden stairs as best she could, her shoes clomping too loud. Harry stood at the door of his library leaning on his cane and shuffling toward the source of the commotion. She had not bothered to grab a coat.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  But Rachel did not answer as she raced past to the back sliding glass door. She did not see anyone down by the white tents. They could be between shifts, on a break, collecting at another location. Wherever they were, they could come back and at any moment.

  Rachel yanked twice before her shaking hands could make sense of the tiny flip lock. When the door opened, she threw herself out onto the deck as though making a dramatic escape. She was down the stairs and under the yellow tape, waving off the Fish and Wildlife officer fifty yards away who shouted something at her that she couldn’t and didn’t try to hear.

  It is hard to run in sand. It is harder to run in sand with the December wind blowing in off the water and into your face, rocks and bits of driftwood reaching up their gnarled fingers to trip your toes. The wind whipped Rachel’s hair in front of her eyes while her feet sank into the sand. She couldn’t keep up her pace and had to goose-step, wasting energy and time. She needed to slow down. Rachel knew that, but knowing and believing are different. No amount of training in what was empirical could do anything against the adrenaline sloshing through her bloodstream. At the water’s edge, her heart rate topped out, and she began to gasp.

  She swallowed gulps of air. Standing there on the edge of the island on the edge of the continent with nothing but air, she still couldn’t get enough. Water pooled in her eyes and dripped from the corners, which might have been from the wind.

  “Go,” she told herself before she was ready. “Move!”

  Rachel waded into the water. It was too cold. Her nerves rebelled, turning temperature to pain. The joints in her toes ached. Her skin, right up to the crown of her head, shrunk tight to her body and broke out in goose pimples. Her muscles contracted. Her back—there were no words for her back. It was as if the wounds were happening all over again, happening on a loop she could not stop. It made her light-headed, sick to her stomach. It was hard to move, but she did. Through it all, she did it anyway because there was nothing else she could do, no one to turn to, nothing that could help. She went into the bay and skimmed her clear, plastic collection tubs across the water.

  She had not brought the smaller containers that attached to the bottom of plankton nets. These were, instead, large tubs not unlike what off-brand rainbow sherbet might come in. She had to move more slowly on the way back. Water is heavy, and she was shivering and unsteady. She had to pay extra attention to her feet to keep from tripping and spilling. She made her way back up the beach, over the rocks and the driftwood and through the brambles near the stairs and back up the tiers of expensive decking.

  Harry was waiting, standing just outside the door, which stood open, cooling the house and raising the heating bill. He was watching her with an intensity she did not appreciate.

  “Excuse me.” Rachel tried to step around him, but he filled too much of the space. “I really have to get these samples in the tanks,” she said.

  He was trying to back up and make way, and Rachel worried for a moment that he’d catch his house slipper on an uneven board or that his right leg, turned in at an awkward angle, would simply give way. But she didn’t have time to help him. As soon as he’d moved just enough, she slid past, taking small but quick steps through the house, her eye always on the samples, careful not to spill. Up the stairs she went and into her room. She set the tubs on the floor.

  Straight from the tubs, she harvested the Artemia lucis, measured, ground the paste, and swallowed it. She did not make a face this time nor did she wash it down with any sort of chaser. She did not have room in her mind for considerations like that.

  She would fix this. She could and would fix this. She could never fix this. The previous test was a fluke. There was another benign explanation for the relief she experienced. Not true. She simply needed better, less decayed samples. She needed to stick to the protocols. What scientist, what scientist at all, would spend years of her life chasing a fairy tale?

  Tears rolled down Rachel’s cheeks while her neurons flung the competing messages, like tiny sparks, back and forth over their network. She carted the tanks into the bathroom one by one, stopping only to wipe her eyes and nose on the back of her hand. She washed and disinfected everything she could then used a long fireplace lighter to flame an alcohol mixture off the metal surfaces.

  She did it because it had to be done, because this had to work.

  Rachel had been six years old when it happened. It had been summer, and summer in the Arizona desert pushes everything down low. People and animals creep along with their bellies to the ground, slipping down into hidey-holes wherever they find them. Popsicles melt after the first bite, and public pools have to be topped off every few days for all the evaporation. Children have to choose then between the heat outside and the sharp-edged people inside, and you can measure the balance of things by how many little ones huddle in whatever shade they can find, holding on to basketballs and toy baby strollers they have no energy to play with.

  Rachel had lived with her mother in a fourplex that was one of twenty other fourplexes all huddled together just behind the Taco Bell, which was open, and the dollar store that had closed. The buildings all looked identical, and visitors, not that there were many, often got lost. There were no helpful signs labeling one building from another or pointing the direction to any rental office.

  On that day, Rachel had come down to the kitchen to find Darren, her mother’s latest boyfriend, along with a pot
of water boiling on the old stove. Rachel remembered some things very clearly and other things not at all. She remembered the wallpaper border by the ceiling pasted up by a former tenant. It had been mauve with flowers on it. Rachel remembered a stick of butter on the counter half melted in the summer heat. She remembered there had been dishes from the morning cereal and dishes from whatever the adults ate and drank the night before in the sink. She did not remember where her mother had gone that day or even, really, what Darren looked like.

  He was by the stove, and Rachel must have been hungry, or maybe she had just been brave. The macaroni lunch wasn’t progressing at all, and she could see the water had been boiling for some time, the level having dropped down in the pot, leaving a white line where it had started, as hard water sometimes does. Rachel had said something with what her mother had begun calling her “smart mouth”; although for the life of her, she did not remember what.

  Darren grabbed her by the arm, which was bare. She remembered that. She had been wearing a little green-and-white-striped tank top that was small enough almost for a doll, and his hands were big enough to wrap all the way round one of her biceps. She had struggled, kicking and hitting as she tried to break free. And then she had. She had broken free, or maybe he had just let her go, but either way she had turned all the way around, her back to him. She had been intending to make for the sliding glass door on the other side of the room, but Rachel never got that far. Intending to run was all she managed to do before the water hit her.