The murderous rock that fell from the heavens is an uncanny blue-red in color. A symbol carved on its surface.

  As the fog begins to dissipate, Striker finds herself kneeling in the shadow of the mama cairn and staring at the blue-red giant forming its base. Overhead something catches her eye.

  Atop the rickety spire of rocks, a one-eyed bird sits preening its feathers.

  Then Lucy steps out from behind the pillar. Each stone in the tower appears misaligned. Playfully the child runs her fingers over the bottom rock. Lightly she raps on it with a tuning fork. At the sound, the cairn quivers. Lucy taps it again. The column shifts back into place.

  And so Lucy holds out her hand. Striker takes it and together they walk out of the thinning mist and down the far side of the volcano. The child is her shepherd.

  Now that the fog is breaking up, Striker knows it is her own eyes and not the white mist obscuring her vision. How each of us only sees what we expect to see, the world conforming to our beliefs. But now that her sight is ruined, everything is perfectly clear. No more misconceptions, no more fears. The earth shakes and leaps under her feet. Everything coming alive.

  On this side of the island, there is no penguin colony. No four-ton seals roaming the beach. Nothing but water and melting ice and the sea like a road stretching in every direction. Striker sees the kayak she and Anders freed Hector from years before, and there is Hector lying on his back beside the zodiac, his unblinking gaze fixed on the heavens.

  Lucy closes her father’s eyes and kisses his nose. He looks peaceful, a man who has accomplished what he set out to achieve. The child tucks something small and gray in the crook of his arm. It’s a stuffed animal, a rat with an orange bow tie, its two buck teeth permanently grinning. This object of love will be Hector’s headstone.

  Then Lucy does what needs doing. Striker is her baby. The child is surprisingly adept. On the stony beach she leads Striker to the tandem, places her in the front of the boat. A burning rock goes flying past, its origin either celestial or volcanic. The sky is raining fire, the sun a few degrees past either noon or midnight. Sulfur and brimstone. The sounds of a great blast. Poisonous gases shoot up into the air. Trumpets. Nothing can sleep forever. We are interconnected. My father’s mansion contains many rooms.

  How much of our personal narratives are even true? All of Striker’s trysts and dalliances with men, none of them ever amounting to much—are they the daydreams of a lonely woman or memories of actual encounters? And is Riley a real flesh-and-blood person, or just the Black ride-or-die friend Striker has spent a lifetime wishing into existence?

  Didn’t she always know it would end like this? How could it not? A house divided will not stand. All her stories catching up with her at once. She just didn’t think she’d take the whole universe down with her.

  Lovingly Lucy hands her a paddle. Striker accepts it and looks straight out toward the horizon. Wasn’t it only minutes ago she pushed off from the Yegorov, the albatross convulsing on deck?

  The kayak wobbles gently as someone seats themself in the back. Once the person is in, Striker inhales deeply and pushes the boat out into the Southern Ocean. Already she can feel her boatmate’s breath on the nape of her neck. She thinks of the myth of Orpheus. How he turned around too soon and was forced to watch as the ghost of his wife disappeared back into the dark.

  Striker knows it isn’t Eurydice in this tandem with her. Most likely it’s Lucy, the Morning Star. The little girl with some unworldly knowledge of where to find help.

  If Striker is damned, it’s the icy dead seated behind her, an island’s worth of souls with their personal histories slowly drowning her. As punishment for the things she has done, she must be their deliverer, the past a country she can never transcend.

  But if she is blessed, it’s her sister paddling behind her, Ama with her gap-toothed grin from ear to ear, and together she and Ama are going home for some good food, good music, rest, a little justice. Striker knows if her sister is the one sitting just over her shoulder, at some point Ama will say:

  “Remember that time we told Trish about our cones at Baskin-Robbins being smaller than everyone else’s and she told us don’t be silly?”

  The words will bring a smile to Striker’s face. Only Ama could think of ice cream at a time like this, all over the blistering ocean growlers hurtling past the sisters like blue comets.

  Then it will come to her. The worst thing in the world. The thing that terrifies her most of all. It isn’t full-frontal insanity. It’s this long-forgotten truth, like transverberation piercing her in the heart.

  “I remember,” Striker will say, the agony dawning in her voice.

  “You know the next day she drove down there and ripped them a new one.”

  Striker will feel the tears starting to rise. “I know,” she’ll whisper.

  Ama will sit smiling, trailing a finger in the water. “Trish and Doug were always doing stuff like that,” she’ll say. “Fighting for us behind our backs. Putting on a brave face because they wanted us to believe we were just like everyone else.”

  Striker will nod. The golden pain rising like sap in her veins. Remembering how she never saw that teenaged swim instructor again after he threw Ama in the pool. Remembering the first moments of Ama deep in the pale blue water before her sister even knew what happened. A brief moment of unabashed wonder in Ama’s eyes. Then her small body of its own accord carrying her back up to the surface.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The toast on page 198 was the Reverend Ed Lynn’s closing words at the Northshore Unitarian Church in the 1980s.

  The definition on page 207 of a microagression comes from ­Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.

  On page 221 the line about a tree touching heaven is a reworking of a quote from Carl Jung.

  The Anna Akhmatova excerpt on page 247 is from her poem “Requiem.”

  The history of pemmican described on page 283 relies on Jason C. Anthony’s Hoosh.

  Deepest thanks to early reader Chele Isaac for her insightful comments throughout the book’s many drafts, and to Kelly Parks Snider for listening as I talked it out. Thanks to my brother Sean for his thoughts about sailboats, though he would’ve preferred a more gruesome death involving getting one’s face chewed up by the engine (heh!). I would also like to acknowledge the Bogliasco Foundation; Rowland Writers Retreat and my fellow fellows there, who were generous in sharing their thoughts on the things that scare them; Macdowell; the T. S. Eliot House; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison for support in writing this book.

  REFERENCES

  Anthony, Jason C. Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012.

  Blum, Hester. The News at the Ends of the Earth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019.

  Monteath, Colin. Antarctica: Beyond the Southern Ocean. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Books, 1997.

  Moss, Sarah. The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration. New York: Burbage, 2006.

  Wilkes, Ally. All the White Spaces. New York: Atria, 2022.

  The character of Robert Foley was named by Bob Wally as part of a fundraiser for the Worcester, Massachusetts, Public Library. (I’m sorry, Bob, that “Martha” didn’t make the cut.)

  Books I am indebted to for their tone and narrative suspense include Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman; Lord of the Flies by William Golding; the Inimitable One, Stephen King’s The Shining; and of course, the OG dark tales storyteller, Nathaniel Hawthorne:

  “When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the ­secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”

 

 

  Quan Barry, The Unveiling

 

 

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