Page 37 of The Dead of Summer

Elisa is flickering. Face, nose, eyes, her features shift in the battered flame of her mother’s lighter.

She closes The Slow Water Report and, just for a second, I’m afraid she’s going to blow out like a candle.

Vanish. She snaps the lighter shut, and I reach for her in the dark to make sure she’s still there.

“I’m okay,” she says. “This isn’t about me. I’m okay, I swear.”

She sounds very, extremely, absolutely not okay.

She sounds … I don’t know what to call the devastation in her voice, but I know I recognize it.

I’ve felt it, too, this nauseating slurry of wonder and hopelessness, anger and grief, and—what’s that last emotion?

Embarrassment, maybe? An undefinable humiliation that I often felt as I looked out Gracie’s hospital window and realized the world was more complicated than just my pain. That my pain was only personal.

I wonder if, like Elisa looks now, I looked like the loneliest person in the world. I squeeze her hand. She’s so still to the touch that I let go right away.

“Did you see that last part?” Bash asks, excited. “The obituary?”

I catch Bash’s eye and shake my head. Stop right there.

We can’t know what it means to Elisa to have searched for these documents for so many years only to find a note that says so much but confirms too little.

What’s clear is the heartbreak on our friend’s face.

Right now, the question isn’t how to give her hope, but what will help hold her together.

What’s a good friend in this moment? Bash nods, understanding.

We can’t give her space, so we give her silence.

For a while, we sit in the car as the fog swirls over us, and no one talks.

I pull the key chain flashlights from the shark backpack and start reviewing the documents up close.

The reports are dense and complicated, full of grids and diagrams that I don’t understand.

Doro used a red pen to circle things quickly, and the ink has since smudged, but it’s all still legible.

I feel giddy, holding the exact proof I used to fantasize about throwing at Gracie’s doctors when they told me these things just happen and it is what it is .

This thing didn’t just happen. It isn’t what it isn’t, and what it isn’t is an accident.

“We’ve got to tell someone.” I state the obvious, hoping the option of action is what Elisa needs to move ahead.

“Who?” Bash asks.

“The government. The FDA. The CDC. We just found proof of a major cover-up that we can now link to the outbreak of—what did Pfaff call it? Cnidaria imperia? It’s not an infection, it’s an infestation .

And the Sixties Spill wasn’t an accident.

It was an extermination attempt. Maybe it worked for a time, but how many people did the contamination make sick?

How many fundraisers and funerals did we go to, all because they poisoned our island to kill their mistake? ”

I’m shivering with adrenaline. Now that we know the poison is real, it’s like I can feel it deep in my bones, turning my marrow black and sticky. But we don’t have to end up like Scary Mary, or even Gracie. We can save ourselves, and we can save everyone else poisoned by this cursed island.

“What I want to know is where the coral came from,” Bash says.

“Cnidaria imperia,” I correct.

“Whatever. Was it some kind of science experiment? It does look kind of nuclear, doesn’t it? Or maybe it’s been here all along, like the ancient organisms trapped in the icebergs?”

I’m about to tell Bash that none of this matters considering the shit growing all over the place outside is clearly not going back to the lab, or the iceberg, or wherever it came from, but then Elisa speaks for the first time in an hour.

“We need the red notebook. The one Pfaff stole from the labs at Easter, that she always keeps with her. That has the answers.”

“No.” I shake my head adamantly. “We need to get off this island and find someone who can help.”

“How?” Elisa asks with blunt doubt.

I jerk a thumb at the ocean beside us. It’s the only clear view we have. Out past a harbor overgrown with coral, boats rise and fall in the soft surf. The moonlight peeking through the low clouds forms a path directly into the horizon.

“You think you’re the first person to think of using a boat to escape an island?

The navy would be on you in a second. And besides, I’m not running away and leaving those people at AMIOS,” Elisa says, and suddenly all her fire is back, but why is she aiming to burn me?

I open my mouth to protest, but she says, “Even if we could leave now, we might never be able to come back, and what happens then? What about Bash’s fam? What about Gracie?”

“Hold up, hold up.” I pump the air with my palms. “We just nearly got flamb é ed in the bayou, and you want to go back to AMIOS? For a notebook? Absolutely not. First of all, escaping was your idea, Elisa, and second of all, we can’t save everyone alone.

For now, Bash’s fam is safe. If we get off this island, we can tell the world about what’s happening here. ”

“Look around, Ollie. The world doesn’t care!” Elisa shouts right in my face. I’m stunned. She slumps back, crossing her arms. “It’s been weeks of this, and where’s the world? If help was coming, it’d be here by now.”

“There’s the hospital ship,” Bash suggests.

“It showed up days before the outbreak,” Elisa snaps. “I don’t trust it.”

“People will care,” I assure Elisa. “If they knew what was happening, what was really happening here, they would care. And thanks to your mom, we have proof that something has been brewing on this island for decades.”

“Thanks to my mom, we have nothing . Even if by some miracle we do make it out, all we have are the rantings and doodles of a crazy lady who killed herself. Everything else we found—my old books, Scary Mary’s final words—got taken by Pfaff!”

I am horrified by Elisa’s distrust. It’s like she’s giving up right in front of me, not just on us but on the world.

I can’t judge her, though. Didn’t I do the same, months ago?

It’s like Elisa and I have traded hearts.

I’m trying to do what’s right for everyone, but all she can think to do is root herself in resentment.

I thrust a finger at the page Elisa still clutches in her hand. “A crazy lady who killed herself? Is that what you got from this? Your mom could still be alive, Elisa. She might be out there, right now, waiting.”

Elisa holds up the obituary. “That’s worse, Ollie.” And then, in a single motion, she rips it in half.

Bash and I gasp. Elisa’s voice is expressionless, but tears catch the faint light of the flashlight between us.

“All this time, I wanted a sign that my mom was out there, alive and waiting for me, but I didn’t think it would feel like this.

If she’s alive, why did she let this happen?

If she did all this to save me, where is she now?

” She looks at the torn paper in her hands and, quieter, she says, “When she was dead, she didn’t have a choice.

But if she’s alive, she chose to save only herself. ”

Elisa sniffs and uses the backs of her hands to wipe away the tears, leaving streaks of mud on her cheeks.

“I’m not going to do the same thing to our island. I’m not going to run away.”

I get what she’s saying. There are people I want to save, too, but how can my heart hope when it’s this battered, this burned, this bloodied?

I think of Sam waltzing forever upon a glittering dance floor, and Willy accompanying his own deadly recital, and Scary Mary petrified in a cage of pearlescent bones.

Their sacrifices got us to where we are now.

If we don’t take the opportunity to run, we doom the hope they left with us.

“Running for help isn’t the same thing as running away,” I say, raising my voice over the din of static from the radio. Bash tries to shush us, but Elisa gets one last jab in.

“Figures you’d just give up on Anchor’s Mercy. You already did it once.”

Elisa’s words sting worse than the jellyfish’s touch, and in a far more sensitive place.

I open my mouth to hit her back, but a sudden surge of static from the radio drowns me out.

Bash smashes it until it fizzles. Then, from outside the jeep, a new sound approaches the car.

It’s a crunching, grating drag, like knees skinning across pavement.

“Do you hear that?” Bash whispers. But we all hear it. The glass begins to quake in the windows, vibrating with a frequency that slowly resolves into a voice. Several voices. Dozens of voices.

“Goooooing to the chapel,” they sing.

“It’s them,” I whisper.

The fight evaporates between Elisa and me. We both glimpsed the thing in the marsh. Bash hasn’t. “Who?” he hisses. “Who?”

The wind has died away. The darkness and fog make it hard to see more than a few feet outside the car, but by noise alone we track the thing as it circles the jeep. When it doesn’t pass us by, Bash hovers his hands over the keys in the ignition.

Elisa squeezes my hand and points with her chin.

It’s right in front of us.

Looking through the windshield is like locking eyes with the terrible darkness of open ocean, waiting for the great jaws of something unfathomable to rise toward you. I can feel it rushing at us. Static prickles my ears, and the glass in the window beside me feels ready to burst like a bubble.

“Everyone, take a deep breath,” I say.

Bash cranks the ignition.

The darkness explodes with light.