plucked from the ocean; the older ones were white as bone. As she watched, the kids hunched down and began putting each item back into their buckets.
“What are they doing?” she asked Theo.
He rubbed his temples. “Apparently they aren’t supposed to take stuff home. Each camper finds an object to show everyone, but then they put them back. It’s a lesson in conservation. Whereas my children have been hiding things in their pockets and sneaking them out. Now I told them they have to go put the things back. Sticks in there,” he said to the kids, pointing at the woods. “Then we’ll drive the water stuff down to the beach.”
Jemima raised her head defiantly. “At camp, we get to take one thing home every day. So we should get to keep one thing for every day. Everyone else got to.”
“Everyone else followed the rules,” Theo said, unmoved. “But you didn’t, so now you have to put it all back.”
Oscar stopped and held up the hunk of seaweed. “We can keep this one,” he said. “It’s already deaded.”
“No,” Theo said. “It all has to go back. It has to go be with its friends.”
“Seaweed doesn’t have friends,” Jemima said mutinously.
Theo crossed his arms and stared at them. Grumbling, they finished loading everything into their buckets, then carried them down the steps and out toward the woods. Kate looked at Theo to see if his expression had relaxed once their backs were turned. But his face had only grown more fearful. Together, they watched his children walk across the lawn and over the place where their grandmother had died, where the blood had seeped into the soil and taken root.
MIRANDA
SERIES 2, Personal papers
BOX 9, Diary (1982–1993)
* * *
APRIL 14 1982
Seventeen days in. I am a survivor of a shipwreck. Floating in the baking sun. Surrounded by undrinkable water. Counting the days since my world ended. Counting the days I can keep treading water. My lips and nipples are cracked and bleeding. Everything in me hurts, from the inside out, as if the baby came out of me and the empty space filled up with pain. I am burned to a crisp. How long can you last? How long can you survive?
APRIL 15 1982
I’m living in white feathers and lizard eyes and dark sludge that pushes up through my throat. When I close my eyes I can feel my blood pouring under the surface of the skin. Where does it all go? If I spill it, I will be lighter, I think. So light I can fly.
APRIL 17 1982
3:06 and everyone is sleeping. Each minute slides past me, too slippery to grip. 3:07 now. See? Soon I will find a way to slow down time and crush open every minute, snap snap. A lobster claw with fresh pink meat inside. The way to do it is to work. Work more. Faster. I have invented a new process. You lay all the sheets of paper all out in a grid, one by one, very specific, and then the light inhabits them, it crawls across the page and nestles in the grain, and then it is at home. Only you must watch the paper very carefully. You must move them when they say they need to be moved. I will stay awake. I will fix it all. I have so many plans.
APRIL 18 1982
Theo is an ugly little beast. He almost looks like an animal. A jaundiced dog, shriveled husk of a human.
Jake snores all night. The sound of it shakes me, gets into my dreams, mows them down. I toss and turn and my ears feel like they are full of glass. And then Theo starts crying and the glass shatters and my head hurts, hurts.
I don’t know if I will ever sleep again.
APRIL 18 1982
Every cell is a bloody eye. It blinks and stares at me. The night is an ink wash above me and the ceiling fan drowns out the sound of crying. Lie here forever and soon I will rot to a dandelion wisp and I won’t ever have to look at that thing anymore, I won’t ever have to pretend I love it.
APRIL 19 1982
There are moments when I catch a glimpse of myself, like bubbles swimming up toward sunlight, like air just beyond my grasp, and I can’t understand what I’ve become. And then away I plunge, down to the ocean floor, to mingle with the other mermaids and trash heaps.