Island Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Patrick Downes

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2019 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We gratefully acknowledge the Government of Canada for its financial support of our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Downes, Patrick, author

  Island / Patrick Downes.

  Issued also in electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77306-192-4 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77306-193-1 (EPUB).—ISBN 978-1-77306-194-8 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PZ7.1.D69Isl 2019 j813’.6 C2018-903526-9 C2018-903527-7

  Cover illustration and design by Michael Solomon

  For MAI and for SM&P

  ONE

  I don’t hear anyone fall. I don’t hear a body crash down through the trees or break on the rocks. I don’t hear anyone let out a last sigh.

  Key —

  My brother. I feel his terror.

  Key’s mind doesn’t speak to my mind the way people imagine between twins. No brotherly pleading inside my own head. No Rad, come — come now. Not exactly.

  I’m walking home, down below the house, the path along the ravine, and I lose my balance. Ground and sky switch places, and I want to throw up.

  I pull my earbuds out of my head, lean against a tree, and retch.

  Key?

  I hear nothing. I look up through the woods toward the wall of the ravine. No window through the trees, no way to see my brother, but that doesn’t matter. I know where he is, my twin, hidden from everyone but me by trees and ridges of rock.

  I’m coming.

  Twelve minutes around the end of the ravine, up two long, steep streets and the short dogleg that leads to our dead end.

  We live on a cul-de-sac. The blacktop comes right to our ragged yard — no curb, no sidewalk — right to our crumbling driveway with purple-flowered weeds and dandelions and grass growing through the tar. A twenty-year-old Subaru wagon stands in the driveway with its bald tires and fringes of rust, keys in the ignition, waiting like an ancient, reliable horse. Nine paving stones that resemble broken teeth lead from the street to our front steps.

  Up one, up two.

  Key? I shout it, or I might not say it at all. I don’t know. Sometimes the words I think to say don’t get past my lips.

  “Key —?” Aloud this time. “You here?”

  We live on a slant. You enter the house on level ground. Then, just inside the door, you feel an invisible hand tug you downhill toward the back of the house. If you set a marble on the floor of the vestibule and wait a few seconds, whisper your name or count to five, the pull of gravity will start the marble rolling. The marble will roll through the entryway and on between the lifeless living room and the staircase to the second floor. It’ll pick up speed through the dining room where my family has laughed and bled. It’ll hum right on through the doorway to the kitchen my father once destroyed in a rage and cruise past the basement door, the cupboards, to a lip of wall at the back door. That marble will jump the threshold out onto the deck and run the channel between two gray and splintered boards until it drops off the end.

  As soon as I’m in the house, I feel that tug, gravity pulling me toward the back door. I go through the house.

  No Key.

  He must be outside.

  I go downstairs and walk out of the basement onto the gravel and dirt and weeds under the deck. Blades of sunlight guillotine down between the boards.

  I stop before the ladder of wood slats and steel cord my father fastened into the ledge at the top of the ravine. My father’s ladder into the abyss. This is land’s end. Another step, and I risk tumbling on down through the brush and bramble and thorns and stones and the trees growing out of the steep wall that ends at the bottom of the ravine.

  The ladder disappears over the edge of the ravine. It dangles a few feet over a platform my father secured to the stone, a platform where he likes to sit alone on a rickety folding chair that leans left. Key and I have imagined, maybe daydreamed, my father falling asleep on that weak chair and sliding off before catching himself. He sits on his chair and looks out past the ravine toward the other side, toward the path where passersby walk or run, sometimes with their dogs. My father sits by himself in the quiet of the trees and vines and raw stone.

  I am standing above the ladder.

  And my brother? He must be down on the platform.

  Why, Key?

  I drop to my hands and knees. My brother and I have never gone down to the platform. But I can see my brother, alone, from the top of the ladder, and I descend, slat by slat by slat.

  “Key?”

  My brother, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands over his ears as if to shield himself against a terrible noise.

  “What’s happening?”

  Nothing so loud. Maybe the trees creaking in the wind, the warming world opening up to spring.

  Murmuring. Maybe Key is murmuring.

  “Key?”

  My brother, useless, rocking, and I feel sick.

  Look, something whispers without whispering, directly into my ear. Just look.

  I stoop, kind of bend my knees and shuffle to the end of the platform. That strange sensation fills my legs, that sensation that makes you think you’ll jump from where you’re standing, the sensation that makes you think you’ll throw yourself to your death.

  Do you see?

  I’m not sure what I think at first, what first comes to mind. Maybe a word: Blood or Muscle or Bone. Maybe Help.

  To be honest, I think the very first thing that strikes me is the impossible angle of the body’s left leg. I can’t swear to it. If you’ve ever seen something so terrible that your mind has a hard time understanding your eyes, then you know you can’t remember anything about the order of thoughts. Really, in that moment, you want to stare. You want to take all the time in the world to understand, to get it through your head what you’re actually looking at. You might want to get closer.

  There’s no way I can get closer to the body even if I want to. Not without falling through the trees and onto the rocks.

  I stand on the platform for a minute that feels like an hour, trying to understand the scene. The body of a man, my father, his twisted, shattered leg, his blood and bone. My father, whose face I can’t make out, broken and dead on a ledge of rock thirty feet below, still far above the bottom of the ravine.

  No sound. No sound.

  * * *

  ı

  For a long time, or what feels like a long time, Key and I say nothing at all. The first voice I hear is my own.

  “We have to go,” I say. “Now.”

  My brother, shaking his head, slapping at his ears as if a bug has crawled into his head.

  I kneel down next to him. “Look at me, Key. We have to get away from here.”

  Key tries to speak, but it comes out all wrong, more like a choking.

  He tries again.

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “That doesn’t matter right now.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You have to get up.” I reach down to help my brother to his feet, but he falls back.


  “We were talking here, Rad. Then —.”

  I hold my hand out. “Come on, Key. You don’t have to know anything yet.”

  Key lets me pull him to his feet. We make our slow way up the dangerous ladder, forty slats toward the rough, climbing ground, toward the loose stones and scraggly land and the shadow of the back porch, up and up toward our rotting house.

  * * *

  ı

  We barely take a few steps beyond the ladder before my brother collapses and falls over onto his side, as if his heart has stopped or he’s been hit with a hammer.

  “No.” Here, the land can give out. Someone can fall. “Not here.”

  I shout my brother’s name. Nothing.

  I shake him.

  “Key.”

  Nothing.

  I hook my hands under Key’s shoulders and haul him up onto his feet. Dead weight, and I nearly fall over backward. I take a step to catch myself.

  We might die if my foot slips or misses the ground entirely, sending the two of us into the ravine.

  Fear makes me angry.

  “Key.” I grind out his name through my teeth. I push back against his weight.

  Have you ever wrestled a person who has given up? Wrestled with a 150-pound sack of wet muscle and hard bone? Even with someone much lighter, it’s nearly impossible to get in control.

  Helplessness makes me angry.

  I take a deep breath and shove my brother, drive him toward the porch until we fall in a heap.

  “Everything is jagged.” Key, finally, and he wrenches himself out from under me. “The blood. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  Key, on his knees, heaving, and his pain, his loss of control, makes me angry.

  I have my rage. My rage burns me up from the inside, hotter than a star, endless.

  In my rage, I lift Key off the ground in a clumsy hug.

  “You’re my brother,” I growl. “I’ve got you.”

  * * *

  ı

  Key and I are fraternal twins, alike but not identical. I’m older by three minutes, taller by three inches, and I run three hundred times hotter. My emotions, what my mother called my weather, raw and uncontrollable.

  I am, my father used to say, changeable. Key, with his immense vocabulary, calls me quixotic. One moment I’m all sunlight, rational, logical, calm. And the next I’m in full storm, irrational, illogical, wild, and serious as murder. I am impossible to predict. Any order to the chaos comes and goes. I can go from laughing to crying, crying to laughing without knowing why. But what everybody fears is my instant rage. And by everybody, I mean everybody, especially me.

  I am like the weather on Saturn. On Saturn, lightning can measure ten thousand times hotter than lightning on earth.

  But Key, my twin, he’s a different story. Even-keeled and easy-going, my brother, kind and infinitely gentle. Meditative and airy.

  He also might have killed our father.

  I wrestle Key through our basement door and stretch him out on the sunken corduroy couch. The damp, cool basement smells of mold and laundry and shadows. But it has a strange, calming effect. It’s in a kind of twilight, not light, not dark. I come here when I feel upset. I pore over my pocket atlas and lose myself.

  I lay out my brother. He sleeps or lies there unconscious while I sit on the floor with my back against the couch, waiting for him to wake up.

  You wonder why I don’t call an ambulance or the police, or why I don’t go back down the ladder to look at my father on the rocks. I don’t want to do anything at all until Key and I talk. So I sit, and I wait, and I drift off into sleep, or a waking dream, maybe into my brother’s dream. Who knows?

  Key and I sit at the center of a maze. White halls like hospital halls leading every which way disappear into points of light. Infinite hallways open in every direction. One of the hallways has a blue stripe painted down its center.

  Key says, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “The blue line?”

  “What else?” And my brother starts down the bright white corridor with the blue stripe that might go on for a thousand miles.

  “Rad?”

  “Hm?”

  “Rad, I’m here.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, wake up. I’m here.”

  I come to and take in my brother, exhausted but upright, standing over me.

  “I just had a dream,” I say.

  “I could tell.”

  I nod and push myself up onto my feet. “Let’s go up to the kitchen.”

  All around us a crowd of ghosts, multiples of one ghost, my father.

  “That’s pretty quick.”

  Key on the stairs ahead of me, walking among the ghosts. “What are you talking about?”

  “The ghosts, Key. All the ghosts. Dad in ectoplasm.”

  “Rad, it’s time to wake up.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The kitchen feels empty and lonely and entirely full. A hundred ghosts of my father wall to wall, covering the ceiling, sitting in the sinks, on top of the refrigerator, everywhere, silent and indifferent, standing, sitting, stretching, watching.

  I remember the day my mother died, eight years ago when Key and I were nine, and her ghosts, all her ghosts. My mother repeated and repeated, filling the house, standing and sitting on top of each other, no room.

  “You want some water?” I pour two glasses from a pitcher of tap water we keep in the refrigerator and hand one to my brother. The ghosts seem uninterested.

  Key nods.

  “Aren’t you going to ask, Rad?”

  I drink through one glass of water and pour another. “What do you mean?”

  My brother shakes his head. “Why are you playing stupid? I killed him. I killed Dad.”

  I drink half my second glass of water. I’m so thirsty.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you, Key. What do you mean? You pushed him?”

  My brother shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I might have.”

  And I can’t help myself. I laugh. The laugh comes from someplace broken. And it disappears the moment it arrives, with the memory of my father’s body.

  “That seems like something you would either know or not know.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Key swallows down half his water, and I top up his glass. “Maybe I pushed him. Maybe I didn’t, but how else could he —”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No. Uh-uh.” I can’t stop shaking my head. “No matter what, you did not kill Dad.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “No, you didn’t. You will not tell me you killed Dad. And you will not tell anyone else you killed Dad. Not the police, not anyone.”

  “I —” Key frowns. “Rad, our world has changed.”

  “You think?” Our father, dead in the ravine. My weather and storms coming closer. “What happened, Key?”

  “Our world has changed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe this will throw me over the edge.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Throw you over the edge?”

  My brother looks like he might throw up.

  “Key, please. You’re the reasonable one, the one with a steady mind, and I’m the one —”

  My brother sits in front of me, shaking all over, his hands in his lap.

  I feel helpless.

  “Key. Please. Talk.”

  My father broken and bloody. His ghosts crowding around us. My brother out of control, silent.

  It’s all too much.

  So what do I do? I throw the water pitcher against the refrigerator. Totally unreasonable, totally irrational and stupid. Totally me.

  I stand up fast, toppling my chair, and th
row the pitcher. When the pitcher smashes — the glass and water — Key jumps. A shocked second.

  And I reach for my glass to throw that, too.

  “Rad.” Key covers the glass with his hand. “This is not the time.”

  I yank the glass out from under his hand.

  My brother, his giant green eyes, the green eyes I have, my brother, reaching out to me.

  “Put the glass down, Konrad.”

  He uses my name.

  I put the glass down, even more upset for my embarrassment, for upsetting Key, and go for dish towels in the drawer next to the sink. The sea of ghosts parts for me.

  “I killed —”

  “You did not kill anyone,” I shout. I stare down at the shattered pitcher, the glass and water all over the floor, and my emotion drains out of me, adding to the mess. Out of nowhere, as fast as my rage, my calm.

  I pick up my chair.

  “I’m not angry at you, Key.”

  When I’m unable to do anything for my brother, when I’m unable to do anything to help myself or my father or anybody —

  It’s the helplessness that makes me crazy. But my sudden rages only make matters worse. I never learn.

  “I never learn,” I say from my hands and knees, the garbage pail next to me. I start to pick up shards of glass. The way the pitcher broke, one side remained intact, and a little pool of water shivers in its shallow bowl. “I’m sorry, Key.”

  The broken glass, the water, and I have already sliced two fingers.

  “The trouble’s only starting, Rad.”

  “I know.” The glass in the pail and my bloody fingers. “How did Dad fall, Key? What happened down there?”

  TWO

  I love maps. And I especially love islands. We once had a National Geographic atlas from the 1990s. I studied it whenever I could, until I threw it off the back porch during a fit. I threw the atlas down into the ravine, lost forever, but I bought myself another old atlas, one I use almost every day.

  I have a goal to memorize the world’s known islands, or at least the ones that show up on common maps and have names. It’s an impossible goal. There are more islands on the planet than we can identify even with satellites, easily more than a hundred thousand. In my whole life, I’ve memorized about fifteen hundred — 1,487, to be exact. Not quite the number of islands just in the Florida Keys. That’s 1,487 islands organized by regions and bodies of water. I use the goal to calm myself down when I feel like I’m losing control. If I feel the wildness, my emotions rising inside of me, flooding me, I go to the atlas, to the world’s islands and archipelagos. I even carry a pocket atlas, a gift to myself. I carry it in my backpack, always. When I feel overwhelmed, I set myself adrift in two-dimensional oceans and seas and lakes. I find islands. And then I get lost in jungles, forests, mountains, lava, and ice.