1
Ferns are older than dinosaurs. They’ve survived by growing under things, made hearty by their place in the shadows. Sucking up mud.
Fern.
Barely even a plant. Ferns don’t make seeds, don’t flower. They propagate with spores knocked off their fronds by passing creatures or strong winds.
They sit there, forest deep, waiting to be touched.
* * *
• • •
Papa said Daddy could have any house he wanted, so he picked an old abandoned church at the end of a gravel road in the middle of the forest on an island.
Papa says it’s a money pit. Daddy says it’s a work in progress.
Papa says it was Daddy’s revenge for making them move for his career.
Papa says Daddy likes to make things hard for no reason. Daddy says it builds character.
Papa says I probably have brain damage from all the sawdust and paint fumes I inhaled as a baby. Daddy sometimes calls the house his other child.
Their bickering soothes me. That they argue about such little things reminds me we have nothing big to worry about. We’re the opposite of dysfunctional. We’re real live unicorns.
* * *
• • •
Commodore Island is nine miles long and five miles wide. In the summer, it’s overrun with tourists. Day-trippers from Seattle with their itineraries of the famous bakery and fish restaurant, the little boutiques and artisan cheese shop, all the old buildings preserved like a retro, small-town time capsule of family-owned businesses. You can barely see the tiny A-Corp logo on their signs.
Sometimes the tourists rent kayaks. Sometimes they go for hikes in the nature preserve at the center of the island. They walk around the muddy lake and take home photos and mosquito bites as souvenirs. They drive Olympic Road in its lumpy oval circuit, the mansions and luxury condos rising over them from the shore and stacking up the hill, each with its own view of the Sound, before the island’s middle gives way to forest.
The tourists slow at the gates of our more famous residents, stopping traffic to take pictures of the rare wild deer crossing the road. They get their little taste of quaint, of our tiny, unscathed bubble where you can almost believe the rest of the world isn’t falling apart, then they return to their gated communities in the city. There have been no deer in Seattle for a long time.
People can afford beauty here. The rich always get to keep a little of what they destroy.
* * *
• • •
Papa had a dream of becoming a fashion designer a long time ago, but he somehow ended up at A-Corp like everyone else on the island. Except he’s not some big fancy executive like most of the parents here. Papa’s the artistic director of the Children’s Division of Consumer Protective Apparel.
Instead of high fashion and runway shows, he’s in charge of making bulletproof vests for kids. It’s not glamorous, but somebody’s got to do it.
The tourists always end up at my work at some point on their trip: Island Home & Garden. They buy our signature T-shirts with the otters holding hands. Everyone loves otters holding hands. Even though otters haven’t been spotted here in a couple decades, not since the big oil spill off the coast of Vancouver Island.
My fathers are some of the few parents on the island who believe that a work ethic must be built; it is not something that can be inherited like wealth. I am the only person I know with a part-time summer job. I’m also the only person who works on this island who actually lives on this island. Everyone who lives here either works for A-Corp headquarters in Seattle, or doesn’t work. Everyone who works here lives in the giant subsidized housing complexes across the bridge to the west, on the peninsula, those miles of identical high-rise boxes strategically built on the other side of a hill so they won’t cheapen the view of anyone on the island. Buses full of workers arrive around the clock for shifts at the shops and restaurants, the grocery store, and the couple of car-charging stations, to work on gardens and remodels of houses. In and out, back and forth, like the tide.
I work while everyone else my age plays. I work while they travel, or while their parents travel and they stay home to party and be tended to by housekeepers and nannies who have their own families across the country waiting for checks to arrive, in the states that have no jobs because of the floods and the fires and the poisoned earth. I work while my best friend, Lily, is in Taiwan visiting family all summer. I sell orchids and fake antique watering cans to tourists and housewives, waiting for my real life to start.
* * *
• • •
But then:
There’s a rumor of a new arrival.
Moving trucks at the bottom of my hill. The gate across Olympic Road opens.
Not the usual executive rich. Not the CEOs and CFOs and COOs and CTOs of the various departments of A-Corp.
A star.
My sleepy town has woken up.
* * *
• • •
Rumor is she just got out of treatment. “Exhaustion,” they call it, which could mean anything. Drugs, alcohol, eating disorder, sex, gambling, self-harm, mental illness. It’s not so remarkable. Some kids on the island make these trips more often than summer camp.
Or she could just be tired.
“I’m tired,” Papa says. “I wish I could go somewhere for exhaustion.”
Daddy rolls his eyes in the way that means “I love you, but you can be so insensitive.”
Then Papa rolls his eyes in the way that means “I love you, but you can be too sensitive.”
* * *
• • •
We have plums, apples, pears, blackberries, wild huckleberries. A vegetable garden that gasps for the few hours of sunlight that reach our small clearing in the forest. Overgrown gardens of rhododendron and azalea. Yellow scotch broom that burns my eyes and makes me sneeze.
In the spring: cherry blossoms and dogwood. Old, forgotten bulbs of daffodils and tulips peek through the weeds, the winter-browned pine needles, the brittle cones. The first sprouts always make Daddy tender and teary-eyed. They never last long enough.
Daddy goes around with a special paintbrush every afternoon pretending to be a bee, dusting each flower, and then the next, and the next, trying to spread pollen now that there are barely any bees left to do the work. He tells me that when I was very little, there were still a few real farms left. Almost everything you can buy at the grocery store is grown in a hothouse now, those vast acres of white buildings stretching across the countryside. But there are still people like Daddy who like to do things the old-fashioned way. They can sell one artisanal apple for twenty dollars at a farmers’ market.