Orphan Island Read online

  Joon laughed as she dropped a fish into the basket at her feet. “And how do you propose to keep her away from the water, Jinny? We live on an island.”

  “I know,” said Jinny, untangling a long strand of dark kelp from the net in her hand. “But just for a few days, I think it’s easier this way. She had a real scare yesterday, with an eel, in the tide pools. She’s nervous about the water.”

  Joon turned and stared at Jinny. “Well, then, now is the exact time for her to get in the water. Otherwise she’ll never do it. You’re just rewarding her fear. What are you thinking?”

  “She hates it,” said Jinny, shaking her head hard. “She really doesn’t want to learn to swim. I know she needs to, after yesterday especially. She really needs to swim. But not today.”

  “Jinny,” said Joon, in her firm, sure tone, “if you don’t make her go back right away, she’ll be even more terrified. Her memory will be worse than what actually happened. That’s how fear works, right? It grows in your memory.”

  Jinny stared at Joon. “Look,” she said. “You want to know the truth? I can’t teach her to swim, okay? It’s not just that she’s scared, it’s that I’m a terrible teacher, and I know it, and I feel bad about that, but it’s the truth. I’m just not . . . patient enough. Or calm enough. Or . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how we all learned to swim. I don’t remember it being so hard. Do you?”

  Joon shook her head firmly. “No, but it doesn’t matter how you feel, Jinny. This is about Ess. And you need to get over yourself. Because she needs to be able to swim. It’s not safe—her crabbing and emptying the fishing nets, and living by the sea, not able to swim. Ben and I were talking about it. He says you told him it’s one of the three main lessons, and yet . . .”

  “Ben and you were talking?” Jinny was stunned. “About me? You think it’s my fault? Haven’t you seen me trying to teach her every day?”

  “I know sometimes you like to carry her around in the water, splashing and laughing. But that’s not the same thing. And now it sounds like you’ve given up, quit on her.”

  “I didn’t!” cried Jinny. “I’d never quit on her. I’m just taking a break while she gets over that eel in the tide pool. Anyway, you think you’d do a better job? You think it’s so easy? Why don’t you take a turn yourself then, Joon?”

  “Are you saying I have your permission, then,” asked Joon, squinting at Jinny and the sunlight behind her, “to try a different way?”

  Jinny nodded. “If you think you can teach her to swim, go right ahead. Anytime. She’s all yours. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Well, then, that’s settled,” said Joon. She glanced up at the path toward the cabins. “And look who’s coming. Perfect timing,” she said.

  Jinny turned to follow the other girl’s gaze, and saw that Ess was tumbling down the path along the ridge from the cabins, arms outstretched, kicking up dust.

  “Well, okay, I guess,” said Jinny, shaking her head. “But I’m not sure I want to be around for this.” She reached down for the fish basket. “I’ll go put these in the kitchen while you explain to Ess.”

  “Oh, I’ll explain it to her, don’t worry,” said Joon.

  Together the two girls walked down the length of the dock. Then Joon made for Ess, and Jinny trudged with her heavy basket of fish to the kitchen.

  But a minute later, as she set the fish down on the table with a groan, Jinny heard familiar shrieking and squealing behind her. She whirled around. “Ess!” she shouted. “What is it? What’s the—” In the distance her eyes found Joon, striding quickly back down the length of the dock, with Ess wriggling and kicking in her arms.

  “Noooo!” Jinny shouted, and began to sprint. But it was too late. Jinny was nowhere close when Joon reached the end of the wooden planks and called out, “Good luck, Ess!” and tossed the girl neatly over into the chilly depths. Plunk!

  “Aaaaggh!” Ess turned immediately into a flurry of water and flailing arms and screams, a shouting, choking disaster.

  Jinny saw all this from afar, as she ran. She dashed forward, her heart racing, and hurled herself past Joon and straight into the sea, aiming for the churning arms and wet bobbing head of Ess, for the spot where the little girl was struggling to keep her head above the water.

  But when Jinny popped up, head above the surface, a few feet away from her Care, she paused a moment, treading water, and stared. Because the girl was splashing less and paddling more each second. She was still calling and crying, choking water, alarmed. But now she also seemed to be . . . floating. Her hands churned and paddled in front of her. Her feet kicked out behind. Instinct had replaced fear.

  Jinny glanced back over her shoulder at Joon. Joon stood on the dock above, arms crossed. “You said I could,” she called out. “You gave me permission.”

  “Not for that!” shouted Jinny. “I didn’t mean that. You could have killed her! She could have drowned!”

  Joon laughed. “Hardly! Not with me standing here, ten feet away. It’s not the open sea, Jinny. This little cove?”

  “Well, you still scared her,” shouted Jinny, wiping water from her eyes.

  “Okay, sure,” said Joon. “But it’s better to scare her now then to lose her later. Don’t you think?”

  Jinny wasn’t sure how to answer that. She turned back to look at Ess again. “Still!” she called out at Joon. “It wasn’t your place! She’s my Care.”

  “You weren’t doing your job, Jinny,” said Joon coldly. “Not sorry.” Then she turned and walked away, up the dock, leaving Jinny and Ess alone.

  Ess was now paddling in a straight line at Jinny. “Jinny, hey, Jinny! Look!”

  “I see!” she called back, trying to smile, and clenching her hands together under the water to keep from reaching out to the smaller girl. To force herself to force the girl to keep swimming. “You’re doing great. Are you okay?”

  Ess looked pale and bedraggled, her wet hair like seaweed all around her face, But even so, she grinned and coughed out, “Yesss!” She paddled clumsily to Jinny and reached out for her, dipping under the water as she raised her arms to clutch Jinny’s shoulders tightly. At last she hung there, limp and panting.

  With Ess trailing from her neck, Jinny slowly swam back to land. She paddled toward the beach, puzzling all the while at what had just happened. Once they were in shallow water, Jinny stood and lifted Ess up, held her tightly. Then she began walking, and she didn’t let go until they were back in the cabin. She walked slowly and carefully, her arms hugging the shivering kid, face resting on Ess’s mop of wet hair.

  That evening, while Ess was busy arranging shells in the wet sand along the beach, Jinny offered to help Ben with dinner. As she picked apart a pile of crabs for soup, Jinny looked up at him, stirring wild onions into a pot over the fire. “Ben,” she called out.

  “Yes?” he said, staring into his pot, as though looking for something in it.

  “Joon said today . . . that you thought I wasn’t doing my job. With Ess.”

  Ben turned, spoon in hand. His eyes looked concerned. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “You’re wonderful with her. She loves you. It’s just the swimming. And other little work things, now and then. It’s just that sometimes you don’t seem to want to make her do the things we all need to do.”

  Inside, Jinny bristled faintly, but it wasn’t the same as talking about this with Joon. If Ben thought it too . . . “She’s little,” said Jinny. “She’s so little.”

  Ben came over to sit beside her on the bench. “She’s exactly the age Sam was one boat ago, the age Nat was two boats ago,” he said. “Everyone starts out little. And everyone gets big fast.”

  Jinny looked at Ben, into his eyes, which were watering from the onions. “Well, she can swim now, at any rate . . . ,” she said.

  “Really?” Ben smiled. “That’s great, Jinny. Good work!”

  “Thanks,” she said with a sigh. “But here’s an Elder lesson for you. It turns out that the best way to teach a k
id to swim is to let Joon hurl her into deep water.”

  “Oh,” said Ben. “Well, I guess, anyway . . . she can swim now. Good enough. Right?”

  “I suppose,” said Jinny. Then she added, “Ben, why do you think they sent Ess here in the first place?”

  Ben wiped his eyes with the back of an arm. “That’s a funny question to ask,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about us getting sent here. We just . . . come.”

  “Yeah—but someone must have sent Ess here, right? Dressed her? Put her in the boat? I mean, she wasn’t born in it. So . . . why? Why did they send any of us here? Isn’t it a funny thing to do, to put a little kid like that, who can’t even swim, into a boat, and send her off on the water? Don’t you ever wonder?”

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t know, but does it matter? I like it here. I love it.”

  “Well, sure, so do I,” said Jinny, tossing down a crab shell. “But I mean, did we do something bad, to get sent away?”

  Ben snorted. “What bad thing could Ess have done?”

  They both looked over at Ess, who was now doing something with a stick around her shells and humming a tuneless song to herself.

  Jinny fidgeted with an empty claw, pulling the thin membrane inside it, to make it pinch Ben’s arm. “Do you remember anything?” she asked Ben. “From before the island?”

  Ben thought a minute, then shook his head. “Not really. Do you?”

  Jinny shook her head slowly too. “Not exactly,” she said. “But . . . sometimes I get a feeling, almost. Like I imagine a color or a shape. Or at night, in a dream—I see something in my head I’ve never seen on the island. But I can’t remember exactly what it is when I wake up. The picture isn’t clear. And it doesn’t explain anything.”

  “I think probably,” said Ben, “probably we didn’t have anywhere else to go. I think probably we didn’t have people to take care of us. I guess I think that’s how we got here. We’re orphans, right? ‘Nine on an island, orphans all’? Like that wizard kid from the books? Or the boy with the gigantic peach? Only without aunts and uncles. Maybe this is where orphans go when they don’t have aunts and uncles?”

  “Yeah, orphans,” said Jinny. “I guess I always thought that too.” She paused before she added, “But the thing is—when Ess arrived, she swore she had a mother. Mama. She wouldn’t stop talking about her. I guess that’s why I’ve been thinking about this. Is that strange?”

  Ben stood up and walked back over to the fire to stir his pot. It smelled wonderful, full of the onions but also gingerroot and wild garlic. He stopped to taste it before he said, “Mama, huh? I don’t know. . . .”

  “Crazy, right?” said Jinny, following him. “I mean, that can’t be true, can it? A mama wouldn’t send Ess away. Would she?”

  Ben turned around, holding out the spoon. “I don’t think so,” he said as she sipped the broth. Then he added, “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because here is where we all are. Here, with one another. In this nice place. With my delicious crab soup.”

  Jinny nodded, though she couldn’t shake the feeling that it would matter. It did matter, to her. If Ess had a mama.

  “Now dump that meat in, so we can eat!” Ben laughed.

  Jinny rose to carry the crabmeat to the pot, but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh at his joke. “Here is where we are. For now, anyway.”

  “Now that that’s settled,” said Ben, “can you go get me some sweet-weed, please?”

  “Sure,” said Jinny. “Of course.”

  As she picked the shiny green sprigs from the sandy patch that was their garden, Jinny thought about Deen, wherever he was. Did he know the answers to these questions now? She wondered what he was doing. She pictured him arriving in his boat, stepping out onto dry land. And then . . . what? What did he see before him? And who? Surely not a mama, surely not . . .

  But what was it like there, in that other place? Who was there with him? Maybe he’d found Tate, and the two of them were off on an adventure together right now. For some reason, the thought of that made Jinny unhappy, though she knew it shouldn’t. What would they do, in that other place, together, without Jinny? She couldn’t begin to imagine it.

  Jinny knew lots of things about the world out there from all the books she’d read. For instance, she knew about the constellations of the night sky, but the book hadn’t said anything about the mist around the island that made the shapes the children saw at sunrise and sunset. Was that world different from Jinny’s world? Jinny found herself tearing angrily at the sweet-weed, ripping it out in clumps, from the roots. She wasn’t sure why.

  11

  The Truth Hurts

  When Ess had been on the island for too many sleeps to keep count, Jinny woke one morning later than usual. The sun was up, and there were no dirty toenails scraping her legs. She propped herself on her elbows and looked around, but Ess was nowhere in the cabin. Only the collection she’d been assembling on the windowsill, of rocks, shells, dried flowers, and seedpods. Plus one broken bit of blue-and-white china with a bird on it, tumbled by the sea.

  Jinny stared at the bit of broken china, her thoughts slow and thick with sleep, before she shook her head, climbed quickly out of the covers, and walked through the half-open door, still in her sleeping shift. She peered out and caught sight of Ess down by the water, holding a fat fish. Bent over her were Jak and Oz. Sam was watching too, from a safe distance, though the other three seemed not to have noticed him.

  Oz was saying something to Ess, who appeared to be listening closely, though Jinny couldn’t make out the conversation from her spot on the ridge. It looked like the boys were teaching Ess how to scale a fish, with a knife that glinted in the sun. Over and over Ess raked the knife sharply up and down the fish skin in a jerking motion. It made Jinny draw a quick breath each time. The older girl dashed back to the cabin to shuck off her shift and quickly pull on her day clothes.

  When she sprinted down to the beach a minute later, she found the boys had moved on from scales to guts. “Now, when you’ve taken off all the scales, you make a slit there, near the tail,” Oz was saying.

  “Like dis?” Ess asked, jabbing the knife hard into the fish’s taut belly with her tiny hand.

  “Right there, yeah, that’s it. And then pull the knife all the way up to the head, quick. But be careful!”

  “Okay,” said Ess. “I be careful.” She made the incision, then dropped the knife sloppily in the sand beside her foot, just as Jinny arrived.

  Jinny flinched when the knife hit the sand and stuck there, handle up. The sand could so easily have been the soft top of Ess’s foot.

  “Hey!” Jinny called out. “Careful with that!” But nobody seemed to be listening to her.

  “Great,” Oz added. “Now just reach up inside and give a good hard scrape with your fingers, so you get all the insides out at once. Yeah, like that. Nice job!”

  “Yeah, nice job, Ess!” said Jak.

  Jinny tried again to interrupt the lesson. “What’re you guys up to?”

  “Dis! I clean a fiss!” screamed Ess excitedly, holding up her gruesome handful of guts and goo. “See, Jinny! Dis! I do it my own self.” The slime oozed through her fingers.

  “Oh,” said Jinny, trying not to retch. “Okay.”

  Oz grinned. “We were just showing Ess here how to clean a fish and some other fun stuff.”

  “Yeah,” added Jak. “Other fun stuff! So she can help with dinner more.”

  “That’s . . . nice of you,” said Jinny. “Thanks. . . .”

  “You’re welcome,” chimed both boys.

  “Still,” said Jinny, “can you check in with me next time? Before you teach her something like that?”

  “Why?” asked Oz. He blinked.

  “It’s just . . .” Jinny thought briefly of Joon’s swimming lesson, and of Ben’s soft admonition. For a moment she tried to bite her tongue, but she couldn’t manage it. The knife was so very mean and sharp, and Jinny was so bad at silence.
“Just—I’m not sure she’s quite ready to handle a knife that sharp.”

  “But I did!” insisted Ess. “I did it.”

  “Aww, c’mon, Jinny,” laughed Oz. “She’s fine. Nobody’s ever gotten hurt that badly cleaning a fish. Have they?”

  “Even so,” said Jinny, “she’s my Care, and I say she’s too young. You can show her again later. Can’t you? When she’s older?”

  “Ha. You’re just jealous because you can’t stomach it yourself. You’ve never been able to clean your own supper, and she’s doing great.”

  “Yeah,” added Jak with a teasing grin. “You just want us to wait until next year so you won’t have to look at it. You just want us to wait until you’re gone.”

  “Shhh!” hissed Jinny.

  But she was too late. There was a tiny gasp as Ess dropped her wet handful of innards on her foot. Then she stared up at Jinny, one wet bloody hand outstretched. “Jinny go away?” she asked.

  Jinny stepped over and bent down to scrape the girl’s tiny toes clean with her fingers. “Pish!” she said gently. “Don’t listen to anything these dumb boys say. They’re only good for hunting and fishing and shouting and making a mess. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Now, come with me, okay?” She took the small slimy hand gingerly and led Ess away, glaring over her shoulder at the two boys.

  Jinny marched Ess down the beach a ways, then led her to the surf, where she washed the offending foot neatly in the water. Jinny rinsed her own fingers clean, letting a handful of wet sand and tiny shell bits sift through them briefly. Then she turned and said, as if nothing had happened, “What should we do today, Ess? You want to go and visit the chickens? Have you had your breakfast? Maybe we can talk Ben into giving us some of those yummy snaps!”

  But Ess wasn’t about to be distracted by sweets. She stared at Jinny, her mouth drawn into a tight worried frown, her eyes huge.

  “What?” Jinny asked. “What is it?” Though of course she knew the answer.

  Ess kicked a foot at the shallow water.

  “Look, it’s fine,” said Jinny. “You’re fine. Now smile. Come on, silly!”