“Miss Suzanna? Is that you?”
She did not answer.
“Miss Suzanna!” It was Mr. B. He had her by the shoulders. She stared back at him. “Coast Guard’s been calling and calling,” he said. “They’re wondering where the hell the light keeper’s gone.”
She said nothing.
“My God, woman.” She heard his alarm without sharing it. She could only see her own emptiness in his eyes—the headlights cast him in too-deep shadow to see anything else. “What’s happened to you?” He shook her slightly. As if he could shake her, Zan, back into the form he held.
She said nothing.
“C’mon now, Mrs. B. will get you cleaned up.”
Zan pulled free. She tilted her head, her eyes meeting his. Then she turned, and sprang back into the forest.
“Hey! Miss Suzanna! Suzanna!”
She ignored the shouts.
In the trees, she did not run. No one followed. With great calm, she walked. Back over the paths she’d passed before, circling deeper and deeper away from the sea. Rain faded to drizzle, and drizzle dried to nothing but drips from the pines.
At the island’s crest, she stopped. Sky saturated from indigo to cobalt.
“Nan!” she shouted. “Nan!” She stumbled forward. Dawn—gray, then palest cerulean, then yellow, filtered through forest lace. Light pierced the overstory, stringing diamond droplets from low branches. Gold lanced from tree crowns to needle-strewn floor. The mossy earth, the air itself breathed, alive with the same life as the goat. How could she search every corner of an unknowable island—a place where a goat could thrive, wild?
Zan called and called until it was her own name she cried into the twisted pines, the lichened granite, the fog lifting from sun-shattered sea.