Wash Over; Drift Away
i.
She spends the first two weeks of every month with her mom and the last two with her dad, in a house on the other side of town. She likes that house better, even though sometimes she misses her mom, because there's a porch swing and her room is painted butter-yellow and there's a tree in the front yard that gets all covered in white buds during spring, and since it's April now, almost May, she can climb up into petal-clouds and she's safe.
Today is the Friday in the middle of the month, and so in the morning she packs her duffel bag with some extra clothes and drags it through the dew-morning grass as she walks to school. Her third grade teacher, Miss Kelly, lets her keep it in the supply closet, and sometimes when her dad's late picking her up, she lets Juliet look though the magnifying glass she keeps in her desk. Only that's a secret, 'cause not everyone is allowed to look. The boys like to fry bugs with the sunlight, and once Miss Kelly found out, she locked it in her desk. But she lets Juliet look at rocks and leaves and the underside of her desk, because Juliet promised a long time ago, way back in the beginning of the year, that she would never do that. "I'm going to be a doctor," she announced to her teacher, "and they don't let people become doctors if they burn up ants."
"That's right," said Miss Kelly, unlocking her desk and reaching inside. "You wouldn't hurt anyone, not even the bugs."
"No," agreed Juliet. "I'll save them." She had a vision of herself cupping a spider in her palms and letting it scurry away through the cracked-open window.
But they had a sub today, a man teacher, and he didn't know about magnifying glasses or ants and he wouldn't let Juliet go to the bathroom after lunch even though the line was really long at recess, so Juliet leans against the wall next to her classroom door with her bags at her feet. She can see three girls playing Double Dutch over by the playground, but last week when she asked if she could play they called her Juliet Pooliet and ran away. She thinks maybe if they were ants, she'd be okay with frying them. Just a little bit.
Her father is forty-five minutes late picking her up. "Sorry, Jules," he says, swinging her backpack and duffel bag into the backseat. "Got caught up at work, couldn't get away."
Juliet thinks this is probably a lie. You can always get away. But she says, "It's okay," and makes the corners of her mouth go up. She hates it when he calls her Jules.
"Looking forward to staying with your Daddy?" he asks as he pulls out into the road, frowning at the driver in front of him.
"Uh-huh," nods Juliet, so that he doesn't get mad like last time, and thinks of paint like afternoon sunlight and trees that hold her, hold her, hold her.
ii.
She meets Edmund in her sophomore biology class at university. He's a graduate student, working with the professor, and he's tall and dark and makes the four other girls in Juliet's class swoon. Juliet ignores him, and so he spends most of his time checking on her progress, leaning over her desk, tossing off a well-aimed quip. He wants to be a doctor, he tells her, like this is something important, like half the people in the room don't want the same thing.
"I do too," Juliet says, and he smiles.
"Really? That's cute."
"Cute?" she repeats, feeling the blood rush to her head, making her dizzy.
"Yeah, what do you wanna be, a pediatrician?"
"No," says Juliet haughtily. "Ob-gyn."
He shrugs. "Close enough."
She sets down her scalpel; the fetal pig will have to wait a few more minutes for her to examine its liver. "What gives you the right to have an opinion?"
He smiles at her, lazily. "Maybe I just find you interesting."
"Maybe I just find you to be an asshole."
"Better watch that temper," he says, peeling back a layer of skin for her and glancing at the muscles beneath. "You're letting me get to you."
She glares at him, infuriated. "You're trying to."
"Yeah," he says cheerfully, "I am, a little."
Fine, she thinks, and sets her mouth in a thin line. When he looks up for her response, she raises her eyebrows and keeps quiet.
"That's more like it," he says approvingly. But he seems a little rattled when she doesn't say another word for the rest of the lab session, no matter how many jokes he cracks, and this, thinks Juliet, this is a victory.
He asks her out on the last day of class, and she's so surprised that she says yes. He takes her to a restaurant just off-campus, and he's charming and debonair, and she finds herself thinking that maybe he isn't quite so bad. A little arrogant, maybe, but that was nothing new. When the check comes, he realizes they've been charged for an extra drink, and with apologies, gets up to argue with the manager. She can see his back, his hands gesturing, the tightening of his shoulders as he shoves the receipt at the hapless manager, and Juliet thinks anger-management problems, and she thinks power. So when he takes her back to her dorm and murmurs, "I had a really great time, Jules," she lets him kiss her on the mouth and doesn't correct him.
They get married the summer after she graduates, a July wedding, with flowers tangled in her long hair and the air conditioners in the reception hall running at full power. When guests start egging them on, wanting them to shove cake in each other's faces, she laughs and says no at the same time he smears frosting across her lips. She thinks things could be worse.
He gets her a job at the company where he works, and soon his boss takes notice of Juliet, sees how hard she's working, and wants to promote her but Edmund threatens to quit if that happens. Juliet overhears, and smiles to herself, because she's a better doctor than he will ever be and he knows it and there's nothing he hates more.
So it's not too surprising when she catches him and a lab technician in his office doing their own kind of fertility research, and it's no shock when the divorce is finalized a few months later, and she hardly blinks when he tells her that if she leaves, if she betrays him in any way, he will ruin her, he will make sure no research lab will ever take her on, he will tell her family that she had an affair with his boss, he will fire her and she'll have no place to go. Juliet nods and looks at the floor and knows that she will do what he says because she can't imagine leaving the one place she belongs, because the thrill of power nearly within her grasp is too much for her to let go.
iii.
Most of the people on the island have lived there for their whole lives, and when they explain why Juliet doesn't believe it until she starts seeing the evidence all around her. She doesn't know what to make of Ben; he makes her think of comets and cyanide and the things people will do, good people, ordinary people, under the influence of another. He's kind to her for the whole first year, even after he forces her to stay, and she begins to believe what everyone else on this island does, that he has power the rest of them don't, power over life and death and other things that used to be arbitrary.
Except over this, she realizes, except for the women. He can't save them. But she can, or she thinks she can if only she can figure out where the anomaly is coming from, and it's only a few months into her stay on the island that she realizes that she's the one with power, she's the one ensuring the survival of these people. A terrifying thought, but delicious somehow, tight under her skin, and so even when things swing wildly out of control she knows she is not helpless, will never be helpless again.
She can feel that slipping away, though, as the months slide by in jungle humidity and too-bright sunshine, and Ben won't let her go. "You would want to leave us," he asks, looking at her wide-eyed, "you who would have given anything to not get left behind?"
"I never said that," she says, heart thumping, but he smiles and she wonders for the thousandth time what the hell he's trying to do.
"But you think it," he says softly. "In fifth grade, your older sister asked you to just live with her and your mom, like she did, and you agreed. When you were seventeen, you smoked a cigarette in the woods behind the school so that Mary Havencamp would let you hang out with her friends." He takes a step forward and lays a hand on her shoulder. "In college, the other girls in your dorm were giggly and ridiculous, and so when Edmund came along, so serious, so powerful –"
"Get away from me," she says, jerking out of his grasp.
Ben smiles. "Just another six months," he says. "Then we'll see."
Goodwin teaches her how to shoot one day, without explanation. He takes her to a shooting range they have, deep in the jungle, and curls his hand around hers as he helps her take aim. "I know you're unhappy," he says gently, and she hits the target on her first try.
"You don't know anything about me," she says, though she realizes a moment later that he probably does.
He doesn't take the bait, though. He looks at her seriously and says, "You're not the only one who can't get out."
"I don't know what you're talking about," she says, and turns around and takes aim again. Her hand shakes as she holds the gun up.
"Okay," he says, and adjusts her grip.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks.
"Because someday," he says, "you'll need to know."
"When?"
"You'll know."
Juliet turns out to be an excellent shot, to Goodwin's great admiration. She tells him she likes the way it feels, quietly, running her index finger along the length of the gun.
"Most people do," he agrees. "A sense of power."
"Yes," she says, and doesn't mention that she knows the angle into Ben's window from behind one of the trees nearby. It's enough to know that if she has to, if it came to that, she could. The thrill of it slicks along her veins and the smell of gunpowder clings to her skin and when he kisses her it's metallic and sharp and nobody can tell them no.
When the island shakes and the sky cracks open and Ben tells him to go, he doesn't look back.
iv.
She's looked through Jack's file a hundred times, looking for weaknesses, knowing she is that weakness. She can almost see him striding down the hospital corridors, in his element, barking orders and leaving the less knowledgeable in his slipstream. She knows that in another lifetime, he would never even consider her, would not respect her. But it's different now, as she watches him gets ready for the hike to the radio tower. Power, yes, but he has no idea of the forces now aligning against him. He does not understand; he believes that everything must be controlled. Juliet controls nothing, but she is not powerless; she can feel the strength of it enter her body like salt-air searing her lungs, like holding her breath while the waves crash over her head and she swims out to sea, triumphant.
Jack thinks there's something he can do, even if he doesn't know what it is, to alter the course of events. She's a long road past that now.