Copper Bright Read online

grandmother’s eyes are riveted, while I’m about to fall asleep. I reach into my right pocket and pull out my ear buds, put them in hidden amongst the cage of my dark curls. I’m glad I wore my hair down today, despite the mugginess.

  I listen to Of Monsters and Men’s My Head is an Animal on shuffle, my gaze a thousand miles away, and not on the dancers at all. Finally the women leave, and the drummer starts up a beat that provides a counter-rhythm to the sound piped from my iPod so intense, it is like my heart fluttering in my throat. My eyes start to feel scratchy and my vision blurs. I’m to my first playthrough of Six Weeks before I realize I can’t hear it anymore, and I fall asleep without even realizing my eyes have closed.

  oOo

  The darkness is almost absolute but for the sound of the lake. It blankets me in deep tones, rolls over me in sharp crescendos. It washes against rocks somewhere far in the distance, but I cannot see them. I peer into the nothingness and feel it as a tangible thing sliding into my eyes, inside my mind.

  And then there is light. So blinding, I wince away from it. And then there is a muting of the light and a sudden shocking silence. I glance about , note the sand under my bare feet, the breeze on my cheeks. I turn around and blink, shivering. There is still no sound at all, even when I feel the eyes upon my back. With trepidation so tangible I can almost feel it coursing through my body, I turn slowly, looking up the bank of gravel I stand on, toward a small hill.

  Sitting atop it against the stark plane of dim cloud-light is a strange beast. It watches with impassive feline eyes the color of the lake near the shoreline, deep malachite, almost ebon. Its ears are forward, inquisitive, whiskers fanned. The bands on its muzzle stand out against the white of its chin, against bronzed antlers like those of deer, small twin-tipped prongs atop its broad forehead. With curiosity, I peer down its back, along its legs. The fur dissolves into celadon-flecked scales with metallic bands like a bluegill, spears of bone stained ivory by water sediment jutting from its vertebrae. The spines rise and slant back, all the way to a tail wrapped several times around its feet, the tip disappearing somewhere behind it.

  We watch each other for a century of small moments in which we are somehow connected, and yet I cannot feel my body. Then the strange beast gazes down at my feet, and I look as well. Lying there is a lump of copper, the patina stripped away, gleaming bright and raw and glaring, like a small sun. I look back up at what I know is Mishipeshu, and it nods at me. I understand. I know what is wanted.

  oOo

  I startle awake, shaking. Grandma looks over at me. She shields her eyes and pats my leg. The dancers have disbanded and the circle is bare, a plastered mass of grass and dust and the burnt smell of briquettes and beef patties.

  That night, before I go to sleep, I take a redwood box containing an oblong lump of copper out of my top dresser drawer. I’ve wrapped it in a silk scarf with roses on it, and across its surface striates a bluish-black coating, dulling the fierce fire beneath.

  Copper is not like most other metals. It doesn’t rust in water, and all of the copper, even the piece in my hands, was forged in the hearts of massive stars long before Earth formed from nothing but dust. With time and air, its surface forms copper carbonate, the patina now visible and the one most famous on the Statue of Liberty. The carbonate is a little layer like a hide, protecting the metal underneath. So that means Lady Liberty was once bronzed, she shown like the sun. But life changed her, because that is what life does. She is still beautiful, but she is now different, I guess.

  This copper used to be my mom’s. The first time she showed it to me, I was five, right before we left for our soon-to-be annual camping trip to Michipicoten Island. She claimed the panther gave it to her, along with my name. And though I don’t really believe, I have a sudden urge to go back to the island, a curiosity that no stubborn denial can shake.

  After a few minutes, I put away the box and lie back on my bed, then curl into a ball, eyes closing against everything I don’t want to do.

  The next day, I load my mom’s kayak into the rack over the top of my rusty Subaru. Since the kayak is fiberglass and subject to cracking, I have to wrestle it carefully into its cradle for transport, and while I’m doing this, Grandma finds me. She puts down a sack lunch on the hood of my car and watches me struggle with the straps. Eventually, her hands come over mine, fingers cinching and pulling, strong and small and darker than my own, but practiced and sure. As she works, I move back, feeling embarrassed because I’ve done this at least a hundred times and for some reason, now I can’t.

  When she is finished, she turns toward me, and her eyes search my face before she speaks.

  “You saw the panther, didn’t you? At the pow-wow?”

  Her words make me stop, and I look up, unsure what to say. The moment seems unreal and frozen, an encapsulated thing apart from reality and yet shared by what we all are. What does she expect me to say? What does she want me to say?

  “I saw it too, on the day Lorna died. It told me that it would ask something of you one day soon. That you might need to go to it.”

  I find my voice, but it’s small and it shakes, because I realize with disquiet that I’m afraid. “I think it wants me to come to the island. I think it wants me to return what was taken. It showed me the copper, like it was claiming it. I- I don’t think it’s mine to keep, after all. And this is crap, but it’s all I have.”

  “If Mishipeshu has requested it, then you should go,” she laughs. “You’re almost a woman, noozhis. I think it time for you to find out this thing for yourself.”

  I make good time down the back roads to Lake Superior. When my kayak finally glides into the shallows, my dry suit familiar and comforting with the lump of copper on my thighs, I’m into the rhythm of what I’m here to do, and things feel right again.

  I paddle with determination for many miles of open water until I pass the spot I call Spirit’s Keyhole, a long stretch of rock like an immense stone whale turning in the sun. At about the middle, the stone divides into two bands of broken rock, jagged like the tumblers in a lock. I can see sky within the hole, and over the top, birch trees grow in a clump, leaves rustling in an emerald torrent.

  I stop paddling and the kayak cruises slowly around the rock, and into a blanket of fog. I watch for the island, and as I’m rounding the far point of the Keyhole, something bumps the underside of the bow. It is a small, inquisitive movement, but it’s there. Feeling ice in my belly, I lift my paddle out of the water and drift for a moment, unsure of what happened.

  Whatever it is hits the underside of the kayak again, hard, and I’m thrown off balance and into the water, sliding sideways. An experienced kayaker might be able to roll back over, but I’m not that good. I feel the copper slip out of my lap and into the frigid water, and, not thinking, I push myself down, after it.

  The shock of the cold is too much and I immediately regret it. Even with my dry suit on, my toes and fingers go numb and I’m sinking without trying. I twist in the darkness, up toward the light and the hazy shape of my flipped kayak, but it’s far away now, and my head hurts too much to think properly.

  Off to my right, I see a flash of ruddy gold and think it’s my copper. But the shape is wrong, and gone too quickly, anyway. Frantic, I try to gasp and suck in water, knowing moments before silence and blackness take me that there is no way I can live through this. Because this is what death feels like, no matter how you die.

  oOo

  Mom brushes a bit of hair out of my eyes, smiles and dabs my nose-tip with a dry paintbrush. It riffles over the edge, sliding in a soft arc onto one of my cheekbones. We’re in her painting studio, inside the mobile home she rented after dad left and we were forced to move. The walls are draped in sheets, the floor splattered with a riot of paint. I smell thinner and varnish, and am surprised that those smells suddenly make me want to cry.

  “What should I paint next?”

  I look up at her empty c
anvas, tilt my head as if considering it, squinting my eyes. I was seven then, and a part of me realizes this isn’t real. But another part of me wants it to be so badly that the truth no longer matters.

  “Paint something bright. Something so that when you miss me at school you can look at it and remember we were together.”

  She slips the paintbrush into my small palms, smiles. Her fingers are warm against mine for a hint of a second, and I want to grab onto them and never let go.

  “Then help me paint it, Alaia. That way, when I’m apart from you, you won’t miss me, either.”

  oOo

  Light cuts through everything and I come back into myself feeling nothing but pain. I cough, spitting water out onto the sand, sensing the pull of the dry suit sticking to my skin, thoroughly soaked and ripped across one thigh and along my belly.

  I am alive! But I have failed, and now I’m alone. The world swims and I hack up more water, arching my back until a great emptiness slips through me, down to my toes. Then I roll onto my spine, breathe in the quiet and the damp. Beneath me, I can almost feel the Earth moving in its sluggish orbit, the clouds slipping in wispy fragments over the dome of the heavens.

  Finally I sit up and rub my temples and the back of my neck until everything no longer spins. It’s later in