The Different Girl

it stayed in place. May let the door swing shut and opened it again, using the new handle. Then Eleanor and Isobel each tried it for themselves, pulling the door open and pushing it closed.
    “A different handle works very well,” said Eleanor, blinking.
    “Wait!” I went to Robbert’s satchel, which May had set down to pick up the window. I carried it back inside and Eleanor and Isobel used their flattened hands to clear a space on the countertop. I set the notebook where everyone could see.
    “Is there a message after all?” asked Isobel. “Did you remember something we didn’t see?”
    I shook my head. “Nothing new is in the notebook. Now is what’s new, and how we have to think. We have to find different handles. But the notebook can tell what handles there are to choose from. Look .”
    I opened one of the oldest file archives, whose name hadn’t meant anything: haven . Inside were more diagrams and designs, lists and pictures, all about the two buildings where we’d lived, showing everything about how they were made, and out of what, and why.
    “The files show what fits together,” I said. “Everything left over from the classroom, or what didn’t melt in the fire. Wood and pipe and wire. Even if they didn’t go together on purpose, we can find what fits .”
    “A handle is anything,” said Isobel. “Like cage and parrot.”
    “A handle is anything,” echoed Eleanor.
    I knew May couldn’t read the words, so I opened another file archive, the one named energy.
    “That’s about us,” said Isobel, pointing to an icon of the four of us standing in the sun.
    “But also Robbert’s roof cells. And the cooker and the kettle.”
    “And the lights?” asked Eleanor.
    “And the lights,” I told her. “And all of it together, down to the smallest part.”
    “Down to the thinking,” said May.
    “Is thinking small?” asked Isobel.
    “Small as air.” May tapped my head with her finger. “And just as big.”
    • • •
    We began where we were in the ruined kitchen, picking things up as we talked, setting what wasn’t broken after all off to the side, and going back and forth to look in the notebook to compare what we’d found to its files. May helped move the bigger pieces and wriggled to places and corners we couldn’t easily reach. The stairs to Irene’s room were smashed, but May still clambered up and called back that the roof was still whole, that we’d be safe from the rain.
    We were collecting pieces of our cots when I realized May had gone outside. When I called her name and she didn’t answer I hurried onto the porch, the others crowding after me. How long had she been gone? Had something happened to her? Should we go look? But then I saw her coming up the beach path, carrying a bucket made from a yellow nylon bag that slopped water as she walked. She set it down on a step, right next to a stack of coconuts we hadn’t seen her collect. I looked into the bag and saw it held a dozen colored shells. May crouched to look with me and poked her finger at one of the shells, which spit a stream of bubbles. The others came up to look for themselves.
    “Tons to eat in the tide pools,” May said. “I’ll make a fire later. And the rain barrel’s good, too, tipped over but doesn’t leak.”
    “There are more planks on the beach, May.” Eleanor pointed. “We found them on the rocks. We can reuse them.”
    “That’s the idea,” said May. “We can reuse it all.”
    But the moment of missing May had taken my thoughts somewhere else. May noticed I wasn’t looking at the shells. She stood up.
    “We have to make sure, May.”
    “I know we do.” May sighed. “Come on, then.”
    • • •
    The four of us climbed down the kitchen steps—careful because the rail was gone—and walked to the dock. The red dirt path looked no different. Only the planks of the dock showed any sign. The metal cleats had been torn out, and the dock was scraped and scarred across its tar-stained surface, the gouges almost writing, as indecipherable as the voices we had heard on the peak.
    I remembered watching Irene scale a fish Robbert had caught, the rough passage of her knife that pulled the fish skin tight and stripped it clean. Was that what had happened to the dock? Was that what had happened to us?
    Of Irene or Robbert we never found a thing.
    Only afterward, sorting through the mess, could we attach them to objects: Irene’s teacup, whole in a heap of smashed dishes, a hair clip, the