by Isla Morley
“What kind of nonsense is this?” huffs an elderly man. “We don’t want to get mixed up in your skullduggery, Hill. Sunflower’s not going to take kindly to those caught aidin’ and abettin’ fugitives. Remember what happened to the Pattersons—”
“Oh, hush up, Sheldon,” the woman in the wheelchair hisses. “Can’t you see the poor woman’s scared half to death?”
Bill clarifies that Adam and I are not fugitives but guests. Indicating that we are to be treated as such, he hands me a glass.
The bearded man who was talking when we first entered now resumes his speech. As he begins to tell of a study done on soybeans, I take a sip and wheeze.
Marcus whispers in my ear, “Bill makes a mean rosé. Best go easy.”
The storyteller is standing beside the fireplace with his elbow on the mantel. The others seem to find his story fascinating, but I am easily distracted. Facial expressions, how loud things are said, how they lean forward to listen, draw back to ponder, glance at one another. From some shuttered part of my mind come memories of youth meetings at church, of being part of a group that behaved like this. I was once part of a community. Belonging—it’s what I envy these people. I take another sip and am waylaid again, this time by how sharp everything tastes.
“The seeds were taken from the Inola Exclusion Zone fifteen years ago, about four months after Diablo,” the storyteller continues. “They were planted in uncontaminated soil, and now they are no longer producing mutant strains; they are becoming more genetically stable.”
“Which means?” Bill asks.
“Which means the plants have made adaptations at the cellular level to radiation. What’s true for plants may be true for humans.”
The elderly man puffs out his chest. “Sunflower just came out with their findings on barn swallows. They put it just the opposite.”
“Is it not in their interest to display the odd mutant specimen? And bear in mind, they don’t let any independent researchers verify their findings. We don’t know what their methodology is. For all we know, their research is based on one corrupted nest. Let me ask you this, Sheldon: What do you think would happen to Sunflower’s funding if their findings were to corroborate those of our researchers?”
“They should shut the place down!” says the woman in the wheelchair. It’s a wonder a figure so frail can fuel so much fire.
Sheldon shoots her a look, but she raises her chin defiantly.
“Not going to happen, Maude. Not after the council got so many different parties vested in the project.” The storyteller checks off his fingers. “You’ve got the administrators of these programs who have pretty much been granted tribal chief status; you’ve got the medical suppliers, the merchants who are running the candidate shipping lanes from Alaska, and let’s not forget our dear Castro who keeps trumping up promises of an untainted generation born during his tenure.”
Everyone takes a sip of their drinks, so I do, too.
“Some might argue that the candidates and their families, the surrogates and support staff have a source of livelihood,” Bill adds.
Maude smarts. “You’re not suggesting the surrogates are contributing to the problem? Because as I see it, they’re little more than slaves.”
Sheldon, who has been muttering to himself, now chimes in. “It’s the defectives we should be worried about!”
Maude looks fit to be tied. “Pay him no never mind,” she says to the three on the couch who thus far have contributed to the discussion only with nods. Turning an icy stare on the old man, she says, “We are all defective, Sheldon.”
Sheldon shakes his cane at the storyteller. “Won’t matter none if the soybeans done come out right when them defectives start breedin’. Before you know it, they’ll be runnin’ the place!”
The rest of the group shifts uncomfortably.
“You’re just repeating what you hear on Republic Radio. If you actually gave some thought—”
The old lady’s accusation only makes Sheldon more excitable. “Haverty’s laying out what others are too dern cowardly to say,” he insists. “We should’ve had the whole lot sterilized when we had the chance! Mandatory, ’stead of giving people a choice. Haverty’s right, and you lot know it!”
“About as right as two left turns!” Maude replies.
People find other places to look. Togetherness seems to be wearing thin in places.
“Anyone care for more wine?” Bill’s flask provides the interruption the storyteller needs to steer the conversation back on track.
“Even if public opinion turned and you had more people calling for these kinds of places to shut down, does anyone for one minute think the Confederacy is going to let that happen?”
I only notice the child-size man in the shadows when he addresses the storyteller. “You said it all along, Ned. You said we’d be in trouble if we made this a political issue.”
There is some discussion along the lines of who predicted what until Maude raises her hand and proceeds with her question as if she’d been called on. “What I’d like to know is if humans are more like soybeans or barn swallows?”
“As long as there are still mutagens in the environment, we are going to see some incidence of maladaptation. It is going to be several generations yet until we know for sure—”
“There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth!”
“Oh, put a spoon in it, Sheldon, and let the man finish!”
The storyteller holds up his hand. “It is going to be a while before we know for sure, but in my opinion, yes, we will continue to see a decrease in radiation-induced mutations in humans. Nature finds a way.”
“I’ll drink to that,” says Bill.
Everyone drains their glasses. I do, too.
The conversation takes a turn to the life expectancy rate, and I pick up my bags and hurry down the hallway to see what’s taking Adam so long. At the farthest end is a brightly lit room. I can’t hear the babies crying or Adam chattering away. It is too quiet. How stupid of me to let Adam out of my sight. What if the woman has led him out of the house and down the path and into the night? What do I know of these people? They all sound like lunatics.
I rush toward the room, which turns out to be a kitchen, a kitchen where my son is sitting in a rocking chair beside a woodstove, giving the baby a bottle. Ginny, holding the other child on her hip, is putting a burp cloth over Adam’s shoulder. She offers me the baby.
“No, that’s okay,” I tell her.
Ginny insists by nodding at the stove where three large pots are simmering. She wants to attend to dinner.
“Oh, okay.” I take my backpack off my shoulder, put the suitcase down, and set my empty glass on the table.
I take the baby and the bottle. Feeling a little light-headed, I sit at the table. The baby draws hard on the bottle teat, her eyes fixed on me. “Better now?” I’ve forgotten how easily babies are satisfied, how trusting they are. There is about them an otherworldliness. I look at this baby the way I used to look at Adam—with delight, but also with the vaguely unsettling feeling she knows more about the universe than I do.
While she nurses, I take stock of my surroundings. Stationed in the corners of the kitchen are high chairs. There is a diaper pail next to the back door, and hanging from the light fixture is a mobile. The windowsill is lined with baby bottles. Marcus brings the children from the compound here, I immediately realize.
“Boy, was she hungry!” Adam exclaims, putting the empty bottle on the table.
Ginny demonstrates how to pat the baby’s back. As soon as the baby burps, Adam says, “Whoa!” He strokes her head and stops, suddenly alarmed. The tip of his finger is resting on the top of her head. You can see the whites of his eyes. “There’s something wrong!”
Ginny and I both get up. He has her feel where his finger is touching. “It’s a hole!”
Ginny waves at him not to worry, and I explain about a baby’s soft spot. “The bones haven’t closed all the way yet, but they will.”
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Not at all assured, he strokes her head very gently and says, “Shouldn’t she wear a helmet until then?”
I can’t get over how good he is with this baby. How quick he is to give his heart. Even before we got out of the silo, when Dobbs first started promising to take us out, I worried whether Adam would adapt. I wondered how long it would take him not to be frightened by everything he saw. Now I wonder whether I am ever going to adapt. Will I ever stop being frightened? Dead, Dobbs is every bit as dismissive as he was in the flesh. Above for less than a week and already you have him relying on strangers.
Ginny puts a bowl on the table and signals Adam to eat. He hands over the baby reluctantly and wolfs down his food.
“Thank you,” I offer, on Adam’s behalf.
He looks up, startled. “Oh, yes, thank you so much.”
If he finds it odd that Ginny does not talk, he gives no indication. I, on the other hand, react to this fact in all the wrong ways. I tell her how kind she is to take us in without any advance notice and what a lovely home she has, and Adam stops chewing and says, “Mom, she’s not deaf.” My next effort at communication is part lip-synch, part sign language. This, too, is frowned upon by my son.
With the baby on her hip, Ginny dishes up stew and sets down a bowl for me. Adam follows her silent directions to take the baby from me to give me a chance to eat. Everyone seems comfortable with the quiet except me. Without meaning to, I volunteer details about our ordeal. I tell Ginny how the people at the compound separated Adam and me despite my wishes, and when she shakes her head and looks at me with such empathy, I feel compelled to tell her about Dobbs and the silo and being kept underground for all these years. Partway through the telling she steps beside me and rubs my back. “I was sixteen when he took me. I went mad for a while. I lost a child.” Facts fall out of my mouth, one after another.
Adam hears about Charlie, who I have not been able to talk about in detail until now, now that I am in a warm kitchen, a real kitchen, having my shoulder patted by a smiling woman and my story extracted by her big, accommodating silence. “Do you have any more wine?”
She pours me a glass.
I take a big sip. “We buried him in a cemetery nobody visits. A place you wouldn’t even want to bury a criminal. I have to go back. I have to put flowers on his grave so he knows he’s missed.” I speak of all the many other things I want to do and how none of it might be possible. Eventually, I run out of words. “I’m sorry; you didn’t need to hear all that.”
Ginny waves away my apology and screws up her face.
“She says not to worry,” Adam explains. And then he makes his own face. Uh . . . uhm . . .”
From the way he holds the baby away from his body, Ginny and I get the picture. Exchanging glances, I laugh and she makes a wheezy hiccup sound. She takes us into an adjoining room, a sunroom with lots of windows and cribs. She puts Angel into a crib, grabs a diaper, and pats the changing table. As soon as Adam lays the baby down, he makes as though to leave, but Ginny latches onto his shirtsleeve, and I voice my agreement. “Oh no you don’t. You want to take care of a baby, then you’ve got to know how to do this.”
“Eew,” he says, but only once. After that, he is riveted.
The swaddling is unwrapped, revealing the child’s calico skin. The brown patches look like giant scabs. The red patches look scaly, like burns starting to heal. The baby gives no indication that she is in pain. Adam is wrapped up in her toes. He measures the length of her foot against the palm of his hand. She responds to his tickling by kicking her legs. Adam laughs and tickles her some more.
Ginny changes her, tucks her into a onesie, and then swaddles her in a yellow blanket. She lifts the baby off the table and hands her to Adam, who understands he is being told to put her in a crib.
“Shouldn’t we give her a name?” he asks.
Ginny’s flattened hand makes a loop: you name her.
“Molly, how about that?”
Ginny gives the A-OK sign.
“Good night, Molly,” he says, planting a kiss on top of her head. I make a mental note of another first: the first time he’s kissed an Outsider.
He fetches Angel, and with the same care, separates her from her rags and soiled diaper. She is perfect but for the paddle where her right foot ought to be. She fusses a little when he uses the damp cloth to wipe her clean and pumps her tiny legs. Instead of remarking on her peculiarity, he folds the diaper perfectly around her little buttocks and hands Ginny the pin. “I’m afraid I’m going to stick her.”
Marcus joins us just as Angel is laid down in her bed. “Shouldn’t have trouble placing these two, right, Gin?”
“You leave the babies here?” Adam asks. His little friend has gone to sleep with her fist curled around his finger.
Marcus nods. “Don’t you worry none. Ginny and Bill will take good care of these girls until the right parents come along.”
Ginny makes some gesture I do not understand.
He translates for Adam and me. “She’s got someone specific in mind for one of them.”
“Which one?” Adam wants to know.
Ginny signals again by rubbing her arm: the child with the mottled skin, Molly.
“What about Angel?”
She raises her eyebrows at Adam and bobs her head slightly. I’m learning to understand her: we’ll have to wait and see.
“There are people who are willing to adopt”—I struggle for the right words—“children like this?”
“Sure. Right after Diablo, the surgeon general called for a ban on baby making, and scores of survivors who were being treated at field clinics opted to get fixed as well. Nobody wanted to pass on the effects of radiation. Well, some of those folks managed to survive, and now they want to raise a family. There are others who just want to do their bit to help out those less fortunate. Sheldon back there will tell you it’s survivor’s guilt. I don’t think so. Caring for a child can give a person hope.”
“Did you work with children before Diablo?” Someone who speaks this way must have been a teacher, a coach, a social worker, perhaps.
Marcus runs his hand over his bald head, sets his glance to a place under the table.
Ginny looks at Adam and cups her hands on her head. Dog.
“We found him in the forest,” Adam answers. “His name is Oracle. He’s got a sore paw.”
She fetches a first-aid kit from the cupboard and motions that she and Adam should tend to it.
“You lost your job helping me and my son,” I say as soon as we have the kitchen to ourselves.
“I ain’t no hero, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Breaking us out of Sunflower, guiding us through hostile terrain, fending off wolves to bring us to safety—if that isn’t valor, I don’t know what is. I start to thank him, but he cuts me off.
“I told you about my boy who died.” He clears his throat. It doesn’t help. Gravelly is how he sounds when he goes on. “Truth is, I hadn’t seen him for years before he passed, not since he was a little kid. Never did marry his mama, like I promised. Never went to one of his Little League games or his school plays.” Marcus looks as though he has something unpleasant in his mouth, a spoonful of rancid meat with no water to wash it down. “You’d think with the kinda dough I was pulling in off the street, I’d have set him and his mama up someplace decent. The last Christmas before Diablo, I showed up with a Happy Meal, and his mama pushed my sorry ass off the porch, told me never to come back. I coulda gone back, made it right, but I used her as an excuse. The morning of the first explosion, I was hustling business through a fence at a middle school playground. Did I work with kids? I did a pretty good job messing them up, is what I did.”
He turns his milky eye to me before bowing his head. “Yeah. Some hero, right?” Marcus looks at me. “You doing all right?”
I stand up. “Thish ish . . .” I stop, horrified. My tongue’s not working.
Marcus takes the wineglass, which, oddly, has been in my hand thi
s whole time. “Looks like someone’s had enough for one night.”
Maybe it’s the wine, but maybe it is being in a home that looks nothing like the silo or the clinic at Sunflower; maybe it’s the smell of beef stew, the slumber of rescued babies, my son administering care to another living thing for the first time—maybe all of this makes me take the man’s hand. It is not for me to pardon. It is for me to hold the hand of a sinner, so that mine, too, may be held. Because the weight of the world can be held for only so long, I lift his hand and perform a pirouette beneath it.
“Well . . .” he says.
“Well,” I declare.
I AM AWOKEN by cawing birds and screeching insects. Adam is digging around in the backpack. He fishes out Dobbs’s key ring and shoves it in his trouser pocket before throwing on his shoes.
“Your hood.”
He grabs it and takes off. I hear the screen door squeak open, then bang shut before I am fully upright.
I look in the mirror on the vanity just to make sure there isn’t a huge crack running down the middle of my head, because that’s very much what it feels like, and am surprised to find a hint of color in my cheeks. My freckles have faded, but for as old as I feel, I have very few wrinkles. Only the thick streak of silver hair hints at any disturbance in the aging process. I undo my braid, rake my fingers through my hair. I screw up my eyes, try to imagine what of me would Mama see, or Mercy, someone from my past? Anything of the girl I once was? What would a man see? All those years ago on the bleachers at the Horse Thieves Picnic Arlo had called me pretty. If he saw me now, would he want to kiss me? I pucker my lips at my image and then smile. Not likely.
I have a vague recollection of the room but not of how I got into bed. I use the jug of silty water on the washstand to bathe and brush my teeth, then change into the embroidered linen shirt and gathered skirt that have a note with my name on them. I follow the voices to a dining room, where Bill Bowers and three of the guests from last night are seated around a wooden table. Missing is the elderly couple. They all call out a greeting. Too loud. They want to know where Adam is, if he might be persuaded to sit and talk with them. I tell them I’ll find out and head for the kitchen. Marcus is pouring juice from a jug. He hands me the glass and takes in the flowing skirt. “You look . . .”