Since the Rending we’d encountered green in the crocodile hue of the root vegetable tops or in the sheen of a potato dug up too soon. But abundant green, the green that swizzles inside your chest and spreads out its parachute arms in springtime—it had been five years since we’d been inside that kind of green. And you will likely find it absurd when I say that the green washed out the gray foam that had clouded my brain—but it did. I don’t mean that everything was made right, just that the green made me want to be in the world again.
“I think we made it to Oz,” Lana whispered.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” I whispered back, pinching a section of her Dodgers sweatshirt between my fingers.
“Hootey-tootey book metaphors later, ladies.” It was the voice again, coupled with a poking sensation against my ass. I turned and for the first time actually really looked at our hostess. She was the visitor with the yellow sled and Quaker oatmeal containers, the one with duct-taped shirt cuffs and short gray hair to whom Rodney had given the dead animal tails. Who’d said Deborah was cuckoo. I’d been poked by the glitter star at the end of a child’s fairy wand.
“I’m Daisy.” She smiled, tongue pressed to a gap in her upper row of teeth. “The name is meant to be ironic. You two come with me. Cora, you too.” She pointed the wand at a woman with short blonde hair who’d been repairing a portion of the wall. The woman nodded. “The rest of you get cleaned up. Abigail?” A girl no older than Cal with protruding ears and angry skin moved out from the shadows at the edge of the room. “Tell ’em what to do.” Abigail nodded.
Daisy turned abruptly on her heel; Lana and I followed her toward the other side of the room. The branch wall gave way to a tunnel, presumably made of branches, though in the darkness I couldn’t tell. I pinched the edge of Lana’s shirt again to keep track of her in the dark. The tunnel was only about twenty feet long; at the end we ducked under a burlap coffee sack while Daisy made impatient clicking sounds. We blinked in the brightness of the gallows sky. I turned.
Behind us wasn’t the wall of branches I’d expected but a Pile, one of the shortest I’d seen, only about fifteen feet high. Although short it stretched for almost the length of a full city block. Half a mile or so to the north loomed another Pile of more average stature.
“Concept by me, design by Cora,” said Daisy, flicking the wand toward the smaller Pile.
“She means we made it,” said Cora. Her voice was lilting; it made me want to hear her sing.
“She may look stupid,” said Daisy, poking Cora with the wand rather fondly, “but she actually has a degree in how to make shit that doesn’t fall down.”
“Engineering. MIT,” said Cora, reaching out her hand toward Lana and me. “And welcome. Sometimes we forget to say that around here.”
“If we let them in it’s assumed,” said Daisy.
“I designed the tunnel first,” Cora explained. Then we just transferred objects from Dumbbell over there,” she waved her hand in the direction of the larger Pile, “and thus Junior was born.”
“So if you didn’t know the course of the river, you wouldn’t even think there was anything behind Junior besides water,” said Lana.
“Yep,” said Cora.
“She’s maybe not so dumb either,” said Daisy to Cora. Then, to us: “This way, before it gets dark.” We walked south for about half a mile until Daisy turned abruptly into a sparse line of saplings, stunned into a sort of half-life since the Rending. Like most of the trees, they had no leaves, but there was still the bend of life in the branches. Beyond the saplings was a large holding pond in which our vessels bobbed. Our Babies were unmoved but the rest of the supplies lay in a pile on the bank.
Kristen was bent at the waist, the tuft of her ponytail sweeping the ground. Paloma was wiping sweat off her neck with a red bandana. Her usual upright posture looked slightly deflated but she smiled when she saw us. “Good timing,” she said.
“Load us up,” said Daisy.
We divvied up the belongings among us.
“The Babies?” I asked hesitantly. Though the urgency to hold my Baby had dimmed ever since I’d laid her in the Nest I still felt her presence, a soft blue heartbeat beneath my skin.
Kristen wrapped her arms across her chest as if to keep herself from reaching for her own Babies. Paloma sighed. “I think we should leave them here for now. They’ll be safe. If we want to move them we can do it in the morning.”
I nodded.
We headed back to the moss room through the ashy drowse of twilight. No one mentioned Zion, but worry had worked its way into the press of Paloma’s mouth, into the dark saddles below Kristen’s eyes. I knew they were both exhausted so I tried to take on more weight—but I’d underestimated my own lingering physical exhaustion from the trauma of giving birth and the walk back from the Zoo. By the time we’d returned to the mossy cavern my thighs and arms were shaking.
Inside, a blue tarp had been spread out under the opening at the center of the room. The Zionite women, who looked cleaner but not entirely relaxed, and about a dozen other women I didn’t recognize—the other Noons, Lana had said they called themselves—sat around the edges of the tarp, sipping from identical white mugs that looked like they’d been plundered directly from a church basement. As soon as we stepped out of the shadows, five or six of the Noons stood up and took the bags from our shoulders and backs. What seemed like a gesture of hospitality turned when they immediately began pawing through our bags and setting out food items on the tarp: turnip pottage, sweet potato pottage, Ziploc bags of smoked fish and meat, ghost fruit, and even a little container of ghost fruit jam (I suddenly felt a spark of gratitude in my chest for Oscar and the sweat he’d poured into the jam for us). They didn’t ask permission and they didn’t set aside anything for later. They put it all out, offered everyone a spoon, and then started passing the containers of food around the awkward rectangle of bodies.
“Well, step up to the trough,” said Daisy, poking Lana and me with the wand.
We obeyed. The sound of chewing and swallowing filled the space. The Noons varied in age and appearance. Some eyed us shyly and a few stared openly, unapologetic about the hanging silence. They seemed comfortable with the quiet, as if it were an object they gathered around, simple as the flat blue tarp.
The looks I exchanged with Talia and Ida and Sylvia and Lana and the other Zionites suggested that we were not so comfortable with the silence but were equally uncomfortable with beginning a conversation. There seemed to be habits and gestures that framed this place that we didn’t yet understand. Exhaustion and a still-present Midwestern sense of propriety kept us, I think, from peppering the Noons with questions or offering them portions of ourselves they didn’t seem particularly interested in receiving.
I should have felt gratitude that we had been welcomed into their community, but instead I felt a sliver of disdain as these women we didn’t know ate our food without contributing anything of their own, not even conversation. The sounds of eating grew louder as the daylight diminished, our hearing amplified by the absence of our vision. There was the sound of the Noons rising, then the outline of Abigail’s ears before me as she gently took the mug and spoon from my hands. To my left, someone cracked her back. Someone else let out a belch.
“Where would you like us to sleep?” I asked finally, both my voice and question sounding somehow ridiculous in the dark.
“I don’t give a donkey’s dick where you sleep,” came the raw grind of Daisy’s voice from somewhere behind me.
“The moss? Is it OK to sleep on the moss?” For the first time I identified with the tremulous whine in Talia’s voice.
“Yes,” came Cora’s lilting voice from what felt like above me, though that couldn’t have been possible. “You’re welcome to sleep on it. It’s hard not to when you first arrive. We all did. But you’ll wake up feeling like a frozen piece of clay.”
I heard the crinkle of the tarp as Kristen and Paloma opted to follow Cora’s advice. The r
est of us curled up on the moss, sweaters and jackets pulled close. In the dark it was impossible not to feel the immensity of all we’d left behind. Had the Zionites just let the Watchers come? Had they brought out our collection of knives and axes? I thought of Michael stretching his hands open again and again. Then traded Michael’s hands for Rodney’s. Squared fingertips, the calluses at the top of his palms and the whorl of softness in the middle. Rodney in his stilted house, framed by his single window. I held him there in my mind, safe inside that frame, until finally I fell asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
I woke feeling the way Cora had predicted but I had slept deeply; the chill hadn’t reached into my dreams. Paloma and Kristen were no longer on the tarp. Abigail was busy setting out the identical coffee mugs and the spoons, still glistening a little with what I supposed was river water. An abused cooler stood at the center of the tarp, the kind with wheels and a long handle for the easy transportation of raw hamburger and Popsicles from the back of a minivan to the grill at a picnic area. Beside the cooler, a straw beach bag held empty food containers.
A woman with black, tightly curled hair cropped close to her head was poking at the hanging baskets with the silver wand. I heard groans from a few of the baskets and saw Cora’s eyes peer blearily over the edge of one hanging just above where I’d been sitting the night before. I’d been right about the trajectory of her voice in the dark.
“The baskets are hammocks!” Talia said with stupid delight.
Daisy whistled the first few bars of “Rock-a-Bye Baby” before opening a container from the cooler and sniffing its contents.
Everything felt looser and more familiar in the light of day. There didn’t seem to be a ritual to breakfast the way there had been at dinner the night before. And there was mumbled conversation in various parts of the room. Maybe everything would be as straightforward and simple as Lana had suggested. The sign would come today and by tomorrow we’d be back in Zion, everyone accounted for, everyone safe and sound. A feel-good postapocalyptic after-school special. But the tightening across my chest suggested that even my body didn’t believe things could work out that easily.
The cooler contained turnips and carrots and potatoes, ghost fruit and stings and smoked fish. There was even a fruit I’d never seen before with red, damasked skin about the size of a kumquat. The red skin collapsed into a burst of cotton-candy sweetness on my tongue but the inside was mostly filled with seeds that tasted like anise. Abigail watched my face turn from joy to annoyance as I chewed. “They’re terrible to chew,” she said sympathetically, “but we think they have protein.”
“Does all this grow near here?” I asked, gesturing to the stings and ghost fruit and my full mouth.
Abigail shrugged. “The ghost fruit is from Zion. The stings are from the Zoo. The goose fruit,” here she pointed to my mouth, “is from an encampment a few miles southeast of here that calls itself Big City.”
“It’s ironic,” Cora added as she thrashed around in her rocking bower. She was either struggling to put on pants or strangling a mongoose.
“How’d you get the ghost fruit and the stings?” asked Lana. Behind her, Eleanor was busy twining Lana’s blonde hair back into its crown, her thin, quick forearms jerking like knitting needles.
“Oh, Abby’ll tell ya how,” said Daisy, clicking the edge of the spoon against her teeth. “Tell ’em, Abby.”
“No one pays attention to a crazy,” Abigail recited in a singsong voice.
“Absofuckinglutely,” said Daisy. She smiled at us grandly with her tongue stuffed into the tooth gap.
“You stole, you mean,” chimed in Talia, who was attempting to pick the seeds out of a goose fruit but only succeeding in staining her fingers with red juice.
“Unbundle your undies, honey. You’ve got a place to sleep and food to eat. You’re safe from Señor Dicko. Calm down. Go weave some baskets.”
“Kristen and I will head out and climb your Pile. Dumbbell it’s called? See if they’ve signaled yet,” said Paloma.
“Nope,” said Daisy, “we’ll be taking care of that. You’ll stay here. Simone and Abigail and Cora’ll keep you busy. You could use a little work. You all look like you’re auditioning for a show called who has the biggest stick up her ass.”
Like sock puppets, all of us opened our mouths slightly—but nothing came out. We couldn’t afford to make enemies of our hosts.
After breakfast, we divided into groups. Paloma and Talia and Sylvia headed off with Abigail. Eleanor and Kristen went with Cora. Lana and Cassie and Ida and I followed Simone, the woman with the curly black hair who’d been waking people with the wand, to another entrance near the one we’d slithered through on the previous day. We walked downriver on a trail parallel to the one Paloma and Kristen had used to pull our flotilla to the holding pond. Above and around us the branches spread out their woven designs. It reminded me of an arbor, one that should have housed women in petticoats and powdered wigs, whispering behind fans about betrothals and betrayals and the cost of calfskin gloves. We were so far away from those women: in our dress, in our speech, in the cadence of our steps. Even our wombs were different, turning semen and egg into vases and canteens, chopsticks and honey bears.
Two hours later that gap did not feel quite so large. I wasn’t any closer to the women of laced bodices and candled chandeliers, but I felt connected to their peasant sisters, the ones for whom a gesture, spinning or scrubbing or churning, was repeated and repeated until it became housed in the very marrow of their bones.
We arrived at a body of water similar to the boat pond. But this one was much smaller and perfectly still since it contained no direct access to the river. There were no branches above the pond itself but they stood sentinel around the perimeter along with a pair of navy green waders and a bag filled with supplies. Around the edges of the pond were piles of branches, some half in and half out of the water; on the surface of the pond floated a few plastic ducks. Simone showed us how the Noons used thread attached to the ducks to keep track of the soaking branches.
“Willow or bamboo would be best to use but we don’t have a lot of willow and bamboo,” said Simone, resuming a lecture she had never officially started. “We find that if we soak elm and maple and birch we can weave them well enough, but they need to be thin and uniform. Otherwise it’s a huge pain in the ass.” She hauled a thin, lithe-looking branch out of the pond and pointed it limply at Lana and me. “Try to get those,” she said, gesturing at a pile of thicker branches to our left, “to look like this.” Then she gave us each a kitchen knife. Cassie and Ida were given the task of transporting the properly soaked and cut specimens to the boat launch, which currently lacked the camouflaged structures the Noons deemed necessary. Simone put on the waders and spent the first hour slogging around, pulling out piles of wood and re-sorting into those that needed more soaking and those that were ready to be cut or transported.
Once Lana and I figured out our task (the right pressure to put against the knife, the best way to brace each branch as we stripped it), we developed a rhythm that was both soothing and boring. Once my mind was no longer occupied in making sure I didn’t slice off my thumb I began to think about Zion and the Zoo, about the patter of heels against the walls of the aquarium, the gun in my hands, the sticky residue on the side of the water bottle. I tried to visualize the Zionites safe but all I could imagine was injury. So then I waded through my memory, trying to remember all the fortunes Chester had ever given me, trying to walk backward through the last times Rodney had touched me: carrying me to the raft, taking the Baby from my hands, cradling me in the Barnes and Noble, holding on to the knobs of my knees as he told me Lana’s story, touching his foot to mine below the cloud sheet in our tent. When was the last time we’d made love? Would I ever get to touch him again? I tried to keep my anxiety in check. Tried nursery rhymes and hymns, recipes and poems.
Eventually Simone came over and sat beside us, correcting whatever mistakes we’d made, trimming and slicing
and whittling with strokes that were gorgeous in their grace and accuracy.
“Did you arrive here knowing how to do that?” I blurted out.
Simone looked up and laughed. She had a sloping forehead and wide cheekbones and a dimple in the middle of her chin that made her look both regal and childlike at once.
“Not even a little,” she said.
“How did you get here?” I asked rather lamely. I wanted to know and even more I wanted to get out of my own head.
She watched Lana for a bit and suggested that she position her hands differently. Lana massaged her palm a bit, shook her fingers out, and then started up again. Once we had all turned back to our work, Simone finally responded to my question.
“When the Rending happened my husband was holding a fistful of my hair and a pair of scissors. We were about to go to a benefit. The kids were at my parents’ house. I had a new dress: emerald green with a row of rhinestones right under the boobs. Maybe now I’d think it was too gaudy, but then I didn’t. I had a matching necklace and earring set, too. It was my benefit—not for me, for the Museum of Contemporary Art, but I was putting it on. I’d been a social worker for fifteen years but I went back to school and got a degree in arts administration. It’s not all that uncommon for social workers to burn out; I was so hopeful when I started but the system was so broken. After a few years I started going to museums on my lunch break, for the quiet and for those flat, clean floors. Pretty soon the art took hold and I wanted to be near it. I’d minored in art history at Beloit, I knew a Rembrandt from a Rubens, but it was the contemporary work that got me. Paintings that looked like photographs and dollhouses covered in sod and religious icons soaking in jars of urine.”
The Rending and the Nest Page 25