“This is what you do here,” I tried again.
“The Asylum is for safety. Yep. But too much safety makes you crazy. Or it makes you mean. We get pushed out of the womb for a reason. You pushed that out of your womb for a reason.” She gestured with her head toward where my Baby bobbed.
“Why?” I asked quietly. She kept winding, so I grabbed her arm and squeezed. “WHY?”
Daisy pulled her arm out of my grip and wiped her face against her shoulder.
“I don’t have a fucking clue,” she said. “I can’t give you your why. It’s pretty clear all of you think they’re special. You’ve built those Nests and you hauled them all down here on those parade floats.” She tied the ends of the cloth rope together and tested the hold. When she was sure it was secure she rested her forearms on the branch and looked at me. “But then you left them here, bobbing in this little swamp we call a boat pond. Are these your totems? Your icons? Your sacred flutes? Your voodoo dolls? Do they bring you luck or misery?”
I thought of the press of my Baby against me, that rush of love, that purified version of the Before sailing through my limbs. The impossibility of living, really living, with my Baby attached to me and the cavernous loss of letting her go. I didn’t want to cry in front of Daisy and I was sobbing in front of Daisy. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what they mean.”
She kept looking at me. Not angry, not bored, not really even compassionate. As if I were an aquarium and she were waiting for a shark to make another pass. “I don’t know,” I said a bit more loudly in case she was hard of hearing. She kept her gaze steady. “I DON’T KNOW!” I shouted so loudly that a fleck of spittle landed on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. She let me keep crying like that for a long time, saying the words over and over until they became a mantra. Finally she took my chin in her hand and raised my eyes to hers. And this time in her voice was a deep kindness. “No,” she said quietly, “you’re probably never going to know why. The only thing you get to decide is the story you’re going to tell yourself about what’s happened. You haven’t figured out your story yet.” Her tone switched back to the gruff Daisy. “So you’re holing up here like a little larva waiting for someone to tell you your boyfriend’s dead and your home has been pillaged. Then you’ll accept that as your story. Defeat. And so will they.”
“I’m not in charge of them,” I said. “The other Zionites are free to do whatever they want. It was their idea to come here in the first place.”
“Whatever you say,” said Daisy, “whatever you want to tell yourself.” Then she turned, put her fingers in her mouth, and whistled at the others. Paloma lifted her arm and waved it to show they’d heard.
“Sometimes I think I’d rather fuck a python than eat another goddamn sweet potato,” she said, apropos of absolutely nothing. I started to laugh then and Daisy joined me, her laugh a pointed cackle and mine a revving, sputtering engine. It had been a long time since I’d heard my body make that sound.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Convincing the others to leave was different than trying to convince people to follow me to the Zoo, though I’d stood before them with that plea less than two months earlier. But this time I wasn’t pregnant, wasn’t shaking, wasn’t desperate for volunteers. I knew I would go alone if I had to. The Asylum was a necessary place but it wasn’t my place. I’d laid my Baby in the Nest so that I wouldn’t be lost forever in a spun sugar version of the Before, so I could live with the people I loved in the place we called home. The Rending took home and family away from us without offering us a chance to fight to save them. Now I finally had that chance and I was weaving baskets and tiptoeing around on moss. I knew I would go alone if I needed to but I also knew I would need the others for my plan to work.
After most people had finished eating dinner that night I stood and clinked my spoon against my coffee mug, a gesture that immediately felt too formal. “I’m going to leave,” I said, in a voice too loud for the quiet of the moss and branches.
“You’re what?” said Lana, swiveling out of a spinal twist so she could see my face.
“I mean,” I said, “I think we should all leave. Not the Noons. I didn’t mean—” I was waving the spoon around like a laser pointer. I put the spoon and cup down and stood again, reaching to my chest out of habit to grab my notebook and finding only my breastbone. I thrust my hands into the pockets of my Guatemalan sweater instead, pinched little clumps of wool at the bottoms. Cora wiped her nose with her sleeve. Paloma finished securing a rubber band around the end of her braid but otherwise everyone was still.
“I can’t add any more words,” I said finally. “I can’t add any more words to the list of what I’ve lost. I know we’ll continue to lose things, to lose people. I get it. But I won’t sit here while it happens and document it. We’re acting like this is another Rending, like we have no choice about what’s taken from us. But that’s not true. We had a choice and we chose the Babies over Zion.
“We have to give up the Babies. Whatever the Babies might mean to us—Zion means more.” I waited for someone to protest but no one did. “So we take the Babies to a neutral location,” I continued. “Then we go back to Zion and we tell Michael where the Babies are. The Babies are what he wants. I vote that we give him what he wants and take back what we want: our home.”
Sylvia had been nodding along as I spoke but now her eyes narrowed. “You really think he’ll believe us? When we show up and tell him this?”
“I don’t think our pinkie swearing will be enough to get him out of Zion, sweetie,” said Ida.
“We offer proof. We take one Baby with us. As a sign of good faith.”
“Because good faith is certain to work with Michael,” said Lana.
“I have no idea if this will work.” I looked at each Zionite in turn then, the way my father used his gaze to cross the distance between us when I was hurt or afraid. “I don’t know if it will work,” I said again, “but I know I can’t stay here any longer.”
We were ready to leave by dawn the next day. We packed our Babies into backpacks and satchels. The Noons offered us food, a few cloaks, and a basket with straps that Abigail helped Ida heft onto her shoulders when it was time to go. Abigail gently untucked Ida’s hair from where it caught below one of the straps then offered, quietly, to come with us. She and Ida walked beside one another, pinkies intertwined, for most of our journey.
It took us two long days of walking to reach the Barnes and Noble. We were only about thirty miles away as the crow flies but since we were attempting some level of subtlety we didn’t travel on Highway 77 or I-35, instead slopping our way through newly saturated fields and the rough stubble of uneven ground.
As we walked we talked about the Babies, really talked, for the first time. It was Abigail who asked a question, something simple and innocuous like “who had the first Baby?” and the story unfolded, each of us picking up the portion of the story that was ours, Ida chiming in with images of Deborah’s birds and her strange funeral in the open-mouthed house.
“Nairobi and Phoenix,” Paloma began and then, turning to Abigail, “the ivory chopsticks. My first Babies.” Abigail nodded encouragingly. “They were also from my Before, they were in my third-grade teacher’s house. Her name was Mrs. Moustakas but she had us call her Mrs. Mouse. A few of us were invited to her house at the end of the year, as a treat, when we’d taken the tests and she knew who had done well, succeeded. My mama had plaited my hair so tightly the pain pulled the day into focus, you know?”
Many of us nodded. Paloma stopped walking abruptly and pulled out her roll of duct tape. She applied a bit more to her left Croc where she must have perceived some weakness, though there was none that we could see. But we stopped and watched her, took sips from water bottles. When she began to walk again, we did too.
“Mrs. Mouse made tea sandwiches. Everything so clean, no wrinkles, shining—elegant. Everything so elegant. We were all girls, all five of us, but my dress was the only one with the netti
ng fabric. What do you call it?”
“Tulle?” Ida supplied.
“Yes, tulle. Satin and tulle. I made so much noise, every time I moved. The other girls wore dresses too but theirs were cotton with bright stripes or polka dots; some of them had big-eyed animals stitched to the front. I looked ready for my first communion. Next to the plates on the napkins were chopsticks that Mrs. Mouse said she collected. Each pair was different: some were wooden, some were plastic, but mine were ivory. She said we could try to eat with them, that it was good to try new things. I don’t remember whether there was meanness in her voice when she said it or not.”
“Eating tea sandwiches with chopsticks?” said Sylvia, “That’s absurd. Why would someone make third-graders try to do that?”
Paloma shrugged. “I don’t know. But we couldn’t do it. The cucumber kept sliding through. But we kept trying. Over and over. For a long time it went on, just the sound the chopsticks made as they lost their grip. All this click click clicking.”
“It sounds terrible,” said Abigail sympathetically.
“It was and it wasn’t,” said Paloma. “I’d worked so hard to do well on those tests. Mi hermana Adriana smoothing her arm over practice pages after dinner every night. So I was proud to be at that table and also humiliated by how overdressed I was, by the way my dress kept swishing. But we were all making that same sound with the chopsticks, the clicking. And there was comfort in that. I remember thinking this is what it means to be grown up, that’s what I remember most about that day.”
Kristen coughed lightly then and gestured with her head toward Highway 77, about a quarter of a mile away, where a few figures were visible on the road. We sank down to the ground as a group, pulling our hoods up, and the cloaks close around us. Once we were entirely quiet I could hear faintly the voices of the other travelers, though not what they were saying, only that their voices were loud enough that they weren’t suspicious, hadn’t seen us.
Once we stood and started walking again it was Ida who asked, “And the canteen, Paloma? What about that Baby?”
“That’s a different kind of story,” said Paloma. She tucked her chin in toward her chest like a bird settling in and we didn’t ask her any more questions.
Cassie, who’d been mostly quiet on the journey, picked up a stick and began to swing it at high grasses, trees, and fence posts as we walked, scything her way forward. “We didn’t have much money,” she said without prompting. “After every spring break all the kids would bring in something for show and tell. Sand dollars and shells and Mickey Mouse ears and little bottles filled with ocean water and even plastic hotel room keys. I never had anything because I spent spring break watching TV and eating cereal while my mom worked. One year on the day I was going back my mom gave me this little honey bear filled with sand. And at breakfast she showed me this magazine picture of Tahiti and we talked about what I would say. This whole elaborate lie. How I ate lobster and butter dripped off my fingers. And there was a big yellow water slide. And every night our towels folded to swans on our pillows.” Cassie took a big swing with the stick at a bent sapling.
“Did it work?” asked Talia.
“It did that day. Those kids believed that I had a dazzling life and there was a minute I believed it too. But by middle school kids knew; the ones with money could smell it on each other, they sniffed it out like dogs.”
No one said anything for a few minutes. We were in the middle of a field of what had been soybeans and even Cassie’s stick didn’t make much of a sound. Eventually, Eleanor talked about how her twins, salt and pepper shakers, were gifts she’d registered for with her first husband. The only things they’d ever actually agreed upon. And Kristen explained that Ezra (four skateboard wheels on a chain) and then Homer (a cable bike lock) were reminders of her boys. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that Kristen had been a mother in the Before. Her constant peppy optimism made that kind of grief seem impossible.
We stopped for the night in a small copse of birch. We lay side by side for warmth, staring up at the skeletal branches.
“After the Asylum, these branches look so disorganized,” said Lana.
“I keep thinking about how much knife-work each would require before it would meet Simone’s standards,” I murmured.
“Are you going to tell the story of your Baby?”
And so I finally did. With the sky darkening between the lines of the branches I told them about my mother and her vases. About the aquarium and my labor and seeing my Baby finally in the parking lot with Rodney and Chester. And when I talked about the feeling of her against me there were murmurs of assent and “yes,” little bits of sound rising up like smoke from snuffed out flames.
We arrived at the Barnes and Noble late on the second day and slept in the children’s section where the blanket Chester and Rodney had covered me with still snaked its way across the ground. One of the chairs was still turned toward the blanket and the sensations of Chester’s hands around mine, of Rodney scooping me to his chest were so strong that I had to point to the stuffed crocodile and say something stupidly ironic to keep from crying. We slept that night like puppies, one mass on the floor.
In the morning light, wiping the grit of sleep from our eyes, we carried the Nests over to the shelves. Lana had found the Baby/Parenthood category marker and we affixed this above the Nests because we hadn’t lost our senses of humor entirely. And it was at that moment, Nests on the shelves, gray light steeping the room, that I realized that all of the Zionites were looking at me, that they were waiting for me to say something or do something or offer a signal of some sort.
So I started to sing “Away in a Manger” because it’s the only song I know that’s about birth and death at the same time. And it was nice to think of mangers and cattle lowing and mothers bending close to hum the tune on Christmas Eve. Then I said the name of each Baby and the others echoed it. At first it was just mumbling repetition, but by the end, it was a litany.
“Tallow.”
“Tallow.”
“Esther.”
“Esther.”
“Phoenix.”
“Phoenix.”
“Azure.”
“Azure.”
“Ezra.”
“Ezra.”
And on and on.
And when we had said all the names I said “Deborah” and they said “Deborah” and we stood in the quiet.
Then I said, “We loved these Babies. We loved the world they came from. We miss that world. But we live in this one now.”
Paloma and Kristen wiped tears away; Lana blew a breath out slowly between pursed lips; Kristen and Eleanor held hands; Cassie folded her arms across her chest and rubbed her own skin as if she couldn’t quite get warm enough.
“Amen,” I said.
“Amen,” they repeated.
Amen. Truly. So be it.
As we filed out of the Barnes and Noble and headed toward Zion the sound of the Amen echoed like a soft clap of thunder. It felt like a gift. My experience of religion when I was seventeen had been so tied to an expectation that God would manifest himself—or herself or itself—as a miracle or overwhelming comfort or a sense of safety. We used the word savior for a reason. Or so I thought. But I never felt saved; I kept waiting for God to show up and God kept not showing up. But now I realized that if an all-knowing being existed, it would be unlikely to make itself known in exactly the ways I expected or desired. My father’s promises and explanations of God’s behavior weren’t wrong, they were a way of helping people tell a story about themselves and the world that emphasized life instead of death, hope instead of despair. It was a great responsibility, this coaxing of people toward a story, because if you did it without compassion, without concern for your flock, then you were no better than Michael.
But if you did it well—and now I knew my father had done it well—then you opened a space for people to see all of the little deaths—the betrayals and job loss, the miscarriages and divorces—to see them as part
of the story but not the end of the story. My father preached that the days in the tomb were the middle, not the end. He said if you paid attention, resurrection was everywhere.
I had understood this promise of resurrection as a constant divine provision of gold light, signals of new life at precisely the right times, comfort at every turn. But it was the paying attention that mattered. In the end, looking closely, without judgment or expectation, is one of the few things we can control, and it is the one act that reveals the heart of the world, regardless of whether that world is imbued with divinity or not.
CHAPTER NINE
Cal saw us first, from the top of Curly. He scrambled down and came running, hair swelling up around him. I thought of the fourteen-year-old boy he’d been, head bobbing on a body that seemed too slight to support it. Now his grown body had arrived and the breadth of his shoulders fit the width of his face, the grace of his eyes. He ran with steam moving through him, arms pumping like pistons. It wasn’t until he reached me and embraced me that I could finally hear what he was saying: “You have to go, you have to go.” By which time it was too late, of course. Not that we would have gone anyway.
Close behind Cal came Drake, who’d been supervising Cal’s movements from the bottom of the Pile. Drake didn’t run, just a brisk walk. Still, those knives. He smiled when he reached us and shook our hands, his cloudy left eye wandering beyond us. “Welcome back,” he said, like a concierge at the Waldorf Astoria.
Drake took my hand again, the way he had when we’d entered the Zoo. It was still warm and light and strangely comforting—which was absurd given that he was squarely on the other team. “Michael will be so pleased,” he said, like the servant who sees the prodigal son returning first, who gets to lead him through the fields to the benevolent father.
As we made our way to the Center, both Zionites and Watchers appeared to observe our procession. Sven approached from the direction of the ghost fruit orchard, pushing a wheelbarrow I’d never seen before, but he stopped when he saw us, didn’t wave or call out. It was the same with Tenzin and Zephyr and Asher. Each Zionite seemed held by an invisible electrical fence while the Watchers trailed us, matching our pace.
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