At the base of the ladder leading up to Rodney’s house were two pairs of shoes I’d never seen before. One was missing laces and the tongues had been pulled out in a way that made me shudder. Those are just shoes, I tried to remind myself. Canvas and rubber. But when Cal tucked his thick hair behind his ears I could see delicate scratches laddering their way from chin to temple; Cal’s skin was not made of canvas and rubber.
Chester stood in front of our blue stadium seats; as we passed he lifted just his right hand, from the wrist, and wiggled his fingers. I responded in kind. Rodney did not appear.
Someone must have alerted Michael because he came to the door of the Center as we began to cross the quadrangle. Now there was a herd of us, ten cloaked women and a couple dozen Watchers behind and around us. Our beautiful quadrangle, Lana had said, her navy dress spinning around her hips. Now she took my hand. “Cobblestone installer,” she whispered.
“We don’t have any cobblestones,” I said, desperation edging my voice.
“You’ll find them,” she whispered back.
Michael looked the same from a distance but markedly different close up. Shoulders raised, elbows pressed to sides, mouth tightened into a hyphen: It seemed as if he were trying to press the entirety of his body into a smaller space. His blue eyes were still as stunning as the small white teeth were disturbing but his hair was no longer slicked back into a crested wave. Now it hung in long greasy strands across his forehead. His hands were plunged into the pockets of the same blue suit coat but one of the pockets was stained a rusty brown.
“Ladies’ night out has ended, I see,” he said. The words sounded like Michael but he’d lost his easy, I-have-everything-I-could-possibly-need tone. “I can’t say the new couture is particularly appealing, but we can fix that. Or perhaps someone just neglected to tell me that cloaks are making a comeback.”
Knight appeared then beside Michael, smiling at me with the same warmth as his twin brother, which almost made up for the fact that about a foot below his lips he was leveling a gun at us. The gun I’d given him.
“Have you missed your friends? I think your friends have missed you. But we’ve been happy here, just business as usual. Cal loves to climb the Piles and he’s still climbing the Piles. Aren’t you, Cal?”
Cal nodded without raising his eyes from the ground.
“And Sven! Look at him. Can’t separate that guy from his ghost fruit. Really. Happy as a clam.”
As much as I tried not to, I couldn’t help breaking my gaze from Michael’s to scan the periphery of the quadrangle for Rodney’s shape.
Michael caught my gaze. “Yes, well, except for Rodney. Rodney grew a trifle belligerent. Which isn’t a way to treat your guests. Guests should feel welcome. So I shot him.”
My chest clamped shut. A low buzz started up in my ears, a plague of locusts.
“Oh, he’s not dead. Well, not yet. He’s ‘between the worlds,’ as my grandmother used to say.”
“You can have the Babies,” I gasped. My plan was to be remote and precise, icy. But there was that buzzing and I needed to quiet it. Also I needed to somehow get more air into my chest.
Michael looked caught off guard, as though his teleprompter screen had gone suddenly blank. “Your Babies?” he said finally. “Why would you give them to me?”
“Because we want you to leave,” I said simply.
“Ah,” he said, his smarmy tone returning, though it still sounded pressed through a sieve. “So after three weeks in the bush you’ve decided that the lives of real people are more important to you than the lives of these objects you birthed. How very forward thinking. I’m sure your friends will be just tickled pink to find out you reached this conclusion.”
“Pack your things,” said Paloma. Her voice was a herd of animals moving across a plain. “Pack your things and round up your people and we’ll tell you where the Babies are.”
“You really think I’m going to parade everyone out of here because you assure me the Babies are nestled in some secret location?” The Watchers tittered their support around us. “First of all, dear—I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“Paloma.”
“Paloma. That’s beautiful. Dove, right?”
Paloma just stared.
Michael continued, “Well, Paloma, first of all that assumes that I’m incredibly trusting and second of all it assumes that I’m eager to depart from Zion, that the Babies are the only reason I’m here. Surely I must be a little bit more complex than that.” Michael drew his right hand from his pocket to emphasize the “little bit” and I saw how grotesque his hands had become from the arthritis, the fingers curling like roots. It was pain that was tightening his voice. “Mira, you certainly thought I was more complex than that, didn’t you? After all we’ve been through?”
His voice came to me through the screen of the buzzing. “Was this really your plan?” I heard him say. And for a second I couldn’t remember. Had I thought the Babies were all that he wanted? That he would march good-naturedly away as soon as they were offered?
“We’ll give you one now,” I heard myself say. Because suddenly I understood it wasn’t just the Babies he wanted. The Babies might satiate the Watchers, but Michael wanted the Babies for the way they offered him control over us. If they were just objects on the shelf of some Barnes and Noble they were worthless to him. He wanted marionettes. He wanted to make us dance. The only way to win was to refuse to dance.
“Drake, take a peek in Mira’s backpack,” Michael said, his voice strained again, but this time against excitement, not pain.
Drake grabbed for my backpack and Lana tried to stop him. Drake pulled a knife, suddenly and effortlessly, and sliced Lana’s arm, then the backpack straps from my shoulders. Ida and Sylvia and I bent to Lana. She held the wrist of her injured arm as though it might fall off. I pressed the corner of my cloak to the wound.
“It’s OK, it’s OK, we’ve got it,” said Ida. She let Lana lean against her. Sylvia gently lifted my cloak and pressed hers to the wound instead. She nodded at me, her eyes snapping.
When I stood again, the buzzing had gone. My backpack and the Nest were at Michael’s feet. Michael was holding my Baby. Michael cupped her, cupped the vase in the palm of his left hand. He ran his finger down the length of her side. And I felt his finger down the length of my side, the spot he’d pressed against just below my hip. At the top of my chest, the base of my throat, the swell of vomit.
He looked at me. “She’s quite beautiful.” He raised her to his cheek. “Is it a she? Did you choose a gender for your Baby? Or was the gender just known to you?”
I curled my fingers into fists and made myself uncurl them. She wasn’t my Baby. She was a vase. Just a vase. A vase like any of the ones my mom had unpacked from squiggles of cut paper. An object with a return slip. Something manufactured not once but a million times. A vase, a vase, a vase. I tried to take deep breaths. Do not dance. Do not dance.
“You know,” he said, eyes still fastened on mine, “she feels very female in my hand like this.” He held her up at eye level as if checking his own reflection and then he gently, very gently, licked her side. “She tastes female too,” he said.
Tears boiled at the corners of my eyes. My nostrils flared. I could feel a flush rising up from my breasts to my neck, my cheeks. Do not dance for this man. Do not give him this.
“Look away,” whispered Lana.
I could not look away.
Michael smiled. Without taking his eyes from mine he held her out in front of him horizontally with his right hand. He sucked the gnarled fingers on his left hand and he squeezed them inside her. I could hear his breath coming faster. And I could see his fingertips on the other side of her, inside of her, smearing arcs on the glass.
And I could not be still.
I screamed and I ran at him. I was only instinct.
As soon as I moved I knew he had been waiting for this because he drew up his arm, the one inside of her, he drew it up above hi
s head as I rushed at him and he brought it down against the ground with an incredible amount of force.
She shattered.
And I had to stop, abruptly, before I reached him, so that I would not step on the broken pieces of her. My Baby was a hundred pieces on the ground.
The buzzing filled my head again, the insistent shuddering of life at a frequency so high it burned against the deep insides of my ears. It entered my vertebrae, doubling me over until I thought I was going to vomit the sound onto the matted grass. But I righted myself and I looked him in the eye.
His eyes were glassy, shining, he was on the verge of true relief from his pain. He needed me to plummet into some unknowable pit of grief so he could ascend into ecstasy, and we were both tottering on this edge together. He removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and he bent and wrapped it around the biggest shard of what had been my Baby and as he handed it to me I could see him mouthing the word token. I took what had been my Baby in my hand and fragments of the Before came rushing through me, torn and disembodied, appearing and disappearing in the freight rush of a flood: the base of my ballerina lamp and oil glistening on a silver platter; the heft of a hymnal in my five-year-old hands and drips from a grape Popsicle on the tops of my bare feet; there was the sun and Orion, there was the moon and a pot of dead hydrangeas, there were my mother and father and Bim and here—
—here was Michael waiting for me to crumple and so I drew back and I plunged the fragment of her into Michael’s chest, I plunged it in with all the force I had in my body, just below his ribs.
I stabbed him with my Baby in the place from which God might have created a woman—if this were a different kind of story.
CHAPTER TEN
His face changed. Transmuted from the cliff edge of ecstasy across the flat plateau of numbness and back to the obsidian valley of pain. His tongue touched his top lip as though he were trying to taste the sensation.
Then he crumpled down, backward, away from me, with the glass, my Baby, still inside of him. My hand was gulping or sobbing, I couldn’t tell. I just remember thinking it should have made a sound but it didn’t. I closed my eyes so the darkness could help me hear.
When I opened my eyes again I was in the same place but Michael was gone. Lana was cradling my upper body in her lap while Ida wound strips of her cloak around my throbbing hand. After wearing the cloaks the last few days it was strange to see Ida’s actual clothing, a navy button-down shirt with tiny white flowers. An amethyst stone nestled at her collarbone. “That’s beautiful,” I said, reaching up to touch it with my left hand.
“Be still, Mira,” said Lana, and she took my raised arm and brought it firmly back to earth.
Around us, Zion had come alive again, as though the pulsing crickets between my ears had been turned out onto the landscape where they belonged. I felt strangely happy, a bee in the middle of her hive.
“Let’s get you to the Clinic,” said Ida, tying the final strip of fabric into a satisfactory knot. Lana used her uninjured arm to gather me up and somehow raise me to my feet.
The moment I stood, his absence crashed into me. “Rodney. I want to see Rodney.”
“Your hand first, sweetie,” said Ida.
I shook my head and pulled my injured arm away from her. The jolt sent an extra throb to my palm and a brief flash of darkness across my eyes. I cradled my hand against my chest. “Not until I see him.”
While Ida and Lana exchanged glances and shrugs I turned in a slow circle. There was Asher, guiding a Watcher I didn’t recognize out of Lana’s room and toward the Center. There was Cal, herding a few other Watchers forward from the Clinic. Just outside the door of the Center, Sven stood beside a plastic bin into which Knight was reverently placing his knives. Mona and Davis sat nearby with the other collected Watchers, bags and backpacks at their feet, as though ready to hitchhike to Baja. Tenzin, exiting the Nesting Facility, offered a thumbs-up in Asher’s direction. “Check the Piles,” called Asher in response.
And in the space between where the Center ended and where the barracks began I could see a wheelbarrow, the one I’d seen Sven pushing earlier. Drake stood beside it, his silhouette strange without the bloom of knives around his waist. From the side of the wheelbarrow dangled an arm and a leg and I knew that the body inside the wheelbarrow was Michael.
“This way,” said Ida.
Lana and Ida guided me to Chester’s room, the strings of beads still dangling from the door, still refusing to cast prismed rainbows on the bare walls. The piles of papers, the bowl with Chester’s treasured objects, even his rocker: All of it was gone. In the middle of the room, on the embroidered stool, sat Sylvia. Her left hand pushed the bare flesh of Rodney’s upper right thigh together while her right hand tried to work a needle through his skin. She glanced up at us when we entered but didn’t say anything.
Rodney lay on Cal’s pool float, my cloud-scudded sheet beneath him. His whole upper body arched upward, his head thrown back, eyes closed and body rigid against the pain. His right hand squeezed my necklace, though I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to bring him comfort or, in the press of those daggers against his palm, offer distraction through another avenue of suffering. And when Lana had decided to give the necklace to Rodney—I couldn’t even begin to piece that together in my mind.
Then he made a sound, his voice tearing open, and I went to him and knelt beside him and covered his mouth with my mouth. He didn’t kiss me back, not at first, not exactly. His lips simply opened and closed gently, the way Bim, as a baby, would mouth the air as he slept, searching his dreams for the comfort of our mother. But then he opened his eyes. “You,” he said. I nodded. I touched the branch on his cheek and kissed the buds at the corner of his lip and then I put my uninjured hand on his chest and he deflated, he let his body down.
I heard the sound of the necklace falling to the floor and then the warmth of his hand cupping my neck. He was crying and so I laid my head against his body. I pressed my ear to his chest so I could hear the hitch of his grief and so I could also hear the heartbeat that moved him forward, that moved us forward, steadily, steadily, into a certain kind of light.
EPILOGUE
Here are the other shards of the story, the pieces you might still want to possess.
The wound did not kill Michael, at least not while he was still in Zion. Sylvia and Ida patched Michael up—not so that he’d live but so he wouldn’t necessarily die. The arm and leg I saw dangling from the wheelbarrow belonged to him but they weren’t lifeless. At least not then.
After Michael fell, Knight dropped the gun. I don’t know whether it was shock or whether he’d been wanting to give it up for a long time, but it turned out the other Watchers weren’t interested in fighting. The Zoo collapsed soon after that. One visitor told us that Michael had hanged himself from the basketball hoop in the aquarium, that for a week the Watchers observed his dead body, thinking that his suicide might contain a sign. When he began to decompose, like any other body, most of them left.
Though I’m glad to know there are no longer Inhabitants and Watchers, I’m also certain Michael couldn’t have tied those knots on his own. I know now there will be other Zoos. I know now that we carry pain from which even a Rending cannot separate us.
I have a scar across my palm, deeper than the life line and the love line. When I spread my right hand open fully I can feel the scar stretch, too. I am never entirely away from that act of violence and that is as it should be.
Lana decided to return to the Asylum. I see her every few weeks. I take ghost fruit or willow branches. She’s working on making me a hanging basket, a cradle.
Things in Zion are much as they were. Before Lana left we took the fragments of my Baby and we began to make a mosaic on the outside of the Nesting Facility. Tenzin and I stay on the lookout for objects that are broken or useless and Zephyr makes his mixtures and Cal turns the broken bits into beauty. Or the remnants of beauty.
Abigail and Ida still intertwine th
eir pinkies at our community meetings and Greg Cracker, the chiropractor with the horrible Christmas sweater, showed up in Zion after the Zoo deflated. He’s adjusted something in Sylvia and now she shows a bit more flexibility. Not much, but some. Talia still reminds us to return our mugs to the Center and Chester distributes fortunes with solemn ceremony. Things in Zion are much as they were before. Except that I am no longer hoping or preparing to arrive anywhere else.
Rodney survived, of course, and it was he who said, when I felt the first flutterings of you beneath my skin: “Mira, you need to give our child her story. Start from the very beginning.”
This is the story I choose to tell about the world and who I was inside of it at a particular moment in time. Like all stories, this one contains gaps and flaws, omissions and embellishments—and scenes I’m sure you’d just as soon forget.
The most dangerous thing of all is the absence of a story.
I cannot give you yours so here is mine, dear one, until you are ready to write your own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Barbara Poelle: agent, cheerleader, therapist, whip-smart reader, and my personal superhero. Thanks especially for noticing that twenty thousand words were missing from the end of the book. Thank you to Brita Lundberg, who offered both wisdom and calm at critical moments.
Thank you to Lea Beresford, editor extraordinaire, who is as watchful about unwieldy verbs as she is about wobbly character arcs. The book is so much better because of you, Lea, and I’m a better writer, too.
Thank you to all of the other folks at Bloomsbury who poured time and energy into the novel, including Nancy Miller, Nicole Jarvis, Sara Kitchen, Sarah New, and Janet McDonald.
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