Gather the Daughters

by Jennie Melamed

  Laughter for a boy, tears for a girl. Everyone at the birth is supposed to weep if it’s a girl, and now everyone is dutifully crying. Sharon’s shoulders shake rhythmically. Surprised, Vanessa feels her eyes fill and tears slide hotly down her cheeks. She glances at Nina, who has hidden her face in her hands. Nina blurs, then sharpens, then blurs again as tears spill down Vanessa’s face, gathering at her upper lip and jaw, dripping onto the already damp and salty straw. The room is so full of noise that she calculates nobody will hear her if she scrunches up her face and yells as loud as she can. And so she balls her fists, licks the briny tears off her lips, arches over at the waist, and screams like she’s being slaughtered.

  Vanessa once asked Mother why everyone cries for girls. It doesn’t seem fair that boys are greeted with celebration, but that everyone cried when she came sliding into the world on a river of salt and blood. Mother told her she’d understand when she was older.

  Chapter Seven

  Caitlin

  Tonight, when Caitlin closes her eyes, instead of seeing a scowling ancestor or terrifying monster, she sees Janey Solomon. She’s looking at Caitlin, and her mouth is askew, and Caitlin realizes that she’s not angry or disapproving, just thoughtful. Burying her face in her pillow, Caitlin smiles a little.

  A few hours later, as Caitlin is dipping in and out of a doze, she hears little plinks against her windowpane, which means Rosie is awake. Carefully creaking open the window, trying not to make any noise, Caitlin slithers out onto the roof. It groans loudly but holds her weight. It makes Caitlin sad to know that someday she will probably get so big she falls through the roof—although in truth the roof could give tomorrow. She also can’t bring herself to tell Rosie Gideon to stop throwing pebbles at her window, even though window glass is more precious than almost anything on the island and Father would be furious with her if the window broke. Besides, if she told Rosie to stop, Rosie might start leaping onto the roof and banging loudly on a wall—or worse, ignore Caitlin altogether.

  Slimmer and lighter than Caitlin, Rosie is perched on the edge of her roof expectantly, waiting. Caitlin guesses the Gideons rue having a house so close to her family, but she likes the proximity to Rosie. Scooching and shinnying, she inches down the flaking shingle roof until they are squatting across from each other, inches apart, mirror gargoyles. Rosie took out her braids for the night, and her hair falls over her shoulders in tight ripples of brown.

  “I heard a drop of rain,” Rosie whispers.

  Caitlin stares up at the sky, which is clear and black and strewn with stars. “I don’t think so.”

  “I did!” Rosie is nine and very headstrong. Caitlin often reflects that if they were the same age, Rosie would be more likely to punch her than talk to her. But Caitlin’s extra four years earn her a grudging respect. “I think summer is here.”

  “I don’t think quite yet,” says Caitlin, the words bitter in her mouth. She swallows to clear the taste, but it lingers like a film. “Almost, but not quite.”

  “I don’t want to wait any longer,” complains Rosie. “My shoes are too tight. Mother spanked me for pinching Gerald when he deserved it. I hurt.”

  The I hurt shivers through Caitlin’s bones in sympathy.

  “It will come,” she whispers. “I promise. Maybe only a few days?”

  “Listen,” begs Rosie. “Tell me if you hear rain coming.”

  The two girls are silent, inhaling the sultry night air and each other’s breath. Caitlin hears crickets, a dog barking, a branch cracking, Rosie’s light, expectant breathing. She hears her own heartbeat, industriously tapping against her ribs.

  “I don’t hear any rain,” says Caitlin finally. “I wish I did.”

  “I hate it in my house,” mutters Rosie. “Whenever my aunt comes over, she and Mother fight and break things. It’s loud.”

  They squat there for a little longer, and then Rosie whispers, “Last night I prayed to the ancestors that Father would die.”

  A flash of panic runs through Caitlin’s groin to the pit of her stomach, like she’s just caught herself from falling off the roof. “You can’t pray to the ancestors for that. They’ll hurt you. You have to follow the shalt-nots. I don’t pray to the ancestors for that, and…” Caitlin doesn’t finish the sentence, but they both know what she’s thinking: My father is ten times worse than yours.

  “Why not?” Rosie looks offended, like Caitlin just confessed to something obscene.

  “I can’t pray for that, I wouldn’t. It’s the way it is, the way it’s supposed to be. Daughters submit to their father’s will, it’s in Our Book. It’s what the ancestors wanted.”

  Rosie narrows her eyes like she’s going to argue and then shrugs guiltily. Her shoulders rise and fall sharply in her nightdress, dipping her collarbone in shadow. “I know. It didn’t work.”

  “Of course it didn’t work. And you had better stop, or you’ll go to the darkness below. You might even get exiled.” Caitlin tries to keep her face as stern as possible, feeling like she should impress on the younger girl the gravity of her transgressions.

  “They can’t exile me for what I’m thinking. They don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  “Thoughts become words,” Caitlin quotes from Our Book. “Words become actions, actions become habits. Tend to your thoughts, lest you find yourself fighting for something you never really believed in.”

  “How do you know it all by heart?” Rosie says.

  Caitlin shrugs. “I just do. I can remember things sometimes.”

  “But not what really counts,” says Rosie, referring to Caitlin’s failure to remember the wastelands.

  “But not what really counts.” Caitlin sighs.

  After a moment, Rosie says quietly, “The ancestors don’t answer any of my prayers anyway.”

  Caitlin glances at Rosie and sees that she is near tears. “Well, someday they will, maybe,” she says soothingly.

  “Yeah, if I pray for what they want me to pray for.”

  “Well…isn’t that what you should be praying for?”

  “That’s not fair. That’s like…like telling me I can have anything I want to eat and then only letting me pick from three boring things I’ve already had a hundred times.”

  Caitlin frowns, trying to digest this. “The ancestors love you,” she says finally, limply.

  “No they don’t. They love my father. That’s why he’s still alive.”

  “They love everybody.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows they love the men more.”

  “Then why were women chosen to be the holy vessel for babies?” Caitlin says, parroting Pastor Saul’s logic.

  “Have you ever seen a woman have a baby?” snaps Rosie. “You call that holy?”

  Caitlin is quiet, hugging her knees. The sound of crickets swells and recedes, swells and recedes, like shining ocean waves bringing in a tide. Rosie is an irritable child, everybody knows that, but Caitlin has never seen this lucid bitterness. “What else do you pray for?” she asks softly.

  Rosie bends her head to Caitlin’s. “I wish that it was summer all the time,” she whispers back. “I wish that Father was dead, all of them were dead. I wish that I could live all on my own, with nobody around except some dogs and cats and goats. I wish that I could turn into a man.”

  Caitlin bows her head as well, so their foreheads almost touch, and she feels the short, silky hairs growing out of Rosie’s temples tickling her skin. For a long time they listen to the faint night noises, taking deep breaths and sighing them out with longing so palpable it wraps around their throats.

  Eventually Rosie rises. “I should go back to bed.” Then she squats down again. “Does your father let you have the sleeping draft?”

  Caitlin shakes her head. “No. I mean, he’s so…well, he probably wouldn’t notice if Mother gave it to me. But if he found out, he’d be angry.”

  Rosie narrows her eyes. “My father won’t either. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it hurts.”


  Caitlin shrugs. “Most girls I know don’t get to have it.”

  Rosie sighs and they are quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I hope Father doesn’t come looking for me.”

  Caitlin nods. Then the thought that her father might come looking for her floods her brain, and she scrambles up the creaky roof and into her room breathlessly. It’s not until she’s huddled under the covers that she remembers he never comes this late. Still, she’s so worked up that she stares out the window for hours, listening to her heart pound in her chest like it’s clubbing her for her misdeeds. The next day she falls asleep in class and gets her palms slapped.

  Summer

  Chapter Eight

  Caitlin

  A thousand hands clapping once, a boot on a hollow rain barrel—the sound slithers over Caitlin and she jolts awake, sitting up in bed. She can’t breathe. Slowly she realizes she’s alone and safe, and her breaths lengthen. A finger drums the top of the roof, multiplying into a handful of fingers, bored boys in church, restless schoolgirls. Soon the beats are hard and fast and ringing. A laugh bubbles up in her throat, and she bites down hard to break it. It is raining. Summer is here.

  For a while she doesn’t move, afraid somehow that if she wakes Mother or Father, they will stop her. She knows they won’t stop her—they can’t—there’s even a shalt-not. Every child has a summer, except Ella Moses, whose legs don’t work because she fell off a roof a few months ago, and the really little children, on the breast or freshly off. But somehow she fears a huge weight coming down on her, to lie on her and keep her in her bed, slowly crushing the breath from her lungs until she is flattened like grass underfoot. Caitlin listens hard and hears Father snoring. He’s not even awake. Slowly she creeps out of bed and opens the window.

  Darkness and water mix to form a thick, whirling mass. She hears a scream, and then another, and then a chorus far off, the sound of escape. She holds a thin arm out the window and feels a rain so thick it’s like putting her hand underwater. Standing there, she tries to think, tries to prepare, but there’s nothing to prepare. She can just go.

  Caitlin grabs her quilt, which is beautiful and pink and will be ruined before the night is through, and wraps it around her shoulders. Stepping quietly out of her room, she sees a black figure hunched before her, a ravening monster, and claps her hand over her mouth to catch her shriek. “I hope you’ll be careful,” says the beast, in Father’s voice.

  She nods, although he can’t see it in the dark, and stands there. If he doesn’t move, she may have to creep back into bed and pretend she didn’t hear anything, that she’s not even alive. But then he melts backwards, saying, “You know you could stay, if you wanted to…” In response, she simply gathers the ends of the quilt off the floor and runs so fast she almost falls over.

  The rain hits her like a shovel. Standing still, Caitlin feels sheets of water pound her head and melt into her bones. The quilt immediately becomes sodden, weighing heavily on her shoulders. She takes one step, and her foot sinks into the newly formed muck. Memory kicks in, or some primal urge, and soon she is racing into the darkness with no idea of where she is going.

  “Oof.” Caitlin hits something soft and falls over. A body, small and wet like hers. A hand probes her face, feeling around her cheeks.

  “Who’s this?” a girl’s voice says.

  “Caitlin Jacob. Who’s this?”

  “Alice. Alice Joseph.”

  They pause for a moment, as if saying grace before a feast, and then simultaneously whoop and take off running, hand in hand. The quilt falls off one of Caitlin’s shoulders and bounces along the ground, equally gleeful. Caitlin and Alice bump into the sides of buildings, into trees and fences, and finally collapse on the ground, laughing. Caitlin lifts her face to the sky and feels the water beat soft the fearful expression she knows she always bears.

  “It feels like the end of the world!” says Alice, following Caitlin’s lead and staring up into the source of all the water and joy.

  “Maybe it is,” says Caitlin. “Does the island attach to anything at the bottom, or does it just float?”

  “I think it floats,” Alice replies, and then laughs because her mouth is filling up with water.

  “Let’s run some more!” cries Caitlin, and they scramble up and run through what feels like an orchard, falling more times than she can count. She knows that she will be a black-and-blue mess tomorrow, but the mud will cover it. The quilt wraps around trunks and rocks, like it can’t go any farther and is begging for rest, but Caitlin yanks it along to the sound of ripping wet cloth. Eventually Alice runs smack into a building and says, “I think it’s a barn!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Smell it!” Caitlin sniffs but all she can smell is rain. “Should we go in?”

  Caitlin wavers between visions of a warm hay bed and the thrill of running farther. Before she can say anything, they hear whoops in the other direction and dart toward them.

  They play at finding one another, exchanging wild calls with the other group and running toward the sounds, figuring out when they’ve gone too far and running back. Eventually Caitlin bangs into someone and they go down in a tangle of arms and legs.

  “Got you!” crows a voice she recognizes as that of Richard Abraham.

  “No, I got you!” she corrects him, and starts trying to pin him down in the dark. He squirms and wriggles out of her grasp like a panicked fish, and his “Chase me!” drifts back to where Caitlin is lying. She rolls and slips and runs in his direction while he calls “Chase me! Chase me!” Finally she lunges and he falls down in front of her with a loud, wet smack.

  “Not fair!” Richard cries happily, and tries to yank her quilt away. Caitlin yanks back, and they play tug-of-war in the rain until Caitlin wins, sliding backwards and falling on her rump. Richard slips by her, his cold wet flesh sliding on hers and disappearing.

  “Mine!” she roars happily. She takes off running nowhere in particular, flailing her arms wildly in the dark and laughing louder than she would dare scream at home. It’s summer, and the quilt is hers, the lavish rain is hers, the brimming joyous night is hers. And there are many more days and nights to come.

  Chapter Nine

  Janey

  Janey feels slowly breathing flesh curled inside the curve of her sleeping body. She is draped around her sister, Mary, like a blanket of bones and skin. Opening her eyes, she sees a grassy sea, drenched and aromatic, splotched with dark puddles. Blinking, she glances down at Mary’s body. Her nightgown is half torn away like she was mauled by a monster, her legs painted garishly in mud and bruises and grass stains. Stretching her hands toward the sunrise, Janey sees they are scratched brown and laced with blood. She is naked already, her graceful, freckled legs and arms caked with dirt and coagulating scabs. Closing her eyes again, she yawns and shifts her body like a satisfied dog settling in for a nap. Janey looks peaceful when she sleeps. When her eyelids veil her restless eyeballs, she looks like what she is: a too-thin seventeen-year-old, stunted and overgrown at the same time, with flaming orange hair. When her eyes open, she turns into something else completely. Her eyes kindle with fire, one that is warm and inviting but is just waiting to shoot lines of flame across the wooden floor and burn your house down.

  “Good morning, sleepy.” She hears a whisper and opens her eyes to see Mary’s lovely green ones beaming into hers. Smiling, she settles her head against her hands and gazes at Mary’s face. Mary is thirteen, still a child, but not for long. Her cheekbones and full mouth hint at womanhood, and her body is soft and slender, but rounding. Janey tries to keep her from eating, to yank her back from falling into the abyss of adulthood, but Mary can’t cope with hunger like Janey can. Janey absorbs hunger into herself, riding the wave of white-hot pleading in her body until it fades to a glow that warms her blood. Mary gets hungry and eats apples behind Janey’s back.

  Janey’s not sure how long she can go without coming to fruition, but she hopes it’s forever. She can’t imagine he
rself with a husband, cooking dinner, looking up into a man’s face, or lying with her legs spread apart, screaming a new life into the world. Just thinking about it makes the world darken a few shades. Never. Death first. She glances at Mary, who has fallen asleep again, breathing deep sighs, her eyeballs roaming under their lids.

  She turns her gaze to the sodden yellow field, where countless small feet have made holes and puddles. There is always a strange peace the morning after the first rain, when all the children are asleep and the island is swimming in rainwater. Morning fog hangs creamy and thick, a cool quilt pulled over the treetops. Occasional butterflies float by in lapis and gold and orange, clapping their wings together briefly and sailing on unseen currents of wind. Birds cheep tentatively, like they’re asking a question, unsure if they’ll be answered by another downpour.

  Janey and Mary will find some of the other children later, band up and figure out who their friends will be this time, but the first night of summer they always spend by themselves. Janey likes to run until they reach the shore, then plunge into the water and splash around. “I’m leaving!” she’ll cry. “I’m swimming away!” Mary only goes in up to her waist, even though the water is pleasantly cool and seems to suck at her slightly, drawing her in. Everyone knows that there are monsters lurking under the deeper water, hungry for girlflesh.

  Last night Mary stayed half underwater, half deluged by rain. Janey finally emerged from the water, panting, her skin blushing with chill, and flopped onto the wet sand. “Someday I will,” she breathed into the rain hurling at her face.

  “You’ll swim.” Mary laughed.

  “I’ll hold a knife to the ferryman,” said Janey. “I’ll kill him unless he takes us across.”

  Janey and Mary have both spied on the ferryman from the rushes near the dock, watching while the wanderers board. He has a face like a stone, cracked and sharp and pitted, sprouting white hairs like a strange moss. His odd hat is perched low and hides his eyes in shadow, but his hands are strong and tense, roped with gray veins. Most of the children don’t think of him as alive the way everyone else is alive. Janey can usually make people do what she wants them to, but she is stymied as to how she would ever force him to do anything.