“What do you mean?” said Amanda. “You’re doing a wonderful job. You were the first one, don’t you remember? All the men love you.”
“I don’t remember, not really,” said Janice. “I’ve been drinking whatever they’ve been giving me, and everything seems all right, but then it wears off and I’m back to being me again. And I can’t do this. I just can’t.”
“But Janice,” said Amanda, “I mean, how did you…before? I mean surely you have before.” She flushes in the dark.
“I have never,” said Janice. “I mean, not like this.”
“Oh,” said Amanda, too surprised to pry further. “Well.”
“I just,” said Janice, her voice rising, “I need to leave, I need to get away.” She put her hands on Amanda’s. “Will you come with me? Can we run away?”
The urge that rose in Amanda’s throat was choking in its bright impossibility, its vivid promise. “But, Janice, where would we go?”
There was a long silence, and then Janice said, “I need more of that drink. I need it now.” Amanda could feel Janice’s heartbeat, thrumming into vibrations like the wings of a hummingbird.
“Wait,” said Amanda, and although she was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to, she woke Mrs. Solomon, their current host.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Solomon blurrily. “Is someone hurt?”
“It’s Janice,” said Amanda. “She’s…not well.”
“Oh, the one who’s being dosed,” said Mrs. Solomon. “Surely she’s over it by now?”
“She’s not,” said Amanda, and again, “She’s not well.”
Mrs. Solomon rose with some grumps and grunts, and walked with Amanda to Janice’s corner. She took Janice’s clenched fist in her capable hands.
“Janice,” said Mrs. Solomon quietly. “You’re a woman now. This is what women do. This is how you get married, and have babies.”
“I don’t,” said Janice, hiccupping, “think I want to be a woman.”
“My goodness, dear,” said Mrs. Solomon. “As if you had a choice.”
Janice burst into fresh tears, and Amanda saw exasperation on Mrs. Solomon’s face, but also sadness and concern. “Darling, were you hurt? Did one of the men hurt you? You need to tell me if they did.”
Janice shook her head rapidly. “I barely even remember most of it.”
“Then why the tears?”
“I just…I just…” She trailed away, hunting for an explanation for her distress. “I just want things to be like they were before. I want a normal summer.”
“Soon you will have children, who will have the summers you once did,” said Mrs. Solomon.
“Do you miss it, Mrs. Solomon?” asked Amanda suddenly. “Summer?”
A flash of pain darted across Mrs. Solomon’s sun-lined face. “We all do, dear,” she said, sighing, “but one can’t be a child forever. Wait here, girls, I’ll be back. You’re lucky I have the ingredients; some men don’t even like it in their house.” Janice lay against Amanda quietly, her muscles twitching. Soon Mrs. Solomon came back and quietly offered Janice a cup filled with strong-smelling liquid.
Janice stared at it, her child’s face suddenly looking thin and old, and then grabbed the cup with both hands and gulped the contents down. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, waiting for the drug to take over. Amanda reached for the cup, sniffed it, and licked out the bitter dregs.
By the end of the summer, they were tired. Tired of moving between houses, tired of sleeping curled up next to the other girls, tired of wildness and play. Their nights with the men had moved from frantic sex to gentle conversations and even shared naps. The men had to go back to their regular lives during the day, farming or potting or whatever their families did, and their faces were drawn from lack of sleep. It was in this drowsy time that Amanda and Andrew started talking. She found him shy and funny, and liked the crow’s feet he was already developing, the shocking white streak in his dark hair.
She remembers lying parallel to Andrew—she can’t remember which house they were in—breathing in each other’s breath and exhaling it back to its birthplace. His callused hand stroked her slowly, tracing the arc of her hip and the trough of her waist, perusing her ribs one by one to her damp armpit, and then starting its way back again. His fingers left a surge of pleasantly prickled skin in their wake, her nerves purring and calming. For Amanda, this was the most pleasurable act of the summer so far.
His smell was alien, brutal, intoxicating: notes of soil, copper, leeks, and the fine dust that gathers on the coats of animals. She raised a finger and ran it down his cheek. He smiled and kissed her fingertip, then closed his eyes.
Looking into his face, Amanda tried to imagine him as her husband. The summer had been so frenetic and tumultuous that it had barely occurred to her that she would be someone’s wife when it ended. She had pictured herself in free fall, in a dizzy tangle of sex and sweets that would last forever.
Soon frost would come and muddy, red-eyed children would start returning home. She would put up her hair—she knew how, the girls had practiced endlessly the entire summer—and walk out into the world an adult. Her metamorphosis was complete: she already felt more staid, heavy, treading firmly on the ground.
What would she do as a woman? Have children, of course. Care for the house. Lie under her husband. Talk about boring things that didn’t mean much. Suddenly, despite her years of desperation to escape him, she missed her father keenly. He was the only one who ever really talked to her. He was the only one who ever knew her.
Feeling her muscles tense, Andrew opened his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to get married,” she confessed in a revelatory whisper.
A frown drew a divot between his eyebrows. “Well, we don’t have to,” he replied slowly.
“No, no, I mean at all. I don’t want to get married at all.”
He raised himself up on one elbow, and she rolled onto her back. “What do you want to do, then?” He put a hand between her breasts, as if to feel her heartbeat and ensure she was hale.
She thought. The silence crawled up her ankles, lapped at her knees, enveloped her waist, and then drew itself tightly over her face like a suffocating sheet. There was no sensible answer to his question. She just stared at him.
“Do you know what I’m looking forward to about being married?” he asked.
She shook her head dumbly.
“Waking up in the morning,” he said, “with my wife next to me.” He put his hand on her cheek and she could feel herself trembling.
She wondered, Do I want to marry him? I don’t not want to marry him. I’d rather marry him than marry any of the other men.
She groped for her voice and gasped softly, “My parents didn’t sleep in the same bed.”
“Well, later, I suppose.” He shrugged. “So much to do. Children to distract you.”
She blinked.
He reached out his free arm and drew her to him. She felt his taut, hairy body graze her naked skin.
“Imagine, we could wake up like this every morning,” he murmured. And even though she knew it would never be the same, that they would lack the soft, sweltering warmth of summertime, the faint breathing of sleeping friends, the sweetness coating their teeth, the blissful and ragged weight of sleeplessness, she still leaned toward him in agreement.
They weren’t the first to agree to marry, or the last. There was a wanderer’s daughter, Flora Saul, in the mix that year, and she was almost immediately won over by the handsome, quick-witted Ryan Joseph. The two girls with swollen breasts and morning nausea were also sought after early. Proven fertility was a valuable asset, worth never quite knowing who fathered your eldest child. Several girls had been picked out by the men long before at church or neighborly dinners and were doggedly pursued until captured. The men left over had to decide between the girls nobody else had wanted. In the end, the three unengaged men looked at drugged Janice, hideous Wilma, and Beth, whose sister had had three defectives,
and they made their decisions. There was a man for every girl, and even if they weren’t thrilled at picking through leftovers, it was better than having no wife at all.
When Amanda finally said good-bye to the other girls, with whom she had bickered and embraced and laughed and whispered, she felt lucky. She hadn’t been forced to settle for someone she disliked; Andrew was strong, capable, and affectionate. Most importantly, she could finally escape home. While she waited for the wedding day, held when the first leaf turned, she simply pretended she wasn’t there. When Mother yelled, she didn’t hear it, her thoughts full of her future with Andrew. If Father tried to gather her up in his arms, just for a quick hug, she barely acknowledged him.
When Andrew carried her over his doorstep, she laughed and kissed his forehead. It took several anxious months to get pregnant, but when she did, his joy was her joy.
Now the memory of his joy has a dirty sheen clinging to its surface, a dark tone she can’t scrub away. Back then, vomiting and tired and full of new life, she thought she’d had everything she ever wanted.
She was wrong. She feels so consumed by terror, she’s not sure if there’s anything left of her. She lies still and limp like damp straw. Inside of her, her daughter is rolling around, swimming happily in a pool of blood and seawater. Her daughter knows nothing but wetness and darkness and muffled sounds. Her daughter keeps her awake. Summer is here, and she is trapped in the bed, trapped under the weight of her child. Amanda thinks of Janey, three years older than her, dirt coating her straight, blameless body. She feels a stab of envy so sharp she curls up against herself and tries not to scream.
Chapter Eleven
Vanessa
On the fifth day of summer the mosquitoes come sudden like the rains, except instead of falling from the sky, they rise up from the ground. In veils of humming gold they sweep the landscape, falling to feed from anything with blood in its veins. The good farmers have already netted the sheep and goat pens; the lazy ones are running and cursing, slapping themselves with one hand and hanging nets with the other. The dogs yipe and whine and run indoors, shaking clusters of insects from their eyes and noses. The cats disappear to the mysterious airtight nooks and passages where cats go, or those who are more tolerant of people lounge indoors, accepting pats of butter and scraps of chicken with a resigned and deserving air. The children throw themselves into the puddled mud, rolling and shrieking and rubbing it on their faces and hair. They end up caked with clay armor, which they endlessly reapply to the creases of elbows and knees and buttocks.
They laugh at themselves, rolling and wriggling in the mud like worms, baring their teeth white against dark faces. Mosquitoes dive into them and probe uselessly, clinging to filthy skin like tiny iridescent feathers. Vanessa often wonders what the mosquitoes live on, since all the people, dogs, and livestock are either indoors or protected, save for mad dashes to empty summer pots into the outhouse. Perhaps the rabbits and rats. She asked Mr. Abraham once, but he had no idea. Father would know. But it’s summer, and she doesn’t have to think about him for months.
Father always has an air of cheerful resignation before summer. “I ran about like a maniac, so you might as well too,” he says. He teases Mother about bloodying some girl’s nose when they were both children, and she shakes her head. His voice switches to his lecture tone, slightly louder with brassier vowels. “Summers are the cornerstone of our society,” he says grandly. “They keep the family working. If you didn’t get a taste of freedom, you would break down in a year.”
“James,” Mother says, frowning, her gaze on the floor.
“Don’t eat rotten food,” Father warned Vanessa right before the rains came. “Drink rainwater only. Don’t fight too much, you’ll get hurt. Don’t get mud up inside yourself. Come home if you get sick.”
Vanessa nodded obediently. Nobody goes home when they get sick. Last year, Alicia Solomon got a cough that turned into a fever, and then she started hacking up bloody phlegm. She lay shivering for days, tossing and calling out, and sweated so much the mud ran off her in rivulets. Her brother had to slap off the mosquitoes and endlessly pack the mud back on. One of Alicia’s eyes turned scarlet. She looked so terrifying that the youngest children ran off screaming when she looked at them. But she didn’t go home, and nobody tried to make her go home. Eventually she arose, shaky and headachy, and her eye faded to shell-pink and then to white again.
With the dogs and people and animals all huddled behind barriers, the world outside seems much bigger. The houses shrink to small boxes, while the fields stretch and yawn wider, and the trees unfurl toward the sky. Even the horizon seems longer somehow, with more sea and shore. The children are the only ones who can walk free, and they grow too, towering over their domain.
Chelsea Moses makes the best cake on the island, and every morning she puts one out, frosted with butter and honey and apple cider. She says she does it for the children, but Vanessa is convinced she does it because she loves watching them fight. Many children hunker down to sleep within view of the doorstep so they can be on alert in the early morning, and after her skirt swishes back inside they wait a beat, then run for it. With twenty or so children aiming for one cake, it quickly turns into warfare. A few mornings Vanessa participates, not only because she loves sweets, but because she loves the fury of dragging at arms and legs with bare hands, punching slick faces, leaping over bodies to grab a handful of frosting. She eats more mud than cake, but it’s sweet with rich crumbs, and sometimes salty with blood from a split lip. Vanessa knows she should start starving herself like Janey, but the thought of going without that amalgam of dirt and honey and blood is too much to bear.
After the children disperse, Vanessa runs to the tallest tree on the island, a sycamore, and climbs it. She likes its three-pronged leaves, and the patchy bark that looks like it has a rash. She hopes that someday it will grow tall enough that she can see the wastelands. Father says it must have roots that go miles deep, because otherwise it would fall over in a storm. As it is, when the wind blows, it sways as gently as a hawk on a current, rustling like a faraway river.
Vanessa adores climbing. She likes to pretend she’s a monkey, which she’s never seen in real life, but Father has a book with pictures of them. She imagines they move like her, arms and legs held wide, paddling up the branches. The monkey is her favorite animal except for the horse, with its long comical face, and graceful neck arched like a rainbow.
Father made her promise not to tell anyone about anything she reads, but Vanessa finds it boring to talk about her forbidden knowledge only with him. Sometimes she’ll try to draw a deer in the dirt, and explains to other children how it runs fast and flips up its tail, but when she goes back home and looks at the real picture, she realizes none of them would know a deer if they saw it. They would be envisioning an animal with wavering legs, two eyes on the same side of its head, so fat it would collapse immediately under its own weight.
At the top of the tree she stretches and strains her neck, but all she can see is water and a cloud bank. The problem with waiting for the tree to grow is that she is growing too, putting on weight and building bone. Soon she’ll become a woman, and then she’ll never be able to climb trees again. She’s never seen an adult climb a tree. Perhaps they would break the branches away and plummet to the ground in an ungainly heap.
Vanessa watches the fog flow and dance and fray, slow and thick like blood in water. She hears her own heart beating, and her breath, and realizes there are no mosquitoes up here to whine their summer song. She starts imitating their hum in her highest voice and then sings a psalm from church, substituting nonsense words because she doesn’t want to think about Pastor Saul. “Oh, for the fooooog,” she calls, “and the dog, and the mosquitoes on a log. Someday it will snow but now, oh no! Cake and potatoes, potatoes and cake, not for a defective, so nice to make! Up all alone, so far from home, singing a song, wish I could stay long, sing my summer song.” She stops singing and listens to the faint echoes of child
ren playing. Gathering her courage, she raises her voice gleefully and sings Father’s favorite swear word, which would get her smacked if any adult heard her say it. “So fuck! Fuck! Fuck you, Father and Mother, fuck you, little brother, fuck all the others, fuck the ferry and the fog, fuck school and fuck church and fuck the ancestors and fuck fruition, fuck you, fuck the island too.” She pauses, waiting for wrathful ancestors to swarm forth like angry bees, or for the tree and the ground to fall away while she hurtles into the darkness below. A bird chirps. Heartened, she swears and sings until her voice becomes hoarse. Then she inches out on a smaller branch, squats, and patters urine down on the lower branches, half hoping nobody is below her, but also half hoping they are. Creeping back, she settles her hips into a curve on the tree and stares at the open sky. She won’t have to leave until she needs something to eat, and that could be a long time.
Chapter Twelve
Amanda
Amanda never paid enough attention to what her mother did at home. But after marrying Andrew, she found herself in a house—her house—that she was meant to sweep when she’d never used a broom, with dinners she was expected to cook when she didn’t know how to build a fire. Other girls learned these things soon after they learned to walk, but Mother had scorned to teach her, preferring to take care of the house herself while Amanda wandered wild.
Everything she did after her marriage, even everyday moments, seemed strange. She had to wear calf-length dresses and walk instead of run, had to gather and knot her hair on her crown—not in practice, but for real—had to smile and greet adults instead of heedlessly passing them by. When she saw her old friends who were her age, but hadn’t yet had their summer of fruition, she had to smile at them like an adult smiles at a child. She hated it, and could tell that they hated her.
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