Not that she wanted to go back to Mother’s hatred and Elias’s blank stares and Father’s heavy embraces. She loved Andrew and wanted to be his wife. But she wanted to run and shout, and sling her arms around her friends, and sleep on the shore too.
The nights were strange and hectic, Andrew’s touch familiar yet strangely foreign and confusing. After he went to sleep, she often had trembling fits, waves of shivering bowling her over like a strong wind. They’d had lots of sex during the summer of fruition, but now, in a marriage bed, it felt wrong. Sometimes she went outside and walked in the cold dirt barefoot, staring at the white moon shining through the fog. For the first few months, she only slept after she felt Andrew get up and go to the kitchen in the morning. Then she was slammed face-first into a dark sleep like someone shoving her into the dirt, and didn’t arise until the early afternoon.
Uncertainly, she’d push the broom around the floor until dust was moved from one corner to another. Then she’d try to mend something, or cook something, and Andrew would come home to find her lost under a pile of cloth or vegetables. She loved that he always laughed and pulled her to her feet, and wore the badly mended clothes, and ate the inedible dishes. She loved him until they blew out the lanterns, and then she wanted to creep away on her belly like something boneless and primitive.
Three months after she married Andrew, Father came to visit. He had stayed away, which surprised Amanda, who had expected more contact from him. (She didn’t expect anything from Mother and Elias, and they barely even acknowledged her at church.)
Then, just when it was getting cold enough to frost over, Father showed up at the door with a smile and a dead rabbit. Amanda had never skinned a rabbit before, and Father sat at the table and watched as she sawed and winced and pulled the pearlescent sheets of membrane, which stretched taut and snapped into dull white gristle as cold maroon blood ran thickly over the edges of the table and onto the floor.
“I miss you, Amanda,” Father said as he got a cloth and knelt to wipe up the florid spatters. “I have nobody to talk to anymore.”
“You know you can always visit,” she replied, her fingers sliding over slimy ribbons of vein and tumescent, slippery muscle. “I’m surprised you haven’t before.”
“Your mother doesn’t like it.”
“That’s not surprising.”
“She says that now you’re out of the family, I should treat you like anyone else.”
Amanda frowned. “But people still visit their children, and everyone has their mothers help them when the first baby comes.” She paused. “Although I’d rather get advice from a goat.”
“Are you pregnant?” His voice quavered a bit.
“I don’t think so.” She and Andrew were starting to be concerned, after three months of regular bleeding every time the moon went dark.
There was a long silence. Amanda had stripped the skin from the rabbit’s back and belly but was having trouble getting it to detach from the joints and tiny paws. It writhed and pulled wetly in her fists. She wondered if she was supposed to cut the head off, and felt a wave of irritation at Father for not offering more help.
“It’s so strange to think of you having a baby,” he said. He was staring at the carnage heaped on the table, his hands twisting between his knees.
“It is strange,” she agreed, and sat at the table with him. Her dress was stained crimson at her waist, her arms encased in sleeves of dried gore. “I’ll have to scrub this dress with soap. Hopefully the stains will come out of the floor,” she said, trying to speak lightly.
Father nodded, looking away and shifting in his chair. “Couldn’t Andrew show you how to butcher a rabbit?”
Couldn’t you? she wanted to snap, but said, “I don’t know. If not, one of the wives can.”
“I suppose.” He took the cloth she was wiping her hands on and played with the edges, reddening the tips of his fingers. The sight made her stomach turn. “It’s a shame your mother didn’t show you more, before you left.”
“She hates me,” said Amanda. “You know that. I’m out of the house now, though, so I don’t have to care about her anymore.”
“I wish you weren’t.”
“Weren’t what?”
“Out of the house.”
“I’m glad I am.”
He winced like she’d slapped him. His forehead creasing, he stared at her. “You’re glad?” he said. “You’re happy? Completely happy?”
Amanda’s mind drifted to nighttime, and how she snuck out of the house to see the moon, standing until her feet went numb. “Not completely happy, but I love Andrew, and I’m sure I’ll get better at all the things I’m supposed to do.”
“You look so much older with your hair up.”
“It feels strange. Like I was wearing the same clothes for years, and somebody took them away from me.”
He nodded. “That’s how I feel without you.”
“How is Elias?” she asked, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “Has he started working with you yet?”
“Somewhat. I don’t think he likes it. He told me he wants to be a fisherman.”
“Well, fishermen have sons too,” she said flatly. She had to fulfill her destiny as a woman, and Elias would have to fulfill his destiny as Father’s son.
“He’s smart. He could have been a wanderer if he’d been born to one.” Father’s voice was admiring but detached, like he was talking about someone else’s child. “Before I know it, he’ll be ready to leave the house. He doesn’t want to leave your mother, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know what she’ll do when he leaves. But if I can survive losing you, she can survive losing him. Though she’ll feel lonely. I do.”
Amanda nodded, unsure what to say.
“I didn’t want to come see you. I wanted to let you settle in, but I also knew it would make me miserable.”
Amanda shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do. Children grow up and leave.”
“It’s life, it’s life. I’ve watched others lose daughters and felt sorry for them. Now they can feel sorry for me.”
“Not too sorry,” she said, half laughing. “With me running around the island all the time and sleeping on the sand, they probably think you’re better off rid of me.”
“It hurt every time I woke up and you weren’t there.”
“I was—” Amanda tried to think of what she was. “Young. Angry.”
“But you’re not anymore.”
“Angry? I don’t think so. I’m just…tired.” She sighed. “Maybe I’ve grown old enough now. I don’t know. It is nice to see you.” This is only half a lie; the familiarity of his face warms something in her.
“Have you ever thought what it would be like if we could live together forever?”
Amanda looked up sharply. “No. Of course not.”
“I’ve thought about it. Just living together, you greeting me every evening when I came home and waving good-bye in the morning. You tending to the garden, the rain barrel, the chickens. We could stay together forever.”
“No, we couldn’t. Nobody does that.” Her voice rose more quickly than she wanted it to, and its volume intensified with her pulse. She didn’t remember standing, but now she towered over her seated father. “You can’t do that. It’s against the shalt-nots.”
“I’m not saying it should happen. I know you have to marry, and have children. Andrew is a good man. You chose well.”
“I did.” Her voice echoed around the kitchen, and she realized she was nearly shouting. Embarrassed, she quickly sat down and looked at the blood on the floor. “I don’t know what you want, coming here and talking like this,” she said quietly.
“It’s just wishes, Amanda. Silly wishes. I’m an old man now, I won’t live much longer. Long enough for Elias to have children, I hope, but once you have a child…well, I feel like it will be the beginning of my end.”
“Maybe I’m barren”—her voice hitches—“and Elias’
s wife will have defectives and you can live a good long time.”
“You know I don’t want that.” They were both quiet, a bird punctuating the silence now and then with a quickly ascending whoop. Amanda felt stupid and clumsy and unreasonably aware of her breasts hanging free under her housedress. Bulbous, ridiculous, shameful. She rose, arms across her chest, and Father rose too.
“Come.” He held out his arms, and she moved into them by rote memory, not even thinking about the movement until his head was on her shoulder. Her nostrils were filled with the scent of his hair, and she shuddered without meaning to. Father didn’t seem to notice. “My girl,” he murmured, rocking her back and forth.
Eventually Amanda pried herself away, disentangling herself carefully but hurriedly from him. Father’s arms remained open, hanging in the air like they were suspended from strings, his face revealing an awkward mix of hope and despair.
“I should go,” he said quietly, his arms still extended. “I’m a foolish old man.”
She cleared her throat. “I won’t let you distract me anymore! I have to figure out how to turn this rabbit into food,” she said, as gaily as possible, as if they had just had a pleasant conversation over some cake and tea. “Come by for dinner soon, so you can see Andrew.”
“Yes,” Father said, giving a strange little bow she’d never seen, and he walked out of the house still holding the bloody cloth. Amanda sat down in the chair, feeling like her bones had turned to water. Putting her head between her knees, she stared at the red smears on the floor until they seemed to mean something, as if they were written in a language she could almost, but not quite, decipher. Her arms wrapped around her head and she pulled her hair loose, her tears making rosy, blood-veined splotches in the splattering of red below.
Chapter Thirteen
Amanda
Amanda wakes in blackness, sitting neatly on her heels, a sphere of cold, milky light gleaming down at her. Choking with surprise, she lets out a small quavering scream and her hands begin groping her face, her belly, her legs, to confirm she is whole. Her daughter is restless, striking at the inside of her womb as if to rouse her from her fugue.
Reaching down, Amanda feels her hands sink into cool, satiny mud and realizes she is outside. There are hulking forms in the distance that, as her eyes adjust, morph into dark houses and crooked trees.
Suddenly she becomes aware of the mosquitoes assiduously drinking her blood, their threadlike, saber-sharp snouts nosing below her skin. Heeding an instinct from the summers of her childhood, she plunges from her seated position to lie flat on her back in the mud. Holding her breath, she begins writhing like a suffocating fish, coating her limbs and torso in cool muck, and then, pushing up to her knees, takes two handfuls of sludge and claps them to her face, spreading the chill mud over her eyelids, down her cheeks and neck, letting it creep down in between her swollen breasts.
She reaches under her nightdress and slides mud upward from her thighs to her groin, over the full-moon swell of her pregnant belly. Her baby spins in bliss. Spent, Amanda collapses onto her back once more. The mud not only fends off most of the shrill, humming bloodsuckers, but soothes her raw and stippled skin. How long was she sitting bare-skinned and absent, like a supplicant cowering before a bright hole sliced out of the night sky? Suddenly Amanda is sobbing, salty tears burning away the mud on her eyelids. Rolling onto her side, she curls up and howls rough and gibbering sobs into the darkness. In the past few weeks, she has done so much muffled weeping, tears rolling down her temples and pooling in her ears, trembling slightly in the effort to breathe evenly and not disturb Andrew, who snores benignly in his safe, blithe dreams where there is no reason to struggle. Now her wails feel as if she is tearing something loose, a scab over a gash that, once liberated, commences to bleed and bleed.
Her daughter begins to revolve in her watery cage, faster and faster. She thumps Amanda’s bladder sharply, and Amanda, not caring, urinates hotly into her wet, rumpled dress and the mud below her and keeps keening.
When her throat is raw and her lungs weakened, she remains curled around herself, the tops of her thighs pressed against her firm belly. I can’t do this to you, she tells her daughter silently. Her daughter pauses, twitches, begins swimming in loops in the other direction. Amanda lays her right hand above her pubic bone, feeling the underwater whirling and dancing in the small, waterproof bowl of the womb that is no longer her own. Her tears have dried and the mosquitoes are hovering ready, and she rubs her face through the mud like a dog with an itch. I’m so sorry, she thinks, pushing herself up with her hands and staring fearfully at the cold moon. Amanda sets off toward one of the slumbering houses to try and make her way home.
Will Andrew wake when she throws buckets of cold rainwater over her skin and stands naked and shivering in the moonlight? Will he feel the dampness of her hair on his arm when she crawls back into bed? If she begins sobbing, will it simply color his dreams with the calm, rhythmic rocking of a winter sea?
Light footsteps in the distance: the children of summer, roaming in search of excitement, or a comfortable place to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Janey
Leading the way, with Mary behind her like a smaller, darker shadow, Janey crashes into battle. She’s not exactly sure which children she’s fighting, although she recognizes Brian Saul’s curls under a paste of mud, and Lisa Aaron’s jet-black, tangled braid.
The children are battling for a prime location on the shore, where the sea roaches like to nose around in the glinting shallows. To Janey, they resemble alien, jointed monsters that could be found in the darkness below—although at the size of a small plate and the speed of a snail, they’re almost cute.
Slightly clumsy and with poor vision, Mary never fights as well as the others, but she follows in Janey’s path and lashes out laterally at any moving bodies. It’s difficult to properly injure anyone, because they all become very slick in a matter of seconds. Clenched fists slip off to the side instead of thudding solidly into skin, nails skitter down muddy limbs without ruffling skin to shreds, even teeth slip over mud-caked flesh and click shut with an unpleasantly electric snap. No matter how a fight starts, it always ends the same way: dirty children writhing and wincing in a tangle of torsos and limbs, like they’ve fused together into some filthy, many-legged abomination.
Fighting makes Janey feel alive in a way that nothing else does: not hovering alone in the black night with her whirling thoughts as company; not running until her heart heaves and her lungs turn to silver, glowing and intractable; not cradling Mary in her arms as she stares at a star-smeared night sky, knowing she will watch them wheel in their slow path until morning. Fighting makes Janey’s blood sing. It’s not the promise of harming others, for she rarely intends genuine injury, nor is it the prospect of revenge on her enemies, as Janey has few enemies she takes seriously. It is something about the heat in the contraction of a muscle, the speed and split-second calculations, the impact of intimate physical contact when, apart from young children and Mary, she lets nobody touch her. Deeper in her is the realization she avoids: it is the only time in her life when the violence of her thoughts are made flesh. She screams, thrashes, lunges as her mind goes still, as her fists and teeth and nails become a churning mass illuminating the turbulence within.
She knows there are rumors that she likes to bash people with rocks or break their bones, but they are unfounded. She is a good fighter, however, perhaps the best on the island, and she never, ever, ever gets tired. She might get dizzy, and her vision might flicker around the edges like there are masses of dark birds homing in on her, but fatigue, giving up, is anathema to her.
Howling with rage and pain, the losing children retreat in a ragged group and squat scowling farther down the beach. Patty Aaron, Lisa’s little sister, starts inching toward their lost territory, but Janey hisses at her, snapping her teeth like an angry dog, and Patty flees again. Drawing herself tall and upright, Janey stares regally out into the water. Sh
e relaxes and smiles as Mary wades in and gazes delightedly at a sea roach, then touches a smooth, cold shell and shivers. Four-year-old Greta Balthazar, in the water next to them, looks askance at the sea roach, her expression dubious. When it moves irritably, she squeals and smiles, revealing tiny sharp teeth. Her brother, Galen, is packing mud back on her skin where it’s fallen off. “Wash the hair, Greta!” he says cheerfully, plopping two handfuls of dove-brown clay on her head and smoothing them down until they drip over the back of her small neck.
Janey feels something cold on her back and realizes Mary is doing the same. The salty clay by the sea smells different than the red veins that run through the dirt. This clay smells like seawater and freshly slaughtered fish. She reaches down and smooths muck over her skin, squishing it between her fingers. Helping Mary repatch the coating over her smooth back and legs, she then pats it carefully around Mary’s green eyes so it won’t fall in. By the end of summer, everyone’s eyes are scarlet with irritation.
Later the other children, victors and losers alike, drift off. Janey moves closer to the brush lining the shore and begins building a fort. She breaks twigs and long, flexible branches off the bushes and erects them in the sand for the frame. Then she and Mary weave branches into walls, going over and under in a soothing rhythm until she’s not thinking about anything at all. It gets dark and Mary yawns, totters, and falls asleep, but Janey keeps working. She is too happy, too energetic to sleep, and time slips past as the stars burn their way across the sky and the sun rises again. When Mary wakes at dawn, the fort is almost done, and the walls have been packed with clay, thick and smooth.
Janey grins when she sees Mary awake, the mud on her face cracking like a large, hideous egg to reveal soft freckled skin beneath.
“Did you forget to sleep?” asks Mary.
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