School always starts the day after summer ends, unless it’s a Sunday. Janey knows the intent is to shock the children back into regular life as quickly as possible, like splashing cold water on fighting dogs. Janey and Mary clean themselves early, before Mother can get at them, and purposely do a bad job of it; they leave smears of mud behind their knees and between their fingers, and Mary’s hair is one big snarl. Then they sneak into the cellar, Mary devouring an entire cold chicken and swallowing a raw egg while Janey nibbles on a potato.
When they emerge, Mother is cooking an unnecessary breakfast, although Mary might be hungry again in a few minutes. A summer supervised by Janey always leaves her ravenous. Mother hugs Mary tightly, kissing her forehead, and awkwardly pats Janey’s arm. Janey doesn’t like being touched by adults, and Mother is constantly dancing between wanting to show affection and fearing Janey’s rejection.
“You two look like you’re in one piece,” Mother says. “Mary, did you eat the chicken I was saving for dinner?”
“Not all of it,” Mary lies.
Father wanders in and looks pleasantly surprised. “Welcome back, girls,” he says. Mother rushes to serve him some cornmeal porridge with berries, and Mary and Janey slip upstairs to get dressed.
Janey often feels a faint guilt about Mother and Father. She knows that, with a normal child, they would have been normal parents. Quiet and passive, they have always been bowled over by Janey’s stubbornness, unsure how to respond to her. Since she was a child, Janey has ruled them. She loves Mother but pities her hesitant nature, treating her faint commands and tentative decrees as mere suggestions to be ignored at her own whim. As for Father, Janey has always held him at arm’s length, with Mary safe behind her. She sometimes catches glimpses of thoughtfulness, of strength, in his personality, but the rule of father and daughter on the island keeps her steadfastly on guard against him. Father appears, somehow, to understand, and he skirts her and Mary with distant affection. The only time Janey lets him touch her is when she is sick, and unable to mount her usual defenses. When Mother has to sleep, or care for Mary, he holds her hand, bathes her forehead with cold water, sings to her, or tells her fantastic stories of flying girls and talking animals. Upon recovery, Janey treats these episodes like a dream, for fear of warming to Father and letting her defenses fall away.
Up in the girls’ bedroom, Janey’s skirt is too tight on her, and she swears and throws it to the ground. “I shouldn’t be growing,” she mutters.
“You don’t look any different to me,” Mary says to reassure her.
Janey turns away and leans her elbows against the window frame. Her vertebrae stretch and swell against the tight skin of her back, rounding upward like they are waiting to break free. She runs her hands through her damp hair. “I can’t do this forever,” she says out the window.
“Nobody can do anything forever,” Mary says.
“You’re right,” says Janey. “Let me try on one of your dresses.”
Mary is shorter than Janey but about twice as wide, and they both laugh as Janey swims about in too much cloth, striking ridiculous poses.
Eventually Janey finds a dress of hers that still fits. They slip on their shoes, which feel so strange that they have to take slow, careful steps to avoid falling over. Father is gone already, to see how their vegetables survived the first frost. The world seems new and chill and sparkling, although they know it will thaw to muck as the sun moves higher in the sky.
Mary dawdles, and they walk too slowly to get to school on time. Mr. Abraham might be angry, but Mary resists Janey’s tugs on her arm, arguing that she would take a whipping right now if it means they get to be outside a little longer. Nobody’s whipped Janey in ages, perhaps because they’re afraid she might grab the stick and begin whipping them back.
At school, the children are uniformly miserable, pulling at their clothes, twisting in their seats, and picking at dirt under their fingernails. Their eyes roll red and wild, naked hands reaching to peel scabs and pick at sores. They avoid one another’s gazes, trying to recollect themselves from the summer mobs, embarrassed at the way their skin shows, hair combed tight, wrapped and trussed in clothing that won’t seem normal for a few days.
Janey always enjoys school, and even today she seems a little cheerful. At her age, she’s learned all she needs to learn, so she rotates around to different classrooms, performing duties as a surprisingly patient assistant. Her thin fingers will grasp the end of a pencil over smaller, plumper ones, and she’ll guide it around in careful swoops. Even the slow children, the ones who really can’t ever learn to read or write but are eager to try, she approaches with optimism and interest.
While she can work forever with an intent child desperate to please her, Janey cannot stand impertinence or laziness. If any of her charges are feckless, or irritable, or do not properly appreciate her help, she loses her temper and rains a volley of smacks on his or her head and shoulders. Once, in a classroom of younger boys, she even grabbed the teacher’s switch and thrashed an obstinate Frederick Moses until he howled.
It’s early enough that the mud is still frozen in peaks and whirls and valleys, like dollops of filthy whipped cream. The air is strangely silent, the sibilant hum of mosquitoes vanished overnight. The entire world is brown except for the crop fields and gardens, where farmers are extravagantly stretching and moving very slowly, simply because they can. Women are sitting on steps, eating breakfast with their fingers. Pushed outside and left alone for the first time since the beginning of summer, dogs scrabble against the door in fear before suddenly realizing the air is clear. Then they lurch around like heavyset lambs, waving their tails and barking with joy. A dog knocks into Janey midleap, and she falls to her knees, giggling.
“I almost don’t mind coming back from summer,” she tells Mary, “if I can see the dogs.” She pushes her face against the dog and blows into its ears. “The end of my freedom is the beginning of yours, isn’t it?” she asks the dog. “Would you like to trade places until next summer?” The dog barks.
Chapter Twenty-One
Vanessa
That night, Vanessa sits at the kitchen table and drinks glass after glass of rich, musky goat’s milk while Mother fills her in on what happened over the summer.
Grady and Karen Gideon took their final draft, as Grady couldn’t walk well since the accident. Their son Byron took over the house with his wife and child. A slew of girls a little older than Vanessa are to be married, naturally, and a few are pregnant. Lots of women had babies, and lots had defectives. Jana Saul had her third defective, so her husband decided to take another wife and conveniently chose Carol Joseph, who was widowed last year. Now Jana and Carol are fighting like angry cats, and if Jana doesn’t stop trying to eject Carol, she’ll get a shaming. Amanda Balthazar bled out from a defective and is dead, and her husband, Andrew, is walking around like somebody hit him in the head with a brick. Ursula Gideon had twins, both healthy, which hasn’t happened in so long that people are lining up outside the house to see them. Stella Aaron was caught talking to a man alone and will be shamed, and so will Ursula Saul, who blasphemed the ancestors to her sister.
Most surprisingly, there is a new family on the island. Their names are Clyde and Maureen Adam; Clyde is a skilled carver, and Maureen is pregnant. Father is having them over for dinner tomorrow night, and Vanessa has to be on her best behavior.
Vanessa is bursting with excitement about the Adams. She was a baby when the second-newest family, the Jacobs, came to live on the island. She’s always felt cheated by not remembering what a family from the wastelands looked like, staggering in. This news is a bright spot in a generally dim return to home and regular life. Father won’t stop hugging and kissing Vanessa and telling her how much he missed her, which makes her tense. Her face, clean and bare, feels skinned.
Mother notices Vanessa’s discomfort and sings with her, “Summer Rains” and “Arthur Balthazar” and “Night of a Thousand Meteors.” It feels all right to sing
church songs, now that she’s back.
For dinner there will be chicken, roasted with new potatoes and beans. With the chill in the air, hot food sounds wonderful to Vanessa, even though she’d trade any hot meal in a minute for a meal of filthy bread eaten outside. Father likes to say, “The seasons change, whether you like it or not.” That night, after he leaves, she cries helpless tears of frustration into her pillow, thinking of the next summer nine months away—or, for her, perhaps never. In the morning, she makes sure her face is composed, even if her eyelids are swollen and her complexion mottled. She doesn’t like Father to see her cry.
Walking to school with dragging steps, Vanessa watches the dogs run and play, wishing she could join them. She makes it on time, although Grace Aaron gets whipped for lateness. Her hitching sobs, disproportionate to the force of Mr. Abraham’s blows, seem to cry for every dismal, uncomfortable student in the class. They read out loud from a book about metals and the layers of the earth, which makes Vanessa yawn and squirm. The only metal the island gets is brought in by wanderers, and the only layer of earth she cares about is the mud outside, slowly thawing.
During recess everyone huddles together, both because it’s still chilly and because they’re wretched. There are clots of younger children sluggishly circulating around the school, playing slowly and clumsily like they forgot how. Vanessa sees Janey Solomon’s copper head and creeps closer to hear what she’s saying. There’s a group of girls around her, and Mary is stuck to her side as usual.
“Having two babies at once is ridiculous,” Janey is saying, wiping a strand of bright hair off her forehead. “I’m surprised she’s alive; she should have just ripped in two.”
“But now she can stop,” points out Mary. “She’s had her two children.”
“Maybe,” chimes in Fiona Adam. “Father says they might only count them as one child, and let her have another.”
“I read once about twins who were born stuck together,” says Vanessa, her confident voice carrying over the group. “Two legs, but two heads. They grew up and lived until they were old.” Vanessa’s library is invaluable; she can almost always tell people something they don’t know.
Everyone turns to face her. “That’s impossible,” says Fiona, scowling darkly.
“I saw a picture,” says Vanessa defiantly.
“It’s just a different type of defective,” says Janey, and Vanessa feels a small leap of pride at being defended by her. “Except they lived. I didn’t know they had defectives, before.”
Not all defectives are born early, and some do continue to draw breath. Vanessa saw a defective delivered once that was quietly placed facedown in a bowl of water while its mother cried. It had no legs, just a tail that trailed off into nothing. Vanessa always wondered if it would have lived, had it been allowed to continue breathing.
“They both lived. Or it lived, or she lived,” said Vanessa. “At least old enough to be a child.”
“So if you marry her, are you marrying one wife or two?” asks Letty, and everyone giggles.
“What other defectives did you see in that book?” demands Janey.
“None,” Vanessa admits. “Only those. They were dressed up in weird clothes and had paint on their faces.”
Everyone nods wisely, as if they know what this signifies.
“I think it was a story,” says Fiona. “Somebody made it up. How could something like that eat? Does it use both mouths or one? If you punch it, does it hurt both of them or just one?”
“Some of the defectives are bled out,” Carla Adam points out. “And sometimes they have more than two legs, although I’ve never heard of two heads.”
“I heard once,” says Letty, “that a woman gave birth to a defective that was a fish. It had gills and scales and everything.”
“Ha! Who did she spend the night with?” cries Fiona, and everyone doubles over laughing at the thought of a woman lying down under a big fish. They become breathless with giggling, their laughter echoing around the glum field.
As their mirth wanes, there’s a pause, and then Diana Saul says thoughtfully, “Alicia is pregnant.” Diana used to be Alicia’s best friend, before Alicia bled and had her summer of fruition. Now Alicia is married to Harold Balthazar and her belly is swelling. She looks strange to Vanessa when they pass each other at church, with her skinny legs sticking out of a woman’s dress.
“It’ll be your turn next summer,” says Letty to Diana, and it’s hard to tell if she’s trying to be comforting or threatening. Diana presses her palms against her flat chest, as if to test for new growth, and then runs her hands contentedly down her ribs. Nobody looks at Fiona, who missed her summer of fruition by about two days. Her body is pushing against her dress in all directions, fighting to emerge from the straight shift.
“Amanda Balthazar bled out, I heard,” says Lily Jacob. “All of a sudden, her blood just all fell out and she dropped dead on the floor.”
Everyone glances at Janey, who loved Amanda. Her face is turned away toward a cluster of boys playing with a frog. “She—” she says. Her voice is heavy and trembling, and she continues looking studiously away from them. Mary puts a tentative hand on her arm, and Janey lashes it off with a violent motion and then becomes still again.
“Anyone can bleed out,” Diana says. “Sometimes it’s a defective, but sometimes it’s just bad luck.”
“My mother almost bled out once,” says Letty, “when I was younger. Her skin looked like chalk and she had to lie in bed for weeks.”
“I heard that it’s your monthly bleeding that will tell you,” says Diana. “If you bleed a lot every month then you won’t bleed out, but if you don’t bleed much then the blood builds up in your womb, and then suddenly you bleed out the baby.”
“I don’t think she bled out,” says a voice so soft Vanessa has to search for the speaker. She sees tiny, bedraggled Caitlin Jacob standing awkwardly at one side of the group. Vanessa finds Caitlin annoying, with her hunched-over frame and shyness; she acts like a frightened mouse.
“What do you mean?” demands Letty. “Of course she did.”
Caitlin shakes her head, but she’s already backing away slowly, admitting defeat in front of Letty’s indignation.
“Wait,” says Janey, turning and holding out her hand. Caitlin stops and looks at her. Janey’s face is pale beneath her freckles, and her eyes are hooded and glassy. “What do you mean?”
Caitlin glances around as if waiting for someone and then shakes her head so her braid falls over her shoulder, hiding a bruise on her neck. “Nothing.”
“Come here,” says Janey in a sweet tone Vanessa has never heard before. Caitlin hovers indecisively, but then slips in next to her.
“Now,” says Janey, putting a hand on her shoulder, “why do you say she didn’t bleed out?” Vanessa has a sudden picture of Janey and Amanda running together two summers ago, muddy and bloody with their teeth bared.
“Because I saw her,” says Caitlin so quietly that they have to lean in to hear her. “I saw her in the water. She drowned.”
“In the water?” exclaims Fiona, but Janey silences her with a wave of her hand.
“When did you see her?” asks Janey.
“It was yesterday,” says Caitlin, and suddenly Vanessa notices how tired she looks, with purple half-moons under bloodshot eyes. There’s a pattern of small bruises up her forearm. “I saw them take her body out of the water. It was all blue. Her body.”
“Who took her body?”
“The wanderers. They were standing there in their black coats. They pulled her out of the water.”
“Are you sure?” says Janey.
“Even if that was true, you don’t know she drowned,” says Fiona. “She could have bled out and then…” She trails off, trying to think of a reason Amanda’s body would have been in the sea.
“There was water coming out of her mouth,” says Caitlin.
Everyone is silent for a moment, and then Fiona glares at Caitlin. “Liar.”
&n
bsp; Caitlin shakes her head, and everyone looks at her frail, marked body. There’s an awkward silence.
Letty sighs dismissively. “Why would they tell us she bled out?”
But Janey’s face is stony, her hands trembling. She takes Caitlin’s shoulder and peers at her intently. Caitlin, surprisingly, stares back, looking weary but determined. Inhaling, Janey releases her and walks off, leaving the school grounds. Mary is shifting her gaze from Janey to the other girls, trying to decide what to do, when Mr. Joseph, who teaches one of the younger classrooms, comes to call everyone back into the school. He looks at Janey’s retreating body, but then shrugs one shoulder and turns away.
Back in the classroom, Mr. Abraham starts talking about types of metal in the wastelands, and Mary puts her head on her folded arms. Caitlin is staring vacantly out the window. Vanessa looks around, trying to catch someone’s eye, but all the girls are resolutely faced forward.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Vanessa
For dinner, the wanderer Adams are expecting the new Adams. Vanessa knows she should be wild with anticipation, but she can’t stop thinking about Janey’s freckled, blazing face gazing at Caitlin’s small, exhausted one. She would normally resent Caitlin and her whispery voice for taking everyone’s attention away from her story of stuck-together twins, but she’s too puzzled by what that whispery voice said.
Why would somebody put Amanda Balthazar’s body into the water after she bled out? Dead bodies are buried deep below the farmlands. She’s heard people say that they fertilize the crops, and others say that they stay whole until summer, when everything turns to muck and they sink like stones through endless layers of earth. Amanda couldn’t have gone into the water and then suddenly bled out, because adults don’t go out during the summer. Or if they do, they don’t go in the water. The only explanation that would make sense is that her husband, crazed with grief, tried to wash off the blood in the sea. But why drag her all the way to the sea if he wanted to wash her? The mosquitoes would have sucked him dry. It doesn’t make any sense to Vanessa, no matter how long she turns it over in her mind. Finally, she decides Caitlin must be a very good liar. But it doesn’t seem right for Caitlin to be a very good anything.
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