Gather the Daughters

by Jennie Melamed

  Janey

  Mary and Janey work through the night to build a large shelter, held up by birch branches and woven through with bark and dead grass. Janey’s fingers fly like narrow white birds as she twines strands together, looping and winding. They are companionably silent in their task, with only the sounds of bark scratching against bare wood, and their feet shifting in the sand.

  Fiona arrives first in the pearly gray early morning, looking petrified, along with Rosie, who looks fierce as usual. Mary welcomes them with embraces. Fiona holds on for a long time, shaking, and Rosie irritably accepts a few seconds of Mary’s arms and then shrugs her off.

  “So what are we going to do here?” asks Rosie.

  “Live,” says Janey simply.

  “They’ll never let us.”

  “We’ll figure out what we need to,” replies Janey, her confidence burgeoning outside but weak and thready inside. Rosie is right; the adults will not tolerate defection. She needs time to discover some advantage, some strategy for resistance.

  “My father will come for me,” whispers Fiona. “He’ll beat me.”

  “Then why did you come?” snaps Rosie.

  “I couldn’t not come,” says Fiona. “It’s…it’s my only chance, you know.”

  Letty comes later in the morning, saying she simply walked out of school. “The teachers don’t really know what to do when you look like you know where you’re going,” she reports. “What are we doing here? What are we going to do here?”

  “We’re going to live together on the beach,” says Mary, her sweet voice full of joy.

  “For how long?” says Letty. “They’ll come for us.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” says Janey. “For now, welcome.”

  Violet comes running up breathless, laughing and sobbing with exhaustion. “I ran the whole way here!” she cries. “I ran the whole way! I’m going to stay here with you!” Her breath is rapid and her voice a little hysterical; Letty goes over and rubs her back in circles until she’s breathing more normally. “I brought a bowl,” says Violet, “I thought we might need a bowl.” Then she bursts into laughter, and so do the others.

  Over the next three days, the girls come to join Janey one by one: apologetically, triumphantly, so quietly that she simply wakes up to find them there. They bring food, sisters, buckets of rainwater. Their eyes are disbelieving, like this is the dream, and tomorrow they will wake up in their regular lives, mourning a vision of freedom. They are mostly Mary’s age, teetering on the brink of fruition, although some have younger girls in tow. Abigail Balthazar, who is only three, cries so hard for her mother that her sister, Lila, must grumpily go leave her on the doorstep. Janey had hoped to see Vanessa Adam, but she remains obtrusively absent. Perhaps she is upset because Janey intimated that her father killed people. The rest of the girls slowly move into the motions of life. There are basic problems to solve: food, warmth, fire.

  The supplies the girls bring dwindle quickly, and Janey forbids theft. “I don’t know why they haven’t come for us already,” she says. “Maybe they’re trying to figure out what to do. The last thing we need is to be stealing from them.” They dig for clams, nibble on different kinds of seaweed to discover which are edible, daring the others to try the slimiest specimens. Despite the prohibition on stealing, Dava Gideon sneaks home in the middle of the night and takes her little brother’s fishing rod and hook. Her bounty is scant, bony fish barely the size of her palm, but the act of catching them makes the girls whoop and cheer. When the rainwater runs out, Janey agrees to have Rosie steal a small rain barrel. After all, she says, there are plenty of unused barrels and an endless well of rain waiting in the sky.

  Fires must be small and innocuous, ideally walled with sand, and when darkness comes the beach springs to life, small flaming blossoms opening on delicate wooden skeletons, warming hands and half cooking fish flesh that will be sucked from needle-sharp bones. When it is deep night, stars plastered across the sky and frost beginning to form on the ground, the girls retreat to the shelter, where they curl up and stretch out and form patterns of limbs meeting together to create a breathing, slumbering, murmuring mass of dirty cloth and tangled hair and still faces.

  During the day, the more industrious girls hunt for food, care for the little ones, and tend to the shelter. Most of the others simply hitch on to whatever amusement catches them. They build castles and moats out of sand and reverently transport minnows, crabs, and snails to pools, where they are named and fed everything from seaweed to spit. Girls strip naked and wade into the water to have vicious, laughing fights, the drenched losers and winners alike warming themselves by sunlight and wading back in again. Dogs run by to investigate this new island population, wagging and barking in greeting, and often staying for a game of chase or tug-of-war before they head back to their home for more reliable food. The one exception is Roro, the apple farmer Saul’s dog, who is enormous and shaggy and gray and seems quite content to spend all day with the girls. With his tongue lolling and tail wagging, he plunges into the water, then rolls in the sand and stretches luxuriously in the sun, only to crash back into the water again. This infuriates Dava, who is always yelling at everyone to be still and not scare the fish. Vera Balthazar, whose father weaves, makes endless garlands of wildflowers, evening blue and golden yellow and blushing pink, and places as many on Roro as he will tolerate, so he springs around the beach shedding glorious scraps of color as the stems come undone.

  When the girls are tired, or lazy, they sit and talk, heads on each other’s stomachs or thighs. They talk about the girls who aren’t on the beach and what they must be doing, and they talk about the girls who are on the beach, and they talk about what they will name their sons and daughters, and they talk about which hurts more, burning or freezing, and if being gathered into the ancestors’ arms involves literally being hugged for all eternity. They proclaim their disgust with boys, and pregnant women, and parents, and everyone who isn’t a girl with a straight, neat body and long sand-caked hair and more freedom than she’s ever tasted in her life. Each hour, it seems, another girl shows shyly at the beach and is welcomed with kind words and shouts of “What took you so long?”

  Everything seems brighter, the colors of the island sharper and more vivid. Janey sees the violet undertone in each ripple of water, the amber shimmer of sun-warmed sand, the dulcet, garnet gleam in each strand of Mary’s damp hair. Janey’s own flesh seems lovelier, creamy-white with sea-green veins buried beneath her pigment-flecked forearm. The sky arcs gracefully above them in washes of blue, the dense, pillowy clouds pearlescent and peach-toned along their bulging bellies. They reflect in the sea like giant, harmless beasts, slowly drifting toward the horizon.

  Janey wakes early the third morning, at the first tint of crimson shattering the black night sky, as if someone had shaken her from slumber. She takes the precious moment gladly and watches the girls sleep peacefully. Let this last, she prays, she knows not to who—certainly not the ancestors, or their puppetmaster God. Just for a little while, let them have this. Let me have it. Please.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Vanessa

  Vanessa,” says Father, “I need to talk with you.”

  It’s late at night, but Vanessa is still awake, and he knows it. Ever since the meeting with Janey she has been thrumming with indecision, with excitement, alternately preparing to run out the door barefoot and then sitting down to carefully plan a list of supplies she will bring to the beach. Vanessa has thought through her mundane future, and dreamed of the power to alter it, but she never pictured this.

  Obediently, Vanessa follows Father downstairs in her nightgown. She can hear Mother moving restlessly in her and Father’s bedroom. Ben is the only one sleeping well tonight. She pictures his golden hair spiraled out in wild tufts, his baby mouth drooling innocently on his pillow.

  Father sits at the kitchen table, the yellowing, mealy remnants of an apple core lying next to him. Vanessa avoids his eyes, staring at the clea
n-swept floor and her small bare feet.

  “Vanessa, I know about the girls on the beach,” he says.

  “I thought everybody would know by now.”

  He shrugs. “True enough. It’s unprecedented. At least since…” She waits, confused, but he makes a motion with his hand like he’s throwing something away. “Vanessa, what Janey Solomon is doing is…” He searches for the word, then stops. Catching her gaze, he sighs. “I know. I know. But Vanessa, hear this now, hear me clearly: you will not join her.”

  She stares at her feet again.

  “Do you hear me?”

  She nods, feeling like a ghost in her nightgown, transparent, without will or agency. And yet she could disobey him. She could walk out that door tonight, when the house is dark, after he has left her room. Suddenly, a surge of power boils in her chest, so astonishing that she gasps out loud. He cannot stop her.

  “Vanessa, please look at me.”

  She doesn’t want to. She stares at his chest, the rough-woven, stained cloth, the slight rise and fall of his breath.

  “Look at me, Vanessa,” he says, and she reluctantly brings her eyes to his. With him sitting, their gazes are level. His eyes are so like hers, hazel with gold and green, a dark splotch on one iris, slightly narrow and fringed with thick burgundy lashes. Slipping away from his gaze, she looks at his set mouth, also like hers, the deep-cut notch in the full upper lip.

  “I know what you did,” she whispers.

  “What?”

  “I know what the wanderers did.”

  He stares at her, his brow furrowed. “What did we do?”

  She leans forward and hisses, “You killed Amanda Balthazar.”

  To her surprise, he looks bewildered instead of guilty or enraged. “Vanessa, what in the ancestors’ names are you talking about?”

  Vanessa blinks and shifts from foot to foot. “It’s true,” she murmurs.

  “Vanessa, who on earth have you been listening to? Of course we didn’t kill Amanda Balthazar. She bled out. It was very sad, but the wanderers had nothing to do with it.”

  “She didn’t bleed out. They pulled her body from the water.”

  “What? Vanessa, are you…are you awake? You’re not making sense.”

  She stares at him intently, trying to elicit a gleam of knowledge from his eyes, a shade of shame in the twitch of his lips. He looks at her, confused, and she sighs. “It’s true,” she insists again.

  “I am sure you heard something, Vanessa, but I would know if that happened, wouldn’t I?”

  She nods slowly. Could the wanderers have excluded Father from their darkest workings?

  Father shakes his head, as if to clear the accusation, and then says, “We were talking about you staying home, where you belong.”

  “But Father—”

  “I want you safe and alive,” he tells her softly. “We’re going to wait until the girls get hungry and cold and come home. The others are certain it will happen in a few days, but I’m not so sure. If time passes and they’re still out there, I’m sure the plan will change and we’ll start searching.”

  Vanessa crosses her arms under her chest, puts her hand on her throat. “Are they going to kill them?” she asks. “Kill the girls on the beach?”

  “Please don’t be ridiculous. Of course not.”

  “Well, then, why can’t I be safe and alive with them?”

  He sighs. “I know it’s selfish, Vanessa. But if you can’t see why you shouldn’t run away from school and your mother and your home, then do it for me. I need you here with me. I have done so much for this island, so much for this family. I just need you to be good. I need you to be the good girl you are. Please, stay here for me, and be good for me. Please don’t go.” He takes her hands in his strong, hard ones, then pulls her into his arms.

  She resists slightly, meets his eyes with her mirror ones. “Don’t you want to me to…” She can’t find the right words, although she discards many—be free, run, fight, rebel, be a child one last time. A precious few seconds pass, and the moment of opportunity is lost. Her hope of escape drains into the floorboards.

  “Who is my little wife?” asks Father in a sweet tone.

  “I am,” whispers Vanessa.

  “And what do wives do?”

  Vanessa hesitates. He’s never followed up with this question before, and a multitude of answers mill through her mind.

  “Do wives stay with their husbands?”

  She sighs. “Yes, wives stay with their husbands,” she echoes dully.

  “Be a good girl,” he whispers again. Her heart is clamoring and screaming to go, run out the door, but his pull is stronger, and the weight of him on her shoulders drags her to the ground.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Caitlin

  Countless times over the next few days, Caitlin steps out her front door and walks a few strides in the direction of the beach. Each time she stops, sighs, and turns on her heel, returning to her stultifying existence of cooking and sewing and trying to fade into walls and tables.

  A foreign, previously undiscovered part of Caitlin is waking up. It burgeons and yawns and stretches under the blanket of her ribs, sealed in soft sheaths of slimy muscle. It breathes and shivers. It terrifies her to no end.

  She puts her hands on the rotting frame of the back door and surveys the unweeded, blackbird-savaged corn lurching crookedly from its stems. Father is nominally a corn farmer, but all of their barter comes from his mash-wine, which doesn’t require corn that is whole or even unblackened. His vats, set aside from the house, brew a concoction so burning and strong it must be watered and honeyed heavily before it is potable.

  Caitlin has a strong aversion to the vats. Once, when she was younger, Father found her dropping pebbles into the searing brew, to see if they would dissolve before they hit the bottom. He wrapped his hand around the back of her skull and shoved her head under the conflagrant liquid. She saw the color of pain inside that vat, red-black and flaming brighter than any fire. He left her weeping and vomiting acid, wondering if she was blind, if the crimson surge had burned out the hollows of her eyes. She was sick in bed for a week after. When Mother asked, she obediently told her that she’d fallen in while playing. She could just see Mother’s face, blurry through her stinging eyes, and watched the smudges of her features contract and change shape. Caitlin could tell from the way Mother wept and kicked the wall that she didn’t believe her.

  Suddenly the smell, so familiar and pervasive, makes her eyes hurt. She walks quickly to the front door and stands there, breathing fresher air. She mulls on Mother’s impotent grief.

  A thought that Caitlin has been trying to suppress abruptly rises to the surface: if she leaves, if she is not there to stand in front of Mother and absorb Father’s violence, what will happen to Mother?

  But another voice, one that has been driven down even deeper, suddenly sings forth. She should be standing in front of me.

  She stares at the horizon: the trees wave, the clouds pass.

  Caitlin leaves that night.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Janey

  It is dusk, blossom tones seeping across a graying sky. Kneeling in the damp sand, Janey is digging for clams while the others finish their slumber. Mary is curled up back to back with Ruth Balthazar, her face inches from the lightly snoring Frances Adam, everyone unconsciously snuggling closer for warmth in the crisp air.

  Scanning for pinpoint airholes, Janey uses two long fingers to dig small vertical tunnels until her nails hit a shock of wet shell, and then she scrabbles to catch the burrowing creatures before they escape. Clamming was never one of her skills before the beach, but she has become quite good at it and enjoys the bloodless hunt. As the stars come out, the girls will rise, yawn, and take to smashing the huddled clams with rocks and sucking out the salty, slimy insides. Sometimes, if the moon is dark enough that the smoke won’t show, the girls make small fires, put a rock by the flames, and boil the clams in their own juices until their sh
ells creak open reluctantly, leaking clear seawater like tears of grief.

  There are snuffles and snorts as the girls wake, see the lilac sky, and roll over for another few minutes of dreaming. They are nocturnal now, sleeping during the crisp fall days and rising at night, always moving their chosen sleeping spot lest habits give them away. Their shelters are flimsy and hastily made. Janey already recognizes the danger of this communal sleeping and suspects soon each girl will need to choose her own hiding place in which to doze during the day. And yet it is hard to deliver that edict, for watching the girls sleep in a pile like puppies, soaking in a more peaceful hibernation than many of them have ever known, gives Janey a sweetness in her chest that rises to the back of her tongue and makes her lips curl upward with pleasure.

  There is a sharp rustle to her right, and she freezes. A large figure emerges from the brush, and Janey’s breath pulses in her throat. “Janey?” whispers a familiar voice.

  Janey half crouches into a fighting stance, although there is no way she could prevail against Father; he is a large man and she a spindly, exhausted girl. But then she notices that he is carrying a basket smelling of fresh bread and festooned with wildflowers, and she straightens, feeling foolish. “Father,” she says.

  “Your mother insisted on the flowers,” replies Father, looking at her kindly. “I said that living outside, you could probably find your own flowers if you liked.” Coppery glints glow in his cropped hair and square beard, the same shades that smolder on Janey’s skull.

  “They’re pretty,” says Janey softly, staring at the tiny golden blossoms. “Tell her I liked them.”

  “She made you bread. She said she can’t imagine what you’re eating out here. It’s not like it’s summer and there are offerings on every doorstep.”

  “Well, we eat,” says Janey lamely. “Tell her not to worry.”