“Show me the body, then, if she’s dead. Prove it.” Caitlin knows she isn’t making sense, but doesn’t care. “You say she’s dead? Show me the body. You have her locked up somewhere, don’t you? Locked up to punish her for being sick.”
He takes a deep breath and kneels down to be closer to her face. She leans backwards. “Caitlin. Your mother is no longer with us. She’s gone to the ancestors. I’m all you have left.”
“That’s not true!” shouts Caitlin. She sees a flash of anger in his eyes and instinctively cowers close to the floor.
“I did the best I could!” Father shouts back, rising. “I tried to help her eat and drink and I washed her when she needed it and she still died! And then I helped you! Who do you think was bringing you food and water? Who do you think washed you when you pissed yourself? She’s dead, Caitlin, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Fury rushes through Caitlin like a storm, so loud and hot that she can barely see. “Liar!” she screams, and hurls her whole body and head into his belly. He falls over like a rotten tree in a strong wind, and she runs over him and out the door, into a cold drizzle of rain. Weakened by her sickness, she can only run like a very young child, tottering along with her arms waving, slipping and falling, but she doesn’t take the time to look behind her. Reaching the sea, she collapses to her knees, out of breath. Father isn’t over her shoulder, so she pushes herself up and starts walking down the shoreline, the cold dark sand sticking to her feet, the windswept water raging blackly at her. Eventually, when she’s too tired to walk anymore, she curls up by one of the structures Janey built. Caitlin closes her eyes and hears the faint echoes of children giggling, breathes in the clean smoke of burning wood, feels the soft shiver of sand as small excited footsteps whisk by her. When she opens her eyes again, she is utterly alone. Her nightgown is drenched and stings her cold skin. Pushing her head down on the sand, she falls asleep. She dreams that the branches spiking upright to form the shelter skeleton gather around her like sentries, multiply and flourish into a forest that hides her from Father when he comes looking.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Janey
A few weeks after Janey returns home, she and her family begin to notice people outside. The first time Mother sees a group of people through the window, she yells and waves until they come within shouting range. They call that they were sick, but they survived the sickness and so now can leave their houses without fear of contagion. It’s the first time Janey hears that living through the illness is possible.
She knows that there were some girls who didn’t leave the beach when she and Mary did. Not many; the combined blow of losing Janey and hearing the story about Mrs. Aaron sent most of the girls anxiously fleeing to their families, a mass exodus weeping bitterly—at the loss of their rebellion, at the dead or dying parents and siblings who might be awaiting them in their long-avoided houses. A few of them, however, refused to leave, declaring obstinately that they didn’t care if their mother and father dropped dead, they were staying on the beach. Janey thinks about them often. Are they still there, those few brave, heartless ones, running down the shoreline and piling together under a mountain of blankets, eating fruit from untended orchards and playing whatever savage games take their fancy?
Janey spends the next few days gazing out the kitchen window. Occasionally two people meet in the distance, and after a brief shouted conversation they move close, hugging and talking, touching each other’s arms and face as if patting clay into a wall, as if making sure nothing is broken. Janey, yearning to be in open space, finds it harder to watch than an empty landscape.
Father sits in the front room and sleeps all day. Janey whispers to Mary that he must have secret activities at night, because she’s never seen a man sleep so much. When she’s tired of watching Mary, she watches Father, the way his eyelids are finely lined with small purple veins, the tapering of his fingers from knuckle to fingertip. Normally Father stays away from the house, preferring to tend to their farm, and he usually makes himself small and unobtrusive at night; apart from his visit to her at the beach, she has rarely spent time alone with him. She sees the way his mustache floats slightly upward with each breath, the small smile on his face when he wakes up and sees her gazing at him, the calm, fond glances he shoots at Mary when she is turned away. When he thinks nobody is watching, he puts his fingertips on his face and cries quietly. Once again, she is struck with the suspicion that she should have trusted Father earlier.
Every evening, Father prays to the ancestors to protect his wife and daughters, which is nice, as he usually prays for the crops or the weather. But the sweet prayers can’t mask the awfulness of dinner. Thanks to the late-summer harvest, they have ample stores of corn, but Mother and Father have always traded for everything else they eat. Butter, cheese, most vegetables, meat, and fruit are all paid for in corn, and now they must sit and eat what they would have traded away. Corn mush for breakfast, dense corn bread for lunch, and bowls of corn soup for dinner. As usual, Mother vainly coaxes Janey to eat more than a mouthful, but she undermines this encouragement by picking listlessly at her own food. Janey wonders what the other families are doing, those who trade labor or cloth. You can’t eat sweat, or wool.
Janey argues endlessly to leave the house. “Do you realize,” she says to Mother, “that we lived out there with no adults for weeks and weeks?”
“And now you’re here. And I will keep you alive if I can help it.”
“But we came home to keep you alive!”
“Well, then we’ll just have to keep each other alive. But I am your mother, in this house—”
“I could go back anytime!”
“You’d freeze, Janey. I’m surprised you haven’t already, all of you.”
“We kept warm,” says Mary. “We had fires, and we slept cuddled together.” Janey glares at her. The details of their freedom are cherished secret’s, not to be handed out thoughtlessly to adults.
Janey is irritable, thwarted, tired. The girl who once led a rebellion of daughters is trapped at home like a buzzing insect in a box. The last few weeks seem like one long dream, distant and impossible now that she is obeying Mother and grumping around at home. Sometimes she slips out of the top of her dress to examine the healing lines of pain that drape around her body like filigree. Ironically, she finds the proof of her shaming comforting, a concrete reminder that she did not simply imagine her time on the beach.
“I wish I’d been sick,” complains Janey pettily as she and Mary sit one afternoon and watch two people run toward each other joyfully and fling themselves into each other’s arms. “Then I could go out.”
“You do not,” says Mary, and then, “What if we can never leave?”
“Leave the house? Of course we can leave the house. We’re not trapped in here forever. We have legs.”
“How long would you wait to leave? To make sure the sickness was gone?”
Janey looks uncertain. “It depends,” she says finally. They watch another person—a woman, it looks like—walk across the landscape.
“But if we never get sick and survive it,” says Mary, “how can we be allowed out where the sickness is?”
“I don’t know,” snaps Janey. “I don’t know everything.”
“Oh, really,” snorts Mary. Janey scowls.
The next morning, Janey leaves before dawn.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Vanessa
Now that people are emerging alive from the illness, Vanessa wants to go out too. Father tells her she can’t, despite the magical medicine that won’t let her get sick.
“I can’t be positive it will work,” says Father, looking down and away, which means he’s lying. “Besides, you don’t look like you’ve been ill. It would seem strange.”
“What do they look like? The people who’ve been ill?”
“Thin. Pale, like they’ve lost all their blood.” Father’s look is distant and weary. “They’re weak, and they cough and have to catch their
breath.”
“I could pretend.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, you couldn’t.”
Vanessa stays in the house with Mother, alternately cuddling and sniping, trying to amuse a bored and fretful Benjamin. They have exhausted his favorite songs, stories, and games, and he repeatedly asks to go out, confused at their lack of response. At one point, Vanessa smears butter on her face for him to lick like a dog. Infuriated by the waste, Mother smacks Vanessa, but her hand slides greasily away and lands on the wall with a satisfying slap.
Vanessa finds it ironic that those who almost died can walk about freely, while the healthy are still rattling about their houses like trapped mice. “Are they going to just take over?” she asks Mother. “Will the people who never got sick stay in their houses forever, and become a race of hidden people?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Mother says. “As soon as Father says there are no more people getting sick, we can go out.”
“How long does there have to be nobody sick? A day? A week? A year?”
“A week,” says Mother, sounding uncertain, but Vanessa grasps at her words. Father keeps them updated when he comes home in the evenings. Two days. Three days. After five days, Father silently shakes his head.
Let pain pass through your mind like water, she tells herself firmly, her eyes flickering closed. Let it fall away like a dream.
Eventually Mother persuades Father to let her roam, and spends a whole day and most of a night away, visiting houses and speaking with friends. Vanessa sulks and worries, Benjamin screams. And then, on the sixth day with no new illness, the new Mr. Adam comes over.
Vanessa is upstairs, trying to read, when she hears the door close. Thinking it’s Father, who went to meet the wanderers, she jumps up and speeds downstairs for news. Instead she sees Mr. Adam. He is shirtless, weaving through the door, his face flushed, his eyes wet and scarlet in their sockets. At first she thinks he’s sick, but then the smell reaches her and she realizes he’s drunk.
“Father’s not home,” says Vanessa.
“Good.” He coughs and spits out some phlegm. “My wife is dead.”
Vanessa pictures Mrs. Adam laughing, her hands in the dirt, and feels like she’s been struck in the chest. Pain flares in her throat, and she chokes for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” she manages lamely. She will not show Mr. Adam her grief, but she feels it running under the floor like a river, waiting to permeate the skin of her soles. “When…when did she die?”
“Two days ago,” he mutters.
“Did the baby die?”
“It wasn’t old enough not to die with her,” he says.
“Of course not,” Vanessa says awkwardly. He continues to stand there. She feels dazed, bewildered. “Would you…would you like some tea?”
“I don’t want any tea.”
“No.” She stands there with her hands folded and suddenly wonders what happened to his shirt.
“I know what you do with your father,” says Mr. Adam.
Vanessa’s breathing quickens as she realizes he knows about the medicine. “It wasn’t my choice, I didn’t have any idea.”
“But you went along with it.”
“I fought. I mean—”
“Soon it became the way things were.”
Vanessa remembers Father’s fingers depositing the pebble in her mouth and doesn’t know what to say.
“My wife is dead,” Mr. Adam says again.
“I’m so sorry,” mutters Vanessa wearily. She needs him to leave. She needs to sit alone in the library and cry. “So sorry,” she says again in a dull voice, like a drowsy, miserable child repeating a rhyme.
“It’s terrible to lose someone you love.”
“Yes.”
“None of the wanderers died, or their families. How do you explain that?”
A streak of fear shoots upward like a flaming bird, tearing through Vanessa’s throat. “I…don’t know.”
“Your father loves you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes?”
“All those nights in his arms.”
Vanessa looks around, vainly hoping that Mother has returned. “Father’s coming back any time now.”
“No he’s not. He’s at one of those wanderer meetings. Secret, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You like what he does, don’t you?”
“I don’t really know what he does, I mean…”
“You know. I know. Everyone knows.”
“Knows what?”
“I heard some girls try to fight it, but not you.” He is swelling again like he did in the library, blocking the light. Her breath quickens, and she tries to calm herself, putting a hand on her belly.
“I told you, I did try.”
“That you like it.”
“No I don’t. It’s bitter.”
Mr. Adam laughs loudly for a while. “I’m sure it is.”
“I think you should go.”
“Such a pretty girl. I don’t even know if I was going to have a girl.”
“I’m sure you’ll have one later,” she says stupidly.
“It’s why we came here, you know.”
“To have a girl?”
“So to speak.” He smiles crookedly.
“What?”
“I’ve seen you watching me.”
Startled, Vanessa pulls back, crossing her arms over herself.
“Look at you now, in that pretty dress.”
Vanessa looks down to her drab dress, spattered with stains. “Uh…thank you.”
“Why should I have to wait years?”
“For what?”
“You’re used to it already. It’s genius.”
“What’s genius?”
“You. You in that dress.”
He marches up to Vanessa, quicker than she thought he could move for how drunk he smells. He puts a hand on her arm and kneads it painfully. “Such pretty white skin.”
Suddenly Vanessa feels like an animal about to be slaughtered. She moves back a few steps, but he advances until she’s trapped against a wall. “Pretty girl,” he says, and tries to put his mouth on hers. She cringes away, and he smears saliva against her ear.
“Stop, Mr. Adam. You can’t. They—they’ll shame you. They’ll exile you.” She inhales his sour, drunken smell and wishes she didn’t have to breathe. “It’s against the shalt-nots.”
“But why do you care? Why do you care? You get it every night.”
“I don’t. Leave me alone.”
“From your father. Do you know how sick that is?”
For a second Vanessa thinks he’s talking about the illness. Then she’s not sure what he’s talking about. Every girl lies down under her father, even if nobody talks about it. Like picking your nose, or scratching your bottom; it’s not something to be discussed in public, but you know everyone does it in darkness, when nobody else is looking.
His hand is on her, pulling, and it hurts. Taking a deep breath, she ducks down, then darts to the side. Vanessa runs up the creaky stairs with Mr. Adam huffing behind her. “Go away!” she screams as she runs into Mother and Father’s bedroom. “Leave me alone!”
“Why should I? Why shouldn’t I take what I want? He does. My wife is dead. His wife is alive. He takes what he wants.” He grabs at Vanessa’s dress, and she pulls away. The sleeve rips off. She should have run out the front door, she knows now, and curses herself for her stupidity.
“That’s different!” she yells.
“Oh, it’s different.”
“Father loves me! And I love him. And I hate you!” This time it’s a piece of the skirt.
His hands close around her waist, and he’s got her against him with one arm, undoing his pants with the other, heaving his stinking breath into her face. Wriggling, she sinks her teeth deep into his arm until she tastes meat and copper. He roars and lets go.
“Bitch!” he says, dabbing at the welling marks. Vanessa casts her eyes around and sees a rock that Mother brought home a long chi
ld-summer ago, black veined with blue. As Mr. Adam comes for her again, she swings it and smashes the window. Grabbing a shard of glass with her palm, she hurtles around and slices at Mr. Adam’s belly.
Blood beads onto his skin, and he stumbles back, looking comically surprised. Vanessa slices him again, and this time the blood pours. He lets out a yell, hoarse and gurgling, and closes his meaty hands around her throat.
Without air, Vanessa desperately thrusts the glass into him and jerks it out, shuddering at the stretch and give of the thick skin that leads to his soft flesh beneath. His hands weaken, and he takes a step back. She is warm and sticky, and he falls heavily to his knees.
Behind him is Father, suddenly there, swinging a length of wood and smashing it into Mr. Adam’s head. He turns to take hold of Vanessa, who slashes and pushes wildly with the shard of glass. “Vanessa. Vanessa. Vanessa!”
She stops. Father’s arms are covered in cuts, and the glass has sliced into her hand so a thick stream of blood spirals down her wrist. “Vanessa,” he says again, pale as paper. He steps forward and unwinds her fingers from the shard one by one, setting it on the floor carefully like it’s alive. The glass is coated with blood and globules of fat. “Vanessa, what happened?”
Mr. Adam is moaning and writhing and holding his head, but Father doesn’t seem to care. As soon as Father lets go, Vanessa snatches for the shard, holds it to her chest with her uninjured hand, and backs against the wall. “Vanessa, he won’t hurt you,” Father says. She sinks down into a crouch, the crimson glass in her slippery grip.
Father stares at her and then turns to Mr. Adam, whose eyelids are fluttering. “He’s got so much fat that I don’t think you hurt him very much,” Father says thoughtfully. This surprises Vanessa, as Mr. Adam is lying in a dark red lake of blood. “Vanessa, you had better leave.”
“What happens now?” she whispers.
“Now he’s exiled. I’m almost glad his wife is dead.” Father kicks Mr. Adam in the ribs, eliciting a groan.
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