After peering out the door a few times to see Mother either yawning or scowling, Vanessa catches her nodding off. Eventually Mother sighs and puts her face in her hands. Quietly, Vanessa squeezes through the door, crawls around her, and heads down the stairs on her hands and knees.
“I’m sorry, James, you’re outvoted.” James is Father. “We need new people. We need parents to take on the children who have no parents!”
“There are only ten who lost both mother and father, and we have enough families who lost children to take them in,” insists Father.
“We need to replenish our stock anyhow. More and more defectives each year, women bleed out—have freaks—and sometimes they die of it. The ancestors warned us of this, and we’ve ignored the warnings. Remember what Philip Adam wrote about diseases, how they flatten a herd unless—”
“People aren’t goats,” interrupts another wanderer.
“They breed like them, and we’ve had as many generations of the same people breeding as we can stand. We’re starting to breed wrong. For all we know, this disease could have been avoided. We need new blood.”
“Fuck new blood and fuck breeding. This is a message from the ancestors. We have slipped, and our standards for everyone have slipped. How can you think that now, now, when the girls have rebelled beyond anything we’ve ever seen, when they are asking dangerous questions—”
“It has to be done, the defectives are the ancestors’ way of—”
“James. We already voted. The decision is made. We will take in new families, as many as we can find.”
“Then,” says Father, “this is the end for us. This is the beginning of the end of everything we’ve ever worked for.” His voice sounds bleak and ragged.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Do you remember what I said about the Adams, first thing? And that man—”
“What he tried to do to your daughter was terrible, but he didn’t succeed. And he’s been more than adequately punished.”
“That’s not my point.”
“We need your help. We don’t need your arguments, we need your help.”
“So what about the men and women who remain?” says another voice. “Do we assign husbands and wives?”
“Perhaps we should have a second summer of fruition for them.”
There’s a bark of laughter, and someone else clicks his teeth.
“I think it’s best—”
Father interrupts. “I can’t believe you don’t see what you’re doing, what you’re risking.”
“James, I’m sorry to say this, but you are a weak link among us and it has to stop.”
A long, incredulous pause. Vanessa’s jaw drops. And then Father says darkly, anger brimming in his voice, “What did you say?”
“You are faint of heart. We have to keep decisions, actions, secret from you, telling you after the fact, when you should be helping us! Your reaction to Amanda Balthazar’s—”
“If you had told me, we could have found another way!” Father pleads. “She was with child! She—”
“Sometimes you have to dig the weed out by the root,” another voice says.
“Everything we have done is within the ancestors’ teachings. You need to reread the secret writings of Philip Adam—”
“I know his writings.”
“Then why this hesitation, this—this—rebellion? You nearly had a fit when you found out what needed to be done with the Joseph woman, and then Amanda Balthazar, and Rosie Gideon…”
“She was a child.”
“And what kind of woman would she have made? What is the point of waiting to find out?”
“You didn’t even bring it to us, you just did it yourself!”
“He’s right, you know,” says another wanderer. “I never would have disagreed, but—”
“You don’t hesitate to kill a dog that bites,” snaps the first wanderer.
“I agree,” says a bass voice. “We have to be able to act on our own judgment. Everything doesn’t require a meeting, a vote.”
“The murder of a child,” says Father indignantly.
There is a moment’s silence, and then two voices rise up and battle for primacy. The louder one wins. “Philip Adam said—”
“I don’t care what Philip Adam said!” cries Father, and there is an appalled silence.
“James, we are going to change,” says the sharp, nasal voice. “We will not be allowing what happened this year to ever happen again.”
“The plague?”
“Well, that too,” says someone else. “If we bring in new families—”
“Not the plague. We will be…better enforcing the shalt-nots. Things will never go this far again. Daughters who escape, who try to live without their fathers’ guidance, will be punished severely, and if they continue not to listen…they must be uprooted too.”
“You think their fathers won’t care?” asks Father softly.
“I think their fathers will listen and obey, unlike their children. I think that once we show what the response is to any kind of rebellion, the daughters will listen and obey as well. Perhaps our mistake was keeping Amanda Balthazar and Rosie Gideon and the others secret. Perhaps we should have—”
“But the husbands, the fathers,” says Father. “These are women and girls who are beloved. If you do this, don’t you think that the men—”
“They. Will. Obey.”
“And your daughter…”
“What about my daughter?” whispers Father through his teeth.
“It’s the way you’ve raised her. We never should have let you have books.”
“How is it different from your collection of things?”
“Now, now,” says a soothing voice. “The subject isn’t James’s library right now. And Vanessa didn’t run away to the beach. How many of you can say the same of your daughters?” A pause, sighs, and embarrassed shuffling.
“So what does this mean for Janey Solomon?” asks someone else.
“It always comes back to Janey Solomon,” says a third voice, with a halfhearted laugh.
“Now, her father—”
Mother smacks Vanessa across both cheeks, her face betrayed and wild. The voices stop at the sound of the scuffle. Someone chuckles, someone else murmurs concernedly. Shaking her head and taking a deep breath, Mother pushes Vanessa to the table and makes her practice sewing with one shaking hand, which is impossible.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Caitlin
Caitlin waits for Janey to come back, but she never returns. Caitlin can’t count how many days it’s been. Sometimes she thinks it’s been only hours, and sometimes she thinks it’s been weeks. Time stretches and blurs and warps in front of her. Her cup fills and she drinks it. Her bread is gone. When she wakes up it’s dark, but Caitlin can’t be sure if she’s waking up every night, or it’s all the same night. She can’t stop coughing.
She knows what a normal person would do is get up and go home. Father might hit her, but he might not. She could even go to someone else’s house. They would let her in. They would feed and dry her, while someone went to get Father.
She knows she can get up because she practices, every now and then, to make sure she still can. She stands under the weight of soggy blankets and moves her feet up and down. Then her knees fold again, and she is back inside her sandy hole. Cold body, burning face. Sometimes she shivers and sometimes she doesn’t. Caitlin has grown to like the feeling of cold on her body. It feels clean and fresh and new.
Her mind skips, dreaming, then not; sometimes a daydream turns into a real dream. She dreams she’s in school and Mr. Abraham is throwing pins at her. She dreams she and Mother are digging a garden for plants that eat people. She dreams that dogs with giant white teeth are biting her feet. She wakes, coughs, and spits; her spit is dark and glistening under the moonlight. The echoes of little girls racing, laughing, giggling, rise up from the sand like they left their ghosts behind them.
Caitlin’s mind slides back and f
orth over her life, like someone running their finger over and over a frosty window, making patterns. If she could start her life over again, she decides, she would shout more. She would bite like the dream dogs. She wouldn’t be so scared of everything all the time. She wouldn’t come when Father called, she would stay where she was. She wouldn’t lose her breath when Mr. Abraham said her name, but speak boldly. She would stomp and yell and be loud and big, eat until she grew six feet tall and then run away.
She rolls into a vision, instead of being yanked or lulled toward it. It is as easy as falling from a high place to a low one.
She is perhaps three or four, closer to the ground than she can ever remember being, reaching her hands forward to another little girl. It’s hot, not the moist heat of an island summer, but a parched, sucking heat that makes her lips feel like dry canvas when she presses them together.
Their dirty hands meet, their forearms marked with black and purple fingerprints and fading golden traces of yesterday’s blows. Their dresses are breathtaking, marvelous: the other girl is wearing a pink Caitlin has only seen in garish sunsets, spotted with bright orange flowers. The embroidery is so fine as to be undetectable, like the cloth itself is branded with the pattern. Looking down, Caitlin sees that she is in stained white, whiter than any cloth she has ever seen, and printed on her dress are tiny words, black and busy like ants, but she doesn’t know how to read them.
The girl’s face is familiar, brownish teeth bared in a smile and brilliant dark eyes staring happily into Caitlin’s. She looks thin, almost as thin as Janey Solomon, but her hair is bright and shining. They laugh at each other in joy and start slowly revolving in a circle. “Ring around the rosy,” they chant in singsong, “pocket full of posies.” Caitlin hears Father yelling at Mother, but Wasteland Caitlin doesn’t fret about this. She is used to it.
“It’s the only choice!” screams Father. “It’s our only choice! I will not stay here!”
And Mother, surprisingly, screams back in a robust voice, “No! I will not go!”
“Ashes, ashes,” the girls chant, “we all fall down!” And Caitlin drops to the ground like her bones snapped. Laughing at their own cleverness, the girls roll around in the dust, which is silky on her toes and spotted with rocks, and strange, small metal circles with crimped edges. She doesn’t know what the song means, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the spinning and falling. Caitlin stares up into a hot yellow sky.
Sitting up, the girl coughs wetly, spraying dark flecks into her palm, then says, “Again!” Brushing off their strange dresses, they begin circling and chanting again, Caitlin already laughing with the knowledge of how their rhyme will end.
And then she is back on the beach, back in her trembling freezing body, years older. She feels the ache of not being with that girl, whoever she was, of not being little and brave, even if everything around her was burning.
Caitlin stands shakily, the rain turned to needles of chill metal, the night turned into poison that chokes her as she struggles for breath. She knows this is the end of her short life, her small life, small in all ways. She knows what she is about to do is a sin, but at the same time she can’t imagine anyone—celestial or mortal—would want her to do anything else.
She has heard a lot, too much, about the darkness below, but she doesn’t think that the ancestors would send her there. She’s always done exactly what she was told to do, except for going to the beach—but so many girls went to the beach. And she went back home. She thinks that must be enough to join the ancestors in heaven.
Does she want to join them there? Maybe there’s another place to go.
Her feet are numb and she stumbles a little when she walks. The waiting water embraces her softly. It’s like a safe bed where nobody will ever bother her again. Bending her knees, Caitlin sinks down into the water, then bobs up. Her skin pricks and chills in the wind. She slides back down into the sea’s warm grasp, the current a soothing tongue against her belly, walking straighter as she goes deeper. When she’s up to her neck, she holds her breath and lifts her feet off the ground, and stays there like she’s flying.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Janey
Janey wakes to find Mary by her bed, slumped forward, her rump in a chair and her head on Janey’s arm. “Get out of here!” Janey hisses at her. “Get out! You’re not supposed to be in here!”
Mary blinks, yawns, stares at Janey with weary eyes. “It’s all right,” she says. “Mother says you don’t have the sickness. You’re not coughing, there’s no fever.” Mary must be right, for her face is sun-warm on Janey’s cool forearm.
“Get out of here anyway,” says Janey spitefully. But instead Mary crawls into bed next to her, all soft warm skin and clean dry cloth, and Janey is too tired to protest. She drifts into slumber, and when she wakes, Mary is asleep, her eyes darting back and forth restlessly under her pearly eyelids. Janey’s hands and feet feel like blocks of ice. She fears she is sucking away Mary’s precious warmth and guiltily moves away, almost falling off the bed. But then she is so cold she snuggles close to her once more and dozes off.
She wakes to Mother coming in with a bowl heaped high with corn mush. “All I have is corn,” Mother says angrily.
“She won’t eat it,” says Mary.
“Oh, yes, she will. She will eat every single bite.”
Janey inhales the thick, yeasty smell and rolls over in bed, away from them.
“Janey,” says Mother.
Janey doesn’t answer.
“Start with one bite,” Mary says, smoothing Janey’s brilliant hair. Janey catches Mary’s hand and puts it under her face like a small pillow. “You need to eat,” Mary says. “If you’d been eating, you wouldn’t be in bed. You would be up, out of bed, doing things.”
Janey opens her eyes, but stares at the wall instead of looking around. Streaks of water roll from the insides of her eyes toward the bedclothes. “Janey,” Mary says. “Janey?”
“It’s your fault,” Janey rasps.
“Mine?” says Mary.
“All of you. You, all of you. All you mothers and fathers with your ancestors and rules and secrets. You can blame me if you want, but it’s all your fault.”
“Janey,” says Mother, “you have to live in the world as it is. Starving yourself—”
“It’s that way because you let it be that way,” mutters Janey. “Leave me alone.”
“You need to eat,” insists Mary, freeing her damp hand from under Janey’s cheekbone. “You fainted, and you aren’t making sense.” Janey doesn’t answer. “Janey, this is important.”
Janey’s eyes stare glassily at the wall again, skimming over the little imperfections in the wood, the scratches and dents and knots. Her bones feel like a bundle of dry sticks as she curls into herself, poking and scratching her from the inside.
“I will make you eat,” says Mother.
“No,” whispers Janey, “you won’t.”
“A little?” says Mary. “Please? What will I do if you die?” She takes the bowl from Mother and indicates with a movement of her head that Mother should leave the room. Exhaling a frustrated snort, Mother does. Janey feels Mary’s finger gently push a ball of corn mush into her mouth. She scornfully spits it out.
“Caitlin’s dead,” Janey says.
“What? How do you know? I didn’t hear.”
“She died by the water. She was waiting for me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was the only one who knew where she was. Alone in the cold. I promised I would come.”
“Janey,” whispers Mary after a moment. “Janey, did they kill her?”
Janey shakes her head. “No,” she says. “It was me.”
“But you were here. You’ve been here for days.”
“Exactly.”
Confused, Mary sits with the bowl of corn mush against her knees and waits. Eventually Janey pushes aside the bedclothes and, her arms shaking, lifts herself into a seated position with her bony hip
poking into Mary’s softer one. Her face is pale and slightly luminescent, a small dim moon suspended in the room. “Mary,” Janey says, swaying slightly, “if I need to get to the church, will you help me?”
Spring
Chapter Fifty-Five
Vanessa
Yesterday was the first day nobody cried in school, and Vanessa feels the full gravity of this. Ever since school started again, children have been constantly breaking into sobs in the half-empty classroom.
First everyone was crying for the dead people, the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. There are so many to mourn that choosing just one seems random and meaningless, like plucking an ant from a teeming hill. Vanessa, unable to hold grief at bay when it was washing over everyone else, wept with them.
Then the wanderers remarried everyone.
It’s not unusual to lose a husband or wife. Widowers, especially, sprout up as women bleed out or die in childbirth, and hapless men are left with cooking, cleaning, and parenting they are utterly unprepared to do. There is usually a mother, or sister, or aunt happy to take care of a bereaved man, especially if they themselves are barren. But the wanderers encourage remarriage, and while there has been the rare man who prefers to set up housekeeping with a sterile, set-aside sister, most seek out new wives avidly; widows are in high demand. Courtship is no-nonsense but friendly, the weddings cheerful and jokey. Remarriages breed the occasional household with three or four children. These rich, chaotic families cause ripples of envy even if the husband and wife soon grow to dislike each other, or the children beat one another with fury in the shadow of evening.
This time, after the sickness fully ended, the wanderers took all of the bereaved into a cold field, commanding them to pair up and get married before the day was out.
Gather the Daughters Page 27