Gather the Daughters

by Jennie Melamed

  People wept and trembled. For some, their dead spouses weren’t even buried. As the wanderers loomed around them, they shakily, obediently tried to pick the person they thought would be best. A few men fought over Mrs. Moses, the young pretty one, and nobody wanted to marry old Mrs. Adam, the dung collector’s widow, who still smelled like an outhouse. Caitlin’s father didn’t even show up. There were more men than women, and a few were left wifeless.

  The couples got married then and there, and negotiation about houses immediately followed. Now there are empty houses for the new families from the wastelands. Many daughters got new fathers, and cried and cried. The boys who got new fathers grieved too. Those who saw strange women installed in the place of their mothers sobbed. For days, everyone on the island seemed to be constantly weeping, eyes swollen and seeping constantly like festering wounds.

  Mr. Abraham’s son died, and so every time anyone cried at school he would struggle not to join them. The tears in his eyes were visible anyway, and that made more children break down.

  And yet yesterday, nobody cried in class. Today, so far, nobody has cried. Mr. Abraham has delivered a dry-eyed lecture on arithmetic and then the many uses of tree bark. Emily Abraham, who sits across from Vanessa, absently picks and scratches at a scab on her leg, and Vanessa watches a thick bead of blood slowly descend in a stripe from her knee to her ankle. The squeak of charcoal on slate is almost unbearable.

  The normalcy of it all makes Vanessa feel oddly guilty. When she could finally leave the house, the weight of the dead came crashing down on her, multiplying with each name until the breath was pressed from her. Letty, Frieda, Rosie, Lily, Caitlin, Hannah—the names didn’t seem to end. The slick black grief entered her once more, flowed across the ground and rained from the sky, turning everything dark and dull. All the pregnant women died with their babies inside them. There are so many bodies, most of them rotting already, and a disgustingly sweet stench hangs in the air and coats Vanessa’s skin with a film of death. She heard there is such a glut of bodies that some had to be chopped up and dumped off the ferry so the crops wouldn’t be overwhelmed with rot.

  Now it feels like they’re pretending it didn’t happen, these dry-eyed children. Vanessa fears they’re letting down the dead, and yet they’re all so close to dead anyway. Everyone is pale and slow, and half of the children are still coughing. Vanessa feels tired and sick all the time, even though she never actually had the sickness. At recess, the girls just sit. They stare into space, they sigh, they lean on the friends who are left. Slowly, Vanessa can see the younger children recovering, like flowers regaining their height after a cold snap. They unbend and blossom, have moments of laughter and play, before the cold stares of their elders turn on them and they sink guiltily back into the shadows. And suddenly, Vanessa seems to be one of these elders. The children’s laughter infuriates her, their bold resilience when she is broken and dead.

  Everyone is eating better now. People exchange stores, and there are rabbits and milk and berries. Every day after school, Vanessa finds Mother sitting with some woman in the kitchen, or having just returned from someone else’s house. Dust collects in the corners, and stains grow on the tabletop. Everyone is so busy consoling each other, and yet nobody speaks to the children. Vanessa is pretty sure they don’t know what to say.

  Father is also gone, meeting with the wanderers, planning, plotting. They’re not going to bring in the new families until autumn. Father talks about “recruiting” and Vanessa doesn’t know what it means. He’s always irritable, and sometimes just angry, snapping and making Ben cry. Vanessa saw a bruise on Mother’s leg the other day, which made Vanessa think of poor, dead Caitlin Jacob. Now that Caitlin is gone, Vanessa remembers her small braveries, and she weeps for ever thinking her weak and useless.

  Rachel Joseph reaches back to scratch her shoulder and then drops a folded piece of paper on Vanessa’s desk. Her posture is so similar to Letty’s that Vanessa stares for a while, unsure if she’s dreaming. Vanessa’s hand has healed to a pink, puckered scar, but it still hurts to move her fingers. Clumsily, she opens the note; written in minuscule letters is “Church. Midnight. Janey.” Vanessa stares as if the words are gibberish, remembering the thrill that would have run through her, back when she was young and people were alive. Right now all she can muster is a faint flare of curiosity.

  Janey hasn’t come back to school, but Vanessa knows she’s still alive. She assumes they have just given up on educating her, since Janey knows more than anyone already. She misses her keenly. Vanessa thought a lot about dream islands, lying in her bed at home waiting for the world to start or end. She wondered if the wastelands were just another island, a big one, with stockpiles from the world before. She wondered if maybe she could swim to another island, if anyone has ever tried.

  Maybe Janey will tell them. Maybe she’s been to another island, and that’s why they haven’t seen her. Maybe she’s been going to another island all along, and she brought the sickness back with her. With Janey, anything is possible.

  Feeling a stab of excitement for the first time in months, Vanessa can’t suppress a happy sigh. Rachel twists around when Mr. Abraham isn’t looking and half smiles. Vanessa smiles back at her, expecting her face to crack from it. The air feels foreign and cold on her teeth, and her cheeks ache. Then tears fill her eyes, and she crumples and puts her head on her desk.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Vanessa

  Janey looks like some kind of insect, with a thin middle and spindly legs and huge, dark eyes. The circles under her lower lids are so black that Vanessa fears she’s been beaten. Her hair is still sparkling, the braid alive down her back. Mary stands by uncertainly, facing Janey with her arms half held out, like she’s waiting for her to fall into them.

  There are so few of them, even fewer than Vanessa had expected. Many girls must have had trouble getting away, and then so many are dead. The girls who did make it stand oddly staggered and spaced out, as if to leave room for all the bodies that should be there but are instead underground, or floating in the ocean in pieces.

  Janey steps up to the podium. The glow catches the stray hairs on top of her head, the thin, brittle down on her arms, bathing her in golden light. “You came here,” says Janey quietly. Mary whispers in her ear, and she speaks louder. “This is the last time you’ll come here. For me, I mean. Thank you.”

  The girls shift uneasily and glance at one another across the darkness.

  “I just wanted to say I think it’s all a lie.”

  “What is?” says Caroline Saul, biting her fingernail.

  “The scourge. There was no scourge. There are no wastelands. There’s people, living out there, living however they live, and there’s us here. Living how we live. Everything, everything they told us, that they told our parents and grandparents and all the way back to the ancestors. They lied about all of it.”

  There’s a long silence. Mary stares at Janey in a way that makes it clear this is new to her.

  “Why?” says Rhoda Balthazar.

  “Because they could,” answers Janey quietly.

  The room is silent again. Vanessa stares at a shadow in the corner of the ceiling. If she believes Janey, then her life is a lie. If she doesn’t believe her, then her life is nothing. This would have angered her, once, made her desperate and terrified, but now she’s too tired to feel much of anything.

  “I’m not sure of it,” says Janey, “I’m not sure of anything. But we need to stop believing everything we’ve been told. And I don’t just mean us.”

  There is a long silence. “Well, that’s all,” says Janey, and steps back. Stalking, starving, her limbs straight, thin lines, she slowly moves toward the stairs like she’s moving through water. Mary stands up, arms wrapped around herself, and watches her go in a kind of bleak horror.

  “Wait,” says Vanessa, but Janey keeps going and disappears.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Janey

  Black. Dead. Burnt. Each ki
ndled nerve end is starting to fray, burning to a jarring stop as her limbs become heavy. Janey is no longer Janey, but shades of gray bones lying piled in a bed.

  This is the other side, this is the dark side, of all her bright and shining moments. This is the part where she kneels down alone, in the dark, and inexorably continues moving downward, disappearing into the dirt, her eyes and ears and throat stoppered with black. She has never sounded such depths before, never felt such despair, silent and heavy as all those stone churches sinking endlessly through the muck, to where the pressure is enough to crush a girl to nothing.

  She may survive this. She may die. It doesn’t matter either way. She will never again sit on her heels on the damp sand, warming her chilled white fingers by a small fire. She will never again laugh at a soaked, sandy dog garlanded with flowers of red and yellow and white. She will never sleep in a halo of small children, shifting and murmuring and pushing against her in the night. Never listen to young girls argue endlessly over the best way to break a clamshell, or how to describe the color of the sea. She will never again sleep under a pile of thorny brush with Mary’s dear form clinging close to her. But she simply does not care. She does not care about any of it, anything. The part of her that cared has expired, and she is too weary to try to resuscitate it.

  Over the next few days, Janey seems to be slowly dying, and she welcomes it. She doesn’t unfold her body, instead releasing dark urine into the sheets. Her words are slow and garbled and her eyes dead. Her starving body slows, her heart jerking and stuttering, her fingers turning cold and prickling and blue. Her breath is acrid, like rotting fruit, her eyes sunken and shadowed with violet and ash.

  Mary is quiet and gentle with her, almost courteous. Her fingers on Janey’s skin are trembling and careful, her lips on Janey’s brow swift and soft as a bird’s wing. Janey can tell Mary wants to be angry, to rage and sob and howl, but fears her fury could be the gust of air that blows Janey out of life and into death. And so Mary cleans her quietly, changes her sheets, and then tells her stories of their long-ago childhood to make her smile. Janey’s gray eyes close and open, open and close without meaning or pattern. She turns her face away from nourishment. She hears Mary murmuring to Mother, and she is already halfway to slumber when Mary’s fingers, coated with honey, enter her mouth. She twists, but doesn’t quite wake, and when Mary removes her fingers, she swallows in her sleep. The next few hours, Janey consumes the entire Solomon stock of honey, one fingerful at a time, sucking at Mary’s finger like a slumbering, ravenous baby. She wakes glassy, dead-faced, miserable.

  “I killed Caitlin,” she whispers to Mary. “And Amanda. And Rosie.”

  “You didn’t kill anybody,” Mary insists.

  “Well, I didn’t save them.” She settles into staring at the wall, her eyes seeing beyond the wood and into the gathering darkness beyond it. Mary slips beside her under the clean sheets, her warm form huddled against Janey’s cold, sharp one.

  “Is it true, Janey?” she whispers in her ear. “What you said in church?”

  “I don’t know,” Janey says. “I don’t know anything. But I think it’s true.”

  Mary puts her head on Janey’s chest, listening to her heartbeat speed up, then slow down.

  “Are you…are you all right?”

  Janey coughs a weak laugh. “No.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Stay here with me.”

  Lately, everything has been bathed in a beautiful mist, as if the morning fog that hangs massive over the gray water has snaked onto land. It dulls Janey’s vision with its billowing smoke. Every now and then Janey sees a black wing fluttering at the edge of her vision. She is sure that there are no birds in the house, but cannot resist checking now and again, swiveling to squint at the corners of the room in case a horde of blackbirds has swarmed in through a new hole in the roof. But she sees nothing.

  Mary climbs on top of Janey to stop her shivering. Janey wraps a chilly arm around her and murmurs, “I wanted to change everything.” Her voice is grating and hollow.

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was trapped.”

  “The island.”

  “No.”

  Mary’s face seems to emit a soft glow in the gloom of night. If there is a God, Janey thinks mistily, I bet he looks like Mary.

  Mary falls asleep with her ear on Janey’s collarbone, waiting for her to say something else. In the morning, when she wakes, Janey’s limbs are still and cool. Nestling in beside her, Mary watches the blue and white colors change in the contours of Janey’s face as the sun rises. Mary doesn’t move until daylight is streaming in the window, and Mother is screaming.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Vanessa

  Ever since the incident with Mr. Adam, Vanessa has been having nightmares of blood. Blood wells out of Mr. Adam, covering the floor in a slick, wet sheet, rising to cover her ankles in summer-warm fluid, grasping her clothes and licking her waist. It pours out of a crack in the sky, pounds the island red, rises in a scarlet mist from the early morning ground. She drinks water to find her mouth ringed with crimson and thick, salty blood running down her throat. When blood begins spotting her inner thighs one afternoon, Mother weeps, but Vanessa is unsurprised. Surely so much blood can’t live in her dreams without finding its way to her waking life.

  Since that day, Father still comes to her room occasionally and climbs into her bed, but only to talk, or to sleep. Vanessa can tell Mother doesn’t like this, and sometimes she hears her listen closely by the door, or tiptoe into the room to stare at them. Father seems amused and then annoyed by Mother’s snooping, but in the morning he looks away from Mother’s gaze and talks of something else.

  One night Vanessa wakes up screaming from a dream of choking, a worm of blood coiled in her throat and slithering toward her lungs. She coughs and breathes gratefully as Father, lying in the bed, rubs her back and murmurs comforting words. Eventually she trusts the air enough to lie down against his chest.

  “Father,” she whispers, “when I killed Mr. Adam—”

  “You did not kill Mr. Adam,” replies Father. “I told you. We exiled him.”

  “When I cut him, then.”

  “Yes?”

  “I couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. Adam’s baby.”

  “The one that died with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about it?”

  “It might have been a girl.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “If it was a girl…”

  “Yes?”

  “It would have had Mr. Adam do to her what he tried to do to me.”

  “Well, it would be different.”

  “And then I thought, what if I were Mr. Adam’s daughter?”

  “You would be a completely different person, Vanessa.”

  “Perhaps. But what if you died in the sickness—”

  “We had the medicine.”

  “Fine, what if a big rock fell on your head, and Mother had to marry again, and Mr. Adam was there—”

  “Mother would never marry him.”

  “What if the wanderers told her to? Or he was the only unmarried man?”

  “But that wouldn’t happen. I mean, at the worst, she’d become a second wife—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m saying, what if Mother had to marry Mr. Adam, and I was suddenly his daughter?”

  “But I’m telling you that wouldn’t happen.”

  “Everything that happened that day would have been different. He wouldn’t have been breaking any laws. I would have been wrong, for cutting him. I would have been punished. They probably would have killed me.”

  “But—”

  “Think of all the daughters who got new fathers, after the sickness.”

  “Well, I should hope none of them are like Mr. Adam.”

  “But nobody knows, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody knows what someone is like, unless they live with them.
”

  “You think all men are like Mr. Adam, behind their walls? Am I like Mr. Adam?”

  “No. But I think you want to think Mr. Adam was a strange mistake, something that never happens, and I’m not so sure.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.” She pauses. “The last new family, before the Adams, was the Jacobs.”

  Father is silent.

  “You know what Mr. Jacob is like. You just had to look at Caitlin to know what Mr. Jacob is like. Mr. Jacob could take a new wife at any time. That wife could have a daughter.”

  “I don’t think he will live that long. He’s poisoning himself with drink.”

  “But what if everyone from the wastelands is like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Mr. Adam, like Mr. Jacob.”

  “They can’t be.”

  “Remember that meeting you had with the wanderers?”

  “Where Mother said you were listening at closed doors?”

  Vanessa flushes slightly, but continues, thankful for the darkness. “What if all the new families we bring in are like him? You’re right, all the people in the wastelands can’t be like him, but what if all the men who want to come here are?”

  “Like Mr. Adam?”

  “Yes.”

  “That isn’t possible.”

  “What if it is? What if I marry someone like that?”

  “You’ll be married by the end of the summer. We won’t be bringing in unmarried men.”

  “How do you know Mr. Adam was like Mr. Adam when he was a young man? How do you know Mr. Jacob was? What if the new families bring in, somehow, something that turns island men into that kind of man? Like a wasteland sickness?”

  There’s a long silence. She takes a deep breath. “What if—”

  Then Father says angrily, “That’s enough, Vanessa. I know you’re clever, but you’re still a child.” He gets out of bed and stomps down the stairs, not bothering to be quiet. Vanessa lies in the dark for a long time, holding her breath.