by Anna North
When the guards brought Nathaniel in, both the women were asleep. Darcy woke to the sound of the door and saw Esther’s face turn smooth and vulnerable as a child’s. The guards shoved Nathaniel to the floor and then cuffed him to the rack between Darcy and Esther. His chin and cheeks were smeared with blood. He smelled like shit. He and Esther looked at each other with a terrible wariness. Nathaniel said, “I’m sorry.” Nathaniel held Esther’s gaze and Esther stared back, blank-eyed, and then she moved her head, awkwardly because she was stiff and constrained by the handcuffs, and laid it against Nathaniel’s shoulder.
For a long time they sat like that, wordless, and Darcy felt freshly and piercingly alone. Finally, when she knew she had to either cry or speak, she asked Nathaniel, “Did they get Ansel?”
His voice was muddled, as if some of his teeth were broken or missing, but at the same time there was a strange new steadiness to it.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “They wanted me to tell them where he was.”
“What did you say?” Darcy asked.
“I lied,” he said. “I told them he was at a GreenValley processing plant in Lower Chicagoland. They weren’t happy when they found out it wasn’t true”—he wiped at his face—“but it might have bought Ansel another day.”
“Who’s Ansel?” Esther asked.
“We hooked up with some revolutionaries,” Darcy explained. “Last-boaters. They were going to try to get me out of here.”
“That’s great,” said Esther, animation returning to her face. “Your mom always hoped that would happen, that the last-boaters would rise up too.”
“Yeah, well,” said Darcy, “don’t get your hopes up too much.”
“I thought Ansel had a plan,” Nathaniel said.
Darcy hated to disappoint him. She saw that he had given deeply of himself to get Ansel that extra day, that he had dredged up a long-disused and nearly forgotten strength. She was worried the guards had humiliated him, that they had not been satisfied with a simple beating.
“Maybe he does,” Darcy said. “But I don’t know. A while ago I met someone who grew up with Ansel. She said he was a freeloader, that none of his schemes amounted to anything. I didn’t believe it then, but now I kind of do.”
Nathaniel made a motion that Darcy realized was his attempt to shake his swollen head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he’s coming for us. All we have to do is wait.”
He looked at Esther then, and asked, shyly, as though he had not been able to bring himself to ask before, “How are you?”
“How are you?” Esther asked, and then they both laughed, rueful and also tender, and Darcy thought, These people deserve to get out of here.
“I think we should try to get out,” she said out loud. “I think we should try to find a way to escape.”
“We did try,” said Esther. “We tried leaning over and pulling the rack out of the wall—it won’t budge. We tried wearing down the handcuffs on the rack—they won’t wear. We tried playing sick and getting the guard to come close, then kicking him in the balls—that’s how Duncan died.”
“Duncan’s dead?” Nathaniel asked.
“All of them are dead,” said Esther. Her voice was flat.
“I’m so sorry,” Nathaniel said, and Darcy barely nodded—to acknowledge him any more than that would have made her cry again.
“Listen,” she said instead, “what if I try to talk to the guards next time they come in? Maybe I can convince them that Marie’s crazy, and they’ll let us go.”
“You can try,” Esther said, “but I doubt they’ll go for it.”
“So that’s it?” Darcy asked. “You think we should sit here and wait for them to kill us?”
“I don’t think they’re going to kill us right now,” Esther said. “If I had to guess, I’d say either they’ll find your friend and kill him, or if they have too much trouble doing that, they’ll come interrogate you. Once they’ve got him and whatever other information they want, they’ll kill you. As for me, they might keep me here my whole life, trying to get Daniel’s address out of me.”
“Or they’ll threaten to kill me,” Nathaniel said.
Esther turned her face away.
“That must be why they kept me alive,” he said. “Whatever they want from you, they probably think if they hold a gun to my head, you’ll tell them.”
Esther’s voice was small and hard, like a bead.
“I would,” she said.
“You can’t,” Nathaniel said. “I haven’t done anything for you my whole life; you can’t do that for me.”
“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Darcy said. “They’re probably busy with Ansel right now. And they’re probably confused about Tyson. The next time a guard comes in, I’m going to try and convince him. Maybe it’ll work.”
“Yeah,” Esther said, “maybe.”
Her voice was grim, and grimness fell on all of them for what felt like hours, and Darcy sat and smelled Nathaniel’s blood and felt despair. Would it have been better if the pills had worked, if she were dead now? She wished she believed, like the Talking Birds people, that death would reunite her with her mother. She wished anything could. She thought that no pleasure could penetrate that room anymore, but after a while Nathaniel and Esther began speaking again, in quiet voices. They sounded awkward at first, but soon their voices took on an identical rhythm, a rhythm they must have agreed upon in childhood, unconsciously, in a meeting of their half-formed brains.
“You remember when we all got pneumonia?” Esther asked.
“And the baby died?”
“That’s right. Unity Ross’s baby. She was holding it in the kitchen, next to the stove. Like if she could just warm it up, it would come back to life again.”
“I don’t remember that part,” Nathaniel said.
“Where were you? Everyone was there. We were all coughing and comforting her and trying to get the baby away. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so awful.”
“I wasn’t there that day. I didn’t get pneumonia, remember?”
“You didn’t?”
“I never did. All the other kids were coughing and wheezing in their sleeping bags all day, but for some reason I never got sick. Then Daniel picked me to go with him on a trip.”
“A trip?” Esther asked. “How come you never told me?”
“I think I tried,” Nathaniel said, “but you were so sick, and then the baby died, and then not long after that we all left anyway. But he took me to the old baseball field down by the creek. It was only maybe a quarter mile away but he put me in three coats and two balaclavas and goggles. I was scared of freezing but he said I wouldn’t if I stuck with him. He said it was good for me to learn how to be in the cold. We had to stop once on the way in an abandoned house, and we lit a little fire in the living room and warmed our hands. The living room had a big TV and a stereo and a fancy lamp, and I asked if we were going to take anything, and he said, ‘There’s nothing here we need.’
“When we got to the field he let me climb up a snowdrift and hang on the chain-link backstop. The grown-ups used to tell stories about baseball, remember, and I tried to imagine people on the field. I didn’t understand how the game worked, so I just assumed all the players would huddle together, like we did, for warmth. Then I saw Daniel in the stands, chopping up the wooden benches with an ax.
“ ‘What if someone wants to play baseball?’ I called to him.
“And he stopped what he was doing, and he came over to me, and he looked almost angry.
“ ‘It’s too late for baseball,’ he told me. ‘We fucked that up, just like everything else.’
“And then I started to cry a little bit, and the tears were freezing to my cheeks, but he held me to him and I could smell that he was sweating from chopping benches, and it was the first time I realized you could actually get hot living there, you could actually sweat. And then he rubbed my hands between his for a minute, and he said he would teach me a new
game.
“He took me to the creek, to a place where a little waterfall had frozen solid. He stood on the ice first, and when it held him, he sat me on top of the waterfall and said, ‘Ready?’ I said I was, and he gave me a push, and I slid all the way down and onto a flat place in the creek, and I spun around. The waterfall couldn’t have been very high, but it felt dangerous, maybe just because I was finally playing outside—anyway, I asked if I could do it again. He said no, it was too cold, but if I took a bath in ice water every day instead of water warmed up on the stove, then I would get a special kind of fat on my back and I could go outside more. He said he’d been doing that for years, and now he could stay outside for an hour or more before he started getting too cold to think straight. He said we should all be doing it, getting used to the cold instead of clinging to the warm stove like babies. I was afraid of him again then, and I didn’t understand, and when he brought me back to the house I ran right to the kitchen to get warm.
“I didn’t really pay attention when Daniel was teaching us. I didn’t really think about anything he said until I was in my thirties and we were trying to make the strawberries at GreenValley. We were burning forty jars of solvent a day just to grow one little twisted strawberry plant, and I thought, maybe it’s too late for strawberries. Maybe we need to let that one go.”
“It’s not just letting go,” Esther said. “He wanted us to move on. If he were here now, he’d probably tell us to enjoy the fucking mangoes. And not dissolve our whole island just so some people can pretend they’re living like they used to.”
“I guess,” Nathaniel said. “To be honest, though, I liked the way I was living. It was nice while it lasted.”
Then Esther told Nathaniel about her life in the years they were estranged, about breaking into the refinery and stealing solvent directly from the tank, about getting caught and spending six months in jail in the same cell as a woman who had murdered her husband when their child died of parrot fever, about getting out and meeting a nun from Our Lady of the Talking Birds who helped her get clean; and when she paused and she and Nathaniel sat for a moment in the silent satisfaction of their reunion, Darcy spoke up.
“Will you tell me a story about my mom?” she asked. “From the mainland?”
They were quiet, as though it took some time to come back from the private world to which they’d gone. Then Esther said, “I have one.
“One day we snuck out of the co-op,” she began. “Sarah and I. One of the older girls was supposed to be watching us but she’d gone off with this man, Simon. Simon always had things to trade—I don’t know how he got them. Once he gave me an apple. It was kind of wrinkled but it was still sweet inside, and in return I let him watch me while I ate it. Anyway. We were eight. We had our indoor coats and the indoor coats of two boys we knew, who we bribed with our jerky rations. We were so hot in all those coats we thought it would be easy. We’d been on lockdown six months by then—no one outside except a few of the men to fix the roof when the snow came through—but we thought they were just trying to keep us in line, making rules to make rules.
“They kept the keys in the office, on a big ring. We were on the honor system not to take them, same as with the pantry, but everyone had been stealing from the pantry for months, so we figured we could take the keys too. Nobody saw us. We snuck along the wall like when we played spies. The tool-room door was the easiest. The grown-ups didn’t go there much. Still, we were expecting someone to catch us.
“We stood against the rusty lawn mower—it was a joke at that point; sometimes the grown-ups got it out when they had parties and pretended to mow the floor—and we looked back into the house. The tool room was next to the dining room—Emmett and his daughter Rose were rolling sleeping bags up and putting out chairs for dinner. They didn’t notice us. Sarah put the key in the lock and then it was like we were sucked out, like the outside wanted us.
“At first we didn’t feel the cold. We went jumping and flapping around the yard, shouting, ‘This is nothing! This is nothing!’
“We made for the trees so they wouldn’t see us from the windows. The first line, the old apple orchard the grown-ups talked about—the trees were all dead. They were bare and black with nothing on them to hold snow. It sounds strange, but we made fun of those trees. We had so little to go on then. We made our gloves into claws and stuck out our tongues and bugged our eyes and groaned, ‘I can’t… I can’t take it anymore.’
“We thought we were real tough. We looked up at the sky like we imagined trees would when their souls were going to tree heaven. Then my eyeballs started to burn. The pine trees were twenty feet beyond the apple orchard. By the time we reached them I couldn’t feel my hands inside my gloves, and that’s when I knew how really cold it was.
“Back when we’d been allowed outside sometimes, we’d learned that with every ten-degree drop, the cold became a new kind of thing. At ten it was brisk and energetic, like splashing your face with water, like having a dog lick your face. Zero is when it got bitter. At minus ten you felt the danger of it, like when you’re very sick with a fever and your body feels like it’s teetering somehow, even when you’re lying down. Minus twenty we’d felt only a handful of times—when it got down that low every day they started locking the doors—but it was almost exciting, like when your fever really crests and you feel yourself splitting from your body. This cold was different from all those. Everything felt bright. My feet squeaked in the snow. The edges of the roof looked like they were glowing. Sarah reached the pine trees before me and cuddled up next to one. I sat against her and felt her body shaking.
“ ‘Can you feel your fingers?’ she asked me.
“I realized I couldn’t. Then my nose was gone too, and then the skin across my cheeks, and it was like I was abandoning my body and going to another place, where cold was only the smallest, most mundane part of some larger, crystalline thing. I felt Sarah stop shivering.
“ ‘Let’s play I’m your mom,’ Sarah said.
“This was Sarah’s favorite game back then, and maybe because neither of us had a real mom, she was always strict with me. She usually told me to go to the time-out corner or get her some potato meal or stand up straight. That day though, she put her arms around my shoulders and sang a song to me in a low voice. The song said that there was a place for every person in the world, and we were in that place, a hole was cut for us in the earth and air, and now that we were fitted into that hole nothing could harm or bother us, and we would never have to worry again. I started to feel the way you feel when you’re falling asleep—my thoughts all floated apart from one another and in between was just the song. As if it had always been there. Pretty soon all I could hear or see or feel was the song, and it was so calm, calmer than I’ve ever been.
“Then hands were all over us, shaking us, slapping our cheeks, carrying us inside. The warmth burned us. The lights scorched our eyes. We cried like newborns.
“Afterward we had frostbite, Sarah lost her little toe, and we didn’t play together so much. When I sang the song again to myself, the words just sounded like gibberish.
“Years later though, when we had moved to the island and were living in the grocery store, Sarah asked me if I remembered that day. I said sure, I said we were lucky we didn’t die. And she didn’t say anything for a while, just kind of looked past me the way she used to. And then she said maybe we wouldn’t have. I said what do you mean, it was minus forty at least; we would have frozen to death if they hadn’t found us, and she said she knew, but that sometimes when she thought about that day she imagined us turning into something else, not children anymore, but something that could live in that place, something new. She said she imagined icicles sprouting from our fingers, and under our arms, until we had big wings made of ice, and then we spread our wings and flew away. I gave her a weird look—I didn’t understand—and she laughed, but I don’t think she meant it to be funny.”
A child’s whimsy, Darcy thought, like pretending that a cheese
-food tin full of water was soup, or a rock with a skirt around it was a doll, or two people were a world. Even dead, her mother hid her real self in songs, in games. Maybe it was the other orphans who had silenced her about the past, had made her think that everyone but Darcy would betray her. But what had driven her so hard to make each of them her best friend and then to reject each so completely, until years later when it was too late for all of them? Was it Daniel? Was it Darcy’s grandmother, whoever she was, leaving Sarah in a cold common room at the co-op with a coat she grew out of and a doll that she lost and a silver necklace that she passed on to Darcy?
Darcy imagined her mother on the ocean. She imagined it like it was a story that had been told to her, something sitting safe in its proper place in her brain, something she knew and had always known. She thought of her mother’s little pointed face looking out above the guardrails of the ship, her mother stealing jerky or biscuits and curling in around herself to eat them, solitary in a corner of the deck while the gray sea surged around her, while the sky seethed, and then the other orphans, all in a pack, jostling and singing, forming a ring around her, attracted by a light that she turned on each of them, and still, at the center of the center of the circle, at the center of her, a loneliness remaining, her bit of jerky wadded up in her fist, her secret thoughts locked up in her mind. Darcy’s heart was empty except for craving. She had one question left.