Well, he was in bigger trouble now than he’d ever been. And that jumpy feeling had returned, worse than before.
That evening, they climbed a steep hump on the mountainside and found another cave perched atop it, larger than the first. Near the end of the day, the dogs had begun to bark again, far below, but no one had the strength to continue, and so the cave was the next best thing. It had a wide mouth that curved around, showing them the slope they’d climbed and the relatively flat piece of ground that rose gently upward from the hump on the mountain. They sprawled weakly across the dirt floor beneath the stone as night consumed the tall trees: ash, oak, and maple.
Kate’s nightmare echoed through the cave an hour later, and when it was done, Max couldn’t go back to sleep. His stomach felt like someone had caged a rabid cat inside it, all teeth and claws.
He felt emptied out, weak in a way he’d always thought old people were when they struggled just to get out of a chair. Hot acid washed up his throat. He wanted to cry out, like Kate did, like Jean did, when the emptiness burned that way. Stumbling, he crawled to the mouth of the cave. Above him, the broad face of the moon looked smugly down through the trees, gloating that it had never gone hungry.
He fell asleep looking at it. And woke a few hours later, ravenous. Powdery moonlight filtered through the cave opening, and he got up and immediately fell down, bruising his chin and tasting mud. He turned to look back at the girls, asleep.
There was Susan, head resting on her hands. She’d gotten them out. She could do things. More than he could, maybe. But she wouldn’t, no matter how much she pretended she was trying. In the night, after Kate’s nightmare, Susan had put her back to sleep telling stories. She’d had the nerve to talk of home, and soft beds, and big dinners.
Anger roused him. Who cared about stories? Stories didn’t fill your stomach. If he’d been the one — if he’d done it — things would be different!
He rested his head against the cool stone at the threshold of the cave, trying to think. A problem was just a nut to be cracked. He’d heard someone say that once, and it was true. There were reasons for things; there were answers. You just had to believe you could find them.
He rose weakly to his feet and stumbled into the forest. There was food there; there had to be. He’d find it. Today, they’d eat.
He wandered up the slope, slow footed. The sun rose and the mist burned away and around him there was nothing but bright, hot green, trees perspiring in the heat. A trickle of sweat rolled down his face, and he caught it with his tongue, tasting salt. The heat made his head swim. He thought of Susan again and got angrier. Soon he was shaking, and tripped over the humped root of a birch tree. Above him, the sun glared through the plump leaves. He sat up, but the world spun, and he couldn’t get to his feet. He leaned against the smooth bark and listened to his heart beat.
She could do it if she wanted.
Somehow, repeating it steadied him. Anger was the only thing that kept him sitting upright now. But then the hunger stabbed at him again, and he tried to swallow. His throat seemed to stick to itself. He wanted to cry.
If only they hadn’t left the orchard. Why had they done that? There was fruit there. Peaches. He remembered the peaches. Plums, too. That was all he wanted. Just something wet, something juicy. A plum. A peach. His eyes burned and he blinked, then closed them. The image of the peach lingered behind his eyelids, bright and perfect. His wanting it was so strong his arm went out toward it. Just a peach. One for each of us. Please. Please.
The heat rose further and pressed against him. He tried to rise but found he couldn’t. His head spun, and he collapsed backward against the tree, seeing flickering lights in front of his eyes. There was darkness now at the corners of his vision. He thought of the peach. Just one. Red and yellow, ripe. The kind so ready to eat that when you held it, your fingers left the slightest mark, a little valley in the soft skin. Orange inside, or almost. Just a peach.
The darkness moved in from the corners, obliterating the forest. In front of him, he could see only a small circle of light. A peach, he thought. A peach. It was there, waiting for him. He could smell it.
They were laughing. Coming to, Max heard them.
I must be dreaming, he thought. I fainted, and I’m still dreaming.
He breathed in the aroma of peaches. Definitely dreaming, he thought.
“Max! Max!”
It was Susan, somewhere to his right.
Nell laughed. “How’d you do it? Where’d you find them? Where’s the tree?”
Max opened his eyes. He was lying amid a pile of peaches.
Max sat among mounds of peaches, feeling as if a comet had dived into his open hands. He was certain nothing had ever tasted so good. The five of them ate until they couldn’t anymore, and then they sucked the stones just to keep something in their mouths. The girls ran their hands over the soft skins, exclaiming. But for a moment, Max held perfectly still, spellbound.
I did this!
The thought came with such fervor that he wondered if this time he really was dreaming.
He breathed peaches, and touched peaches, and weighed them in his palm. The wind in the tiled room had swept through in a moment, but the peaches stayed, and the comforting weight in his stomach, the heavy reality of them, made him want to burst.
He glanced at Jean, still licking her fingers, and grinned.
“Jean,” he said. “What’s your favorite food?”
“Peaches,” she said, and grinned back at him.
“Me, too,” said Kate. “Peaches. Definitely.”
Peaches. Definitely.
Of course, he couldn’t enjoy it forever. The peaches were a miracle, but they were also a question, and Max knew better than to try to ignore the facts.
So when they’d finally gathered the remaining fruit into Nell’s blanket, and he’d slung them over his shoulder, exulting in the weight against his back, he went to walk beside Susan.
“There weren’t any peach trees,” he said. “I didn’t go out and find one, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Susan looked at him with surprise and relief.
“Then how?”
He could only shrug, feeling a prickly warmth in his cheeks. “I don’t know.”
Good old Susan. She didn’t even say I told you so. In fact she didn’t say anything at all.
“It wasn’t the way you said, though,” he continued after a while. “There wasn’t any pushing or explosion or anything.”
For the first time in two days, she didn’t fidget or look away when he spoke to her.
“Tell me” was all she said.
The confused, awful feel of the morning washed over him.
“I was mad. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I was mad at you. Just going crazy that you wouldn’t do that thing again.”
He frowned, a little embarrassed. But when he glanced at her, he saw she accepted this with nothing but a small nod.
“So I was wandering around, and then everything started to go black. I was passing out, from the heat and from starving, probably. And I thought of that orchard we first came to. I wished I was there. I could smell the peaches. And that was it. I woke up, and I saw.”
The peaches, in their blanket sack, bounced against his spine. Even his shirt smelled like them now. He worried suddenly that it would call the dogs to them.
“You smelled them because they were there,” Nell said. “I smelled them, too. They’re wonderful.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “But they weren’t there when I sat down. It was just so . . . strong. I wanted it so badly. I needed it.”
“You needed it!” Susan nodded vigorously. “Just like I needed to get out. Maybe here, when you need something desperately, it just comes.”
Max wondered. Jean had a peach in her hand; she’d been eating it as they walked. He watched her use her sleeve to wipe the juice from her chin. She caught his eye and smiled at him, holding it aloft like a prize.
Could Susan be right
? They’d all needed to eat. Had he needed it more than the others? He shook his head.
“We were all hungry. We all needed to get out of that room — but you did it. That first morning, we needed to get home — we were desperate for it. But we’re not home! It can’t be just needing it, or thinking about it. If that were it, we’d all be doing it all the time. It’s got to be more than that.”
Nell kicked at a stray rock in the barren ground. “Then what?” she asked. “Tell me, and I’ll do it, too. Because I’d like to have something better than just my blanket to lie on. And I’d like a drink of water. And a clean shirt.”
She sighed, as if she’d run out of steam. Maybe she had. As grateful as Max was for the peaches, his back still ached.
They were all tired, exhausted from the hunger and then the food. They lapsed into silence and kept walking, tensing at the occasional lull in the wind, when distant barking rolled up the hill.
Max tried to ignore it. He needed to put the pieces together. The Genius. The wind. The peaches. What did they have in common? He thought of the marketplace. There’d been all that cheering, and everyone was excited. He remembered the thrill that had washed over him when it started. But it wasn’t until the Genius began to speak that the buildings — even the people — had changed. Was it the excitement that had done that?
He thought about the tiled room. No thrill there. But there was fear. Lots of it. And with the peaches? He’d been angry. Angry at Susan.
He tried to take a mental step back, tried to see how it all fit. Could it be anger, then? Fear? Desperation? If it were, why hadn’t they all made the wind in the room? Why hadn’t they all made peaches?
Though the sound of the mourning bell did not reach the mountain, the exile felt its toll. Too often, it rang now, singing its song of anger and regret. Wordless, soundless, it flowed up to the small cottage, grief alone reaching to press at the windows and push at the door. Grief, and the howls of the lost. If madness had invaded the exile’s mind at last, it had reached into the valley, too, rage and retribution spreading like disease.
Each time, the exile followed that silent summons, the better to spy the faces of the sufferers, searching and hoping not to find a familiar one among them. And amid all this, or perhaps because of it, the dreams came and came again, children invading all the old places, children stepping from the whispering orchard into the day, climbing the wood and descending into the valley.
Children found and lost again; children welcomed, then discarded.
Late that afternoon, the sky darkened and lightning flickered behind the clouds. Soon, fat raindrops slapped the tops of the leaves and churned the brown earth to mud. Max walked through it, getting chilled and wet as the five of them scrabbled up the muddy rise. The mountain changed here into a series of craggy steps, yawning with caves. They crawled into the first one that had enough space for all of them and turned to watch the storm, shivering with the sudden cold and flinching at the crack of thunder.
Max set the peaches down and sucked at his wet clothing, glad for the water, even if he was shivering. Outside, he could see the lower half of the mountain spread below him. Clouds foamed so thick over the wood a new mountain seemed to have risen from the roof of trees.
A fork of lightning split the sky.
“It can’t get us, right?” Kate asked.
Max peered from beneath the stone rim and counted three before the thunder smashed above the trees.
“No, the cave’s protecting us,” he said.
“That’s good.”
Still, at the next burst she gripped his hand.
“I don’t like it.”
The trees bent and flailed in the wind, and Jean moved close, too.
“What if it hits a tree?” she asked. “Will it catch fire? Will it burn us?”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
But he could feel them jump beside him, and Jean dug her fingernails into his arm with each new clap overhead.
“Tell us a story,” Kate said after a while. “Like Dad does when there’s a storm.”
The wind threw rain into the cave, and Max blinked it from his eyes. Despite the food and the rest, he was still tired, and his bones ached. “Ask Susan,” he said. “Susan knows lots of stories.”
But Susan had stretched out by the curve of the wall, and she only shook her head.
“You tell one,” she said. “I’m too tired.”
The sky flashed and the trees shivered and the rain drove into the earth.
“Okay,” Max said. “I’ve got a story.”
It was a story of thunder and lightning, and all the things people used to believe, before they knew anything.
“They knew things,” Susan said. “Just not science.”
“Right, before they knew any science,” he amended. “And so they were afraid of things like storms. Some thought whole families of gods lived over the clouds, and thunder was the sound of one of their giant chariots rolling over the sky.”
Jean leaned her head against his arm. “That’s funny,” she said.
He rubbed the rain out of his hair, and then out of hers, listening to the drops clatter in the dirt like small stones.
“Well, they didn’t think so. Other people said thunder was a giant bird whose wings made the wind blow and the thunder come. There were lots more, but I don’t know them all.”
Nell had stretched out so that she lay parallel to the mouth of the cave, behind the three of them. “You’re forgetting the one who threw thunderbolts,” she said.
“Yes, there was that, too,” he agreed. “And there’s even a story about thunder being the sound of people bowling in the sky. But I’m not sure anyone ever believed that one.”
There was a long pause when he’d finished, filled by the sound of the drumming rain and the rush of wind through leaves. After a while, Kate said, “So what’s the end?”
Max looked down at her. In the gray-gold light of the storm, her curls seemed charged with electricity.
“What do you mean the end?”
“Well, a story’s got to have an end, doesn’t it?”
The trees bowed and hissed, and wet leaves slapped the stone above them as Max thought about it.
“I guess the end is that people learned to understand things. You know, lightning’s just electricity in the air, looking for a place to go. And thunder’s just the sound it makes. You hear it later because light travels faster than sound.”
The little girls were quiet a minute.
“So people weren’t scared anymore? Is that the end?” Kate asked him.
He gave her a half-hearted yes. There were plenty of things to be afraid of at home, even in a world framed by solid walls and rules he knew. Storms just hadn’t been one of them. Here, even that certainty was gone. He wasn’t sure he could say there was nothing to fear.
“Well, that’s a good story, then,” Kate said. “Thanks.”
The storm did not calm until long after dark. As he watched it, Max thought about huge birds that brought the wind, and flashing thunderbolt weapons, and the truth of static electricity and polarization. Lightning and thunder made a lot of noise, he told himself, but it was all just physics. Explosions came from chemical reactions, and there was a reason for them, one plus one equaled two, no matter how big and loud two happened to be.
Emotions, they were chemical reactions, too, in a way. He thought about that awhile and wondered if the rules in Ganbihar meant that simple things like fear and excitement and anger could turn on the lightning.
The storm had long gone and the sky had turned from gold to black when Kate began to scream into the dark. Max had been waiting for it, and now he sprang up and grabbed her by the shoulders before the others could find her.
Strong emotion, he thought. Excitement, anger, fear. Chemicals. Maybe these were the rules in Ganbihar.
“Mom!” Kate wailed. “Mom!”
He leaned in and called into her ear. “Kate! Do you see her? Do
you see Mom?”
She thrashed in his arms. “Mom! Mom!”
He could hear the others in the dark, groaning, patting at the ground to find their way. Still, he held on to Kate.
“Get her, Kate!” he shouted over her crying. “You can get her! Take us to her!”
Kate’s voice rose an octave. “Mom!” she shrieked. “Mom!”
Susan had found him now. She located him with her hands and tugged.
“Max! What are you doing? Stop that!”
Max shoved her away.
“Aren’t you scared, Kate? Don’t you want her?”
“Kate!” Susan called over him. “Kate, it’s okay, we’re here!”
Kate sobbed. Max’s throat tightened, but he thought of chemistry, and rules, and . . . then Susan yanked him sharply backward. Suddenly Kate’s wails were muffled by Susan’s shirt.
“Kate, it’s okay,” he heard Susan say softly. “It’s okay. Wake up.”
At last they quieted her. Max sat by the cave wall, silent, while Susan sang Kate back to sleep, and Nell told Jean, who had begun to cry, to come beside her and hold her hand. No one spoke to him, not even Jean, and he didn’t have to see them all to feel the bite of their disapproval. He tried to shrug it off, but all the crying made him want to shrink inside himself.
Finally, he heard Susan rise and fumble along the cave wall until she reached him.
“That was mean,” she whispered.
He cringed. “It was an experiment. I had to try.”
Silence, then a long sigh from Susan.
“But it didn’t work.”
“No. Obviously not.”
She moaned softly, a disappointed, hopeless little sound.
“What did you think was going to happen?”
He looked out of the cave into the forest, where cobwebby strands of mist clung now to the bases of the trees. The clouds had cleared away, and a full moon glared overhead, whitening mist and trees to bone. “I thought maybe it was chemistry.”
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