In the Shadow of the Sun

by Anne Sibley O'Brien

  “Mmmm,” Simon murmured as she laid it over his face. He reached up one hand to press the coolness in.

  C’mon, Simon, get better.

  Back at the wall, she touched the carcass gingerly. She stretched it out lengthwise on the stone wall, avoiding looking at the bloody mess of the head. The thick body, minus the head, was longer than her outstretched arm.

  Once, when she was nine or ten, Dad had taken her fishing and showed her how to clean the fish she caught. She closed her eyes, trying to recall the process.

  She pushed her jacket sleeves up to her elbows, held up Simon’s knife, and sawed off the snake’s head. Then she made a slit down the length of the body to the tail. She pulled out the slimy guts and dropped them to the ground, trying not to gag. She sliced crossways through the skin and bones, cutting the meat into big chunks. By the time she was done, the top of the wall, her hands, and her forearms were covered in blood and guts and bits of raw flesh and skin. Meat, she kept telling herself, pushing down the impulse to puke. This is meat.

  She carried the pieces, two handfuls at a time, into the lean-to and slid them into the steaming water. Then she ran to the stream to scrub her hands and arms over and over until every trace of the grisly operation was gone.

  If she survived this trip, she was going to become a vegetarian.

  When she returned to the lean-to, the most amazing aroma of cooking meat reached her nostrils. Her mouth started to water. Her stomach, which had given up and gone to sleep, woke up, clamoring to be fed. Mia pulled out hunks of the meat and arranged their feast on a thin platter of rock.

  Inside the farmhouse, Simon was leaning up against the wall, eyes open. She nearly dropped the platter.

  “Hey, Squeak,” he said.

  Tears sprang to her eyes at the relief of seeing him awake. She hadn’t realized until this moment how worried and desperately alone she’d felt without him.

  “You’re better!” she said.

  “Yeah, I think the fever’s broken. Was I out a long time?”

  “Since we got here yesterday morning. It’s late afternoon now. The next day.”

  “Whew. I had such weird dreams.” He had his hands flat on the floor now. “I thought it was the fever, but — how come the floor’s warm?”

  Mia grinned. “I made a fire in the kitchen. It heats the floor — it’s set up that way. And that’s not all —” She slowly lowered the flat stone to the ground in front of him. “Ta-da!”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s meat. Snake meat.”

  Simon’s eyes widened. “Where — Squeak, you killed a snake?”

  She nodded, grinning at the disbelief in his face.

  The meat was bland, but it was by far the best thing she’d tasted in her entire life. Even better than persimmon pulp.

  “Mmm, tastes like chicken,” Simon joked.

  It actually sort of reminded her of chicken, and also a bit of fish. Plus something else she couldn’t place. The best part was the meatiness. The sensation of sinking her teeth into something solid and nourishing. Chewing.

  Maybe she wouldn’t become a vegetarian.

  When she’d finished gnawing the bits off the little bones, she sat back. Her stomach was actually full. The floor beneath her was warm. It was the best she’d felt since the moment she’d found the photos on the phone.

  She told Simon about everything she’d done.

  “You’re blowing my mind,” Simon said, shaking his head. “All I did was sleep.”

  “How’s your leg?”

  He pulled off the cloth and together they examined the wound.

  “Colorful,” Mia said. Some of the red had faded to pink. The bruises bloomed in purple and blue and even a bit of green.

  “Definitely better. Look how much the swelling’s down. I’m gonna try to sleep some more.”

  She helped him prop his leg on the rock and lie back, then stood with the remains of their dinner.

  “Squeak.”

  “What?”

  He closed his eyes. “You’re a hot ticket.”

  She caught her breath. It was a favorite phrase of Dad’s. Gratitude and longing, relief and fear swept through her. She hiccupped a sob.

  In the kitchen, she dumped the skin and bones left from their meal back into the kimchi pot with the remaining snake meat. Bones could make soup. She added kindling to the fire for the night. Then she washed her hands and filled their water bottles at the stream.

  Completely spent, she rested on the porch. The late afternoon sun cast a bit of warmth. A breeze tossed the branches of a nearby grove of trees, dancing the leaves in a shimmer of yellow confetti. If she didn’t turn around to see the half-gone roof, or look down to see her jeans and jacket, she could imagine that she was a young woman living on this farm with her brother in times past, when Korea was all one country.

  She saw herself carrying a low table with the meal she’d prepared, placing it on the floor in front of her brother — and nearly burst out laughing. She’d pictured Simon sitting cross-legged on the floor in traditional clothing, but his skin and eyes and hair were all wrong for this daydream.

  She was no farmer’s daughter in long-ago Korea. She didn’t have any real cooking or cleaning or homemaking skills. Everything she’d done today she’d had to make up along the way. But Simon was better, because she’d found a way to heat water. She and her inside clothes were clean. Her belly had meat in it. Parts of her were actually warm. And she had done it all. All by herself.

  Simon was right: She was a hot ticket. Spy Girl and Katniss Everdeen, rolled into one.

  She pulled out her journal and made a few notes, the first she’d been able to write since they’d run. She was too tired to do much more than make an outline of what had happened each day, but it was impressive when she saw, all at once, what they had managed to do. It was completely, unbelievably astonishing that they had made it this far; what were the chances?

  Later, lying in the darkness against the warm floor, feeling her muscles unknot, she wasn’t comfortable by any standard she’d known before. The floor was brick hard. They had no pillows or blankets. The room had a hole in the roof and no door. Whatever part of her was on top was soon chilled. But compared to straw pallets in a railroad shed, compared to a pile of leaves on a mountainside or the metal floor of a boxcar, this clean, flat, warm surface felt blissful.

  They were going to have to leave the farmhouse soon. They still had an impossibly long journey. Dad was still under arrest. There were people chasing them. It might get bad. But right now, there was a little bit of good.

  Time to rest and get strong for what was coming.

  It was raining when she woke, but Soon-ok decided to spend the day gathering wild roots. The moisture would loosen the soil, making the plants easier to pull. Winter was on the way, and it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to dig through the snow and chip the roots from the frozen ground.

  Her favorite spot to harvest was a secluded grove high on the mountain, a place that seemed all her own. She gathered her basket and tools and went quickly, before anyone could appear with some request or demand to delay her.

  As she started up the path, the misty rain helped clear her head. She felt the relief of getting away from the village, away from the always-watching eyes, the calculating, judging, and sometimes outright hostile glances, from faces that had once been friendly but now feared contamination by association.

  Soon-ok’s father, a farmer, had been full of zeal for building a new nation by feeding its citizens. But inevitably, his enthusiasm and popularity had threatened someone with a higher rank — the bully party leader who controlled local matters. Her father’s ideas for improving crop yield were twisted into evidence of corruption and individualism, which everyone in the village knew could not possibly be true, but no one dared to contradict. Then came the sham of the “trial,” and the sentence: five years in a reeducation camp. The one thing her father’s strength of character won was protection for his
family; the official was shrewd enough to calculate that there was a limit to what the villagers would go along with, and sent her father off alone. Two years after his departure, Soon-ok still did not know whether this was a piece of fortune or not.

  She felt the pull in her calves as the path steepened, the growing lightness in her spirit as she got farther from the village, where her father’s tormentor still presided. She gazed about at the thickening trees. The forest was the school where her father had been the wise teacher, she the eager pupil, absorbing his instructions of when to gather and how to prepare that fern, that wild green, the new shoots of bamboo. Much of the wild harvest happened in the spring, but as he had taught her, there was always something to be foraged. The roots she sought now were still abundant in autumn.

  They were fortunate to live here. The hilly contours and often poor soil made farming much more difficult than in the wide plains, but those places suffered more when drought or floods or lack of fertilizer caused crops to fail. Here they could always turn to the forest for sustenance. Though there were difficult years, there had never been a time when her father had not been able to produce something he’d grown or foraged to feed his family.

  As she crowned the rise, she reached a sheltering high canopy of bright foliage. The rain barely reached her now that she was under tree cover. She felt her face relaxing, releasing the careful mask. Since her father was a convicted criminal, their whole family was suspect. And she had something to hide: her knowledge that an innocent and upright man could be unjustly accused. That all his devotion to and good deeds for the cause meant nothing. That the gap between what her country preached and what it practiced was wide.

  She knew her duty. She was her father’s daughter, loyal and true. Despite what had been done to him, it was not in her nature to take vengeance or become subversive. For her father’s sake, she did what was expected. But she had taken her heart back from her country. Her allegiance now was only to her family.

  OCTOBER 7

  The rain had come just after dawn. Through the hole in the roof, the sky lightened, then darkened again as storm clouds thickened. It started sprinkling, then increased to a steady drizzle, as if someone was gradually turning on a faucet. The floor beneath Mia was cold.

  “Yuck.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around herself, looking over at her brother. Simon was still sleeping. His color was better, less flushed. His breathing sounded normal.

  Mia got up and went out to the porch, watching the rain dripping from the roof. She needed to make another fire, but she’d used up all the kindling she’d gathered the night before. She shook her head. Nothing to do but get wet.

  By the time she got back to the lean-to with armloads of damp brush and branches, her back and shoulders were soaked. She knelt to build the fire, crumpling a few of Simon’s magazine pages into balls. She’d burned up all of Sports Illustrated and was halfway through Car and Driver, but she figured he’d think it was worth it. Even with the dry paper, it took three matches to light the kindling. Only ten left.

  She huddled, shivering, close to the firepit, feeding bits of grass into the tiny fire, willing it to spread. When the flames were finally strong enough to generate warmth, she turned her back to it. Dodging the little waterfalls streaming through the leaky roof, she gradually dried off her jacket.

  She and Simon weren’t going anywhere today. They could get hypothermia in no time. Simon probably needed another day to rest anyway. She sighed. She could feel the weight of the need to hurry, but they’d never be able to survive, much less help Dad, if Simon couldn’t finish the journey.

  She pulled the pot of leftover snake meat over the fire to heat, then climbed back into the room to sit on the gradually warming floor. Her jeans still felt clammy, but at least she’d stopped shivering. She pulled her knees to her chest and rested her head against the wall. The rain fell through the open roof and pooled in little streams on the broken floor, spilling through the cracks. All the impossibilities and uncertainties of the journey ahead crowded around her, like a pack of hungry wolves.

  After a while Simon woke up. They ate some snake meat and shared a persimmon. Three left. She scooped the leftover meat onto a stone and the broth into one of their water bottles and ran back out into the rain to rinse the jar in the stream and fill it with water. When the water was warm, she showed Simon how he could take a bath too.

  The drizzle continued through the long hours of the morning, trapping them in the corner.

  “Remember when Dad used to read us those books? About the Boxcar Children?” Mia asked. “This keeps reminding me of them.” They sat side by side, backs against the wall of the room.

  “Yeah, except they lived in a make-believe sunshine world where all people were good and loving. While we’re lost in the middle of a country that starves its people, has arrested our father, and is hunting us down this very minute!”

  “Yeah, well, there’s that.” She turned to Simon, raising an eyebrow. “I still loved the stories. All the details of how they did everything for themselves. That’s what this reminds me of.”

  “The Boxcar Children, North Korea.” Simon’s voice was deep and dramatic, like a TV announcer’s. Mia laughed. They were joking with each other. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that.

  Who changed?

  “Simon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to tell you … I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what?” He sounded genuinely surprised. Given all that she’d been doing for him, that was appropriate. But she still needed to say it.

  “The other night, when you were sick, I woke up from a nightmare. I thought about all the horrible things that had happened. And I realized, this is really all my fault.” It was easier to say it not looking at him, just staring into the misty rain.

  “Your fault? Squeak, we already talked about this. Sure, you opened the phone, but if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t have run away with the photos, and someone could have found them. That would have been much worse for Dad. And for us.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about back in August.” She still didn’t look at him. She just needed to blurt this all out. “You know how I always said I didn’t tell on you? Because I didn’t know anything? Well, that’s not really true. I mean, I didn’t know where you had gone, what you were doing. But I heard Mom on the phone telling Dad you were at Nathan’s. I’d seen Nathan around town that afternoon. So later I asked Mom where you were, just so I could tell her you weren’t with Nathan. I did that on purpose. So it’s my fault you got caught. And we came on this trip because of all the difficulty we were having getting along. So whatever happens, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for getting us into this whole mess.”

  There was a pause.

  “You didn’t get me into this mess, Squeak.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “No way. You may have done that one sneaky little thing, but if we’re playing a blame game, I win, hands down. There was no way I would’ve gotten away with all that stuff in August, whether you said anything or not. Going to New York even though Mom and Dad told me I couldn’t, lying, stealing a car —”

  “Stealing a car?” Now she turned to him, wide-eyed.

  “Told you; I win.”

  “What happened? I mean, I knew you went to New York. But stealing a car?”

  Simon sighed.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she added quickly.

  “No, it’s fine. It just seems so ridiculous now, with everything that’s happened.” He took a breath. “It starts way back in the spring, I guess, when things were really going south with Randi. Most of the time I couldn’t get her to even talk to me. She wouldn’t respond to my texts or return my phone calls. It was like she was disappearing, erasing herself.” He lifted his hurt leg and adjusted it on the floor. “That felt like my fault. I was her boyfriend, I was supposed to make her happy, and I couldn’t.” His voice sounded b
leak.

  Mia murmured a protest, but Simon raised a hand, cutting her off. “I know, I know. Depression. We had a whole assembly on it at the beginning of the year. But knowing there was nothing I could do to fix it didn’t make me feel better. It was worse — I just felt helpless.” He blew out a breath and let his head fall back against the wall, fiddling with the woven cord on his wrist.

  Mia was listening so intently, she was practically not breathing. Simon never told her stuff like this. She didn’t dare look directly at him, in case he stopped, but she leaned closer, wanting to catch every word.

  “It was the crappiest feeling. Everything about the situation made me angry. That Randi hadn’t trusted me to stick around when things were hard for her, that I hadn’t been able to figure out any way to help her. Maybe that I was even a little bit relieved when she broke up with me, because it felt kind of like getting out of prison.”

  There was a long pause. Mia didn’t make a sound.

  Simon sat forward, wrapping his arms around his bent leg, the good one. “So fast-forward to late August. The deal was I wanted to go to this concert in New York that Jen and Rusty and I had bought tickets for. But then Mom and Dad decided they didn’t want us driving back in the middle of the night. We didn’t have a place to stay in the city, and Dad was going to be gone, and they just thought it didn’t seem safe. Or ‘wise,’ as Mom put it.”

  Mia gave a half-grin. That sounded exactly like their mother.

  “Thing was, I was kind of into Jen. She’d been flirting with me a little, and it was a great distraction from all the bad stuff with Randi. So I argued and argued with Mom and Dad, but it was no good. I thought I was going to have to miss the concert.” Simon reached down and adjusted the cloth on his leg.

  “Then Mrs. Fasulo called. Could I feed her cats while she was gone for the weekend, and could I pick up her lawn mower at the shop on Saturday morning? She’d leave the car keys on the counter. Saturday morning I did all that stuff for her. Rusty and Jen had already left. And I thought, why not? So I just … took the car, drove to Stamford, left the car in the parking lot, and took the train into New York.”