He lifts his chin at me, the way he used to when he would call me hyperbolic. Before I knew what that meant. “There’s a curfew now. The social hall is chicory and pleasantries. No singing except for services. No dancing.”
“That’s like a permanent state of reverence. How does that work?” We couldn’t even get people to agree on food distribution days in the City, let alone enforce a curfew.
“The people wanted to make sense of their fear and their guilt. I think they wanted to believe him when he said their faith, their sacrifice, was the only thing between them and the catastrophe outside.”
This makes sense in some ways, even though I don’t think it’s much more than a case of an insular population. “Sacrifice? What did they sacrifice?”
“The old magics, Syd. The elementals. Those who didn’t have any powers to give up gave their blood, sweat, and tears to ensure we were self-sufficient.”
It doesn’t seem possible, at least not in my hometown, where the people were cantankerous and opinionated and proud. Not in the country’s last bastion of magic. “And everyone just agreed?” No wonder the New Charitans hadn’t fought to help us. They were too scared to even fight for themselves.
“Not everyone. The Sorensons, the Beckers, your old dance teacher, Ms. Loosten. Two dozen others protested. Finally decided to leave.”
“Loosten isn’t here?” She would be nearly eighty years old, and yet, if anyone would understand my frustration, it would be her. “That sucks.”
“Some went down to Klein, some on over to Meadow. Wasn’t sure how they’d fare.” Pi looks down at his bottle. “But it seems like anyone born here really was protected by the Spirit. Hopefully it’ll protect them down the road just like it did you.”
I let this last part slide for now. Pi can believe in his beloved, magical Spirit all he wants, but not me. “So the Bishop just let them leave? No consequences?”
“The consequences were . . . veiled. After he and Priam—sorry, Governor Willis—closed the gates, they issued residency permits to those who remained. No permit, no reentry, even if you’re New Charity born. That’s why it was a big deal that the Governor allowed you in.”
“He’d look pretty bad denying entry for bereavement.”
Pi nods. “I imagine your old friendship with Cas and Len didn’t hurt, either.”
The twins were an enigma—awaiting my arrival, anticipating Cress’s breakdown, and all the rest of it. “How come they got to keep their powers if everyone else gave theirs away?”
Pi raises his eyebrow. The wine was starting to talk. “You know, if I were a more cynical man, I’d say the Bishop selected the Willis kids as Acolytes because he knew the sort of political ally their father would turn out to be.”
“Priam Willis as Governor, huh?” Cas and Len’s father was a glad-hander, to be sure—a real guy’s guy, replete with the three slaps on the back and a point of the index finger. It wasn’t surprising to think that he’d had political aspirations, and even less surprising he’d climbed on the back of the Sanctuary to reach them.
“When Cal and I were in school with him, it seemed more likely he’d inherit his father’s money and sit back and count it for the rest of his life. But the old boy had dreams, too, I guess.”
“So, for all intents and purposes, everyone behaves lest they piss off the Spirit. Priam gets to be Governor while the Bishop keeps everyone in line. And everyone just gave up? ‘Here’s my gift’? Even you?”
He shrugged, tired. “Even me. It was just air made into music. The needs of our people were greater than my own comfort.”
“And even you weren’t a little bit concerned about my comfort?”
“Of course I was. But by the time you lost your mom, it seemed you already knew how to survive, how to manage your emotions, how to cope. We assumed you wanted nothing to do with us.”
“I was alone for the first time in my life, Pi. So, yes, I learned to cope. And so have all the other Survivors. And it’s about time that changed.”
There hasn’t been enough wine to broach the subject. The air in the room is charged. I’ve forgotten how a family can read each other in ways others cannot, and it makes me feel transparent and irate and sad all at once. His voice hardens to stone. “Syd. I knew, eventually, you’d come back here. Your father and I both wanted that. But not if you’re only here with some vengeful political agenda. Whatever it is you have planned, just leave it.”
“What?” I ask, knowing I’m failing at innocence. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
“I know it has to be frustrating . . .” He’s trying to placate me, and it’s the last straw in a very long day.
“Oh, you do?” I slide down from the counter. “Do you know what it’s like to eat the same canned crap year after year? To be too cold. Too hot. To always be tripping and falling? To spend countless hours stripping down and burning your furniture to boil water? To lose your best friend because there are no lights for surgery or fully functional clinics? Do you know what it’s like to sit alone, covered in candle wax, day after day after dark goddamn day?”
Pi is looking at me like I’m wielding an ax instead of a wineglass. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he says, hands in half surrender. “I should have come for you back then, before. I should have come myself. Your father kept saying . . .”
“That’s not the point, Pi. Just because I’m not in the City right this minute doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening to the rest of the Survivors. Danny still dies whether I’m here or there. How can you—how can New Charity—just sit on your hands?”
“Even if it were up to me, would you really have us gamble with the lives of your Survivors? Think about it.”
“Don’t give me that nonsense about the virus being in the water. Most of the Survivors have antibodies—they’re as immune as those of us from New Charity, and people have been drinking from the dregs of the Basalt the whole time. Whatever you’ve got in that reservoir has been diluted over the last five years. Even if we have to keep boiling the water, we can’t rebuild without electricity, and now we’re dying in other ways. Preventable ways, Pi.”
“Syd, I hear you, but I need you to be careful. Take a few weeks and process your father’s death before you go spouting your discontent all over town.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Look, Syd, the Bishop can’t see forward, only behind. But the twins . . . All I’m saying is be careful about the positions in which you place your friends. You think this is all for the greater good, but there are people’s futures at stake.”
“There are people’s lives at stake, Pi,” I find myself yelling. “Don’t you get it?”
He pulls his jacket on and looks at me, the color drained from his face. “More than you know, Syd.” The soft bump of the screen door punctuates his exit.
I’m so tired I hurt. So pissed off at Pi that I almost feel awake again. But I know that sleep is a necessary evil. I let my deep memories lead my feet, unsteady with wine, up the stairs and down the hall to my old bedroom. Shouldering the door open, my hand lands on the switch, once more right where it should be. The room brightens, and I gulp for air.
In the City, it’s not all that uncommon to happen into perfectly preserved spaces. Though I’m usually searching for libraries, I’ve blundered into sewing nooks and laundry rooms and walk-in closets. There’s a hush, a reverence, as it happens, an involuntary flashback to some part of my own life.
Sometimes I visit these spaces intentionally. Last year, I made my annual ballet memorial trek through the dressing rooms of the Company. I wandered the row of women’s lockers, trying to resist the urge to cry over the rat-chewed satin and tulle littering the room—a feat made easier with Danny trailing behind me, proclaiming that once a place smells like feet, the place will always smell like feet, come hell or high water, as will the people who spend their time in such places. People like dancers. All dancers but me, right? He’d remained mercifully silent.
<
br /> But the laugh he would’ve loosed over the pink monstrosity of my preteen bedroom would have been heard clear to the Survivor camp. Nary a scrap of wallpaper can be seen beneath the adages illustrated with dancers in unlikely poses, posters of new satin slippers juxtaposed with ratty leg warmers, and playbills from trips to places that probably no longer exist. Tiaras and headpieces, favorite tutus, and worn-out pointe shoes hang from tattered ribbons. The corners of my four-poster bed are draped with costumes I left behind, sweated through and outgrown, and dried bouquets of roses. It’s the work of an insane balletomane. There is no trace of me here, though. No real person, just ruffles and hopes. I don’t remember being this myopic, but here is the evidence.
My mom had said we’d start fresh in the City. And we did. I left the dream behind and headed straight into the reality, for better or worse.
Though it’s possible I’d taken a few steps toward adulthood back then. I stumble over to the white desk in the far corner and open the center drawer. Turning my palm up, it only takes me two or three pats to find the pack of cigarettes I taped there after Cas and Len and I tried smoking them out behind their barn.
Some of the girls at the dance school had promised cigarettes would help me stay thin. I was desperate to fit in back then, to succeed, to drag Cas and Len with me through the door of rebellion, but the coughing didn’t seem worth it the way it did after I hit puberty. Now cigarettes are nearly impossible to find.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” I say to a dancer’s shiny poster face.
The matches are dry and the cigarettes even drier, but the burn feels good in my lungs, appropriately punishing, and smoking in my room—this fuchsia-plastered dream of an earlier me—feels appropriately rebellious.
It occurs to me that there is no one left in my life to care. I sink into the pink pile carpet and cry.
CHAPTER FOUR
Syd
Something is pounding in my head and at first I think it’s a hangover and then I’m sure it is and then I’m sure it’s something else, too. It takes me a few seconds to remember where the hell I am. I’m in a bed and there’s light streaming through a window. The room is very brown, very boring, very guest room-y, which is when I recognize the stupid dogs-playing-cards picture on the wall, and the night before comes flooding back along with the adrenaline that accompanies the sound of the front door opening, and footsteps bounding up the stairs. Someone is knocking at the door of my old bedroom, where I decamped last night for someplace less nostalgic. Because the person is knocking out the rhythm to “shave and a haircut,” my reptile brain relaxes. It is—it can only be—Cas.
“In here,” I croak. But she’s yelling my name too loudly to hear me. I trip my way out of bed, having alligator-rolled myself up in an infernal beige comforter. I crash into a dresser trying to get untangled, my inner thighs and back muscles screaming as I try to right myself. Cas lets out a squeal. “Syd, is that you?”
I want to say something smart, but I’m mostly focusing on not strangling her. “Who did you think it would be?”
Her torso cranes around the doorframe into the guest room. “You nearly scared me half to death.”
“And yet you are the one breaking and entering.”
She shrugs apologetically. “I just figured since the hide-a-key was still there . . .”
That damned key. I didn’t rehide it because I hadn’t remembered its existence, let alone its location. “In the crook of the big rock?”
“In the elbow of the little aspen,” she says, as if I’ve forgotten her birthday. Which, coincidentally, I have. “What are you doing in here?”
“Did you see in there?” I point toward my old room. Then I cross my arms over my chest, glad I’m at least wearing a T-shirt and the superhero underwear I wrestled Danny for inside the discarded detritus of a discount mart.
Cas turns back to my bedroom across the hall. “You might have a point.” She wanders through the door and drops onto the floor where I’d left an old photo album open the night before. “But Syd. So many memories. I kind of love it.”
“I’m thinking of charging admission, calling it The Cave of TuTu Much.” I follow her in and relocate the cigarettes. It’s funny how quickly habits can be taken back up. “Want one?”
Cas coughs and waves her hand in front of her face. “No. Gross.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me where I found them?” I can’t believe she’s not shocked to see a cigarette.
“The Wagners have a tobacco farm. The mercantile sells their stuff these days, anyway.”
And here I’d lived years thinking I’d never smoke again. I blow a smoke ring at her. “You don’t remember this box? You and me and Len smoking these out on the ridge?”
She shakes her head.
So much for the poignancy of childhood antics. “Well, Cas, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
“I’m here to help you. You know, clean the stalls. See if you need a dress for tonight. Remember?”
“Are the horses even up yet?”
“The horse. Singular. Unless Pi is home. And yes. It’s three in the afternoon. Even horses are up.” Cas starts with condemnation and ends with disappointment. I don’t know what I expected of our friendship, after all these years. I didn’t expect whatever this is, this strange transfer of power. “But I guess you must be pretty tired.” She does not sound convinced.
“Wait, you can grow tobacco here?” I ask, rewinding. Last night’s trot through cool, green grass comes back to me. Out the window are the same dusty streets of old, but the hills beyond are dark green with sage instead of sandstone. Another hank of memory barges through my mind—my mother cursing the rocky soil, her latest gardening experiments limp, spindly, brown, or all three. “Since when?”
“Since the Blessing.” She looks away from me when she says it, the condemnation all at once conspicuously absent.
“Humph.” I want to say many things, but Pi’s warning stops me. For the moment.
She carefully closes the photo album and sets it on top of the bed. “Where do you want to start?” she asks, rising from her cross-legged position.
“Well, I’m going to finish this cigarette, and then I was hoping to try out some of this hot water I’ve heard so much about.”
The look on her face is the one I’ve wanted since she met me at the car, so I’m not sure why it infuriates me further. “Are you being funny?” she murmurs. “I can’t tell if you’re being funny.”
I turn my back on her and head down the stairs. I’m relatively sure I saw a can of Folgers on the counter last night and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to drink a whole pot of it single-handedly.
“Look, I know I’m doing this wrong, Syd.” Cas is at the head of the stairs and I stop at the bottom. “I’m not, you know, like you. I’m not cool. I’m not citified.”
I take one last drag of the cigarette before I stub it out in the pot of what might have once been a fern. “I think what I can’t get my head around is that you don’t know there is no cool anymore. There’s no citified. There’s nothing. No celebrities, no national tabloids, no papers, no trends. There’s no fashion, no cars, no travel, no art, no singing, no painting . . .”
“Fine. Don’t yell. I get it, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So I guess that means no dancing, either?”
If only I’d allowed myself to choke her earlier.
Cas drop steps her way down the stairs, deep in thought. When she gets to the bottom she sits. “Will you tell me?”
I end up talking while Cas takes over the coffee and makes a grocery list. I sit on the same stool Pi sat on, and I tell her about going to the City and starting at the Company.
We make an effort to go out and look at the barns. Cas heads right to the rail, offering something from her pocket, a browned apple slice in the palm of her hand. “They left you the gray to ride.”
“Thoughtful,” I croak.
My dad’s gray gelding stands in
the shade of the barn sleeping, head down, looking—appropriately—as if he’s lost his best friend. I will my feet forward, but I meet with a wall of denial. Somehow walking into the paddock will make this all real, instead of theoretical.
“I’m sorry, Cas. I just don’t think I can do this part right now.”
And so we go back inside and drink more of the stale Folgers. Polite yet firm, Cas shoves me toward the shower, and sits on the closed toilet while I talk above the running water about my mother and the flu and how they quarantined us in place, and I’m glad I’m in there so it doesn’t look like I’m crying, even though I am, and not just about my mother but at the warm, filthy water swirling around my ankles, my aching thighs, and a bruise on my bicep that’s throbbing, though I can’t quite see it, even when I crane myself into a dangerous position and almost meet my death at the hands of my own toilette.
When the water’s not filthy anymore, Cas hands me a towel and I explain how there was relatively little disorder until the very end. And as I dry off, I tell her about Danny and Agnes and Mina and Buster and our efforts to rebuild.
I really don’t have time to wax rhapsodic about the City because Cas is steering me toward my bedroom, where we open up my closet and are immediately rewarded by an eruption of sequins we try to stuff back behind the bulging doors.
“Where did your mom keep the clothes that didn’t fit her anymore?”
This takes significant brainpower. My mom cleared out the closet she shared with my dad. That much I remember, sitting on the floor, handing her pairs of shoes. “I don’t know if she even . . .”
“Everyone keeps old clothes that don’t fit,” she declares, oblivious once again to a world somewhat devoid of the divisions of old and new and fit and doesn’t fit. “Guest room?”
So we come full circle to the very brown room. My new room, I decide, and lo and behold, in the closet there are faded denim shirts and tatty-edged jeans, old bouclé suits—all clean and soft and somehow still smelling of her. I’m crying again and Cas pats me awkwardly. “Do you need a hug?” she whispers.
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