I straggled in to Tess’s diner late the next morning, having taken a detour to check a cut on Windy’s foreleg. Len had gone on ahead to Vocational Retraining, no doubt stopping at Al Truax’s place to smoke a cigarette and lament the injustice of Al having aged out of the class the year before.
Syd was still waiting for me, having cobbled together a striking black tunic and white jeans from her mother’s things. She looked like a fashion model stranded in an old western movie. I glanced down at my cargo pants, which had already collected something brown at the hem from the paddock. Her jeans were, of course, immaculate.
Tess stopped at our table to collect my thermos. “The usual?”
I nodded.
Syd’s water appeared untouched, and she was studying a small blue journal with a lock on the side. “Wasn’t sure you’d show,” she said, glancing up.
I wanted to say something authoritative. This was my town, my diner, my Vocational Retraining, and she had no business acting like I was the one inconveniencing her. I already had Len to watch out for—his wanderings, his drunken benders, his refusal to take retraining, his future, his life seriously; it wasn’t as if I needed another charge. “My mother wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She gave an amused huff. “You’re old enough to make your own choices.”
“Easy for you to say.”
There was a change in her face. Her smile didn’t so much fall as harden into a glare. “Quite. I don’t know why anyone bothers having parents at all.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Look,” Syd said, “what do you want, Casandra? Do you want to be my friend, my ally, my acquaintance, someone I used to know? Those are all fine. But the choice is yours, okay? We’re way past the age of playdates.”
“I have duties, Syd. You asked me to listen to what your life was like, but you’ve never even asked about mine.”
“Fine,” she said. “Tell me all about the arduous life of a Sanctuary Acolyte.”
Tess completed another loop around the restaurant, dropping off my thermos and two pastries. “I know you said you weren’t hungry, Miss Turner, but I reckon your father’d want me to make sure his girl was well fed.” Syd smiled with genuine gratitude, but when Tess turned away, she just stared at the warm turnover in her hand.
“What?” I asked.
She shook herself from her daydream. “I just wish . . . never mind.”
“Let’s get going.” I scooted out of the booth, tapping the face of my watch. She followed, eyes drifting over the empty cafe and out onto the deserted sidewalk of Main Street.
I kept my voice soft. “Being an Acolyte is different now that my father is in office.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. Everyone watching you grow up.”
“It was easy when we were kids. Like a performance. But it’s different now.” The vision of Cal calling out as the Bishop wandered the halls of the Turner Ranch swooped unbidden into my mind. Part of me wanted to blurt everything right there, but I couldn’t possibly tell her until I was sure. How could I even explain what I’d seen?
“Well, it’s not like I don’t understand what being on stage is like,” Syd said.
“You and your mother wanted the same things, though, didn’t you?” I asked, my mouth half full of pastry. “I don’t know what my mother wants. She already has everything. And I mean everything. And still, I can’t do anything right.”
“Why don’t you get out of there, then? Aren’t there quarters for Acolytes over the Sanctuary? Didn’t we have grand plans for that place back when we were fourteen? Repainting everything aquamarine and having slumber parties every night.”
“After the gates closed, Perry came home and Troy stayed, so Len and I just never left. I mean, at first the Bishop encouraged families to stick together—you know, with the unrest and travel bans and the defectors. And after that, I suppose it was simple inertia.”
“I know all about inertia,” Syd said. “I think I had a case of that myself.”
“With Mama, I just do my best to try not to rock the boat.”
“God, Cas, she’s a piece of work. The way she treats you is really not okay.”
“She does the best she can,” I said, surprised at my own surliness. But it wasn’t fair. My mother would praise Syd till the cows came home, and Syd could care less. “Besides, she’s your number one fan.”
“Then she’s definitely an idiot,” Syd said, with a half laugh. “You know that’s bullshit, right? She doesn’t approve of me any more than anyone else. It’s an act for Pi. For the Bishop. For herself.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. We walked the rest of the block in silence, Syd returning to her uneaten pastry meditation until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d consumed my own in about three bites. “Those are best when they’re still warm, you know.”
“I wish I could give it to Mina. Or Agnes, maybe.”
“So you are going back.”
She nodded. “I made promises.”
“When do they expect you?”
“Soon. But I don’t have an exact number of days or anything. I have no idea how long whatever this is will take.”
“Settling Cal’s affairs? We said we’d help and we will. I promise.”
Syd stopped and turned to face me. “There’s one more thing I want to understand while I’m here, but you’re not going to like it.”
“You don’t have to—” I began.
“I want to—I have to—find a way to help the City,” she said.
My heart dropped into my shoes, and I prayed to the Spirit she wouldn’t finish her sentence. The Bishop rarely used his Hindsight, but if he was wasting his powers on anyone, it would be Syd. Whatever she wanted to confide in me wasn’t guaranteed to stay our secret.
“Mina and Agnes and Doc,” she rambled. “They need electricity. I have to find a way to get it to them. Your reservoir is killing us.”
I could see how much she loved them, these imaginary City people who she carried with her in her heart. These people who had no idea what they had sent her to do. “The Bishop closed the reservoir for a reason.”
“Which is?”
The mantra had been drilled into us for years. “The safety of the citizens downstream.”
“The water is safe for you but not for us?”
“It’s not that simple,” I said, not knowing how to explain. “There’s the Blessing, too.”
“It’s just a nice side benefit that the extra water irrigates all your crops, tobacco to beans, and keeps the creeks and gullies full?”
We started walking again. I knew how the change in the land must look to her, how it would look to anyone prepared to be angry.
I took a deep breath, weighing whether or not to explain the way the Wards protected the reservoir and that opening the floodgates would cause more problems than it would solve. “I know it’s hard to believe, but the Spirit smiled on us, Syd. Maybe it would be better to find a way for your friends to come here. Spirit willing, the Bishop will listen.”
“Enough with your Spirit nonsense. You can’t really believe all this crap?” She stopped again. “This isn’t lullabies and rose-colored visions and green hills. Your land isn’t meant to look like this and neither is ours. There are real people out there who need help.”
“Aren’t we people here in New Charity?” I asked, more pitifully than I meant to.
“I thought so once. But now I’m not so sure.”
I reeled from her succinct rejection of the Spirit and New Charity itself. How could she dismiss it all out of hand? I couldn’t understand how she would rather go hungry than eat the pastry she still held in front of her. The one she still held when I opened the door to our classroom in the basement of the courthouse.
Sheriff Jayne, tall, broad shouldered, and sun browned, beamed at her. “Apple turnover for the teacher? You shouldn’t have.”
Despite the promising beginning, the amity between Syd and Sheriff Jayne
didn’t last more than a few minutes. Syd surveyed the room, resting on her back foot, arms crossed in front of her, as whispers crescendoed to full-blown discord.
“Would you like to introduce yourself?” the Sheriff asked.
Syd faced the room, cheeks still cool and pale while the blush bloomed over my own face just standing beside her. She held the pastry out to the Sheriff, and said, “I don’t think we need to pretend if we don’t have to. Is there anyone here who doesn’t know who I am?”
Two hands shot up. The Fenton brothers, who moved here just after Syd and her mother left town.
She didn’t do a very good job of hiding her annoyance, her fight to keep from scowling turning her mouth into an uneven grimace. “I’m Syd Turner. My father is, was, Cal Turner. He bred horses, as you probably know. I’m here because, well.”
The Fentons mumbled their condolences.
“Is that sufficient?” Syd asked. The Sheriff nodded.
But before we could sit down, a voice started cackling. “So that ballerina nonsense you moved away for, how’s that working out for you?”
To Syd’s credit, she tried to ignore Becky Purcell. But Becky wasn’t so easily dismissed.
“Empty auditoriums getting you down? Or do you even have auditoriums anymore? I heard all you Survivor folk are like animals, fighting over food and burning all your furniture and your books and all that artsy shit that was so important to be cultured.”
“Yup. Once a week we trade fingers for tennis shoes. But look,” she said, cocking her head, “I still have one left.” She flipped Becky off with a flourish.
“Okay, okay,” said Sheriff Jayne. “Put it away.”
“Thought you were better than all of us,” Becky mumbled. “Gonna show all us backward hicks what success looks like. Looks like a tired-assed has-been to me.” Snickers and snorts made their way through the room.
“At least I tried to make something of myself,” Syd said.
It was an unexpectedly halfhearted comeback. Things might have ended there if Becky and her friends had given up their whispering. If Syd had let their pettiness go. If I had come to her defense.
I’d been standing there guppy mouthed, so Len stood up and pushed me into a seat. He grabbed Syd’s shoulder, whispering, “They aren’t worth your time. Come sit.” But Syd’s expression shifted, hurt to anger. The cheek she’d attempted to turn flushed deeply.
When the plague came, we did lose a handful of people. Becky’s father and uncle were among those who, for various reasons, had skipped out on the Bishop’s bird flu vaccine—the one that ended up protecting us from the sickness that decimated the rest of the world.
The Purcells’ original refusal deepened a divide running between the ramshackle cabins on the east side of New Charity and the rest of town. Unlike Syd’s mom, who missed the vaccine for a business trip, the Purcell men flat refused to trust the Bishop. The resulting scandal was less about the health decision and more about the snub to the Sanctuary. By the time the Bishop asked for the sacrifice of the townspeople’s gifts, that seam was pulled into an outright rift. The cabins had more to lose without their magic to help with farming and fishing, and they didn’t trust my father’s promises or the Bishop’s.
When the defectors raised a fuss and left town, it was a surprise to most of us that Becky and her mother didn’t go with them. It seemed there was nothing to keep them here, and yet they stayed, Mrs. Purcell ceding her water gift as if it were a pot roast instead of her legacy.
Syd smiled at Len, then at Becky. “Good to know some things never change, Len. Seven years and you haven’t even bothered to take out your trash.”
Becky shot from her chair like a startled bird. The Sheriff had her in a headlock just as quick, which was lucky for Syd. After Becky quit ballet she’d put on more than a few pounds of muscle baling hay for the McMahons and helping her family’s trout fishery. “Enough. Both of you.”
“You were right, Cas,” Syd said. “This has been informational.” In three long steps she was back out the door we’d just come through.
I must have made a move to get up. Len sat back down beside me. “Let her go.”
Becky pulled loose of the Sheriff and made a beeline for Len and me. “You shit-eating hypocrites. Aren’t you supposed to reject those who don’t buy in to your precious Sanctuary?”
Len grinned beatifically. “The Spirit shines on us all. Even you, it seems.”
“You can close your mouth now, Casandra,” she spat.
It was a long class.
Len and I finally located Syd back at the diner, drinking chicory this time. The blue journal was open, the lock discarded alongside with a bobby pin still jammed into the bottom. On the lined page, there was handwriting, small and neat enough that I couldn’t read it from across the table.
Len pointed to the lock. “Used the brute force method, I see. One of my favorites.”
She looked up, eyebrows scrunched together. “Did my dad move a big herd of horses in the last few months?”
“He might have taken some down to Klein,” I said, feeling awful all over again as I took another mental trip down the last few minutes of Cal Turner. Cal was one of the few who had a permit to deliver letters and pies and whatever else those in New Charity needed to pass along to their relatives in the towns nearby. “There are still a few here, though. One of the Sheriff’s deputies took a few others to keep an eye on. Pi’s been feeding the gray, right?”
“Him and, um, the Sheriff?” she said, shaking her head at the pages. “Sheriff Jayne. She’s about Perry’s age, right? Maybe she was away at school when we were young; is that why I don’t know her?”
Len nodded. “I think so. She doesn’t talk about herself much. She was one of the cabin families. Her kin died long before any of this happened, though.”
I reached over and touched her hand. She flinched, but stayed still. “I’m sorry about Becky.”
“Don’t be. She wasn’t wrong. The thing is, I forgot her. I sort of forgot everybody. I mean, except for you two.”
Len flicked imaginary dust from his shoulders. “We’re not easy to forget.”
“Class won’t be so bad next time,” I said.
She barked a laugh. “And what gave you the impression there’ll be a next time?”
“You said you wanted to learn about it. How they built it. Why it’s closed.”
I barreled on before Syd could ask any questions about the reservoir. “Look, once you understand, you’ll see why it’s so dangerous,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t call my bluff. But of course she did.
“Like, what, the water might be too wet for the people downstream? Save it, Cas. I’m the wrong demographic for your propaganda.”
“It’s not propaganda, Syd. How can you just show up with all your preconceived notions and be sure you’re right?”
“They aren’t notions. I’m using my brain to think up logical conclusions. You might try it sometime.”
I gripped the fork in my right hand hard so hard the cheap metal warped under my thumb.
Beside me, Len stiffened. “Don’t. Don’t start fighting.”
“This is why you don’t remember anyone,” I said. Len slumped into the booth beside me. “You were—you are—completely oblivious to other people and their thoughts and opinions.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you tried respecting this place, the people in it, then maybe people would be nicer to you. I mean, why couldn’t you just tell everyone about your life here before you left? Your life after you left? You practically bit the Fenton kids’ heads off.”
“I did not. What do those baby jackasses need to know anything about me for?” She leaned over the table, her face close to mine. “I’m only here to exploit your wonderful idyllic little town.”
“Syd, you know we don’t think that.”
“What do you want from me? You want me to beg these people for some sort of forgiveness? Absolution for leaving in the first place?”
&n
bsp; “You could at least act like you’re glad to be here. Like you missed us. Like you missed Troy or your uncle or the town. Anything that you left behind when you made up your mind your dream was more important than we were. Like you don’t think everything we are, everything this place is . . . is garbage.”
“Everything this place is? This place doesn’t belong to any of you. I don’t care what your crazy Sanctuary gospel preaches: this is just a place like any other place.”
“How can you say that? Len and I have spent our lives proving the Spirit shines on New Charity.”
“Speak for yourself,” snapped Len.
Len, once more somewhere other than in my corner, made me even more incensed. “All I’m saying, Syd, is that if you just tried a little harder not to be so . . . so you.” The words felt like cold water over the coals in my throat. I desperately wished them unsaid.
“Whoa, Cas,” said Len.
“Well, I don’t see anyone forcing you to be here,” Syd said, her voice far away. She closed the journal and slid it into her back pocket.
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just you’re so, you know, like you don’t care.”
“Because I don’t care, Casandra.”
I threw my hands in the air. “I’m not saying it’s right that people are judging you, I’m just saying they are judging you.”
She stood up, still spotless, unwrinkled. “So I should change. You think that would do the trick: one big attitude adjustment?”
“No. Of course not,” I said. “But you could meet them halfway or something.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“Syd, please wait.” She tried to surge ahead, but had to stop as the door of the cafe swung inward into her path. In tumbled Perry, Troy, and the Governor, who’d clearly been in the back room of the mercantile—where the Willis boys were some of the most loyal consumers of Bill’s bootleg beer.
“My lucky day,” Syd said, straightening her bag. “A whole Willis posse.”
Tess met us at the door, shoving a box of turnovers into Syd’s hands. “You look like you might need a bit of bolster there, honey. Take those home for you, and you tell your uncle to come see us real soon, you hear?”
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