by Riley, Peggy
She drops down into it, feels herself falling to the floor of it, lumpy, soggy. Blankets are there, warmth for the end of the world, damp now from whoever had tried to put their fire out. Her clogs trip over the bedding. Knees bent, her arms swinging before her, she gropes her way forward, out of the hatch’s light, to feel for the wall. It reeks of rot, of decay and waste, worse than the inside of the ruined house. “Amity?”
A scratching comes and she thinks of the metal shelves with their foodstuffs, the sacks of grains and rice. Rats, she thinks, and shudders. Only rats.
She kicks something hard on the floor and she crouches, thinking shelves will have fallen or been pulled down. She might be walking on all of their food. She freezes, so as not to destroy any more of it, whatever the rats have left her. Her fingers feel through cloth and find stitches, the spidery stitches made by wives of many generations. Stitches made by her.
Something is breathing. She holds her own breath and decides in the silence that it must be her. Her daughter is not in the room below. She is weak with relief, but still she can feel her heart slapping her chest from within.
She creeps forward, slowly, clog step by clog step, until her hands find glass jars, stacked and whole. Safe. Her hands find bags of grain that are soaked, no doubt sprouting, and sacks of apples rotting, fermenting. She finds the carboys of water they took turns to fill and haul down.
The room is Rapture-ready, but Rapture never came. Still, God hates waste. In the dark she fills her arms with Mason jars, beets in vinegar, tomatoes in molasses, whatever her hands can find. She waddles them over the lumps of the floor to pass them up through the hatch hole, to shove them across the temple floor, where they topple and roll above her. Then she creeps back, to gather more.
She hears the scratching again—a twitching. Something heavy, moving against the metal shelves. “Amity? Is it you?” She hears a low, ghostly moan and she thinks of the old, old woman, buried beneath the temple, inside its very foundations. She wishes for the flashlight.
And then her feet are caught. Her heart pounds and she bends to the stitching. She feels the shapes beneath it then, and she cannot place them or imagine what they are, and she can only remember how wives dropped their children, down through the hatch, and how she pulled her own children free, running them away, while the children of forty-nine wives were shut in for safekeeping and the altar table slid across to hide them. So that they could not be taken. She remembers how the flames took hold as she ran.
Had wives run without children? Had the children not been taken at all, but left down here?
Her hands leave the sheet. She cannot bear to lift it. She clutches at her skirt.
She has to get out of here. She no longer cares about the food they stored or the sheet that might prove to the outside world that they had lived and loved there, one family all. Everything is tainted now, by all that has been done. She reaches up for the hatch, to pull herself up, and then she hears it.
The voice that stops her. The voice that haunts her.
“Wife,” she hears. “Amy.”
40
Spinning
Amity plays hide-and-seek with Sorrow. Sorrow wants Amity to find her. Amity knows it by the apple core, lying brown and dainty on its side. She knows by the cheese crumbs, leading her up the stairs.
She looks and listens for Sorrow. She hears doors slam and follows the sound to the top of the landing, where she is struck by the emptiness, by the absence of family. The house is too big without them, spilling out of bedrooms, bustling by with hands full of linens and babies. The house is too quiet now.
She sniffs the air for Sorrow. She thought she would only have to follow the smell of her fire, but all the house smells of Sorrow. She peers into bedrooms, sees their empty, unmade beds. She calls down the corridor. And then she watches as the long legs of the wooden ladder are slowly lowered from the attic, inviting her up.
She looks up the length of them, up into the eaves of the house, expecting Sorrow’s grin or grimace. “Sorrow?” she calls up to the roof and the silence.
She hooks her elbows around the rails and climbs up, her clawed hands unable to catch hold of the rungs. She moves, one sneaker at a time, up into the smoked A-frame of the roof. Her head pokes up through the attic floor and she can see their giant bed, made for all the children, the floor covered with air mattresses, cushions, and blankets where they all slept together in a tangle of limbs.
“Sorrow, I’m here.” Amity shuts her eyes.
Across the room she hears clogs shuffle over floorboards. She smells Sorrow’s acrid smoke. “We just want to see you.”
“Don’t you look,” she hears back, breathy.
“We won’t hurt you.”
“You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Amity nods, her eyes shut, and waits until she feels two bony hands cover her eyelids. She feels tears squeeze out from beneath them, as if they pour from Sorrow’s palms. “Are you okay?” She knows better than to ask about Dust.
“Don’t look at me,” Sorrow tells her, and Amity nods.
Like blindman’s bluff, Sorrow leads Amity through the house, eyes shut, her arms tugged and pulled as if by their missing strap. Amity winces, waiting to be smacked into a wall as her sister walks her. Sorrow pulls her down the stairs and at every step she expects to put a foot out and find the tread is gone beneath her, that Sorrow has walked her off the edge of the world.
When the heat of the sun hits her face, she knows Sorrow has walked her out the front door. Her eyelids flicker open and she catches, for a moment, the sight of a shape in a dark skirt and dirty blouse, cap jammed tight as muslin on a jar. She looks like any wife or mother. She feels Sorrow’s hands slap back over her eyes.
“I told you not to look,” she says.
“I’m sorry.” Amity bites her lip, afraid of what Sorrow doesn’t want her to see.
“You will be sorry. Come on.”
Amity feels herself dragged over dirt and up cement steps to floorboards. Her sneaker slips over lumps and bumps and Sorrow’s hands dig into her face, but she trips. Her ankle twists and her useless hands fly out to break her fall. She sprawls across the temple boards, arms sliding over fabric. Dazed and flat, her eyes open. She looks up at the dark skirted shape of her sister, bending down to scoop her up. She sees Sorrow’s face.
“Don’t!” Sorrow shoves a hand out and turns away, shielding herself with her other hand, but Amity has seen her. She is beautiful, beautiful as she ever was. Amity has taken the fire from her and into her hands, just as she had hoped. She had healed Sorrow after all.
“Sorrow,” she says. “Look at me.” She holds her boiled hands out. She waits for Sorrow to pinch them or kick her, to exert her revenge at last, but Sorrow only drops her own hands from her face. “The fire didn’t get you.”
“No,” Sorrow says, as if she is sad about it.
Amity closes her eyes and she can see the fire rise up about them. She can hear how Sorrow shouted, from the field and from the altar. She can see all the fires she started. Then she feels Sorrow take hold of her wrists and pull her upward, walk her forward, and she is afraid.
But Sorrow says, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.” The promise and threat of their prayer.
“Through the cities of war, I will be with you,” Amity finishes. She feels herself walked in a circle. Her heart leaps for Sorrow.
“When you walk through fire you shall not be burned.”
Amity finishes the prayer. “And the flame shall not consume you!”
And then Sorrow spins her, faster and faster, at last. Her eyes shut, the room wheels in her head and all about her. She feels herself spinning with the stars and the sky. She feels herself in a circle of women, visible and invisible through all of time, family eternal. They are there in her body, there in her blood. She knows they are waiting for her, reaching down from cloudy heaven. And Rapture, when it comes, will come as a vortex, twisting the faithful up to God with the dead. Th
at is what they are spinning for—they are spinning to feel how the world will end. When Sorrow releases her, Amity spins free in an orbit about the room as the wives did, flinging her body in a whirlwind as she has only witnessed, whipped like the spinning top of God. And she is embarrassed by her jeans and her sneakers then, rubbing and squeaking over the floor. She should be dressed for spinning, in a woman’s skirts and cap. She has forgotten who she is. She has been vain enough to think that people have been looking at her, when she should only be staring at God.
And then it is all she wants—to be who she was.
From below her, from beneath them both, she hears a voice. She hears a scream.
Amity looks at her sister and she is only smiling.
“Father,” Sorrow says.
41
The Room Below
Wife,” he calls her.
Through the dark of the room below, she hears his voice with a jolt that shakes a scream from her, and she knows why he didn’t follow them, why the cars that pursued her were never his, why the police couldn’t find him or question him, why he hadn’t come for them after all. He was down below.
He had been here all along. He was the one who stayed, finally, and waited for her return. And then she is sorry to have come back, Sorrow or no. Her eyes strain in the darkness, but she cannot see him. No husband, handsome, the white suit of his wedding days. No husband as she found him, lost and bewildered in his haze of drugs, nor the beauty of him, lost in prayer, beyond any of their reaching. He would be wasted away to nothing, she knew, living on the scraps of the room below, or scavenging the house as she thought Sorrow must have done. He might be only skin and bone, much as his second wife was now.
“I knew you’d come.”
“Not for you.”
“Help me up,” he says. His voice comes clear and strong. She can afford him no pity.
She steps back into the square of light from above, making it harder to see him or find him in the room below. She hears him moving, following her into it. “I’d have bolted the hatch if I knew you were down here.”
“To bury me?” He gives a laugh that becomes a long, wet cough. She can hear the fluid in his lungs, from the damp and chill of the room below, even in summer. The cough doubles him over, the slim shape in the darkness that moves closer, comes toward her.
From above her, she hears footsteps, the sound of wooden clogs turning on boards. “Daughter?” she calls. She looks up.
“Daughter,” he says, and then his hands are on her and he is pulling her to him, away from the light, and all she wants is to get out, grab her daughters, and go. The slim bones of his fingers shackle her wrist, reach for her face, her mouth and nose, to silence her once and for all, and she shoves him away. He catches her arm and pulls her into a filthy embrace, and then she must scream.
The footsteps stop above her. “Daughter!” she shouts.
From above, from the light, a face pokes in. Amity’s face, her dark braids dropping down. Then Sorrow’s face beside her, pale and frowning, beautiful.
“Sorrow!” she cries.
“Sorrow,” he echoes, and she turns to him, there in the light. His tunic is stained and greasy, dark stripes marking sweat and waste. His hair hangs in rats.
“Don’t you say her name—” she shouts.
“I only wanted—” he falters.
“I know what you wanted.”
“I never wanted—Sorrow—”
“You shut up.” She pulls away from him, flying backward, toppling back, stumbling over the blankets and the sheet, where arms reach down from the light for her. Two sets of arms. She reaches up to let hands grip her forearms and elbows hook her to lift her, even as he comes for her. She feels her two daughters draw her up, save her, pull her from the room below, even as his hands are in her skirt, around her ankles. She gives one good kick with her wooden sole and feels it connect with bone with a crunch.
And then she is in the light of the temple and her two girls are there and it is all she wants in the world, her two girls safe, and she is sorry to have wanted more. She thinks of Bradley for a moment, an ache and a loss, then she holds Amity to her, fiercely, breathing her in. She holds an arm out for Sorrow, her own Sorrow, but she does not come. “Daughter, you’re safe now,” she says.
“Am I?” Sorrow turns to the hole in the floor and bends down toward it, as she did when the fire started, and Amaranth is afraid of what she will do and what she has done. She is afraid of what Sorrow wants.
“Come away from there, Sorrow.” She follows to draw her up by her shoulders, away from the hole and the room below. “We’ve come back for you.”
“Go away!” Sorrow snarls. Amaranth puts her hands on Sorrow’s shoulders and Sorrow squirms away from her. “You threw it away. It’s mine now!”
The skeletal bones of her husband’s hands reach up from below, for Sorrow to take. The nails are dark and split. Sorrow only smiles at them.
Amaranth bends before her daughter. “This is wrong, Sorrow, what you want. Can’t you see it?”
“You don’t know,” Sorrow says. She takes hold of her father’s hands and Amaranth pulls at her, to pull her back from him. Sorrow shouts, “Let me go—you don’t want him!”
“I want you, Sorrow,” she says.
“You never wanted me,” Sorrow snaps back.
“Oh, daughter. That’s not true.” Amaranth can remember how that felt, not being wanted, left behind and abandoned. She remembers how desperate she was for someone to want her, anyone. Wasn’t that how she came to be here? She holds a hand out to Sorrow and Sorrow looks at it with disdain, like the pathetic thing that it is, offered too late with too little.
Sorrow reaches down for her father’s hand. “Behold, the Lamb,” she says.
Bradley’s truck and the car of Wife Forty-Eight sit, bumper to bumper, clipped together with cables. Amaranth turns the key of the car and watches the temple. “It’ll take a few minutes to charge,” she says. “Goddamn it.”
“We can’t leave without Sorrow,” Amity cries through the truck window, straining against her seat belt.
“No one can leave if I can’t start the truck.”
“But we will take her? We won’t leave her here?” Amity’s voice breaks with a sob.
Amaranth thinks of the bodies in the temple, the bodies in the room below. She thinks of her husband and of Sorrow, their bodies entwined in the room below, and how she did not want to see it. If the temple were on fire again, right now, she would let it burn to the ground and make it disappear.
Sorrow and her husband step from the temple. He is bent and scrawny. His face is a skull, dark sockets for eyes, but Sorrow is strong beside him. She looks strong enough to carry them both.
Amaranth jumps from the truck to them. “Ask him what he is hiding from, Sorrow. Ask him why he hides from what he did.”
“Wife,” Zachariah murmurs. “I didn’t—I never meant—”
Sorrow holds a hand up to him and he cowers from it, as if he is afraid of Sorrow now.
Yes, Amaranth thinks. It is Sorrow who should mete out his justice, for all that he took from her. But instead, she sets her hand upon his filthy head. She raises the other in benediction, in forgiveness. “Give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come.”
He covers his eyes and turns his head away from the two of them.
“Come away from him, Sorrow.” Amaranth stalks back to the cars.
Sorrow smiles. “Behold his bride, the New Jerusalem.”
“My God. Forgive me.” Zachariah crouches into a kneeling prayer.
Amaranth throws off the jumper cables and slams both hoods. She sees Amity trying to open the passenger door, and she gets in the truck and starts the engine. Amity tries to push past her, to scramble out for Sorrow, but she shoves her daughter back and jams the truck into gear, grinding, and drives them toward the temple. She idles to hold a hand out for Sorrow, one last, desperate hand, but her daughter and husband only take hold of one another.
She sees them flame to life in one another’s eyes. She can see there is an invisible strap between them, tying them together, stretching across the whole of the country. There is nothing she can do to pull them apart, no matter how he protests now or how her daughter smiles.
She slams the truck into drive and hauls toward the path, tires spitting gravel. In the rearview mirror she watches, to see if he will move to the other car, try to follow after, to explain and protest his innocence. But if he has the thought, he doesn’t act on it. Sorrow holds him still and fast, beneath the flat of her hand.
Amity cries out, “Mother—we can’t just leave her here!”
But Amaranth does. She steers between the thin white pines to drive them from Sorrow’s New Jerusalem, the smoldering, moldering ash of her heaven and desire. And Amity can only scream for Sorrow, soundless in the glass of the cab, until the house and the temple and their family are gone again.
42
Home
Amaranth parks outside the police station, finding a dark spot away from the streetlamps. She grips the steering wheel with shaking hands.
“But we don’t talk to police,” Amity whines. “We can’t tell them anything.”
“That was your father’s fear. Everything is changed now.”
“I don’t want everything changed. I want everything to go back!”
Amaranth pulls the key from the ignition. The sooner she gets Amity back to Oklahoma, the better. “He has broken laws, Amity. Think how he hurt Sorrow. Think of the room below—”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. You don’t know everything. You think you do.”
“I do know. I saw him. I saw Sorrow. I know what fathers do.”
“No, Amity.” She shakes her head.
“You think he killed everyone, but he didn’t.”
Amaranth grabs her daughter, a hand on either shoulder. “What did you see?”
Amity turns her head away, toward the police station. “He didn’t start the fire and you can’t tell them he did. I saw her, at the hole with Father shouting. I saw her, when he said he wouldn’t let the police split us up and how we should hide. I saw Sorrow start the fire.”