Once An Eve Novel

six



WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE DOCK, THE SUN WAS LOW IN THE sky. The restaurant that had become Califia’s de facto dining hall was livelier than it had been in weeks. I parted a tangled curtain of vines and ivy, exposing the restored interior. A long bar jutted out from one wall. Wooden tables and benches were crowded together in the center of the room, covered with the remains of boiled Dungeness crab, sole, and abalone. A two-foot-tall statue of Sappho was perched on a shelf in the corner; it had earned the place the affectionate nickname “Sappho’s Bust.”

“Well, looky here!” Betty called from behind the bar, her big cheeks already red from a few beers. “It’s Lady and the Tramp!” The women on the stools all laughed. One took a quick swig of bathtub ale, the homemade beer Betty brewed.

Arden glanced sideways at me, frowning. “I suppose I’m the tramp?”

I took in her shaved head, spotted with scabs, her thin face, her skin crisscrossed with tiny scratches, and her fingernails, still dirty despite two baths. “Yeah.” I shrugged. “You’re definitely the tramp.”

The back doors were open, letting in the smell of the campfire burning behind the restaurant. Delia and Missy, two of the earliest escapees on the Trail, were flipping green coins into one another’s drinks. It was a stupid game they liked to play after dinner, to the exclusion of everyone else. They stopped when Arden and I walked past, Delia nudging Missy hard in the side.

Some women sat along the tables in the back, chatting as they broke apart crab legs. I spotted Maeve and Isis in the corner. Maeve, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was opening an abalone shell for Lilac.

Betty set two mugs of beer on the bar. “Where’s the dog?” she asked, checking the floor by Arden’s feet for signs of Heddy.

“Left her behind.” Arden took the mug and swigged it. Then she stared at Betty, her brow furrowed in annoyance, until the woman left to attend to someone at the other end of the bar. Arden swallowed. Her whole body seized as she coughed, the beer nearly coming back up. “Since when do you drink?” she whispered, looking at the amber liquid.

I took a few sips, enjoying the sudden lightness in my head. “Nearly everyone does here,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

I thought of those first days, when I would sit alone in Lilac’s bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, having already completed my chores. Everything had seemed so foreign. The women chopped wood in the clearing above us, the sound following me through the house. The branches rapped on the windows, refusing to let me sleep. Quinn would come retrieve me, insisting I accompany her to the dining hall, where she would sit with me for hours. Sometimes we’d play cards. Betty would pour us her newest batch and I’d sip it slowly, telling Quinn about my journey to Califia.

When I looked up, Arden was still studying me. “Besides,” I added. “It wasn’t exactly easy to lose you and Caleb in the same month.”

Regina, a heavyset widow who’d lived in Califia for two years, teetered on the stool beside us. “Caleb is Eve’s boyfriend,” she whispered to Arden. “I used to have a husband, you know. They’re not as bad as everyone here says they are.” She raised her glass, signaling for another drink.

“Boyfriend?” Arden narrowed her eyes at me.

“I guess,” I said, resting my hand on Regina’s back to steady her. “Isn’t that what he would be called?” At School we’d learned about “boyfriends” and “husbands,” but only to be warned against them. In our Dangers of Boys and Men class, the Teachers told us stories of their own heartbreaks, of the men who had left them for other women or the husbands who’d leveraged their money and influence to keep their wives in domestic slavery. After seeing all that men were capable of in the wild—the gangs who slaughtered one another, the men who sold women they’d captured, the Strays who resorted to cannibalism in desperation—some of the women in Califia, especially the escapees from School, still believed that men were universally bad. Life after the plague seemed to prove that, over and over again. But there were also the few who still remembered husbands or past loves fondly. Many called Regina and me hopeless, to our faces and behind our backs. But when I awoke in the middle of the night, my hands searching the bed for where Caleb should’ve been, hopeless seemed too mild a term for how love made me feel.

Delia and Missy were arguing now, the packed tables quieting as their voices grew louder. Everyone’s attention shifted to their side of the room. “Let it be! Enough!” Delia yelled. She gripped her drink, letting the green coin clink around the bottom of the glass.

“Just tell her,” Missy urged. She turned around in her seat, waving frantically at me. “Eve! Hey, Eve—”

Delia reached over the table and gave Missy one good push, sending her tumbling backward onto the floor. “I told you to shut it,” she said. Missy rubbed her head where it had met the hard wood. “Just shut your stupid mouth,” Delia continued. She got up and started around the table, but Maeve pulled her back.

“All right now. Enough.” Maeve glanced around the room. “Guess you two need to learn to slow down. Isis—get them to bed, will you?” Her eyes darted to me and Arden, as if gauging our reactions.

“Tell me what?” I asked, still stuck on Missy’s words.

Isis laughed. “Missy’s just drunk—right, Delia?” she urged. Delia wiped the sweat from her forehead, but didn’t respond.

“Somebody saw him,” Missy muttered, brushing the dirt off her pants. She was speaking so low I had to stoop down to hear. “Someone saw that boy Caleb. She knows,” she repeated, pointing at Delia again.

Maeve stood and grabbed Missy’s other arm, helping her up. “That’s silly. This is just—”

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Delia started, cutting her off. Everyone in the hall was quiet. Even Betty had stopped talking, standing silently behind the bar with a stack of dirty dishes in her hands. “But when I was in the city the other day, scavenging for supplies, I ran into a Stray. I’d seen him around last week. He’d asked me where I’d come from, where I was heading—”

“You said nothing, right?” Maeve interrupted, her voice flat.

“Of course,” Delia snapped. She was calmer now that she was in Isis’s and Maeve’s grip. She refused to look them in the eye. “He had tried to barter with me for my boots. And then the other day he pointed to the new ones he was wearing and laughed, saying he’d stolen them from a guy he found out on Route Eighty.”

Every part of me was awake, alive, my fingers and toes pulsing with energy. “What did they look like … the boots?”

Delia wiped the corners of her mouth, where a thin coat of spittle had formed. “They were brown with green laces. Came up to about here.” She pointed to the soft flesh above her ankle.

I let out a deep breath, determined to keep calm. They sounded like the boots Caleb had worn as he walked beside me, winding our way through the city streets. I couldn’t be certain. “Was the boy alive?”

“He said he found him in that furniture warehouse on the side of the road, in that stretch right before San Francisco,” she said, looking at one of the older women. “IKEA? He said that he was badly injured. His leg was infected from a stab wound.”

I only saw Delia’s lips moving, heard the words that were coming out of her mouth. I tried to process them one by one. “Where? Where is that?”

“Now listen.” Maeve put up her hands. “This is probably just a rumor. There’s nothing to prove that—”

“He could be dead by now,” I said softly, the thought even more frightening now that I’d spoken it aloud.

Isis shook her head. “He was probably making it up. He’s a Stray.”

Regina was smiling. “She loves him. She can’t just leave him out there.”

A few of the women started to agree, but Maeve raised her hand to silence them. “No one is going to find Caleb,” Maeve announced. “Because Caleb isn’t even there. The Stray probably lied. They always do.” Then she turned to me, her face full of concern. “Besides, we couldn’t have you going back into the wild now, not with the King after you.”

All I heard were the intentions lurking behind each word. You will never leave here, she seemed to say. I won’t let you. She grabbed my arm and ushered me out, following close behind Isis, who was taking Delia. A few other women helped Missy into a chair, offering her their condolences for the knot forming on the back of her head.

Outside, the night was cold and damp. I slipped out of Maeve’s grip. “You’re right,” I said meekly. “It has to be a lie. I guess I just wanted to believe it.”

Maeve’s face softened and she reached out to squeeze my shoulder. She held Lilac close to her side. “We hear these types of things all the time. Better not to entertain them.”

I shook my head. “I won’t then. I promise.”

But as we walked back to her house I slowed my pace, letting her, Lilac, Delia, and Isis get a few steps ahead. Arden ran up behind me. We were both smiling in the dark. She nodded toward the bridge, the idea already taking root. The question that had consumed us was answered. Finally, we knew what to do.