“I don’t care. Just give it to someone who needs it.”
“There’s lots who need it. You want me to stay in Mississippi or…”
“Just do it, Sarat.”
“All right.”
Martina went back to her room and lay on her bed. The sheets were cool and the pillow felt good against the back of her neck. Soon the girls heard snoring from behind the curtain.
Dana, lying still on her cot, cast an eye at her sister.
“Go on then,” she said.
“She’s gonna change her mind when she wakes up,” Sarat replied. “She’ll want it back.”
“And she’ll get mad at you if it’s still there. Open it up—let’s take some of it and tell her we haven’t given away the rest yet. Then everybody’s happy.”
Sarat retrieved from a sheath in her pocket the small folding knife Gaines had given her. When she first received it the blade was dull, but she had scraped it against the sharpening stone night after night. Now the blade was rough and uneven from being overworked, but Sarat mistook this for sharpness.
She slit the tape and opened the care package. She picked the first items she saw inside—a couple of stunted, Blue-grown oranges—and tossed one to her sister. Dana pierced the skin with her fingernail and held the fruit to her nose and inhaled deeply.
“They must have gone all the way up to Virginia for these,” she said.
Sarat shook her head. “Simon says they’ve only been fighting around the southern end of the Smokys. Picking out those militias around there. Get any further north and the Blue soldiers proper will get you.”
“Can’t grow these in Tennessee,” Dana said. “Too hot. Gotta be Virginia at least.”
“They don’t go get them where they’re grown. They just pick them up at the ports in Augusta. You can get whatever you want there. Stuff you can’t even get in Atlanta.”
Dana smirked. “What do you know about all that? You can’t even point Augusta out on a map.”
“Yeah I can, and it’s true. Nobody keeps track of what’s on those charity ships. You can steal half the boat before anyone notices.”
Sarat sifted through the rest of the package. She tossed a small can of cashews to her sister, and kept a packet of apricot gel for herself. She set aside a tube of superglue and a roll of twine and some knitting supplies to hand out to other refugees, and left the rest for her mother.
“Hey, give me some of those,” Dana said, pointing to a small container of painkillers. “Mama doesn’t need those.”
“Nobody needs those,” Sarat replied. “They’re for broken bones. What have you got that needs these?”
“I got bored,” Dana said, raising her feet to the air and flicking her toes at the ceiling. “I got ten broken bones’ worth of bored.”
Sarat observed her sister on the bed. She seemed younger somehow. For as long as she could remember, Sarat had felt that her twin had a head start on her, an innate understanding of what it means to be grown up. But in the last few months, she had come to feel the opposite. Now Dana suddenly seemed to her impossibly juvenile, and the things that held her interest girlish and trite.
Sarat set the painkillers in the package and then slid the box under her bed. She turned back to her book. Dana picked at her orange, savoring each segment and setting a strip of the fruit’s skin atop her upper lip like a mustache. She hummed the first bars of a popular Redgrass song called “Julia’s Right,” which the summer prior had been the biggest hit in all the Mag and was universally banned anywhere north of the Tennessee line. The song was by a country star called Cherylene Cee, after whom Sarat had named her pet turtle.
Dana turned once more to her sister. “So when are we gonna tell Mama?” she said.
“Tell Mama what?”
“You know what. About you and me going away. About Atlanta.”
Sarat sighed. When she had first told her sister her ambition to one day travel to the Southern capital and work with the government of the Free Southern State, Dana had chuckled at the thought. What use do you think they have down there for a refugee girl from Louisiana? she’d said; you gonna run for president too? But as the months passed and the camp continued to fill well beyond its capacity, its occupants subjected daily to new and varied indignities, the idea of running to the city began to appeal more and more to Dana. She started boasting to her friends about it, until Sarat regretted ever having told her anything about Atlanta.
“We’re not just leaving our mother here and running away,” Sarat said. “Who’s gonna take care of her?”
“Simon’s been taking care of her just fine,” Dana said, pointing at the box under Sarat’s bed.
“Simon doesn’t spend more than one night a month in this tent—you know that.”
“So, what, we’re just gonna live the rest of our lives in this place? Wait for another storm to come and wipe the whole place away, or the Birds to come by and bomb it to hell? I thought you had all these plans about working for the government, letting the world know what the North’s been doing to us, all that stuff. You keep talking about how you’re gonna change things. You can’t change a damn thing living in Patience.”
“We’re gonna go, Dana, I promise. But we gotta think about our people too.”
Dana snorted. “Our people? In this camp, are you kidding me? You think if it weren’t for everyone knowing Simon was with the rebels and you now being Albert Gaines’s pet, they wouldn’t have come through here and stolen every damn thing we got? Ain’t nobody in this camp our people. Only thing we got in common is we all on the losing side of the same war.”
“We’re not losing the war,” Sarat said. “And I’m not Gaines’s pet.”
“C’mon, girl. You spend every damn night with him, he’s got you reading all those books and running all those errands. You know well as I do he’s just an errand boy for all them rebel groups. Comes to places like this looking for anyone dumb enough to strap on a farmer’s suit and blow themselves up outside some Northern checkpoint. Won’t be long before he tries to put a farmer’s suit on you too.”
“He’s a teacher,” Sarat said. “Nothing more.”
Sarat stood up. She lifted her messenger bag off a hook on the wall and slung it over her shoulder.
“I’m gonna go look for Simon out by the creek,” she said. “It’s getting ’round sundown—they should be coming in. Don’t tell Mama nothing about Atlanta, and don’t take any of those pills.”
THE AIR SMELLED of mildew. Everywhere there were signs of damage from the storm, but also signs of recovery. With nowhere else to turn to, the refugees began to rally around the rain-damaged tents like antibodies to an infection.
On her way to the northeastern end of Alabama, Sarat passed countless lines of clothes and sheets and flags and blankets, all drying in the wind; tablets and radios and phones planted like seeds in bags of rice. The sky was a matte purple. Another warm, dry evening was coming over the Mag. The puddles began to dry.
She walked through the northern tents, where there were some signs of damage but no signs of life. She passed the tent in which her pet turtle lived and reminded herself to check on the animal later.
When she approached the remains of Highway 25, she saw a man and a boy, both hunchbacked with heavy baggage, walking north toward the ruined bridge and the gate to the Blue country. She approached and saw that it was Marcus Exum and his father.
The two carried overstuffed packs on their backs and grocery bags in their hands, and the father wore around his neck a pair of birding binoculars. Sarat watched them for a minute as they approached the place where the road once crossed low over the creek.