Karina carried the bags into the kitchen. They were full of esoteric supplies, things she couldn’t get from town: Oolong tea; shrimpshell bandages; the painkiller they called Bonesetters; anticonvulsants for Simon; caviar from the Russian Union.
Karina made breakfast. Simon would only eat his eggs scrambled and runny, without salt or butter. At noon, when his eyelids began to droop, she made him a sandwich of chocolate spread and apricot gel. He inhaled it and for a couple of hours afterward was ebullient and electric.
In these hours, after the weeping pilgrims who came to see him had been ushered away, she took him for walks through the forest. Many days, when Miss Sarat was gone to her secret places and Miss Dana was off in the docks in Augusta, it was just the two of them alone, walking hand in hand.
He delighted in the curling wakes of the barges and the crackle of dead leaves underfoot and the way the sunlight felt on the place near the back of his head where the hair no longer grew.
Sometimes he saw purple and orange flowers in the ground—strange life that grew in spite of the heat and the frequent storms. Sometimes he pointed at the flowers, and Karina, who did not know their names, would invent names for them: Bigwics, Morning Hallows, Laviolas, Southern Laviolas.
After she finished making breakfast, Karina woke Simon. Like the rest of the house, his room was barren. There was only a nightstand, a closet, and the bed he slept in. Miss Sarat had a rule about decorations in the house: there were to be none. No paintings or photographs on the wall, no flower vases in the living room, not even a welcome mat on the porch. There had once been an iron weather vane on the roof, a rooster atop a spinning arrow—the day after the Chestnuts moved in, Miss Sarat climbed up and tore it down.
The only exception to the rule was an ugly ceramic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which sat on Simon’s nightstand. The statue was cracked in a million places and seemed to accumulate dust faster than any other surface in the house. But Miss Sarat ordered Karina never to touch it.
Simon woke to her smell before the rest of her entered the room—an oversweet lavender and vanilla perfume she knew he loved. He woke smiling, reaching for her. She wore the colors he liked. Warm, bright colors—reds and yellows, a sunflower print on her flowing skirt. She knelt by his bedside and instantly his hands took hers. He leaned up and kissed her on the cheek, a sloppy kiss, the spittle of sleep still wet on his lips. It was progress—a step she’d kept hidden from the twins. They knew he’d started to remember names and return greetings and they thought he’d started to dress himself, but they didn’t know he’d gained a sense of affection.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” Simon replied, echoing her cadence, her inflection.
She helped Simon out of his pajamas and into a fresh white T-shirt and a pair of track pants that stretched around his growing waist. She took his recent weight gain and the new wheel of fat around his gut as more signs of healing. In the first few weeks following his arrival at the house, he had taken in nothing but milk and mashed apple paste. And on one ugly morning, the family discovered that he’d developed a crippling fear triggered by the smell of cooked meat. Now he was eating—picky and tedious as a toddler, but he was eating.
She guided Simon to a chair at the kitchen table. Then she went back to his room and made the bed. The bed was dressed with fine, rebel-smuggled sheets of the best Bouazizi cotton.
AT NOON the women came to see him. They arrived a few minutes early. Karina saw them from the living room window, idling at the small gate at the end of the road. She let them wait—she knew if she allowed them in just a few minutes early, soon they would start arriving to their appointments even earlier, and others would learn of it and start doing the same, until the schedule Karina worked so hard to maintain would be rendered irrelevant.
At noon exactly she walked the length of the dirt driveway and met the women. They were sweltering, packed into their Tik-Tok: the driver was a woman whose first name was Kristin but who demanded everyone call her the Widow Bentley. Her daughter, Leslie, sat beside her, and her mother, Eleanor, sat in the back.
Karina opened the gate. For a moment the Tik-Tok’s tires spun impotently in the dirt. Then the car fumbled along toward the house. Karina followed. She took her time walking back. When she got there, the Widow Bentley and her daughter were helping the widow’s mother exit the carlet. The eldest woman, Eleanor, was hollow with a cancer of the lungs, and, although her daughter and granddaughter took pains to constantly assail her with hope, she seemed resigned to the fact she was dying.
The Widow Bentley had taken to wearing black, long-sleeved blouses and black skirts since her husband died a year earlier in the botched rebel raid on East Ridge. She’d forced her mother and daughter to do the same; the clothes hung limp on the eldest woman’s wasting frame, still and slack as a waterlogged flag.
Karina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.
Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflicting on others the very same carnage once inflicted upon them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again—she knew them only as the Widow This or the Widow That—but she’d never met a Widower Anything.
She had lived more than half her life in the South and yet often she still felt like a foreigner. She was the daughter of doctors—analytic, razor-minded natives of the Bangladeshi Isles who overcame great poverty and strife and had no time or patience for sentimental things. From a young age her parents had seen the worst of war—the northward death marches in retreat from the rising seas; the Arunachal Massacre; the four failed Springs—and had dedicated themselves to alleviating that suffering wherever they found it.
Karina’s earliest memories were of field hospitals and blood-caked bedsheets, the great thundering barrel of war. She witnessed the last of the Russian Expansion, the wars of conquest at the furthest edges of the Bouazizi. She stitched her first suture at fourteen, tied her first tourniquet at fifteen. She knew war, knew it better even than these delusional, totem-grasping widows.
And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
SHE LED THE WOMEN into the living room. “Something to drink?” she asked.
“Water,” Leslie said. The teenage girl slumped on the couch on the end furthest from where her mother and grandmother sat. She stared out the window at the moving river.
“We’re just happy to see Simon, sweetheart,” the Widow Bentley said. “You can bring him in now.”