I tried, but I couldn’t bring the hammer down hard enough, for fear I’d miss and hit her finger. Finally, I cracked the nail with enough force to move it, but at an angle; it splintered the wood.
“Better, better,” my aunt said. “At least that did something.”
She had me practice on the damaged plank until I perfected the motion. In half an hour, I’d hammered the board into the floor with so many nails, no force in the world could move it. I beamed at my handiwork.
We covered half the hollow in the floor before the midday heat exhausted me. She suggested we go cool down in the river. With ease she picked me up and set me on her shoulders. We walked out to the eastern edge of the property and over the seawall and out to where the stunted trees met the water.
We stopped in a place where a soft beach of soil separated the willows. We sat for a moment while my aunt recovered from the long walk. I dug my hands deep into the earth. I learned, on one of our earliest trips to the river, that she liked to swim naked. The first time she’d taken off her clothes, she did so in the water, fearful I’d be frightened by the sight of her scars. But it didn’t bother me—I’d seen them before, when I spied on her that night after she first arrived in our home. So I stripped down too, and from that day onward it seemed unimaginable that anyone should step into the water clothed.
We swam under the shade of the willows and the quarantine wall. On one of our trips to the river I had asked her why the wall was there. She said the people on the other side had been infected with a sickness, and the wall was built to keep them from making others sick. I asked her what kind of sickness. She said the kind where you don’t ever get better, the kind you can’t help but pass on to your children, and they to theirs.
To the east a guard looked on from the tower. I waved at him but he didn’t wave back. At first the guards scared me, but my aunt told me they were not human beings, just a pair of eyes unable to harm or help anyone or anything. I thought of them now in the same way I thought of the stick-figure children my mother had painted on the levee, and I was no longer scared.
We dried ourselves in the sun, naked by the riverbank. Even now, her body astounded me: the strange rivulets of scarred skin that lined her upper arms and shoulders, dead-looking and paler than the rest of her; the way her breasts and stomach sagged; the smoothness of her shaved head. In her presence I could think of nothing strong enough to harm us. Not the river, nor the wall, nor whatever lay beyond the wall.
“Is Dana your sister?” I asked. The question had been weighing on my mind for weeks, ever since I heard her say Dana’s name when she was talking to my father one night. I knew the woman in one of the pictures on our staircase wall was my other aunt, but my parents had never told me much about her.
The question seemed to take her by surprise.
“That’s right,” she said. “My sister and your father’s sister.”
“Does she live in Atlanta?”
“No. She’s dead.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“You know the Birds that fly around here sometimes?”
“Sure.”
“Well, they’re empty now; they just fly around doing nothing until their solar panels break down or their wings crack and they crash in a field somewhere. But before you were born, they used to be weapons. They use to drop bombs from their stomachs.”
It seemed such a ridiculous thing—birds that drop bombs from their stomachs. But like the squiggly things in the soil or the fish with whiskers or the old coastal cities now buried underneath the sea, I believed it. I believed it because she said it.
“You know, she lives right here now, my sister.” Sarat pointed at the water. “After she died, instead of burying her in the ground, I buried her in the river.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I wanted her to never stop moving.”
“If I die, will you bury me in the river?”
My aunt chuckled. “It’ll be a good long while before you die,” she said. “I’ll be gone before then.”
“How about if you die?” I said. “Do you want me to bury you in the river?”
She was dumbstruck, as though she’d never considered it before. She smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you did.”
I leaned against her arm, and put my own arm around her. She was mine and I loved her.
WHEN WE RETURNED from the river there was a man at the gate. He was a stranger to me, dressed in a fine prewar suit and a green tie. He stood just outside the gate, his car parked in the driveway, peering in. We walked up the road to meet him.
It wasn’t until we were very close to the gate that my aunt’s damaged eyes finally made out the stranger. She stood a long time staring at him, her face empty.
“Go on inside, Benjamin,” she said. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
I asked her who the man was, but she ordered me inside again in a tone that let me know it was best not to ask any more questions.
She opened the gate. She inspected the man who stood before her, the man she hadn’t seen in many years. He had aged, but he had aged well. The silver wings of hair and the thick black mustache, now also graying, were little changed from when she’d last seen him among the ruins of Lake Sinclair all those years ago.
“Hello, Joe,” she said. “I thought you’d be long gone by now.”
“Hello, Sarat,” said Joe. Instantly she recognized his faraway accent. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit sooner. I didn’t know they had set you free.”
She ushered him to the woodshed. I watched them from my bedroom window, hoping to catch a snippet of their conversation, but they walked silently and shut the door behind them.
I only learned what he said to her later, when I read it. By then it was too late.
THEY SAT ON STOOLS by the workbench. She saw that he had not changed, his cool air of charm the same as it had been in their old clandestine meetings.
“He’s a cute boy,” said Joe, pointing in the direction of the house. “Is he…?”
“He’s my nephew.”
“I see— How are you, Sarat?” he asked.
“Alive,” my aunt replied.
“I want to say, first of all, that I didn’t know what Albert Gaines had done. A long time ago he’d sent his daughter and her mother to live in the Bouazizi Empire, so they would be safe during the war, and I’m told his interrogators told him they’d learned of their whereabouts, and used it as leverage against him. He was not a coward when I knew him, Sarat, and I…”
“Don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Joe nodded. She saw that he was doing now what everyone she’d known from before her time in prison had done—he was staring, trying to reconcile the shape and size and damage of her now with the recollected image of the lanky teenager he’d once known.
Finally he said, “I know what they must have done to you in that place, Sarat, and I am truly sorry.”
“You didn’t come here just to tell me that.”
“That’s correct,” Joe said. “I understand that you were able to meet one of your old prison guards. I understand that you were able to exact some measure of revenge.”
Sarat laughed. “Revenge,” she echoed. “Revenge, revenge. I hurt one man. Do you think it was just one man who hurt me?”
“If you would like, I can ask my contacts to look for others,” Joe said. “Many of the guards who were stationed at Sugarloaf when you were there are back on the mainland now. Perhaps…”
“Why stop there?” she said. “Why don’t you line them all up for me—can you do that, Joe?—you line up every man who made me what I am: the ones who killed my father, the ones who killed my sister, the ones who killed my mother, the ones who made it so my brother will never be whole again, the ones who drove us from our home, the ones who slaughtered all those people in Patience. You line up the whole lot of them for me, Joe. Then I’ll have my revenge.”
“And supposing I could?” Joe asked.
A grimace of light shone through the cracks in the boards.