“They don’t know what New York is,” Otis teased. Marjorie scrunched her nose at him, feigning annoyance. He turned to us, but his gaze was far off. “It was across the country, and it was one of the most spectacular cities in the world. Buildings that shot up from the ground, the sidewalks so packed with people you had to dart through them. Underground trains and hot dogs that you could buy on the street.”
I had read books set in New York—The Great Gatsby, The House of Mirth—but it still sounded impossible. The sheer number of people it would take to fill a skyscraper, to fill a street . . . I hadn’t seen that many people in my entire life.
Marjorie brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Thank you, darling. I was in New York and there he was one night, sitting across from me, telling some ridiculous story about recycling.”
“It wasn’t about recycling,” Otis chuckled to himself. “But that’s okay.”
“What’s recycling?” Arden asked.
“It doesn’t matter. The point is,” Marjorie continued, “I wasn’t listening. I just kept watching him, and I thought: This man, this someone—I didn’t even know his name—is so alive. He was the most exciting person I’d ever met . . . and the most familiar.” Otis kissed Marjorie’s hand.
I thought of the way Caleb looked at me, how I could feel each inch between us. The way the crescent shaped scar in his cheek crinkled when he smiled, how he always stared straight ahead when he was saying something important.
“I kept thinking he’d turn into a knucklehead, but every minute I spent with him, I just loved him more,” Marjorie finished.
Arden swallowed a bite of eggs. “Is that why you didn’t go, like everyone else?” she asked. “When the King called for the City of Sand, were they going to split you up?”
Marjorie looked down, her finger tracing the grain of the wood table. “The King doesn’t want people like us in the City. We’re too old to be of real use to him. We don’t have any resources he could use. He wanted me to teach in the Schools, and they tried to make Otis work at the labor camps. But no, that’s not why.”
“We didn’t go,” Otis said, “because it was wrong. It still is.”
“During the plague, and after, everyone was so afraid,” Marjorie continued. “There was a formal government before it happened, a democracy. But the illness came on so fast, half of the country’s leaders were dead within the first six months. The laws were irrelevant—no one was reading the Constitution. Information was withheld. Some of that was intentional, I’m certain now. For a long time, without electricity, without phones, we had no clue what was happening. Then this politician announces plans to rebuild. He was only supposed to be in power until things got settled, but it was two more years before the plague ended. By then everyone trusted him. They believed him when he said America needed to be unified under one leader. They were so afraid, they just listened and followed. They never questioned, and it only got worse.”
“Maybe it will be different though, if we wait?” Lark’s face rested in her hands. “It can’t go on forever. Maybe once the City of Sand is built and—”
“‘Time itself is neutral,’” Marjorie corrected, her words steady with the rhythm of memorization. “And ‘we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.’”
Otis leaned back in his chair, his bad leg lying straight before him. “Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Who is that?” I asked, picking up the last piece of boar.
Otis and Marjorie looked at each other. “There’s still a lot you girls need to know,” he said.
“We have a few days,” I answered. I had learned so much in School, but it all seemed worthless now. My real education had begun with Caleb. I felt as if I was only getting started; the truth was something I couldn’t yet imagine.
“Yes,” Marjorie said. “We do.” She smoothed her hands over the table, her eyes meeting Otis’s. “For now, how about you turn on the projector. I bet these girls have never even seen a proper movie.”
Otis walked to the middle of the living room, where a flat box was connected to a giant pack covered in shiny gray tape. “Runs on D batteries,” he said, smacking the top of it. “Figured it out myself.” He pressed a few buttons and a white rectangle appeared on the wall above the fireplace.
“What is it?” Lark asked, sitting down on the couch. She pulled a lace pillow into her lap. Slow music filled the room and the wall above the fireplace flashed the word GHOST.