They squat there for a little longer, and then Rosie whispers, “Last night I prayed to the ancestors that Father would die.”
A flash of panic runs through Caitlin’s groin to the pit of her stomach, like she’s just caught herself from falling off the roof. “You can’t pray to the ancestors for that. They’ll hurt you. You have to follow the shalt-nots. I don’t pray to the ancestors for that, and…” Caitlin doesn’t finish the sentence, but they both know what she’s thinking: My father is ten times worse than yours.
“Why not?” Rosie looks offended, like Caitlin just confessed to something obscene.
“I can’t pray for that, I wouldn’t. It’s the way it is, the way it’s supposed to be. Daughters submit to their father’s will, it’s in Our Book. It’s what the ancestors wanted.”
Rosie narrows her eyes like she’s going to argue and then shrugs guiltily. Her shoulders rise and fall sharply in her nightdress, dipping her collarbone in shadow. “I know. It didn’t work.”
“Of course it didn’t work. And you had better stop, or you’ll go to the darkness below. You might even get exiled.” Caitlin tries to keep her face as stern as possible, feeling like she should impress on the younger girl the gravity of her transgressions.
“They can’t exile me for what I’m thinking. They don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“Thoughts become words,” Caitlin quotes from Our Book. “Words become actions, actions become habits. Tend to your thoughts, lest you find yourself fighting for something you never really believed in.”
“How do you know it all by heart?” Rosie says.
Caitlin shrugs. “I just do. I can remember things sometimes.”
“But not what really counts,” says Rosie, referring to Caitlin’s failure to remember the wastelands.
“But not what really counts.” Caitlin sighs.
After a moment, Rosie says quietly, “The ancestors don’t answer any of my prayers anyway.”
Caitlin glances at Rosie and sees that she is near tears. “Well, someday they will, maybe,” she says soothingly.
“Yeah, if I pray for what they want me to pray for.”
“Well…isn’t that what you should be praying for?”
“That’s not fair. That’s like…like telling me I can have anything I want to eat and then only letting me pick from three boring things I’ve already had a hundred times.”
Caitlin frowns, trying to digest this. “The ancestors love you,” she says finally, limply.
“No they don’t. They love my father. That’s why he’s still alive.”
“They love everybody.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows they love the men more.”
“Then why were women chosen to be the holy vessel for babies?” Caitlin says, parroting Pastor Saul’s logic.
“Have you ever seen a woman have a baby?” snaps Rosie. “You call that holy?”
Caitlin is quiet, hugging her knees. The sound of crickets swells and recedes, swells and recedes, like shining ocean waves bringing in a tide. Rosie is an irritable child, everybody knows that, but Caitlin has never seen this lucid bitterness. “What else do you pray for?” she asks softly.
Rosie bends her head to Caitlin’s. “I wish that it was summer all the time,” she whispers back. “I wish that Father was dead, all of them were dead. I wish that I could live all on my own, with nobody around except some dogs and cats and goats. I wish that I could turn into a man.”
Caitlin bows her head as well, so their foreheads almost touch, and she feels the short, silky hairs growing out of Rosie’s temples tickling her skin. For a long time they listen to the faint night noises, taking deep breaths and sighing them out with longing so palpable it wraps around their throats.
Eventually Rosie rises. “I should go back to bed.” Then she squats down again. “Does your father let you have the sleeping draft?”
Caitlin shakes her head. “No. I mean, he’s so…well, he probably wouldn’t notice if Mother gave it to me. But if he found out, he’d be angry.”
Rosie narrows her eyes. “My father won’t either. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it hurts.”
Caitlin shrugs. “Most girls I know don’t get to have it.”
Rosie sighs and they are quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I hope Father doesn’t come looking for me.”
Caitlin nods. Then the thought that her father might come looking for her floods her brain, and she scrambles up the creaky roof and into her room breathlessly. It’s not until she’s huddled under the covers that she remembers he never comes this late. Still, she’s so worked up that she stares out the window for hours, listening to her heart pound in her chest like it’s clubbing her for her misdeeds. The next day she falls asleep in class and gets her palms slapped.
Summer
Chapter Eight
Caitlin
A thousand hands clapping once, a boot on a hollow rain barrel—the sound slithers over Caitlin and she jolts awake, sitting up in bed. She can’t breathe. Slowly she realizes she’s alone and safe, and her breaths lengthen. A finger drums the top of the roof, multiplying into a handful of fingers, bored boys in church, restless schoolgirls. Soon the beats are hard and fast and ringing. A laugh bubbles up in her throat, and she bites down hard to break it. It is raining. Summer is here.
For a while she doesn’t move, afraid somehow that if she wakes Mother or Father, they will stop her. She knows they won’t stop her—they can’t—there’s even a shalt-not. Every child has a summer, except Ella Moses, whose legs don’t work because she fell off a roof a few months ago, and the really little children, on the breast or freshly off. But somehow she fears a huge weight coming down on her, to lie on her and keep her in her bed, slowly crushing the breath from her lungs until she is flattened like grass underfoot. Caitlin listens hard and hears Father snoring. He’s not even awake. Slowly she creeps out of bed and opens the window.
Darkness and water mix to form a thick, whirling mass. She hears a scream, and then another, and then a chorus far off, the sound of escape. She holds a thin arm out the window and feels a rain so thick it’s like putting her hand underwater. Standing there, she tries to think, tries to prepare, but there’s nothing to prepare. She can just go.
Caitlin grabs her quilt, which is beautiful and pink and will be ruined before the night is through, and wraps it around her shoulders. Stepping quietly out of her room, she sees a black figure hunched before her, a ravening monster, and claps her hand over her mouth to catch her shriek. “I hope you’ll be careful,” says the beast, in Father’s voice.