When Andrew carried her over his doorstep, she laughed and kissed his forehead. It took several anxious months to get pregnant, but when she did, his joy was her joy.
Now the memory of his joy has a dirty sheen clinging to its surface, a dark tone she can’t scrub away. Back then, vomiting and tired and full of new life, she thought she’d had everything she ever wanted.
She was wrong. She feels so consumed by terror, she’s not sure if there’s anything left of her. She lies still and limp like damp straw. Inside of her, her daughter is rolling around, swimming happily in a pool of blood and seawater. Her daughter knows nothing but wetness and darkness and muffled sounds. Her daughter keeps her awake. Summer is here, and she is trapped in the bed, trapped under the weight of her child. Amanda thinks of Janey, three years older than her, dirt coating her straight, blameless body. She feels a stab of envy so sharp she curls up against herself and tries not to scream.
Chapter Eleven
Vanessa
On the fifth day of summer the mosquitoes come sudden like the rains, except instead of falling from the sky, they rise up from the ground. In veils of humming gold they sweep the landscape, falling to feed from anything with blood in its veins. The good farmers have already netted the sheep and goat pens; the lazy ones are running and cursing, slapping themselves with one hand and hanging nets with the other. The dogs yipe and whine and run indoors, shaking clusters of insects from their eyes and noses. The cats disappear to the mysterious airtight nooks and passages where cats go, or those who are more tolerant of people lounge indoors, accepting pats of butter and scraps of chicken with a resigned and deserving air. The children throw themselves into the puddled mud, rolling and shrieking and rubbing it on their faces and hair. They end up caked with clay armor, which they endlessly reapply to the creases of elbows and knees and buttocks.
They laugh at themselves, rolling and wriggling in the mud like worms, baring their teeth white against dark faces. Mosquitoes dive into them and probe uselessly, clinging to filthy skin like tiny iridescent feathers. Vanessa often wonders what the mosquitoes live on, since all the people, dogs, and livestock are either indoors or protected, save for mad dashes to empty summer pots into the outhouse. Perhaps the rabbits and rats. She asked Mr. Abraham once, but he had no idea. Father would know. But it’s summer, and she doesn’t have to think about him for months.
Father always has an air of cheerful resignation before summer. “I ran about like a maniac, so you might as well too,” he says. He teases Mother about bloodying some girl’s nose when they were both children, and she shakes her head. His voice switches to his lecture tone, slightly louder with brassier vowels. “Summers are the cornerstone of our society,” he says grandly. “They keep the family working. If you didn’t get a taste of freedom, you would break down in a year.”
“James,” Mother says, frowning, her gaze on the floor.
“Don’t eat rotten food,” Father warned Vanessa right before the rains came. “Drink rainwater only. Don’t fight too much, you’ll get hurt. Don’t get mud up inside yourself. Come home if you get sick.”
Vanessa nodded obediently. Nobody goes home when they get sick. Last year, Alicia Solomon got a cough that turned into a fever, and then she started hacking up bloody phlegm. She lay shivering for days, tossing and calling out, and sweated so much the mud ran off her in rivulets. Her brother had to slap off the mosquitoes and endlessly pack the mud back on. One of Alicia’s eyes turned scarlet. She looked so terrifying that the youngest children ran off screaming when she looked at them. But she didn’t go home, and nobody tried to make her go home. Eventually she arose, shaky and headachy, and her eye faded to shell-pink and then to white again.
With the dogs and people and animals all huddled behind barriers, the world outside seems much bigger. The houses shrink to small boxes, while the fields stretch and yawn wider, and the trees unfurl toward the sky. Even the horizon seems longer somehow, with more sea and shore. The children are the only ones who can walk free, and they grow too, towering over their domain.
Chelsea Moses makes the best cake on the island, and every morning she puts one out, frosted with butter and honey and apple cider. She says she does it for the children, but Vanessa is convinced she does it because she loves watching them fight. Many children hunker down to sleep within view of the doorstep so they can be on alert in the early morning, and after her skirt swishes back inside they wait a beat, then run for it. With twenty or so children aiming for one cake, it quickly turns into warfare. A few mornings Vanessa participates, not only because she loves sweets, but because she loves the fury of dragging at arms and legs with bare hands, punching slick faces, leaping over bodies to grab a handful of frosting. She eats more mud than cake, but it’s sweet with rich crumbs, and sometimes salty with blood from a split lip. Vanessa knows she should start starving herself like Janey, but the thought of going without that amalgam of dirt and honey and blood is too much to bear.
After the children disperse, Vanessa runs to the tallest tree on the island, a sycamore, and climbs it. She likes its three-pronged leaves, and the patchy bark that looks like it has a rash. She hopes that someday it will grow tall enough that she can see the wastelands. Father says it must have roots that go miles deep, because otherwise it would fall over in a storm. As it is, when the wind blows, it sways as gently as a hawk on a current, rustling like a faraway river.
Vanessa adores climbing. She likes to pretend she’s a monkey, which she’s never seen in real life, but Father has a book with pictures of them. She imagines they move like her, arms and legs held wide, paddling up the branches. The monkey is her favorite animal except for the horse, with its long comical face, and graceful neck arched like a rainbow.
Father made her promise not to tell anyone about anything she reads, but Vanessa finds it boring to talk about her forbidden knowledge only with him. Sometimes she’ll try to draw a deer in the dirt, and explains to other children how it runs fast and flips up its tail, but when she goes back home and looks at the real picture, she realizes none of them would know a deer if they saw it. They would be envisioning an animal with wavering legs, two eyes on the same side of its head, so fat it would collapse immediately under its own weight.