Suddenly she becomes aware of the mosquitoes assiduously drinking her blood, their threadlike, saber-sharp snouts nosing below her skin. Heeding an instinct from the summers of her childhood, she plunges from her seated position to lie flat on her back in the mud. Holding her breath, she begins writhing like a suffocating fish, coating her limbs and torso in cool muck, and then, pushing up to her knees, takes two handfuls of sludge and claps them to her face, spreading the chill mud over her eyelids, down her cheeks and neck, letting it creep down in between her swollen breasts.
She reaches under her nightdress and slides mud upward from her thighs to her groin, over the full-moon swell of her pregnant belly. Her baby spins in bliss. Spent, Amanda collapses onto her back once more. The mud not only fends off most of the shrill, humming bloodsuckers, but soothes her raw and stippled skin. How long was she sitting bare-skinned and absent, like a supplicant cowering before a bright hole sliced out of the night sky? Suddenly Amanda is sobbing, salty tears burning away the mud on her eyelids. Rolling onto her side, she curls up and howls rough and gibbering sobs into the darkness. In the past few weeks, she has done so much muffled weeping, tears rolling down her temples and pooling in her ears, trembling slightly in the effort to breathe evenly and not disturb Andrew, who snores benignly in his safe, blithe dreams where there is no reason to struggle. Now her wails feel as if she is tearing something loose, a scab over a gash that, once liberated, commences to bleed and bleed.
Her daughter begins to revolve in her watery cage, faster and faster. She thumps Amanda’s bladder sharply, and Amanda, not caring, urinates hotly into her wet, rumpled dress and the mud below her and keeps keening.
When her throat is raw and her lungs weakened, she remains curled around herself, the tops of her thighs pressed against her firm belly. I can’t do this to you, she tells her daughter silently. Her daughter pauses, twitches, begins swimming in loops in the other direction. Amanda lays her right hand above her pubic bone, feeling the underwater whirling and dancing in the small, waterproof bowl of the womb that is no longer her own. Her tears have dried and the mosquitoes are hovering ready, and she rubs her face through the mud like a dog with an itch. I’m so sorry, she thinks, pushing herself up with her hands and staring fearfully at the cold moon. Amanda sets off toward one of the slumbering houses to try and make her way home.
Will Andrew wake when she throws buckets of cold rainwater over her skin and stands naked and shivering in the moonlight? Will he feel the dampness of her hair on his arm when she crawls back into bed? If she begins sobbing, will it simply color his dreams with the calm, rhythmic rocking of a winter sea?
Light footsteps in the distance: the children of summer, roaming in search of excitement, or a comfortable place to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Janey
Leading the way, with Mary behind her like a smaller, darker shadow, Janey crashes into battle. She’s not exactly sure which children she’s fighting, although she recognizes Brian Saul’s curls under a paste of mud, and Lisa Aaron’s jet-black, tangled braid.
The children are battling for a prime location on the shore, where the sea roaches like to nose around in the glinting shallows. To Janey, they resemble alien, jointed monsters that could be found in the darkness below—although at the size of a small plate and the speed of a snail, they’re almost cute.
Slightly clumsy and with poor vision, Mary never fights as well as the others, but she follows in Janey’s path and lashes out laterally at any moving bodies. It’s difficult to properly injure anyone, because they all become very slick in a matter of seconds. Clenched fists slip off to the side instead of thudding solidly into skin, nails skitter down muddy limbs without ruffling skin to shreds, even teeth slip over mud-caked flesh and click shut with an unpleasantly electric snap. No matter how a fight starts, it always ends the same way: dirty children writhing and wincing in a tangle of torsos and limbs, like they’ve fused together into some filthy, many-legged abomination.
Fighting makes Janey feel alive in a way that nothing else does: not hovering alone in the black night with her whirling thoughts as company; not running until her heart heaves and her lungs turn to silver, glowing and intractable; not cradling Mary in her arms as she stares at a star-smeared night sky, knowing she will watch them wheel in their slow path until morning. Fighting makes Janey’s blood sing. It’s not the promise of harming others, for she rarely intends genuine injury, nor is it the prospect of revenge on her enemies, as Janey has few enemies she takes seriously. It is something about the heat in the contraction of a muscle, the speed and split-second calculations, the impact of intimate physical contact when, apart from young children and Mary, she lets nobody touch her. Deeper in her is the realization she avoids: it is the only time in her life when the violence of her thoughts are made flesh. She screams, thrashes, lunges as her mind goes still, as her fists and teeth and nails become a churning mass illuminating the turbulence within.
She knows there are rumors that she likes to bash people with rocks or break their bones, but they are unfounded. She is a good fighter, however, perhaps the best on the island, and she never, ever, ever gets tired. She might get dizzy, and her vision might flicker around the edges like there are masses of dark birds homing in on her, but fatigue, giving up, is anathema to her.
Howling with rage and pain, the losing children retreat in a ragged group and squat scowling farther down the beach. Patty Aaron, Lisa’s little sister, starts inching toward their lost territory, but Janey hisses at her, snapping her teeth like an angry dog, and Patty flees again. Drawing herself tall and upright, Janey stares regally out into the water. She relaxes and smiles as Mary wades in and gazes delightedly at a sea roach, then touches a smooth, cold shell and shivers. Four-year-old Greta Balthazar, in the water next to them, looks askance at the sea roach, her expression dubious. When it moves irritably, she squeals and smiles, revealing tiny sharp teeth. Her brother, Galen, is packing mud back on her skin where it’s fallen off. “Wash the hair, Greta!” he says cheerfully, plopping two handfuls of dove-brown clay on her head and smoothing them down until they drip over the back of her small neck.