Vanessa can’t quite understand what is happening to her this summer. It’s like she has morphed from the bright, popular wanderer’s daughter into a loner, not so much down the social ladder as on a different structure completely.
Father likes to say, “Each child has his own summer, but each summer leaves a different child.” Father is always saying things that sound poetic, hoping other people will start repeating them—and to be fair, they often do. He says things about summer so often Vanessa believes that, deep down, he’s really mad he doesn’t get to have summer anymore.
This summer, Vanessa is happiest alone. She sways contentedly up in her tree, walks the shore with her feet in the muddy shallows, wriggles under netting and squats in herds of goats, enjoying their animal scent and the comforting rub of their rough skins. She sees other children often, and sometimes joins them in raiding a food supply, or in one of the organic games that spring up over a piece of shingle or a puddle of water. But when the game ends, instead of adhering to a group, she retreats to solitude. She wonders if it would be different if Ben were older. It might not.
This may be her last summer to spend luxuriating in freedom. She’s already thirteen. She doesn’t have some of the signs that other girls have that indicate fruition is coming: the thickening at the middle, the chest of an overfed toddler, the faint tangle of hair under the arms and between the legs. She remains neat, straight, and smooth, and wants to stay that way. At night, she even prays to the ancestors for this, even though she knows they have no interest whatsoever in her staying a child. But she persists, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
One night she joins a group spying on the summer of fruition. She sees Hannah Joseph, who used to be her friend, being mounted from behind by Allison Saul’s older brother. From the sounds she makes, Vanessa can’t tell if Hannah is having a very good time or a very bad time. It looks like it would hurt. Vanessa always feels bad for the she-goats and ewes when they have to deal with the weight and penetration, the scrabbling hooves. Staring at Hannah, Vanessa imagines herself in her place and immediately feels sick. She vacates the window for another eager spy, trying not to retch. That night she sits in the water up to her waist, half wishing a sea monster would loop a slimy tentacle around her leg and drag her underwater to her doom. She pictures the sudden breathlessness, the gaping vacuum in her lungs, the thrashing of her body slowly becoming more peaceful as water fills the empty spaces inside of her.
She can’t see the point of the repetitiveness of it all, people living to create more people and then dying when they’re useless, to make room for even more new people. She’s not sure why they keep making new people to replace themselves, except—of course—that the ancestors said to. In a year or so some man will mount and marry her, and she’ll push out two children, assuming she is fertile and doesn’t have defectives. She’ll raise them to be like her—obedient, if smarter than most—and eventually she’ll take the final draft and die. She sees her life before her like a dim pathway leading around and back into itself.
She finds herself envying the children who run and scream and play in the mud, fighting and eating and not caring one bit what will happen in autumn when the ground freezes, or even what will happen tomorrow. She watches Mary, Janey’s sister, who they say disobeys the ancestors and the wanderers and even her own father. She searches for some difference in Mary, something that sets her apart from Vanessa and the others, a sign of regret or joy at having escaped her father’s embrace. She watches her with hatred, wondering what it might be like to sleep through the whole night without her body, even in slumber, tensing for the possibility of a hand reaching under the sheets. And yet Vanessa also pities Mary. After all, Mary has never been as special to her father as Vanessa is to hers. Nobody will ever love Vanessa more than Father. Our Book says the father-daughter bond is holy. Does that mean Mary and Janey are blasphemous? Looking at Mary’s laughing, trusting face staring at Janey, her graceful jaw and sharp cheekbones the only resemblance between them, Vanessa thinks she looks happy. But it’s summer, isn’t everyone happy?
In her tree, Vanessa dreams. She dreams of a world where she has something to do like a man does. She dreams she’s a wanderer, importantly striding into the wastelands to search for goods and people and secrets. She dreams she lives in the wastelands, in the flames of sin, killing for her breakfast and running around with her clothes on fire. She dreams she’s a mud monster, slithering slickly through the muck, spying the white soles of little girls spotting the slime above her and gleefully choosing her prey. She dreams she’s Janey Solomon, and she doesn’t need to eat to stay alive, and she terrifies everyone. And then she wakes up and she’s Vanessa, small and unimportant.
Fall
Chapter Nineteen
Caitlin
The end of summer is here.
All the children could sense it coming. The mud cooled and made them shiver in the morning. The afternoon rains had a new, potent chill. The sky collapsed into nightfall just a little bit earlier. Knowing that their summer was almost at an end, the children grew sadder and meaner. Janey and Mary, who spent the entire summer defending a wooden fort they built on the beach, gathered up some cousins and led a small army across the island. Everyone they encountered, instead of running away, lunged into the fight. Davey Adam hit his head on a rock and fell asleep for a few hours, Theresa Solomon broke her finger, which now crooks to the right, and Peter Moses was bitten in the knee by little Rita Moses, who is only four but managed to draw blood. Laughing, Janey scooped Rita up into the air and paraded her around on top of their crowd, the little girl’s glee rapidly fading to frightened sobs.
Caitlin stays away from summer violence. Now she is staying away from the inevitable return home. She walks on the frosted-over mud near the shore, swinging her knees high with every step as the freezing muck stings and sparks her feet. Soon her toes will turn blue and she really will have to go back home. They’ve all heard the stories of the children who lost their toes, or their feet, and Caitlin wants her feet attached to her. But she also wants to stay outside and walk just a little longer.
The first frost means that summer is over. She can’t deny that the frost exists; it’s lacy and glistening and has draped a breathtaking veil over every field, rock, and tree. But still, just a little longer.