While she can work forever with an intent child desperate to please her, Janey cannot stand impertinence or laziness. If any of her charges are feckless, or irritable, or do not properly appreciate her help, she loses her temper and rains a volley of smacks on his or her head and shoulders. Once, in a classroom of younger boys, she even grabbed the teacher’s switch and thrashed an obstinate Frederick Moses until he howled.
It’s early enough that the mud is still frozen in peaks and whirls and valleys, like dollops of filthy whipped cream. The air is strangely silent, the sibilant hum of mosquitoes vanished overnight. The entire world is brown except for the crop fields and gardens, where farmers are extravagantly stretching and moving very slowly, simply because they can. Women are sitting on steps, eating breakfast with their fingers. Pushed outside and left alone for the first time since the beginning of summer, dogs scrabble against the door in fear before suddenly realizing the air is clear. Then they lurch around like heavyset lambs, waving their tails and barking with joy. A dog knocks into Janey midleap, and she falls to her knees, giggling.
“I almost don’t mind coming back from summer,” she tells Mary, “if I can see the dogs.” She pushes her face against the dog and blows into its ears. “The end of my freedom is the beginning of yours, isn’t it?” she asks the dog. “Would you like to trade places until next summer?” The dog barks.
Chapter Twenty-One
Vanessa
That night, Vanessa sits at the kitchen table and drinks glass after glass of rich, musky goat’s milk while Mother fills her in on what happened over the summer.
Grady and Karen Gideon took their final draft, as Grady couldn’t walk well since the accident. Their son Byron took over the house with his wife and child. A slew of girls a little older than Vanessa are to be married, naturally, and a few are pregnant. Lots of women had babies, and lots had defectives. Jana Saul had her third defective, so her husband decided to take another wife and conveniently chose Carol Joseph, who was widowed last year. Now Jana and Carol are fighting like angry cats, and if Jana doesn’t stop trying to eject Carol, she’ll get a shaming. Amanda Balthazar bled out from a defective and is dead, and her husband, Andrew, is walking around like somebody hit him in the head with a brick. Ursula Gideon had twins, both healthy, which hasn’t happened in so long that people are lining up outside the house to see them. Stella Aaron was caught talking to a man alone and will be shamed, and so will Ursula Saul, who blasphemed the ancestors to her sister.
Most surprisingly, there is a new family on the island. Their names are Clyde and Maureen Adam; Clyde is a skilled carver, and Maureen is pregnant. Father is having them over for dinner tomorrow night, and Vanessa has to be on her best behavior.
Vanessa is bursting with excitement about the Adams. She was a baby when the second-newest family, the Jacobs, came to live on the island. She’s always felt cheated by not remembering what a family from the wastelands looked like, staggering in. This news is a bright spot in a generally dim return to home and regular life. Father won’t stop hugging and kissing Vanessa and telling her how much he missed her, which makes her tense. Her face, clean and bare, feels skinned.
Mother notices Vanessa’s discomfort and sings with her, “Summer Rains” and “Arthur Balthazar” and “Night of a Thousand Meteors.” It feels all right to sing church songs, now that she’s back.
For dinner there will be chicken, roasted with new potatoes and beans. With the chill in the air, hot food sounds wonderful to Vanessa, even though she’d trade any hot meal in a minute for a meal of filthy bread eaten outside. Father likes to say, “The seasons change, whether you like it or not.” That night, after he leaves, she cries helpless tears of frustration into her pillow, thinking of the next summer nine months away—or, for her, perhaps never. In the morning, she makes sure her face is composed, even if her eyelids are swollen and her complexion mottled. She doesn’t like Father to see her cry.
Walking to school with dragging steps, Vanessa watches the dogs run and play, wishing she could join them. She makes it on time, although Grace Aaron gets whipped for lateness. Her hitching sobs, disproportionate to the force of Mr. Abraham’s blows, seem to cry for every dismal, uncomfortable student in the class. They read out loud from a book about metals and the layers of the earth, which makes Vanessa yawn and squirm. The only metal the island gets is brought in by wanderers, and the only layer of earth she cares about is the mud outside, slowly thawing.
During recess everyone huddles together, both because it’s still chilly and because they’re wretched. There are clots of younger children sluggishly circulating around the school, playing slowly and clumsily like they forgot how. Vanessa sees Janey Solomon’s copper head and creeps closer to hear what she’s saying. There’s a group of girls around her, and Mary is stuck to her side as usual.
“Having two babies at once is ridiculous,” Janey is saying, wiping a strand of bright hair off her forehead. “I’m surprised she’s alive; she should have just ripped in two.”
“But now she can stop,” points out Mary. “She’s had her two children.”
“Maybe,” chimes in Fiona Adam. “Father says they might only count them as one child, and let her have another.”
“I read once about twins who were born stuck together,” says Vanessa, her confident voice carrying over the group. “Two legs, but two heads. They grew up and lived until they were old.” Vanessa’s library is invaluable; she can almost always tell people something they don’t know.
Everyone turns to face her. “That’s impossible,” says Fiona, scowling darkly.
“I saw a picture,” says Vanessa defiantly.
“It’s just a different type of defective,” says Janey, and Vanessa feels a small leap of pride at being defended by her. “Except they lived. I didn’t know they had defectives, before.”
Not all defectives are born early, and some do continue to draw breath. Vanessa saw a defective delivered once that was quietly placed facedown in a bowl of water while its mother cried. It had no legs, just a tail that trailed off into nothing. Vanessa always wondered if it would have lived, had it been allowed to continue breathing.
“They both lived. Or it lived, or she lived,” said Vanessa. “At least old enough to be a child.”
“So if you marry her, are you marrying one wife or two?” asks Letty, and everyone giggles.
“What other defectives did you see in that book?” demands Janey.
“None,” Vanessa admits. “Only those. They were dressed up in weird clothes and had paint on their faces.”
Everyone nods wisely, as if they know what this signifies.
“I think it was a story,” says Fiona. “Somebody made it up. How could something like that eat? Does it use both mouths or one? If you punch it, does it hurt both of them or just one?”
“Some of the defectives are bled out,” Carla Adam points out. “And sometimes they have more than two legs, although I’ve never heard of two heads.”