Vanessa rolls her eyes. “Because I’ll never know if it’s true,” she says. “Whatever I think of could be true, and so could the islands where they live on honey and babies grow on trees.”
“What if you could know something?” asks Janey softly. “I think we should try to know more. Even if in the end, it doesn’t change anything.”
“Know more about what?”
Janey arranges her skirts around her knees and then sits down on the wet sand. Vanessa imitates her and feels the cold dampness invade the backs of her thighs. As Janey leans forward, her braid swings into Vanessa’s lap like a flaming rope. “We need to know,” she says, “about the wastelands.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Vanessa
Janey thought she was the first of the children to seek out the wastelands. Vanessa didn’t mention that ever since she first heard of them, she has been trying to find out more. The enticing vision of a world on fire intoxicates her. She imagines the grass, the trees, the houses of the island exploding into flames: the warmth, the brightness, all she knows turning to tinder and shattering, sparking, collapsing into ruin and dust. She pictures sifting through the soft, sable ash for the clean white bones of her kin, walking with gray feet to survey the fallen stones of a dead church. Daydreams like these make her wonder, sometimes, if she is marked in some way, a hidden defective but a defective all the same. A streak of rot across her mind, staining her thoughts pitch-dark.
When they met on the beach two days ago, Janey suggested that Vanessa try harder to inveigle information from Father, but Vanessa knows this is futile. She has spent her whole life using everything she has—her body, her voice, her words, her smiles—in order to find out more about the wastelands. Father knows how to push aside her questions with a calm, easy voice, as if he had been taught from an early age to deflect the curiosity of daughters. Perhaps he has. Perhaps soon he will begin to indoctrinate Ben in the art of closing off the world to those who seek it.
Father is a dead end, but Vanessa has other sources now. Perhaps the new Adams do not know, yet, how to turn away those who are persistent. Vanessa has to beg or trick Mrs. Adam into telling her of the wastelands. She shies away from the idea of more time with Mr. Adam, remembering how he swelled darkly over her in the library. He seems like he would extract something vital from her in exchange for information, like her lungs or her teeth.
On the other hand, Vanessa quite likes Mrs. Adam. She is hesitant and gentle, with the mannerisms and speech of a child. Unlike most adults, she looked at Vanessa with a bright face, like she couldn’t wait to speak with her. If Vanessa could talk to Mrs. Adam without Mr. Adam interfering, she would do it even without an ulterior motive. She thinks she knows how.
For a week’s worth of afternoons, Vanessa lurks about the Adam household like a hungry dog lured by the promise of scraps. Finally she sees Mrs. Adam drift vaguely toward the garden and rushes to meet her. “Mrs. Adam!” she says breathlessly.
Mrs. Adam starts. “Vanessa!” she says just as breathlessly. “How nice to see you. How are you?”
“Well,” says Vanessa, feeling almost shy. “Are you going to garden?”
“I’m going to try,” says Mrs. Adam, laughing a little. “The women have been trying to explain to me what to do, but I’m just hopeless. I hope I don’t kill everything.”
“You won’t,” says Vanessa encouragingly, “I’m sure you won’t.” She pauses. “Would you like me to help you?”
“That would be lovely,” breathes Mrs. Adam. “Are you good at gardening?”
“Oh, yes,” lies Vanessa, who is so averse that Mother doesn’t even bother forcing her anymore. “I love it.”
“Oh, good,” says Mrs. Adam. “I was going to weed.”
Even though Vanessa rolls happily in the mud every summer, she can’t stand pulling spiky plants out of rich, fertilized muck. “I love weeding,” she says with flagging conviction.
Pulling up the skirt of her dress and the ends of her thick-knit shawl, Mrs. Adam kneels on the cold ground. “How do you tell which one is a weed?” she asks.
Vanessa also kneels, her kneecaps becoming frigid within seconds. “Well,” she says brightly, “it takes practice.”
Carefully, Mrs. Adam begins pulling strips of plants from the garden that seem like they might not belong. Vanessa, trying to appear patient and calm, does the same. They make a little pile of greenery between them. “How are you settling in?” asks Vanessa.
“Oh, everyone is so kind,” says Mrs. Adam cheerfully. “People are helping us with everything. I don’t know how to sew, or, or scrub things with sand, or cook over a fire, goodness no. Everyone is so willing to show me things, twice, usually.”
Vanessa instantly realizes that this means that people in the wastelands do not sew, or scrub things, or cook over fires. She wants to interrogate Mrs. Adam immediately, but has learned from her interaction with Mr. Adam in the library. She simply says, “Oh?”
“Oh, yes, I either burn things or they’re raw. Luckily Clyde is patient with me. More than usual, since he’s learning so much too. It’s so different here.”
Vanessa has to bite her tongue, hard, until her questions slide back down her throat and can be swallowed. “I’m sure,” she says.
“It will be normal in no time,” prattles Mrs. Adam. “It just takes time. That’s what Clyde says. He was so eager to come here, and I’ve never seen him happier. And it is so lovely here, so lovely. Like nothing I’ve seen. It was hard to come here, to leave everything behind, but the beauty of it—the trees!—that helps.”
Vanessa sorts carefully through a variety of responses and checks to make sure Mrs. Adam is distractedly peering at a plant before saying, “Who do you miss most?”
“My grandmother,” says Mrs. Adam. “I’ll never see her again, and that’s hard.”
Vanessa sits up on her heels, her hand full of leafy vine, and gapes at Mrs. Adam. “Your grandmother?” she says.
“She was—is—such a love,” murmurs Mrs. Adam. “Her name is Elizabeth. Now, she could have sewn things.”
“How old are you, Mrs. Adam?” asks Vanessa softly.
“Me? I’m twenty-seven,” replies Mrs. Adam.
Vanessa’s head reels, and she reaches out and pulls out a plant at random, trying to keep her face neutral. At twenty-seven, Mrs. Adam should be a grandmother herself. How old must her grandmother be? Why didn’t she have to take a final draft? Could her husband be supremely useful in some way?
“And your grandfather?” she says in what she hopes is a light tone.
“Oh, he died years ago,” says Mrs. Adam. “He was wonderful too.”
“I see,” mutters Vanessa, pulling out bigger and bigger handfuls of foliage and trying to control herself.
“Vanessa,” chirrups Mrs. Adam suddenly, “I think you’ve pulled out a carrot.”
Vanessa jumps, and looks at a tiny orange root growing from a flock of green stems. “Oh,” she says.
“At least I think so, let me see.” Mrs. Adam runs her fingers over the root, brings it to her mouth, and then says, “Oh,” and puts it down.
“What is it?” asks Vanessa.