“You would?” whispers Linda.
“My sister told me that after she got married she felt like nothing would ever change for her again,” said Fiona. “Especially after she had her daughter. She said she loved her daughter, but also couldn’t stand her, and that after she was born, she kept having nightmares. She said she wanted to die. Not that she would kill herself, but if she got swamp lung or something and it killed her, she wouldn’t mind. She used to go out in the cold, sometimes, in light clothes, to see if she could catch it.” There is a long silence as they digest this information. “She wasn’t the type to say anything to others, but she said things to me. How she wanted everything to change. How everything was wrong. She said it to me. Maybe if she said it to other people, she’d be dead.”
Everyone is silent for a minute.
“I can’t feel my feet,” says Rosie finally. “I cannot feel them.” She leans over and pokes at the skin of her instep. “My toes are blue.”
Caitlin suddenly realizes she is shivering heavily and is feeling sleepy. “Your lips are blue,” Rosie informs her.
“We need to go back,” says Linda. “It’s almost dawn anyway.”
“We don’t need to go back,” says Rosie, and Caitlin sees new conviction dawn in her eyes.
“You’re going to go,” she whispers.
“I think…I think I’m going too,” says Fiona. “Not right now. Maybe tomorrow, when I can bring something warm to wear and some food. Will you go?”
“I—I don’t know,” says Caitlin, her head spinning.
Clutching themselves, they ascend the church steps and run home on numb feet, tripping and falling, catching themselves with cold hands that prickle with pain, thrusting fingers into their mouths for warmth. Caitlin sneaks into bed, rolling herself over and over so she is wrapped in layers of quilt, and immediately falls into a deep sleep.
The next day, Fiona and Rosie are missing from school, as are Letty and Violet. Caitlin feels envy stab her in the gut so sharply it’s hard to walk upright.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Janey
Mary and Janey work through the night to build a large shelter, held up by birch branches and woven through with bark and dead grass. Janey’s fingers fly like narrow white birds as she twines strands together, looping and winding. They are companionably silent in their task, with only the sounds of bark scratching against bare wood, and their feet shifting in the sand.
Fiona arrives first in the pearly gray early morning, looking petrified, along with Rosie, who looks fierce as usual. Mary welcomes them with embraces. Fiona holds on for a long time, shaking, and Rosie irritably accepts a few seconds of Mary’s arms and then shrugs her off.
“So what are we going to do here?” asks Rosie.
“Live,” says Janey simply.
“They’ll never let us.”
“We’ll figure out what we need to,” replies Janey, her confidence burgeoning outside but weak and thready inside. Rosie is right; the adults will not tolerate defection. She needs time to discover some advantage, some strategy for resistance.
“My father will come for me,” whispers Fiona. “He’ll beat me.”
“Then why did you come?” snaps Rosie.
“I couldn’t not come,” says Fiona. “It’s…it’s my only chance, you know.”
Letty comes later in the morning, saying she simply walked out of school. “The teachers don’t really know what to do when you look like you know where you’re going,” she reports. “What are we doing here? What are we going to do here?”
“We’re going to live together on the beach,” says Mary, her sweet voice full of joy.
“For how long?” says Letty. “They’ll come for us.”
“We’ll figure it out,” says Janey. “For now, welcome.”
Violet comes running up breathless, laughing and sobbing with exhaustion. “I ran the whole way here!” she cries. “I ran the whole way! I’m going to stay here with you!” Her breath is rapid and her voice a little hysterical; Letty goes over and rubs her back in circles until she’s breathing more normally. “I brought a bowl,” says Violet, “I thought we might need a bowl.” Then she bursts into laughter, and so do the others.
Over the next three days, the girls come to join Janey one by one: apologetically, triumphantly, so quietly that she simply wakes up to find them there. They bring food, sisters, buckets of rainwater. Their eyes are disbelieving, like this is the dream, and tomorrow they will wake up in their regular lives, mourning a vision of freedom. They are mostly Mary’s age, teetering on the brink of fruition, although some have younger girls in tow. Abigail Balthazar, who is only three, cries so hard for her mother that her sister, Lila, must grumpily go leave her on the doorstep. Janey had hoped to see Vanessa Adam, but she remains obtrusively absent. Perhaps she is upset because Janey intimated that her father killed people. The rest of the girls slowly move into the motions of life. There are basic problems to solve: food, warmth, fire.
The supplies the girls bring dwindle quickly, and Janey forbids theft. “I don’t know why they haven’t come for us already,” she says. “Maybe they’re trying to figure out what to do. The last thing we need is to be stealing from them.” They dig for clams, nibble on different kinds of seaweed to discover which are edible, daring the others to try the slimiest specimens. Despite the prohibition on stealing, Dava Gideon sneaks home in the middle of the night and takes her little brother’s fishing rod and hook. Her bounty is scant, bony fish barely the size of her palm, but the act of catching them makes the girls whoop and cheer. When the rainwater runs out, Janey agrees to have Rosie steal a small rain barrel. After all, she says, there are plenty of unused barrels and an endless well of rain waiting in the sky.