Fires must be small and innocuous, ideally walled with sand, and when darkness comes the beach springs to life, small flaming blossoms opening on delicate wooden skeletons, warming hands and half cooking fish flesh that will be sucked from needle-sharp bones. When it is deep night, stars plastered across the sky and frost beginning to form on the ground, the girls retreat to the shelter, where they curl up and stretch out and form patterns of limbs meeting together to create a breathing, slumbering, murmuring mass of dirty cloth and tangled hair and still faces.
During the day, the more industrious girls hunt for food, care for the little ones, and tend to the shelter. Most of the others simply hitch on to whatever amusement catches them. They build castles and moats out of sand and reverently transport minnows, crabs, and snails to pools, where they are named and fed everything from seaweed to spit. Girls strip naked and wade into the water to have vicious, laughing fights, the drenched losers and winners alike warming themselves by sunlight and wading back in again. Dogs run by to investigate this new island population, wagging and barking in greeting, and often staying for a game of chase or tug-of-war before they head back to their home for more reliable food. The one exception is Roro, the apple farmer Saul’s dog, who is enormous and shaggy and gray and seems quite content to spend all day with the girls. With his tongue lolling and tail wagging, he plunges into the water, then rolls in the sand and stretches luxuriously in the sun, only to crash back into the water again. This infuriates Dava, who is always yelling at everyone to be still and not scare the fish. Vera Balthazar, whose father weaves, makes endless garlands of wildflowers, evening blue and golden yellow and blushing pink, and places as many on Roro as he will tolerate, so he springs around the beach shedding glorious scraps of color as the stems come undone.
When the girls are tired, or lazy, they sit and talk, heads on each other’s stomachs or thighs. They talk about the girls who aren’t on the beach and what they must be doing, and they talk about the girls who are on the beach, and they talk about what they will name their sons and daughters, and they talk about which hurts more, burning or freezing, and if being gathered into the ancestors’ arms involves literally being hugged for all eternity. They proclaim their disgust with boys, and pregnant women, and parents, and everyone who isn’t a girl with a straight, neat body and long sand-caked hair and more freedom than she’s ever tasted in her life. Each hour, it seems, another girl shows shyly at the beach and is welcomed with kind words and shouts of “What took you so long?”
Everything seems brighter, the colors of the island sharper and more vivid. Janey sees the violet undertone in each ripple of water, the amber shimmer of sun-warmed sand, the dulcet, garnet gleam in each strand of Mary’s damp hair. Janey’s own flesh seems lovelier, creamy-white with sea-green veins buried beneath her pigment-flecked forearm. The sky arcs gracefully above them in washes of blue, the dense, pillowy clouds pearlescent and peach-toned along their bulging bellies. They reflect in the sea like giant, harmless beasts, slowly drifting toward the horizon.
Janey wakes early the third morning, at the first tint of crimson shattering the black night sky, as if someone had shaken her from slumber. She takes the precious moment gladly and watches the girls sleep peacefully. Let this last, she prays, she knows not to who—certainly not the ancestors, or their puppetmaster God. Just for a little while, let them have this. Let me have it. Please.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Vanessa
Vanessa,” says Father, “I need to talk with you.”
It’s late at night, but Vanessa is still awake, and he knows it. Ever since the meeting with Janey she has been thrumming with indecision, with excitement, alternately preparing to run out the door barefoot and then sitting down to carefully plan a list of supplies she will bring to the beach. Vanessa has thought through her mundane future, and dreamed of the power to alter it, but she never pictured this.
Obediently, Vanessa follows Father downstairs in her nightgown. She can hear Mother moving restlessly in her and Father’s bedroom. Ben is the only one sleeping well tonight. She pictures his golden hair spiraled out in wild tufts, his baby mouth drooling innocently on his pillow.
Father sits at the kitchen table, the yellowing, mealy remnants of an apple core lying next to him. Vanessa avoids his eyes, staring at the clean-swept floor and her small bare feet.
“Vanessa, I know about the girls on the beach,” he says.
“I thought everybody would know by now.”
He shrugs. “True enough. It’s unprecedented. At least since…” She waits, confused, but he makes a motion with his hand like he’s throwing something away. “Vanessa, what Janey Solomon is doing is…” He searches for the word, then stops. Catching her gaze, he sighs. “I know. I know. But Vanessa, hear this now, hear me clearly: you will not join her.”
She stares at her feet again.
“Do you hear me?”
She nods, feeling like a ghost in her nightgown, transparent, without will or agency. And yet she could disobey him. She could walk out that door tonight, when the house is dark, after he has left her room. Suddenly, a surge of power boils in her chest, so astonishing that she gasps out loud. He cannot stop her.
“Vanessa, please look at me.”
She doesn’t want to. She stares at his chest, the rough-woven, stained cloth, the slight rise and fall of his breath.
“Look at me, Vanessa,” he says, and she reluctantly brings her eyes to his. With him sitting, their gazes are level. His eyes are so like hers, hazel with gold and green, a dark splotch on one iris, slightly narrow and fringed with thick burgundy lashes. Slipping away from his gaze, she looks at his set mouth, also like hers, the deep-cut notch in the full upper lip.
“I know what you did,” she whispers.
“What?”
“I know what the wanderers did.”
He stares at her, his brow furrowed. “What did we do?”
She leans forward and hisses, “You killed Amanda Balthazar.”
To her surprise, he looks bewildered instead of guilty or enraged. “Vanessa, what in the ancestors’ names are you talking about?”
Vanessa blinks and shifts from foot to foot. “It’s true,” she murmurs.
“Vanessa, who on earth have you been listening to? Of course we didn’t kill Amanda Balthazar. She bled out. It was very sad, but the wanderers had nothing to do with it.”
“She didn’t bleed out. They pulled her body from the water.”
“What? Vanessa, are you…are you awake? You’re not making sense.”
She stares at him intently, trying to elicit a gleam of knowledge from his eyes, a shade of shame in the twitch of his lips. He looks at her, confused, and she sighs. “It’s true,” she insists again.
“I am sure you heard something, Vanessa, but I would know if that happened, wouldn’t I?”
She nods slowly. Could the wanderers have excluded Father from their darkest workings?
Father shakes his head, as if to clear the accusation, and then says, “We were talking about you staying home, where you belong.”
“But Father—”