“I want you safe and alive,” he tells her softly. “We’re going to wait until the girls get hungry and cold and come home. The others are certain it will happen in a few days, but I’m not so sure. If time passes and they’re still out there, I’m sure the plan will change and we’ll start searching.”
Vanessa crosses her arms under her chest, puts her hand on her throat. “Are they going to kill them?” she asks. “Kill the girls on the beach?”
“Please don’t be ridiculous. Of course not.”
“Well, then, why can’t I be safe and alive with them?”
He sighs. “I know it’s selfish, Vanessa. But if you can’t see why you shouldn’t run away from school and your mother and your home, then do it for me. I need you here with me. I have done so much for this island, so much for this family. I just need you to be good. I need you to be the good girl you are. Please, stay here for me, and be good for me. Please don’t go.” He takes her hands in his strong, hard ones, then pulls her into his arms.
She resists slightly, meets his eyes with her mirror ones. “Don’t you want to me to…” She can’t find the right words, although she discards many—be free, run, fight, rebel, be a child one last time. A precious few seconds pass, and the moment of opportunity is lost. Her hope of escape drains into the floorboards.
“Who is my little wife?” asks Father in a sweet tone.
“I am,” whispers Vanessa.
“And what do wives do?”
Vanessa hesitates. He’s never followed up with this question before, and a multitude of answers mill through her mind.
“Do wives stay with their husbands?”
She sighs. “Yes, wives stay with their husbands,” she echoes dully.
“Be a good girl,” he whispers again. Her heart is clamoring and screaming to go, run out the door, but his pull is stronger, and the weight of him on her shoulders drags her to the ground.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Caitlin
Countless times over the next few days, Caitlin steps out her front door and walks a few strides in the direction of the beach. Each time she stops, sighs, and turns on her heel, returning to her stultifying existence of cooking and sewing and trying to fade into walls and tables.
A foreign, previously undiscovered part of Caitlin is waking up. It burgeons and yawns and stretches under the blanket of her ribs, sealed in soft sheaths of slimy muscle. It breathes and shivers. It terrifies her to no end.
She puts her hands on the rotting frame of the back door and surveys the unweeded, blackbird-savaged corn lurching crookedly from its stems. Father is nominally a corn farmer, but all of their barter comes from his mash-wine, which doesn’t require corn that is whole or even unblackened. His vats, set aside from the house, brew a concoction so burning and strong it must be watered and honeyed heavily before it is potable.
Caitlin has a strong aversion to the vats. Once, when she was younger, Father found her dropping pebbles into the searing brew, to see if they would dissolve before they hit the bottom. He wrapped his hand around the back of her skull and shoved her head under the conflagrant liquid. She saw the color of pain inside that vat, red-black and flaming brighter than any fire. He left her weeping and vomiting acid, wondering if she was blind, if the crimson surge had burned out the hollows of her eyes. She was sick in bed for a week after. When Mother asked, she obediently told her that she’d fallen in while playing. She could just see Mother’s face, blurry through her stinging eyes, and watched the smudges of her features contract and change shape. Caitlin could tell from the way Mother wept and kicked the wall that she didn’t believe her.
Suddenly the smell, so familiar and pervasive, makes her eyes hurt. She walks quickly to the front door and stands there, breathing fresher air. She mulls on Mother’s impotent grief.
A thought that Caitlin has been trying to suppress abruptly rises to the surface: if she leaves, if she is not there to stand in front of Mother and absorb Father’s violence, what will happen to Mother?
But another voice, one that has been driven down even deeper, suddenly sings forth. She should be standing in front of me.
She stares at the horizon: the trees wave, the clouds pass.
Caitlin leaves that night.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Janey
It is dusk, blossom tones seeping across a graying sky. Kneeling in the damp sand, Janey is digging for clams while the others finish their slumber. Mary is curled up back to back with Ruth Balthazar, her face inches from the lightly snoring Frances Adam, everyone unconsciously snuggling closer for warmth in the crisp air.
Scanning for pinpoint airholes, Janey uses two long fingers to dig small vertical tunnels until her nails hit a shock of wet shell, and then she scrabbles to catch the burrowing creatures before they escape. Clamming was never one of her skills before the beach, but she has become quite good at it and enjoys the bloodless hunt. As the stars come out, the girls will rise, yawn, and take to smashing the huddled clams with rocks and sucking out the salty, slimy insides. Sometimes, if the moon is dark enough that the smoke won’t show, the girls make small fires, put a rock by the flames, and boil the clams in their own juices until their shells creak open reluctantly, leaking clear seawater like tears of grief.
There are snuffles and snorts as the girls wake, see the lilac sky, and roll over for another few minutes of dreaming. They are nocturnal now, sleeping during the crisp fall days and rising at night, always moving their chosen sleeping spot lest habits give them away. Their shelters are flimsy and hastily made. Janey already recognizes the danger of this communal sleeping and suspects soon each girl will need to choose her own hiding place in which to doze during the day. And yet it is hard to deliver that edict, for watching the girls sleep in a pile like puppies, soaking in a more peaceful hibernation than many of them have ever known, gives Janey a sweetness in her chest that rises to the back of her tongue and makes her lips curl upward with pleasure.
There is a sharp rustle to her right, and she freezes. A large figure emerges from the brush, and Janey’s breath pulses in her throat. “Janey?” whispers a familiar voice.
Janey half crouches into a fighting stance, although there is no way she could prevail against Father; he is a large man and she a spindly, exhausted girl. But then she notices that he is carrying a basket smelling of fresh bread and festooned with wildflowers, and she straightens, feeling foolish. “Father,” she says.
“Your mother insisted on the flowers,” replies Father, looking at her kindly. “I said that living outside, you could probably find your own flowers if you liked.” Coppery glints glow in his cropped hair and square beard, the same shades that smolder on Janey’s skull.
“They’re pretty,” says Janey softly, staring at the tiny golden blossoms. “Tell her I liked them.”
“She made you bread. She said she can’t imagine what you’re eating out here. It’s not like it’s summer and there are offerings on every doorstep.”
“Well, we eat,” says Janey lamely. “Tell her not to worry.”