He chuckles at that, glancing at her handful of button-sized clams. “I don’t think me saying that will do much good.”
“It’s true,” insists Janey. “We eat well. We had chicken yesterday.” She doesn’t mention that after Mildred Aaron had triumphantly carried back the squawking, bristling chicken, nobody wanted to kill it.
“It’s so pretty,” little Evelyn Jacob had said. “Look at its feathers.” They all stared at its snowy, fluffed feathers like thistledown.
“It could be our pet,” suggested Mary.
Janey didn’t want to kill the bridling, noisy bird either. However, she knew that the other girls were hungry all the time, and that they didn’t have her fierce determination to keep their hunger at bay. Biting her lip, she snatched the chicken by its fluttering, gulping throat and snapped its neck, which gave like a salt-bleached twig. A few girls burst into tears, but Minnie Saul, obviously used to this process, grabbed the carcass and began expertly plucking the feathers in a flurry of snowfall. Half the girls swore they wouldn’t eat it, but once the smell of the skin curling and crackling in the fire began disseminating through the air, everyone ate a small slice of meat and sucked the bones clean.
Janey blinks, feeling an unaccustomed wash of guilt. “I’m fine,” she says determinedly. “Tell Mother I’m fine.”
“I know,” he says, holding out the basket. She takes it and cradles it in her arms. The bread is still warm, and the gentle heat radiates into her rib cage. Unable to resist, she pushes a fingertip through the firm golden crust into the soft, spongy bread below. Mother used to get angry at her for doing that as a child; she would leave an intact loaf of bread to cool and come back to a pockmarked, half-eaten mutation with Janey nowhere to be found. Janey raises a fingerful of hot, grainy, barely cooked dough to her mouth and swallows without thinking about it. Unused to such richness, her body shimmers with pleasure.
“She’s been trying to do this for days, but I haven’t been able to find you,” he says.
“How did you find me today?” she asks tensely.
“Janey, the island isn’t huge,” he replies. “They can find you, as soon as they want to. And they’ll hurt you.”
They gaze at each other, and Father blurts suddenly, “I’ve been unhappy here since I was born.”
Janey blinks. “What?”
“I just…I’m not a very good man, I think. At least, I don’t follow the ways of the ancestors well. I suppose I don’t believe in them. I know everyone thinks I’m scared of you, but that’s not it. It just never felt right to me. I know it’s supposed to be good for you, good for Mary, a father’s duty. I know I’m supposed to believe, supposed to pray, supposed to…do a lot of things. It’s a sin, disobeying the ancestors and the wanderers, but God gave me a mind too, and the way we do things never seemed right to me. Ever since I was a boy. Lots of things. I’m not a fighter like you, but I can still think.”
Janey is taken aback; this is the most she has ever heard her father say. It never occurred to her that Father could do anything but passionately believe in the ancestors’ ways.
“It’s going to get colder,” he says. “You and Mary can come home whenever you need to. Your mother and I will welcome you.”
“I can’t come home,” says Janey.
“How long do you think you can stay here?”
Suddenly she feels exhausted, like the weight of her own body is dragging her to the ground. “I can’t think about that.”
“You will need to,” he says gently. “It’s getting colder.” His eyes are glistening. “You are getting thinner and thinner. You can’t keep doing this without starving. Dying.”
“Mary,” she murmurs. “You have to protect Mary.”
He snorts joylessly. “Protect Mary?” he says. “Do you have any idea how many men are waiting for her to come to fruition? How many are desperately putting off their own until she’s ready? She’s on her way, Mary. I can try to counsel her on which of the men will be the gentlest, the least likely to cause her pain, but Mary will have her summer of fruition soon, and she will marry, and she will have children if she is able.”
“I don’t want that for her,” Janey says brokenly, tears coursing down her cheeks. “I want her to be happy.”
“Some women are happy, with their husbands and their children,” he says.
“She never will be,” says Janey, “and it’s all my fault. I’ve ruined her for it. I should have left her alone.”
“You couldn’t,” says Father. “You need her. And whatever happens, the days she had with you will always be the ones she remembers and longs for.”
“And she’ll never be happy again,” finishes Janey, and they both bow their heads at the truth of this.
Father takes her slender hand. She jumps at the unexpected contact, but doesn’t pull away. Then suddenly he laughs.
“What?” says Janey, suspiciously.
“I’m just trying to think of a man who wouldn’t be petrified to marry you,” says Father. “And I can’t think of a single one.”
“I would end up with the one too drunk to know what he was doing,” offers Janey. “He would sober up and take one look at me and run straight into the sea.” Holding hands and inhaling the smell of fresh bread, they tilt back their heads and laugh upward at the emerging starlight.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Caitlin
Caitlin doesn’t sleep. She is terrified of waking up back at home, in her own bed. At night she lies listening to the collective breath of sleeping children. If she drifts off, she snatches herself awake immediately and lies in a state of peaceful torpor, inhaling the dark and salt and rich smell of sea-stiffened dresses softened by sweat and play. At dusk and dawn, when the sun is hovering in the sky, sometimes she feels safe enough to curl up on the sand and doze. Sometimes Roro decides to stretch out beside her, and she wakes up with a mouthful of wet sandy fur, his huge heart thumping against hers.
A day or two after Caitlin’s flight, Fiona is the first to be caught. She is last seen at twilight, chasing a rabbit into the brush with a homemade slingshot, then simply disappears. Shaken, the girls debate whether she was captured, or just decided to leave and go back home. Fiona returns to the beach two days later, her body painted in lush bruises of indigo and gold, her lip split and stuck together with clotted blood, her hands shaking.
“It was Father,” she says thickly through her swollen mouth. “He just…took me. But the wanderers were there too. They said he had to punish me properly. They said if he didn’t, they would. And so he beat me, and then left, and then came back and beat me some more. Mother cried and put me to bed and I left as soon as I could walk again, but they know where we are. They knew where to find me.”