Opening the heavy door, she sees him sitting on the floor, curled into himself, sobbing savagely like an angry child. Something is wrong, perhaps she is dreaming; men do not cry like this. Children cry like this, over anything from a broken cookie to a sister dying, and women cry like this when they deliver defectives or are beaten, but men simply shed a tear or two and are done with it, even if they are burying their own son. Something has gone wrong within Father, and part of her is so bewildered that she wants to creep back upstairs and pretend she never heard him. Steeling herself, she whispers, “Father?”
He opens his arms, and she goes to them, only to find herself constricted in an embrace that crushes her ribs together so tightly she cannot breathe. Heaving, Father buries his face in her bare neck, tears and spit streaming out of him and dampening the shoulder of her nightgown, wet strands of beard sticking to her flesh. She pats him automatically, knowing this is what she should do, but something inside her quails. Of all the acts she and Father have ever performed together, this feels the most intimate, the most raw. It makes her want to shrink inside herself, so she can’t feel her own skin.
Struggling to breathe, she waits for the intensity of his sobs to lessen, for him to raise his face and wipe it on his arm and apologize, but he simply continues to cry, his body convulsing and twisting with grief. “Father,” she says eventually. “Father, let me get Mother.”
“No,” he gasps, loosening his hold so she can take a few deep breaths. “No. Please.”
“What is it?” Vanessa asks, still tangled in a tearstained, muscular embrace and aching to disengage herself. “What happened?”
“Vanessa,” he whispers, “my father was a wanderer, and his father as well.”
This is beyond obvious, but she says nothing.
“The things I have seen in the wastelands, the things I have seen…what I have protected us from. I have shepherded the island, I have carried on the teachings of the ancestors.”
“Yes,” she says after a pause.
“It is my life’s work, it is holy work, but—” Here he breaks down sobbing again, his forehead on her collarbone. “Vanessa, I’m not the only one who didn’t know, and…I don’t know how…”
Suddenly Vanessa understands. “You found out,” she says. “You found out they killed Amanda and Rosie. You didn’t believe it at first. You thought the girls were lying, and then the rest of them, the wanderers, told you the truth. They waited this long…”
He pulls back and stares at her. “When did you find out?”
“I’ve known for a long time.”
In an instant he is standing, rearing back, a creature of rage, but somehow she feels no fear. “You knew,” he says. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”
“I did tell you.”
“But not so I’d believe you, you didn’t convince me!”
They stare at each other, Father with tears streaming down his face, Vanessa calm and pale. Suddenly he collapses, sits on his haunches with his face in his hands, no longer weeping, but frozen like a trapped animal. Vanessa knows she should go to him. She has never seen him so defeated. She will have to soothe and comfort him for nights to come, but for now she turns on her heel and leaves the library, quietly mounts the stairs, climbs into bed, and falls into a dreamless sleep.
Winter
Chapter Forty-Two
Vanessa
It starts in church.
The next Sunday. Vanessa is sitting between Mother and Father, half listening to the pastor talk about disobedience and the darkness below, when Mrs. Gideon, the farmer Gideon’s second wife, starts coughing. People are always coughing as the weather cools, but she coughs for so long that people start frowning in her direction. Vanessa turns around just in time to see her spray the face of Mrs. Saul the fisherman’s wife with flecks of blood.
Everyone freezes, except for the pastor, who drones on. Mrs. Saul blanches, suddenly resembling Janey, with too-white skin and a smattering of dark freckles. Mr. Gideon puts his arm around Mrs. Gideon, who is dabbing at her bloody mouth in shock, and they stand up and stumble toward the stairs. Alma Gideon, the first wife, sits stock-still for a moment before following. Then everyone stares at Mrs. Saul, who wipes at her face with the edge of her coat, her eyes wide and horrified. Someone else has started coughing far in the back rows of the church, and all heads swivel in unison to see. Eventually that coughing quiets and the crowd’s attention drifts back to the pastor, who looks annoyed at the disruption.
Later that evening, Mother tells Vanessa that Mrs. Gideon is dead. Vanessa is shocked; plenty of people die of sickness, but sickness usually takes a while to claim its victims. That night, Vanessa lies awake in the dark and thinks of Mrs. Gideon, who was nondescript and boring, but is now interesting because she is dead.
The next day Hannah Adam’s baby dies. Mrs. Adam goes to feed her and finds the infant sprawled in a rictus in her cradle, her face azure and her tongue swollen. Vanessa’s house is too far from theirs to hear the screams, but Father tells them of the scene later. When Vanessa leaves for school, he warns her to keep her coat on, like coats can protect you from dying bloody. Or blue.
Five more girls are missing from class: Edith, Leah, Mildred, Deborah, and Julia. In an already decimated class of only twelve girls, the absence looms hugely. Have they all gone to join Janey? The children look at Mr. Abraham out of the corners of their eyes, trying to read his expression, but he merely looks bored and launches into the day’s lessons.
After school, Linda tells Vanessa that Mildred hurt her arm. Leah’s brother tells her that Leah is sick, but not that kind of sick. But then two days later, Mr. Abraham wipes his eyes and tells them that Leah is dead. Mildred is still absent, and Linda looks quiet and pale.
The pastor likes to talk about the scourge, and Vanessa can’t help but wonder if it has come to punish the island for the girls’ disobedience. True, nothing is on fire, but surely this is the disease that scoured the wastelands. She asks Mother, who shakes her head but stays quiet.
By the end of the week there is no school anymore. Mother tells Vanessa that she will stay at home and help her until the sickness has passed. She talks about it like a fun party, but her voice is strained and there are violet circles around her eyes. She cycles between offering an uncomfortable surfeit of affection and ordering Vanessa to mend seams and scrub floors. After a day of this, Vanessa bitterly thinks that she would gladly be in bed coughing up blood, given the alternative. The next day Mother seems to regret holding her captive, and she lets her outside to run around the house. Vanessa sees a few men checking on gardens or crops, and a few women hanging out laundry to dry. She waves at Jean Balthazar through her window, and Mrs. Balthazar waves back.
Vanessa visits the chickens and watches them squabble, laughing as they peck one another on their tufted rumps, and then goes to throw rocks into the water at the beach, enjoying the serenely expanding circles on the calm surface. She is pretty sure this doesn’t count as running around the house, but after all, it’s not like she’s gone to join Janey.
She ends up thankful for her brief disobedience. When she returns home Mother, uncharacteristically frantic, smacks her across the face, and then tells her that two more people are dead and she can’t go outside anymore.
Chapter Forty-Three
Janey