As Vanessa enters her second week in bed, Father comes into the room and pulls her into a rough embrace. It is not a prequel or an invitation, but rather an attempt to wrest his daughter out of her despair. “Vanessa,” he whispers, “you must let yourself live. You are alive. I am alive, Mother and Ben are alive. You must focus on the living and not the dead. It was my fault, I put my sorrow on you and Mother and I should have kept it to myself. The girls, everyone who is lost, they are in the arms of the ancestors. Don’t listen to what anybody says. They came back, like good children. They were all good children. Dying of sorrow when everyone around you is drowning in blood is understandable, but not forgivable. Do you understand me?”
She tries to understand. She tries to let the names pass through her mind like water; not thick or sticky but clear running water, like the rain that pelts the rooftop. If she stays in the house, someone being dead is the same as them being alive, she tells herself. She feels cold glass under her hands, looks out her window at branches and dead leaves. She sits at the kitchen table in her nightgown and watches Mother’s face, the absentminded contentment as she cooks. She watches Ben while he sleeps, innocent and free, like a lamb resting after a day of gamboling. Eventually the names of the sick and the dead milling in her brain begin to blur into an opaque wash of gibberish. Nothing seems to make sense, but she’d rather be confused than dying. She lets grief drain from her eyes as she weeps, seep from her fingers and soles into the floorboards as she walks, rise from her stomach in a cleansing rush as she falls to her knees and heaves.
Vanessa idly wonders what the wanderers will bring back from their next wasteland voyage. Mother hopes it’s something to help with the bodies. Corpses are usually buried swiftly, deep in the fields, but now there are too many bodies and not enough people to dig. Next door, Mrs. Aaron died, and all they could do was drag her body outside and cover it with a blanket. There have been rains the past few days, and occasionally Vanessa will inhale the fresh smell of rain and dirt laced with a scent so indescribably horrible that she has to rush to the kitchen and bury her face in something fragrant to wash it away. Mr. Aaron is recovering, Father says, and while Vanessa feels sorry that he has to bury his rotting wife, she is also impatient for him to hurry up and recover so he can take the body away.
Mother is anxious and fretful. She asks, “What did we do to deserve this?” as if Vanessa knows the answer. Vanessa wants to sit, bar her grief from her mind, and reread her favorite books, but Mother barely leaves her side. She makes Vanessa sit and talk to her while she sews, finally mending hems and darning holes that have marred the family clothing for months. Vanessa finds the closeness of their bodies, the constant questioning tone of Mother’s voice, unnerving. Once Mother coughs into one hand, and Vanessa doesn’t even think until she is flat against the far wall. Mother sighs and rolls her eyes, and Vanessa guiltily goes back to her seat, leaving a few extra inches between them.
For a long time, as long as she can remember, one of Vanessa’s favorite daydreams has been that everyone on the island, except her, would die. Even Father, even Mother. Not die in piles of stinking bodies, but simply be swept away by some unknowable force, leaving the entire island to Vanessa. She would walk naked by the water, letting the sun warm her skin, not caring if her body started to change. She would go into other people’s houses and take whatever she wanted, whatever gewgaws caught her fancy, or perhaps the collections of wasteland detritus in the other wanderers’ houses. After she took them, maybe she would smash them. Maybe she would break all the windows in all the houses—except hers, so the wind wouldn’t get in. All the dogs and cats would be hers, in one big furry pile begging for her attention, walking by her side like protectors, like guardians. She could read for days and nights, every book, not just the ones Father thought were good for her. She would sleep in a pile of licking dogs and purring cats, and wake up with the entire day and the entire stretch of island all to herself, morning after morning.
Late one night, Vanessa remembers this daydream and feels choked, nauseated by guilt. How could she have dreamed of losing Mother and Father? Is she a defective, not in body, but in mind? The ancestors can be severe in their punishments; what if the entire island dies to show her the consequences of her fantasies? Every minute she closes her eyes and begs the ancestors to stop. She tells them she didn’t really mean the daydream in the first place. She begs them to save Mother and Father and Ben, at least. She steals a knife, cuts her hand, lets her bright blood drip onto the floor as tribute, like in church. I repent. She rubs the bloodstains with her toe until they are a rusty smear. Please hear me.
Days pass as she hides in Father’s library whenever she can, not reading but just staring, her arms crossed around her rib cage. Eventually Vanessa decides that the ancestors wouldn’t kill everyone to punish one girl’s daydream. That would mean they are cruel and capricious, but Pastor Saul says they are kind and that all punishments are deserved. She almost manages to convince herself.
They have enough to eat, thanks to the wanderer tributes. Despite the commandment to stay home, people appear to be sneaking out of their houses at night to leave food on their doorstep: filthy carrots, ears of corn, a dead chicken. The island can’t try to appease the ancestors with anything tangible, so they seem to be thrusting food at the wanderers in hopes they can somehow intervene. It used to be that families brought by a load of vegetables, a loaf of bread, or a cut of meat with a smile. Mother would chat with whoever came by, invite them in for some tea. Now the food waits, sparkling with dew in the morning, half ravaged by dogs and rats.
After a week spent mostly in silence, Father leaves at dawn for a trip to the wastelands. The next day, he returns in a long coat Vanessa hasn’t seen before. He looks furtive and anxious, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. After hugging Vanessa, he touches Mother’s shoulder and says, “Vanessa, can you leave us alone for a moment?”
Hurt, she creeps up to her bedroom. Why should Mother know secrets she can’t? When Father comes in, she rolls to turn her back to him.
“Vanessa,” he says, perching on the edge of the bed. His tone is brisk, like he hasn’t noticed she’s angry. “I need you to pay attention.”
“To what?” she mutters.
“Sit up. Look at me.”
Vanessa slowly pulls herself into a sitting position. He’s holding his hand like there’s something precious in it. Peering into the palm, she sees a small white pebble.
“I need you to do something for me, but you can’t tell anyone.”
“What is it?”
“I mean, your mother, but you can’t tell anyone outside the family. Ever.”
Vanessa frowns. She has been so long confined to the house that she can’t imagine seeing anyone besides her family ever again. “What is it?” she repeats.
“I need you to swallow one of these every day.”
Vanessa looks into his face to see if he’s joking, but doesn’t see a smile. Examining the pebble further, she sees that it’s not a pebble at all: it’s too round and regular, with a faint line dividing it into two equal halves.
“What is that?”
“It’s medicine.”
Medicine is a syrup, or tea, and tastes murky and terrible. “It doesn’t look like medicine.”
“I can’t explain.”