This quiet version of Father, who does not weave or yell or swear, seems like a stranger. “Yes, Father,” Caitlin says obediently, and he nods, but keeps standing there. She closes her eyes and finds she can’t sleep with his presence in the room. Behind the darkness of her eyelids, he blares like a spotlight onto her brain. She stays still, closing her eyes almost all the way yet watching him through needle-thin cracks in her eyelids. She sees him look down at the floor, sigh, wipe his face, and eventually shamble off. Pushing herself to the head of the bed, Caitlin piles the stinking sheets on top of herself and falls gratefully into cool, black sleep.
She wakes fitfully, and it’s either dark or light out, and sometimes there is soup next to her and sometimes bread, and sometimes nothing. Mother is keeping the water pitcher full, but Caitlin never sees her. There’s a pot so she doesn’t have to use the outhouse, but Mother keeps forgetting to empty it, and eventually the room stinks of stale urine. Caitlin begins practicing standing and taking steps around the room, and starts feeling stronger. She hears Father’s footsteps sometimes. Mother must be keeping him away.
Soon she is strong enough to leave the bedroom. The sour sick smell permeates the house, but Caitlin barely notices it anymore. She walks slowly down the hallway, and suddenly Father appears like a creature from a nightmare. Caitlin stumbles backwards a few steps.
“You’re up,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, peering around him for Mother.
“That’s good.”
“Where’s Mother? I want her.”
Father looks down. “Caitlin, she…”
“Is she out again?”
“No.”
“Good. Mother!” she calls, looking past him.
“Caitlin, she’s not here.”
“You said she wasn’t out?”
“She’s not.”
“She has to be somewhere.”
“She is.”
Caitlin’s breath is starting to choke her, high up in her throat, and she swallows and gulps a few times. “Where is she, then? Where’s Mother?”
“She can’t…she isn’t…”
“Is she sick? Is she still sick? I can take care of her now.”
“She’s not sick.”
“Where is she?”
“Caitlin, she died.”
The words fall heavy onto her head, like blows, and she raises her arms to ward them off. “She can’t die,” says Caitlin. “You’re a liar.”
“She did. She got sick and died.”
“You killed her. You murdered her! I knew someday you would hit her too hard and now she’s dead!” She has never screamed at Father before, and it feels like punching through a sheet of glass, a shattering of a wall thought unbreakable; she bleeds relief from between her clenched fingers.
“I—” Father chokes. She sees something unfamiliar on his face. “I promise you…”
“Show me the body, then, if she’s dead. Prove it.” Caitlin knows she isn’t making sense, but doesn’t care. “You say she’s dead? Show me the body. You have her locked up somewhere, don’t you? Locked up to punish her for being sick.”
He takes a deep breath and kneels down to be closer to her face. She leans backwards. “Caitlin. Your mother is no longer with us. She’s gone to the ancestors. I’m all you have left.”
“That’s not true!” shouts Caitlin. She sees a flash of anger in his eyes and instinctively cowers close to the floor.
“I did the best I could!” Father shouts back, rising. “I tried to help her eat and drink and I washed her when she needed it and she still died! And then I helped you! Who do you think was bringing you food and water? Who do you think washed you when you pissed yourself? She’s dead, Caitlin, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Fury rushes through Caitlin like a storm, so loud and hot that she can barely see. “Liar!” she screams, and hurls her whole body and head into his belly. He falls over like a rotten tree in a strong wind, and she runs over him and out the door, into a cold drizzle of rain. Weakened by her sickness, she can only run like a very young child, tottering along with her arms waving, slipping and falling, but she doesn’t take the time to look behind her. Reaching the sea, she collapses to her knees, out of breath. Father isn’t over her shoulder, so she pushes herself up and starts walking down the shoreline, the cold dark sand sticking to her feet, the windswept water raging blackly at her. Eventually, when she’s too tired to walk anymore, she curls up by one of the structures Janey built. Caitlin closes her eyes and hears the faint echoes of children giggling, breathes in the clean smoke of burning wood, feels the soft shiver of sand as small excited footsteps whisk by her. When she opens her eyes again, she is utterly alone. Her nightgown is drenched and stings her cold skin. Pushing her head down on the sand, she falls asleep. She dreams that the branches spiking upright to form the shelter skeleton gather around her like sentries, multiply and flourish into a forest that hides her from Father when he comes looking.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Janey
A few weeks after Janey returns home, she and her family begin to notice people outside. The first time Mother sees a group of people through the window, she yells and waves until they come within shouting range. They call that they were sick, but they survived the sickness and so now can leave their houses without fear of contagion. It’s the first time Janey hears that living through the illness is possible.
She knows that there were some girls who didn’t leave the beach when she and Mary did. Not many; the combined blow of losing Janey and hearing the story about Mrs. Aaron sent most of the girls anxiously fleeing to their families, a mass exodus weeping bitterly—at the loss of their rebellion, at the dead or dying parents and siblings who might be awaiting them in their long-avoided houses. A few of them, however, refused to leave, declaring obstinately that they didn’t care if their mother and father dropped dead, they were staying on the beach. Janey thinks about them often. Are they still there, those few brave, heartless ones, running down the shoreline and piling together under a mountain of blankets, eating fruit from untended orchards and playing whatever savage games take their fancy?
Janey spends the next few days gazing out the kitchen window. Occasionally two people meet in the distance, and after a brief shouted conversation they move close, hugging and talking, touching each other’s arms and face as if patting clay into a wall, as if making sure nothing is broken. Janey, yearning to be in open space, finds it harder to watch than an empty landscape.