Father sits in the front room and sleeps all day. Janey whispers to Mary that he must have secret activities at night, because she’s never seen a man sleep so much. When she’s tired of watching Mary, she watches Father, the way his eyelids are finely lined with small purple veins, the tapering of his fingers from knuckle to fingertip. Normally Father stays away from the house, preferring to tend to their farm, and he usually makes himself small and unobtrusive at night; apart from his visit to her at the beach, she has rarely spent time alone with him. She sees the way his mustache floats slightly upward with each breath, the small smile on his face when he wakes up and sees her gazing at him, the calm, fond glances he shoots at Mary when she is turned away. When he thinks nobody is watching, he puts his fingertips on his face and cries quietly. Once again, she is struck with the suspicion that she should have trusted Father earlier.
Every evening, Father prays to the ancestors to protect his wife and daughters, which is nice, as he usually prays for the crops or the weather. But the sweet prayers can’t mask the awfulness of dinner. Thanks to the late-summer harvest, they have ample stores of corn, but Mother and Father have always traded for everything else they eat. Butter, cheese, most vegetables, meat, and fruit are all paid for in corn, and now they must sit and eat what they would have traded away. Corn mush for breakfast, dense corn bread for lunch, and bowls of corn soup for dinner. As usual, Mother vainly coaxes Janey to eat more than a mouthful, but she undermines this encouragement by picking listlessly at her own food. Janey wonders what the other families are doing, those who trade labor or cloth. You can’t eat sweat, or wool.
Janey argues endlessly to leave the house. “Do you realize,” she says to Mother, “that we lived out there with no adults for weeks and weeks?”
“And now you’re here. And I will keep you alive if I can help it.”
“But we came home to keep you alive!”
“Well, then we’ll just have to keep each other alive. But I am your mother, in this house—”
“I could go back anytime!”
“You’d freeze, Janey. I’m surprised you haven’t already, all of you.”
“We kept warm,” says Mary. “We had fires, and we slept cuddled together.” Janey glares at her. The details of their freedom are cherished secret’s, not to be handed out thoughtlessly to adults.
Janey is irritable, thwarted, tired. The girl who once led a rebellion of daughters is trapped at home like a buzzing insect in a box. The last few weeks seem like one long dream, distant and impossible now that she is obeying Mother and grumping around at home. Sometimes she slips out of the top of her dress to examine the healing lines of pain that drape around her body like filigree. Ironically, she finds the proof of her shaming comforting, a concrete reminder that she did not simply imagine her time on the beach.
“I wish I’d been sick,” complains Janey pettily as she and Mary sit one afternoon and watch two people run toward each other joyfully and fling themselves into each other’s arms. “Then I could go out.”
“You do not,” says Mary, and then, “What if we can never leave?”
“Leave the house? Of course we can leave the house. We’re not trapped in here forever. We have legs.”
“How long would you wait to leave? To make sure the sickness was gone?”
Janey looks uncertain. “It depends,” she says finally. They watch another person—a woman, it looks like—walk across the landscape.
“But if we never get sick and survive it,” says Mary, “how can we be allowed out where the sickness is?”
“I don’t know,” snaps Janey. “I don’t know everything.”
“Oh, really,” snorts Mary. Janey scowls.
The next morning, Janey leaves before dawn.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Vanessa
Now that people are emerging alive from the illness, Vanessa wants to go out too. Father tells her she can’t, despite the magical medicine that won’t let her get sick.
“I can’t be positive it will work,” says Father, looking down and away, which means he’s lying. “Besides, you don’t look like you’ve been ill. It would seem strange.”
“What do they look like? The people who’ve been ill?”
“Thin. Pale, like they’ve lost all their blood.” Father’s look is distant and weary. “They’re weak, and they cough and have to catch their breath.”
“I could pretend.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, you couldn’t.”
Vanessa stays in the house with Mother, alternately cuddling and sniping, trying to amuse a bored and fretful Benjamin. They have exhausted his favorite songs, stories, and games, and he repeatedly asks to go out, confused at their lack of response. At one point, Vanessa smears butter on her face for him to lick like a dog. Infuriated by the waste, Mother smacks Vanessa, but her hand slides greasily away and lands on the wall with a satisfying slap.
Vanessa finds it ironic that those who almost died can walk about freely, while the healthy are still rattling about their houses like trapped mice. “Are they going to just take over?” she asks Mother. “Will the people who never got sick stay in their houses forever, and become a race of hidden people?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Mother says. “As soon as Father says there are no more people getting sick, we can go out.”
“How long does there have to be nobody sick? A day? A week? A year?”
“A week,” says Mother, sounding uncertain, but Vanessa grasps at her words. Father keeps them updated when he comes home in the evenings. Two days. Three days. After five days, Father silently shakes his head.
Let pain pass through your mind like water, she tells herself firmly, her eyes flickering closed. Let it fall away like a dream.
Eventually Mother persuades Father to let her roam, and spends a whole day and most of a night away, visiting houses and speaking with friends. Vanessa sulks and worries, Benjamin screams. And then, on the sixth day with no new illness, the new Mr. Adam comes over.
Vanessa is upstairs, trying to read, when she hears the door close. Thinking it’s Father, who went to meet the wanderers, she jumps up and speeds downstairs for news. Instead she sees Mr. Adam. He is shirtless, weaving through the door, his face flushed, his eyes wet and scarlet in their sockets. At first she thinks he’s sick, but then the smell reaches her and she realizes he’s drunk.
“Father’s not home,” says Vanessa.
“Good.” He coughs and spits out some phlegm. “My wife is dead.”
Vanessa pictures Mrs. Adam laughing, her hands in the dirt, and feels like she’s been struck in the chest. Pain flares in her throat, and she chokes for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” she manages lamely. She will not show Mr. Adam her grief, but she feels it running under the floor like a river, waiting to permeate the skin of her soles. “When…when did she die?”
“Two days ago,” he mutters.
“Did the baby die?”
“It wasn’t old enough not to die with her,” he says.
“Of course not,” Vanessa says awkwardly. He continues to stand there. She feels dazed, bewildered. “Would you…would you like some tea?”
“I don’t want any tea.”
“No.” She stands there with her hands folded and suddenly wonders what happened to his shirt.
“I know what you do with your father,” says Mr. Adam.
Vanessa’s breathing quickens as she realizes he knows about the medicine. “It wasn’t my choice, I didn’t have any idea.”
“But you went along with it.”
“I fought. I mean—”
“Soon it became the way things were.”
Vanessa remembers Father’s fingers depositing the pebble in her mouth and doesn’t know what to say.
“My wife is dead,” Mr. Adam says again.
“I’m so sorry,” mutters Vanessa wearily. She needs him to leave. She needs to sit alone in the library and cry. “So sorry,” she says again in a dull voice, like a drowsy, miserable child repeating a rhyme.