“I don’t want anyone to find me.”
“Maybe you could come home with me,” Janey says thoughtfully. “Your father would look for you, but maybe he’d let you stay with us. You need a mother. There are so many of us without mothers now. The wanderers will work it out. Someone said they will just match up wives and husbands. I’m not sure that would work. Can you imagine any woman agreeing to marry your father? He’d cut them in two. Here, I brought you water. You can fill it up in anyone’s rain barrel.”
Janey hands Caitlin a cup and she gulps the water down. Taking it back, Janey sets it on the sand. “It’ll fill with rain soon.”
Caitlin nods.
“Can you get out of there?”
Struggling a bit, Caitlin stands up shakily. Janey smiles. “I was worried you were stuck.”
Caitlin shakes her head, and reaches out and wraps one of the blankets around her. It’s scratchy and wet, but warm, and she gives a little sigh.
“I don’t like you staying here alone. Why don’t you come home with me?”
Caitlin shakes her head hard.
“What are you worried will happen?”
Caitlin’s mouth quirks, and then she bursts into tears.
“Well, I’ll come see you every day. We’ll think of something.” They sigh in unison. “What else do you need?”
Caitlin shakes her head again.
“You’re very brave.” Janey hugs her, hard, and Caitlin leans into her bony shoulder and wishes she’d stay. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Try digging a hole and lining it with the blankets, and then gathering everything at the top.”
She does try, that night, but it doesn’t work. She rolls up in blankets and sleeps badly, waking to numb feet and a racking cough. Waiting all day in the same place, Caitlin watches the water advance and recede, and builds little shapes of sand, but Janey doesn’t come. That night Caitlin wakes up coughing so hard she vomits slime streaked with blood. “Janey?” she mutters, squinting to see a tall spindly figure coming toward her, dancing like a flame. Then Mother’s soft hands stroke her brow like a mist of cool water, and Caitlin sighs with relief.
“Mother, I dreamed you were dead,” she says. Mother doesn’t answer, but keeps caressing Caitlin’s face with cool damp hands until Caitlin wakes up sprawled out in the rain, feverish and alone.
Chapter Fifty-One
Janey
When Janey returns at nightfall, sandy and soaked and flushed, Mary moves to hit her. But before she can raise an arm, Janey pulls her aside and starts talking about how they have to take in Caitlin, and when Mary cocks her head in confusion, Janey paces around the room, throwing her hands in the air and making stifled half-exclamations. “Janey,” says Mary. “Janey, I can’t understand you.”
Janey shakes her head and staggers. Rising, Mary darts toward Janey, who sinks warm and shaking into her arms.
“Mother,” says Mary. “I think Janey’s sick.”
Janey tries to protest, but time stops, stretches, and twists away like a plume of smoke. Her tongue is slow, pushing against heavy air as she tries to form words. They cut it out, she thinks thickly, so now I can go, to and fro. Then she laughs a little at her rhyme. Her body is made of water, and she pulls from Mary’s arms and splashes to the floor.
Then everything happens very quickly, in flashes. She is in Father’s arms, being lifted toward the ballooning ceiling. Mary’s face is near hers, smearing and blurring like streaks of paint on a rain-swept window, and then suddenly snatched away. She is in bed, the sheets thick and silky and coiling against her skin like live snakes. Everything is swaying and shuddering. Something’s wrong, she thinks slowly, and then, I am sick. “Mother,” she says heavily. Mother turns toward her.
“Don’t let Mary in,” whispers Janey urgently, trying to make each word separate and easy. Her mouth feels numb. She has to speak quietly; she doesn’t want another lashing.
“I won’t,” promises Mother tautly, stripping Janey of her damp dress. She gathers Janey in her arms and lifts her easily, slips a warm nightgown over her aching head and down her slender body.
“You’d better get out of here,” croaks Janey.
“If you think I’m leaving you alone for a second, you’re a fool, Janey Solomon,” snaps Mother, and Janey sinks back, intimidated and a little impressed. Mother’s hair, sleek like Mary’s, falls out of her topknot in slices of darkness, and her freckles shift around on her face as Janey stares blurrily.
“Mother, your face,” says Janey, and a cool cloth is laid on her aching forehead. It’s the most wonderful thing she’s ever felt in her life. The coldness sinks into her brow bone, flows down her temples in pulsing waves, cooling the inferno in her brain. It cuts past the sourness in her throat, the throbbing pain in her eyes, the trembling ache in her bones. “Thank you,” she gasps, and slips beneath consciousness.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Vanessa
Vanessa’s hand is healing, although Mother bound it so tightly to keep the edges of her wound together that the flesh swells between the cloth strips. She makes Vanessa hold it in the rain barrel regularly, and gives her a bitter tea that sleeps away the pain. Mother says her hand won’t work perfectly again and will probably always pain her, but that Vanessa should be able to do everything that a woman needs to, except perhaps sew. Vanessa is no lover of sewing and can’t help feeling that this news is a ray of light in an otherwise dark prognosis.
Two of Father’s cuts needed a stitch from Mr. Joseph the weaver, but Father tells Vanessa they don’t hurt. She responds that he needs to go put his belly in the rain barrel, which makes him smile.
A few days later, the wanderers meet in Father’s library. Vanessa is accustomed to wanderers gathering in her home, but now they seem like alien beings, murderous and predatory. She thinks of them sitting uncomfortably on the floor, or leaning against the bookshelves and dirtying the books with their black coats, and shivers.
She can only assume they are trying to figure out what to do now that everyone is dead. Curiosity proving stronger than fear, she inches away from Mother when her back is turned and sets to eavesdropping.
“The fields will be admirably fertilized, but there is nobody to farm them.”
“No, that’s not true. Quite a few farmers survived; we can simply broaden some of the fields that we made smaller before. We’ll divide them again, when we need to.”
“We have nobody to make paper now. Only one carver left. We’ve lost a lot of skilled—”
Mother finds Vanessa and pulls her into the kitchen. Once she stops glowering at Vanessa and becomes lost in her work, Vanessa creeps out to listen again.
“More widowers than widows. All the women with child died. We need everyone to marry, but we’re short on women. A few men could take on more wives, but in the past that’s only been if their first wife can’t have a healthy child. Is that something we want to change?”
A sharp, nasal voice. Mr. Solomon? “Ah, says a man who won’t have to deal with a furious wife!”