Janey looks like some kind of insect, with a thin middle and spindly legs and huge, dark eyes. The circles under her lower lids are so black that Vanessa fears she’s been beaten. Her hair is still sparkling, the braid alive down her back. Mary stands by uncertainly, facing Janey with her arms half held out, like she’s waiting for her to fall into them.
There are so few of them, even fewer than Vanessa had expected. Many girls must have had trouble getting away, and then so many are dead. The girls who did make it stand oddly staggered and spaced out, as if to leave room for all the bodies that should be there but are instead underground, or floating in the ocean in pieces.
Janey steps up to the podium. The glow catches the stray hairs on top of her head, the thin, brittle down on her arms, bathing her in golden light. “You came here,” says Janey quietly. Mary whispers in her ear, and she speaks louder. “This is the last time you’ll come here. For me, I mean. Thank you.”
The girls shift uneasily and glance at one another across the darkness.
“I just wanted to say I think it’s all a lie.”
“What is?” says Caroline Saul, biting her fingernail.
“The scourge. There was no scourge. There are no wastelands. There’s people, living out there, living however they live, and there’s us here. Living how we live. Everything, everything they told us, that they told our parents and grandparents and all the way back to the ancestors. They lied about all of it.”
There’s a long silence. Mary stares at Janey in a way that makes it clear this is new to her.
“Why?” says Rhoda Balthazar.
“Because they could,” answers Janey quietly.
The room is silent again. Vanessa stares at a shadow in the corner of the ceiling. If she believes Janey, then her life is a lie. If she doesn’t believe her, then her life is nothing. This would have angered her, once, made her desperate and terrified, but now she’s too tired to feel much of anything.
“I’m not sure of it,” says Janey, “I’m not sure of anything. But we need to stop believing everything we’ve been told. And I don’t just mean us.”
There is a long silence. “Well, that’s all,” says Janey, and steps back. Stalking, starving, her limbs straight, thin lines, she slowly moves toward the stairs like she’s moving through water. Mary stands up, arms wrapped around herself, and watches her go in a kind of bleak horror.
“Wait,” says Vanessa, but Janey keeps going and disappears.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Janey
Black. Dead. Burnt. Each kindled nerve end is starting to fray, burning to a jarring stop as her limbs become heavy. Janey is no longer Janey, but shades of gray bones lying piled in a bed.
This is the other side, this is the dark side, of all her bright and shining moments. This is the part where she kneels down alone, in the dark, and inexorably continues moving downward, disappearing into the dirt, her eyes and ears and throat stoppered with black. She has never sounded such depths before, never felt such despair, silent and heavy as all those stone churches sinking endlessly through the muck, to where the pressure is enough to crush a girl to nothing.
She may survive this. She may die. It doesn’t matter either way. She will never again sit on her heels on the damp sand, warming her chilled white fingers by a small fire. She will never again laugh at a soaked, sandy dog garlanded with flowers of red and yellow and white. She will never sleep in a halo of small children, shifting and murmuring and pushing against her in the night. Never listen to young girls argue endlessly over the best way to break a clamshell, or how to describe the color of the sea. She will never again sleep under a pile of thorny brush with Mary’s dear form clinging close to her. But she simply does not care. She does not care about any of it, anything. The part of her that cared has expired, and she is too weary to try to resuscitate it.
Over the next few days, Janey seems to be slowly dying, and she welcomes it. She doesn’t unfold her body, instead releasing dark urine into the sheets. Her words are slow and garbled and her eyes dead. Her starving body slows, her heart jerking and stuttering, her fingers turning cold and prickling and blue. Her breath is acrid, like rotting fruit, her eyes sunken and shadowed with violet and ash.
Mary is quiet and gentle with her, almost courteous. Her fingers on Janey’s skin are trembling and careful, her lips on Janey’s brow swift and soft as a bird’s wing. Janey can tell Mary wants to be angry, to rage and sob and howl, but fears her fury could be the gust of air that blows Janey out of life and into death. And so Mary cleans her quietly, changes her sheets, and then tells her stories of their long-ago childhood to make her smile. Janey’s gray eyes close and open, open and close without meaning or pattern. She turns her face away from nourishment. She hears Mary murmuring to Mother, and she is already halfway to slumber when Mary’s fingers, coated with honey, enter her mouth. She twists, but doesn’t quite wake, and when Mary removes her fingers, she swallows in her sleep. The next few hours, Janey consumes the entire Solomon stock of honey, one fingerful at a time, sucking at Mary’s finger like a slumbering, ravenous baby. She wakes glassy, dead-faced, miserable.
“I killed Caitlin,” she whispers to Mary. “And Amanda. And Rosie.”
“You didn’t kill anybody,” Mary insists.
“Well, I didn’t save them.” She settles into staring at the wall, her eyes seeing beyond the wood and into the gathering darkness beyond it. Mary slips beside her under the clean sheets, her warm form huddled against Janey’s cold, sharp one.
“Is it true, Janey?” she whispers in her ear. “What you said in church?”
“I don’t know,” Janey says. “I don’t know anything. But I think it’s true.”
Mary puts her head on Janey’s chest, listening to her heartbeat speed up, then slow down.
“Are you…are you all right?”
Janey coughs a weak laugh. “No.”
“What should I do?”
“Stay here with me.”
Lately, everything has been bathed in a beautiful mist, as if the morning fog that hangs massive over the gray water has snaked onto land. It dulls Janey’s vision with its billowing smoke. Every now and then Janey sees a black wing fluttering at the edge of her vision. She is sure that there are no birds in the house, but cannot resist checking now and again, swiveling to squint at the corners of the room in case a horde of blackbirds has swarmed in through a new hole in the roof. But she sees nothing.
Mary climbs on top of Janey to stop her shivering. Janey wraps a chilly arm around her and murmurs, “I wanted to change everything.” Her voice is grating and hollow.
“You did.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was trapped.”
“The island.”
“No.”