“For one,” Adri said, “we didn’t use up the planet like you guys did. You know, older people.”
Lily thrust her hands through the air once again, finally a little tense, her mouth tightening. “I know you young folks will get it all sorted out. I’m sure it’s not so bad.”
“Well there’s no Miami and hardly any Bangladesh and no polar bears,” Adri said tightly. “And they’re paying billions of dollars to start a colony on Mars because humans need an exit strategy. So how bad do you want it to get before you think it’s bad?”
Lily didn’t reply for a while, and Adri looked down at her hands on the steering wheel. Instead of shaming Lily, she was acting like an idiot: she was trying to hurt an old lady’s feelings, and she couldn’t understand exactly for what.
“Well, you lied,” Lily said finally, looking out the window.
“About what?” Adri asked.
“You are kind of an asshole.”
A long silence followed in which Adri tried to absorb the words, which hurt but were probably true. Then Lily pinched her shoulder softly.
“That’s okay, I like assholes. They’re colorful.”
Adri blew out a breath, exasperated.
“Can I write you? After you’re gone?” Lily asked.
“Um, yeah, I guess so. We can video too. It’s not, like, the 1800s. It’s not like I’m taking a vow of silence.”
Lily smiled. “Of course. Things are changing so fast, I lose track. I always thought that was so wonderful, the ways people are changing things. But apparently I was wrong.” Her mouth turned up at the corners sarcastically.
They pulled up to the house. Lily gazed around the farm as they climbed out of the car. “My mother was an optimist. Maybe I got that from her.” She cast a glance sideways at Adri. “She loved this place. And now there’s hardly anyone around to remember her or the people who used to belong to her.”
Adri looked out toward the tortoise house, and Lily followed her gaze. Galapagos happened, at that moment, to be staring over at them while chewing a big piece of lettuce, her eyes glittering and observant.
“Well, I guess she remembers,” Lily said. “She’s like those glasses in The Great Gatsby. She’s seen it all, but she’s not talking.”
Adri hadn’t read The Great Gatsby.
“You remind me of her a bit,” Lily said. “My mom, that is. She was a force of nature too.”
Adri didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Compliments only embarrassed her. And she wondered why Lily was so constantly, irrepressibly nice to her.
That night, after Lily went to bed, Adri was restless, wired. When she started looking for the letters again, it wasn’t with much hope of finding them, it was just an urge she couldn’t explain. Maybe if she found them, she could give them to Lily as a gift—a symbolic apology for being a fairly crappy person. She went about it systematically, scouring the house—every room but the one where Lily slept—looking in cabinets, the attic (full of more junk than she’d ever seen in one place in her life), every shelf of every closet.
Finally, curled back behind a line of books, half stuffed behind a shelf that had come loose, she found a thick, bursting manila envelope, and her heart skipped a beat. It contained a clothbound journal fraying at the seams. Property of Catherine Godspeed, it read on the inside cover. Even staring at the name, she couldn’t believe she’d been lucky enough to find it after so many years.
The first page was full of tight, scrawling handwriting. She tried to flip to the back page, but when she did, a pile of envelopes and postcards fluttered out from where they’d been tucked, landing scattered on the floor. She knelt, gathering them together in an awkward pile, and then sat back on her heels.
The letters were still neatly in their envelopes, yellowing but legible, all addressed to Beth Abbott (and the later ones to Mrs. Beth Godspeed), and return-addressed Lenore Allstock, Forest Row, England.
She carried them up to her room.
Years later, even after she’d followed the trail of it all as far as it would go, Adri would always think of that moment, kneeling in front of the bookshelves, as the moment she first touched her own history.
She sat cross-legged on her bed and opened to the first page of the journal, and read the first lines.
The dust came again this morning. It kicked up out of nowhere, looking like a gray cloud rolling across the ground instead of the sky.
She kept going. She didn’t surface again until dawn.
CATHERINE
PART 1
PROPERTY OF CATHERINE GODSPEED
CANAAN, KANSAS
MAY 20, 1934
The dust came again this morning. It kicked up out of nowhere, looking like a gray cloud rolling across the ground instead of the sky. I was just walking out of the barn with a bucket when I saw it blowing across the northeast edge of the farm, but by then it was too late to get to the house. I had to hold on to the fence not to fall over my own feet, and then all those grains of dirt ran their hands against me and polished me like sandpaper, crawled into my eyes and throat. And then it passed, and the sky was that relentless blue again.
Now everything has a thin layer of grit. All Mama’s books in the library are powdered. My toast this morning was dusty and so were my eggs. But we are lucky this week. Sometimes the dust blows for days.
I dream about rain and wet leaves, even when I’m awake. I could lie down on a patch of green grass and never get up.
I found this postcard in the bottom of one of Mama’s drawers, while I was looking for pennies she might have left there before they became so scarce.
I’ve read it over six times, and I still don’t understand it. There’s never been a Lenore in our lives, and Mama’s never mentioned her.
I can see her now, out at the side of the house, sweating over the kitchen garden—which feeds us—and Ellis, our helper over by the barn listening to baseball on his wireless, feeding our one skinny cow. Galapagos is wallowing in the mud in what used to be a pond and trying to catch a fly. Beezie is in the hall coughing on the dog.
I want to ask Mama about Lenore, but she is the best imitator of a stone you ever met. You can have a whole conversation with her just by yourself. I’ve spent my whole life trying to read her signals. She has a way of pulling you into her silence.
This morning she said she smells rain on the dry wind. We all looked at each other and agreed that rain is on its way. But our eyes said something different.
We’re a house full of secrets. The main secret is that we are afraid.
Twenty-four sunny days in a row. Where have the clouds gone?