“We have to keep it clean,” he said, rebandaging it, and she knew that was his way of saying I’m sorry.
How could they ever survive what they had seen together? They would be like tumors to each other: a nest of dark things, terrible memories, questions they wanted to forget.
They could never go back to how things had been. If they wanted to go forward, she feared, they would have to cut those tumors out. They would leave all their pain in the past. They would bury it so deep that even their heartbreaks couldn’t hurt them.
Still, no one came. It hadn’t been long, but Gemma grew anxious and increasingly restless. She desperately wanted to move on, to reach an end point, to hear her mom’s voice, to see gas stations and telephone poles and parking lots and all the ugliness of life that now seemed beautiful: maps, grids, roads, wires. She craved fluorescent lights and boring TV and normalcy. But she also knew it would be risky to leave. They might be ten miles from another settlement, maybe more.
Pete was right: it was better to wait.
He left Calliope and Gemma alone when he went to clean off in the old-fashioned tub, which also functioned with a pump and drew no hot water. She wondered if he felt the same way she did, like they’d been slicked all over with death, like it would never wash off.
In the kitchen she watched the sun turn dust motes in the air, wishing she could shake the feeling of terrible intrusion—a sense that had less to do with being in a strange house and, like Goldilocks, eating and drinking and consuming, and more to do with a feeling that they’d stumbled on a sleepy mystery best not to awaken. She was almost afraid to breathe too hard.
Calliope, on the other hand, moved from room to room, opening drawers, touching everything, marveling at soup spoons and wooden tongs, can openers and mason jars, salad bowls and flower vases, needlepoint pillows and woven place mats. She disappeared and reappeared wearing a second dress on top of the first one, a knit sweater that hit her at mid-thigh, and a wide-brimmed hat. Gemma wanted to say something, to tell her not to, but the words kept swelling in her throat like a sponge. She kept having the crazy thought that Calliope wasn’t wearing different clothes, but different skins; that the clothes were like the discarded shells of long-dead cicadas.
Calliope wasn’t sick: it was an obvious realization but one that came late. Calliope was thin, way too thin, and her head was shaven, and she had crooked teeth. But she wasn’t like Lyra. Lyra was sick in a way that showed itself even when she was desperately trying to hide it. Gemma knew that the replicas had been given different variants of prion disease, some of them much faster-working than others. There would have been control groups, too.
The idea of Lyra being selected and Calliope being spared made her sick, even though she couldn’t say why she cared so much. When it came down to it, she hardly knew Lyra. When it came down to it, she was here because of Lyra. And Lyra had thanked her only once, and probably wouldn’t care whether Gemma lived or died.
“You shouldn’t touch everything,” Gemma said at last, when Calliope crouched, letting her dress pool on the floor, to examine a fat-bristled broom next to the stove.
Calliope threaded a finger through its bristles, then tugged, so some of them came away in her hand. She let them scatter. “Why not?”
Exhaustion now felt to Gemma like a weight, like pressure bearing down on her from outside. “Because these things don’t belong to you,” she said. “This isn’t your house.”
A shadow moved across Calliope’s face. “Why not?”
Gemma stared at her. She realized she had no idea how to begin answering. We can live here, Calliope had said. Did she not understand what belonging meant?
“Because . . . people live here. They’re coming back. They use those spoons and cups and hats and . . . and everything.”
Calliope removed the hat and turned it over in her hands. “But we used them too,” she said after a moment. “So doesn’t that mean we own them now?”
“No.” Gemma reminded herself that Calliope didn’t understand, and that it wasn’t her fault. “It’s not about who uses what. They just—the house is theirs. They own it.”
Calliope frowned. “Why?”
“Just because,” Gemma said. “Because the house is theirs, it was always theirs. They probably built it—”
“So if you build something, it automatically belongs to you?” Calliope’s voice had turned sharp, and Gemma realized she’d said the wrong thing.
“No,” Gemma said carefully. “Not always.” Calliope looked down. Her knuckles were very white on the brim of the hat. “You don’t belong to Haven, Calliope. You never belonged to them.”
Calliope said nothing for a while. “It’s just I’ve never seen so many things before,” she said, so quietly the words touched Gemma like a wind. She immediately felt terrible. “I always wanted, for my own. All of us wanted things. Only people could own anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Gemma said. She really was. How would she ever be able to fix Calliope? How could she even start? “It isn’t the owning that makes a person, you know. It has nothing to do with that.”
“Then what?” Calliope said. “What is it?”
Gemma couldn’t answer that either. Calliope looked down at the hat, turning it again in her hands.
“At Haven the nurses left things without meaning to. Clips to put in your hair, except we didn’t have hair, we weren’t allowed. Number forty liked pens. She liked to suck on them. Her tongue was always black with ink. Maybe that’s why she was an idiot. I found a whole package of gum, once, and Cassiopeia got a bracelet and I wanted it bad, but she hid it so them wouldn’t take it.” Calliope shook her head. “But I got even better than she did, in the end. It was because of watching. Most of the other thems never paid attention. But I always paid attention. I saw how the people talked and how they did things.”
Wind briefly stirred the curtains, and made phantom shapes: faces appeared in the cloth, rippled, and were gone.
“The nurses hid in the bathrooms to use their cell phones.” She said cell phones the way someone else might say church: as if the words carried special power. “They weren’t supposed to, but they did anyway. I found a cell phone of my own one day. It was just sitting there. I kept it hid. I was very, very careful. When they turned up Ursa Major with Nurse Maxine’s wallet, all of us got searched. Ursa Major got hit so bad her face swole up and she had to go to the Box.”