“?‘When Papa was away at sea,’?” Cal read aloud.
Apollo leafed through the pages. Mama sitting on the bench in the garden. Ida inside the house with the baby, playing her horn. At the window the small figures in purple robes, their faces shrouded in shadows. The goblins were sneaking in. He stopped here, pulling his hand away from the book. Cal reached out and turned the page for him.
Now Ida stayed playing her horn and looking out the window. Behind her the goblins carried her baby sister away. The child’s mouth opened in a shout, the eyes wild with fear and pleading. But Ida couldn’t hear her sister over the music. In the crib the creatures left a replacement. A baby, identical to Ida’s little sister, wearing the same bedclothes. Except the replacement had been carved out of ice.
On the next page Ida lifted the ice child and held it close, cooing. Ida whispered to the thing, saying, “I love you.” But the creature couldn’t return Ida’s embrace because it wasn’t alive.
Cal closed the book again.
“I don’t know why your father read this book to you when you were little,” she said. “But I’m showing you this book because it tells the truth. You and Emma have ended up in one ugly fairy tale. Every woman on this island has been where you are now. It won’t do for you to shut your eyes or pretend otherwise. You’ve crossed the waters, and you can’t go back. William was right about at least one thing. We are witches. But let me tell you what else is true. The man in that cage consorts with monsters.”
Apollo took a moment to wonder, again, at the threat of William’s cavalry.
I won’t call it off. I won’t even try.
APOLLO ATE HIS oatmeal. Neither he nor Cal spoke for a little while, and instead the sounds of the other women filled the room. Some joked with one another, others discussed routines and repairs for the island, and here and there pairs of women sat together and whispered to one another more intimately.
“Did these women…” Apollo couldn’t finish.
“Did we do what Emma did?” Cal set her spoon back in the bowl. “Yes. All of us.”
Apollo set the bowl down. “What about the kids I saw outside?” he asked.
“Some of these women had more than one child. When they ran to me, they brought their other children with them.”
“What do these kids know about what happened?”
“At the library we teach them reading and writing and arithmetic.”
“But not history.”
“Not that history.”
“Why do they stay? Life looks pretty rugged around here.”
Cal set her chin and didn’t look away from Apollo, a resolute gaze. “Not all of them do. I don’t demand that they stay. These women came to me bereft and confused. I offered them a place where they would be believed. Not second-guessed. Not dismissed. Here they wouldn’t have their realities explained away. Do you know how few women get that simple gift? It works miracles. Not all of them want to stay but every woman leaves this place stronger than when she arrived.”
Apollo rose holding the bowl, the book tucked under one arm, and for a moment he loomed over Cal. He didn’t even have time to straighten up before one of the imperial guards appeared, her makeshift mace in hand.
“I’m just getting up!” Apollo shouted, agitated by the crowding. His body ached so badly from last night’s beating that he couldn’t imagine how they still thought of him as a threat. It had been hard enough just to get back on his feet.
Cal went onto her knees, then pushed up slowly and with exertion. In the daylight she appeared more her age. “He’s fine,” she said, patting the guard.
Apollo walked among the clumps of women still eating on the ground. Two basins sat on the long table, each filled with water. He did as the women did, dumping the last of his oatmeal into a nearly full bucket—collecting for compost—then washing out his bowl in the basins.
While he did this, Cal visited with the women there, saying a few words to one or another. She returned to him only to show him where they set the wet bowls out to dry. As he did this, he weighed the option of informing Cal about William’s bargain, William’s threat. But when she came to him, he didn’t mention it.
“Can I see the kids?” Apollo asked. “Can I meet them?”
Cal gave Apollo the once-over once more. “You really want to?”
“I liked hearing the laughter,” he said.
She dumped traces of oatmeal from her bowl, washed it out, and set it down to dry. “Wonders never cease,” she said, more to herself than to him.
Cal brought Apollo back to the courtyard, recess in session. A few of the older children played tag while others had large plastic balls they kicked or threw around. The high point of incongruity was one girl, maybe three years old, riding a scooter on the uneven brick of the courtyard. She held the low handle of the machine, one foot on the board and the other on the ground. She couldn’t keep her balance yet. She fell and she got up and she fell and she got up. When a woman came to try and help pull the scooter, the tiny girl swatted the woman back. She was going to do this herself.
Apollo listened to the children. The screeching frustration of the girl on the scooter. The monkey cries of two boys wrestling over a yellow ball. The taunting and whining, the cooing and cackling. Children. Glorious and half wild. He nearly fainted from the beauty of them.
Cal brought one arm to his back to steady him. “When I became a mother,” she said, “being this close to children was enough to give my husband hives.”
“Let’s get closer,” Apollo said.
Now a small group of women appeared from the Doctor’s Cottage. They held work tools and gardening apparatus. Large burlap sacks were slung over each one’s shoulders.
“The best part about setting up on this island,” Cal said, “is that we can grow our own food. A kibbutz in the middle of the East River.”
Apollo gestured toward the girl at the far end of the courtyard, the one whose scooter had toppled again. The three-year-old stood over the fallen scooter and hissed at it as if it was a dog in need of correction. She cried with frustration and tried to lift it herself, but it was too heavy.
Cal and Apollo walked toward her, weaving through the children who played around them. When they reached the girl, she looked up at them, squinting, then swatted at them and shuffled around so she stood between them and the scooter.
“No!” she said.
Now she reached down and grabbed the handle of the scooter and lifted it partway, but it fell back on its side.
Cal crouched down beside the girl. “You need some help,” she said.
The little girl backed away from Cal and bumped right into Apollo. She turned, looked up at him, and gave a grimace. “No!” the girl shouted at him.
Cal waved Apollo down so he crouched in front of the girl, at her eye level. The girl’s hair had been styled into thin, tight box braids with small, clear beads on the ends of each one.
“My name is Apollo.”