“Drive safe,” Edie said. It was the only parting sentiment she could come up with. “And good luck.”
Violet nodded, then hurried to the car’s front passenger seat. Andy was behind the wheel. He put the car into reverse, waved; the other men followed suit. Marta, seated by a window, pressed her hand to the glass and smiled. Violet, staring off in some other direction entirely, did nothing. In another moment they were gone, even the rumble of the car’s engine, swallowed by fog and distance.
The silence they left was very, very loud.
“So,” Edie said.
“So,” Wes agreed.
“Upstairs? Look at some maps, make a plan?”
“Sounds good,” Wes said.
“But I’d like to finish Persuasion first. If that’s OK. I only have twenty pages left.”
Wes agreed to that, too.
She’d tell him about the seeds later, over the maps and lunch, and they would have to worry and strategize: Where to plant, and when? How to process them once they’d grown? Seeds tied you down to a square of soil. Seeds made your world smaller. And yet, they each contained a world, too, didn’t they? For a couple of hours, the seeds would be Edie’s secret: these hundreds of worlds, this pocket full of possibilities.
Epilogue
She Is Consumed
Bedtime is always an hour-long ordeal, but it is a sweet ordeal. Mostly. There’s the bath, the anointing with oils and lotions—Ali’s eczema is very bad, and the skin on her chest is sometimes almost as angry a red as Violet’s own. The fresh diaper and pajamas, the books—Sweet Pea Sails the Sea, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Where Is the Bear?, and, oddly, The Shaman and the Salt Line are all current favorites—the songs, the noise machine, the rocking chair. Finally, the breast. This is a habit Violet needs to break, Ali’s nursing to sleep. She’s almost twenty months old, and the midnight comfort feeding keeps Violet from ever getting a solid night’s sleep, which she desperately needs, working the schedule she does. But it is so hard to let it go, for both of them. As they rock tonight, Ali’s eyes are still open; they glitter, reflecting the star-shower pattern circling on the ceiling above her. Violet lifts the baby’s bare foot and mouths it playfully, rubbing her lips against the perfect pearl toes, and Ali smiles around her nipple, pulls off, and says, “Mama eat.”
“Yum yum yum,” Violet says. “Tasty toes. Mommy is so hungry for toes.”
Ali bops her foot against Violet’s mouth and latches on once more. Her eyes flutter closed.
Several minutes later, when the motion of her mouth has stopped, Violet pulls her breast loose and tucks it back into the flap of her nightgown. She rises, and the rocking chair creaks loudly, but Ali is heavy and motionless in her arms, out cold—for the whole night, Violet hopes. Her alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., which usually gives her enough time to shower, dress, and drink a cup of coffee before Ali’s soft cries emanate from the nursery. The bus that passes by Ali’s daycare gets to the stop near their apartment at 6:00, then again at 6:15. If they miss the 6:00, Violet still has a chance of getting to work on time. If she misses the 6:15, it’s call a cab and spend a few hours’ pay on fare, or get fired.
After she’s laid Ali in her crib and drawn a light blanket over her, Violet goes to the projector. As she does every night, she runs her fingers over the gold chain dangling from a nearby lampshade—it glimmers in the shifting light—then rubs the gold A charm between her index finger and thumb. For luck. The necklace is the only fine thing in this apartment. She hopes she never has to pawn it.
They live in one of the upstairs units of an old carved-up house on the outskirts of Greensboro. The house was built fifty or sixty years ago, when there was still talk of a train route being run out to this part of town. Fat chance of that. Now, most of the residents are like Violet: low-skill workers in one of the city’s hotels or malls or restaurants, people who wash clothes and sheets and floors, slap meat onto griddles, drop potatoes down into vats of hot oil (a job—the one—that Violet had avoided, one of the only ways that the ruin of her face has empowered her), treat sewage, collect trash. They had settled into subdivisions like Violet’s, living three or four families, even five, to houses that had been built for one, though how one family had put so much space to use is beyond Violet’s comprehension. The houses in Meadow Glade Estates were all the same originally—tan siding and brick veneer, four bedrooms and a downstairs office, two-car garage, shallow front porch with grand white columns and a two-story entryway—though they’ve all been adapted over the years, resulting in a haphazard but creative architecture reminiscent for Violet of Ruby City. Meadow Glade is bearable only for the small ways it reminds her of her old home: the people, who are mostly decent and hardworking, though there is a crime element here, no doubt about it, and all of Violet’s windows have bars, and her doors triple-lock; the thriftiness and ingenuity; the sense of community, of the importance of protecting one’s own. As she emerges from her daughter’s room, she can see that her downstairs neighbor, Sally—who has a key to Violet’s rooms, just as Violet has the keys to hers—has left her a square of pound cake on a beautiful chipped old plate. It sits in the middle of the coffee table with a doily under it—Sally has a sense of occasion, even when there is none—and a glass of milk next to it. There’s a scrap of paper with one word written on it, etched in Sally’s ornate script: Enjoy.
Violet settles down to do just that. It’s 9:30. The new episode of her favorite show, a half-hour comedy out of Britain called Cheek, dropped today, but before she cues it up on her tablet, she checks the news feeds—a masochistic act, one guaranteed to drain some of the pleasure out of this precious quiet time. But she can never stop herself.
David Perrone is the lead story again. Another big rally, attendance in the thousands. More speculation about whether his popularity will hold out until the primaries next year. The pundits say no, but Violet knows better. His platform has been securing the border, keeping out the illegals—like Violet. But she understands. No one understands the misguided dream of a Wall more, she thinks, than a person who’d sacrifice everything to traverse it.
She closes the news and syncs Cheek to the used monitor she picked up at a rummage sale. There’s a crack in the corner of the monitor, but you don’t even see it when the show is playing. It’s amazing what people in-zone toss.