Gather the Daughters
Jennie Melamed
For my amazing, talented,
magnificent Mom and Dad
Prologue
Vanessa dreams she is a grown woman, heavy with flesh and care. Her two limber, graceful daughters are dancing and leaping on the shore as she watches from the grass where the sand ends. Their dresses flutter chalk-white, like apple flesh or a sun-bleached stone. A calescent sun shatters on the surface of the water, luminous shards slipping about on the tiny waves like a broken, sparkling film. One daughter stops to turn and wave wildly, and Vanessa, her heart aching with love, waves back. The girls clasp each other’s forearms and spin in a circle, shrieking with laughter, until they collapse on the sand.
Rising and conferring with their heads close together, they hike up their dresses to wade into the sea. Don’t go too far! calls Vanessa, but they pretend not to hear. Walking wide-legged like awkward herons, wetting their hems, they peer into the water for fish and crabs, until the younger one turns back and yells, We’re going to swim, Mother!
But you can’t swim! Vanessa cries frantically. Heedless, they crash into the water and begin paddling away, kicking their slender legs and thrashing with their hands. Swiftly, borne by a powerful current, they grow smaller and smaller. Vanessa tries to run to the edge of the sea, but her feet are stuck fast, woven into the ground like tree roots, her legs paralyzed as dead stumps. She opens her mouth to call them back, but instead of urging her daughters back to shore, she finds herself screaming, Swim faster! Get away from here, get out, now! The sun vanishes and the sea turns dark, roiling and spitting, and their beloved faces shrink to motes. Vanessa clenches her fists, closes her eyes, and shrieks, Never come back here again! I’ll kill you if you come back here! I swear I’ll fucking kill you both! The girls disappear into the horizon, and Vanessa drops her face into her hands and weeps.
Thief, whispers a voice that seems to come from everywhere, echoing and groaning in her rib cage. Blasphemer. The ground softens, and she falls through a sea of dark slime into the raging black fire of the darkness below. Her bones snap like sticks. Rotating her head violently on a broken neck, she sees her daughters writhing next to her, their straight, slim legs bending and shattering as their white dresses burn.
Then Father is there, shaking her, holding her. “Vanessa, relax,” he says as she trembles and whimpers. “It’s just a dream.” She loosens her fists and sees, in the gray dawn light, that she has cut small, dark crescents into her palms.
“What were you dreaming about?” asks Father sleepily.
“I can’t remember,” she replies, and no matter how often the dream comes back to haunt her, smearing and dissolving hotly in her brain as she gasps and claws her way to consciousness, she always tells him she can’t remember. She knows instinctively it is not something to be freely given away to adults, like a flower or an embrace. This dream, the dark embodiment of blasphemy, is a shameful secret rooted strongly as a tooth or a fingernail. And Father, muttering vaguely as he kisses her sweaty brow, never tries to wrest it from her.
Sometimes, in the drowsy mornings after, she gazes at Mother and wonders what she would call out if Vanessa were swimming away from her, toward the wastelands.
Spring
Chapter One
Vanessa
The long spelling lesson is done, and Mr. Abraham is now talking about soaking and curing leather. As he rambles on about techniques for concentrating urine, Vanessa inhales lightly and cautiously, as if her lungs are about to be scalded by the acrid smell of leather curing in its vats. The half-vinegar, half-musk scent hangs in the air for weeks in early spring, and she’s already decided she will never marry or even live near a tanner. Keeping her eyes open and her face attentive, she drifts off into daydreams of summer. When Letty reaches back to scratch a shoulder blade and drops a note on her desk, Vanessa jolts into the present. Using her bitten nails to pick open the small package, she reads:
Do you think it was her first time?
Half an hour ago, Frieda Joseph burst into tears while trying to spell “turnip.” They weren’t tears of frustration, but big, dry, gulping sobs like she’d been punched in the throat. Mr. Abraham took her out of the classroom for a while. He must have sent her home, because he returned without her.
Frieda’s chair sits naked and prominent. All the girls around it are carefully looking in another direction. There’s a bloodstain on the wood, bright and ragged, with a dark, crusting drop on the floor. Everyone knows it wasn’t there yesterday.
Vanessa is silent, lost in memory, and Letty shifts in her seat and eventually turns to cast her a questioning look. Annoyed, Vanessa shrugs curtly at her.
Letty faces front again and flakes off a tiny corner of paper. She writes something with the thin charcoal pencil, stretches extravagantly, and drops it on Vanessa’s desk.
Vanessa snatches the paper and cradles it in her lap, squinting. The charcoal is smudged and she can barely make out the words: What a baby. I didn’t cry my first time.
Vanessa bites her tongue in exasperation. Carefully separating a piece of paper from her sheaf, she writes, Liar. Stretching forward, she drops it on Letty’s lap like a little yellow butterfly. Letty shoots Vanessa a hurt look and then assiduously turns toward Mr. Abraham and fakes interest. Vanessa begins winding the ends of her braid through her fingers, wishing she were outside, running.