“Sometimes you have to dig the weed out by the root,” another voice says.
“Everything we have done is within the ancestors’ teachings. You need to reread the secret writings of Philip Adam—”
“I know his writings.”
“Then why this hesitation, this—this—rebellion? You nearly had a fit when you found out what needed to be done with the Joseph woman, and then Amanda Balthazar, and Rosie Gideon…”
“She was a child.”
“And what kind of woman would she have made? What is the point of waiting to find out?”
“You didn’t even bring it to us, you just did it yourself!”
“He’s right, you know,” says another wanderer. “I never would have disagreed, but—”
“You don’t hesitate to kill a dog that bites,” snaps the first wanderer.
“I agree,” says a bass voice. “We have to be able to act on our own judgment. Everything doesn’t require a meeting, a vote.”
“The murder of a child,” says Father indignantly.
There is a moment’s silence, and then two voices rise up and battle for primacy. The louder one wins. “Philip Adam said—”
“I don’t care what Philip Adam said!” cries Father, and there is an appalled silence.
“James, we are going to change,” says the sharp, nasal voice. “We will not be allowing what happened this year to ever happen again.”
“The plague?”
“Well, that too,” says someone else. “If we bring in new families—”
“Not the plague. We will be…better enforcing the shalt-nots. Things will never go this far again. Daughters who escape, who try to live without their fathers’ guidance, will be punished severely, and if they continue not to listen…they must be uprooted too.”
“You think their fathers won’t care?” asks Father softly.
“I think their fathers will listen and obey, unlike their children. I think that once we show what the response is to any kind of rebellion, the daughters will listen and obey as well. Perhaps our mistake was keeping Amanda Balthazar and Rosie Gideon and the others secret. Perhaps we should have—”
“But the husbands, the fathers,” says Father. “These are women and girls who are beloved. If you do this, don’t you think that the men—”
“They. Will. Obey.”
“And your daughter…”
“What about my daughter?” whispers Father through his teeth.
“It’s the way you’ve raised her. We never should have let you have books.”
“How is it different from your collection of things?”
“Now, now,” says a soothing voice. “The subject isn’t James’s library right now. And Vanessa didn’t run away to the beach. How many of you can say the same of your daughters?” A pause, sighs, and embarrassed shuffling.
“So what does this mean for Janey Solomon?” asks someone else.
“It always comes back to Janey Solomon,” says a third voice, with a halfhearted laugh.
“Now, her father—”
Mother smacks Vanessa across both cheeks, her face betrayed and wild. The voices stop at the sound of the scuffle. Someone chuckles, someone else murmurs concernedly. Shaking her head and taking a deep breath, Mother pushes Vanessa to the table and makes her practice sewing with one shaking hand, which is impossible.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Caitlin
Caitlin waits for Janey to come back, but she never returns. Caitlin can’t count how many days it’s been. Sometimes she thinks it’s been only hours, and sometimes she thinks it’s been weeks. Time stretches and blurs and warps in front of her. Her cup fills and she drinks it. Her bread is gone. When she wakes up it’s dark, but Caitlin can’t be sure if she’s waking up every night, or it’s all the same night. She can’t stop coughing.
She knows what a normal person would do is get up and go home. Father might hit her, but he might not. She could even go to someone else’s house. They would let her in. They would feed and dry her, while someone went to get Father.
She knows she can get up because she practices, every now and then, to make sure she still can. She stands under the weight of soggy blankets and moves her feet up and down. Then her knees fold again, and she is back inside her sandy hole. Cold body, burning face. Sometimes she shivers and sometimes she doesn’t. Caitlin has grown to like the feeling of cold on her body. It feels clean and fresh and new.
Her mind skips, dreaming, then not; sometimes a daydream turns into a real dream. She dreams she’s in school and Mr. Abraham is throwing pins at her. She dreams she and Mother are digging a garden for plants that eat people. She dreams that dogs with giant white teeth are biting her feet. She wakes, coughs, and spits; her spit is dark and glistening under the moonlight. The echoes of little girls racing, laughing, giggling, rise up from the sand like they left their ghosts behind them.
Caitlin’s mind slides back and forth over her life, like someone running their finger over and over a frosty window, making patterns. If she could start her life over again, she decides, she would shout more. She would bite like the dream dogs. She wouldn’t be so scared of everything all the time. She wouldn’t come when Father called, she would stay where she was. She wouldn’t lose her breath when Mr. Abraham said her name, but speak boldly. She would stomp and yell and be loud and big, eat until she grew six feet tall and then run away.
She rolls into a vision, instead of being yanked or lulled toward it. It is as easy as falling from a high place to a low one.
She is perhaps three or four, closer to the ground than she can ever remember being, reaching her hands forward to another little girl. It’s hot, not the moist heat of an island summer, but a parched, sucking heat that makes her lips feel like dry canvas when she presses them together.
Their dirty hands meet, their forearms marked with black and purple fingerprints and fading golden traces of yesterday’s blows. Their dresses are breathtaking, marvelous: the other girl is wearing a pink Caitlin has only seen in garish sunsets, spotted with bright orange flowers. The embroidery is so fine as to be undetectable, like the cloth itself is branded with the pattern. Looking down, Caitlin sees that she is in stained white, whiter than any cloth she has ever seen, and printed on her dress are tiny words, black and busy like ants, but she doesn’t know how to read them.
The girl’s face is familiar, brownish teeth bared in a smile and brilliant dark eyes staring happily into Caitlin’s. She looks thin, almost as thin as Janey Solomon, but her hair is bright and shining. They laugh at each other in joy and start slowly revolving in a circle. “Ring around the rosy,” they chant in singsong, “pocket full of posies.” Caitlin hears Father yelling at Mother, but Wasteland Caitlin doesn’t fret about this. She is used to it.
“It’s the only choice!” screams Father. “It’s our only choice! I will not stay here!”