And Mother, surprisingly, screams back in a robust voice, “No! I will not go!”
“Ashes, ashes,” the girls chant, “we all fall down!” And Caitlin drops to the ground like her bones snapped. Laughing at their own cleverness, the girls roll around in the dust, which is silky on her toes and spotted with rocks, and strange, small metal circles with crimped edges. She doesn’t know what the song means, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the spinning and falling. Caitlin stares up into a hot yellow sky.
Sitting up, the girl coughs wetly, spraying dark flecks into her palm, then says, “Again!” Brushing off their strange dresses, they begin circling and chanting again, Caitlin already laughing with the knowledge of how their rhyme will end.
And then she is back on the beach, back in her trembling freezing body, years older. She feels the ache of not being with that girl, whoever she was, of not being little and brave, even if everything around her was burning.
Caitlin stands shakily, the rain turned to needles of chill metal, the night turned into poison that chokes her as she struggles for breath. She knows this is the end of her short life, her small life, small in all ways. She knows what she is about to do is a sin, but at the same time she can’t imagine anyone—celestial or mortal—would want her to do anything else.
She has heard a lot, too much, about the darkness below, but she doesn’t think that the ancestors would send her there. She’s always done exactly what she was told to do, except for going to the beach—but so many girls went to the beach. And she went back home. She thinks that must be enough to join the ancestors in heaven.
Does she want to join them there? Maybe there’s another place to go.
Her feet are numb and she stumbles a little when she walks. The waiting water embraces her softly. It’s like a safe bed where nobody will ever bother her again. Bending her knees, Caitlin sinks down into the water, then bobs up. Her skin pricks and chills in the wind. She slides back down into the sea’s warm grasp, the current a soothing tongue against her belly, walking straighter as she goes deeper. When she’s up to her neck, she holds her breath and lifts her feet off the ground, and stays there like she’s flying.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Janey
Janey wakes to find Mary by her bed, slumped forward, her rump in a chair and her head on Janey’s arm. “Get out of here!” Janey hisses at her. “Get out! You’re not supposed to be in here!”
Mary blinks, yawns, stares at Janey with weary eyes. “It’s all right,” she says. “Mother says you don’t have the sickness. You’re not coughing, there’s no fever.” Mary must be right, for her face is sun-warm on Janey’s cool forearm.
“Get out of here anyway,” says Janey spitefully. But instead Mary crawls into bed next to her, all soft warm skin and clean dry cloth, and Janey is too tired to protest. She drifts into slumber, and when she wakes, Mary is asleep, her eyes darting back and forth restlessly under her pearly eyelids. Janey’s hands and feet feel like blocks of ice. She fears she is sucking away Mary’s precious warmth and guiltily moves away, almost falling off the bed. But then she is so cold she snuggles close to her once more and dozes off.
She wakes to Mother coming in with a bowl heaped high with corn mush. “All I have is corn,” Mother says angrily.
“She won’t eat it,” says Mary.
“Oh, yes, she will. She will eat every single bite.”
Janey inhales the thick, yeasty smell and rolls over in bed, away from them.
“Janey,” says Mother.
Janey doesn’t answer.
“Start with one bite,” Mary says, smoothing Janey’s brilliant hair. Janey catches Mary’s hand and puts it under her face like a small pillow. “You need to eat,” Mary says. “If you’d been eating, you wouldn’t be in bed. You would be up, out of bed, doing things.”
Janey opens her eyes, but stares at the wall instead of looking around. Streaks of water roll from the insides of her eyes toward the bedclothes. “Janey,” Mary says. “Janey?”
“It’s your fault,” Janey rasps.
“Mine?” says Mary.
“All of you. You, all of you. All you mothers and fathers with your ancestors and rules and secrets. You can blame me if you want, but it’s all your fault.”
“Janey,” says Mother, “you have to live in the world as it is. Starving yourself—”
“It’s that way because you let it be that way,” mutters Janey. “Leave me alone.”
“You need to eat,” insists Mary, freeing her damp hand from under Janey’s cheekbone. “You fainted, and you aren’t making sense.” Janey doesn’t answer. “Janey, this is important.”
Janey’s eyes stare glassily at the wall again, skimming over the little imperfections in the wood, the scratches and dents and knots. Her bones feel like a bundle of dry sticks as she curls into herself, poking and scratching her from the inside.
“I will make you eat,” says Mother.
“No,” whispers Janey, “you won’t.”
“A little?” says Mary. “Please? What will I do if you die?” She takes the bowl from Mother and indicates with a movement of her head that Mother should leave the room. Exhaling a frustrated snort, Mother does. Janey feels Mary’s finger gently push a ball of corn mush into her mouth. She scornfully spits it out.
“Caitlin’s dead,” Janey says.
“What? How do you know? I didn’t hear.”
“She died by the water. She was waiting for me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was the only one who knew where she was. Alone in the cold. I promised I would come.”
“Janey,” whispers Mary after a moment. “Janey, did they kill her?”
Janey shakes her head. “No,” she says. “It was me.”
“But you were here. You’ve been here for days.”
“Exactly.”
Confused, Mary sits with the bowl of corn mush against her knees and waits. Eventually Janey pushes aside the bedclothes and, her arms shaking, lifts herself into a seated position with her bony hip poking into Mary’s softer one. Her face is pale and slightly luminescent, a small dim moon suspended in the room. “Mary,” Janey says, swaying slightly, “if I need to get to the church, will you help me?”
Spring
Chapter Fifty-Five
Vanessa
Yesterday was the first day nobody cried in school, and Vanessa feels the full gravity of this. Ever since school started again, children have been constantly breaking into sobs in the half-empty classroom.
First everyone was crying for the dead people, the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. There are so many to mourn that choosing just one seems random and meaningless, like plucking an ant from a teeming hill. Vanessa, unable to hold grief at bay when it was washing over everyone else, wept with them.