We were nearly down the long hill to the corner, and I didn’t want to leave her thinking about a possible quarantine. I said, “Mother finished our dresses last night. Are you going to come over to try yours on?” Sombra’s flushed cheeks darkened. “To make sure about the hem,” I said hesitantly. “To see how we’re going to look tomorrow.”
Sombra shook her dark head. “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” she said uncomfortably. “Mamita has a lot of chores for me today. With the Magassar coming in tomorrow. She’s taking the new hands to board again, and so she said she wanted me to bring in everything ripe from the greentent for the supper tomorrow night. I wish Mamita had made our dresses,” she finished unhappily.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll bring it over tomorrow morning. We’ll get dressed together.”
It had been a mistake to mention the dresses, and a worse one to have had Mother make them for us. I had been to Sombra’s house countless times, with Mamita bright and cheerful as a cherrybright, feeding us vegetables from the greentent and asking us about school, reaching up on tiptoe to pull Sombra’s curls away from her face and, no taller than me, hugging me goodbye when I left. Mother was rigid and erect as one of the tallgrasses that shaded our porch when Sombra came home with me. She had not spoken a dozen words to her during all the fittings. We should have had Mamita make the dresses.
Yesterday Sombra had tried on her dress timidly. I had not seen it so nearly finished before, with the red ribbons pinned where they would be threaded through the bodice. “Oh, Sombra, you look so beautiful!” I had blurted out, “Oh, Mama, it’s the loveliest dress I’ve ever seen.”
Mother had turned on me with a look that made Sombra gasp. “I will not allow you to call me that,” she had said, and slammed the door behind her. Sombra had shimmied out of the dress and into her jeans so fast she nearly tore the thin white cotton.
“It’s because of the babies,” I had said helplessly. “She had seven babies that died between Francie and me. Little Willie lived to be three. I remember when he died. It was a planetwide and there wasn’t anything to give him and he laid upstairs in the big bed crying, ‘Mama! Mama!’ for five days.”
Sombra had her shirt buttoned and her books scooped up. “She lets Francie call her Mama,” she said, her cheeks flaming with anger.
“That’s different,” I had said.
“How is it different? Mamita lost nine babies to the strep. Nine.”
“But she has you and the twins left. And all Mother has is Francie.”
“And you. She has you.” I had not known how to explain to her that Francie, with her blue eyes and yellow hair, made her think of San Francisco, of earth. Francie and the geraniums she tended so carefully in the hot damp air of the greentent. And when she looked at me, what did she think? She had found me that day after Willie died, hiding in the greentent, and had switched me. What was she thinking then? And what did she think this morning when the district nurse told her Mr. Phelps had scarlet fever and we were within two of a planetwide? The scratchiness had returned, this time as a dull ache. I knotted my hand into a fist and pushed against it, but it did no good. I wondered if I’d better take a strip when I got home.
“You’re worried about them imposing a quarantine, aren’t you?” Sombra said. We were nearly down the hill, and I had not said anything the whole way.
“I was wondering if they’ll have pink carnations tomorrow,” I said. “I was wondering if they’ll give us some to wear in our hair?”
“Of course. Mamita said so. You’ll have red roses. You’ll be so pretty.” The long walk down the dusty hill had dried us off. She looked hot now, the sweat on her forehead curling her dark hair. “Let’s sit down a minute, all right?” She sank down on the low mudbrick fence and fanned herself with her books. “It’s so hot today.”
I looked over her head at the peach tree. It was no taller than me and folded-in on itself so that it barely gave any shade at all. Its leaves were narrow and so pale a green the dust made them look the same color as the wheat. There were little pinkish-white specks between the leaves. I squinted at them.
“Don’t you think it’s hot?” Sombra said.
This was the only one of Father’s trees that had lived past the ponics tanks. It had lasted five years now, though it had never borne fruit. And now there were the pale specks all over it, which could be moths or sorrel ants. The ache pressed dully against the hard bone of my sternum, bending me forward under it. I put the edge of my fist against the pain, pressing hard into the bone, willing myself to straighten. Mother was always telling me to stand up straight, to try to look at least as tall as I could, not like some hunched dwarf, and I would straighten automatically, my whole body responding. I willed myself to hear her voice now. My shoulder blades pulled back, stretching the ache with it till it had pulled out to nothing. I stood still, breathing hard.
“I can’t sit down,” I said breathlessly. “I have to go right home.”
“But it’s so hot! Do I feel hot to you?” She pulled me onto the wall with her and pressed her cheek against mine. It was burning against my chilled face.
“A little,” I said. I must take a strip when I get home. And tell Father about the tree.
“You’re not getting sick, are you?” she said. “You can’t get sick, Haze, not for graduation. You go right home and go to bed, all right? I don’t want you sending us under a planetwide.”
“I will,” I promised her, climbing over the fence and into the field for a closer look at the tree. The specks were larger than I had thought, almost the size of…
“Oh, Sombra,” I shouted after her delightedly, “we won’t go under a planetwide, and I’m not getting sick either. I’ve had a good omen. There’ll be flowers for graduation.”
“How do you know?” she shouted back.
“I thought the tree had something wrong with it,” I said. “But it doesn’t. It’s in bloom!”
She grinned in happy surprise. “You mean blossoms?” She was over the low fence in an easy step and peering eagerly at the tiny tight blossoms. “Oh, they’re just starting to come out, aren’t they? Oh, Haze, think how pretty they’ll be!”
A red cherrybright whizzed through the air over our heads and lighted unafraid on the top of the tree, shaking the branch in our faces. The folded blossoms bowed and dipped.
“The pink blossoms are for my ribbons,” Sombra said happily, “and the cherrybright’s for your red ribbons!” She put her arm around my waist. It felt warm through my thin shirt. “And you know what they mean?”
“That we’ll be beautiful tomorrow! That nothing can possibly go wrong because we’re going to graduate!”
“Oh, Haze,” she said, hugging me, “I can hardly wait.” She ran back to the road. “Bring my dress over first thing in the morning and we’ll get ready together. Everything’s going to be perfect,” she shouted to me. “The day is full of omens.”
No one was in the house but Francie, sitting at the kitchen table, dawdling over her lessons with a strip in her mouth.
“Papa’s in the greentent. With Mama,” she said, taking the strip out of her mouth so she could talk. It was the bright red of a negative reading. Active strep blanched the strips like a person going white from fear. “Are you scared?” she said.
“Of what?”
“Mama says two more and they’ll call a planetwide. There won’t be any graduation.”
“There will so, Francie. There hasn’t been a planetwide in ages.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” I said, thinking of the peach tree and what Father would say when he saw it was in bloom. He would think it was a good omen, too. I smiled at Francie and went out to find Father.
He stood in the door of the greentent, blocking it with his bulk. Mother stood across the ponics tanks from him, holding onto one of the metal supports. Through the thick plastic, she looked as if she were drowning. Her hand clutched the strut so hard I thought she would pull the whole
tent down.
“It’s what they want,” Father said. “It ties us to them. We’ll be doing just what they want.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“It will take away every chance of a cash crop. You know that, don’t you?”
“Mr. Phelps died this morning. There have been seventeen cases in northern.”
“The Magassar will be landing tomorrow. We don’t have to…”
“No,” she said, and looked steadily at him. “You owe it to me.”
His hand on the doorframe tightened until I could see the veins stand out on his hands.
“The peach tree’s in bloom,” I blurted, and they both turned to look at me, Father with blank drowned eyes, Mother with a look like triumph. “It’s a good sign, don’t you think?” I said into the silence. “An omen. It means the Magassar will land tomorrow and everything will be all right…anyway, it has to have some kind of incubation period, doesn’t it? People can’t just catch it in one day.”
“It’s a new strain,” Mother said. She had let go of the strut and was pushing dirt around the base of a geranium. “The district nurse said it appears to have a very short incubation period.”
“She doesn’t know that,” I said earnestly. “How could she know that for sure?”
She looked up, but at my father, not at me. “Mr. Phelps had taken a strip that morning. It was negative. You would not have expected Mr. Phelps to get it at all, let alone so quickly. Maybe others you wouldn’t expect will get it, too.”
The call box, attached to the plastic feederlines above the ponics tanks, barked suddenly. The sharp, short signal that called the district nurse. The signal that meant our district. Mother looked at me. “What did I tell you?” she said.
My father let go of the doorframe, and took a step toward her. “Move your geraniums to ponics,” he said, “I need the plaindirt to plant more corn in.” He turned and walked away.
I helped Mother move the geraniums into the tanks, my body tensed for the alerting bark of the box, but it did not ring again. After supper we stayed in the kitchen, and when we went up to bed, Father carried the little box with him, trailing its wires like ribbons, but the box did not sound again. Oh, yes, the day was full of omens.
The pale pink haze was gone in the morning, replaced with the clear chill to the sky that meant night frost. I took Father down to the tree before breakfast to look at the peach blossoms. They dropped like scraps of paper at his feet when he put out his hand to a branch. “The frost got them,” he said, as if he didn’t even mind.
“Not all of them,” I said. Some of them, crumpled and tight, like little knots against the cold, still clung to the branches. “The frost didn’t get all of them,” I said. “It’s supposed to be warm today. I knew it would be warm for graduation.” He was looking past me, past the tree. I turned to look. A cherrybright fluttered on Sombra’s fence. Our good omen.
“No!” Father said sharply, and then more gently as I turned back to him in surprise, “the frost didn’t get them all. Some of them are still alive.” He took my arm, and steered me back to the house, keeping himself between the tree and me, as if the frozen blossoms were my disappointment and I could not bear to see them.
At the greentent I stopped. “I have to take Sombra her dress,” I said, barely able to keep the excitement of the day out of my voice. “We have to get ready for graduation.” He did not let go of my arm, but his hand seemed to go suddenly lifeless. I patted his cold hand and ran into the house to get Sombra’s dress and down the steps past him with it over my arm, fluttering pink ribbons as I ran. He still stood there, as if he had finally seen the frozen blossoms and could not hide his grief.
It was not a cherrybright. It was a quarantine sticker, tied to one of the distance markers. I stood for a moment by the peach tree looking at it as my father had done, the dress as heavy on my arm as my hand had been on his. “No!” I said, as sharply as he had and took off running.
I could not even let myself think what breaking quarantine meant. “I don’t care,” I told myself, catching my breath at the last corner of the fence. “It’s graduation,” I would tell Mamita. “The Magassar will be landing with all those flowers. We have to be there.”
Mamita would look reluctant, thinking of the consequences.
“One of the hands has it, doesn’t he? The new ones always get it. But this is our graduation! You can’t let him spoil it. Think of all the flowers,” I would say. “Sombra has to see them. She’ll die if she doesn’t see them. Give her a strip. Give us both one. We won’t get it.”
I climbed over the fence, careful of the dress. Even folded double, it almost dragged on the ground. The gate would be locked. I cut through the field at a dead run and came up to the house the back way, past the greentent. The door stood open, but I could not see anyone through the plastic. Sombra must have hurried through her chores to get ready and left the door open. Mamita would kill her. I could not stop to shut it now, because someone might see me and turn me in. I had to get to Mamita and convince her first.
I knocked at the back door, leaning against the scratchy stalk of a tallgrass, too breathless for a moment to say any of the things I had planned to say. Then Mamita opened the door, and I knew I would never say any of them.
I could hear a baby crying in the house. Mamita passed her hand over her chest, pressing as if there were a pain there. Then she put her hand up to her forehead. There were brilliant scarlet creases on the inside of her elbows. “Why, Haze, what are you doing here?” she said.
“I brought Sombra’s dress,” I said.
A sudden, hitting anger flared out of her black eyes, and I stumbled back, raking my arm against the tallgrass. It came to me much later that she must have thought I brought the dress for Sornbra’s laying out, that she had felt the same anger as Mother did when she saw me standing and still healthy while the babies died, one after the other. I did not think of that then. All I could think was that it was not one of the hands, that it was Sombra who was sick.
“For graduation,” I said, holding the dress out insistently. If I could make her take it, then it would not be true.
“Thank you, Haze,” she said, but she didn’t take it. “Her father’s already gone,” she said. “Sombra’s…” and in that breath of a second, I thought she was going to say that she was dead already, too, and I could not, would not let her say that.
“The Magassar will be landing this morning. I could go over there for you. I could catch a downer. I’d be back in no time. The Magassar’s bringing a whole load of antibiotics. I heard the district nurse say so.”
“He died before the district nurse could get here. He wouldn’t let me call until we found Sombra in the greentent. He didn’t want to spoil her graduation.”
“But the Magassar…”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Sombra was the twentieth,” she said.
I still could not take in what she was saying. “There was only one call. That makes nineteen.” One call. Sombra and her father. One call.
“You should go home and take a strip, dear,” she said. “You’ll have been exposed.” She put her hand to my cheek, and it burned like a brand. “Tell your mother thank you for the dress,” she said, and shut the door in my face.
When Francie found me, I was sitting under the peach tree with Sombra’s dress across my lap like a blanket. The last of the blossoms fell on the dress, already dead and dying like the flowers aboard the Magassar.
“Papa says for you to come up to the house,” Francie said. Mama had curled her hair with sugar water for graduation. The curls were stiff against her pink cheeks.
“There isn’t any graduation,” I said.
“I know that,” she said disdainfully. “Mamma’s been making me take strips all morning long. She thinks I’m going to get it.”
“No,” I said, my cheeks burning from the brand of Sombra’s cheek, Mamita’s hand. The pain pressed against my sternum and would not go away. “I’m going to
get it.”
“I told Mama I didn’t even sit near her. And how you never let me walk home with you two, how you always ride the downer. She sent for me as soon as she found out about Mr. Phelps, and Sombra wasn’t even sick then. But she wouldn’t listen. Anyway, you never get sick. She probably won’t even make you take a strip. And Sombra wasn’t sick yesterday, was she? So you probably weren’t exposed either. Mama says the incubation period is really short.” She remembered why she had been sent. “Papa says you’re supposed to come now.” She flounced off.
I stood up, still careful of the white dress, and followed Francie through the field of scratchy wheat. They don’t know about my breaking quarantine, I thought in amazement. I wondered why Father had sent for me. Perhaps he knew and wanted to talk to me before he turned me in. “What does he want?” I said.
“I don’t know. He said I was supposed to come and get you before the downer came. There’s been one already, with a coffin. For Mr. Utrillo.”
I stopped and looked back toward the road. The downer rattled past the peach tree, spraying water over the scattered blossoms, wetting the coffin it pulled behind it. Sombra’s coffin. He had at least tried to spare me that. And now I would have to try to spare him my dying, as much as I could.
I imposed my own quarantine, sneaking a strip as soon as I got back to the house. I had been afraid that Mother would make me take one, but she didn’t, although Francie was already sitting at the kitchen table when I came in, protesting the bright red strip Mother held in her hand. I held the strip I had stolen behind my back until I could get out to the greentent. I took it there, huddled under the ponics tank in case it took a long time. It blanched white as soon as the paper was in my mouth. I did not need the strip to tell me I was getting sick. Sombra’s cheek, her mother’s hand, burned on my face like a brand.
No one reported me. I did not doubt that Mamita, much as she loved me, would have turned me in. This was more than a planetwide. It was a local, too. The Magassar had already broken its orbit and was heading for home. We were on our own, and the only way to stop it was to keep the quarantine from being broken. Which meant Mamita had the fever, too, that maybe all the people on the Turillo stead were dead or sick with it and no one to help them.