Page 36
Arden climbed through the pantry, throwing herself on one of the bottom bunks. “It’s actually pretty big,” she said, as Lark followed her inside.
Lark traded her ripped jumper for a fresh nightgown before collapsing into the mattress, pulling the thin quilt over her legs. She rested her head on the flattened pillow, for the first time seeming calm, her expression softening as she readied for sleep.
My stomach was full from the berries and my heartbeat had slowed into a steady rhythm. We were still on the run, still in danger, but I didn’t feel the same terror in my chest. I looked into Marjorie’s kind, weathered face.
“Go on. ” She gestured again to the pantry. The smell of fire clung to her clothes, its scent comforting in its familiarity. “You’ll be safe here—I promise. ”
I couldn’t help it any longer. I hugged her, relaxing into the warmth of her body. The Teachers had never touched us, with the exception of a quick hand on the back as they led us to dinner, or a firm tap on the shoulder when our gaze had drifted outside the window during class. I had begged Teacher Agnes once—that first year I was at School—to untangle my hair. I had shrieked, kicked, my tiny arms flailing as I banged the brush on the porcelain sink. She had stood there for over an hour, hands in her pockets, not moving until I worked at the knot myself.
Gradually Marjorie’s arms left her sides and she wrapped them around me, too. My hands pressed against the hard bones in her back, feeling how tiny she was beneath her loose linen shirt. “Thank you,” I said, repeating the phrase over and over, the words growing fainter each time. “Thank you, thank you. ”
Chapter Twenty-six
WE AWOKE TO THE SMELL OF BAKED BREAD. “WE HAVE fresh eggs for you girls,” Otis said, pulling out the chairs around the dining room table. I looked at the spread before us, the steaming scrambled eggs, the wild boar meat salted and dried into thin strips, the soft bread on the heated stone of Marjorie’s oven. I smiled, my throat choked again with emotion.
“This looks delicious,” I said. Lark sat down and piled a heaping spoonful onto her plate. She hadn’t bothered changing out of her nightgown.
Arden looked around the room, taking in the front windows, the side windows, and the doors that faced the backyard. The curtains were all drawn tightly shut. “Are they vampires?” she whispered.
Marjorie moved around her kitchen, chopping tomatoes and throwing them into the bowl. I thought again of the chase through the woods, of Fletcher, and the wound that opened in his chest when she shot him.
“Is he still outside?” I asked, keeping my eyes on her.
Marjorie stopped chopping. Then she gestured to the front window with her knife. “Bill and Liza are taking care of him. ”
Arden stared at the plate of red meat. “Who are Bill and Liza?”
“Our cats,” Marjorie said. She set the tomatoes down in front of Otis, her hand on his neck.
Lark swallowed, her eyes jumping from Marjorie to Otis and back. “Your cats are taking care of Fletcher?”
Otis nodded, then took another bite of his meat.
I pulled at the curtain on the front window, letting in a thin stream of white light that exposed the dust in the air. A hundred yards off, two mountain lions were tearing at Fletcher’s carcass, their jaws plunging into his bloody flesh. One of the beasts held a hand in its mouth, the gray fingers sticking out between its teeth.
“Best not to go near the window, dear,” Marjorie said, summoning me back to the table. “There’s always the chance the troops are watching. ”
Lark chewed on a strip of boar. She eyed Marjorie, then Otis, warily. “So you’re . . . married?”
Marjorie ran her fingers over Otis’s, her eyes dancing in amusement. “I met Otis long before the plague. I was living in New York at the time—”
“They don’t know what New York is,” Otis teased. Marjorie scrunched her nose at him, feigning annoyance. He turned to us, but his gaze was far off. “It was across the country, and it was one of the most spectacular cities in the world. Buildings that shot up from the ground, the sidewalks so packed with people you had to dart through them. Underground trains and hot dogs that you could buy on the street. ”
I had read books set in New York—The Great Gatsby, The House of Mirth—but it still sounded impossible. The sheer number of people it would take to fill a skyscraper, to fill a street . . . I hadn’t seen that many people in my entire life.
Marjorie brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Thank you, darling. I was in New York and there he was one night, sitting across from me, telling some ridiculous story about recycling. ”
“It wasn’t about recycling,” Otis chuckled to himself. “But that’s okay. ”
“What’s recycling?” Arden asked.
“It doesn’t matter. The point is,” Marjorie continued, “I wasn’t listening. I just kept watching him, and I thought: This man, this someone—I didn’t even know his name—is so alive. He was the most exciting person I’d ever met . . . and the most familiar. ” Otis kissed Marjorie’s hand.
I thought of the way Caleb looked at me, how I could feel each inch between us. The way the crescent shaped scar in his cheek crinkled when he smiled, how he always stared straight ahead when he was saying something important.
“I kept thinking he’d turn into a knucklehead, but every minute I spent with him, I just loved him more,” Marjorie finished.
Arden swallowed a bite of eggs. “Is that why you didn’t go, like everyone else?” she asked. “When the King called for the City of Sand, were they going to split you up?”
Marjorie looked down, her finger tracing the grain of the wood table. “The King doesn’t want people like us in the City. We’re too old to be of real use to him. We don’t have any resources he could use. He wanted me to teach in the Schools, and they tried to make Otis work at the labor camps. But no, that’s not why. ”
“We didn’t go,” Otis said, “because it was wrong. It still is. ”
“During the plague, and after, everyone was so afraid,” Marjorie continued. “There was a formal government before it happened, a democracy. But the illness came on so fast, half of the country’s leaders were dead within the first six months. The laws were irrelevant—no one was reading the Constitution. Information was withheld. Some of that was intentional, I’m certain now. For a long time, without electricity, without phones, we had no clue what was happening. Then this politician announces plans to rebuild. He was only supposed to be in power until things got settled, but it was two more years before the plague ended. By then everyone trusted him. They believed him when he said America needed to be unified under one leader. They were so afraid, they just listened and followed. They never questioned, and it only got worse. ”
“Maybe it will be different though, if we wait?” Lark’s face rested in her hands. “It can’t go on forever. Maybe once the City of Sand is built and—”
“‘Time itself is neutral,’” Marjorie corrected, her words steady with the rhythm of memorization. “And ‘we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. ’”