All Fall Down

  All of this is bad trouble. Sunny hangs back, thinking on this, while Patience heads for the giant silver refrigerator with two doors. She opens them. Inside is all white light and shelves of food, more food than Sunny has ever seen, ever. Patience is already reaching on her tiptoes for a jug of milk. She brings it down and pours two glasses. She gives Sunny one.

  “Here.” Patience drinks hers.

  Sunny shifts the kitten to the crook of her arm and takes the glass. She sips it cautiously, and Penny laughs again. She pushes the glass hard into Sunny’s teeth.

  “It’s not bad, stupid. “

  Sunny’s had sour milk so many times she can hardly think of what good milk tastes like—sweet and cold. Like this. She gulps it. The kitten’s little head turns, tiny tongue creeping out when a drop splashes on its fur. Sunny should give the kitten some milk, but it tastes so good and feels so nice in her belly, she doesn’t want to.

  “It’s never bad right from the fridge,” Patience says as if she’s telling a secret. “Only in the dinner hall, sometimes.”

  Sunny holds out her glass. “More?”

  Patience pours more, then puts the jug away. She drinks another glass herself. “Give some to the kitten.”

  “How?”

  “Put it on your finger.”

  Sunny does. The kitten’s pink tongue scrapes her skin. She giggles. She gives it more milk, then drinks some herself.

  Patience has opened a drawer and is rustling around inside it. This makes Sunny more nervous than when she took the milk from the fridge. Patience holds up a flat rectangle in brown paper. Silver foil on the ends. Sunny can’t read the white letters on the brown paper.

  “Chocolate,” Patience whispers. “A whole bar! I’m taking it.”

  “No!” Terrified, Sunny again squeezes the kitten too tight. “You can’t take anything from the kitchen! Thieves don’t get through the gates!”

  “You stole milk,” Patience points out.

  Sunny’s stomach clenches. Outside in the sunshine, she was too hot, but here in the shadows all of a sudden she’s so cold her teeth chatter and click. She presses the kitten’s soft fur under her chin.

  “You gave it to me!”

  Patience shrugs. She rinses both glasses in the sink and puts them with the others in the big plastic bin on the counter. “You drank it.”

  Sunny wants to cry. Patience is right. She doesn’t cry, though. She hushes herself. Listens with her heart, but can hear nothing. The kitten squirms.

  “C’mon. Let’s go back before Fleur notices we’re missing.” Patience leads the way, saying over her shoulder, “If you’re going to keep that kitten, you’re gonna have to keep feeding it.”

  Sunny touches the soft fur. Holding this kitten reminds her of holding a baby, all sweet and soft and full of love. Her own baby! She puts a hand on her belly, which should feel too full from the milk but has a lot of room left in it. Always room left in her belly. One day, Sunny will bleed from down there like Mama does, and she’ll go to Papa and see if she can be the one true wife, get him another true son. That would be a baby of her very own to love and feed.

  But until then, maybe she can practice on this kitten.

  “I’m going to put it in my room.”

  Patience’s eyes get wide. “You’ll get caught!”

  Sunny shakes her head. “No. Not if you don’t tell.”

  For once, Patience doesn’t look like she’s going to be mean. She nods. “Okay. I won’t tell.”

  “Will you help me get the milk? If I let you play with the kitten?”

  “Sure. I guess so.”

  Together, they sneak down the hall and up the stairs toward the bedrooms. Not all the rooms have closets, but this one does. Closets are worldly, made for keeping material things when you have too many to keep in a box under the bed or in a dresser drawer. This closet is empty but for a metal rod and a few shelves and an empty shoe box Mama put in there so long ago she’ll never remember it.

  Sunny takes a towel from the drawer and tucks it into the box. The kitten on top. She thinks about how the kitten has to breathe. “Should I put the lid on?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  They settle on pushing some holes into the top of the box with a pencil, then putting the lid on the box and the box in the closet. The kitten is mewing a lot. Sunny closes the closet door and presses her ear to it, listening, but she can barely hear it.

  She turns to Patience, excitement tumbling all her words together. “We’ll have to feed it every day! And when it gets bigger, we can train it to do tricks!”

  “Cats don’t do tricks, stupid.”

  “Papa’s dog did tricks.”

  They’re both silent while they think of Papa’s dog, the one John Second sent through the gates.

  “You’re going to get caught,” Patience says. “We’d better go outside.”

  In the hot summer sunshine, Fleur and Henry are still on their blanket, but now they’re just talking. Patience takes Sunny behind the greenhouse and tears the wrapping off what she took from the kitchen. She breaks the stuff inside into a soft square that leaves brown smudges on her fingers. It’s like poo. She offers it to Sunny.

  Sunny shakes her head. “Ew!”

  “You should eat it, it’s good.” Patience shoves the whole piece in her mouth, chewing.

  Sunny risks taking the piece Patience holds out next. Patience wouldn’t eat poo, would she? Oh, it’s not poo at all, it’s sweet! So sweet, and Sunny’s mouth dances with happy when she gobbles it up. Together they eat the whole thing and lick their fingers clean.

  “Chocolate,” Sunny murmurs, flat on her back, her belly so tight it might just bust.

  “It’s good. I told you.”

  “Why don’t we ever have any for dinner, if there’s some in the kitchen?”

  Patience shrugs. “It’s for Papa and his true sons and his one wife.”

  Papa’s one wife died like his dog. Papa said she tried to get through the gates all on her own before she was ready, so her vessel was here but what was inside, the secret voice, was still there, too. Stuck in the ground forever.

  “Papa doesn’t have a one wife now,” Sunny said.

  “Maybe it’ll be me.” Patience has chocolate all around her mouth. “Or you.”

  Sunny frowns. “We’re too little.”

  Patience shrugs. “We won’t be forever. If you are Papa’s one wife, you get a lot of good things. I think I’m going to be his one wife, when I get older. Then I don’t have to even worry about getting through the gates.”

  Sunny doesn’t understand everything there is to know about the world beyond, but that doesn’t sound right. Still, she’s not going to fight with Patience. The other girl will pinch or shove her. And besides, now Sunny’s stomach hurts bad.

  Fleur is calling them. Patience gets up first. Sunny follows slowly. The sun beats down on her head. She drags her feet in the dirt.

  Henry’s gone, and Fleur has her clothes on again. She’s going to take them all inside for afternoon meditations. She lines them up, all the kids who aren’t babies in the nursery or old enough to have chores. Patience, Sunny, River, Willow, Praise.

  Fleur’s white blouse has long sleeves and lots of buttons. Her skirt is long, with more buttons down the front. Her belly pushes out the front of it, because Fleur’s going to have a baby. Her hair was all down around her shoulders, but now she ties it on top of her head as she tells all the kids to get in line. She’s sweating.

  Sunny’s tummy groans and twists. Fleur looks at her. “Sunny, what’s wrong?”

  A burning bad taste rushes up Sunny’s throat and out her mouth. She spews the chocolate all over the grass, almost on Fleur’s bare feet. Even over the sound of
coughing so loud in Sunny’s ears, she hears Patience laughing. Fleur shouting something. A couple of the other kids start to cry. River throws up, too.

  “Oh, Sunny,” Fleur says when Sunny blinks up at her. “What did you get into?”

  With that bad taste still in her mouth, Sunny can only shake her head and wait for Patience to tell about the chocolate. But Patience has a liar’s tongue and a thief’s hands, and she doesn’t say anything.

  Neither does Sunny.

  Chapter 43

  Liesel didn’t ask her husband where he’d been or why he hadn’t answered her calls. She looked at him standing in the kitchen with a kitten in each hand. Pets, he said. For the kids. Then she turned on her heel and left the room.

  Three hours in the emergency room. The doctor had said it could be food poisoning or a virus, but either way she’d given all three kids shots of some powerful antinausea medicine as well as a prescription for some antibiotics for what she’d diagnosed as a previously untreated and chronic ear infection for Peace. An hour after that they were home, the kids showered and in clean pajamas, finally asleep. On the couches in the den, still set up with fresh towels and plastic-lined cans just in case, but resting comfortably. Sunny was with them in a sleeping bag on the floor between them, but Liesel doubted she was asleep.

  And then there was Christopher, hours late without apology or explanation, bringing two more creatures into the house for Liesel to deal with. More mess. More poop. More of everything. It was too much.

  She ignored him calling her name and went upstairs to their bedroom, where she stripped out of clothes that reeked of hospital and sickness. She left them right there on the floor and turned on the water as hot as she could stand. It was her third shower of the day, and she didn’t even care. She just got in under the spray and turned her face up to the water so it would pound away the urge to cry.

  It didn’t work. Liesel crouched on the floor of the shower as the world spun. For an awful few minutes she thought she might be coming down with whatever the kids had, but the sickness in her stomach settled with a few slow breaths. She was just tired. Exhausted, as a matter of fact.

  Heartsick.

  Liesel gave in to the tears. Let them well up and out of her, less painful than a sickness but just as powerful. She pressed her forehead to the floor of the shower, thick with soap scum because she hadn’t had time to scrub it in weeks. The water pounded her back, and her fingers slipped on the floor as she gripped it, trying to find something to hold on to so she wouldn’t just fly away.

  “Liesel?”

  “Go away.” She didn’t want him to see her this way, didn’t want to have to talk to him. She might sick up everything inside her, all the words she’d been biting back, the feelings she didn’t want to admit.

  Liesel didn’t want to have to tell Christopher she’d been so, so wrong to ever think this could work.

  The shower door rattled open, letting in a burst of cool air. Christopher stepped in, fully clothed, and shut the door behind him. Blinking, Liesel looked up at him, but before she could say a word, he crouched down next to her.

  “Talk to me.” Christopher didn’t seem to notice his suit was getting ruined. The expensive tailored shirt, the silk tie she’d bought him several years ago for his birthday. The water sluiced over him, soaking into the fabric. His hand rested on her naked back, the pressure of his fingers light but insistent. “Please, Liesel.”

  It all came up and out of her, rushing, the words tumbling over one another in a jumbled, incoherent babbling she could barely keep track of but which Christopher seemed to follow just fine. She clutched at the front of his shirt, hating everything she said and yet overwhelmed with relief as it all spilled out of her. The story of the food she’d been finding, Sunny’s reasons for keeping it. How angry Liesel had been that Sunny would think she needed to be prepared for starvation. How the kids had gotten into the spoiled pudding and eaten it while Liesel had been selfishly taking time for herself, even though she’d known better.

  How it could have been the poison under the sink they got into, or stairs they fell down, a knife in an unsecured drawer.

  “I can’t do it,” she said finally. “I can’t do this, Christopher. I thought I could. I wanted kids so much, I thought I could just become some sort of…I don’t know. Supermom. Superwife. Whatever. But I can’t do it. Everything is dirty, they need something from me every second, and I just. Can’t. Do it.”

  Christopher sat on the floor, long legs stretched out, and cradled her to him. “You’re a great mother, Liesel.”

  “I’m not anyone’s mother!” A fresh spate of weeping shook her.

  He held her for a while, saying nothing. That turned out to be the best thing he could’ve done, because a lot of times when they had discussions, Christopher focused so much on figuring out ways to “fix” her that he didn’t really pay attention to what she wanted, which was simply to tell him how she felt.

  Liesel pressed her face to his sopping shirt. “I thought I would just…love them. And that would be enough. But it didn’t work that way, Christopher. I’m an awful person.”

  “No. You’re not.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “They should be so easy to love!” She shook her head, eyes closed, letting him hold her while the backbeat pounding of the water somehow made everything easier to admit.

  “Love isn’t always enough,” Christopher said.

  Liesel pushed away to look at him. “Do you love me?”

  He looked surprised. “Of course I do.”

  More tears, just a few, but somehow hurting more. “Do you love me as much as you loved her?”

  Christopher didn’t say anything for a long, quiet minute. “I could never love any woman the way I loved Trish.”

  Liesel let out a single sob, finally hearing what she’d feared all along, broken but not destroyed. But before she could say anything, he’d tipped her face to his.

  “Look at me.”

  She did, blinking, eyes swollen.

  “But I could also never, never love any woman the way I love you.” He kissed her slowly with the water running over and between them. “Don’t you get that?”

  Liesel looked at his clothes, then at her own nakedness, and the ridiculous juxtaposition of it made her laugh. It surprised her to find any humor in this at all, but she did. It seemed to surprise Christopher, too, but he laughed along with her. Then he kissed her. He held her tight. Harder. Within minutes both of them clung to each other, heaving with laughter that sounded suspiciously like sobs. Or maybe it was the other way around. All she knew was when they tapered off, the water had started to cool.

  She still felt like she might fly away, but now it was from the weight that had fallen from her rather than the world spinning desperately out from underneath her. She held her husband’s face in her hands and kissed his mouth. When she looked at him, both of them blinking away water, she remembered how it felt to want to be with him instead of always hoping he’d walk away.

  Together they managed to get out of the shower, and she helped him get out of his wet clothes, too. He hung them over the edge of the tub and stood in front of her. Both of them naked now, it seemed like the simplest and most natural thing to step into each other’s arms. To kiss. Liesel thought there was no way she’d be interested in making love, not after the day she’d had.

  She was wrong.

  Chapter 44

  Sunny’s gone through this before, but it’s no better the second time around. The pain ripples across her back, down low, then circles around her belly. She puts her hands on it, feeling the muscles tense, tense, tense…release. She lets out the breath she was holding. It’s not quite time, but it will be soon.

  The floor isn’t clean enough yet, and there’s no telling how long it will be
until she’s in actual labor, so she bends back to the bucket and the scrub brush. The hot, soapy water has turned her hands bright red and softened her nails so that when she presses too hard on the scrub brush, one bends back.

  More pain, smaller and yet somehow worse than the rising and falling ache in her back and belly. She can’t even suck at it, since she doesn’t want to put her finger in her mouth after it’s been on the bathroom floor and also in the bucket of filthy water. The nail is now hinged like a piece of paper that’s been folded. The crease is low enough that if she pulls it off, her skin will tear, too. There’s no choice for it, though, and she steels herself to hurt when she does it.

  If only babies were born as fast as that, she thinks as she drops the torn nail into the toilet she’s been scrubbing around.

  She already knows this baby is a girl. Her mother did all the little tests, checking to see which eye had the reddest veins, which way the pendulum swung when hung over her belly, what foods Sunny was craving. There’s a whole list of them, silly things, and Mama said of course not to say anything about them to John Second because he’d be angry they could even think they might be able to determine something the universe had been so careful to make a secret. But Mama was right about Happy and right about lots of other babies, so Sunny believes she’s right about this one, too.

  She’s going to call this baby Patsy, after her mom.

  But for now, Sunny scrubs. She wipes down the toilets, too. The doors of the stalls, both of them. The sinks, the mirrors. By the time she gets to that part, she has to stop every ten minutes or so to cling to the sink and pant her way through an ever-increasing round of pain.

  Now it’s centered almost inside her. Deep inside. The baby’s head, pushing down on her, opening her. Getting ready to push its way out into the world.

  When she steps into one of the three showers, the timing’s perfect. Her water breaks. Hot fluid splashes down her thighs and legs, hits the tile floor. Soaks her underpants and her dress, too. It’s tinged with blood.

  The pain that comes next is instantaneous and somehow furious. A knife, stabbing. Sunny clutches at the shower curtain and tears it from the rings, which clatter to the floor as she stumbles forward. On her hands and knees, she feels another wave of pressure and pain building up inside her.