Amity & Sorrow (33 page)

She settles Amity back into the truck. The interior dome lamp is burned out, but she turns the ignition key half on to switch the headlights to full bright, telling herself it is for Amity. She is not afraid of the dark or the things flapping and flitting in it, catching the corner of her eye. It is only a bit of plastic bag blowing or a Styrofoam cup, caught by the wind.

Amity stares out into the light. Her hands reach like a zombie’s. ‘What happened here?’

‘The fire? You remember.’

‘No. Before. What made us all like this?’

Amaranth turns to her. ‘It started with love. It started with your father and his wanting to help people, to make a family for them – and with them.’

Amity’s head whips to the side, distracted. ‘Look!’

A flash of white runs across the headlight beams.

Amity’s hands flap uselessly at the door handle, to get out.

‘We mustn’t scare her,’ Amaranth says.

‘Sorrow,’ Amity whispers.

They peer through the window, but they see nothing more.

When Amaranth wakes, Amity is stretched across her, sprawled across her lap.

In the dawn’s light, it all looks much worse. The raised beds before the house have been trod in and flattened. The goats have been in them, she figures, eating the spring buds and summer weeds, once there were no humans to bang buckets filled with peelings to feed them.

She turns the ignition key off with a groan. She tries to start the car and finds it won’t. The headlights she left on have drained the battery. She’ll have to check the barns for jumper cables. She’ll have to find another car with power.

The house in the daylight is worse, too, and Amity stays in the car, as if she doesn’t want to see the damage. Walls are polka-dotted with black mold. Amaranth mounts the stairs to search the rooms above and her foot goes through a stair tread, as if the house itself will pull her down into it. She clings to the handrail and hauls herself up to the landing.

Each bedroom door stands open. There are small things dropped and scattered along the floor. A sodden ribbon, an ashen strap. The plump, headless body of a rag doll bears the tread of a boot print. Inside bedrooms, dresser drawers are open, their contents spilling. She finds blond baby curls and bobby pins, a damp brown envelope filled with translucent milk teeth, and her heart aches for the children who lost them, the mothers who nursed them, the blur and chaos of the family she loved and left.

And then she tells herself no. The love she longs for is a lie. She must remember.

In her own room at the back, her drawers and cupboards have been opened and searched. She reaches between the mattress and the springs to find what she has hidden, the proof of her life that she left behind: the black-and-white photograph of her mother, her marriage certificate, and the brittle paper of Eve’s death certificate, a reminder that this was never Eden. She takes a last look at the ransacked room and jams them all into her apron pocket. This is all she has to show for her life here.

The hatch to the attic is open, but the ladder has been pulled up. She stands beneath it, calling up into the hole. ‘Sorrow?’

Back outside, she finds that Amity is not in the car. Heart pounding, Amaranth rushes to find her beside the temple steps, kneeling before a huddled pile of trash, a soiled altar of stuffed teddy bears, a Virgin Mary votive candle, a single faded American flag.

The temple looks as if it has only just been abandoned. But when she looks more closely, through its shattered windows, she can see that the floor has blackened and buckled from the heat. It is studded with debris from the fire. Her husband’s temple, stilled from the spinning of women, silent from the gunshots and the shouting and Sorrow’s rasping tongue, burned now and ruined.

She thinks of the food in the room below and how hungry Amity must be, how hungry she is. She looks at the thin ribbon of caution tape and wonders what the police found before they unspooled it. She wonders what they took away.

Amity looks at her. ‘It doesn’t look safe,’ she says.

It isn’t safe, Amaranth thinks. And it never was.

M
other walks her away from the house and the gardens, over their land to count and inventory the cars and campers parked beneath trees. She names the wife who drove each one. She opens trunks and glove compartments, looking for paperwork, looking for supplies and jumper cables. She inserts keys into ignitions, all jangling from the one big key ring Father kept, while Amity follows tire tracks on grass and gravel, looking for the single track that will tell her where Dust’s motorcycle was, bringing Sorrow.

Amity hears her mother scream and she rushes back to find her inside a car, her head down on a steering wheel. The ring of keys has been flung onto the dirt. ‘It’s dead,’ she says. ‘They’re all dead.’

‘Who’s dead?’

Mother lifts her head. ‘No, Amity, the cars. No one’s dead.’

‘How do you know? Where are all the mothers? Where is everybody?’

Mother leans over to pick the keys up. ‘This is the seventh wife’s car. She drove it across the country to get here. I need the car of a later wife, a newer wife …’

Mother wanders toward the fields of alfalfa, heavy with purple blooms, no longer forbidden. Amity follows. They hear the drone of bees. Mother claps her hands for the goats, to see if they will come and be milked by her, but they are used to their freedom now. They stare back with their slit-iris devil eyes. Beyond, the barns are fallen, collapsed under their metal roofs. Amity remembers when she saw them on fire, but Mother only gives them a quick search and says there is nothing for them inside.

Mother finally gets Wife Forty-Eight’s car to start, though the tires are flat on their rims. She tells Amity they’ll drive into town to buy some cables.

‘Will there be food?’ Amity asks her.

Mother steers them toward the temple. ‘I thought there would be food left here.’ She idles a moment beside the sag of the caution tape. Then she moves them down the dirt trail, driving them to a gas station and to town.

Mother unwraps her bandages at the pharmacy counter. Amity looks at the spinner racks of glass jars, balms, and unguents. She looks anywhere but down at her hands, being slowly revealed. The pharmacist in his white coat takes a quick look at them and then he runs away from them, into a small glass room, where he speaks to another man and points at Amity, and she turns away from them to stare into a corner filled with wooden legs. And then there are two men, staring into her palms. They ask her to wiggle her fingers.

‘What are you putting on these hands?’ the man asks.

‘Comfrey and honey. Ash from the fire,’ Mother says. ‘I mash a poultice. I hope—’

‘You’ve done very well,’ the pharmacist says, taking in her dress and Amity’s. ‘Under the circumstances. You’ve no eschars. You’ll keep these scars, of course, but they’ll fade over time.’ He flexes Amity’s fingers back from her palms and she can feel the skin stretching. She fears it will rip. ‘Keep these wrappings off now. The skin needs to breathe.’

‘We do a burn balm,’ the other man says. ‘Better than honey. I’ll get you a tube.’

‘But is she all right?’ Mother asks. ‘Will she be all right?’

The pharmacist smiles at Amity. ‘You might have considered skin grafts, but this is how she is now. And such a pretty little girl.’

Amity pulls her hands from his. Liar.

‘Try to use your hands, child,’ he says. ‘They’ll forget what they’re made for.’

At this, she looks up at him. She is forgetting what her hands can do, too.

People stare in towns here, same as Oklahoma. They walk and laugh and buy too much, just like there. She can see the signs of the shops up and down the street, now that she isn’t being told to hide or stay down, and the windows piled high with baked goods and ice creams, women swinging shopping bags in wide, proud arcs. There seems to be so much that people want in the world.

Seeing a sign, she spells out the letters in
GOODWILL INDUSTRIES
and she thinks that’s what they all need, some goodwill. She looks inside at the clothing, hanging and stacked, and thinks of the day when Sorrow ran and Mother sent her to buy something that she could make into a wrist strap. How surprised she was to see all the manner of ways that a woman could dress back then, when she exchanged a coin for a white belt that had lost its dress.

‘We don’t need anything,’ Mother says.

Two girls walk past then, seeing Amity’s dress and pinafore, her mother’s dress and apron, the raw skin of her outstretched hands. They bend their heads together and, once past, they let out loud guffaws, exaggerated and oversize laughs, butts swinging. Amity curls herself over her hands. She wishes Sorrow were there. She misses her wrist strap.

Mother shifts the brown bag on her hip, the apples and cheese, the squishy loaf of bread. ‘Perhaps we could afford something.’

The thrift store is filled with garments and housewares, racks of clothes and stacks of furniture, tables on sofas, chairs upside down. There are shelves of old books and crockery, china, and crooked-heeled, foot-worn shoes. Amity brushes by a rack of blue jeans, faded and ragged-hemmed, as Dust’s were, while Mother flicks dresses across a metal rod: flowers, polka dots, stripes. She rubs fabric between careful fingers and reads labels. ‘These are man-made. Cotton and wool is what you want. Nothing that says “Keep Away from Fire.”’

Amity stares at a rack filled with slippery fabric and elastic straps, breast-shaped and crotch-shaped. In a fire, they’d be the first to go and quite rightly, too.

Mother takes her into a curtained cubicle to stand with her arms out, so that Mother can untie and unwrap her, pull dress after dress over her head. The full-length mirror shows her, shows all of her. She has never seen all of herself, all at once, and she steps close to it, closer, until she hits her nose on it. The mirror shows a dress, short, exposing her knees, a pleated riot of burgundy roses in blowsy bloom. Mother cinches a satin bow, pink and shiny as her unwrapped hands, about her waist. ‘Lovely,’ she says.

‘Will this stop people from staring?’ Amity asks.