Authors: Sophie Littlefield
The hawthorn bushes’ second bloom was scant, and after Cass picked enough for the pies, the small berries were nearly all gone. The few that remained weren’t enough even for pancakes. Cass would give them to Ruthie and Twyla when they were ripe, and they would get the sweet juice all over their faces. A treat, something to enjoy as they waited out the winter.
Winter was tough on children, the cold days and early nightfalls. They had no television. No electronic games. No radios. Not even lamps, except for special occasions. Children got bored and then they got restless.
Cass could sympathize. She got restless, too.
Chapter 2
AN HOUR AFTER sundown Cass was back in the room she shared with Ruthie, one of three cobbled-together boxes that formed a sloping second-floor addition to an old board-sided house. These were not coveted rooms, but Cass was among the most recent to arrive at New Eden and so she took what was offered without complaint.
Besides, even with that she didn’t mind. What the builders of the ramshackle house lacked in skill, they made up for in imagination. The rooms lined a narrow hall that overlooked a spacious living room, the body of the original house, whose roof had been sheared off to accommodate the second floor. There were two tiny rooms at either end of the hall, and Ruthie and Twyla loved to use them for imaginary boats or stores or churches or zoos or schools, and since no one really owned anything, they were free to borrow props from all over the house. Buckets became steering wheels, folded clothes became racks of fancy dresses, dolls became dolphins bobbing on imaginary seas.
Twyla, who was older than Ruthie—nearly five—remembered some of these things from Before. But to Ruthie they were entirely make-believe.
Ruthie was telling Cass about a book that Ingrid had read them that evening. Fridays were Ingrid’s turn to watch the four youngest children—the girls plus her two sons, age one and three—and she stuck to the most educational books from New Eden’s lending library, biographies and how-things-work and math books. She also made flash cards with pictures of things long gone, like birthday cakes and puppies and helium balloons and ice skates. Cass and Suzanne secretly called Ingrid “Sarge”—at least, they had before Suzanne mostly quit speaking to her—but Cass felt a hollow pang whenever she saw Ingrid bent earnestly over the little ones, pouring herself into lessons they were too young to understand.
Cass had once felt that passion. When Ruthie had been missing, Cass’s hunger for her daughter was stronger than her own pulse, a primal longing. Now she’d had Ruthie back for half a year, but sometimes Cass felt like she was losing the thread that bound the two of them together.
So she listened and she listened harder.
“The fork goes on this side,” Ruthie said in a voice that was little more than a whisper, patting the mattress on the floor. She was a quiet child; she never yelled, never shouted with joy or rage. “The knife and spoon go here. You can put the plate in the middle. That’s where it goes.”
Cass murmured encouragingly, folding back the sheets and blankets as she listened. These lessons were pointless, but what else could she do? For some, the old rituals brought a kind of solace. Ingrid was such a person.
The room was illuminated by a stub of candle melted to a plate, and when Ruthie was tucked in she blew the candle out, as was customary. Candlelight was to be conserved, to be used only when necessary.
“Can I help set the table tomorrow?” Ruthie asked, yawning. Tomorrow Suzanne would watch the kids so the other two could work, the three of them rotating every three days. Despite their troubles, Suzanne and Cass had an unspoken agreement never to let their discord affect the children.
Cass calculated what needed doing tomorrow—Earl had promised to come to Garden Island in the afternoon and look at some erosion that was threatening the area Cass had tilled for lettuce along the southern bank—but she could knock off after that, come by and get Ruthie. They could help with dinner, eat early and still have time to visit the hospital.
It had been a long time—too long—three weeks, a month? She hadn’t meant to let it happen, but it had gotten harder and harder to go there.
But yes, she had promised herself she would be better.
They could get there in time to help Sun-hi with the last few chores of the day. And Ruthie actually enjoyed the visits—she was too little to be afraid.
“Yes, Babygirl,” Cass said, trying to keep her tone light. “And then you can wash all the dishes. And dry them and put them away. How does that sound?”
“Will you help me?” Ruthie asked doubtfully, sleep overtaking her voice. So serious, Ruthie never seemed to know when Cass was teasing her.
“Of course I’ll help you,” Cass whispered, laying her head down on the mattress next to Ruthie’s, her knees on the carpet. She felt Ruthie’s breath on her cheek. Before long it became regular with sleep.
Cass kissed her softly and crawled over to the corner of the room where she kept their few special things in a cabinet that had once held electronics, part of a “media center” in a time when media still roamed the earth and electric byways. She ran her hand over the books, the toys and jars of lotion, the wooden flute and the little glass bowl of earrings, and only then did she take down the antique wooden box that had held a board game a hundred years ago. She’d traded a potted lime-tree seedling for the box, which a woman had carried with her all the way from Petaluma in her backpack. On its surface, in flaking paint, was the image of a dancing bear balancing an umbrella on its snout. No one knew what the box meant to the woman, or why she’d carried it all those miles, because not long after arriving in New Eden, she cut her foot on a piece of broken bottle in the muddy shores, and died three weeks later when the infection reached her heart.
The woman had one good friend, a mute who had walked beside her all this way, who inherited her few paltry things when she died. Who now owned a lime tree.
Cass ran her fingertips lightly over the painted bear. Then she opened the box, took the plastic bottle from inside and put it to her lips.
The first swallow burned like heated steel, like justice done.
The second swallow and all the ones after that went down like nothing.
Chapter 3
THE SINGING WAS back, somewhere behind his eyes, a strange high-pitched, tuneless song that had been weaving in and out of his diluted dreams for days, or months, or years, for all he knew. It seemed like he had been here forever. “Here” was a place of watery uncertainty, its outline flickering and disappearing, brief flashes that inevitably faded into the nothing, over and over and over again.
His senses were gone. He was content—well, perhaps
content
was not right, but
aware
of his lack of sensation and glad for it. At one time, in that vast unknowable that was Before, there had been pain, indescribable pain. But now there was just nothing, and he drifted around in the nothing and was aware of it and that was all.
Until the singing started, a whiffling, meandering tune as though someone was letting the air out of a bicycle tire.
The thing that was Smoke, this creation of mind and nothing, stumbled over this thought:
Bicycle. Tire.
Details came into focus:
bicycle tire
was black, matte to the touch and about the size of the round mirror that had hung above the mantel in his parents’ home in Valencia.
Mantel
Parents
Valencia
No, no, no—this was no good. New thoughts intruded, and Smoke’s consciousness shivered and contracted, like an amoeba under a slide. He did not want to think. He did not want to wake.
Mantel, parents, Valencia.
In the trilevel house in Valencia where Smoke lived with his father, who sold…
Acuras
…and his mother, who dabbled in portrait photography—
Dad
Acura
Mom
portraits
—there were fires in the fireplace and trays of sandwiches and the game on Monday nights.
Also, he was not called Smoke.
Edward Allen Schaffer, that was his name, and he had grown up in Valencia and his parents were dead and now people called him Smoke and he’d loved a woman and he’d tried to make up for the terrible thing he had done but they’d found him first and that was all.
Wait—it wasn’t really singing, was it?
What Smoke had mistaken for singing wasn’t sound at all—it was light. It waited outside his eyelids but it was growing impatient with waiting, and when it became impatient it pressed harder against him and became like a sound, entering his brain and ricocheting from one corner to the other. It wanted him to come back. It insisted that he come back. Smoke did not want to, but now he understood that it was not his choice.
Painfully, inevitably, Smoke began to gather himself.
First step…somewhere, he’d had a body. Where he’d left it, he wasn’t really sure, but he would not be able to do much of anything without it, and so he cast his weary and reluctant mind out until it stumbled upon the form of the thing and he traced its shape with his memory. It made him laugh, or at least remember laughing, remember the feel of laughter if not the reason.
Toes! Toes were ridiculous, weren’t they? Something to laugh about? There were so many of them, and it took Smoke a long time to count each of them, two sets at the end of his two feet. These were attached to legs, which had apparently been there all along but damn if he hadn’t forgotten about them. Wonderingly, Smoke recalled his legs and that was enough for a while and he let go, exhausted, and floated back out into the nothing and rested some more.
Days passed. Nights passed.
The next time he came back, the toes, feet and legs were still there and now so were arms. Fingers—these he found interesting enough to dwell on for a while, especially since they felt…incomplete. Memories of touching things, grabbing them, holding them, breaking them. His stomach. His neck. So, it was mostly all there, then. He was all there, and apparently had been for some time. Again, that struck him as funny and he smiled or thought he smiled, though maybe he only imagined either event.
Wait…there was something. Something important. The woman. The woman and the girl. Cass and Ruthie. Those were their names. Hair like corn silk, eyes like green agate.
The memories and sensations coming back too sharp and too fast now, bringing with them pain. Smoke groaned, remembering a kiss—that would be Cass. She tasted like sun and iron and oranges, her skin was silk and velvet and he wanted it.
Wanted her.
He had been at a crossroads, had been choosing the forgetting place, except now he’d remembered Cass and there was no longer a choice, only Cass, only the Cass-shaped hole she’d left in him.
Once, he thought she came to him. He struggled to come up from the wavery not-here. He was willing to accept the pain of returning, willing to let go of the lovely forgetting, if only he could see her, touch her, and he tried, God how he tried. He called her name, but he had no voice because it, too, was still caught in the gone place.
The grief of this loss was as real as what he’d left behind. Whether she was a prisoner, too, or a spirit, he didn’t know—only that she’d been here. That was enough, that and the memories. They strengthened him and girded him for the pain.
The nothing was gone. The pain was waiting. He breathed in deep and pushed off from the edges and broke the surface, and with a mighty effort, he opened his eyes.
Chapter 4
WHEN DOR CAME around, the sounds of partying in the distance had mostly died down. Earlier, there had been the occasional shout, laughter carrying on the breeze, a couple of firecrackers—where they had come from, Cass had no idea, since nearly everything that could be ignited or exploded had been set off a year earlier when the Siege splintered weeks into riots and looting and people fighting in the streets.
Back then, Cass had trouble sleeping through the sounds of car crashes, screaming, gunshots, things being thrown and driven over and crashed into. By the time she finally left her trailer for the last time, joining those who were sheltering at the Silva library, the street in front of her house smelled of damp ash and rot, and smoke trailed lazily from half a dozen burned structures throughout the town while corpses rotted in cars and parlors and survivors learned that the Beaters weren’t so easy to kill.
Sleep had been hard then, because sobriety meant you had to let it all in, every sound, every thought, every memory. Doing A.A. the right way meant handing over your denial card; those who held on too tight never lasted long, and Cass had been in the program long enough to see people come and go. So when she lay awake in her hot, lonely trailer, tears leaking slowly down her face, she accepted the sounds as her due, just one more surcharge of sobriety.
Of course, none of that was a problem now.
Cass sat on the rough poured-concrete stoop behind the house, sipping and watching the bonfire burning down to embers in the middle of the big dirt yard in front of the community center a ways off. On warm days people played football and volleyball there. In the spring there would be picnics; if Cass managed to patch things up with Suzanne by then, they could take the girls there to make wreaths of dandelions and wild loosestrife.
The building’s doors had been thrown wide and people spilled out of the party room holding their cups and plastic bottles. Drinking wasn’t forbidden in New Eden, and it wasn’t even exactly frowned upon, but you didn’t see much of it except on nights like these. It had been hard to get used to, after the indulgent ethos of the Box—sometimes the mood of New Eden seemed like a hoedown or a revival, wholesome to the point of cloying.
Sometimes Cass missed the edge-walkers. The despair-dwellers. The ones who routinely lost their battles with themselves.
Her
people.
And sometimes she wondered if people like that were just another species doomed to extinction. Aftertime was not hospitable to weakness. It offered too many outs, too many reasons to quit.
Cass couldn’t quit, though, because she had Ruthie. So when she fell off the wagon, she fell with excruciating care. She did not actually enjoy a single drop of her cheap kaysev wine as she slowly sipped it down. She wanted to gulp, to drown in it; instead she parceled out not quite enough, every night—and never before Ruthie went to sleep—enough to get just a little bit out of herself. Cass thirsted for complete oblivion; instead she medicated herself to a painful place in the shadows cast by what she couldn’t escape.
A footstep on gravel, a figure cutting moonlight—Cass nearly missed him, focused as she was on the orange glow of the remains of the bonfire. But it could only be one person, the one man who knew her habit of sitting out here late into the night while the community slept, the sentries at the bridge the only other souls awake in the small hours.
“Thought you were going to turn in early,” Dor said, lowering his tall, sinewy body next to hers.
Cass shrugged. “You knew I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
For a while they sat in silence. Dor drank the dregs of homegrown wine. When he got to the bottom, he held up his plastic cup—the flimsy kind that college kids used to serve at keggers—and stared at it from several angles in the light of the bonfire a hundred yards away.
Then he crushed it in his hand as though it was nothing. Cass raised her eyebrows in the dark.
“Better not let Dana see you do that.”
Dana was the compliance leader, tasked with making sure everyone reused and recycled and composted—and the most vocal member of the New Eden council. The council operated on principles of concordance and had sworn off hierarchy, which only seemed to make Dana that much more dogged about getting his way whenever an issue was brought before it. He also seemed to delight in taking rule-breakers to task, though there was no formal punishment structure, only admonishments to do better. You got the feeling Dana would have welcomed more authority as long as he was the one wielding it.
Dor flashed a bitter grin that quickly disappeared. “Dana can go fuck himself. I’ve just spent eight hours up to my ass in rotting siding and I have the splinters to prove it. If I want to stomp one cup under my boot for old times’ sake, I’d guess I’ve earned the right.”
But rather than tossing the cup on the ground, he took the twisted, torn mess and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. No one littered in New Eden, not even Dor—the three islands were all they had.
“Ruthie sleeping?” he asked after a while, and when his words were followed by his warm, rough fingertips on the strip of skin at the small of her back between sweater and jeans, Cass swallowed hard, because he could take her to the other place that fast.
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely as his fingers traced circles, drifting slowly lower. This went on for a while, moments, hours, who knew…it was always like this, him barely touching her, both of them going white-hot in seconds. They never talked about it. Sometimes he would keep talking—about the things he was fixing, about nails and shingles and broken asphalt; about a bird he’d seen lighting on a fence post, or a book the raiders had found somewhere; about his daughter’s latest project, a mural she was painting on the wall of their building or a jean jacket she was embellishing with Valerie’s help. He would talk, and Cass would murmur in the appropriate places, the lulls and silences in their conversation, and if someone had been listening to the two of them, unable to see where his hands were going, they would never know there was anything going on except conversation. Dull conversation.
“I might take a ride out with Nathan tomorrow,” Dor went on, without inflection. “Go out toward Oakton, see what we can find.”
Cass nodded. Nathan siphoned gas from wrecked vehicles, using a system he’d rigged from a pump, a length of hose and some custom couplings—along with a sledgehammer and crowbar for dealing with tank locking devices. He drove out in his tiny hybrid in the mornings and came back with his cans and jugs full. Cass suspected Nathan did it more for sport than anything else—and that Dor went with him for the same reason.
“Be careful,” she said unnecessarily. Beaters had been showing up more often lately along the shore, five or six times a week, where they could easily be picked off while they screamed in frustration, unable to swim. There was a certain fascination in watching Glynnis and John, the best shots on the island, taking the skiff out and shooting them at almost point-blank range, dropping them with a single shot to the head or spine, the only sure way to kill them quickly. Cass never let Ruthie watch, but she’d joined the other spectators half a dozen times, borrowing Jasmine’s binoculars so the burst of blood filled her vision through the lenses.
But meeting them on land was another story entirely. Especially since Nathan and Dor had to get out of the car to siphon.
“I will,” Dor growled as he pulled Cass toward him, his big hand wrapped around her arm, his warmth seeping into her skin even through her jacket.
She went wordlessly, straddling him in the dark, and her mouth met his with a hoarse cry deep in her throat. Her knees ground against the hard, cold concrete as she levered herself more forcefully against him. She could feel his hardness between her legs, and his hands slid down her back, against her ass, pulling her against him. Her teeth knocked against his, and his mouth was hot and hungry on hers. She plunged her hands into his hair—long enough to snarl in her fingers—and felt the bristle of his beard against her thumbs.
It was like this with Dor, this hunger, this need to consume him and be consumed. There was nothing tender about it. Every time, she had bruises. Sometimes one of them would break skin with their teeth, their nails. But every time, this feeling.
“Where is she?” Cass gasped, wrenching herself away from the kiss. She could feel Dor scowl, his jaw tightening under her hands.
“Can’t be sure,” he said, kissing the soft skin under her chin, scraping against it. He knew she meant Sammi, not the woman. Twice—only when both Valerie and Sammi were safely on the sparsely populated northern island for the day—Dor and Cass had fucked in his room, the luxury of a bed intoxicatingly heady but almost distracting, because they were so accustomed to sheds, abandoned boathouses and, most often, the cold ground at night. They’d rutted in between the rows of plants in Cass’s garden on moonlit nights and on the rocky, muddy shore on moonless ones, and Dor had taken her standing up in a narrow space between trucks in the auto shed. Many times, working in the thin winter sun by herself, Cass thought about what they did and wondered if it was the shame of it, the degradation of hiding, that made it that much more intense.
She tasted the liquor on his mouth and licked it greedily. She could not get enough of the taste of him. So it would be another time in the open, another morning when she would wake in filthy clothes, dirt ground into her knees, her elbows, twigs and pebbles in her hair.
Well, so be it.
Dor stood, half carrying her until she wriggled from his grip and found her footing. Dor, who had been an investor Before, who had spent his days under fluorescent lights working at a computer, had been hardened Aftertime. Until they came to New Eden, he’d run the Box, a fenced-in pleasure mart, and he’d trained with former cops and gang members, learned martial arts and shooting and put his body through a demanding regimen until it was as imposing and strong as it could be.
And Smoke had done the same, right along with him. What else was there to fill their days?
Everyone was lean and basically fit now. Life demanded it. Physical labor filled everyone’s hours. But Dor ran the length of the islands at dawn, and he lifted weights in the lean-to where sports equipment was haphazardly stored, on both fine days and rainy ones. He was even more hard-muscled now than when they arrived, and Cass suspected it was because he was no longer in charge of anything, no longer a leader, and too much energy accumulated inside him with nowhere to go. His skin against hers was hot; his muscles had been hardened by his own punishment.
He led her ungently down the rocky path to the water’s edge. Here, on the southeast end of the middle island, a wooden dock extended twenty feet into the water, its pilings loose, water lapping over the far end. Soon someone would need to either fix or salvage it. But that was not for tonight. Dor led her to the center, which was dry, if splintered and rough, and pulled her against him. His breath was hot on her neck; his teeth grazed against her skin. She seized handfuls of his shirt, threw back her head and let go of conscious thought. For a moment he crushed her against him, and Cass’s eyelids flickered at the sensation of her body joined all the length of his, the bonfire a golden, shimmering, wavering illusion in the distance, before she let them drift shut.
If she’d kept them open, she might have seen her coming.
By the time her footsteps clattered on the wooden boards and her shocked gasp reached their ears, by the time Dor and Cass disentangled from each other, it was too late to do anything but try to keep their balance as the dock swayed and rocked.
A flashlight’s beam arced wildly across the dock, skittering over the water, until it leveled at them, shining it directly into each of their faces in turn. Cass blinked hard, but when Sammi lowered the light, she saw that the girl’s eyes were filled with tears.
“Dad?” she gasped. “Oh my God—Cass—what are you
doing?
”
Cass backed away from Dor, as though to erase what the girl had seen, but really, even a fifteen-year-old couldn’t mistake what they were doing for anything but what it was.
“Wuh…we were just—” Cass stammered. Dor’s hand shot out and he grabbed Sammi’s hand, but she jerked it back.
“Oh my
God!
” she repeated. “I can’t believe— Her?
Her?
”
And then she was running, but at the edge of the shore her shoe caught on the lip of the dock and she went sprawling. Dor raced to help her up. Cass stood, with her hand to her throat, unable to breathe, knowing what they had broken, the enormity of it buzzing in her head.
Sammi refused her father’s hand, crawled away from him, got to her feet and paused for only a second, her arms hugging her slender frame.
“I hate you!” she cried. “I hate you
both!
”
And then she was sprinting away, the light’s beam ricocheting wildly across the landscape, back toward the bonfire, and disappearing completely around a wide building.
Dor watched Sammi go. Cass watched him watching. She ached for him, even as her skin still tingled with the memory of his touch.
Sammi wasn’t supposed to see them, not ever. No one was. How they thought they could keep doing this without anyone ever finding out, in a place as small as these islands, she had no idea.
But neither of them had been able to stop. Not once.