Scarecrow

She didn’t say anything about the crater.

I’d thought she would. I’d walked down through the wheat with Garnet hanging on my hand and Genny on the other side, and every step of the way I’d been working out what I’d say. That I was sorry. That I hadn’t meant it. That I’d stopped. That I didn’t know if I could stop again.

I came into the front room, and she looked at me from her pillows by the stove, and held out her hand.

I went and sat on the edge of the bed. She took my hand in both of hers. Her fingers were cold and thin and had no strength in them at all.

She looked at my face for a long time. At the dried blood on my lip that Genny had missed. At my eyes.

”You stopped,” she said.

That was all. Just that. Not a question.

I nodded. I couldn’t talk.

”Good,” said Mother. ”That’s the only part that matters.” She squeezed my hand, a very little. ”Now go and wash your face. Garnet’s been keeping your supper warm for three hours, and if you don’t eat it she’ll never forgive either of us.”

I went and washed my face.

I ate my supper. Garnet watched every bite.

Later, much later, after the twins were in bed, I sat in Father’s chair by the window in the dark and Mother said, out of nowhere, ”He did it too. Once.”

I turned my head.

”The first week,” she said. ”After the locks. We were walking east, and we came to the edge of a town. The sign was still standing. Your father looked back over his shoulder, the way we’d come, and you could still see the dome from there. Very small.” She paused. ”He took the town apart. Every building. In about a minute. I watched him do it. Then he sat down in the road and put his hands over his eyes, exactly like you. And I sat down next to him and waited.”

I didn’t say anything.

”It doesn’t go away,” Mother said. ”I won’t lie to you. It didn’t for him. But you learn where the bottom of it is. You learn to feel it coming. And you learn to put your hands over your eyes before it gets there.” A long breath. ”You’ll learn. You’ve already started.”

”I almost—”

”I know.”

”Three miles, Mother. I got three miles. If Genny hadn’t—”

”Genny didn’t stop you,” Mother said. ”You’d stopped already. Genny just sat with you so you wouldn’t be alone afterward.” Her voice was very soft. ”That’s what we do in this family. We sit with each other afterward. Your father taught me that. I taught Genny. Someday you’ll teach Garnet, or someone else.”

The stove ticked in the dark.

”Go to bed, love,” she said.

I went to bed. I didn’t think I’d sleep.

I slept for eleven hours.

When I came down the next morning, the teapot was floating.

I stopped dead in the kitchen doorway.

It hung in the air over the stove at about the height of my chest, slowly turning, steam curling from its spout. As I watched, it tilted, and poured a thin stream of tea into a cup that was also floating, a foot to the left of it. The cup filled. The pot tilted back. The cup drifted across the kitchen and out the door into the front room.

I followed it.

Mother was sitting up. Properly sitting up, against her pillows, not slumped. There was color in her cheeks for the first time in months, two small spots of pink. Her hair had been brushed and pinned back. And she was watching the cup come toward her with an expression of intense, slightly cross-eyed concentration.

It arrived in front of her and hung there, wobbling. She took it in both hands. Then she looked up at me and smiled. Her real smile, the one from the photograph.

”Four o’clock,” she said.

”It’s seven in the morning.”

”It’s four o’clock somewhere.” She drank. ”I woke up and I could feel it. Like a door that’s been stuck for a year, and then one morning it swings open. So I thought I’d better make some tea before it stuck again.”

I stood in the doorway and didn’t know what to say.

I knew what this was. I’d read about it, in the eleven medical books in Father’s study, in the one with Dot — find out first written on the inside cover. There was a chapter near the back. I’d read it twice and then never again.

The books called it a rally.

I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I went into the kitchen and made eggs, the good kind, not blue, and when I came back with them she ate the whole plate, every bite, and asked for more.

Garnet came down the stairs half asleep, saw Mother sitting up with a cup of tea floating beside her head, and screamed so loud Genny came running with a frying pan.

Then Garnet burst into tears and climbed onto the bed and wouldn’t let go of Mother for half an hour. Genny stood in the doorway with the frying pan held out in front of her and looked at me, and I saw her mind racing, the way mine had. Genny had read the medical books too. Some of them.

I didn’t know if she’d got to the chapter near the back.

I shook my head at her, very slightly. Not now.

She put the frying pan down.

On the second day, she wanted to sit in the kitchen.

Not in bed by the stove. In the kitchen. At the table. Under the wall.

Genny carried her through in Father’s chair, the one from the window, the whole chair at once with Mother in it, floating, Mother laughing and telling her to mind the doorframe. Genny minded the doorframe with about a quarter of an inch to spare on each side and set the chair down at the head of the table where Father used to sit. Then she stood back with her arms folded and pretended she hadn’t just done the gentlest thing anyone had ever seen.

Mother looked up at the wall.

She looked at it for a long time. The faded gray boxes, the blue and the orange. The oatmeal smear across the noble gases. Everything alive. Respect this one.

”He used to paint at night,” she said. ”I’d sit right here with a cup of tea and watch him. He was so careful with it. He’d hold his breath on the straight lines.”

Then she turned to the kitchen and clapped her hands once, and said, ”Right. Breakfast.”

And she made it.

Not with her hands. She couldn’t have stood at the stove for a minute. She did it from the chair, the old way, the way I remembered from when I was very small. The flour tin opened itself and floated over to the counter. A bowl drifted down off the shelf to meet it. A wooden spoon rose up out of the jar on the windowsill and began to stir, slowly, while an egg cracked itself neatly on the edge of the bowl and dropped in.

Garnet sat at the table with her mouth open.

She’d never seen it. Not really. By the time Garnet was old enough to remember things, Mother’s hands had already started to shake, and the teapot had stopped coming at four o’clock. To Garnet, Mother had always been the woman in the bed by the stove.

She watched the spoon stir by itself and the bowls float from shelf to counter to table, three of them, in a little line, like ducks crossing a pond. She watched Mother’s face, calm and concentrating, with that faint cross-eyed look. She didn’t make a sound.

The last bowl floated down and landed in front of her. It was porridge. It had a strawberry on top. Mother’s strawberry, not Garnet’s, made with her mind from the inside of a cherry stone, a little bit lopsided.

Garnet looked at it. Then she looked at Mother.

”You never told me you could do that,” she said, in a very small voice.

”I could always do that,” said Mother. ”I just forgot for a while.”

Garnet didn’t eat the strawberry. She took it out of the bowl very carefully and put it in her pocket, and I don’t think anyone in the family ever found out what she did with it.

In the afternoon, Mother wanted to play cards.

We had one deck. It was older than me. It had come from the ridge settlement in trade for a jar of Father’s water, years ago, and half the cards were soft as cloth and the queen of clubs had a tooth mark in the corner that Genny swore was Garnet’s and Garnet swore was Genny’s. Mother taught us all the game she’d learned in the orphan hall. It was called Crowns, and it involved a lot of shouting.

We played in the kitchen, the four of us around the table, with the light coming in long and gold across Father’s wall.

Mother didn’t touch her cards. She held them in the air in front of her, fanned out, floating a few inches above the table. When it was her turn, a card would slide out of the fan and turn itself over and settle onto the pile, and she’d say, ”Crown,” or ”Pass,” or something rude, depending.

Garnet won the first game.

Genny won the second.

Garnet won the third and fourth.

By the fifth game, Genny had narrowed her eyes.

She watched Mother’s floating cards with intense suspicion. She watched the pile. She watched Mother’s face, which was perfectly innocent. When Garnet won the fifth game with a run of three crowns that should not mathematically have been possible, Genny put her cards down flat on the table.

”You’re letting us win,” she said.

”I would never,” said Mother.

”You held the queen of clubs for three turns. I saw it. You could have crowned on the second turn and you didn’t.”

”I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

”You’re cheating,” said Genny. ”You’re cheating to lose.”

Mother looked at her with an expression of enormous dignity.

”Genevieve Dask,” she said, ”I have been playing this game since before you were a thought in anyone’s head. I have played it in orphan halls and barracks and bomb shelters and once, memorably, on the roof of an invader ship while it was on fire. If I wished to beat you, I would beat you so thoroughly that your grandchildren would feel it.” She sniffed. ”I am simply having a bad day.”

Genny opened her mouth.

Then she closed it again. Something went across her face. She looked at Mother, and at the cards floating in the air, steady and sure, and at the pink in Mother’s cheeks, and she picked up her own cards again without a word.

Garnet won the sixth game too, and crowed about it until supper.

I caught Mother watching me that evening.

I was at the sink, washing up. Genny was drying. Garnet was sitting on the counter, telling the gold fishing weight about the card game. And when I turned round to put a bowl on the shelf, Mother was looking at me from her chair at the head of the table.

Not the way you look at someone across a kitchen. The way you look at a page you want to remember. Slowly. Carefully. All of me, a little bit at a time. My hands in the water. My face. The way I stood.

She didn’t look away when I caught her. She just smiled a little, and kept looking.

I knew what she was doing. I’d done it myself, at the window, the night of the moon story. I’d done it on the porch at dusk, the first night, holding her cold hand. You look at the thing you’re going to lose, and you try to keep it.

I turned back to the sink so she could keep going without me watching.

I washed the same bowl four times.

On the third day, she knitted.

She asked for the wool first thing in the morning. It was in a basket under her bed: gray wool, soft, spun from the fleece of the ridge settlement’s last two sheep and traded for three jars of honey Father had made from nothing. Six inches of scarf were already done on the needles. The bit she’d managed before my birthday, before her hands stopped holding them.

She didn’t hold them now either.

The needles rose out of the basket and hung in front of her, and the wool unwound itself from the ball and fed up into them, and they began to move. Click. Click. Click. Slowly at first. Then faster, finding their rhythm. Garnet sat cross-legged on the end of the bed and watched, rapt, her head going back and forth with each stitch.

”Can you teach me?” she asked.

”With your hands,” said Mother. ”Not like this. You have to learn it with your hands first. Then you’ll know it all the way through, and you can do it however you like.”

”Like Lucas and the chemistry.”

”Exactly like Lucas and the chemistry.”

So Mother taught her. She sent the needles into Garnet’s hands, and then she sat and talked her through it, stitch by stitch, and every few minutes she reached out with her mind and gently straightened a stitch that had gone wrong. Garnet’s tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth. She dropped a stitch, and then another, and then she got three in a row right and shrieked so loud the teapot rattled.

By noon there were eight more inches of scarf. Some of it was Mother’s, smooth and even. Some of it was Garnet’s, lumpy and too tight and with a hole in it where a stitch had escaped.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

”It’s for Lucas,” she said to Garnet. ”It was meant to be his birthday present. I want you to finish it for me.”

Garnet looked up. ”Why can’t you finish it?”

There was a little pause.

”Because you need the practice,” said Mother. ”And because it’ll be better if both of us made it. Will you do that for me, darling? Will you finish it, even if it takes a long time?”

”Yes,” said Garnet, at once.

”Promise?”

Garnet looked at her. She was very serious.

”I promise,” she said.

Across the room, in Father’s chair, Genny had gone very still. She didn’t look up from her book. She didn’t turn the page, either, the whole rest of the afternoon.

At the end of the third day, Mother asked to go out to the field.

Not to the porch. To the field. To the scarecrow.

”I want to walk,” she said.

”You can’t walk,” said Genny.

”Then I’ll walk a very small amount, and your brother will hold me up for the rest. Lucas.”

I picked her up.

She weighed almost nothing. That was what I’d remember, after. Not the sunset, or the wheat, or what she said. How little she weighed. I carried her down the porch steps and set her feet on the ground at the edge of the field, very carefully, and kept my arm around her waist, and she stood.

She stood on her own feet in the wheat for the first time in a month. And then she walked.

Not far. Down the middle row, between the gold heads, one step and then a long pause and then another. I held most of her weight. Genny walked on her other side, not touching her, with her hands ready. Garnet ran ahead and then back and then ahead again, like a dog that can’t decide.

It took a long time. We didn’t hurry.

When we got to the scarecrow, Mother put out her hand and touched its coat.

Father’s coat. The patched elbows. The faded charcoal face that looked so faintly disappointed in all of us. Garnet’s wheat bracelet was still around its wrist, gone dry and pale now.

Mother stood and looked at it with her hand on its sleeve.

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she leaned close to the feed-sack head, and said something very quietly. I don’t know what it was. I was holding her up, and my ear was right there, and I still didn’t hear it. I don’t think it was meant for me.

Then she straightened, a little, and looked back at the house.

The sun was going down behind the ridge. The house sat at the bottom of the valley with the lamp lit in the front window and the filter humming in the walls, and the wheat around it gold, the real gold, the few minutes at the end of the day. The east edge was green where Genny had fixed it. The tree stood over Father’s stone with its long shadow stretched across the grass.

”He made all of this,” Mother said. ”Out of nothing. Out of ash.”

”I know.”

”No.” She shook her head slightly. ”You know he made the field. You know he made the filter, and the house, and the food in the cellar. But that’s not what I mean.” She looked at the three of us. Genny beside her, very straight. Garnet in the wheat with dried stalks in her hair. Me, holding her up. ”He made this. Out of nothing. Out of two people they’d thrown away.”

She was quiet a moment.

”It was enough,” she said. ”I want you all to know that. Whatever comes. It was enough. It was more than enough.”

Garnet came and leaned against her, carefully, on the side that wasn’t me. Genny put one hand on her back, very lightly, just resting there.

We stood like that in the middle of the field, the four of us and the scarecrow, until the sun went down.

She was very tired that night.

I carried her back to the house and put her in the bed by the stove and she was asleep before I’d pulled the blanket up. The pink had gone out of her cheeks. Her breathing had gone shallow again, careful, like walking on ice.

The needles lay in the basket under the bed, beside the half-finished scarf. They didn’t move.

The teapot sat on the stove, cold.

Garnet came down in her nightgown and climbed onto the end of the bed and curled up there like a cat, the way she had most nights that month. Genny brought her blanket down and lay on the floor beside it. Neither of them asked what was wrong. Neither of them said anything at all.

I sat in Father’s chair by the window with the lamp turned low and watched Mother sleep.

Three days. That was what the chapter near the back of the book had said. Sometimes a day. Sometimes a week. Most often three.

I’d known since the teapot. I hadn’t told anyone. I’d just tried to look at all of it, everything, every minute, as hard as I could. The bowls crossing the kitchen like ducks. The queen of clubs held for three turns. Garnet’s tongue between her teeth over the knitting. Mother standing on her own feet in the wheat.

I’d tried to keep it.

Out in the field, the wind came down the valley, and the scarecrow’s coat lifted at the hem.

I didn’t go out to fix it. Not that night.

I stayed where I was, and watched her breathe.