Scarecrow

Mother left the hospital in a wheelchair, and hated it.

”I can walk,” she said.

”You can walk eleven steps,” said Dr. Halloway. ”I counted. The Tower is a great deal more than eleven steps from here.”

”Then Genny can carry me.”

”Genny is nine,” said Dr. Halloway, ”and you’ve been carried enough by your children. Sit down, Dorothy.”

Mother sat down. She glared at the doctor the whole way to the car. Dr. Halloway pretended not to notice. I was starting to think they’d known each other a long time.

The car was long and gray and low, and its doors closed by themselves. It slid out of the hospital’s gates onto a wide avenue, between rows of trees, and the driver turned toward the center of the dome.

Then Mother said, ”The ring street.”

The driver glanced in his mirror. At Dr. Halloway, who was sitting up front.

”It’s the long way,” said the doctor.

”I know it’s the long way,” said Mother. ”Take it.”

The driver took it.

The ring street was the oldest street in New Halcyon, Mother said. It ran all the way round the inside of the dome, just inside the wall, in a great curve, and every gate opened onto it. When she was a girl in the orphan hall, it had been the only street the children were allowed to walk on. Once a month. In a line. Holding hands.

It was busy. Shops along both sides with their doors open. People on the pavements in clean bright clothes. A cart full of fruit. Children.

The people stopped as we went past.

Not all at once. It spread out from the car like rings in water. A woman with a basket saw us through the window and stopped dead. Then the man beside her. Then the people across the street. They knew who we were. Everyone knew. They’d seen the crater from their rooftops.

A mother on the far pavement took her little boy by the arm and pulled him behind her skirt. Quietly. Without taking her eyes off the car.

Garnet waved at him through the window.

He ducked out of sight.

Garnet’s hand came down slowly. She didn’t say anything. She looked at Mother.

Mother was looking out of her own window. Her face hadn’t changed. But her hand on the blanket over her knees had gone very tight.

”They used to stop us in the street to touch our hands,” she said quietly. To nobody. ”On this street. Right here.”

Then Garnet grabbed my arm so hard it hurt.

”There,” she said.

It was a small shop, narrower than the ones on either side, with a dark green door and a wide front window. A painted sign over the door, the paint gone pale and cracked. A loaf of bread, in gold. Under it, in old curling letters: THORNE & DAUGHTER. BAKERS.

The window was empty. A shutter had been pulled halfway down over it. A small card hung inside the glass: CLOSED.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The bread went in the window at six.

Mother had gone completely still.

She was looking at the green door. At the window. At the gold loaf on the sign. And her face was doing something I’d never seen it do. Not sad. Not angry. Something younger than both. As if she were fifteen again, holding hands in a line on the only street she was allowed to walk on, looking at the steam on the glass.

”It’s still here,” she said.

The car went past. The shop slid away behind a curve of the street. Garnet twisted round in her seat to keep it in sight until it was gone.

Mother didn’t turn round. She sat looking straight ahead with her hands tight on the blanket.

”Daughter,” she said, very quietly, after a while. ”It didn’t say daughter before.”

The car turned off the ring street onto a wide straight avenue. The towers got taller. The gardens got bigger.

Genny said, ”Stop the car.”

The driver looked at Dr. Halloway. Dr. Halloway looked at Mother. Mother nodded.

The car stopped.

Genny was looking out of her window at the blank side wall of an apartment building. A huge flat sheet of pale stone, nine stories high.

In the middle of it, there was a shape. Very faint. A rectangle of stone that was very slightly paler than the rest, as if something had covered it for years and then been taken away. And inside it, fainter still, the ghosts of figures, where paint had soaked into the stone before it was scrubbed. Two people, back to back. One with an arm raised. Something hanging in the air above her hand.

And along the top, almost nothing, the outline of letters.

H. U. M.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

Then she turned her head and looked across the avenue. At the tall white tower on the other side, with gardens spilling off every terrace and a glint of a pool on the roof.

”The forty-first floor,” she said. ”On this side. With the window over the gardens.” A pause. ”Facing that wall.”

Dr. Halloway, in the front seat, had turned round. She was looking at Mother with an expression I couldn’t read.

”Dorothy,” she said. ”I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d—”

”Of course he did,” said Mother. Her voice was quite calm. ”He always does. He puts you exactly where you’ll feel it most, and then he’s very kind to you while you feel it.” She looked at the tower. ”Which floor is it, Ruth?”

Dr. Halloway hesitated.

”The sixtieth,” she said.

Mother nodded slowly.

”Then I suppose I’ll be looking down on it,” she said. ”Drive on.”

The lift was a small mirrored room with no buttons. When the doors closed, it simply rose, so smoothly that the only way you could tell was the little lit number over the door, counting.

Nobody said anything.

39. 40.

41.

Mother’s hand on the arm of the wheelchair closed. I watched it in the mirror. The knuckles went white.

42.

She didn’t look at the number. She looked straight ahead, at the four of us in the mirrored wall, in our patched clothes, with ash still on our boots. Her hand stayed closed until the number said 60.

The doors opened.

It was the whole floor.

Walls of glass on every side and the city spread out below like a map. Pale wood floors. Thick rugs. Couches big enough for five people. Lamps that came on by themselves. Plants in stone pots taller than me. A fireplace with a real fire.

It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I hated it immediately.

Garnet didn’t.

She let go of my hand in the lift doorway and ran. Through the main room and down a hall and into a room and out again. Lucas, there’s a bath, it’s as big as the cellar. A door. Genny, there’s a room just for BOOKS. Running feet. There’s STAIRS.

The stairs went up to the roof. The roof had a pool on it.

Genny didn’t run. Genny walked the perimeter. Slowly, touching every wall, opening every door and shutting it again. She found the stairs to the roof and went up and came down. She found a narrow stairwell at the back of the kitchen going down sixty floors, and stood looking into it for a long time.

”Two ways out,” she said quietly when she came back. ”The lift and the stairs. The lift they can stop.” She glanced at the glass walls. ”And the windows.”

”We’re not going out of the windows.”

”No,” said Genny. ”But I could. And I could carry her.”

She went to check the bedrooms.

Mother hadn’t moved. She’d had Dr. Halloway wheel her to the glass wall on the side that faced the avenue, and she sat there with her hands in her lap, looking down.

You could see it from here. The blank side of the building across the street. The pale rectangle in the stone, nine stories high. From sixty floors up, the ghosts of the figures were clearer than they’d been from the street. Two people, back to back. An arm raised.

And somewhere below us, nineteen floors down, a window over the gardens where a girl of twenty used to close the curtains on it every night.

”Mother,” I said.

”I’m all right, love,” she said, without turning round. ”I’m just looking.”

The crates had arrived before us. Stacked neatly in the main room.

Genny carried the glass into the kitchen herself. Floating it in front of her, three feet off the floor, one hand raised, past a long counter where a round pink man in a white coat and a tall white hat was chopping something green very fast.

He looked up. Saw the glass. Saw the little girl walking behind it with her hand up and nothing holding it.

He dropped the knife and backed into the stove with a small high sound.

Genny stopped. She looked at him with her face perfectly blank.

”Where does it go?” she asked.

”Anywhere,” said the man faintly. ”Anywhere at all, miss.”

Genny set it against the long wall at the end of the kitchen, between the windows, where the morning light would come through it. She let it down onto the floor without a sound.

Then I wheeled Mother in.

She saw it from the doorway.

A hundred and eighteen faded boxes, floating in a pane of glass, with the afternoon light coming through them and throwing the gray and blue and orange across the pale wood floor. The oatmeal smear across the noble gases. Everything alive. Respect this one.No.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she put her hands on the wheels of the chair and pushed herself across the kitchen. Slowly. All by herself. Right up to it. And she reached out and put her fingertips on the glass, over carbon, where his brush had been.

”He held his breath on the straight lines,” she said.

She stayed like that a while. The round pink man stood pressed against his stove, very quietly, watching her.

Then Mother turned the chair round, and looked at him, and smiled.

”Hello,” she said. ”I’m Dorothy. These are my children. Don’t mind Genny. She’s nice. She’s just bad at showing it.”

The man’s name was Bertram Dunmore. By the end of the evening, he’d stopped standing pressed against the stove.

He made dinner with his hands. Nothing changed, nothing made. The vegetables came from the terrace gardens. The eggs came from actual chickens. I stood in the doorway and watched him crack one, and he saw me watching, and asked if I wanted to try, and I cracked it and it went everywhere. He laughed, and then looked terrified that he’d laughed, and then laughed again when I didn’t do anything about it.

We ate at a table that seated twenty, all bunched at one end, the way we did at home. Mother at the head. Soup. Fish, which Garnet refused once she’d understood what it was, in case it had been somebody’s friend on the moon.

And bread. A whole round loaf, in a basket, under a white cloth.

Garnet tore a piece off. Pale inside, full of tiny holes. She put it in her mouth and chewed and stopped chewing.

And started to cry.

Not loud. Just tears, while she sat there with her mouth full, chewing very slowly, as though she were trying to memorize it.

”It’s right,” she said, when she could. ”Inside too. That’s what it’s supposed to taste like.”

Mother reached across and broke off a piece for herself. She held it a moment. Then she ate it.

She closed her eyes.

”Is it Thorne’s?” she asked, without opening them.

Mr. Dunmore looked startled. ”No, ma’am. The Tower bakery, on the third floor. Nobody up here buys from the ring street.”

Mother opened her eyes.

”No,” she said quietly. ”I don’t suppose they do.”

Garnet looked at her. Then at me.

”Page two,” said Genny, from the other side of the table, without looking up from her soup. ”Garnet may visit the bakery on the ring street by the east locks.”

”I know,” said Mother. ”I was there when you wrote it.” She looked at Garnet for a long moment. ”Six in the morning. That’s when the bread goes in the window.”

”Will you come?” said Garnet.

Mother didn’t answer straight away.

”Not the first time,” she said finally. ”The first time, I think, should be yours.”

That night, I set up the filter in the corner of my room by the glass wall. I didn’t connect it to anything. There was nothing to connect it to. But there were sockets in the walls, and I ran a wire to one, and set the timer the way Father had.

Five o’clock.

Then I went up to the roof. Mother was already there. Genny had carried her up, chair and all, and set her at the rail at the far end. The twins were sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water.

I went and stood beside Mother.

The city glittered below us. Above us, so close it felt like a ceiling, the dome caught the light and threw it back. You couldn’t see the stars through it. Just a flat, faint glow.

”The stars can’t hear us in here,” said Mother softly.

I looked up and searched the glow for a long time.

There. Low over the edge of the dome, to the east. Faint. Blurred by the glass. The moon. And on its face, if you knew exactly where to look, a little left of center, the smallest bright spot of ice.

Mother saw it too. She reached out and found my hand on the rail, and held it.

At five the next morning, in a room on the sixtieth floor of the tallest tower in New Halcyon, an old machine built out of a burned-out truck woke up in the corner and began to hum.

It didn’t clean anything. There was nothing to clean.

I lay in the big bed and listened to it start. Catching. Climbing. Settling.

And down the hall, through the open door of her room, I heard Mother cough once, very softly, and then breathe. Deep. Even. Without having to think about it.

I listened to that for a long time, too.