Читать книгу Horizon - Sophie Littlefield - Страница 14

Chapter 8

THE DAY WAS a scorched and stretched expanse of time. Cass was grateful—her gratitude lousy with guilt—that it was not her day with the kids. Tomorrow was her day in the babysitting rotation and she would not drink tonight. Or at least she would only drink a little, almost nothing. And she would not see Dor tonight. And, definitely, she would visit Smoke. All of that. She just had to get through the day first.

Earl showed up as promised and they walked the bank together, boots squelching down into the sodden soil near the bank, clumps of reed stems going pale where they met the earth, crushed flat under their feet.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally, when they reached the southern tip of Garden Island. Looking north from here toward the other islands, you could see only the rooftop of the community center and a few of the other buildings. A lazy plume of smoke swirled up into the clouds, the remains of the breakfast fire. Lunch was always a cold meal, a lean repast of kaysev in its humblest forms—greens for salad, hardtack made from the everyday flour.

Cass had been skipping lunch too often, she knew that. She was much too thin, her muscles taut and sinewy across her shoulders, her back, her arms. She would go join the others, just as soon as they were finished here. She would eat extra, she would nibble sustenance like a squirrel.

“Maybe hold back on this one area,” Earl said, indicating a section of Cass’s planned lettuce patch. “I don’t think it’s gonna go, but this winter’s been bad for rain.”

Cass nodded. She’d expected as much. She had the rows sketched in twine tied to sticks sunk into the spongy soil, waiting for a dry day to plant.

Earl hitched up his pants, their business concluded. He was a kind man, Cass knew that, the leathery kind of sixtysomething man who would have been a putterer, a retired gent who refereed Little League games and built sunrooms and gazebos for his wife. He never complained about the arthritis in his joints though it was clear that mornings brought him almost debilitating stiffness. As they walked slowly back along the path, he favored one leg; if a trove of Advil or Tylenol popped up, there would be some relief for him—but that was as good as wishing for helicopters or snow cones, since everything good had been raided from the easy scores long ago.

“So you got your crew coming down after lunch,” Earl said amiably.

Cass was surprised he kept track. Benny, Carol, a few others who pitched in occasionally—they came to Garden Island on the afternoons when Suzanne watched the kids, everything revolving around the child-care schedule. The kaysev field was separated by footpaths into six long and narrow sections, and on picking days the crew worked alongside Cass, bent-backed like the migrant workers who used to dot the strawberry fields along Highway 101 from Salinas down to San Luis Obispo fifty miles to the west. It was hard work, painstaking and slow, making sure they didn’t miss a single blue-tinged leaf. The markings could be subtle—on the youngest leaves in particular, there was nothing but a light tint at the base of the veining, only the slightest crenellation along the edges of the leaves. In a mature plant the signs were unmistakable—the leaves were ruffled prettily and the underside had the blue shade of the veins on a fair-skinned woman’s breast. For that reason Cass discouraged her team from picking any of the young plants at all.

Benny and Carol had become as efficient as she was and so she no longer double-checked their baskets. They were a good team, close-knit. The dynamics had shifted, Cass knew that—at first she and Benny and Carol stood together at the end of the rows, hands pressing at their aching backs, resting and talking for a few moments before heading back down the field. Now she mostly worked at her own rhythm and it was the others who took their breaks together, their laughter occasionally ringing out over the hush of the island. At the end of the day, when everyone carried their baskets back to the kitchen, the others were subdued, overly polite, asking after Ruthie and Smoke, asking if she needed anything else, help with some chore. Cass always said she was fine, she had everything under control, and it seemed to her they were happy to have her answers and be able to leave her company.

Earl wasn’t like that—or maybe it was only that he moved so slowly he could not outrun the pall she cast. For a moment Cass was so grateful for his kindness that she had an urge to hug him, to put her hand in his big work-rough one. He could be like…a father to her, maybe. Her own father left her for good early on, and her stepfather was rotting in the hell he richly deserved by now, and it would be nice—so nice—to have someone who cared about her. Cass blinked at the shock of painful longing, made a small sound, an exhalation of breath.

Earl stopped, put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Cass, are you all right?”

She tried to evade his kind eyes. They were sharp and shining in their nest of wrinkles in his weathered face, but he had seen.

“I’m fine.”

His hand stayed heavy on her shoulder for a moment. “You need to take care, girl,” he said gruffly, and Cass knew it was reproach as well as concern, that he recognized the signs of her hangover. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she, and as they walked the rest of the way she redoubled her fierce silent promise that tonight would be different, that tonight she would abstain from everything that was wrong.

The hardtack, spread with a bit of jam to sweeten it, did not go down easily and did not do well in her stomach afterward. Still, Cass got through the afternoon, keeping to her own row and painfully thinking up responses to the others’ cheerful greetings. The sky cleared by late afternoon, turning a brilliant sapphire suffused with unseasonable warmth, and Cass’s skin sheened with perspiration as they walked back together.

They turned their baskets over to the kitchen staff, who would wash the leaves and pods and roots and turn them into a dozen different dishes. Today’s harvest was mostly tender leaves, succulent and pale from all the rains, so it would be salads, stir-fries and maybe even an exotic soufflé made with the precious eggs from the three chickens found in a creek wash a quarter mile from a farmhouse near Oakton. People joked that the chickens were New Eden’s VIPs and everyone was anxious for the day a rooster would be found and ensure future generations of poultry.

The few pods they’d found were still young and tender enough to be eaten as is; though mature pods were edible they were tough and fibrous and usually reserved for the work studio, where they were dried and turned into a coirlike material that could be used for mats and scrubbers. But the shelled beans could be tasty if they weren’t allowed to get too large—at that point, the beans would be dried, oil pressed from them and the rest ground for flour.

The meals would be prepared with care and presented with ceremony by the women and a few men who tended the kitchen. People needed to take pride in their work—Cass understood that. She even wished she could feel the same, and she envied the beaming servers who set out dishes garnished with lemon slices, the juice squeezed so that everyone could have a little in their boiled water.

Cass lingered in the yard, pretending that she was caught up in a boccie game, in reality putting off the moment when she would have to face Suzanne. That was how she came to be among the first to hear the cry go up.

“Blueleaf!”

For a beat after the syllables hung in the clear warm air, there was silence. Cass whipped around and stared at the long table where the rinsed kaysev was laid out to dry, two of the kitchen staff—Rachael and Chevelle—frozen over a sorted pile, looks of horror on their faces.

Cass leaped to her feet and ran to the table. Chevelle mutely handed over a bunch of leaves. Cass examined it with shaking fingers and yes—oh, yes, there it is—the cloudy blue tint at the base of the leaf, trailing up into the veining, which was almost azure before it shaded to green. The leaves were too young yet to have clearly ruffled edges and they lay cool and smooth in Cass’s hand.

“Oh fuck,” Chevelle murmured, as Corryn hastened over, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Is it?” she demanded in the booming voice that more than anything had sealed her position as head cook. She held out her hand for the leaves but Cass made no move to share them, only nodding.

The worst of the discovery—the first in a month—was not that a rogue plant had grown on Garden Island, but that one of them had failed to identify it when they picked it. If it had been passed over by the kitchen staff—whose job was to cook, not inspect, the harvest—it likely would have been eaten.

And one or more of the people of New Eden would have begun to turn.

“Which basket?” Cass demanded, scanning the row on the wooden counter behind them. Rachael pointed, her face drained of color. “Whose basket?”

Cass seized the basket and spun it in her hands, looking for the metal scrap that Earl had wired to each basket, initials inscribed with a nail, to identify its owner. CD.

CD, she read, and her throat closed.

Cass Dollar

It could have happened to anyone. The kind words, spoken in an unexpectedly kind and tender voice by Corryn, were a branch offered to one drowning in a current, and Cass tried to hold on.

It worked, in the moment. Corryn had ushered Cass into the storage pantry while the others checked and rechecked the harvest. Harris and Shannon joined them in the pantry for a quick consultation; it would be discussed at the nightly council meeting, and Cass knew that Harris could be counted on to quell any hysteria. Corryn, if she were called upon to recount what happened, would be fair. She was a woman who would always continue to be kind.

These are good people, Cass reminded herself, holding her arms tight across her chest, back in the room an hour later with Ruthie. It was almost dinnertime and Cass would not let her daughter go hungry, but she did want to wait until most of the people had eaten, until darkness was settling over the dining area and they could sit alone.

But these were good people. How could she have taken them so resolutely for granted? Why had she rebuffed all their efforts at friendship, at inclusion? But Cass knew the reason why—the reason was sitting in the wooden box. In the dimming light of evening, the bear’s gilded collar seemed to shine. The umbrella balanced on his nose as it always did; his placid canine expression remained unperturbed.

“Can we go see Smoke?” Ruthie asked. She was playing with Cass’s bowl of earrings, taking them out and sorting them, dozens of sparkly and polished studs and dangles, some with mates, some without. Cass mostly kept the collection for her girl, since she rarely wore such things anymore, but tonight she had to tamp down her irritation and resist snapping at her daughter for the baubles spilled and snagged on the dirty carpeting.

“I don’t know, honey.” Cass smoothed Ruthie’s hair down gently as her little girl snuggled into her lap, her skin soft and warm despite the chill of the room.

“’Cause he misses us. He told me.”

Cass’s fingers stilled in Ruthie’s downy hair. It needed a cut. “Did you have a dream about Smoke, honey?”

After Cass had recovered her daughter, it had taken a while for Ruthie to begin dreaming again. At first her dreams took the form of daytime trances; they were often frightening and sometimes providential. Dreams of birds preceded the appearance of the giant black buzzards; dreams of other disasters followed.

But recently Ruthie had only mentioned nice things. Cakes, mostly—she loved cookbooks and pored over them at night with Cass—and adventures with Twyla and sometimes Dane.

She frowned, a tiny line appearing on her brow. “I don’t think so, Mama,” she said, her voice going even softer, almost a whisper. “He said he misses us.”

“But—” When, it was on the tip of Cass’s tongue to ask. In which of their visits had Smoke done more than thrash or mumble in a coma-sleep? It had been weeks since they’d been to the hospital, and Cass had not discussed Smoke with anyone, least of all Ruthie.

“It was…” More frowning. “Before. Before today. Yesterday?”

Cass sighed. There would be no making sense of this rogue impulse, and she didn’t want to disconcert Ruthie by pressing her further. “It’s all right. We’ll go see him soon, and we’ll see what he says, okay?”

Ruthie brightened. “And can I ask Corryn for a cookie to take to him?”

“You may ask—but it might not be a cookie day.” Also, Smoke was still being fed his meals ground and moistened, in a spoon, his dormant body responding only enough to swallow the mush—but Cass didn’t mention that either.