Page 36

Days before the storm descended upon them, they saw men at the gates. Three of them, all caked in white dust as if a new triptych of statues had been suddenly erected there.

We’re not going to let them in, are we? Evelyn said.

No, said Mama. She was standing waist-deep in the wheat they had planted. Evelyn was chewing one of the stalks.

What should I do?

Where’s your sister?

I don’t know.

For Christ’s sake. Go and find her and go inside.

Evelyn looked at the gate. The three stone men had not moved. The ground they stood on shimmered in the heat and they seemed to phase in and out of existence. One of them was calling weakly through the bars.

Evie!

Shall I tell Papa?

Her mother did not answer.

Lily was in the first place Evelyn looked, far away from anyone, crouched under the broad, thick leaves of her dinosaur plant. She was reading her book and wearing earmuffs despite the sweltering heat. When she looked up, Evelyn saw she had smeared mud under her eyes like war paint.

Mama wants us to go inside the house, Evelyn said.

Lily shrugged to suggest that she couldn’t hear and then went back to her book.

Lily?

She shifted the earmuffs away from one ear.

What?

Mama said we have to go inside.

Why?

Evelyn could not say, and for a long time afterward she wondered why. Perhaps she had not wanted to excite her sister, or perhaps she had foreseen the entire episode play out exactly as her mother had said it would. Or perhaps hope was too cruel a thing to burden Lily with.

It’s lunchtime, Evelyn said.

I’m reading.

You’re not meant to be reading.

I don’t care.

Come on, we should get some lunch.

I don’t want to. I’m tired.

But Mama said so.

Why don’t you have a thought of your own one day, Evie?

She replaced the earmuffs. Evelyn could hear voices from around the front of the house. Lily rocked back and forth, oblivious. Evelyn tried to grab her sister’s hand and pull her up, but Lily wrenched her arm free—each as strong as the other now, all sinew and sunburn.

Evelyn did not move for a few moments and then heard her mother scream.

Stay there, she said, though Lily couldn’t hear her or her mother, and was intent on staying anyway.

She ran around to the front of the house and up the driveway and saw Mama at the gate. It was still locked, but one of the men had put his hands through and had pinned her arms to her sides. What had they offered, Evelyn thought, that her mother should have gone so close to them? Another now had Mama’s neck in the crook of his elbow so her face was in profile, pressed hard against the iron bars while the rest of her body squirmed. He was making some strange rasping sound of hilarity, laughing or crying. The third was pacing from one side of the gate to the other, looking for a likely place to climb.

Evelyn went straight to the front door and into the hall. She called for her father, but he was lurking somewhere in the upper echelons of the house, as he had been for months, and she knew he would not answer. Her mother had imagined and described this scene to her and Lily many times, but as usual it was only Evelyn who had paid her any heed. She went down into the coolness of the cellar as instructed, found the cabinet in the dark, took their father’s shotgun and a handful of shells.

When she emerged from the house, the heat was so intense it seemed to have silenced everything in the garden, save for the rough and erratic scraping of her mother’s shoes in the gravel. She was no longer screaming because one of the men held a huge and dirt-caked hand over her mouth. Evelyn snapped the breech and loaded two shells as she walked, then raised the shotgun at the men. The steel of the barrel was freezing in her palm.

The third man had found his way over the gate, but when he saw Evelyn coming, he backed up and stood shoulder to shoulder with Mama, as if they were friends, a couple even. Evelyn approached. There were shadows on the man’s face despite the noon sun directly overhead. He seemed unimaginably old. He smiled and showed her gums that were blueish and toothless.

Now then, what’s all this? he said.

Evelyn had never pulled the trigger before because her mother had wanted to conserve what little ammunition they had. You have to get close, really close, her mother had said, so Evelyn got close.

One of Mama’s eyes was swollen, and there was a dark red trickle coming from between the fingers of the hand that held her to the bars. Evelyn looked from man to man, each of them a pale and bloodless scarecrow, all driftwood and rags. Their eyes were bulbous and opaque. Not really men at all; some creature of a different order, raised from a barren earth.

This isn’t how you usually treat your guests, is it? the man beside Mama said, but before he had even finished speaking, Evelyn had nudged the barrel up against his leg and pulled the trigger. The sound was strangely dull. She was thrown backward, and the thigh of the man’s jeans exploded as if he contained nothing but air. He fell to the floor but didn’t cry out. As if the effort was already beyond him.

The wilder of the other two men screamed and made an attempt to climb the gate himself, strange, dry gulping noises issuing from his mouth. His tongue hung like a dog’s and was the color of lead. Evelyn got to her feet again and came as close as she dared and fired the second shell into his belly. A pink, hot cloud, and then she felt herself suddenly sodden, and could hardly blink for the blood that sluiced into her eyes and over her lips. The rank taste of sulfur and iron.

She wiped her face and tried to load another two shells, but her fingers were slick with blood and she dropped them in the dust. By the time the breech was closed again, the third man had let go of Mama and was limping into the desert he had sprung from. Evelyn fired through the bars twice but only made a spray of dust each time, and soon the man was out of range, then out of sight.

The first man was wheezing a few feet from her and Mama. He rolled onto one side and fumbled in the dirt as if he had dropped something. Evelyn glimpsed the pattern on his shirt and thought she recognized it, but she wasn’t sure, and besides, it was too late for that. Mama got to her feet and went stumbling back to the edge of the lawn. When she returned, she was holding the sickle she’d been using to collect their meager wheat harvest. She stood over the man and looked down. Neither spoke. Evelyn watched, as if her mother were demonstrating some new task from the almanac. As if she were pruning or deadheading an unruly plant.

Her mother slumped down against the gates, and Evelyn went and held her. They sat in silence and the blood dripped from their chins until it thickened and then dried and then started to stink in the heat. Their clothes were heavy with it and creaked when they moved.

When she went to get Lily, Evelyn found her asleep in the grotto, using the book as her pillow. Evelyn and Mama washed in the lake and were clean in time for dinner, their skin pink as if they’d just caught the sun. Lily poked sullenly at her stewed apple and they told her none of what had happened, because there was no way of telling her, even if they’d wanted to.