The Eatery seems to grow so small it presses against their skin. In the weak light, every single one of them looks wan.
The visitors ebb away. Some of the Runaways leave with them, some of the Newbies. A number of Wolfs have encountered a number of Meadows and vanish into the sunset. Dorotka shocks them all. She finds a mate among the revelers at the concert, the dead boy in her garden proves the tipping point, and she packs a bag and, weeping in Polish, goes. As soon as she does, the aphids move in and coat the soy yellow.
Some of the charges are dropped. Most people make bail from outside Arcadia, but many are furious that the community to which they’d dedicated their lives wouldn’t bail them out. Whole families disappear into the night. There are beds open in the Ado Unit. Among the Old Arcadians who leave are Pooh and her mother, who vanish in the early morning after Cockaigne Day. Cole and Ike both look guilty when they hear the girl is gone.
Bit comes in from his Photography Tutorial with Mikele. He finds Hannah alone at a table in the Eatery, head in her hands. Hannah? Bit says. What’s wrong?
She stands, wordless, and leads him by the hand to the pantry. The shelves, which are usually stocked full, now shine, mostly bare. There is vegetable oil, white sugar, some spice.
We have no more food, Hannah says. We have tofu. And bread. And a few preserves from last season. We’re going to starve to death unless we come up with something. Nobody has sent back money from the Plot, and I don’t even know how much of it was confiscated.
Her voice, serrated, hits Bit in the gut. What about the Motor Pool? Bit says. Can’t they sell an extra car or something?
Extra? Hannah says. Have we ever had extra anything?
Pregnant Ladies and Trippies and mud, Bit says to make her laugh. He can’t help it: he thinks of Hannah’s secret cache, the miniatures in their frames, the Belgian lace, the tea set. As if she knows what he’s about to say, she says, There is only so much you can sell before you start to sell yourself.
What about sending Monkeypower out? he says, and she says, Bit, take a look at the fields. This morning we sent out a hundred of our best workers. That will feed all six hundred of us for a few days. Then, nothing.
Even when she walks back up to her room, Bit wants to call after her, Let me talk to Helle. Let me get back whatever weed she has left, or the money she made.
But he can’t: he can’t approach Helle without seeing the men in the trees, Helle’s face cometing off into the dark. He can’t go near. Helle first looks wounded at his coldness, then she too stays away.
Handy comes home on bail. Bit watches with Abe and Hannah from their bedroom window as he steps from the Chevrolet. He seems shrunken, and when Helle and Leif and Ike run to him at the bottom of the hill, they are all taller than their father.
Why is nobody else down there welcoming Handy back? Bit says.
We’re all fed up with Handy’s shit, Hannah says. I’m not the leader, but my word is your command. Everyone must work, but freeloaders are welcome in Arcadia. Fucking Cockaigne Day. A community based on work, but I get to spend all day up in my fancy room, high as a kite, sticking my dick into any of the chicks who will lay down in front of me.
Hannah, Abe says.
Hannah snaps, What? I know you think the same thing.
Yes, he says. I’ve never heard you say the word dick before. Cussing becomes you.
She says, Ha! and kisses him, very slowly, on the forehead.
Now she sits on the bed and says, Stone family meeting. Item one and only. Do we stay or do we go?
For an hour, they debate. Carefully, cautiously. With Handy out of the picture, they can change Arcadia; if they stay, they will have to shoulder the crippling debt. If everyone works their asses off, they can survive the winter; how can they work with so few people left? They love Arcadia with all their hearts; their hearts are so very tired.
They decide to not decide. They will stay, and if staying becomes unbearable, they will go.
Bit tries to wait for Helle at night. They have to talk, but she doesn’t come back from wherever she is disappearing to. In the mornings, he sits outside the room she shares with Jincy and Muffin, but she doesn’t emerge. She is a smooth white fish, darting away from him. He wakes at midnight shaking from another nightmare, and rises. The moon is full and cold. He tries to run but gives up, the rock in his stomach too heavy. He finds his way into the thick, watchful woods. There is the familiar press upon him, the eyes from the dark. The menace could kill him. He walks until he finds himself at Verda’s and knocks on her door. She is up sleepless also, making cornbread muffins. He sits at the woodstove in her blanket, Eustace curled around his feet. Verda reads him and says nothing. At last, after he has picked apart his muffin and held the tea until it is lukewarm, she says, Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it.
He doesn’t say anything.
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know.
In the morning, the Pink Piper roars to life. Peanut and Clay have spent all night getting it into working shape. Astrid is going back to the Midwifery School in Tennessee with all the Pregnant Ladies, the midwives. She and Handy have one last kiss on the porch. He says, I hate that this whole thing is over.
Still, there is — what? the release of losing? the hope in devastation? — in his face.
The lawyer will be in touch, you know, Astrid says.
She kisses her children. When Helle says, Take me with you, Astrid says, You must have your year in Norway. It will be grand for you. Margrete is very tough and will help you mend your ways, my girl. You are too wild.
Ike, unabashed, weeps, and Bit can do nothing but pat his shoulder until he calms.
When Astrid boards the bus, Lila goes with her. Hiero stays. Arcadia feels like a book with the pages ripped out, the cover loose in Bit’s hands.
Titus and his family drive off before lunch, cramped in a Volkswagen van that had been such a beater even the Motor Pool had left it for dead at one corner of the lot. It may be, Bit thinks, the van he was born in. Jincy and Wells hitch into Syracuse, but not before Jincy bends to hug Bit. I love you, she says. I’ll find you. At a loss, he kisses her hands again and again, his wild-haired sister. Muffin goes with her mothers, screaming. The Free Store is unmonitored for two days until Abe presses people into shifts there, and in that time, things are taken from the shelves with nothing to replace them. Good things: knives and pouches of tobacco, candy bars and handkerchiefs, handmade pillows and afghans, gone. They wake to find more people missing. Tarzan. Peanut. Clay. Harrison, whose charges are dropped. More and more, faster and faster. The Ado Unit echoes, rooms empty. Only two hundred people eat supper that night.
Handy disappears the afternoon he is supposed to return for his trial. For hours, Cole and Bit and Dylan talk over Handy’s flight through Vermont, up into Canada, growing breathless at the thought of his being an outlaw. But Helle and Ike trail back into the Common Room at midnight, limp. With a weary air, Helle says, I drove us. And we went all the way to Niagara Falls after we dropped him off, just to see the waterfall.
They stare at her. You took Handy to Canada? Cole says.
I wanted to keep going to Canada, says Ike. But he insisted on going to the jail.
And you know what he said? Helle says. Right as he got out of the car? He said, Be good, kiddos, that’s what he said.
There was no Stay strong, and brave, my beautiful children. No I love you, Ike says, trying to make a joke of it.