It was alive, and she could not shake the feeling that she had known about it all along. Like molecules finally fitting, making a whole—yet not. Nothing biological whatsoever. Something other.
Kaye touched her forehead. “Am I having a stroke?” she whispered. She fingered her lips. They were trying to form a smile. She bent them straight. “I can’t be weak. Not now. Who’s there?” she repeated, as if locked into a pointless ritual.
She knew the answer.
The visitor, the caller, possessed no features, no face or form. Nevertheless, being bathed in this cool, lovely fount was like having all of her great-grandmothers, her great-grandfathers, all the wise and sweet and wonderful and powerful members of her family whom she had never met, all at once and together bestowing the unconditional approval and love they would have bestowed had they cradled her as an infant in their sheltering arms. There was that much in it, and more.
But the caller, at once gentle and unbelievably intense, was nothing like her fleshly kin.
“Please, not now,” she begged. With relief came fear that she was losing her tenuous link to reality. The caller was known to her, yet long denied and evaded; but it showed no anger, no resentment. Its only response to her long denial was unconditional sympathy.
Yet was there also trepidation? The caller exposed an extraordinary longing to touch and show itself despite all the rules, the dangers. The caller quite charmingly yearned.
Kaye suddenly opened her mouth and let air fill her lungs. Funny, that she had stopped breathing for a moment. Funny, and not scary at all; like a personal joke. “Hello,” she said with the exhale, dropping her shoulders and relaxing, pushing aside the doubts and giving up to the sensation. She wanted this to last forever. She knew already it could not. To go back to the way she had felt just a few minutes ago, and all of her life before that, would hurt.
But she knew the pain was necessary. The world was not done with her, and the caller wanted her to be free to make her own choices, without its addictive interference.
Kaye walked back to the cabin to check on the sleeping Stella and to look in on Mitch. Both were quiet. Stella’s color seemed to be stronger. Patches of freckles came and went on her cheeks. She was definitely past the crisis.
Kaye returned to the dock and stood staring into the early-morning forest, hoping that the loveliness, the peace, would never leave. She wanted it all, now and forever. There had been so much grief and pain and fear.
But despite her own yearning, Kaye understood.
Can’t go on. Not yet. Miles to go before I sleep.
Then, she lost track of time.
Dawn arrived in the east, on the other side of the trees, like gray velvet by candlelight.
She stood beside the overturned rowboat, shivering. How long had it been since she had returned to the dock?
Without words, the fount had spent hours sluicing her soul, (she was not comfortable using that word but there it was), wetting and revealing dusty thoughts and memories, becoming reacquainted in real and human time. Wherever it flowed, she knew its unalloyed delight.
It found her very good.
“Is Stella going to be all right?” Kaye asked, her voice soft as a child’s in the shaded close of the trees. “Are we all going to be together and well again?”
No response came to these specific questions. The caller did not deal in knowledge, as such, but it did not resent being asked.
She had never imagined such a moment, such a relationship. The few times she had wondered at all what this experience might be like, as a girl, she had conceived of it as guilt and thunder, recrimination, being assigned onerous tasks: a moment of desperate self-deception, justifying years of ignorance and misbegotten faith. She had never imagined anything so simple. Certainly not this intense yet amused upwelling of friendship.
No judgment. No punishment.
And no answers.
I did not call for this. The body has prayed the prayers of desperate flesh, not me.
Her conscious and discerning mind, most concerned with practicalities, the mistress in starched skirts who stared out sternly over Kaye’s life, told her, “You’re playing Ouija with your brain. It doesn’t make sense. This is going to mean nothing but trouble.”
And then, as if it were shouting a kind of curse, Kaye’s tense and adult voice flew to the trees, “You are having an epiphany.”
The crickets and frogs started their racket again, answering.
Finally, the conflict became too much. She dropped slowly to her knees on the dock, feeling that she carried precious cargo, it must not spill. She bent over and laid her hands flat on the rough, weathered wood.
She had to lie down to keep from falling over. With a long, slow release of breath, Kaye stretched out her legs.
47
OHIO
Augustine had divided them into two teams, the first with eight students, the second with seven. Toby’s team had worked first, from ten in the evening until three in the morning. Teachers and nurses carried those chosen by the team to an exercise field, laying them in rows under the blue glare of tall pole lamps, in the warm early-morning air.
Silently—with little more than a touch of palms and a whiff behind each ear—Toby passed his duties to a girl named Fiona, and the first team fell onto cots laid out in Trask’s office.
Fiona and the others on the second team went out with Augustine, back down the steel stairs to the main floor.
Until dawn, Fiona and the six helped Augustine sort through other buildings, walking up to each child on the cots or on bedding spread over concrete or wood floors, on bunks in the former cells and in the dormitories; bending over and smelling above the heads of the sick, showing with one finger, or two, who was strongest, who would probably live another day.
One finger meant the child was likely to die.
After eight hours of work, they had processed about six hundred children, starting with the worst, and consequently, had already visited the most dead and dying, and the children on both teams were quiet and tired.
More children volunteered, forming a third, fourth, and fifth team. Toby did not object, nor did Augustine.
While the first two teams slept, the new teams examined another nine hundred children, separating out four hundred, most of them able to walk with the teachers to the field, where they were assigned to old tents marked “Inmate Overflow.”
And round into the dawn and beyond ten o’clock, the kids worked with the remaining teachers, nurses, and security officers—the bravest of the brave—carrying bodies wrapped in sheets or in the last remaining body bags, or even in doubled plastic garbage bags, out to the farthest area within the fence, the employee parking lot, where the dead were laid out between the few and scattered cars.
Middleton worked to rearrange accommodations so that they could set up a morgue in the main gymnasium, adjacent to the infirmary. By eleven, the bodies had been removed from the parking lot and placed out of the sun.
Augustine estimated they had perhaps ten or fifteen hours before the dead would become a horrible nuisance, and twenty before they became a health hazard.
At noon, Augustine fell over after stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, between a row of inmate tents. The children carried him back to the infirmary, with the help of DeWitt.