I paused at the open door. Rashmi’s mom had her back to me. She was wearing a sleeveless navy dress with cream-colored dupatta scarf draped over her shoulders. She passed down a row of empty desks, perching origami animals at the center of each. There were three kinds of elephants, ducks and ducklings, a blue giraffe, a pink cat that might have been a lion.
“Please come in, Ms. Hardaway,” she said without turning around. She had teacher radar; she could see behind her back and around a corner.
“I stopped by your house.” I slouched into the room like a kid who had lost her civics homework. “I thought I might catch you before you left for school.” I leaned against a desk in the front row and picked up the purple crocodile on it. “You fold these yourself?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, “so finally I gave up and went for a walk. I ended up here. I like coming to school early, especially when no one else is around. There is so much time.” She had one origami swan left over that she set on her own desk. “Staying after is different. If you’re always the last one out at night, you’re admitting that you haven’t got anything to rush home to. It’s pathetic, actually.” She settled behind her desk and began opening windows on her desktop. “I’ve been teaching the girls to fold the ducks. They seem to like it. It’s a challenging grade, the fifth. They come to me as bright and happy children and I am supposed to teach them fractions and pack them off to middle school. I shudder to think what happens to them there.”
“How old are they?”
“Ten when they start. Most of them have turned eleven already. They graduate next week.” She peered at the files she had opened. “Some of them.”
“I take it on faith that I was eleven once,” I said, “but I just don’t remember.”
“Your generation grew up in unhappy times.” Her face glowed in the phosphors. “You haven’t had a daughter yet, have you, Ms. Hardaway?”
“No.”
We contemplated my childlessness for a moment.
“Did Rashmi like origami?” I didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t want to listen to the silence anymore.
“Rashmi?” She frowned, as if her daughter were a not-very-interesting kid she had taught years ago. “No. Rashmi was a difficult child.”
“I found Kate Vermeil last night,” I said. “I told her what you said, that you were sorry. She wanted to know what for.”
“What for?”
“She said that Rashmi was crazy. And that she hated you for having her.”
“She never hated me,” said Najma quickly. “Yes, Rashmi was a sad girl. Anxious. What is this about, Ms. Hardaway?”
“I think you were at the Comfort Inn that night. If you want to talk about that, I would like to hear what you have to say. If not, I’ll leave now.”
She stared at me for a moment, her expression unreadable. “You know, I actually wanted to have many children.” She got up from the desk, crossed the room and shut the door as if it were made of handblown glass. “When the seeding first began, I went down to City Hall and volunteered. That just wasn’t done. Most women were horrified to find themselves pregnant. I talked to a bot, who took my name and address and then told me to go home and wait. If I wanted more children after my first, I was certainly encouraged to make a request. It felt like I was joining one of those mail order music clubs.” She smiled and tugged at her dupatta. “But when Rashmi was born, everything changed. Sometimes she was such a needy baby, fussing to be picked up, but then she would lie in her crib for hours, listless and withdrawn. She started antidepressants when she was five and they helped. And the Department of Youth Services issued me a full-time bot helper when I started teaching. But Rashmi was always a handful. And since I was all by myself, I didn’t feel like I had enough to give to another child.”
“You never married?” I asked. “Found a partner?”
“Married who?” Her voice rose sharply. “Another woman?” Her cheeks colored. “No. I wasn’t interested in that.”
Najma returned to her desk but did not sit down. “The girls will be coming soon.” She leaned toward me, fists on the desktop. “What is it that you want to hear, Ms. Hardaway?”
“You found Rashmi before I did. How?”
“She called me. She said that she had had a fight with her girlfriend who was involved in some secret experiment that she couldn’t tell me about and they were splitting up and everything was shit, the world was shit. She was off her meds, crying, not making a whole lot of sense. But that was nothing new. She always called me when she broke up with someone. I’m her mother.”
“And when you got there?”
“She was sitting on the bed.” Najma’s eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. “She put the inhaler to her mouth when I opened the door.” Najma was looking into Room 103 of the Comfort Inn. “And I thought to myself, what does this poor girl want? Does she want me to witness her death or stop it? I tried to talk to her, you know. She seemed to listen. But when I asked her to put the inhaler down, she wouldn’t. I moved toward her, slowly. Slowly. I told her that she didn’t have to do anything. That we could just go home. And then I was this close.” She reached a hand across the desk. “And I couldn’t help myself. I tried to swat it out of her mouth. Either she pressed the button or I set it off.” She sat down abruptly and put her head in her hands. “She didn’t get the full dose. It took forever before it was over. She was in agony.”
“I think she’d made up her mind, Ms. Jones.” I was only trying to comfort her. “She wrote the note.”
“I wrote the note.” She glared at me. “I did.”
There was nothing I could say. All the words in all the languages that had ever been spoken wouldn’t come close to expressing this mother’s grief. I thought the weight of it must surely crush her.
Through the open windows, I heard the snort of the first bus pulling into the turnaround in front of the school. Najma Jones glanced out at it, gathered herself and smiled. “Do you know what Rashmi means in Sanskrit?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ray of sunlight,” she said. “The girls are here, Ms. Hardaway.” She picked up the origami on her desk. “We have to be ready for them.” She held it out to me. “Would you like a swan?”
By the time I came through the door of the school, the turnaround was filled with busses. Girls poured off them and swirled onto the playground: giggling girls, whispering girls, skipping girls, girls holding hands. And in the warm June sun, I could almost believe they were happy girls.
They paid no attention to me.
I tried Sharifa’s call. “Hello?” Her voice was husky with sleep.
“Sorry I didn’t make it home last night, sweetheart,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know that I’m on my way.”
THEY SHALL SALT THE EARTH WITH SEEDS OF GLASS
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of six novels for adults and young adults. Her novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her most recent, Love Is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Subterranean, Zombies vs. Unicorns, and Welcome to Bordertown. In addition to the Norton, she has won the Nebula and Cybils awards and been nominated for the Indies Choice Award and Locus Award. She lives in Mexico City, where she is getting her master’s in Mesoamerican studies.