Scarecrow

She slept most of the next day.

She woke a few times. Never for long. Once around nine, long enough to drink a little water and ask whether the willows on the creek had leafed out. Once at noon, long enough to smile at Genny in Father’s chair. Once in the middle of the afternoon, when she didn’t seem to know where she was, and called for someone named Nell, and then for Father, and then went back to sleep before any of us could answer.

The rest of the time, she breathed.

Carefully. Shallowly. Long pauses between. I sat on the floor beside the bed with my back against the wall and counted them without meaning to. The longest was fifty-three seconds. I didn’t breathe either, for that one.

Genny had one of the medical books open on her knees, the thick one, and she didn’t turn the page all day. I could see which page it was from where I sat. The chapter near the back.

Garnet didn’t come inside at all.

I found her in the field late in the afternoon, sitting at the scarecrow’s feet with the knitting in her lap. She’d carried the whole basket out. The needles moved slowly in her hands, her tongue between her teeth.

She didn’t look up when I sat down beside her.

”Is Mama going to die?” she said to the knitting.

I thought about Father at the kitchen table, under the wall. You deserve to know the shape of the thing you’re afraid of.

”Yes,” I said. ”I think soon.”

The needles stopped. She nodded slowly, three times, as though agreeing with something somebody had said a long time ago.

”I thought so,” she said. ”Since the cards. She let us win too much.”

Then she leaned sideways against me, and I put my arm around her, and she cried very quietly into my shirt until she was done. When she sat up, she wiped her face on my sleeve.

”I want to sing to her,” she said. ”Tonight. When it’s dark. She says the stars can hear.”

She woke at dusk. Really woke. Her eyes found the window, and then us, all three.

”There you all are,” she said. Her voice was a thread.

”Who’s Nell?” Garnet asked.

”Nell.” Mother turned her head slowly on the pillow. ”Goodness. My friend. In the hall. The bed next to mine. She had a gap in her front teeth and she could whistle through it loud enough to wake the whole floor.” A long breath. ”She didn’t wake up. After. In the program. I was dreaming about her.”

Then she said, ”Genny. Closer.”

Genny knelt by the pillow, and Mother said something to her, right against her ear. I didn’t hear it. I watched Genny’s face instead. She listened with her jaw set, and then partway through something in her face gave way, like ice on the creek in spring, cracking along one line and then another. Mother lifted her hand and put it on the side of Genny’s face. Genny held it there, hard, and nodded. Then she went back to Father’s chair and turned her face to the window.

When it was dark, Garnet climbed up the bed and lay down beside Mother, carefully, and sang.

The old song with no words. The one she sang every morning on the porch steps.

Mother’s eyes opened. ”Garnet,” she whispered. ”Where did you learn that?”

”I didn’t learn it. I just know it.”

”I used to sing it to you. Both of you. In the cot. Every night, until you were two, when I couldn’t get up the stairs anymore.” Her eyes were wet. ”The matrons sang it in the hall. To the little ones, so they’d know they weren’t alone in the dark. Nobody knew the words.”

”I didn’t remember,” said Garnet. ”I just knew it.”

Mother laughed. Just a breath with a shape to it.

”Sing it again,” she said.

Garnet sang it again. And very faintly, under Garnet’s voice, so quietly I wasn’t sure I was really hearing it, Mother hummed it too. The two of them, winding round each other in the dark like the stalks in Garnet’s bracelet.

Outside, the stars came out over the field.

The twins fell asleep a little before midnight. Garnet against Mother’s shoulder, in the middle of a verse. Genny upright in Father’s chair, her arms folded tight across her chest, on guard even asleep.

Mother’s hand had found its way into Garnet’s hair.

I turned the lamp down to almost nothing and sat on the floor and must have dozed. When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me.

I got up on my knees beside the bed, close, so she wouldn’t have to say anything loud.

”The girls,” she whispered.

”I know.”

”No. Listen.” A long pause. ”They’ll come. Soon. And they’ll say they can help them. And maybe they can. You’ll have to choose. I’m sorry I can’t choose for you.” Another pause. ”Whatever you choose. Keep them together. Don’t let anyone make them into what they made us. Let them be what they want to be. Promise me.”

”I promise.”

”Garnet’s hair needs brushing,” she said. ”In the morning. It’s in knots at the back. She won’t let Genny do it. Genny pulls. You do it. Start at the ends and work up.”

I almost laughed. It came out as something else.

”Start at the ends,” I said.

”And work up.”

Her fingers moved, very slightly, in Garnet’s curls. Then they were still.

She closed her eyes.

I stayed on my knees by the bed.

Her breathing went on. Slower. Longer pauses. Sixty seconds. Seventy. A breath, small. Eighty. A breath. I held her hand. It was very cold.

The moon went down behind the ridge. The stove went cold.

I didn’t wake the twins. They were both exactly where they wanted to be.

At twenty to five, the sky over the ridge was only starting to turn gray.

She took a breath. A small one.

I waited.

I waited.

And the windows began to rattle.

I felt it before I heard it. A pressure in the air. A hum so low it came up through the floorboards into my knees. The glass in every window buzzed in its frame. The lamp flickered. The photograph on the sill shivered and fell over.

I knew that hum. I’d been six years old and building a tower out of wooden blocks.

I was on my feet and at the door before I’d decided to move.

It was coming over the ridge fast. Not slow and careful like a seed. Fast, low, its belly almost scraping the ash, throwing up a long wake of gray dust behind it. Lights along its side. It came straight down the slope toward the valley and didn’t stop at the line where the gray became green. It came down hard at the bottom of the field, right on the grass, and the ramp was coming down before it touched.

People ran out. Three of them, in white, carrying cases. And behind them, slower, with a cane, in a long gray coat, a man.

The hot thing under the floor of me came up so fast I tasted copper.

I was standing in Father’s doorway. On Father’s boards. Looking down the path at the man who’d stood at the bottom of these steps eleven years ago and waited for the noise.

The three in white stopped at the foot of the porch steps. They looked up at me and stopped dead, as though they’d hit a wall. One of them was a woman, older, gray-haired, holding a case against her chest. She didn’t step back. Her eyes went past me, through the open door, to the bed.

Crane came up behind them, out of breath, leaning hard on his cane.

He didn’t come up the steps. He stopped at the bottom.

”Lucas,” he said.

I didn’t answer. The porch rail under my hand had started to hum.

”Listen to me,” said Crane. He was breathing hard. His scarred face was very white in the gray light. ”I have had a satellite on this house for eleven years. It records heat. Your mother’s has been falling for an hour. By my arithmetic, she has perhaps five minutes.” He didn’t take his eyes off mine. ”Dr. Halloway can stop it. Now. Tonight. Not forever. But tonight.”

The gray-haired woman held up her case. Her hands were steady.

”Let her in,” Crane said, ”or don’t. I can’t make you. Nobody can make you. But you have to decide now.”

Do not trust him.

She’d written it in pencil seven years ago. She’d said it to me twice since. Whatever they promise you about your sisters, remember what they promised us.

Approach should be made only following the natural death of both parents.

He hadn’t waited. He’d come early. Minutes early. I didn’t know why. I didn’t care why.

Behind me, in the front room, she took a breath. I heard it. Small. A long, long time after the last one.

The air in the doorway was humming. I could feel all three of the people in white standing below me. I could feel the craft on the grass. I could feel Crane. All I had to do was look.

And she’d die anyway. In five minutes. With nobody to stop it.

I stepped aside.

”Go,” I said.

The woman in white went past me so fast her case brushed my arm.

She knelt by the bed and had the case open before I’d turned around. The other two were behind her with lights and a machine on wheels that came up the steps on its own. Genny woke with a jerk in Father’s chair and was on her feet, and the lamp, and the teapot, and every cup in the kitchen were suddenly in the air, shaking.

”Genny,” I said. ”Let them.”

She stared at me. Her eyes went to the woman by the bed. To the needle in her hand, long and silver, catching the lamplight.

The cups didn’t come down. But they didn’t move either.

Garnet was awake too, sitting up beside Mother, her hair wild, her face white. The woman in white looked at her once, briefly, and said, ”Stay exactly there, love. Keep holding her hand. That’s the most useful thing in this room.”

Garnet held Mother’s hand.

The woman found a place in the crook of Mother’s arm and slid the needle in. Something pale gold went out of the syringe into her. Slowly. All of it.

Then we waited.

I don’t know how long. The machine on wheels made a soft beeping, slow and uneven. One of the men held a mask over Mother’s face. The woman had two fingers on Mother’s wrist and her eyes on her watch.

The beeping went on. Slow. Uneven.

And then, very slightly, less slow.

The woman’s fingers didn’t move from Mother’s wrist.

Crane stood in the doorway behind me. He hadn’t come in. He stood on the threshold of Father’s house leaning on his cane and didn’t come over it.

At five o’clock, the filter woke.

The hum came up from under the kitchen floor, the way it always did. Catching. Climbing up through the boards and into the walls. Settling.

It reached the rafters.

And Mother took a breath.

Not a small one. A real one. Her chest rose under the blanket, and fell, and rose again. On the machine, the beeping steadied, and went on steadying, until it was even. Slow, but even.

Garnet made a sound I’d never heard from anyone.

The cups came down, one by one, onto the table. Genny sat down on the floor where she stood.

The woman in white let go of Mother’s wrist, finally, and sat back on her heels, and let her breath out.

”She’s holding,” she said. Then she turned and looked up at me. ”For now. That dose will carry her a few hours. She needs a hospital. She needs it this morning.”

I turned around.

Crane was still on the threshold. His hand was white on the head of his cane.

”She’ll have to come with me,” he said quietly. ”To New Halcyon. There’s nowhere else.”

I looked at him for a long time.

He didn’t look away. And he didn’t look sorry. He looked like a man who had done the arithmetic, and been right, and was very tired.

”I know,” I said.