The Ash Family by Molly Dektar

Author:Molly Dektar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 16

Queen healed slowly, as far as I knew. She was hidden in Dice’s room, behind a locked door. While she healed, the paulownia trees flocked the forest in lilac. The indigo buntings made families.

Two weeks later, she returned to the dinner table, where she ate her toast the way she liked it, upside down, with the butter on her tongue. Everyone welcomed her. Her hair seemed longer, almost bob length, and I was jealous. Dice said, “She’s a good one. Got through a hard round of the summer flu.” Dice knew the truth, and so did Pear and I, but the real story had not gotten out. Not even Rainer seemed to know.

After dinner, Pear called “O’Leary” for Queen.

And will the Judge descend,

And must the dead arise;

And not a single soul escape

His all-discerning eyes?

As I gathered up the oblong songbooks, Queen put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me say good night to the sheep with you,” she said.

I had missed her. I had so many questions I’d been saving up: About what had become of Cassie. Dead in an accident? About whether Queen had killed her mother. Was it an accident? About her baby. Tucked in the bone room, the place where we bury our departed friends, as Sara had said? And maybe now was the time to answer the question I was afraid someone would ask, eventually. How much had I revealed to Lindsay?

We walked past the sheep, gray smudges on the black hay. I felt we were negotiating in silence, figuring out who ought to speak first. We walked past the dark hillocks of cows, the sighing horses, the mother pig and fourteen piglets. Then she said, “I wish I was allowed to be sad.”

I didn’t like this kind of conversation. We were not supposed to wish things were different. We were supposed to know our ways were right, by instinct, the way animals know things.

“Of course you can be sad,” I said, which was true—be sad about the sixth extinction, be sad about human nature, just don’t be sad about the baby.

I shouldn’t have had to tell her this. She knew. She knew the baby was never hers. She knew there was no definite self, and so the baby would emerge elsewhere, like Gemini’s lead bullets, melted and re-formed, melted and re-formed from the same stuff into different shapes. Queen could look for her baby in the woods and find it, in the horses and find it, in the berries and find it. His spirit could range everywhere, and could be found reflected in everything, which was true of every person who has ever died.

I stopped. “Go on ahead,” I said. She clasped my hand a moment, but I pulled away. Dice had answers for everything, and the answers were truer, on the whole, than the ones I got in the fake world. There was something wrong with the fake world as it was—the thin-walled houses built with no attention to the sun; the knickknack

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