The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  It’s a doll. A dingy doll, with a faceless knitted head and body, and braids of wool for its arms and legs.

  She is glad there is no possibility of speech between them. She doesn’t know what she would say. She doesn’t know what even to think. Is it something he made, or saved from his own childhood—which she can see, from standing so near him now, was not so long ago—or some cast-off bit of trash he found somewhere?

  He points at her belly and then takes a sudden step backward, as if the gesture was too great an intrusion.

  Her eyes sting, unexpectedly, as she smiles. Nodding and shaking her head by turn, she pulls the doll to her belly, to show her understanding. Her gratefulness.

  He doesn’t return her smile, but neither does he leave. He shuffles slightly from one foot to the other, his eyes settling on her belly. She is suddenly, unexpectedly, reminded of Beau.

  An impulse strikes her and she takes up the book from the floor where she laid it. As he watches, she turns pages until she finds the one where his name and his brother’s appear. Unsure if he understands or can even read, she points from one name to the other, looking up with the question in her eyes.

  Hesitating, he reaches for the book, takes it from her and stares for a long time at the page. And then a smile breaks over his face so abruptly she is startled. He turns the book around and lays one finger under his name. Romeo.

  She mouths the name, and his smile widens. Then, suddenly he is laughing, and after a pause, she laughs too, not understanding why, not understanding anything.

  With one hand, he pulls a lock of black hair away from his forehead and leans toward her. She is confused, and then he draws a finger down a long, pellucid scar that runs down his face in the shape of a scythe. The blade of the scythe curves under his eye, where now, she realizes, she will always be able to glimpse it, if she looks closely enough. And now they know each other.

  He drops the hair and she shapes the name again with her lips and tongue. Romeo.

  This time, he only nods, and then he shuffles out the door and is gone.

  * * *

  —

  After Romeo leaves, the moon is too high to illuminate the window, and she lays the history aside until morning. She pretends to sleep through Sladja’s dawn visit, and then when the woman is gone, she retrieves the history from the drawer. Impulsively, she takes the book to bed, where she reads under cover of the blankets.

  A long and unexpectedly fruitful summer passes before Josefine appears again. Sladja returns to a formal, impersonal prose that now strikes Judy as unnatural. Many passages are only long lists of crop yields, and she can sense the relish with which they are recounted, the words themselves swelling on the page as if with appetites of their own.

  Maybe it’s out of this sentiment of abundance and satisfaction that Sladja welcomes Josefine back. The young woman arrives at night, near summer’s end, and is found waiting by the fire when Oona rises to prepare the first meal of the day. Judy draws her breath in sharply as she reads, Her child will come in no more than three months. How can Josefine have become pregnant, and so far along as that, in the season and a half she’d been away? Or was the father of the baby someone in the camp? The history shows no interest in such questions, but accepts her return as gently as the members of the colony do.

  Even Sladja shows her something near affection, producing the last yields of the dying peach tree for her to salt away, and fixing up a house for her to live in all by herself, as no one has ever been allowed to do before.

  Josefine is permitted extra rations of food, and dismissed from the chores that occupy other members of the camp. And so she grows round and idle, hunched over the fire, humming to herself as autumn cedes to winter and still the baby hasn’t come.

  The account of Josefine’s labours when they arrive at last is terse. Her pains go on for two nights, through a windstorm. The woman who once delivered the babies of colony members left camp some time before, so Sladja and Oona tend to Josefine.

  The baby, a hairless, wailing boy, is born smaller than expected, given her size and long pregnancy. After his birth her pains continue unabated, and they fear she will die of hemorrhage as one member of camp did years earlier.

  But to their astonishment, several minutes later, she pushes again and a second boy is born. All at once, Judy understands, even before she reads that the woman names her sons Bobby-Rae and Romeo.

  The two boys are raised as much by the camp as by their mother, who is seldom referenced in the pages that follow. Whenever she is named, it is regarding some mishap that befell her sons under her care, or a minor offence meriting sanction. Sladja appears to look on her with continued kindness, showing no relish in describing her transgressions, while Ren is enthralled by the twins. He fashions cloth slings, and daily carries the babies into the hills with him, murmuring ceaselessly to them, as if they understand.

  Though Josefine’s behaviour is no less strange than before she was sent away, no one seems troubled by it anymore. If she is found creeping through camp in the dark, she’s gently returned to the home she now shares with her children and Oona, who is charged with watching over the babies at night. Her thieving of food is indulged; it’s no longer a time of scarcity but of abundance, and there is more to spare, and, as Sladja writes, after birthing two hale boys, she needs to regain her strength.

  And then one winter morning, Oona wakes to find mother and children gone from the house. The colony searches for hours and at last the boys are found far up in the hills, standing in the creek where the colony fishes in summer. But it is long past summer, and the mountain water is ice-cold.

  The boys are breathless with sobbing, their legs, which only learned to stand in recent months, shaking beneath them. From the bank, their mother watches them, turning narrowed, defiant eyes on Sladja and the other members of camp as they approach.

  When the boys have been dried and bundled in warm blankets and carried back to camp, Sladja and Oona question Josefine. She tells them the boys needed to be punished. She says they had cried all day and wouldn’t listen when she told them to stop, and that night she dreamed they tormented her still, and it was then she understood they were wilful and demanded her correction.

  After that, Josefine lives in her house alone again, and Oona and the twins are given a room in another house until a house of their own can be made ready. Josefine is never left alone with her children, though she is given supervised time with them each day.

  But still Oona worries, confiding in Sladja that she believes the boys will not be safe as long as their mother stays at camp. When Sladja discusses the matter with Ren, he argues that it would be a greater hardship for the boys to be deprived of their mother. “We’ll keep them safe,” he tells her. “There are so many of us watching over them.”

  And then one day Josefine becomes fixated on the boys’ hair, which falls over their eyes in dark curls. She is granted permission to cut it, Sladja noting approvingly that she has begun again to show interest in her sons, but the man who was intended to supervise the haircut must have turned his attention away. When Josefine and her sons appear at the fire that night, both are shorn to the scalp, and Romeo’s brow has been cut open by the iron blade of the scissors.

  We can’t keep both mother and children safe. No more argument can be made. And yet all night we argued in our house. Ren begged me, as he had begged the others, not to turn her out. “Our pity is what unites us and what divides us from those we fled,” he said. “We can’t let our hearts harden against this woman, when she needs our mercy most.”

  At dawn, exhausted and no longer sure, I agreed to speak to Josefine.

  She sat in her house, on her unmade bed, and didn’t stand when I entered the door. Her eyes unnerved me as they always do.

  I saw no point in evasion, so I told her, “We don’t want you near your children anymore. You put them in danger. We sent you once f
rom camp, and you returned to us. We let you return to us. But you’re no longer welcome here.”

  “What will happen to them?” she asked me in her odd, childlike voice.

  I told her we would keep them and that she could trust us to raise them well and with love. “They’ll be safe here,” I promised her. “Whatever happens, they’ll be fed and cared for and kept safe.”

  She looked away then.

  “Do you hear me? You don’t need to worry about them anymore.”

  “What will happen to me?” she asked.

  I hesitated. “I can’t tell you that. You’ll be on your own. You’ll find your way in the wood, as you did when you went away the first time. You know how to forage. It will be summer soon, and easier to find shelter and water and meat.”

  She answered me like she was reading from a page. “I know I’m not a good mother. I know I’ve hurt my children. I don’t know how to help them. I don’t think they’re like us. I see in their eyes something that scares me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The other ones. I see the look of the other ones.”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. The twins are too young to be known. They are only needs and impulses. They smile and cry and feed, and cannot so much as speak. But I have never been a mother. Is it possible that she instinctually perceives what it will take years for us to see? I remembered Ren’s sister saying, after her child was tested, that she had always known.

  But I told her, “You can’t know if they’re infected. There’s no way to know that yet.”

  Her cold hands fastened on to mine and wouldn’t let go. “Will you help me?”

  I answered honestly, “I don’t know how.”

  And then she said she wasn’t well and never had been. Before coming to the hills, she’d been steadied by doctors and drugs, but they had always been only ties, tethering her against a great wind. The wind never ceased to blow, and then everything changed and all the ties were cut. Still it wasn’t her fault, and she couldn’t be blamed any more than the ill can be blamed for their disease.

  I saw the truth of it, all of it, the unfairness, the helplessness, the harm we risked doing to a woman who already suffered. I heard and felt, as Ren had asked me to hear and feel, and I pitied her.

  * * *

  —

  A special house is built for Josefine. A house far from the others, outside the clearing they circle, set amidst the trees. She is permitted to stay in the house, and meals are brought to her there. But Oona learns that the twins have taken to slipping away whenever their caretaker’s back is momentarily turned, to come to stare at the house where their mother is kept, and that she calls to them from the windows when she sees them, and tells them things that frighten them. And so the boys are watched more closely still, and the windows of Josefine’s house are painted black.

  * * *

  —

  Judy knows she must put the history back in its drawer, but she is nearing the end of the written pages and so only reads faster and faster, her hand turning over each new page with the sense of plunging down into darkness, hoping to find something there. And snow falls outside the broken window of Josefine’s house.

  The next page contains only six lines and then a great empty space.

  The parents of the youngest boy, James, noticed first. And then all the parents woke and found their children gone and rang the bells. All the bells of the camp rang as we searched for them. We went to Josefine’s house like fools, worried for her children, and they were gone, and she was gone. Eight children, with hers. And all of them gone.

  * * *

  —

  Judy traces the words with her fingers, closing her eyes. How long ago did it all happen? How long ago did the woman sleep where she sleeps, wake into the darkness of her black-painted house and do whatever terrible thing she had done to her own boys and all the children of the camp? She reminds herself that the twins live. They were returned. They are here still.

  A page is left white and blank, as if to separate the writer of the next page from what came before, to avoid touching even the words. And on the new page, the handwriting has changed from Sladja’s cramped, uneven script to a steady, slanting hand. Judy has read half a page before she understands.

  My ljubavi. You don’t speak to me or anyone. You don’t answer me. You hear, but you don’t answer. If you did, my love, I would know what I can only guess. You grieve as we all grieve, but there is more, you have taken shame upon yourself. You think it happened because you let it. You think if you had been sterner, harder, if you had driven her from camp after the haircuts, or sooner, or never let her come at all, driven her and that man, whose name I do not even remember, back into the wood the night they came to us seeking help, you think then we all would be safe. The children, all asleep in their beds, the parents with unbroken hearts. You and I as we once were, beloved to each other.

  And I don’t know how to bring you comfort, because I know so very little. I don’t know what words she said to lead them away, or even how she left her locked house. I don’t know why she wanted to flee camp or why she wanted those little boys and girls by her side. I don’t know why the mood left her, why she tied the children there in the wood—did she think to punish them or us or to leave them where we could find them? The oldest three, the ones we haven’t found, may live still. You must remember that and hunt yet, not lose courage to search. They may still be with her.

  I don’t know even if you are right to blame yourself. Or if you blame me, and are right in that too.

  I wish I had been the one to find them. I wish it had been me and not you. I wish I’d taken up their little bodies and warmed them in my arms, wrapped them in blankets before you or their parents saw, so you wouldn’t carry in your head the way they looked discarded on the ground, the two who escaped, face down in the snow like little dolls. I wish you hadn’t seen the way James still huddled beside the still-breathing twins where they were bound, his thumb in his mouth, so you thought he too lived until you touched his cold tiny hand.

  But we will never have not seen these things or not know what we know or not have done what we did. And everything we have done in these hills is defiled by it. The poison of it runs through the houses we built, the gardens we dug, the lives we made.

  We lived a dream for a time, a world we’d made ourselves. I fooled myself that it was a real place. Now it seems a fancy so threadbare I can see through it to all the things we never spoke about. What we pretended not to know. We didn’t make a world; we retreated from one. And we brought with us all the same capacity for calamity and irreparable mistakes.

  Oona says we were wrong to pity the woman, that we should instead have pitied her children, but who can make such a choice? I know you think now she was one of the infected, and perhaps she was. Or perhaps the boys are, as she feared. I look for certainty, which once was the contour of everything. But I find it all shifts when I look at it; nothing will hold still for me or surrender to my grasp. It took courage to make our lives here, as we always used to say, but more than that it took certainty, and there is none of that anymore.

  It’s for this reason I leave with the others. And it’s not you I leave. If you would come, I would travel with you. I would go back to the world by your side.

  Would I stay if I loved you better? I don’t know even that. It seems to me like a very great fight to love another person, even you. And there is no more fight in me.

  * * *

  —

  When she finishes reading, Judy lays the pages on the ground beside her, meaning to tuck them away later, but she falls asleep. She dreams of men and women she never saw, all the members of the colony, streaming down the mountains like an avalanche. In her dream, there are thousands of them.

  XV

  Judy wakes in a dark room, and doesn’t know if anyone came and went while she was asleep
. With her outstretched hand, she feels the pages, resting where she left them. And then the door opens and Sladja enters the black house.

  She sets her lantern on the desk and takes something from her coat. Though she can see only a pool of light on paper, Judy guesses it’s the second history, what she has copied out for Sladja so far. The older woman, who hasn’t yet looked at Judy, spreads the pages over the desk, sorting till she finds what she’s looking for. She beckons to Judy, her mouth at a slant—almost a smile.

  Judy doesn’t dare move the papers on the floor or slide the cover overtop—to turn her attention to them in any way might summon Sladja’s gaze. Instead, she rises from the bed and lets the other woman show her the page on the desk. With a gesture, Sladja urges Judy to sit on the stool behind the desk, and then she lays her finger on a revision she has made on the clean first page of the second history. She touches it the way a person might touch the hand of someone they love.

  Judy recognizes the list of names that began the history, the list she copied for Sladja with four names excised. The erasure of the people who belonged to those names is complete—Judy has no idea what significance their existence had, or how profound its omission might be—save one. And it’s that name that has been restored to the list, fitted under Sladja’s own.

  Ren Takami, Judy reads and looks up, searching for an explanation in the face of the woman standing over her. Sladja points again and then draws her hand away, letting it rest at the edge of the desk, touching Judy’s own. Their eyes meet and it seems to Judy that Sladja believes an understanding has passed between them. But Judy understands nothing.