The Indifferent Children of the Earth

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 16, Friday 26 August

  At seven, I rolled off the bed, the cuts in my side flashing to life. Lack of sleep made my eyes gritty, but I pulled on some clothes, washed my face, and stumbled downstairs. I could see Mom through the window the great room; she knelt facing the house, her mouth set in a grim line as she attacked the weeds in the flowerbed. I gave a wave; I hoped she would notice me, look up, smile the way she had smiled when Isaac had been alive. When she didn’t hate me. If she saw me, though, she gave no sign of it; she bent lower, her bare fingers raking the earth, as though she would tear out its heart.

  I ate marshmallow-y cereal until it made me gag, and then I dumped out the rest of the bowl, brushed my teeth, and started walking to school. The town was quiet, so quiet compared to New York, but it wasn’t silent. Not like inside my house, where I could hear my thoughts bouncing back from the pitched ceilings. Here, birds sang, and there was the noise of the train and the river meeting, like lovers long separated, and the rumble of cars and movement and life—but all in harmony with the coolness of the summer morning, with the breeze, with the light off the cement walk.

  For all that equilibrium around me, I felt none of it inside. I had hoped the quickener would be able to help me against the hidden grower, but now I knew that was an idle dream. The quickener was not unskilled—he was untrained. A threat to the people around him, to all the people of West Marshall. And I should be trying to hunt him down, trying to kill him. Perfect. I had no quickening left, and now I found myself with two sorcerers to kill. The grower, though, was the more pressing problem. He had to be using a great deal of power for it to bleed off and create that many sprawls, but that much growing should have taken dozens of lives. How could that many people disappear in a town this size without anyone noticing? It made no sense.

  School passed in a blur, although Mary sat on the other side of the table from me at lunch. She barely responded to Wyatt and Shawn, and she didn’t say a word to me. The way she darted daggers at Olivia, though, and occasionally at me, told me she had heard about our plans for the evening. The way Taylor eyed us made it clear that Mary wasn’t the only one. I was glad when lunch was over and I could disappear into class again.

  After school, I walked up Lilburn Street alone; Olivia stayed after school to do some homework, but we agreed to meet at seven. I promised to plan everything, since I had asked her out, but as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I had made a mistake. I’d never been the romantic type, really. Or maybe I was a hopeless romantic. I wasn’t really sure. Either way, I wasn’t good at coming up with things to do. It was a nice day, hardly any humidity, and a quick breeze stirred away the worst of the heat, but by the time I reached Forest at Home, I was sweating.

  And there, on the door, a sign. Closed. Nothing else. The padlock on the gate to the lot confirmed it. I even wandered around back, wondering if Mr. Wood had left me a list of things to do, or if he was there doing some major overhaul, even though he hadn’t told me anything in advance. The dumpster and another locked door were the only things that met me.

  Mr. Wood had closed the store today. The day after I dumped all that herbicide around the grower’s tree in the cemetery. Mr. Wood was sick. So sick he couldn’t open the store. Sick from the poison I had fed his tree.

  Mr. Wood was the grower.

  I ran, as fast as the cuts in my side, as fast as the bruises that kept me from breathing, would allow. Back home, flying through the foyer, into the kitchen. I pulled the phone book down from a cabinet and flipped through it, to the W’s.

  Wood, Jared. 1372 Skyrise Dr. And a phone number.

  I grabbed our cordless phone and punched in the number, my hands trembling. Ring. Ring. Ring. He wasn’t answering. He was incapacitated. This was my chance.

  “Hello,” a voice said, interrupting my thoughts. It took me a minute to recognize Mr. Wood’s voice.

  “Hello,” he said again.

  “Mr. Wood, hey. It’s Alex.”

  “Ah dammit,” was the response. “I forgot to tell you we’d be closed today.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Family business,” he said, his voice snapping the words shut. “I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”

  I hesitated; he didn’t sound sick, but he could be faking it. He could know I suspected him, he could guess I had poisoned the tree.

  “Is everything ok?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “My sister’s sick. I’m watching her kids while she’s getting some tests done. It came out of the blue, why I didn’t call you earlier.” A pause. And then a grudging, “Sorry.”

  And then, in the background, I heard children scream, and Mr. Wood’s voice, slightly muffled, saying, “Outside! I told you to play outside.”

  “Alright,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”

  “Goodbye, Alex.”

  I hung up the phone. It wasn’t Mr. Wood. A sick grower wouldn’t have been able to sound that normal, would he? He wouldn’t be watching a bunch of kids. That was a real hole in my deduction. It couldn’t be Mr. Wood.

  But it could be his sister. Maybe it was his family, then, that were growers. Maybe that’s why Mr. Wood hated Grandfather. But if she was at the hospital in Arcadia, I had no way to get to her. Not only would she be surrounded by people—doctors, nurses, staff—but I literally had no way to get there. I wouldn’t touch Isaac’s car, no matter what my parents said. And by the time I biked there, she could be gone.

  Still, I had a lead. Mr. Wood’s sister was a grower, perhaps the whole family. And I knew which tree was hers. Which meant that I had the advantage; I just needed to burn it down, and I’d have everything taken care of. Except for the quickener. But that could wait.

  And then I realized that I only had an hour and a half before my date with Olivia. I had no plan. Nothing even resembling a plan. I paced back and forth in the great room, trying to think. What did people do on dates? I remembered the thrill of quickening, of time spent working on a new focus, standing too close, and moving closer while pretending to reach for something. And every time the quickening, the foci, became more of an excuse to spend time together, turning into long nights of talking, of half-feigned caresses, until the pretense of quickening fell away. But that had been a different situation, and I no longer had quickening. So the question, again: what did normal people do on dates?

  Movies, I guess. And dinner. I didn’t think Olivia would be particularly impressed by a movie, and I wanted to impress her. Wanted to be with her, wanted to see her smile at me, and I wanted to know that she didn’t know the real me, but that she liked the part that she saw. Because even if that wasn’t honest, I was a starving man, and stolen bread is better than none. So movies were out.

  Dancing? I could dance, but that didn’t seem like her thing either. Plus, where did you go dancing in West Marshall? The kids in Footloose had a better chance than I did. Frustrated, I sank onto the couch and buried my head in a cushion. Darkness and dusty cloth. Hell, what did girls like to do?

  A tap on the glass brought me upright. Mom, back at the flower patch behind the great room, waved and gestured for me to come outside. Arms and legs like lead weights, I pushed myself up, outside, a mixture of anxiety and hope. I wanted to talk to her, wanted to have her talk to me, but I could feel the silence bricking up the words in my throat, making me mute, dividing us against my best efforts.

  I slumped onto the ground just behind her and started plucking blades of grass.

  Mom turned around, ruffled my hair with one hand, and said, “Time for a haircut.” And when she said the words, she said them with that teardrop smile that told me she couldn’t look at me without remembering.

  A shrug. The only response I could muster. The worst was that I couldn’t see the accusation in her eyes; all I saw was sorrow. But I could feel that accusation drawn tight between us, an arrow pointed at my heart. It was all my fault. All my fault Isaac died.

  She turned back to the rich, black soil, m
aking careful mounds around the base of some flowers, clearing other patches of struggling weeds.

  “How was school?”

  “Fine.” The vocal equivalent of a shrug, since her back was to me.

  “Do you . . . have you made any friends?”

  “Yeah. Some kids I sit with at lunch.”

  “Well, that’s nice. Are you going to be doing anything with them tonight?”

  I didn’t answer; how could I tell her I was going to go have fun, going to enjoy myself with a girl who liked me? I might as well tell her I didn’t care about Isaac, that I didn’t care about her or Dad.

  There was a moment where her shoulders tensed; I waited for the arrow to fly free, the accusation to strike home. And then it passed, and all she said was, “Oh Alex, why can’t you just—” And she stopped herself there, the last words falling like seeds into the black soil.

  She didn’t need to finish the words; I could hear them. Why can’t you just be like Isaac? Normal, happy, unproblematic. I didn’t have an answer, except that I had killed Isaac. And what kind of an answer was that?

  Mom leaned back, turned to look at me. Dark eyes, as dark as the earth, and olive skin. I had inherited both. One soil-covered hand rested on my leg, near my ankle. Mom tilted her head back, but not in time, because I saw a tear trace its way between specks of dirt on her cheek. Her hand tightened on my leg, as though she could somehow communicate her pain to me that way. And I felt the wall of silence crumble between us, and words were falling from my mouth before I could gather them up. A confession that I couldn’t stop.

  “I have a date tonight.”

  Mom froze. I waited for it. The screaming. The tears. The hate. I deserved it all. I couldn’t hide what I was doing any longer.

  “What?” Her head still tilted back, but those dark eyes locked on me.

  “I have a date tonight. Her name is Olivia.”

  It was like watching the sun come out from behind the clouds. A smile, the first real smile I’d seen on Mom’s face since I woke from the coma. “Alex, that’s wonderful!” She wiped her cheeks, laughing and smearing more dirt on her face. “Tell me all about her. How did you meet her?” And before I could answer, she surged forward and wrapped her arms around me.

  It took me a moment before I could relax, return the hug, but I felt something shift and crack inside me. A barrier I hadn’t even realized was there. And then I was hugging her back.

  “Mom,” I said as I hugged her. “What do people do on dates?”