Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  “Someone more special than that. Rare goods.” Billie taps one finger to her fresh purgatory lips, a secret smile. “But shh, okay. For real. You’re going to get me in trouble.”

  “More special than Rihanna?”

  “Can I see?” Billie takes the compact from Fontaine, turns it this way and that. “It’s beautiful, thank you. Will you do my hair too, when the bandage is off?”

  “If you want!” She’s flushed with pleasure. “But can’t you give me even a little hint?”

  “Oh man, I’ve said too much already. It’s supposed to be a secret. I overstepped. Forget I said anything. Please.”

  It’s too easy. Fontaine’s face is scrunched in hungry curiosity. Like winding up a toy and setting it loose.

  “Oh, look,” Billie says, “Zara’s back,” full of faux cheer. “I better go help. Thanks again, you’re an angel.”

  She lopes down to where the car is pulling up on the shred of grass in front of the house, trying not to look too smug.

  “What happened to your face?” Zara says as Billie takes over the bags of groceries from her arms.

  “Fontaine. Makeup. She didn’t sit on it, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ll leave that to Rico.” Who is trotting up to join them, looking vaguely guilty and hungover, if Billie is any judge of that. And she is.

  “Jealous, chica?” Rico flicks her tongue at her obscenely.

  “Fucking children,” Zara sneers.

  “Oh no,” Billie says, sweet as a candy heart with a message on it. “I think Fontaine is at least eighteen.”

  “That’s a joke,” Zara observes.

  “What does the outside world have to say?” Rico asks, low. “Before we get inside.”

  “Mm,” Zara grunts. “The address has been confirmed. The family still lives there, paid their cable bill recently. The buyer is still keen. But we need to finish this thing. We could go tonight, if you were not drunk.”

  “Or you weren’t so damn lazy,” Rico snarls. “You could drive, bitch.”

  “Fatigue is the second biggest killer on the roads after alcohol.”

  “‘Buyer,’ singular?” Billie says.

  Zara ignores her. “I heard you’re cooking for us. Don’t try and drug anyone. I have heard what you are like.”

  “I would never,” Billie protests. “They’ve had quite enough already.”

  Count ’em, nine white power girls living in the woods. Snow Meth and the eight tweakers. They tell her their names, but they slip right past her, along with the compliments on the food she has cooked for them with her own hands, chicken skewers on the grill, with peach chunks and her own barbecue sauce (adapted because smoked paprika is hard to get out here in the backwoods), blackened broccoli with sesame seeds, dhal and chapati baked in tin foil in the coals.

  She doesn’t need their names. Or only one, and Ash comes to find her after the meal, which saves her having to pull her aside. It looks more natural this way, less suspicious. Zara is sitting down by the firepit, glaring into the flames, and someone has pulled out a karaoke machine, or a laptop with a microphone, and Rico is performing the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” as if it’s a romantic ballad and not a stalker anthem, but that’s okay, because it means her attention is not on Billie and Ash, washing dishes in the brightly lit kitchen. Or she is, because Ash is holding her beer by the neck between her fingers, like a hanged man. Talking.

  “Fontaine said your sister ran off with something. Or someone.”

  “That’s right,” Billie says, faking a drunken slur. “And I’m going to fucking kill her.” And all of you, she thinks. Or let you do that to each other.

  “Drugs?”

  Billie shakes her head.

  “Medicine.”

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “C’mon. What’s got you chasing across the country with a head wound? You can tell Ashleigh. I saved you. You think just anyone could have pulled off that life-saving procedure? Not just any one would have had the guts and the know-how. You were in serious trouble. So spill.”

  “I really can’t say.” Billie shakes her head again, refuses to look around, playing coy, scraping the dhal gravy from the pot.

  “Money. A suitcase full of money.”

  Billie rinses the soap off the pot, turns it upside down on the drying rack. “That’s not it, either. I should get back, stop Rico mangling that song.”

  Ash catches her wrist. “They friends of yours, these two?”

  “I wouldn’t call them that.”

  “Business partners. That’s all right. I know how that is. They’re my business partners too. Rico, anyway. We help each other out. Shipping special packages. Supply and demand.”

  “Gears of commerce,” Billie agrees.

  “Gears got to get greased, though.”

  “Otherwise they stick.”

  “Hold up the whole machine. You understand me.”

  “I’m not the one with the purse strings.”

  “Sure, sure. But it would help me smooth things along if I understood what we’re dealing with here, with this rare and precious product that has you chasing all over the place.”

  “Do you like your business partners?” Billie says.

  “It depends. How about you?”

  “No.”

  “Fontaine said it’s a person.”

  “That’s right. A very special person…”

  36.

  Cole: Spillage

  Every night. Every single damn night, Cole has to unspool her soul, confessing to Sister Hope, the electronic eavesdropper running alongside. It’s the price she paid for joining, for the chance to hide herself and Mila in plain view, but it’s sandpapering her nerves. It’s the complexity of the layering, running out enough truth to anchor the lies, praying they don’t cross-examine Mila to check out her story.

  And the hours and hours of talking and talking, as if she hasn’t done enough of that in the last months and years, as if it helps. Grief is the magic bottomless refill. You spill your guts, wring yourself out, only for the pain to fill you up again. Sometimes she wishes she could default to don’t ask, don’t tell. But the Church don’t play that way. Still, if it gets them to where they need to be…

  Live up to your name, boo.

  Cole? So I should be setting things on fire? But she knows ghostguy means her Church name. Fucking Patience.

  So here they go again, in a study overlooking the New Mexico hills, a glitter of lights in the blue dusk. Her womb is a tight fist, her back aches. She’s already soaked through her pad.

  “Welcome, Sister Patience. God’s grace is within you.” Hope sets the digital recorder on the desk between them.

  “And within you, Sister Hope,” Cole echoes the words. She’s good at memorizing lines, ever since her sixth-grade school play, when she was one of three praying mantises with unwieldy cardboard claws in an ambitious African retelling of Cinderella.

  “Everyone goes through this. It’s hard to face yourself, who you were. The process of becoming is tough. A lot of Sisters drop out before they ever get to Mortification. It’s not for sissies, taking on the sorrows of the world. But I see you. God knows what’s in your heart. I know you’re brave.”

  “I don’t feel brave,” Cole confesses. Tent-peg truths, but she’s raising her big top in a field sewn with razor blades that snag threads, might rip the canvas all the way up, if she’s not careful.

  “But you are. To have come this far, to have endured what you have.”

  “Hardly unique.”

  “God doesn’t have a yardstick to measure us. We all suffer. All suffering is valid.”

  “It’s not a competitive sport.”

  “Exactly. That’s very good, Sister Patience! I like that a lot! I might use that, with your permission of course.”

  “Go wild. It’s all yours. So are we still talking about lust today?”

  “We can come back to that. I wanted to talk about moments in your life where you think you could h
ave done better, so that you can forgive yourself.”

  “Wow. I don’t even know where to start.”

  Murder? That seems like a good place.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I was never religious. I mean, I went to a church school in…back home.” She catches herself before she can say Johannesburg. “But it wasn’t serious. It was like geology classes, except we got parables instead of igneous rock versus sedimentary, something you put up with, even though you knew you were never going to pursue it further.”

  “We come to God in our own time.”

  “So I don’t have much experience, but this feels more like therapy than religion.”

  “Have you done a lot of therapy?”

  “Not really. With my husband…”

  “Evan,” Hope says, checking her notes.

  See, ghostguy? See how well she’s doing at fudging their names.

  “Yeah. We did couples counseling after Mila was born. I had no idea how hard a newborn would be. People try to tell you, but it doesn’t cover it. There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a torture method. It broke us for a while. It was so hard. Do you have children?”

  “This isn’t about me. And you don’t have to compare. No yardstick, remember? Having kids is hard. And it was hard for you.”

  “Right.” Cole’s womb complains, and she presses her fingers against her belly. Can you pray away period pains?

  “So, let’s maybe talk about your feelings around having your daughter, how you could have been a better mother and a wife.”

  And sister. That’s the one we should be talking about.

  “I come here…,” Hope prompts.

  “Sorry, yes. I come here with my heart open to acknowledge all the ways I have failed in the past, to confront my sins, to take accountability for my transgressions, and try to be better.”

  “Because we must first forgive ourselves…”

  “We must first forgive ourselves, before we can seek His forgiveness. He is alive in us. We are the kingdom, and His power and glory reside in us, now and forever.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen,” Cole echoes. She gets how easy this is, how neat, to give yourself over to someone else’s care, their rules. You don’t have to think, you don’t have to make decisions, or do anything at all. Except keep the lies straight. Just until they get to Miami.

  “Last night, we were talking about lust.” Hope’s eyes are bright, avid. Everyone’s a voyeur. Yesterday, Cole had trotted out the dirty stories, the easy ones: when she first started masturbating, her first boyfriend. Almost painfully innocent now.

  She was seven and her parents were renovating her room, so she was camped out in the spare room, reading a book she’d smuggled off the top shelf of the library in her dad’s den, The Joy of Sex. It had always squicked her out before, or been completely hilarious with the line illustrations of the hippie couple with his dense beard and her armpit hair, and all the arrangements they configured themselves into. She’d straddled the arm of the green corduroy sofa and pressed herself against it, feeling hot and light and dizzy, making out with the back of her hand.

  Then she was fifteen and James was nineteen, and she’d practiced saying his name, breathily, sexily, on the rope swing under the mulberry tree at the bottom of the garden that she was definitely too old for, and the rope creaked uncertainly, but also created a beautiful pressure between her legs. How the first time, even one finger inside her had hurt.

  Then there were the one-night stands, the doomed romances, the guys she slept with purely for conquest purposes. She could fill up a hundred Confidances with sex talk. If that’s where Sister Hope wants to go, she’ll play her part.

  Hope takes her hands in hers. “This is normal, what you’re feeling.”

  Horny? Cole does not say, because her survival-mode self is at the wheel. Concentrate.

  “The guilt. Let’s not talk about sex. Let’s talk about your relationship with your husband. Did you always love and obey him?”

  Does in bed count? Hands lashed to the bedpost, light S&M. Her breathy, delighted “yes, sir.”

  It opens the door to other memories. That time before Devon got really sick, when he could still walk, still get out of bed. The two of them smoking the tiniest joint of the government-issue marijuana in that house in Oakland while Miles was fast asleep upstairs, in the bed they all shared. (She’d taken to being middle spoon, getting between them so he wouldn’t feel the jut of his father’s hips, his bony legs—a stick figure of his former self.) Tiny, because they needed to save it for when. The inevitable. Miles getting sick.

  Devon was teasing her about her addiction to Deadbook, she remembers, the collective noun for the social media graveyards with names streaming like the financial tickers used to before the markets crashed. It was relentless, impossible to keep up, and yet reassuring for exactly that reason: it meant they weren’t alone.

  “Who died today? Any celebrities of note?”

  “Jake Gyllenhaal. The president of Burkina Faso, a Taiwanese film director, a kid I went to kindergarten with, Benjamin Bunny.”

  “His name was Benjamin Bunny?”

  “His nickname. Ben Ludtz.” She gave a wistful sigh. “I was going to marry him one day.”

  “You got me instead. Sorry.”

  “At least you’re still alive.” She nudged her head up under his arm, like their cat Mewella used to do.

  “For now. Did I ever meet him, this first love of yours?”

  “No, and to be honest, I don’t know it’s him at all. A Ben Ludtz died among the many, many, many today.”

  “From heartbreak. Thirty years later. Because you spurned him!” He pinched the joint back from her fingers. “Bogart.”

  “I’ll break you, my friend,” she laughed, “if you’re not careful with your spurious accusations.”

  “Too easy. I’m fragile. I’d snap, just like that!” He clicked his fingers and dropped the joint onto the floor. “Ah, crap!” But when she started to bend for it, he caught her. “Leave it.”

  “We’ll burn the house down,” only half-protesting.

  “Really?” he raised one brow at the kitchen tiles. He always did good eyebrow. “We need to have a talk about your understanding of flammable properties.” He kissed her.

  “We need to talk about your breath!” she laughed, and then pressed her mouth back to his, feeling the sudden hot urgency of him, of them.

  “I’m dying,” he shrugged, one-shouldered, his palm in the small of her back, pulling her against him. “Can’t help it.”

  “Don’t die,” she admonished, “and get these off,” indicating the unerotic dinosaur-print pajamas Miles picked out for him for Christmas.

  “I’m trying, baby. I’m really trying.” The pair of them fumbling in a kissing-grinding-groping-disrobing waltz back toward the couch. “But I’m just saying…”

  “What?” she pulled off her hoodie, unhooked her bra, flung it aside.

  He grinned, in that shell-shocked way. “Have I told you how fucking magnificent your tits are?”

  “Many times,” she grinned back, scrambling onto the couch, kicking away her panties. “What were you saying?” She guided his hand between her legs. “I lost track.”

  “Jesus, you’re wet.” He hesitated, playful-serious (which meant very serious). “I’m just saying, baby, if I die, you can’t hold it against me.”

  “How about this?” she reached for his cock, impatient. “Can I hold this against me?”

  He groaned. “Yes. Fuck. Please. Please do.”

  Sex and death. What a cliché. That’s humans for you; seventy percent water and terrible cliché. It wasn’t the last time, but it was the last good time.

  Hope’s cough prompts her.

  “Honor and obey? Yes. I tried. Sometimes I was willful. I didn’t listen.” Like letting Miles watch the Black Lives Matter protests on the news, so far away, it felt like he wouldn’t be afraid. But they were also doing apartheid histor
y at school, listening to Trevor Noah’s audiobook. “Would I have been born a crime, Mom?” He couldn’t sleep; he cried because he was afraid a police officer would shoot him.

  “He’s a kid, Cole.” Devon had berated her, after an hour lying next to Miles on the top bunk, telling him stories until he dropped off to sleep.

  “But he needs to know about the world.”

  “He can wait. He’s got enough to worry about.”

  “You know it’s a ploy, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your son is sneaky and clever, Dev. I’ve no doubt that he’s worried and scared, but always at bed time? Do you know he lured me into an hour-long conversation last night that started with segregation? We ended up talking about photography and light and exposing for different skin tones, and somehow, we got onto how the aurora borealis happens because of magnets.”

  “He gets that from me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your good looks, my sneakiness and smarts. Don’t beat me! It’s a compliment.”

  Now, “Can you give me an example?” Hope says, and Cole dredges her memory for something that would satisfy her.

  “I made jokes at his expense. I embarrassed him in public. I got mad that time we were visiting his sister in Chicago after Mila was born, and we were in a restaurant with her three kids, and our brown baby, and some woman mistook me for the white nanny. She commented on it—said it was so progressive.”

  “Mmm,” Hope says. “You felt out of place and unworthy.”

  “Tayla was—is—so perfect. She’s beautiful and smart and she has the perfect family. Had. Jay died. Then Eric.”

  Names, boo. You’re giving real names.

  Shit.

  “And you felt that you couldn’t compare.”

  Get back on track. “Yes. Motherhood was hard, like I said. I wasn’t prepared. And…I kept working when I should have been the homemaker.” She’s flailing in the dark, hoping this failure to be a Stepford Wife is the kind of thing she’s supposed to confess.

  “Ah,” Hope says. “Do you think you’ve failed as a mother?”