She rose, slipped her tunic over her head, drew up her trousers. They pinched her waist; she would have to let them out again soon. Before leaving, she took the chipped white mug of tea Meg had made for her, walked to the front door, and peered out. No one around. She dumped its contents in the dirt. She had forgotten a few times, and once, Meg noticed. “You missed your Salt dose this morning,” she said, motioning to the full cup on Violet’s nightstand. A fly floated in the cool brown liquid.
“Oh. Yeah. I remembered later, at Vic’s. So I had a cup then.”
“Cool,” Meg said. She had taken the cup, grimacing at the fly, and flung the tea out the door.
—
Violet had thought, for a long time, that fear was something she would no longer feel. Would, yes: it was an act of will, this relinquishing of fear, because her poor brain insisted on it long after she had nothing, or close to nothing, left to lose. She lived on, through the loneliness and constant pain, for June’s sake. Out of love for her. Which made her hate June sometimes, and she had wanted more than once to say, “If you really cared about me you would let me go.” The problem, though, was that June would let her go. If Violet put it that way. And then June would have to live on with the guilt of letting her go, of the consequences of such letting go, and Violet wanted, despite everything, to spare her that.
Long back she’d started regularly using Salt—in grain form, taken orally—for pain. Owle dispensed it to her. If the initial trauma of the burn had been an all-encompassing, months-long ROAR, and her day-to-day baseline now was like trying to have a conversation with someone while some other person at your side shouted nonsense, the Salt sent the shouter across the room, sometimes even across the house. On the rare occasions when Violet had shot up, the shouter was banished entirely, leaving behind a calm so eerily perfect that Violet knew the risks of indulging more often, knew that to do so would be as good, ultimately, as firing a gun into her own skull. She had lived with pain so long that its absence seemed a kind of death.
Still, she’d come to depend on her low-level dosage—both the reprieves it offered and the anticipation of a reprieve, which gave her hope, something to aim for, a way to muddle through even when the medicine wasn’t in her system. Owle’s plan, then—his offer—had stopped her cold.
“I’d have to do without all of it?” Violet had asked. They were sitting at his kitchen table—the same table where Owle had outlined for June the full scope of Ruby City’s fertility problem only the previous week. “Not just the tea but the pain meds, too?”
“All of it,” Owle confirmed.
“And there’s not even a guarantee?”
“Nope,” said Owle. “That’s the whole reason for even trying this, Violet. We have to know if the contraceptive effect stops when you stop the Salt. And even if it does, there still aren’t guarantees. You’re what, thirty-six?”
“Around that,” Violet said.
“It’s not your fertile prime.”
“Then why are you fucking asking me, then?”
“Because I trust your discretion,” said Owle. “I know you wouldn’t want this getting out and causing June trouble. And because I thought you might be interested.”
It was true. She had come to him a year earlier asking—haltingly, unable to meet his eye—if she might be going into early menopause or something. She hadn’t had a period in over six months, she said, and normally she’d just say fuck it and good riddance, but in the back of her mind—way back, far off, just a hypothetical, mind you—she’d wondered if maybe, someday, some way or another, she might think about having a child. Owle had looked at her in a way she hadn’t much liked: shrewdly, pityingly.
Now, she asked—unable, again, to meet his eye—“Who’d father it, then?”
His turn to look away. “Me, I guess, though I’m most definitely not in my fertile prime. I’m not talking about laying you down on a bed of roses, either, so don’t worry about the old man trying to romance you. We’d do it with syringes. That’s assuming you start menstruating again, of course.”
“If there is a baby,” Violet said. “We—what? Share it?”
Owle shook his head emphatically. “No, ma’am. I’m not interested in that. I’m too old to start daddying, and I’m too busy doctoring. If you have some other candidate in mind, that’s fine, but I’m operating on strictly a donor basis.”
Hell of a proposal. Stop your medicines, both the one that saves you from deadly disease and the one that saves you from constant pain. Wait an indeterminate amount of time. If, if your period returns, come in a couple of weeks later for a syringe of old-man spunk. Repeat. Repeat. Wait some more. And at the end of it all, maybe you’ll have a baby to raise. Out here. Alone.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
It took eight months for her period to resume. Eight months with the pain shouting over her shoulder, eight months having to keep up with her regular responsibilities—for June could not, must not, know what she was trying—without the protection from tick bites. Doc Owle got her a jar of NO-BITE and a Stamp; she had to use it four times. “You need to make some excuse to June to stay closer to home,” he kept telling her, and Violet kept refusing. If June thought that something was wrong, that anything had changed, that something was happening in Violet’s life without her knowledge or approval, she’d go into lockdown mode. June hated anything she couldn’t control. She would try to stop Violet. She would pressure and cajole and lay down guilt trips on Violet until Violet capitulated to her demands, because after all, she’d be right, wouldn’t she? What business did Violet have trying to become a mother? What child would want to nurse at her breast, look up into her ravaged face?
Still, she persisted. Even after Owle started murmuring doubts, suggesting that it might be time to give up and resume the inoculation, she persisted, and finally she was rewarded with the familiar aches, tenderness, the sight of blood on a washcloth. Owle celebrated with a slug of whiskey. “This is good news,” he said, his hand shaking. “This is reason to hope. You did good, girl.”
Getting pregnant took another year, over which her menstrual cycle started, halted, sputtered, started again: 36 days, 21, 62, 23. Timing her fertile days became its own job. She grew intimately familiar with Owle’s house, the tick of his windup clock, the smell of his pipe smoke, his curtained-off “exam room,” his attempts at professional courtesy and efficiency: like the clean sheet he made a show of removing from a drawer and laying out on the exam table, even if he was only taking her temperature. People probably either thought they were lovers or that Violet was dying of some terrible cancer.
She persisted through another five tick bites, too, though she did finally allow Owle to feed some story to June about Violet having a nutritional deficiency that was affecting her energy levels and compromising her immune system. Best if she stayed near camp for the foreseeable future, he said. Another sacrifice, because the work Violet did for June, for Ruby City—it gave her days shape, purpose. She didn’t like milking plants alongside her bunkmates, or helping Errol with the bread baking, or any other job that forced her to spend her day with people, their yearning need and barely masked disgust.
Then finally, three months ago: two lines.
Owle had wanted to go right to June with the good news. “Absolutely not,” Violet said, and she only shook her head when he demanded to know why, what could possibly happen, what was she afraid of. When Violet came to him three weeks ago and told him of her intention to accompany Andy back to the OLE camp to help with the hostage taking, he was livid. “This has gone on long enough,” he said. “It doesn’t just affect you. The whole village has a stake in this. I can list four women for you off the top of my head who’d want to stop the Salt this second if they knew what we know. You can’t risk going out there and getting yourself killed.”
“I’ve risked everything,” Violet said. “Me. Not you, not June, not anybody else.
People aren’t as stupid as you think they are. I live in the bunkhouse. They know what’s what. They chug that tea like it’s beer, trade partners once a month. If the rest haven’t put two and two together, it’s only because they don’t want to face it.”
“That may be true,” Doc Owle said. “But there’s still no good reason for you to go join that group. I thought you wanted this baby. I’m starting to wonder now.”
“You have no fucking idea what’s going on inside of me,” Violet said. “Not in my body and not in my head. I have my reasons, and I swear to God, Owle, you tell June before I decide to and I’ll slit your throat. You don’t want to test me on this.”
He blanched and backed away a step. “Fine,” he said. He grabbed his pipe and chomped down hard enough on the stem that he couldn’t hide a wince of pain. “Do what you want. I’m officially out of it.”
That wasn’t what Violet wanted. She’d come to almost like Harold Owle—it certainly didn’t hurt to almost like the father of your unborn child—and though she knew to not expect partnership from him, didn’t really want a parenting partner, it had been nice to have someone to go to, confide in, consult for advice. Almost like having a friend.
But she didn’t know how to smooth things over and still have her way. So she nodded, stood. Left.
—
She was out of the bunkhouse at 10:45, in time to collect the hostages’ lunches and bring them over to the warehouse. She was supposed to have put in a couple of hours this morning at the flower beds, but she was content, on occasion, to exploit her status as June’s adoptive daughter. No one seemed to miss her company much, anyway.
From Vic’s cabin she retrieved a crate loaded with a steaming crock of green beans and potatoes. “Errol has the biscuits this time,” Vic told her. “How’re they doing on water?”
“Don’t know,” Violet said. “I haven’t been over there yet.”
“You might want to check on that. They’re probably running low.” Vic shook her head with frustration, or maybe despair. “Lord God, I’ll be glad when this is over. Those two poor kids. Dead and gone. They didn’t have no business with guns, and I’m not afraid to say so.” She seemed afraid, though. She kept wringing a dishtowel. “Your mama said to you what the plan is?”
“June does what June wants,” Violet said. “She sure don’t answer to me.”
Vic grunted and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Nor to me. Well, she ain’t steered us wrong yet. But I’ll be glad when this is over. That’s for sure.”
At Errol’s, Violet was greeted by a cloud of flour dust and the perfume of rising yeast. Errol, his back to the door, lifted a hand from a mound of dough and pointed it at one of his work tables. “Bread’s in that basket. Tell them it’s all they’re getting today, so save some back if they want any with dinner.”
Violet’s stomach rumbled audibly. Her appetite over the last eighteen weeks had been fickle; her one consistent desire was for bread and sweets.
“Want a roll?” Errol asked.
“Sure,” Violet said.
“They’re by the stove.”
She set the crate on the table by the basket of biscuits, walked over to the cooling pan of rolls, and plucked a golden one from the edge row. A runner of steam spiraled into the air when she tore it open. She sunk in her teeth, transported for a few seconds by its buttery richness.
“You been looking better,” Errol said. He was using a broad handle of wood, sanded to a fine edge, to fold the dough over on itself. He flashed a quick glance at her. “Not so scrawny.”
Violet nearly dropped what was left of her roll in surprise.
“No offense. I just meant you should eat what you want. You got room to grow.”
“OK,” Violet said, too startled to be annoyed. “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” Errol said.
She set the basket of biscuits on top of the crock and lifted the crate again, letting some of the weight press against her stomach. So it was starting to happen, then. Her secret would come out. How shocked they’d all be if they knew, she thought with a kind of pleasure. What she had said to Harold Owle was the truth: no one understood what was inside her.
The baby moved again, as if in agreement.
It was a cloudy day. The warm snap held—it had to be close to seventy out—but rain spit in a fine mist. Violet hunkered under her hood, head dipped over the crate, and hurried toward the warehouse, where Cedric sat with his back against the door, taking what shelter the roof’s overhang offered. He looked up from the book he was reading. “Hey, there. Got lunch?”
“Got my hands full.”
“Oh, right,” he said, jumping up. He slid the paperback into his back pocket and picked up the gun from where he’d laid it on the ground beside him. The door was stopped from opening out with a heavy wood bar, which Cedric lifted. Then he fitted a key into the padlock.
“I need to check the water supply,” Violet said. “So keep an eye out.”
“I always do,” he said, patting the gun’s stock.
Violet was struck first by the barnyard smell of the storage shed’s interior. The five remaining hostages looked up and just as quickly looked away, as if her face were a cause of shame in them. Except for the very pretty one, the one who’d caught the knapsack Violet dropped the day they had taken the OLE campers hostage. This one looked at Violet, then the food, then at Violet again. “Need help?” she asked, careful not to leap to a sudden stand as Cedric had done. He was standing in the doorway now, gun pointed into the room.
“You can clear a space on the table there,” Violet said. “I’ve got to see how you’re doing on water.”
“Less than a few liters left,” the tall, muscular one said dully.
She looked herself just to be sure. There were maybe a couple of centimeters of liquid at the bottom of the insulated jug. “I’ll send Vic over here,” she said—more to Cedric than to the hostages. She unpacked the crate—biscuits, a chipped set of dishes and mismatched forks, the ceramic crock, its glass lid beaded with condensation—and loaded the dirty bowls and spoons from breakfast. “The bread’s all you get today. Save some if you think you’ll want it with supper.”
Only the pretty one—Edie—seemed to be listening to her. The others were lining up at the table, using their forks to transfer, slowly and awkwardly, beans and potatoes to their plates. This wasn’t the staring Violet had become so accustomed to over the course of her life, though. It was curious, and frank, but the curiosity penetrated her scars. And then Violet realized a strange thing. Edie wondered about her. Her motives. Most people turned not just their eyes away from Violet but their minds; their curiosity only extended as far as, How did that happen to her? This deeper consideration was new, uncomfortable, inconvenient. It was also such a relief that she wanted to cry.
This was the one. If Violet were to go through with this, Edie was the one.
At the door, she said to Cedric, “If you see Vic before I do, tell her I’ll deliver dinner tonight, too.”
“Got it,” Cedric said. He squeezed the padlock closed, barred the door, and removed the paperback from his pocket. “See you then.”
—
Roz was outside with the princes when Violet approached the house. She had a hank of rope that the dogs took turns tugging, both of them growling softly with excitement, and Roz barked laughter, transferred the grip end to Tauntaun, and let them wrestle each other. “Vi,” she said. She beckoned roughly with her now-free hand and drew Violet into a fast hug, pounding her twice on the back, firmly, and smacking the side of her head with a kiss. “You’ll make your mother’s day.”
“I can’t stay long,” Violet said awkwardly.
“Oh, sure. We understand. Just do what you can do.”
She hadn’t grown up in this house—Violet was in her teens by the time June and their small group had settled w
hat would become Ruby City, and the house was built another year after that—but it was as close to a home as she’d ever known. It was small, plain, but cozy: the front door faced a staircase that went up to a half floor; this is where Violet used to sleep. A door to the right of the entry went to June and Roz’s bedroom; and the great front room, as they always called it, with its fireplace and three south-facing windows, was to the left. The kitchen took up the house’s back half, and a porch off the back of the kitchen faced Piney Gap Branch, which made a pretty racket after a good rainfall. Violet, when she was sixteen or seventeen, had dragged a fallen tree over to traverse the branch, and she’d spent more hours than she cared to count now sitting on it, legs straddling a knot that was shaped a bit like a saddle horn, letting her bare toes graze the water’s surface and dreaming hopeless dreams about love and romance, the miracle surgery that would fix her face, or the boy who’d want her exactly how she was, and she’d thought about sex, felt the same confused stirrings as the procession of oversexed kids in the bunkhouse felt but no way to satisfy them. Or not the ways she wanted.
June, through all of this, was a force—a strong and tireless leader, selfless to a fault, visionary, brilliant, intense; when she loved, she loved fiercely, and only Violet and Roz lived behind the protective barrier of June’s devotion, and that barrier sometimes felt more like a holding cell. For Violet, at least. How did you thwart the will of the person who had gathered you up from where you had been abandoned to die and accepted you as her own, in a world of people who regarded you as monstrous, disposable? How did you rebel against that person? How could you bring yourself to disappoint her? The answer, most of the time, was that you didn’t. Violet had chosen two battles: moving out of this house and down to the bunkhouse was one. The other, sixteen years ago, was when she ran away back to Flat Rock for two weeks to kill Fat Daddy and Big Mama.
Violet found June in the great front room. She had been dozing in the rocking chair and startled when Roz let the door bang shut. “Oh,” she gasped, sitting up straight and widening her eyes, then rubbing her face briskly. “You scared me half to death.”
The Salt Line Page 29
