The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “It’s not only for her.”

  Marta made a snorting sound.

  “Well, gosh, it’s partly for her. And I probably am being a damn fool, on that count, at least. But I have a penance to pay, Marta. Ruby City, that other village June mentioned. Lee, Anastasia, Wendy, Tia.” He cleared his throat. “Jesse. They’d all be alive if I hadn’t made that deal with your husband, if I’d stuck to my values instead of trying to make a quick buck. I want to try to put some good into the world, and that medicine could still make a difference.”

  “I wished I believed that. I really do.”

  “There’s another thing. Maybe this will be a more compelling argument for you.”

  Marta lifted her pale eyebrows.

  “Your husband. Will he let me come back and not take his deal? Knowing everything I know?”

  Marta flipped through the sheaf of papers, though Wes didn’t think she was actually seeing any of the words or numbers on the pages. At last she stopped. Tapped them against her thighs to neaten the edges. Refolded them along the old creases. The she tucked them against her middle and crossed her arms over them protectively.

  “All right, Wes,” she said. “Let’s be fools.”

  —

  The next morning, the chalet was shrouded in fog, the view outside the two banks of windows nothing but white and white and white. The group, Edie and Wes, too, went downstairs for the first time since their arrival and gathered beside the car. Berto and Andy argued about the best way to pack the trunk with the supplies they’d pilfered from the chalet’s stores. Edie felt something building inside herself like bubbles in a champagne bottle. She was scared. But she was also ready to see the others leave. She was ready for the life that awaited her and Wes after the others’ taillights had vanished downhill, into the mist. She was ready for midday to come, so that Wes could pass the forty-eight-hour mark and they could both believe, for real and true, that he was in the clear for Shreve’s.

  But first, goodbyes. Dutiful hugs and well wishes. Edie was reminded of long-ago Gulf Zone Christmases with relatives she only saw once or twice a year, those imposed physical intimacies, unwelcome but required by shared blood. And this group all shared blood now, didn’t they? Or shared bloodshed. Edie wouldn’t miss Andy, Berto, Ken. But she could put her arms around each of them, feel their hearts thudding against her own—proof that they all lived, still. Was that the point of a hug? Two human hearts thudding together, testifying? This made a sort of sense to Edie.

  She hugged Marta fiercely, and Marta kissed her cheek. “Take care of yourself,” Marta said. “Be smart.”

  Edie promised that she would.

  She withdrew so that Marta and Wes could exchange their goodbyes, understanding that there was something special between the two of them, a bond unlike any the others on this excursion had shared. She was jealous of them, in a way. But there was no replacing her own mother. Not with Marta, not with anyone else in the world. Edie had been loved, and lucky, and the loss served only to underscore these facts, to remind her of their preciousness.

  That left Violet. She hung at the edge of the group, arms folded tightly across her chest. Edie didn’t even try to go in for the obligatory hug.

  “Thank you for what you did,” Edie said. “You saved us.”

  “I saved my baby,” Violet said. “And I got the rest of them killed.” She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled something out. “Here. It may be all that’s left.”

  Edie took the offering: a paper pouch. Whatever was inside it made a fine rustling sound in the transfer, and Edie peeled the flap up to examine the pouch’s contents.

  “The seeds,” Edie murmured.

  “Yeah. It turns out I won’t need them.”

  Edie nodded and folded the flap back down, then rolled it down a second time for good measure. She slid the pouch into her Stamp holster.

  “Drive safe,” Edie said. It was the only parting sentiment she could come up with. “And good luck.”

  Violet nodded, then hurried to the car’s front passenger seat. Andy was behind the wheel. He put the car into reverse, waved; the other men followed suit. Marta, seated by a window, pressed her hand to the glass and smiled. Violet, staring off in some other direction entirely, did nothing. In another moment they were gone, even the rumble of the car’s engine, swallowed by fog and distance.

  The silence they left was very, very loud.

  “So,” Edie said.

  “So,” Wes agreed.

  “Upstairs? Look at some maps, make a plan?”

  “Sounds good,” Wes said.

  “But I’d like to finish Persuasion first. If that’s OK. I only have twenty pages left.”

  Wes agreed to that, too.

  She’d tell him about the seeds later, over the maps and lunch, and they would have to worry and strategize: Where to plant, and when? How to process them once they’d grown? Seeds tied you down to a square of soil. Seeds made your world smaller. And yet, they each contained a world, too, didn’t they? For a couple of hours, the seeds would be Edie’s secret: these hundreds of worlds, this pocket full of possibilities.

  Epilogue

  She Is Consumed

  Bedtime is always an hour-long ordeal, but it is a sweet ordeal. Mostly. There’s the bath, the anointing with oils and lotions—Ali’s eczema is very bad, and the skin on her chest is sometimes almost as angry a red as Violet’s own. The fresh diaper and pajamas, the books—Sweet Pea Sails the Sea, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Where Is the Bear?, and, oddly, The Shaman and the Salt Line are all current favorites—the songs, the noise machine, the rocking chair. Finally, the breast. This is a habit Violet needs to break, Ali’s nursing to sleep. She’s almost twenty months old, and the midnight comfort feeding keeps Violet from ever getting a solid night’s sleep, which she desperately needs, working the schedule she does. But it is so hard to let it go, for both of them. As they rock tonight, Ali’s eyes are still open; they glitter, reflecting the star-shower pattern circling on the ceiling above her. Violet lifts the baby’s bare foot and mouths it playfully, rubbing her lips against the perfect pearl toes, and Ali smiles around her nipple, pulls off, and says, “Mama eat.”

  “Yum yum yum,” Violet says. “Tasty toes. Mommy is so hungry for toes.”

  Ali bops her foot against Violet’s mouth and latches on once more. Her eyes flutter closed.

  Several minutes later, when the motion of her mouth has stopped, Violet pulls her breast loose and tucks it back into the flap of her nightgown. She rises, and the rocking chair creaks loudly, but Ali is heavy and motionless in her arms, out cold—for the whole night, Violet hopes. Her alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., which usually gives her enough time to shower, dress, and drink a cup of coffee before Ali’s soft cries emanate from the nursery. The bus that passes by Ali’s daycare gets to the stop near their apartment at 6:00, then again at 6:15. If they miss the 6:00, Violet still has a chance of getting to work on time. If she misses the 6:15, it’s call a cab and spend a few hours’ pay on fare, or get fired.

  After she’s laid Ali in her crib and drawn a light blanket over her, Violet goes to the projector. As she does every night, she runs her fingers over the gold chain dangling from a nearby lampshade—it glimmers in the shifting light—then rubs the gold A charm between her index finger and thumb. For luck. The necklace is the only fine thing in this apartment. She hopes she never has to pawn it.

  They live in one of the upstairs units of an old carved-up house on the outskirts of Greensboro. The house was built fifty or sixty years ago, when there was still talk of a train route being run out to this part of town. Fat chance of that. Now, most of the residents are like Violet: low-skill workers in one of the city’s hotels or malls or restaurants, people who wash clothes and sheets and floors, slap meat onto griddles, drop potatoes down into vats of hot oil (a job—the one—that Violet had avoided, one of the only ways that
the ruin of her face has empowered her), treat sewage, collect trash. They had settled into subdivisions like Violet’s, living three or four families, even five, to houses that had been built for one, though how one family had put so much space to use is beyond Violet’s comprehension. The houses in Meadow Glade Estates were all the same originally—tan siding and brick veneer, four bedrooms and a downstairs office, two-car garage, shallow front porch with grand white columns and a two-story entryway—though they’ve all been adapted over the years, resulting in a haphazard but creative architecture reminiscent for Violet of Ruby City. Meadow Glade is bearable only for the small ways it reminds her of her old home: the people, who are mostly decent and hardworking, though there is a crime element here, no doubt about it, and all of Violet’s windows have bars, and her doors triple-lock; the thriftiness and ingenuity; the sense of community, of the importance of protecting one’s own. As she emerges from her daughter’s room, she can see that her downstairs neighbor, Sally—who has a key to Violet’s rooms, just as Violet has the keys to hers—has left her a square of pound cake on a beautiful chipped old plate. It sits in the middle of the coffee table with a doily under it—Sally has a sense of occasion, even when there is none—and a glass of milk next to it. There’s a scrap of paper with one word written on it, etched in Sally’s ornate script: Enjoy.

  Violet settles down to do just that. It’s 9:30. The new episode of her favorite show, a half-hour comedy out of Britain called Cheek, dropped today, but before she cues it up on her tablet, she checks the news feeds—a masochistic act, one guaranteed to drain some of the pleasure out of this precious quiet time. But she can never stop herself.

  David Perrone is the lead story again. Another big rally, attendance in the thousands. More speculation about whether his popularity will hold out until the primaries next year. The pundits say no, but Violet knows better. His platform has been securing the border, keeping out the illegals—like Violet. But she understands. No one understands the misguided dream of a Wall more, she thinks, than a person who’d sacrifice everything to traverse it.

  She closes the news and syncs Cheek to the used monitor she picked up at a rummage sale. There’s a crack in the corner of the monitor, but you don’t even see it when the show is playing. It’s amazing what people in-zone toss.

  This half hour is hers. Then to bed on the pullout sofa, then work, then a few precious hours with Ali, then bedtime. And then she does the whole thing over again.

  She has just taken her first bite when there’s a sound out in the hall. Redford going to his rooms, she assumes, so she chews and swallows on her right side (she has a bad tooth on the left, is still saving to get it pulled), then takes another bite. But the footsteps stop outside her door, then creak. Violet pauses her show, annoyed, and waits for the knock. “Sally?” she calls.

  There’s another creak. Then more steps, this time moving in the direction of the stairs, and then Violet doesn’t hear anything anymore.

  She rises, uneasy, and sets her plate back down on the coffee table. At the door, she looks through the peephole. Sees nothing. She presses her ear to the door. Nothing.

  She thinks about messaging Sally downstairs, but Sally’s the nervous type, and Violet doesn’t want to rile her up over nothing.

  So she returns to the door, loops the chain in the slide, and turns the three locks. Opens it. Quick look to make sure no one is hiding to the door’s left or right, or crouched down below the view of the peephole. Then she closes the door, unhooks the chain, and opens it wide enough to stick her entire head out.

  The hall is empty. But there’s something on the floor.

  An envelope, folded from creamy paper, and—again—one word in a hand she recognizes: Violet.

  Not Sally’s hand, though.

  Her heart starts thumping hard. She looks out into the hall again, walks to the top of the stairs, peers down. Then back to her room. The apartment is on the house’s back half—none of the windows faces the front door—but Violet looks out the window anyway, and she sees nothing there, either, no dark figure moving away in the night.

  Hand trembling, she slides a finger under the envelope’s seal. There’s a sheet of paper, and Violet unfolds it.

  Violet,

  I think about you all the time. I hope you found what you were looking for over here. I am still on the hunt myself. I have a debt to collect. Another visit to pay.

  I think all the time about the Salt, too. Why it cost us our babies. And the conclusion I reached was that we don’t deserve to be here. We’re not supposed to be here. And if the ticks don’t finish the job, the cure will. But I’m glad you got your baby, Violet. I hope to meet her. It gets me through a day to imagine it.

  Love,

  June

  From the bedroom, Ali cries out. Normally, this would be cause in Violet for exhausted resignation, even despair, but tonight she goes to her daughter gladly, grateful for the excuse to snuggle her close. Maybe Violet will just sit in the rocking chair, hold her all night long. There will be no sleep for her now, anyway. She can only rock and hold her child and think about her mother—the woman who stood silently outside Violet’s own door, then chose to pass over it.

  Acknowledgments

  To my agent, Gail Hochman, and editor, Sally Kim: thanks for sticking it out with me through three books and for not turning tail when I told you this one would be about killer ticks.

  Thanks, too, to Danielle Lavaque-Manty and Leah Stewart for the early feedback and encouragement. “Trust the tick,” Danielle said when I was wallowing in self-doubt. I tried to do that.

  You hear a lot about how motherhood makes writing difficult, and I’ll agree that finding the time and motivation to work is a challenge. But I couldn’t have figured out what this book was about without my children. My first pregnancy began shortly after I started drafting The Salt Line, and my second child was born a few weeks after I submitted the final line edits. Becoming a mother to Selby and Raina helped me figure out the novel’s why—but more than that, it taught me that I have to write to please myself, or else the time away from them isn’t worth it.

  I ended this book with Violet and a small act of kindness that gets her through a hard day. I’ve been shown so many of those kindnesses in the last four years. I am lucky to work at an institution with a generous maternal leave policy, and I’m lucky to be supported by so many good people. To my parents: thank you for taking such joy in my children, and Mom: I couldn’t have survived those weeks after Raina’s birth if you hadn’t been here holding my hand. Risa Applegarth and Matthew Loyd: you are family to us, and we love you and your sweet girls so much. Erin McGraw, there will never be enough thank-yous for all that you’ve done. The list goes on: Jennifer Whitaker, Amy Vines, Juliana Gray, David Roderick, Rachel Richardson, Jen Feather, Audra Abt, Tony Cuda, Katherine Skinner, Amanda Weedman, Tita Ramirez, Drew Perry, and Rhett Iseman Trull—whether you were dropping off food or hand-me-downs or sending me a funny text, you’ve each done more for me than you probably realize.

  As ever, the last and biggest thank-you has to go to my husband, Brandon Jones. Our first date was twenty years ago, hard as that is to believe, and I can only marvel at how good those years have been, how lucky we are. You make me laugh, and you make me feel hope. As you wrote back when we were both still basically kids: Next time I see you, I’ll be hugging and kissing on you.

  About the Author

  © RACHEL MCCONOUGHEY

  Holly Goddard Jones is the author of The Next Time You See Me and the story collection Girl Trouble. Her work has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, Tin House, and elsewhere. Jones was a recipient of the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Prize for Excellence in Fiction and of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She earned her MFA from Ohio State University and her BA from the University of Kentucky, and now teaches creative writing at UNC Greensboro and li
ves in Greensboro with her husband, Brandon, and their children.

  HOLLYGODDARDJONES.COM

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