Landry Park

by Bethany Hagen

  He waved away an oncoming lightning bug. “I did not say that biology wasn’t necessary. Only that it wasn’t noble. Physics is the gateway to understanding our very existence—our beginnings and ends. Those who study it are contemplating the largest questions in the universe. Biologists today are nothing more than laboratory technicians, replicating vaccine recipes created centuries ago.”

  Seeing my chance, I pounced. “Perhaps I could contemplate those questions, too. Have you reconsidered my going to the university?”

  Father stopped, his mouth twisted in amusement. “Are you seriously still preoccupied with this business of going to the university? After I told you expressly that it was not possible and that you must marry?”

  I raised my chin. “I won’t change my mind. I want to go and I think it’s best for the estate—and for me—if I have an education.”

  “How could it be best for the estate if you were celibate and shut away for four or five or eight years, when you should be marrying and providing the family with another heir?”

  I pulled away from him. “I can’t waste my days in utter boredom while I wait to be bred like a horse. I hate feeling like my life is not really my own.”

  “Your life is not your own,” Father said calmly. “And it never was. Just as mine was never my own, and your uncle Stephen’s and your grandfather’s were never their own. We are Landrys. And without Landry Park—which cannot be safe without an heir—and without our history of contributing to this great way of life, we are nothing. We are servants to our dynasty.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I whispered. “Or I shall go mad.”

  His face softened. “You are not a broodmare or dog or even a Hapsburg princess to be married off to shore up alliances.” He took me gently by the shoulders. “Do you not see that you will be the mistress of this house and of your marriage? That whoever you marry will be eternally grateful to you for your condescension in letting him live in your house? You will join the ranks of the Uprisen, Madeline, and your children will bear the Landry look, not that of your husband’s. I am not condemning you to a life of vassalage, but a life of leadership.”

  “Can’t this life wait until after I have attended the university?” I asked one last time. “Please?”

  “It cannot.” He kissed my forehead. “It’s my fondest wish that you will see the wisdom of all I have asked of you. And please, for the sake of our amity, do not trouble me with this conversation again.”

  David Dana was walking the wrong way.

  It was three days after Cara’s debut, and I was browsing in a dusty bookstore in the middle-class part of town. I’d found a battered copy of The Faerie Queen and pulled it off the shelf. We had a four-hundred-year-old copy under glass at home, but this one was newer, with annotations.

  My lips murmuring the verses, I had looked up to see David, dressed in a shirt and vest like a servant, with a gardening cap pulled low over his face and his shoulders hunched. He glanced backward every now and then to make sure he wasn’t being watched.

  He was walking east, into the poorest part of town. Soon he would be among the scullery maids and laborers and factory workers. If he kept walking after that, he’d reach the rusted chain-link fence and tumble-down gate leading to the miserable slums of the Rootless.

  He’s probably just going for a walk, I told myself. Stop being so suspicious.

  I couldn’t help it, though. I had to know what he was up to, walking so quickly and so furtively. If he was going to the Rootless ghetto, it could have something to do with the girl he’d helped in the park. I entertained the fantasy of running up alongside him, asking him where he was going and why. But the harsh words uttered in Cara’s ballroom still hurt. My pride refused me asking him plainly.

  Mind made up, I set down the book and slipped out of the shop, careful to stay several feet behind as I trailed him. Enough people roamed the sidewalk with fresh loaves of bread and bottles of milk in hand that I could easily weave in and out behind David without being seen.

  “What are you doing?” someone to my left demanded.

  I turned to see Cara—of all people—looking radiant and sunny in a tennis uniform and sneakers. She frowned at me. It was another opportunity to pester her for answers, but the thread connecting me to David was too compelling, too strong to break.

  “Nothing,” I told her. “Just out for a walk.”

  I turned back to David, relieved to see the gardener’s cap still bobbing in the distance. I scrambled to follow, forcing my short legs into long strides.

  Cara easily matched my pace. “Madeline, what are you doing?” she asked curiously. “Why are you going east?”

  “Why are you?” I asked.

  “I am hiding from my mother,” she said, and for a minute, the imperiousness in her voice faded. “I told her I’d meet her after tennis at the country club, but I decided to leave instead.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s none of your business.” Her voice was clipped. I looked over and was surprised to see something like unhappiness on her face. She glanced at me. “You didn’t used to be so nosy. I wish you would stop.”

  “All right then.” I turned my eyes to the back of David’s head.

  “So why are you heading toward the bad part of town?”

  “Well, that is none of your business.”

  “Is that—” she squinted up ahead. “Is that David? Where on earth is he going?”

  I didn’t answer, but wondered—not a little sulkily—why she didn’t know, since she had debuted with him three days earlier, since they were the couple constantly being photographed holding hands and cuddling. I wished I had the willpower to turn off my tablet and my wall screen, and shut out the stream of gentry gossip. But the lure of his face, of even a glimpse of his bright eyes and big smile—it weakened me. Paralyzed me. I bit my lip, resisting the urge to look at him again, at the way his back and shoulders stretched his shirt and at the way the sunlight caught the ends of his hair under his cap.

  “Oh,” she breathed, after I kept my face averted from hers, trying to hide my thoughts. “I get it. You’re following him. Does this have something to do with your fight at my party?”

  “No,” I answered quickly.

  She smiled a sharp smile. “Of course not.”

  “I am curious about where he’s going, is all. Most gentry avoid this part of the town like the plague.”

  “And so should we. Who cares what he’s doing?”

  “I care,” I said, redoubling my pace. “And I would have thought you would, too.”

  She cut in front of me, making me stop short. “No, really. It’s one thing for a man to stroll into the eastern part of town, but we’re two girls and we’re not exactly dressed to blend in. Let’s go back.”

  “This doesn’t involve you,” I said.

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “But it will if the constables find your body stuffed in an alley somewhere and I have to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty that I didn’t stop you.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. It wasn’t like Cara to care about what I was doing or where I was going. I sincerely doubted that she was trying to stop me out of fear for my safety.

  “I want to see where David is going,” I told her firmly, and pushed past her.

  She stood there for a moment then skipped up beside me.

  “I’m coming along,” she announced. “I want to see what he’s up to as well.”

  “Shouldn’t you already know what he’s up to?” I asked, “Since you’re together and all?”

  “I’m not his secretary,” she replied. “Just his girlfriend.”

  I tasted bitterness like bile in my mouth. “You sound like you are really in love. Congratulations.”

  “And you know so much about love?” Cara scoffed. “I know for a fact that you’ve never even kissed a boy, much less dated one.”

  “What do you know about it? Have you ever actually cared for someone? Not just what they could do for you or how
they could make you feel—but cared about them as a person? Put their thoughts and wishes above yours?”

  “Yes,” she said, and I was shocked by the intensity in her voice. “And if I were you, I would shut up now.”

  Well, at least that threat led us back to normal Cara behavior. The sound of cars and fountains and people murmuring filled the space where our conversation had been.

  We passed a series of small but respectable row houses with their neat window boxes of yellow flowers. We walked past tall apartment buildings with children playing outside, past homes with patchy yards and auto garages with rusted wind turbines on top. We walked for almost an hour, the hot concrete of the sidewalk burning through my slippers.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what happened the night you were attacked?” I asked finally, the worst of my vexation with Cara draining into my legs, into my feet, into the sidewalk.

  “No,” she said.

  “I talked with Philip Wilder, you know. A few days ago.”

  She threw up her hands. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “Because I thought he might have been the one to hurt you.”

  “Philip?” she scoffed. “Please. He couldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “He hurts his boxing partners.”

  “Because he has zero training as a boxer and can’t control his own strength. I could fight him off easily if I wanted.”

  “Why did you stand him up?” I asked. “He said you were supposed to meet him in the gallery, but when he went, you weren’t there. Why were you in the Grove instead?”

  “It’s really none of your business.” Her jaw was clenched.

  I watched her face carefully. “Were you going to meet the Lawrence boys instead?”

  “It’s none of your business!” she exploded. “Who touched me, who touches me, who wants to touch me—it’s over, it’s done with, and it’s none of your concern.”

  I thought of the Rootless raids, of the red paint on my house. Of my father pushing the Rootless and the Rootless pushing back. “You’re wrong,” I said softly. “You’ve made it my business now.”

  She focused her green eyes on me. “I am sorry about your house,” she said after a minute.

  “Are you?”

  “Listen, it’s not my fault that your father is some kind of dictator when it comes to the Rootless. But I am sorry about your house. I know how much you love it.”

  I examined her face for any sign of sarcasm. There was none. For some reason, this unsettled me. Cara being selfish and haughty was one of the most consistent facts of my life. That she had genuinely noticed my feelings and expressed some form of pity—it bothered me.

  Four or five miles out from the bookstore, I could make out the twisted metal and crumbling stone that separated this ghetto from the ghetto beyond. David was walking straight toward it.

  The neighborhood by the Rootless fence was rough; the roads were potholed and weedy, and there were few people out and about, though the sound of barking dogs and blaring wall screens filled the open air.

  Those people who were outside stared at us hard, taking in my long flowing dress and Cara’s sparkling bracelets. They knew we didn’t belong here. They knew we had no business heading east. But whereas someone from the middle-class part of town might have stopped us, might have begged to escort us away from those twisted pointless gates, no one here seemed interested in helping us.

  Cara, for one, seemed entirely unconcerned, which was curious, given her earlier insistence that I avoid the dangers of this area.

  It’s not that dangerous, I reassured myself. The Rootless are always polite and quiet when they collect the charges. But then I remembered the red words scrawled across the front of my house. It was possible that they wouldn’t take too kindly to two gentry girls waltzing into their neighborhood, no matter how much one of them theoretically sympathized with their cause. I knew the constables patrolled the Rootless part of town, but how frequently and with what degree of diligence was a mystery. No one knew where I was—I could be missing for days before anyone thought to look here.

  The Rootless lived in a vast enclosed space that had once been a massive park. Before the Last War, people came here to visit the zoo and the large outdoor theater. Children played soccer or baseball on the expansive fields. The zoo and the theater were gone now, but the crumbling stone pillars of the entrance remained, as did the occasional stone park shelter—isolated, ancient things out of place among the shacks and ration stations and wind turbines spinning nearby. Stone and steel, side by side.

  At first, the town on the other side of the Rootless gate looked much the same as the neighborhood before it. The road was rough and potholed. A corrugated metal ration station displayed shriveled and bruised fruit, while a carpentry shop next door smelled of sawdust and metal.

  Disconcertingly, the bread station nearby smelled of the same thing.

  The farther I crept past the gates, the more differences I noticed between the two neighborhoods. There were no weeds growing up in the streets here. Delicate charcoal and chalk murals ebbed and flowed from one building to the next, sometimes spilling onto the sidewalk below, sometimes flowing across the street in black-and-white rivulets. Concrete statues and shining steel sculptures guarded doorways and intersections, and hand-carved benches lined the roads, set in the shade. Trees and wildflowers filled the spaces between buildings and houses, and the sidewalks were meticulously paved with white stone. Farther in, the not-quite-houses here were infinitesimal, barely there specks of shelter, but despite the mismatched shingles and plastic for windows, all the houses were repaired and clean and had well-trimmed lawns.

  There were no gardens here. No vegetables or herbs, or anything of the like. Even wild onions were not allowed to grow in the Rootless ghetto. Growing your own food was punishable by arrest and possibly worse, depending on the gentry’s mood.

  And the gentry’s mood was evident everywhere in the otherwise peaceful neighborhood. I counted five or six burned houses, with only charred metal and broken concrete remaining among the ashes. The plastic that many used in lieu of glass for their windows was puckered and tattered, as if batons and rocks had ripped it apart, and everywhere, on walls and doors and signs, the authorities had pasted a large, colorful poster: a gentry man from the waist up with his arms spread wide. In the foreground were smiling families holding nuclear charges with sacks of food piled at their feet. Behind the gentry man’s head was the familiar atomic energy symbol, the orbits of the electrons painted in silver and the nucleus a ball of shining gold resting on top of his head. The electrons were painted emerald and ruby and sapphire, making the symbol look like a crown studded with jewels. Like a halo.

  WE ARE ALL FAMILY, read a banner at the bottom.

  A few older men and women sat on the shaded benches, their eyes on me. I nodded to them and attempted a halfhearted sort of wave, hoping the gesture seemed friendly and not pretentious.

  Their expressions didn’t change, but I could feel the dark hostility hovering around them. I picked up the skirt of my soft cotton dress and hurried past them with my head ducked. I felt embarrassed by my long pale arms, smooth and still smelling of ivy soap and chamomile from my bath this morning. Of the wide silk sash just under my chest, of the silk slippers on my feet. Cara just gave the people we passed a jaunty smile.

  “Stop it,” I hissed.

  “What? I’m being friendly.”

  “You are being supercilious.”

  David took a left, and we hugged the shadows of the buildings, ducking behind a statue when he looked back. There were only a few people out and about—most were probably out collecting charges, or sorting them onto the trains at the very eastern edge of the old park. I fervently hoped that we wouldn’t go anywhere near the sorting yards; my only knowledge of them was gleaned from whispered conversations of the servants, and those conversations were always riddled with fear and horror. I knew they were underground, in a concrete and lead-lined cave, the same as the
train tracks and the hundreds of miles of tunnels that led the trains to Florida where the charges were shot into space.

  David stopped and scanned the street. I yanked Cara behind a nearby statue and held my breath.

  “This is so stupid,” I heard her say, but she stayed still and I got the feeling she was actually enjoying this, in some weird way.

  After a minute like this, David turned around and continued on his way. I scurried to catch up, with Cara following close behind.

  We came upon a low brick building with darkened windows. A sign with a picture of an overflowing stein swung above the door. David walked in. I crept up to the door, thinking hard. Perhaps if I snuck in quickly, no one would see me. Or maybe if I followed someone in, I could hide.

  But there were two of us, and in our fresh clothes and with our long, gleaming hair—so different from the Rootless women with their lank strands tucked underneath kerchiefs and caps—we’d never be able to walk in unnoticed.

  The roar of greetings and clunking mugs diverted my thoughts. There was an open window at the side of the building. I slipped into the narrow alley and sat beneath the open window, fighting the temptation to take a peek at the men inside. Cara arranged herself beside me, wrinkling her nose at the damp stone currently ruining her tennis skirt.

  “Now that the pretty boy is here, can we finally begin?” a gruff voice asked from inside the tavern.

  “Good to see you, too, Smith,” David said pleasantly. Some chairs scraped against the floor, as if people were pulling up to the table. Given how clearly I could hear everything, I surmised that the group was very near the window.

  “What news from the other side of town, David? Will they stop the arrests?”

  “How could they?” David answered. “With the mayor sick with radiation-induced cancer? With Smith’s stunt at Landry Park last month? The gentry are all paranoid, but Alexander Landry is more paranoid than most, and with him convinced that one of you attacked the Westoff girl and ruined his house, he is hell-bent on punishing the persons responsible. You’re lucky that no one has been killed.”