–Well?
–Some of it.
He made a displeased, grunting sound.
–Let’s put her to ground.
Which we had to do, to make sure the toxins left her – and to heal the ribs.
We started to close her, pulling on the skin that was surprisingly dense for a woman so hardly there.
It was still raining. The lawn made a belching sound. I jumped a little, looked at Father.
–It’s just the rain.
–Been a time since I heard it belch.
He didn’t reply. Miss Gedeo was on the ground and he was clearing the hair from her eyes.
–Something might have fallen in.
By which he meant an animal. A fox or a hare.
We put her at a fair distance from Mr Kault, who was still kicking on occasion, and I made sure that her head was to one side and that her lips were only slightly parted. It was hard to arrange her properly with the wet ground spilling in, and so I had to squat in the grave beside her. The rain ran down my shoulders and back like quick, cool fingers and made me wonder if this was what Cures felt when we checked them over.
By the time we’d patted the earth down smooth, evening had settled fully in a mist-blue haze.
Back inside the quiet house I realised how loud the outside-air had been.
We spoke briefly of things to be done the next day, and then Father took his coffee to the long couch, smacking his mouth at the tang it put there. I watched him settle back on the cushions, the muscles in his neck releasing, and went to bed.
Father must’ve been catching some scent on me, some difference I hadn’t accounted for. How else could he have known? No one knew about me and Samson. We’d both been careful, knowing how certain Cures would chafe at our being together.
Some would have wanted me burned at the stake, had they known. Others would have been jealous, thinking I was giving him some sort of elixir by lying with him – that he was getting a private, more effective kind of curing. Father had always said
We give them any cause to get frightened and they’ll forget how much they need us. Like that. Overnight. They’ll want us gone.
The next time I went to meet Samson I thought Father might pester me, but he didn’t.
He was chopping in the kitchen and I waited a moment, closing the front door behind me, to see if he’d call, but all I heard was the knife striking the counter.
Samson was at the usual place and we were quiet on the drive to the river. Neither of us mentioned his sister. Outside of the truck we stood close to one another and I felt his body warm beside me. After I took him inside his breath got so slow I thought he was sleeping. But then,
–How long have we been spending time together?
–Ha! Spending time!
He was lying on his stomach in the grass by the riverbed. My dress was hiked up around my waist and my thighs were itching from the prickling weeds.
–Maybe four months?
–That all?
His voice was thick. Dreams creeping in.
–Feels like longer.
–Does it?
I lay back and fanned my stomach with my dress but it was wet from his sweat and sagged at the hem. I said
–Must be the sneaking around. Makes time go slow.
His face inside the cross of his arms. Eyes closed.
–We could always go somewhere that doesn’t need sneaking.
–Sure, but the drive getting there … be half a day.
–No.
Flipping onto his back.
–No. I mean the two of us move somewhere. Live somewhere else.
The sky was entirely smooth. Cloudless in a false kind of way.
–You know I can’t leave.
–He’d get over it in time.
I let my knees fall together. The wet between my legs had yet to dry.
–We’re not Cures.
–So?
–We don’t work the same way. He wouldn’t get over it.
–I think you could do it if you wanted to.
I clicked my tongue and sat up, stood up. Looked to the river: thick and still.
–I’m going swimming.
I stepped over him and felt his fingers on my ankle, on the bulge of bone. I took off my dress and dipped it in the water, hung it over a bush to dry, waded in and looked over my shoulder. He was back on his stomach, his face turned away.
When we first started meeting he’d ask me
–What do you do for fun?
And I’d laugh and say
–Never you mind.
But what I was really thinking was Nothing. Not a thing aside from this.
Later, he asked questions like
–What happened when you were born?
–I wasn’t born.
–Fine – when you came out the ground.
–Father carried me to the attic and nursed me.
–What did you eat?
–You don’t want to know.
–All right. How’d you learn to speak?
–Same as you. Father just spoke to me all the time and soon I’d words of my own.
Only much, much sooner than an infant Cure.
–Why the attic? Seems lonely.
–Because it gets no light, and when I came up my skin still hadn’t quite set. Burned easy.
Laughing on his side, on the bedding of our soiled clothes.
–All grown up now, though.
Pinching my arm, squinting and smiling.
–Tough-tough-tough.
When I was a child and Father grew tired of talking the days seemed like they’d go on and on.
–Can’t I have a brother?
–No.
–A sister?
–No.
–Why not?
–When you’re older you’ll have your own child. My time parenting is done.
And so I climbed the trees and hurt the birds, not knowing it was hurt at the time.
I stood on the lawn and watched the twitching progress of a long black feather, its edges uneven and prickling.
Tousled and singed, it lay in the middle of the grass. I wondered if a raven had gotten caught in a chimney.
Father’s footsteps sounded from the patio and the feather tumbled away, awkwardly falling over itself back toward the trees.
A rough wind was coming.
I pressed my palms on my thighs to keep my dress down.
Father was standing on The Burial Patch with his shovel – we were there to bring up Mr Kault. It was still a little cool, being so early in the morning, and the grass kept close its dew.
The Ground gave way softly to the shovel and the soft-gush sound blended with Mr Kault’s middle-born son coming up the driveway twenty minutes early. After a foot’s worth of digging Father shimmied The Ground aside. We saw his cheekbones first, then his nose and then the front-door width of his chest.
Father got down on his knees to clear away the last bit of earth, scooping it around the sides of Mr Kault’s panted legs and sleeved arms. He squatted then, and said
–Kault … Kault, you can wake up.
Out came his pupils, a pair of deep wet holes, and the irises surrounding them swirling and brown. His hands grasped at the low walls of his soil-bed.
He didn’t see me as he blinked his way around the garden – or what he could see of it, and Father asked him how he was feeling.
There was no need for me to be there aside from the usual caution – a Cure resisting being above ground – but Mr Kault was fine. I went into the sitting room and sat in the window while Mr Kault got changed in the downstairs bathroom at the far end of the pantry. I’d left his things there. They’d smelled like outside.