And so he began to look for clues.
There were so many things when he began to question Father’s version of events. The glow from the mainland that Father said was from the bombings and fires. If that were so, why did we never hear the sound of the bombs? And why was the glow so steady? Shouldn’t a fire wax and wane? And the publication dates on the comic books Father said he had looted from the burned-out stores—they were still being printed five years after we had fled.
But the last straw, the thing that made Cain take the battered boat and flee for the mainland, came from the most unlikely place of all.
May’s snowflake.
She had pinned it on his wall months before, cut out of a newspaper Father had been using to clean the shotgun.
Cain had taken it down, and he’d seen there was a date on it. A date just two days before Father holed the boat and told us that life on the mainland was destroyed beyond repair.
May had snipped a dozen holes into the articles, but Cain could still read between the lines—and the stories were ordinary, commonplace ones. A school fair and a fancy-dress competition. An irritated letter about the town council’s policy on pothole repair. An advertisement for a Disney cruise.
He could have shown the snowflake to Father. He could have demanded an explanation. But he knew what Father would say. Fake news. Media propaganda. They’re blinding you to the truth, boy.
And Cain was done with Father’s truth.
It took a long time for Jacob’s arm to heal. I had been lucky—a clean shot to the upper arm, designed to incapacitate. But Jacob had been shot in the shoulder. The bone shattered, and he might never regain full use of his arm.
It took our shattered hearts even longer to heal. How do you relearn everything you thought was the truth? How do you make your life again? When they talked of high schools and exams and jobs, I wanted to laugh. The school I remembered was one where the alphabet was hung in bright colors around the walls, and the story-time bear was a large, friendly presence in the corner by the show-and-tell table—impossibly far from the sprawling gray buildings full of more people than I had ever imagined existed.
After that first morning, May did not sing again, until I began to think that perhaps I had imagined that small, high voice singing “Mamma mia, hello again” beside my hospital bed. She grew thin and pale and did not want to come out of her room or visit any of the day centers Mother had found for her. She only lay on her bed, staring at the wall, stroking her pillow the way she had once stroked Woof.
At last Mother bullied her into the car and they drove off together, May huddled and withdrawn in the back seat. Mother came back alone, looking drained, and said that May had agreed to stay for a “trial” day.
I went with her to pick May up. Not because I wanted to, but because Mother looked so sad and defeated that I wanted to make her happy.
We opened the door to the center, and Mother signed us in, and we walked down the corridor to the peach room, where May was supposed to be, and we opened the door.
And there she was, sitting on the floor, head down, surrounded by scraps of paper. They were playing ABBA, and some of the other students at the center were in the middle, dancing and smiling. May wasn’t dancing. But as I drew closer, I saw that she was singing—her own words. And she looked up at me with shining eyes and held out a string of paper dolls longer and more beautiful than any she had ever made.
“The singer makes them all,” she sang along to the beautiful rising music, and her face was happier than I could remember as she spread the dolls out in a great span from arm to arm, more dolls than she had ever seen, ever dreamed of.
There were tears in Mother’s eyes as she picked up an armful of discarded scraps and scattered them in the air, over May’s head, the white fragments raining down like snowflakes all around, while May held up her arms and laughed and laughed and laughed, and the music played on, while all around, the children danced.