“Don’t worry about which side, just come on!” she called.
“Huh?” they both said.
“Just come on!” she shouted.
When they found her, they handed Vern her summer outfit, a loose linen top and fitted hide pants cropped just above her ankle. Each child looked at her naked body all cockeyed, like they didn’t see her without clothing all the time.
“Why you acting like you just seen the dead?” asked Vern.
“What’s that, Mam?” Feral asked, his voice so dainty she could barely hear him over the rumbling river.
“What’s what?”
Both her babes pointed to her, and she looked down at herself. A great rash had broken out over her arms, chest, and neck. Inflamed patches of red and white, bumpy and pus-filled, covered her.
“You did something to it?” Howling asked.
“I didn’t do nothing!” Vern said defensively.
Back at camp she rubbed salve all over. The itching hadn’t subsided, but it had lessened with the outbreak of rash. “It’s worse on your back,” said Howling, rubbing the salve there for her.
“I was scratching it a lot,” she said. “Because it was itching,” she added hastily, not wanting him to think she’d made those welts on purpose.
“I don’t mean that. It looks like…” He drew his finger down her spine. “It’s all hard, Mam. And white. Like your skin’s boiling. You look like your skeleton’s on the outside.”
Vern couldn’t make sense of his description and waved him off. “It’s just an allergy. The skin reacting bad to a flower.”
“That’s one powerful flower,” said Howling. “Flowerful.” That cracked him up.
He loved rhymes. Loved words. Loved to play with their infinite combinations. Back at Cainland, he’d be reading by now. He’d have inherited her old copy of Ashanti to Zulu, an ABC book of cultural traditions from various peoples across the African continent, by a woman named Margaret Musgrove. The copy had belonged to Vern’s mam. She should’ve thought to bring it with her, or other books, at least, when she’d left the compound. Something with pictures and words so her babes could see beyond what was in the woods.
Vern had never learnt to read. It gave her a migraine just to try, with the way it hurt her eyes. Instead, Lucy would read out loud to her. Before Ollie’s TV, that was how Vern learned about the outside world, from books. Her favorite was Giovanni’s Room. In it, two men got together, together-together, like husbands and wives, like Vern with Ollie, though it made her retch now to think of it.
The book had been her and Lucy’s secret. Lucy had sneaked it in. Unlike Vern, she hadn’t been born on the compound and had only come with her parents when she was seven and already full of the outside world. When she’d left at thirteen with her mam, as abruptly as she’d arrived, she’d left Giovanni’s Room for Vern in their secret hiding place in the woods, tucked inside a rotting log. But it wasn’t like Vern could read it, and she certainly couldn’t ask anyone else to read it aloud for her. In it had been the phone number and address for Lucy’s aunt’s house. Vern knew it was Lucy’s way of telling her to come after her.
Vern should’ve packed the book when she ran away, but her mind, for once, hadn’t been on Lucy. It had been on her own two feet, one after the other. Lucy had gotten her chance to leave, had escaped without a second thought about Vern. Now Vern understood why, how intoxicating fleeing was. She’d left her mam and her brother like it was nothing, like they were nothing. Goodness, in that moment, they were.
Giovanni’s Room was only one book. There were thousands and thousands more. Maybe even a million. Perhaps in one of them there was the answer, the answer to it all. Howling and Feral deserved to read that.
The woods were endless in their own way. There were infinite things to learn in that expanse. But it was not the world, and soon enough they’d all have to say goodbye to it.
There were questions that could not be answered here: questions about Ollie, questions about Vern’s body, questions about Cainland, questions about books. She wanted to show her babes the shape of the world, but she couldn’t even draw them a map.
She had all those papers and the laptop she’d taken from Ollie’s place, and no one to tell her what they said. For all she knew, everything she’d ever wanted to know about where she’d grown up was written on that computer. Everything that was happening to her body.