Page 32 of Ringer
He was right. Besides, Gemma knew she couldn’t have gone much farther on foot anyway. Her ankle was so swollen it no longer even looked like an ankle. It wasn’t even a cankle—more like a purplish skin-bandage rolled and strapped around where her ankle should be.
The house was unlocked. Inside, it was very neat and full of sunlight. There was a gas stove and, Gemma saw, a small refrigerator cabled neatly to a battery. But no microwave, no digital clocks, no phones or iPads left casually on the counter, no mail, even. The lights were wall-mounted gas lanterns. Again she was struck by the weighty stillness, as if time had turned heavy and dropped like a hand over the whole place.
There was a plate on the table, toast half-eaten, along with a mug of unfinished coffee. This bothered her for some reason—why leave the house so neat but not clear your breakfast?
Calliope caught her staring. “There was a male,” she said. “He ran off when he saw me.”
“Why?” Gemma asked, and Calliope shrugged. It seemed weird to her that a boy in his own house wouldrun at the sight of a girl on his land, but then again, she didn’t know much about Amish culture. Maybe he’d run for help, and even now there were people on the way who could take them to a town, or point them in the right direction, at least. “He didn’t say anything? He didn’t speak to you at all?”
“He just ran,” Calliope said.
They drank water from a sink that worked with a hand pump and came out cold and tasting deliciously of deep earth. Instantly, Gemma felt better. They ate bread and fried eggs with yolks the orange of a setting sun, and Gemma nearly cried: she’d never been hungry before, truly hungry, in a way that torqued your insides. She couldn’t even feel bad about the food they were stealing. They would pay it all back, anyway, she would make sure they did, once she got home.
In a cellar, Pete found an old-fashioned icebox, and in a closet, coarse linen hand towels that he used to make a pack for her ankle.
“We need to wrap your hand again,” he said, and Gemma didn’t want to but knew he was right.
He crouched in front of her and began to unwind the T-shirt they’d used to stop the bleeding. When it came away, Gemma was shocked by the sight of her missing finger: she couldn’t understand, for a moment, where it had gone, still felt it buzzing and tingling.
She bit her lip as tears broke up her vision. Pete said nothing. He didn’t look disgusted. He didn’t try and make her feel better. He just dampened a clean towel and slowly wiped the blood off the back of her hand, off her fingers. She bit the insides of her cheeks when he touched the wound itself, so hard her mouth flooded with a metal taste. Pain came down on her like a shutter, and then it passed.
“We have to keep it clean,” he said, rebandaging it, and she knew that was his way of sayingI’m sorry.
How could they ever survive what they had seen together? They would be like tumors to each other: a nest of dark things, terrible memories, questions they wanted to forget.
They could never go back to how things had been. If they wanted to go forward, she feared, they would have to cut those tumors out. They would leave all their pain in the past. They would bury it so deep that even their heartbreaks couldn’t hurt them.
Still, no one came. It hadn’t been long, but Gemma grew anxious and increasingly restless. She desperately wanted to move on, to reach an end point, to hear her mom’s voice, to see gas stations and telephone poles and parking lots and all the ugliness of life that now seemed beautiful: maps, grids, roads, wires. She craved fluorescent lightsand boring TV and normalcy. But she also knew it would be risky to leave. They might be ten miles from another settlement, maybe more.
Pete was right: it was better to wait.
He left Calliope and Gemma alone when he went to clean off in the old-fashioned tub, which also functioned with a pump and drew no hot water. She wondered if he felt the same way she did, like they’d been slicked all over with death, like it would never wash off.
In the kitchen she watched the sun turn dust motes in the air, wishing she could shake the feeling of terrible intrusion—a sense that had less to do with being in a strange house and, like Goldilocks, eating and drinking and consuming, and more to do with a feeling that they’d stumbled on a sleepy mystery best not to awaken. She was almost afraid to breathe too hard.
Calliope, on the other hand, moved from room to room, opening drawers, touching everything, marveling at soup spoons and wooden tongs, can openers and mason jars, salad bowls and flower vases, needlepoint pillows and woven place mats. She disappeared and reappeared wearing a second dress on top of the first one, a knit sweater that hit her at mid-thigh, and a wide-brimmed hat. Gemma wanted to say something, to tell her not to, but the words kept swelling in her throat like a sponge. She kept having the crazy thought that Calliope wasn’t wearing differentclothes, but different skins; that the clothes were like the discarded shells of long-dead cicadas.
Calliope wasn’t sick: it was an obvious realization but one that came late. Calliope was thin, way too thin, and her head was shaven, and she had crooked teeth. But she wasn’t like Lyra. Lyra was sick in a way that showed itself even when she was desperately trying to hide it. Gemma knew that the replicas had been given different variants of prion disease, some of them much faster-working than others. There would have been control groups, too.
The idea of Lyra being selected and Calliope being spared made her sick, even though she couldn’t say why she cared so much. When it came down to it, she hardly knew Lyra. When it came down to it, she was here because of Lyra. And Lyra had thanked her only once, and probably wouldn’t care whether Gemma lived or died.
“You shouldn’t touch everything,” Gemma said at last, when Calliope crouched, letting her dress pool on the floor, to examine a fat-bristled broom next to the stove.
Calliope threaded a finger through its bristles, then tugged, so some of them came away in her hand. She let them scatter. “Why not?”
Exhaustion now felt to Gemma like a weight, like pressure bearing down on her from outside. “Because these things don’t belong to you,” she said. “This isn’t your house.”
A shadow moved across Calliope’s face. “Why not?”
Gemma stared at her. She realized she had no idea how to begin answering.We can live here,Calliope had said. Did she not understand what belonging meant?
“Because... people live here. They’re coming back. They use those spoons and cups and hats and... and everything.”
Calliope removed the hat and turned it over in her hands. “But we used them too,” she said after a moment. “So doesn’t that mean we own them now?”
“No.” Gemma reminded herself that Calliope didn’t understand, and that it wasn’t her fault. “It’s not about who uses what. They just—the house is theirs. They own it.”
Calliope frowned. “Why?”
