Girl in Landscape (11 page)

Pella didn’t exactly have an answer. “I was just lying down for a minute,” she said. She recalled her fugue, her visit to Wa’s store. Her dash back across the valley. No, she didn’t exactly have an answer.

“Looked dead,” said Raymond, turning away disgusted, as if Pella had failed in some responsibility to him and David, some promise that she wouldn’t ever look dead.

Pella felt that in some way she
had
failed. She got up, dusted herself off.

Martha stood sipping from a plastic bottle. David stood beside her, watching Pella, attentive, his hands a little out from his sides. The way Pella imagined he had watched Caitlin lying helpless in her shower.

“Anybody down there?” she asked Bruce.

“Nope,” said Bruce. “Efram must be out somewhere. Maybe he’s up at Wa’s. We got Martha something out of his fridge anyway.”

Pella didn’t say a word, just trudged back with them.

“Invite Diana Eastling over for dinner tonight.”

Pella had located Clement out behind the house. He was tamping soil from a bag into a trench in the ground. She limped up, her ankle a bit weak after all. Raymond and David were playing inside the house. Bruce and Martha had wandered home.

Clement looked up at her, a smudge of soil across the top of his nose. He pursed his lips. “That’s a pretty specific request,” he said. “What if she’s busy?”

“Try.”

“May I ask what this is about?”

“Maybe she knows about the Archbuilder viruses, about what they do to people.”

Now Clement looked concerned. Pella felt only annoyance. She wanted to bypass his useless, uninformed attention. “Is there something I should know about?” he asked. “Are you … already experiencing something unusual?”

“No,” she said, certain she was lying, certain she wanted to be.

“So what’s the sudden urgent need for information?” He grinned and shrugged at her, rubbing dirt off his hands.

“Don’t you think—” She knew she was being impossible, unfair. She wanted him to help her without fathering her, without arousing those instincts. Still, she persisted. “Shouldn’t we find out more about it,
before
something happens?”

“If you feel that way, that’s reason enough.” He’d caught her tone now. “I don’t know Diana that well, Pella, but we can ask. Do you really want to talk with the boys there?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re liable to ask a lot of silly questions.”

“I guess.” She was surprised. Clement would treat her like an equal if she insisted. If that was what she wanted.

A good question.

“We’ll go ourselves,” said Clement. “Find out what there is to know. Then you and me can translate for the boys later.”

After dinner they set out into the north of the valley as the sun went down. The fragmented arches were all black silhouettes, against a sky still pink and peach beyond the ruins. It felt wrong walking alone with her father. Pella could think of only two or three times before,
in the days leading up to Caitlin’s death. In hospital corridors.

Diana Eastling’s house was lit, visible from a distance. They approached in silence, without discussion, without a plan. Deer footsteps whispered in the darkness on either side of their path. Pella wondered for a minute if she shouldn’t have come alone. Too late. They stepped up onto the porch and Clement knocked on the door. Pella drew in her breath.

The door opened, but it wasn’t Diana Eastling who opened it. Efram Nugent stood with one hand on his hip, his big shoulders filling the doorway.

“Hello,” he said.

“We were looking for Diana Eastling,” said Clement uncertainly.

“You’re Clement Marsh?”

“Yes.”

“Efram Nugent. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He stuck out his hand, and Clement took it. “Diana’s headed out south of here for a few days.
In the field
is how she’d say it. She asked me to keep an eye on her place.”

“Ah.”

“Why don’t you come in?”

Clement looked at Pella and shrugged. “Sure.”

Pella followed her father inside, crushed. Why wasn’t the house dark? How could they have happened to find Efram here? This was worse than merely not getting what she wanted. It seemed in some way the exact reverse.

Diana Eastling’s house was discouraging. It was so underfurnished and perfunctory that she might have only just moved in. Cardboard boxes were stacked against two walls of the front room and under the dining table. It looked to Pella as if Diana Eastling lived elsewhere, and kept this house for storage or camouflage.

And Efram moved through it as casually as if he owned it. They had entered his space. Possibly any space he inhabited was his, the way he moved his shoulders to carve the air. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Marsh,” he said. “We keep missing each other.”

“We do? I hadn’t noticed.” Clement grinned, meaning it to be funny.

“Pella didn’t tell you I came around?” Efram pointed at her, as if she were off somewhere in the distance.

“No, actually,” said Clement. “Maybe she forgot.”

“Maybe,” said Efram, raising his eyebrows at Pella significantly.

Pella turned and looked out the window, back across the porch at the jagged black landscape they’d crossed coming here. The sky was dark now, too, the sun finished.

The lit house had been a trap for them, a trap she led Clement into.

“Here.” Efram pulled out chairs for them, as though they all belonged there in Diana Eastling’s house. Clement sat, but Pella took the long way around the table, pausing to examine Diana’s desk, which was loaded with disordered papers, stopping to peek into the unlit kitchen. She imagined briefly that Efram was
lying to them, and Diana was in the house somewhere, hiding, listening. She wished it were true.

There were no household deer visible, anywhere. Pella went and sat down at the table, as far from both Efram and Clement as possible.

Efram exhibited his uneven smile. “People have been trying to get it through my thick skull that your coming here means something, that it’s some kind of defining moment around here.” He tipped back in his chair and swung his legs up onto the table, then took a pipe and a lighter out of his pocket. Pella stared. Efram not only put his feet on Diana Eastling’s table, he smoked in her house. She wished he would burn it down, so she and Clement could flee. “I’ve been laughing it off,” Efram continued, “but now it occurs to me they may be right.”

Clement shook his head. “I’m just one man and his family, here to start over, Mr. Nugent. We may be part of a trend, but we’re only part of it.” Clement’s voice was testy, brittle.

“Call me Efram. And let me finish. I was going to say maybe we need a defining moment. This is going to be a town, maybe a big town. That’s okay with me.” He lit his pipe and puffed out white, aromatic smoke. “And you’re a politician,” he added. “You want to be involved. That’s okay too.”

“I’ve worked as a politician. Now I’m working as a homesteader. I’m beginning to wonder what it is that’s
not
okay with you.”

“You don’t want to be seen as a carpetbagger.”

Pella wanted to cover her ears. The world seemed to
have closed in around them there at the table, and the two voices flew at Pella from different directions: Efram’s a low ambient insinuation that wanted to surround her, take over the world, and Clement’s a tinny broadcast from too far away to matter, but too nagging to ignore.

“I don’t want to
be
a carpetbagger. I want to be a part of the community here. A growing place, that’s something entirely new to me. I want to learn.”

“Learning is good,” said Efram. He took his legs off the table, his pipe out of his mouth, and leaned forward to peer into the bowl of the pipe. When he spoke it was as if he were reading something from inside the bowl. “What if I told you I thought we
needed
some organization, a few rules around this place?”

“You’re headed somewhere, Efram. I don’t imagine you’re a person who ordinarily beats around the bush, but you’re doing it now.”

“Pella’s a lovely girl.”

“You’ll embarrass her.”

Clement’s words seemed to Pella the very definition of inadequate. She was past embarrassment.

Humming with obscure shame and dread was more like it.

“Then I’ll switch the subject,” said Efram. He turned the pipe around and pointed it at Clement. “I think we ought to draw a line around this town we’re starting here, Marsh. Make it a
human
settlement, a place where kids are safe.”

“You want to exclude the Archbuilders, is that it—”

“And I want Pella and her brothers to take those
pills.” The words were so lazily formed it was almost possible to ignore how he’d interrupted Clement to say them.

“This planet belongs to the Archbuilders, Efram,” said Clement, as though he couldn’t begin to address Efram’s suggestions directly.

“I’m just talking about moving them out of our settlement. They don’t care. They’ve got plenty of other places to wander around. A whole ruined planet for them to gawk at and wonder what the hell happened to their civilization.”

“If we become a little embattled preserve—”

“Maybe you’d rather we become
Archbuilders
.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Efram put his pipe in his mouth and pointed his thumb at Pella. “That’s what you’re doing to Pella if you don’t give her the medicine.”

“I don’t think medicine is the right word for it.”

“Do you think it’s right to put a political experiment ahead of your children’s welfare?”

“Politics you believe in should be reflected in the choices you make for your family,” said Clement, angry now. “There isn’t any difference between the two. If there is, you’re a hypocrite.”

“You were a Democrat, right?” Efram pronounced it so it nearly rhymed with
hypocrite
, as if he thought that might have been what Clement really meant. “I thought your party was against screwing with human biology.”

“Please. We’re a long way from our own scientific fiascoes here. These viruses have been stable for centuries.
The Archbuilders remade their world from the ground up. It’s pointless to regard some of it as suspect, unnatural. If we’re going to live here, breathe the air, we’ve certainly got to find out what the viruses do to us.”

Pella heard her father as Caitlin must have heard him. His authentic principles, his rightness. Only his rightness seemed lost here. Hopeless. She’d made it hopeless, with the thing she was hiding from him.

“Do to her, you mean,” said Efram.

“Nothing’s happened to her,” said Clement confidently.

“Is that right?” Efram turned to Pella and raised his eyebrows, smiled.

Pella stared back, her mouth opening to speak. But nothing emerged.

It was her lie to defend.

The thing had only happened once. Twice if she counted the dream. Maybe never again.
But what if she wanted the pills?
She felt a swell of panic. She could sneak the pills, take them without anyone knowing—

As harshly as she felt toward Clement, she didn’t want him to be wrong and Efram right.

But Efram nodded at her as she sat and stared, as though he already had his answer, or was getting it now.

Then she blinked her eyes, and was out in the night, squatting low on the summit of a pillar, staring out at the valley, her tiny body twitching, humming with awareness. Below her spread a tangle of ruins, threaded
with vines whose leaves shimmered in the gentle, invisible wind. Beyond the ruins lay a homestead, one light shining through the windows, and through the porch window Pella could see three people seated at a table, two men and a girl—

“No,” she said.

She was back at the table.

“
No
what?” said Efram, squinting at her.

Pella touched her own arms, her legs, trying to believe in herself, in the presence of her body. She felt the small throb of pain in her ankle, smelled Efram’s pipe. She was here. Not outside. Not watching herself through deer eyes.

“Nothing’s happened to her,” said Clement furiously. “We discussed it.”

“You discussed it?” said Efram, completely unruffled. “What prompted that?”

“No,” said Pella, finding her voice. “Nothing happened.” She said it to push Efram away, if only for a moment, and to assert to herself that she was
here
, in her human body. That she wouldn’t drift out into the night.

Was this how Caitlin felt after her operation? Half-present, half-gone?

If she let herself drift and wander would she find her mother, somewhere out in the moonless valley?

“Fair enough,” said Efram. “We’re all agreed that nothing should happen.” He took his eyes off Pella at last, and turned back to Clement. “So why not take the step to ensure that it doesn’t?”

Clement stood suddenly. “Why don’t you leave that for me and Pella to decide,” he said.

It occurred to her that she should rise now, follow Clement, show her belief in him, as if this were one of his podiums, or convention halls. But she didn’t stand. She was unsure her legs would hold her. So she stayed at the table with Efram, trembling, paralyzed by her fear that Efram was holding back something terrible that she needed to know.

She’d lied to protect herself. But it had become a lie to protect her father.

She closed her tired eyes, but their two voices babbled on maniacally. The room was filling with words, with shattered inflexible sentences. Pella wanted to howl, or to disappear. Instead she huddled, listening. Efram said, “I don’t know if you and your kids ought to decide something that matters to everyone here, the whole town.”

“I can’t imagine why you think it’s so important,” said Clement.

“What you can’t imagine,” Efram shot back, “is exactly the problem. Things you can’t or haven’t bothered to imagine about the Archbuilders, things I know.”

“You like to deal in vague warnings,” said Clement. “If you know something, let’s have it. I don’t think you do. If the result of the viruses were known, I’d have read about it.”

“You really think it’s that simple, don’t you, Marsh? Read about a place, then go blundering in. The map and the territory are the same.”