Gather the Daughters Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Jennie Melamed

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

  Cover photograph © Nikki Smith / Arcangel Images

  Author photograph by Jennifer Boyle

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-46367-6

  E3-20170620-NF-DA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Spring Chapter One: Vanessa

  Chapter Two: Vanessa

  Chapter Three: Amanda

  Chapter Four: Caitlin

  Chapter Five: Amanda

  Chapter Six: Vanessa

  Chapter Seven: Caitlin

  Summer Chapter Eight: Caitlin

  Chapter Nine: Janey

  Chapter Ten: Amanda

  Chapter Eleven: Vanessa

  Chapter Twelve: Amanda

  Chapter Thirteen: Amanda

  Chapter Fourteen: Janey

  Chapter Fifteen: Amanda

  Chapter Sixteen: Amanda

  Chapter Seventeen: Amanda

  Chapter Eighteen: Vanessa

  Fall Chapter Nineteen: Caitlin

  Chapter Twenty: Janey

  Chapter Twenty-One: Vanessa

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Vanessa

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Janey

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Vanessa

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Caitlin

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Vanessa

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Janey

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Vanessa

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Vanessa

  Chapter Thirty: Janey

  Chapter Thirty-One: Caitlin

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Janey

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Vanessa

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Caitlin

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Janey

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Caitlin

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Vanessa

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Janey

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Vanessa

  Chapter Forty: Janey

  Chapter Forty-One: Vanessa

  Winter Chapter Forty-Two: Vanessa

  Chapter Forty-Three: Janey

  Chapter Forty-Four: Caitlin

  Chapter Forty-Five: Caitlin

  Chapter Forty-Six: Vanessa

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Caitlin

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Janey

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Vanessa

  Chapter Fifty: Caitlin

  Chapter Fifty-One: Janey

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Vanessa

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Caitlin

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Janey

  Spring Chapter Fifty-Five: Vanessa

  Chapter Fifty-Six: Vanessa

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: Janey

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: Vanessa

  Chapter Fifty-Nine: Vanessa

  Chapter Sixty: Vanessa

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my amazing, talented,

  magnificent Mom and Dad

  Prologue

  Vanessa dreams she is a grown woman, heavy with flesh and care. Her two limber, graceful daughters are dancing and leaping on the shore as she watches from the grass where the sand ends. Their dresses flutter chalk-white, like apple flesh or a sun-bleached stone. A calescent sun shatters on the surface of the water, luminous shards slipping about on the tiny waves like a broken, sparkling film. One daughter stops to turn and wave wildly, and Vanessa, her heart aching with love, waves back. The girls clasp each other’s forearms and spin in a circle, shrieking with laughter, until they collapse on the sand.

  Rising and conferring with their heads close together, they hike up their dresses to wade into the sea. Don’t go too far! calls Vanessa, but they pretend not to hear. Walking wide-legged like awkward herons, wetting their hems, they peer into the water for fish and crabs, until the younger one turns back and yells, We’re going to swim, Mother!

  But you can’t swim! Vanessa cries frantically. Heedless, they crash into the water and begin paddling away, kicking their slender legs and thrashing with their hands. Swiftly, borne by a powerful current, they grow smaller and smaller. Vanessa tries to run to the edge of the sea, but her feet are stuck fast, woven into the ground like tree roots, her legs paralyzed as dead stumps. She opens her mouth to call them back, but instead of urging her daughters back to shore, she finds herself screaming, Swim faster! Get away from here, get out, now! The sun vanishes and the sea turns dark, roiling and spitting, and their beloved faces shrink to motes. Vanessa clenches her fists, closes her eyes, and shrieks, Never come back here again! I’ll kill you if you come back here! I swear I’ll fucking kill you both! The girls disappear into the horizon, and Vanessa drops her face into her hands and weeps.

  Thief, whispers a voice that seems to come from everywhere, echoing and groaning in her rib cage. Blasphemer. The ground softens, and she falls through a sea of dark slime into the raging black fire of the darkness below. Her bones snap like sticks. Rotating her head violently on a broken neck, she sees her daughters writhing next to her, their straight, slim legs bending and shattering as their white dresses burn.

  Then Father is there, shaking her, holding her. “Vanessa, relax,” he says as she trembles and whimpers. “It’s just a dream.” She loosens her fists and sees, in the gray dawn light, that she has cut small, dark crescents into her palms.

  “What were you dreaming about?” asks Father sleepily.

  “I can’t remember,” she replies, and no matter how often the dream comes back to haunt her, smearing and dissolving hotly in her brain as she gasps and claws her way to consciousness, she always tells him she can’t remember. She knows instinctively it is not something to be freely given away to adults, like a flower or an embrace. This dream, the dark embodiment of blasphemy, is a shameful secret rooted strongly as a tooth or a fingernail. And Father, muttering vaguely as he kisses her sweaty brow, never tries to wrest it from her.

  Sometimes, in the drowsy mornings after, she gazes at Mother and wonders what she would call out if Vanessa were swimming away from her, toward the wastelands.

  Spring

  Chapter One

  Vanessa

  The long spelling lesson is done, and Mr. Abraham is now talking about soaking and curing leather. As he rambles on about techniques for concentrating urine, Vanessa inhales lig
htly and cautiously, as if her lungs are about to be scalded by the acrid smell of leather curing in its vats. The half-vinegar, half-musk scent hangs in the air for weeks in early spring, and she’s already decided she will never marry or even live near a tanner. Keeping her eyes open and her face attentive, she drifts off into daydreams of summer. When Letty reaches back to scratch a shoulder blade and drops a note on her desk, Vanessa jolts into the present. Using her bitten nails to pick open the small package, she reads:

  Do you think it was her first time?

  Half an hour ago, Frieda Joseph burst into tears while trying to spell “turnip.” They weren’t tears of frustration, but big, dry, gulping sobs like she’d been punched in the throat. Mr. Abraham took her out of the classroom for a while. He must have sent her home, because he returned without her.

  Frieda’s chair sits naked and prominent. All the girls around it are carefully looking in another direction. There’s a bloodstain on the wood, bright and ragged, with a dark, crusting drop on the floor. Everyone knows it wasn’t there yesterday.

  Vanessa is silent, lost in memory, and Letty shifts in her seat and eventually turns to cast her a questioning look. Annoyed, Vanessa shrugs curtly at her.

  Letty faces front again and flakes off a tiny corner of paper. She writes something with the thin charcoal pencil, stretches extravagantly, and drops it on Vanessa’s desk.

  Vanessa snatches the paper and cradles it in her lap, squinting. The charcoal is smudged and she can barely make out the words: What a baby. I didn’t cry my first time.

  Vanessa bites her tongue in exasperation. Carefully separating a piece of paper from her sheaf, she writes, Liar. Stretching forward, she drops it on Letty’s lap like a little yellow butterfly. Letty shoots Vanessa a hurt look and then assiduously turns toward Mr. Abraham and fakes interest. Vanessa begins winding the ends of her braid through her fingers, wishing she were outside, running.

  All the girls wear braids, smooth and sinuous over their shoulders, and they toy with them when nervous or excited. It’s a deeply ingrained fidget, and when girls turn to women and put their hair up, their fingers flutter uselessly in the air as they try to remember what is missing. Hems are another favorite target for irritable fingers, and it is a rare girl’s dress that bears a neat, well-stitched edge. Today they are dressed in whatever their mothers saw fit for May, which leaves some chilly and some sweltering. A few of the dresses are pink from berry juice and others yellow from roots, while some are simply the undyed off-white of light wool. The dresses are smudged and stained, darkened at the armpits and splattered with the remnants of messy eating. Summertime is for intensive weaving and sewing, and the dresses will either be let out or let down, firmly scrubbed and reused, or given to a family with a younger girl. While the older girls often wear new, fresh dresses, the younger ones are always swimming in threadbare smocks ready to fall apart.

  As Mr. Abraham drones on, Vanessa wishes there was enough paper for drawing, but the wanderers decided a few years ago that the island should produce its own paper, instead of relying on leftover sheaves from the wastelands. Mr. Joseph the arborer has been experimenting, but this year’s batch is an extravagant failure; the paper crumbles and separates almost at a touch. Even so, they know better than to waste it. When Bobby Solomon drew a sheep breathing fire on one of his sheets, his teacher Mr. Gideon whipped him so badly he limped for days.

  The clock seems to run slower when three o’clock approaches, the hands creeping and stuttering. Vanessa wonders if Mr. Abraham remembered to wind it this morning. It’s a beautiful thing, beaten from wasteland copper and full of the tiniest gears and wheels possible, like infinitesimal tawny beetles, so small they could fit on a forefinger. As much as Pastor Saul likes to talk about sin and war, Vanessa can’t help but think that they were doing something right in the wastelands if they invented such miraculous devices.

  Gabriel Solomon brought some parts to school last year, filched from his clockmaker father, who received the precious objects from the wanderers. The children gathered around, always impressed by wasteland goods, begging to touch the miniature glimmering shapes. Sometimes when Vanessa sees the stars, she imagines little sprockets and gears from a broken clock, flung up into the black. She wishes her father were a clockmaker, even though a wanderer is much more important. The holy wanderer walks the wastelands without becoming part of the disease, Pastor Saul likes to say. Vanessa once asked her mother which disease he was talking about, but Mother didn’t know. She asked Father, and he talked of the diseases that ravaged the wastelands after the war. He wouldn’t tell her about the war itself, though; he never does. Vanessa has attempted various charming ways to ask Father questions—he likes her cleverness, but despite her efforts, he refuses to discuss it. She can’t find anything about it in their library either. Everything that ever happened must be in books, somewhere, but none of the ones she has access to have proved helpful.

  Finally the clock reaches five to three. Mr. Abraham erases the large slate in the front of the classroom, wiping clean the chalky detritus of learning, and the children stand automatically with their heads bowed and hands clasped. Ceremoniously, Mr. Abraham takes down a copy of Our Book, the only book ever written on the island. It’s handwritten on wasteland paper and bound in the strongest leather, but he still has to use a finger to keep loose pages from fluttering to the ground like dead, holy leaves.

  “From the fires of wickedness we grew forth, like a green branch from a rotten tree,” he reads. “From the wastelands of want came the hardworking men of industry and promise. From the war-stricken terror came our forefathers to keep us safe from harm.” Like everyone else, Vanessa mouths the words along with him. “From the cleansed and ravaged dust of the scourge came the flowerings of faith and a new way. With the ancestors to guide us, we will grow and prosper on a straight and narrow path. O ancestors, the sanctified first ten, plead with God on our behalf, and save us from impurity. Amen.”

  “Amen,” repeat the girls. They file quietly out of the room and then scatter, their heels clacking on the wooden floor like a handful of pebbles tossed to the ground. The girls mingle with the other classes, streams of boys in ragged pants and long shirts, younger children shrieking and running happily ahead. Sarah Moses catches Vanessa’s arm as they run down the stairs and into the humid air.

  “I bet it will rain soon,” Sarah says, squinting up at the hazy sky. Her hair is frizzy with moisture and outlines her head in a jagged halo.

  “It’s not even June,” Vanessa replies crossly. “It never rains before June.”

  “The woodbirds are burrowing into the trees already,” Sarah says gleefully. “Mother says that’s a sign. Tom’s been sharpening rocks all winter.”

  Vanessa rolls her eyes. Tom Moses has dreams of making weapons, but so far all he’s ever done is throw rocks and dart away, hooting. “Shouldn’t he be helping your father weave?” she asks Sarah pointedly.

  “He does,” Sarah says. “We’ve made lots of cloth this winter, Mr. Aaron’s thread is good this year. We’ll have mountains after summer. The new sheep they brought from the wastelands really helped. Sometimes the lambs are speckled.”

  “I know,” Vanessa answers. Everyone went to stare at the spotted lambs when they emerged from their mothers. Grown, they look like they’re splattered with mud, although the rains haven’t started yet. “Does that mean the thread is brown?”

  “Kind of tan,” Sarah says. “Not dirty-looking, just different.” Vanessa nods thoughtfully, wondering if the wanderers had to round up each sheep separately, or if they’d stumbled across a whole pen of them. New animals are rare, but this was a stroke of luck; about half of the lambs on the island had begun dying from some unknown illness, and the wool had been brittle and weak for years.

  Despite the damp warmth, Vanessa enjoys her walk home. Blackbirds are muttering in the trees, and the tall, slender grasses shiver with unseen animal life below; the rhythmic swoop of a rabbit or the whispering rustle of a
hunting cat. Dodging the fields of shorter green pasture, she walks in the amber, knee-high meadows, letting the blades brush her legs with swift strokes.

  At home, Mother has made cookies. Ben, Vanessa’s three-year-old brother, looks like he’s been eating them all day. Amused, Vanessa brushes golden crumbs from his blond ringlets and is rewarded with a wet, milky smile. Mother comes up beside her with two honey and corn cookies on a clay plate, and fresh milk in Vanessa’s favorite lacquered cup. Intently, Vanessa stirs the milk with a finger and watches as blobs of tawny cream rise to the surface. She dunks in a cookie and carefully licks each drop of cream clinging to its sweet, crumbling mass.

  Eight years ago, when Vanessa was five and her grandparents drank their final draft, the family moved to this house, leaving the old one for Mother’s sister. Like most of the island houses, it is built almost entirely with wasteland wood, treated with a water-repellent tincture from the dyer Mr. Moses. While the house itself is well constructed and sturdy, the Adams’ kitchen is the finest on the island. Father, who likes to build things, set to work on the kitchen as soon as his parents were buried, adding special drawers that could be filled with flour or grain, and metal rods at different lengths from the hearth fire, with a clay door to shut so the room wouldn’t fill with smoke. He laid dove-gray and lavender stones fanning out from the oven door, the closest of which could be used to keep food hot. Vanessa remembers Mother walking around the new kitchen in a daze, smiling and giving Father joyful glances filled with a strange longing Vanessa couldn’t quantify.

  The crowning jewel of the entire house is the kitchen table, also made of wasteland wood, but shimmering with rich, iridescent tints of gold and crimson. Father’s family has passed it down over the decades, and it bears the stains of use: a burnt-black spot in the middle, scratches along the legs that scar blond. To protect it from further injury, Mother has covered it almost completely with a rough woven mat, but Vanessa likes to lift up the edges and run her fingers over the blushing wood, watching as the oils of her skin make a greasy film on top.