We get my mother to her room. It is arduous and it’s not dignified, but Maeve gets her onto the bed, and I wash some of the muck off and smooth back her hair from her face and hold her hand.
I can feel the tiredness come off Maeve in waves, but she doesn’t stop moving till she gets things done. I’m helpless. I can do nothing but blink back tears and shock and try to make Mam look more comfortable.
As if that matters.
Mam. Oh, Mammy.
I try not to think, which is easy enough. Thinking in a straight line won’t be easy again for a long time.
Maeve shows me the wound. It doesn’t even look like a bite; it’s worse than a bite. It’s on her left side, a mouthful, big and toothy, taken out of her soft flesh. A part of my mother’s own self torn violently away from her. I try to imagine how much it must have hurt, the sheer brutal pain, and cannot. The violence of it is shocking to me, despite everything I’ve been taught.
“It’s not bleeding,” I say. I hear the stupid hope in my voice.
“Clean it,” Maeve tells me, her voice flat as she moves up toward the head of the bed. I watch as she takes my mother’s wrist, and I think she is going to feel for her pulse, but instead, she takes twine from her pocket and she ties one end around Mam’s hand and the other to the bed. She pulls the knots tight. There’s no gentleness in the movement. It reminds me of something.
“I don’t know how,” I say. I sound small and far away.
“You do. I’ve told you.” Maeve has moved around to the other side of the bed, and once she’s finished there, she leaves the room. I hear her going into her bedroom, and then water sloshing around in her basin, water that has been there since I bought it up to her the morning she and Mam left. Days and days ago.
The sound of my breathing is loud in the room. I can’t take my eyes off my mother’s calm, closed face. Her chest rises and falls slowly, nearly imperceptibly. We inhale at the same moment, my mother’s lungs and my own.
I shiver.
I know now what Maeve’s matter-of-fact motions with the string reminded me of. She looked just the way she does when she’s getting a chicken ready for the fire.
My mother’s wound is too big to be closed so I can only clean it, which Maeve knew already.
I wince as I try to wash the hole in her side in boiled water, expecting her to flinch, to cry out. There’s a lot of wound and not enough skin to cover it. I wash the blood away and look closely at the red flesh. It makes me feel nauseous and itchy, looking at it. The edges of the wound are turning black and green. It looks infected. I wonder what we’re going to give her, how she’s going to recover from this. I wonder even as I know there’ll be no recovery.
I haven’t worked out why Maeve brought Mam home yet.
Instead of thinking too hard, I go out to the chickens, and I feed them and collect eggs, and I check the fence and weed the vegetables and pull potatoes, and I draw water and then more water and lug it back to the house. Then I’m still so tired. I can’t close my eyes without seeing my mother’s festering bite, so I drill myself on techniques, and then I run the course. Moving is only just marginally better than not moving.
I don’t sleep much but I don’t get up, I’m too afraid of the day, till Maeve bangs on my door.
Training doesn’t stop, not even for death. I was told this before, but I suppose I didn’t believe it. There were a whole load of things I was taught that I didn’t believe.
“Come back to the house after morning chores,” Maeve calls in to me, and later, when I’m back, she is waiting for me in the kitchen, our war council room.
Her face looks much older than it did a week ago, before they set off. She looks as if she has been grabbed and shaken roughly, spun around and pushed off in a direction she doesn’t want to go. A game we used to play on birthdays when I was a child.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
She looks at me as if I’ve just taken a load of chicken shit and rubbed it over my face.
“This is what’s going to happen now,” she tells me after a pause. Her voice is gruffer even than usual, as if she’s coming down with a cold. I wonder how much rest she’s had. “We’ll document any changes. We’ll learn. We’ll watch till it wakes. And then, you’ll kill it.”
It takes me long moments to catch up with what she’s saying, with what she means by “it.” I can’t breathe; it feels like something has landed on top of me. Dizzily, I put my hands to my head.
“No,” I say, “I won’t.”
“You will.” It’s the way Maeve says it—there’s no doubt in there; she has all the second guesses that the sea does, or a storm. She sounds how she always sounds. But we’re standing in the kitchen talking about me killing my mother.
“You can’t make me.” I believe her already, though, that I’ll do it. I’m too shocked to cry, but she’ll get me to do this, one way or the other. “I’ll leave.”
“Yes, you may leave, if you must,” Maeve says, and has a long drink from her mug.
She knows I won’t go anywhere. She knows that I know I’ll die out there without her.
“I’ll go to the mainland,” I tell her, surprising myself. “I’ll find Phoenix City. I’ll find a cure.”
Maeve’s expression changes at last. She’s angry now, furious, and in one movement she gets to her feet and throws her mug at the wall beside me. It smashes, and little drops of steaming water scald me, the wall, the floor. I cry out, but Maeve hasn’t even paused; she is shouting.
“What do you know about it, what do you know about Phoenix City?” Her hands are bunched into fists, and I’m on my feet, in my guard, but quivering, devastated with fright.
“I’ve seen it written,” I say. “Why did you teach me to read if I wasn’t to learn? It’s on papers, they say to go there and you’ll be safe.”
A moment passes, and Maeve runs her hands through her dirty hair, making it stick up. She looks away, through the cracks in the planks over the window.
“Don’t mention that place to me again, do you hear me?” she says, quieter. “That city is long dead.”
“But it existed?” I whisper, still shaking, not relaxing my guard.
“It used to.”
“It’s not on any maps,” I tell her.
She stares at me, furious.
“Why do you never tell me anything?”
She turns round again to look at me; she looks me right in the eyes.
“Phoenix City was in the east,” she says, hard and fast and final. “It wasn’t a good place, and it’s gone now. Those things you read, what they say isn’t true anymore. If it ever was.”
“So, we’re to stay here, just Mam and yourself and me, forever?”
“What do you think we’ve been doing, putting our lives in danger every time we leave the island? We’ve been looking for—for more for you.” She’s still angry, but she’s trying, trying to tell me the things she thinks I need to know, and her words about how they’d been off searching, despite the danger, knowing what might happen, they hit hard, so they do. I thought they were leaving to test me, or punish me. Or just to be away. So I did.
Maeve looks so tired. She seems small for the first time in my life. She puts a hand to her forehead and takes one breath, in and out slowly, and there’s a catch to her voice when she speaks again.
“Your mother is dead, love.”
Only Mam calls me that, calls me “love.” Hearing that word in her mouth makes me so angry.
“She was dead the moment she was bitten, you know that. That’s what we’ve been teaching you, all along.”
“You do it, then,” I tell her. “You can do it.” I find it hard to get the words out. I cannot get myself in control.
Maeve nods. It’s a brisk nod.
“It’s a skrake; it’s not your mother. If I end it now, it will be over, but you’ll have learned nothing. We have to use everything we have, everything. When the skrake is conscious and moving and hungry, you’ll end it. I’ll help you.”
She stops talking, waiting for my sobs to subside, but minutes pass and they don’t. Eventually, she moves from her seat toward me, and I flinch and take my hands from my face, but Maeve pulls me to her and holds me tight again.
“She saved me,” Maeve says quietly. “It had me, and she got in its way. She’d never’ve been bitten otherwise, only saving me. She got bitten so I could come home to you.”
I shudder into Maeve’s warm, strong shoulder.
“She wanted me to get back to you so that we could keep training, so I could keep making you strong.” She pulls away and takes my face in her hands and looks so deep, so unflinchingly, into me that I can’t even blink.