Chapter 2.

 

Gina

 

 

Nurse Dana left that winter, and Gina was glad about that.

There was a big snowstorm. Mostly they didn't have that much snow where they lived, although Willis said there was lots of snow on Dad's north fields. So this was a treat for the children.

Mom didn't like storms. She took a whole bunch of medicine and went to bed with her headache. Gina and Willis and Terry played out in the yard almost all day. Willis knew wonderful things to do in the snow, building things, big walls and round snowmen and lots of snowballs. They threw the snow at each other in great armfuls, and then they went inside and the housekeeper let them get hot synth cocoa from the cooker, although she grumbled about all the melting snow they had tracked in on her floors.

So they were tired that night, and Gina fell asleep as soon as she went to bed, only to be roused up several hours later by a lot of screaming at Dad's end of the hall. It sounded like several people, all yelling and shrieking, and one of the voices was, Gina was sure, Nurse Dana.

She opened her door and looked out.

There were three people down by Dad’s open bedroom door, Dad, and Nurse Dana, and Connie, who was a grownup woman, fifteen years old, who lived with her Dad and Mom. They fixed some of the farm machines if they got broken. They lived in one of the workers' houses, about half an hour away by aircar. Gina could not imagine what Connie was doing here in their upstairs hall, and she wasn't even wearing clothes. She was naked, and Nurse Dana was angry with her; the thundercloud was full of lightening, great white bolts of it. She had Connie's hair in her fist, a big handful, and she was banging Connie’s head against the wall and when Connie tried to get away from her she began pounding on her with her fists, her head and her shoulder and her back, and then she grabbed Connie's hair again, all the time yelling, saying words Gina didn't know, but they didn't sound nice. Connie was screaming and crying, and Dad was trying to get between the two of them, shouting at Nurse Dana to stop it, she was acting crazy.

"You don't understand!" he said. "You've got it all wrong! It isn't what you think!"

"This whore was lying naked in your bed, that's what I understand; what have I got wrong about that, you two-timing bastard!" Nurse Dana hollered, and she slammed Connie against the wall again, and Connie screamed. At the other end of the hall Mom’s door opened, and Mom’s maid appeared, staring.

"Gina!" whispered Willis urgently, and Gina ran down the hall to him, very fast, and he put an arm around her and told her to go into his room and stay there, but she didn't want to; she wanted to see. Connie was shielding her face with her arms and she was crying, and Nurse Dana hit her very hard on the ear with her fist. The whole of the hall was full of thunder and lightening and all sorts of hurt.

"Baby love!" said Dad, and even Nurse Dana could see he didn't mean it. He grabbed Nurse Dana's arm, and she let go of Connie's hair and swung around and slapped him across the face with her free hand. He stepped back, and Connie, one eye puffed up and blood oozing out of her nose, scuttled back into his bedroom. "Damn bitch," said Dad, and he slapped Dana back, very hard, and she kicked at him, aiming for the place between his legs and hitting his leg instead when he ducked, and he backhanded her, knocking her against the wall.

Connie, clothes in a bundle in her naked arms, tried to scoot around Dad, and Dad grabbed a handful of her hair and flung her back into the bedroom. Nurse Dana flew at Dad with her fingernails scraping his face and he yelled and hit her again, and Connie darted around Dad and down the hall and down the stairs, as fast as she could run, leaving a trail of blood spots behind her on the floor.

Nurse Dana went for Dad, hitting him right in the stomach; he said, "Oof!" and doubled over, and Nurse Dana screamed something at him – Gina had never heard the words before – and then pelted down the hall and into her little room beside the nursery, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the whole upstairs. Dad, wheezing, straightened up and stormed after her, but she must have locked her door. He tried it, pulling with all his strength, but it wouldn’t open, so he began hammering on it yelling at her to open this door this moment, you stupid bitch, and Gina could hear Terry starting to cry in the nursery, frightened awake by all the noise.

"We’ve got to get Terry," said Willis into her ear, and he began to edge down the hall. It scared Gina to be that close to Dad, who was red-faced and pounding on the door with his fists and kicking it and yelling awful things in that great furious voice, but she followed Willis, because Terry was so frightened and they had to do something about that, and she couldn’t let Willis do it all by himself. They got past Dad, who never even noticed they were behind him, and they ran into the nursery.

Terry was standing up in his crib, as red-faced as Dad and screaming his head off, and when he saw them he reached out his little arms right away to be picked up. Willis pushed the button on the end of the crib and the railed side slid down and Willis was able to lift Terry out, while Gina gathered up an armful of Terry’s blankets and his big blue stuffed toy dog.

Terry wrapped himself around Willis and stopped his screaming, although he was still sniffling and sobbing, and Willis led the way back to his own room, edging past Dad, who was beating on Nurse Dana’s door with both fists. She was yelling at him from inside the room; she was saying that he would never get his stinking hands on her again.

Willis put Terry down on his own bed, and Gina gave him the stuffed dog, which he clutched tightly. He stopped crying, sticking his thumb in his mouth and looking at his sister and brother with a sort of misty relief, and Gina used one of his blankets to wipe off his face. "I’ll get a washcloth," said Willis, and started out into the hall and stopped in the doorway.

"Goddamn, Eugene, shut the hell up," said Mom’s voice very clearly, and Gina could hear a big "Whack", followed by a heavy thud. She ran to the door. There was Dad lying on the floor rubbing his head and moaning, and there was Mom wobbling from wall to wall, her maid trying to guide her back to her bedroom, and Mom was holding with both hands what looked like a leg from a chair, bent in the middle.

"Once I get done with this damned contract marriage, this filthy place is history," Mom shouted, although it was hard to understand her, the way her words ran together, and she stumbled into her bedroom and slammed the door.

Willis backed into his room and shut the door, and he and Gina climbed back into his bed with Terry between them, sucking his thumb and now looking rather pleased at this midnight adventure. After awhile they heard someone stumbling up the hall, bumping into the walls just like Mom had, and then they heard Dad’s door slam shut. The hurt and anger out there began to fade. Gina felt a little better. Now that it was safer, Willis went and got a damp washcloth and a towel from the bathroom across the hall, and they washed Terry and let him settle down in Willis's bed, and Gina lay down there too. Willis folded up a quilt on the floor and slept on that. He said it was like soldiers, out on maneuvers; they didn't have beds either, he said, and they were very tough and didn't need beds. They probably didn't even like beds, he said.

"Willis," said Gina, softly because Terry had finally gone to sleep with his thumb still in his mouth, "why was Nurse Dana mad at Connie and Dad?"

"Just grownup stuff," said Willis. "You’re too little to understand. When you get bigger you can figure it out."

Which wasn’t very satisfactory, but Gina knew not to ask any more questions. Willis was lying there on his back looking at the ceiling, and she could feel his anger. It wasn’t a thundercloud or the tired grayness either; it was something dark and deep, dug right into him, part of him, and it had to do with Dad. It was scary. But he wasn't mad at her and Terry, anyway, and now that the house was quiet again and they were all in Willis’ room and safe, Gina snuggled down beside Terry and went to sleep herself.

The next morning Nurse Dana was gone, with all her clothes and everything, and her aircar which had been parked in the drive out back. Dad didn't get up until it was afternoon, and Mom didn’t get up at all that day, which meant she had a bad headache. Her maid came downstairs and looked at Willis and Gina and Terry in the kitchen having lunch and she said she wasn't paid to look after kids and didn’t like kids and wasn’t going to do that again.

"Well," said the housekeeper, leaning back against the food keeper with her arms folded, "if you think I'm going to be a nursery maid at my age, and that one just starting to get into mischief – !" She looked darkly at Terry, who was toddling after the cleaner as it whirred through the room; he kept trying to grab it and it kept bobbing back and forth just ahead of him, sucking the dirt from the floor as it went. "I have too much to do now," she said, which was funny; she just used the synthesizer most of the time, so she didn’t cook, and she used disposable dishes, so she didn’t have to wash them, and the cleaner did most of the floors and walls and curtains downstairs, and Mom's maid cleaned her room and everyone else cleaned their own, except for Terry, who was too little, and Dad. But the housekeeper was encased in a solid untouchable dark grey cloud; Gina could see it. No one could argue with her now.

"You don't have to look after us," said Willis, forking macaroni and cheese into his mouth at the kitchen table. "We can look after ourselves."

"Well, you're going to have to look after yourselves today," said the housekeeper. "I'm plenty busy this afternoon. You keep your brother and sister out of trouble and out from under my feet, you hear me, boy?"

Willis gave her a dark grim look and went back to his macaroni and Terry, with a sunny laugh, fell upon the cleaner and tried to pick it up, but the vacuum held it down to the floor and it lurched away from him and swung out into the hall that led to the big dining room, where the grownups ate when other farm masters visited. Terry trotted after it, and Gina put down her fork and hurried after him, to be sure he stayed out of trouble, like the housekeeper said.

 

Nurse Dana never came back, and Mom finally hired a woman named Posie, who was bigger than Dad and very old, older than either Mom or Dad, and Gina could not see how she felt as easily as she had seen with Nurse Dana. Mostly Gina just picked up a kind of vague misty disinterest. But she let Gina alone after she found out that Gina could manage her own buttons and fasten her own shoes and she was nice to Terry, in a kind of absent-minded way. She had very bad headaches like Mom and sometimes she took a lot of medicine and didn’t get up from her afternoon nap until quite late, but that was all right. Gina and Willis didn’t mind looking after Terry. He could walk and talk a little, and he was kind of fun.

Spring came, and warmed into summer. Now that Gina was five, she found her freedom somewhat curtailed; she was big enough, Mom said, to take lessons on the computer like Willis did, learning how to read and write and keyboard and figure numbers, and she was stuck inside most mornings with the lessons, which came from a school which specialized in long-distance learning on a far-away planet called Haivran. There were schools on Linden’s World, but they were in the towns, which were also far away although not as far away as Haivran. A lot of the workers sent their children to board in town and go to schools, but Mom said no child of hers was going to attend classes with that rabble, and it was in the contract.

Gina didn't know much about numbers, but she knew how most words looked printed, and Willis had showed her a little bit about the sounds the letters stood for and how to figure out the words she didn't know. So the lessons for beginning readers were kind of boring, things she had known for a long time. But Mom thought it was very important, so Gina dutifully went through the motions.

Gina wondered what it would be like to go to school with a lot of other kids. She had very little experience with other kids; they weren’t encouraged to socialize with the workers’ children, and there were no other farm masters close enough to visit. Mom said they were better off with the computer and that was the sort of thing they had computers for, and she should be grateful, which Gina tried to be.

She worked on the numbers. Mom said she would help, but she was drinking a lot of that funny-smelling stuff, and she didn't always make a lot of sense. So if Gina had any problems she asked Willis, who had gone through these lessons years ago and knew everything about them. He was eleven now, and had much harder lessons. He was very smart; he got very good grades. He had a real gun now and hunted the varmints through the rows of the croplands around their house, and he lifted heavy weights and spent a lot of time running and throwing balls and tossing them through hoops and things like that. But he always seemed to have time for her and for Terry, and unless he was doing something dangerous, like hunting with his gun, he was always willing to take them along.

Gina liked to wander by herself, though, if Willis was with Terry, or if Posie wasn’t having a headache and could watch him. There were many hidden places in the crop fields, rises and dips in the land that the farm machines mostly went around as they planted and tended and harvested. One she particularly liked was just a little walk away from the house, but you’d never know it was there. It was a hollow lined with native grass, a velvet green, and in summer, like now, with clumps of stiff dark leaves and little white flowers. And in the center of the hollow was a pool of water, bubbling up from the stone-lined bottom, a natural spring, Willis told her. It watered the plants in the hollow, he said, and he thought it was safe to drink, too. He tried it and he didn’t get sick, so Gina wasn’t afraid to sample it herself. It was very cold, even on a hot day, and had a tang to it. Willis said it was minerals in the water.

The water and the grass made it seem cool down there even on a hot summer afternoon, and Gina wound her way through the rows of the crops with the sun beating on her head, planning to sit on the grass by the spring and eat her cookies and look at the reader Willis had loaned her. She couldn't read it in the house, where someone might see her reading something too old for her. They thought she should stay with the beginning readers, which weren't any fun. Up in her room, she showed the beginning readers to Terry, who liked the pictures, although what he really enjoyed was music vids. He could beat out a rhythm to go with the songs on an old plastic bowl, and he played a lot with a little toy flute Posie gave him.

He was with Willis today, and Gina was by herself. The water bubbled through the rocks and flowed in a small gentle stream through the green grass and out to the cropland. Gina crouched down by the water and took a drink, and then she sat by a clump of the flowering plants, cushioned by the grass under her, and turned on the reader.

It was a really good story, about a boy and a girl and a strange make-believe world only they could go into, by magic. Later in the story, Willis had told her, there were big battles, with primitive weapons and lots of blood; that was the part he liked. Gina liked the magic. She took a bite of one of her cookies and looked up to see, standing among the crop stalks on the side of the hollow, the strange man with the pale skin and the white hair and the very blue eyes, the one she had seen in the nursery last summer with Mom. She hadn’t heard him walking through the stalks, but there he was anyway, just standing there looking down at her with those sharp clear sky-eyes.

She stared back. He was wearing a white shirt, tan pants, a loose red and black jacket with wide sleeves, which looked too hot for a day like this; his hands, pale as his face, hung quiet and empty at his side. He had a fine silver-colored chain around his neck, and a pendant, with a design that looked like a ribbon or a cord tied in complex knots, hanging from it. The pendant was silver, too, but it looked dark against the white shirt.

He just looked at her, without moving or saying a word, all by himself and separate in the cold whiteness around his mind, and she felt once more as if she had seen him somewhere else, before he had been in the nursery with Mom, but she couldn’t remember where.

She stared back at him, as silent as he was.

Finally he blinked those vivid blue eyes and then he stepped back from the edge of the hollow into the rows of the crop land and he was gone. She scrambled out of the grass and looked around, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. He was swallowed up by the plant stalks, and the sky, and the golden sunshine, and there was not the slightest sign of his passage.

He might never have been there at all.