Outrun the Moon(60)

The girl pulls at the lank strings of her hair, her round chin trembling. Her mother takes the food. “Bless you. We tried ter take taters from a chips station that ’ad fallen, but there were soldiers wif shooters,” she says in an Irish accent that sounds like she’s holding a plum in her mouth. “Said looters would be shot on the bloody Bobby Scott. Mayor Schmitz issued a written proclamation.” The woman’s mouth trembles. “I just wanna feed me children.”

Francesca gasps. “That’s dreadful.”

“Surely they should make exceptions,” I add, not completely following the woman’s speech but getting the gist. “The enemy is the fire, not its victims.”

The woman shakes her head. “They’ve declared martial law.”

Francesca holds her leaf out to the young man, who has the same floppy brown hair and rounded chin as his sister and mother. “Please, we don’t want it to go to waste.”

He reluctantly accepts the food, and though it’s dark, I can see the shame on his cheeks.

Is it harder to give up one’s dinner, or take it as charity? With hunger pangs as sharp as knives jabbing my stomach, I’d take a handout with gullet open wide. But for him—maybe because he is a boy and we are girls—the choice seems harder.

Francesca walks faster than normal back to our camp. “When will the army come? People are suffering.”

I glance around at all the people shuffling about. “I know. I wish there was something we could do.”

What would Ma do if she were here? She would make sure we ate by any means necessary. We might’ve been poor, but our bowls were never empty. If Ma had seen all the hungry people here, she wouldn’t have hung up her apron until she had given them something.

By the time we return to camp, Harry and Katie are washing off the twig forks. Georgina and Minnie Mae are folding leaves into cones to use for drinking water. That’s clever, as we only have one fruit jar to use between the eleven of us. The Bostons droop into one another like three sacks of flour. One reads from the comportment book to the others. With the first chapter already gone, there are now fifty-nine chapters to go. Our toilet supply will last another two months at this rate.

The vanishing sun lights the sky a strange yellow purple, half day in the west and half night in the east. It amazes me that even when the world is going to hell in a handcart, there’s still beauty in the fringes.

Francesca gives the cooling pot a stir. “Grandmother Luciana says pasta water is full of nutrients.” Making ourselves comfortable, we huddle close to the dying fires and take turns filling the empty spaces in our stomachs. Folks stop by, peering into our pots to see if we have anything good. We offer them pasta water, and all but one accept a sip from our much-used fruit jar.

Harry and Katie huddle beside us. “That was prime, what you did,” Katie says. “You girls are of the first water, Gran would say.”

“They needed it more than we did,” I say, though my grumbling stomach says otherwise.

Francesca hands me a spoonful of pasta water. “We can boil a gruel of rice to sit overnight for breakfast. It’s better with milk, but since we already drained the cow, we can use water.”

I brighten. “That’s how we make juk. We ate that for breakfast all the time. Lunch and dinner, too. Jack loved it; he’d gobble it faster than Ma could put it in his bowl. She called him her bottomless jar.” The memory makes my heart ache, and suddenly, I’m no longer hungry.

I pass the spoon to Francesca, but she merely holds onto it. All three girls’ eyes shift to me. I stiffen, putting the wall back up, willing them to look away.

“Mercy?” says Francesca. “I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened. There’s nothing you could’ve done.”

Her soft words squeeze my heart. Even if she speaks the truth, it is a truth I can’t accept right now, and maybe for a long time.

When Tom’s mother died, he got into a fight with anyone who breathed wrong around him. He stayed mad for a good year, and even now, he doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s almost as if, by staying mad, he acknowledges that she mattered to him. I think it’ll be the same for me.

The stars wink, teasing me with the notion that this has all been some colossal joke. That I will wake up any second in the living room of our flat on Clay Street with the smell of pomelo in the air. But the universe never jokes. It is always profoundly, unflinchingly serious.

I clench my fists, feeling the pinch of my fingernails in my palms, squeezing harder until the discomfort makes me let go. The pain is real, both inside and out. My life has changed. There is no going back. There is only holding on to this present, whose shape is as hard to define as a cloud.

My mind flips to the last chapter of The Book for Business-Minded Women, where Mrs. Lowry discusses when bad things happen to good businesses. Our success is determined not by external forces, but how we react to them. And didn’t Ma always tell her more hapless clients that you can’t prevent the birds of misfortune from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from making nests in your hair?

If I want to survive—not just the earthquake—I must march, swim, pull oars, and dig in. I mustn’t stay still.

Katie bumps my knee with her own. “What are you thinking, Mercy?”

“About hunger. This park is full of hungry people. Maybe they can stand it the first night. But what about tomorrow? The next day? Next week?”