American War(52)

Inside, she found Sarat and Dana on their cots, reading. Dana held a tablet; on the screen there was a Tumble magazine feature on Black Sea chic and the newly resurgent fashion scene of the far northern Bouazizi.

Sarat sat upright on her cot, an old Southern history book in her hands, on loan from Gaines.

“How did you two get back here so fast?” Martina asked. She breathed in deeply; the air inside the tent smelled bittersweet and acrid, a chemical scent.

“She was out all night saving everybody’s trash,” Dana said. “I was in here.”

“Why didn’t you come to the building?” Martina asked. “This whole tent could have been swept right out in the storm.”

Dana chuckled. “You kidding? Simon and a couple of his friends came by a day ago and sprayed the whole thing down. They got chemicals that make the water bounce right off of anything—makes it like it never rained at all. It was a loud storm, though, I’ll tell you that. Barely got any sleep.”

Martina observed her other daughter, who had yet to take her eyes away from the pages of her book.

“You knew ’bout this?” she asked.

Sarat shrugged.

Martina fell silent. She walked past her daughters to her own room. In the last year the woman and her twin daughters had come to occupy the entirety of the tent, as Simon had taken to living outside the camp, only returning for a night or two every few months.

On her bed Martina found another care package from her son. It was a cardboard box that had once held a kitchen mixer. Its top flaps were sealed tight with packing tape.

Martina lifted the box. It felt heavy, perhaps twenty pounds. Without opening it she carried it past the blanket curtain to her daughters’ room. She set it beside Sarat’s bed.

“Take this and give it out to the people who lost their tents,” she said.

“What’s in it?” Sarat asked.

“I don’t care. Just give it to someone who needs it.”

“There’s lots who need it. You want me to stay in Mississippi or…”

“Just do it, Sarat.”

“All right.”

Martina went back to her room and lay on her bed. The sheets were cool and the pillow felt good against the back of her neck. Soon the girls heard snoring from behind the curtain.

Dana, lying still on her cot, cast an eye at her sister.

“Go on then,” she said.

“She’s gonna change her mind when she wakes up,” Sarat replied. “She’ll want it back.”

“And she’ll get mad at you if it’s still there. Open it up—let’s take some of it and tell her we haven’t given away the rest yet. Then everybody’s happy.”

Sarat retrieved from a sheath in her pocket the small folding knife Gaines had given her. When she first received it the blade was dull, but she had scraped it against the sharpening stone night after night. Now the blade was rough and uneven from being overworked, but Sarat mistook this for sharpness.

She slit the tape and opened the care package. She picked the first items she saw inside—a couple of stunted, Blue-grown oranges—and tossed one to her sister. Dana pierced the skin with her fingernail and held the fruit to her nose and inhaled deeply.

“They must have gone all the way up to Virginia for these,” she said.

Sarat shook her head. “Simon says they’ve only been fighting around the southern end of the Smokys. Picking out those militias around there. Get any further north and the Blue soldiers proper will get you.”

“Can’t grow these in Tennessee,” Dana said. “Too hot. Gotta be Virginia at least.”

“They don’t go get them where they’re grown. They just pick them up at the ports in Augusta. You can get whatever you want there. Stuff you can’t even get in Atlanta.”

Dana smirked. “What do you know about all that? You can’t even point Augusta out on a map.”

“Yeah I can, and it’s true. Nobody keeps track of what’s on those charity ships. You can steal half the boat before anyone notices.”

Sarat sifted through the rest of the package. She tossed a small can of cashews to her sister, and kept a packet of apricot gel for herself. She set aside a tube of superglue and a roll of twine and some knitting supplies to hand out to other refugees, and left the rest for her mother.

“Hey, give me some of those,” Dana said, pointing to a small container of painkillers. “Mama doesn’t need those.”

“Nobody needs those,” Sarat replied. “They’re for broken bones. What have you got that needs these?”

“I got bored,” Dana said, raising her feet to the air and flicking her toes at the ceiling. “I got ten broken bones’ worth of bored.”

Sarat observed her sister on the bed. She seemed younger somehow. For as long as she could remember, Sarat had felt that her twin had a head start on her, an innate understanding of what it means to be grown up. But in the last few months, she had come to feel the opposite. Now Dana suddenly seemed to her impossibly juvenile, and the things that held her interest girlish and trite.

Sarat set the painkillers in the package and then slid the box under her bed. She turned back to her book. Dana picked at her orange, savoring each segment and setting a strip of the fruit’s skin atop her upper lip like a mustache. She hummed the first bars of a popular Redgrass song called “Julia’s Right,” which the summer prior had been the biggest hit in all the Mag and was universally banned anywhere north of the Tennessee line. The song was by a country star called Cherylene Cee, after whom Sarat had named her pet turtle.