American War(86)
“What is it,” she said, “your own sister not good enough for you? You trust a stranger more? You happier with some woman you know nothing about?” As she spoke she could hear her voice rising, and she knew it would carry inside the house, but she did not care. “She ain’t even from the Red. Her mother and father, they live up there in the North, with the Blues. The same Blues that did this to you, that killed our father and our mother, the Blues that kill and humiliate our people every single day. And you like her better? You like her better than your own blood?”
It was only when her brother, weeping openly now, recoiled with his hands against his face that she realized she had instinctively brought her own hand up to strike him.
Sarat threw the scissors in the dirt. She went inside, past where Karina stood in the kitchen. She went to her sister’s room and shut the door behind her. She lay in her sister’s empty bed, beneath the soft sheets that glared a pinkish silver under the light. The sheets smelled of beautiful things—of citrus and jasmine cream. But they also smelled of Dana, of her hair and of her skin and of her breath. The smell Sarat knew from childhood, the smell of Chestnuts.
JUST BEFORE DAWN, she woke to the sound of a knock on the door. For a second she thought it was Dana, but instead she saw Karina.
“What are you still doing here?” said Sarat. “You’re spending the night here now?” She chuckled bitterly. “You sleeping with him too?”
“Sarat, there’s a man outside,” said Karina. “It’s about your sister.”
Before the slick of sleep had gone from her eyes, Sarat was running out the door. She found another of Bragg’s boys in the driveway. He had his head lowered as though he’d done something wrong.
“Speak,” said Sarat. “What happened to her?”
“The Birds,” mumbled the boy.
THEY DROVE most of the way to Augusta. Just before they reached the hospital, she saw the wreckage by the side of the road.
A group of locals from the nearby town had gathered around the twisted remains of the vehicles, gawking at the carnage. The remains were of three cars and a bus. The bus was charred although the shape of its body held, but the Tik-Toks had been cracked open like fortune cookies, and no longer resembled cars at all. A crater severed the road.
They drove to the nearest hospital. It was more of a clinic, no bigger than a diner, and had once been an animal hospital before the war. Relatives of the dead and injured crowded the entrance and the lobby. Alongside them were members of the United Rebels, who had been dispatched from Atlanta to document the carnage. Sarat shoved past them all, yelling her sister’s name, until Adam Bragg Jr. took her by the arm and led her to a room near the back of the clinic.
They passed a silent spectacle of the dead and dying. The bus had been carrying migrant Southern workers returning from the Blue border of South Carolina. They’d been hired as part of an agreement engineered quietly between Atlanta and Columbus to send workers to help fix cracks in the Northern quarantine wall. It was dangerous work for little pay, and no Union laborer would do it.
The men and women lay covered in stained white sheets, their relatives gathered around them. The nurses and doctors, greatly outnumbered, moved from patient to patient with grim resignation.
She found the room where her sister lay. Before she entered, she heard Bragg Jr. as he tried to tell her something—“It was just dumb luck,” he said. “They haven’t had control over those things in years.” But his voice sounded very far away.
She closed the door behind her, and the sounds of the pained and wailing were muted.
The girl on the bed ended at the knees. The sheet on which she lay and the one that partially covered her were colored a red that, in places, had darkened to black. The clothing had been sheared off her, and the skin below was blistered and burned.
Sarat stood over her sister. She ran her hand along the skin of Dana’s thigh. She felt the indentation in the skin where someone must have tried to stem the hemorrhaging wound. She saw the coal marking on her sister’s forehead—“3:49,” the time the tourniquet was tied.
She saw the chest rise and fall for the last time. She saw the eyes flicker, the lips move.
“It’s going to be all right,” said Sarat, but it was not Sarat making the words. They left her mouth but they belonged to an impostor. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay with me, it’s going to be all right.” The room smelled of rubbing alcohol.
Sarat dropped to her knees and rested her head on her sister’s chest. Dana’s fingers curled around hers.
“Beautiful girl,” Dana said. “I miss you already.”
FOR THE NEXT WEEK Sarat did not set foot inside her house, except to lock Dana’s bedroom door and prohibit Karina from ever coming anywhere near it.
She slept outside, sometimes in the woodshed but other times on the damp soil by the river, near the plot where Karina’s crops struggled to grow. At night she dreamed of drowning.
A month after she set her sister’s ashes free in the Savannah, the Blues finally came for Sarat. One night she heard music among the trees; a whisper of hands against bark, of feet against earth, very faintly in the distance. The night was quiet but enveloped in the quiet was a murmur. Years later, she would recall a pinprick of red light moving across the woodshed wall. Then the door creaked open. A canister tumbled into the woodshed, and the room erupted in sound and light.