Burn Our Bodies Down(76)

I glance out the back door, toward the porch there and the fields beyond. “It was more than one harvest, wasn’t it?”

Gram laughs, low and bitter. “Every year after that. Worse and worse. I sold half the farm to Richard’s parents, hoped they might be able to keep it going. That way if I went under, there’d still be some work.”

Richard. Mr. Miller. How can she say his name so simply, like she didn’t wash his blood out from under her nails?

She gets up abruptly, takes her glass of orange juice to the sink and finishes it in one swallow before rinsing it. I watch the rounded shape of her shoulders, the white of her knuckles. “By ’eighty-one I’d stripped half of what I had left. Nothing out east would grow. So.”

“So?” I press.

She sets the glass down and turns to face me. I can’t see anything but the shape of her, the light over the stove catching her hair. “So then I heard about ridicine. You asked me before what it is. It’s a chemical. It was meant to be used on hybrid crops. Sometimes you splice two kinds together and you get a sterile seedling. So you treat it with something like ridicine.”

“It was banned,” I say, and her head turns more fully toward me. “You used it anyway.”

She takes a breath, and for a moment I think she’ll deny it. But then she lets it out, so slow, and says, “Yes. I did.”

“Why?” Connors said it could kill people. I don’t understand what it could give Gram that would be worth the risk.

“It was meant for lab conditions,” Gram says. “You’d treat a hybrid on the cell level. Tiny amounts.”

That is not what happened here at all.

“But I needed my land to grow,” she continues, her voice louder now, more alive. “I needed to get Fairhaven back to how it was. People were depending on me. This town was depending on me.”

I picture the fields nearest the house. They’re different from the others. The corn still living, but wrong. Off. Like the bodies in the apricot grove.

“It stimulated growth.” Defensiveness in the hold of her body, in every word. “It turned sterile plants fertile. And yes, it was dangerous. I knew that. But it was just me. It didn’t matter. I had to try.”

No, you didn’t.

“I treated the land with it. For at least two years, and nothing happened.” She swipes at her cheek roughly, and I realize that she must be crying, the close shadows of the kitchen hiding it from me. “But you treat anyplace long enough with something and it’ll start to build up.” She pauses for a moment as she slips on a pair of pink oven mitts and pulls the casserole out of the oven, setting it on a rack to cool. Just like Gram, I think, to keep on as if everything is normal. “It built up in the land. It built up in me, too.”

She laughs then, almost bitter. “Would you believe I didn’t care much for Scripture before all this?”

“Scripture?” Why are we talking about this now?

“Really,” she says. “I went to church now and then, but…Anyway. I spent a good two years out there. Trying to work the land on my own. Trying to get it to give me something back. And then it did. It gave me Jo.”

This. This is what I need. This is how I understand myself, and Tess, and all those girls in the grove. “Gave you Jo how?”

Gram makes an exasperated sound. “Do I need to explain the mechanics of birth to you, Margot?”

“You’re the one talking about Scripture,” I say, but Gram’s already going on.

“The ridicine did what it was supposed to. Gene duplication. Only, in me.” Gram’s hand drifts across her stomach. “I had your mother right there in the apricot grove. I didn’t realize she was coming until it was too late. There was quite a lot of blood.”

“But that’s only one,” I say. “And they were twins.”

“Yes.” She sounds exhausted. “Katherine came differently. I went back out to the grove the next day and there she was. Half buried. Just a little thing. Just like her sister.”

It cracks open in my chest, something I’ve known since I saw those girls in the grove. Katherine and Jo. Mirror twins. One born from Gram and one born from the earth. Pieces fitting together, everything I’ve seen and tried to ignore all part of the same puzzle.

Blood on Nielsen land. Give it enough, and it might give something back.

“Is that why?” I ask. “Why they were different?” Why Katherine got sick and Mom didn’t. Why the fire ruined one and saved the other.

“I’ll never know for sure,” Gram says, and I tamp down a flare of frustration. “But chemicals break down. They decay. And that certainly happened to Katherine. Not Jo, though. I always supposed it processed differently in her. Passed itself on.” She nods to me. “After all, here you are. Come from your mother just like she came from me.”

But not the girls in the grove. The ridicine kept inside or sent down the line—it doesn’t make a difference. Damage done no matter what, and we’ve all ended up back here, haven’t we?

I shake my head, ignore the flash of pain and get up, cross the room to lean against the counter next to her.

Gram looks at me. In the yellow light her skin is sickly and thin. Tear tracks fresh on her cheeks, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time.