Sand: Omnibus Edition (34 page)

“You know I’m the one who should be going,” Palmer said, as he watched her repack her bag.

“Why?” she asked. “Because you’re the oldest son?” It was a jab meant in jest, but none of her brothers seemed interested in sparring with her.

“No,” he said. “Because I owe this asshole. Because of Hap. Because I started all of this.”

“More reason then for you to be
here
and see it through.” Vic pulled two folded pieces of paper from her belly pouch and handed them to her brother.

“Fuck you,” Palmer said. He held up his hands and showed her his palms. “I’m not taking your rites. You’re coming back alive, damn you.”

Vic grabbed his wrist and jammed the papers into his hand. “These aren’t my last rites, asshole. It’s your map.”

Palmer looked at the papers in his hand. He inspected the map he had pulled out of Danvar, then shook the other piece of paper. “What’s this note, then?”

“That’s everything I know about diving deep. How to dive down to a thousand meters.”

“Bullshit,” Palmer said.

Vic grabbed him by the shoulders and waited for him to look up at her. “Even with the right suit and visors, those depths will kill you without batting an eye. There’s no breathing down there. And your suit will feel like it’s gonna rip you apart until you get below three hundred. But it can be done. I’ve marked some of my favorite sites on your map there. Also some others that I think look promising. I made a key on the back so you can understand my notes. My advice to you right now is to send divers dumb as me down there. Don’t take that chance yourself. You’ve got nothing to prove.” She tapped him on the shoulder. “You stay alive,” she said. “You were the one.”

Palmer lifted his goggles and wiped tears away from his eyes. He lowered them back down and studied the map and the notes. “How’re these not your last rites?” he asked. He looked up at her. “You’re not coming back, are you?”

Vic hugged her brother, and Palmer returned the embrace. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

“I will.” His voice was a whisper.

“And Rob and Conner.”

“I will,” he said.

She let him go and turned away before lifting her own goggles and wiping her own eyes. Rob ran toward her from the tent and crashed into her legs, throwing his arms around her. “Not yet,” he told Vic. “Don’t go yet.”

Vic knelt down and hugged her little brother. “I’ll be back soon,” she told him. Rob frowned. There was sand on his lips. Vic lifted his ker from around his neck and adjusted it snug across his nose. He was the hardest one to lie to because he was the smartest. “Take care of your new sister,” she said.

Rob nodded. Conner came to her side with her canteens. He lifted her heavy pack and held it for her the way a diver held another’s tank. She stood and slipped her arms through the backpack straps, cinched the belt down snug over her hips, then took the canteens one at a time.

“Damn thing’s heavy,” Conner said, referring to the pack but probably more directly referring to the bomb. He stood and rubbed his shoulder. Something unspoken passed between the two of them, the sort of communication that happens beneath the sand when throat whispers become another’s thoughts. The two of them had dived together, had salvaged lives together, and they had salvaged something between them by doing so.

Vic gave her brother a hug. He slapped her pack and whispered something lost to the wind. And then Vic turned toward the gash and saw her mother waiting out there, just like she’d found her mom the night their dad had disappeared. Vic left her siblings behind, waved one more time toward the tent where Violet was standing alone, then strode out to meet her mom, dreading this goodbye the most.

“I can’t talk you out of this,” her mother said.

Vic laughed, thinking on how hard so many people had tried. “When’s the last time you talked me out of anything?” she asked. She meant it to be fun, to keep that goodbye from being so serious that she couldn’t leave, but most of all to lift her mother’s hopes that she might return.

“I lost you once. I don’t want to lose my daughter again.”

Vic glanced back at the tent. “You’ve got a new daughter to watch over,” she said. “Think of it as an even trade—”

“Don’t you give me that bulls—” her mother started.

“I’m not giving shit,” Vic said. She felt the blood in her veins grow cold, the chance at humor lost. “I’m not giving, Mom. I’m taking. That’s what I’m doing. I’m taking my father back from them. I’m going to take their city and make them pay for the one we lost. Tit for tat, Mother. They owe us, and I’m gonna make them pay.”

“No. You’ll cross that gash and you’ll die for nothing.” Her mother was crying. It was the hardest thing Vic ever bore seeing, her mother vulnerable and weak and … human. Her mom didn’t even wipe away the tears, just let them gather sand from the wind.

“You did your best by us, Mom. You weren’t given packed sand to walk across. I know that. I wouldn’t have done half as good as you did.”

With that, Vic hitched up the heavy pack and turned away from the campsite. It was the highest compliment she could’ve paid. She could’ve told her mom that she loved her, but neither of them would’ve believed that. Love was earned and hard-fought and cherished. It was Marco’s face and his rough palm on her cheek. It wasn’t something a family got just for being a family. But her mom had done more with a shitty hand and honest play than a bluffer with an ace up his sleeve. Vic knew this was true as she crossed that hard break in the desert sand, that jagged divide between the then and the now—like a row between lovers or between family members, a wound that permanently mars a relationship, that moves it from courtship and passion to resigned cohabitation, that turns a daughter into an enemy, so that the best one can hope for is that she becomes a friend.

Vic wiped the mud off her cheek, hating herself as she left the gash behind. And then she stopped and lowered her heavy pack there in No Man’s Land. She turned, pulled her ker down around her neck, and ran back, felt near to her youth again, was crying like the little girl she never wanted to be, never wanted to be. And her mom’s arms were wide. No questions. Just tears streaking down her face. A line in the sand that was nothing, not even there, taken in stride.

“Thank you,” Vic muttered into her mother’s neck. “Thank you, Mom. Thank you.”

Which was more than love. And it sustained her as she went back to her burden—that crack in the sand a thing that could be crossed and re-crossed—and she headed dead into the wind and toward the horizon, her mother’s reply echoing in her ear, accompanying her on that long march, whispered there at the edge of No Man’s Land and over the insolent flap of that untamable tent:

“My sweet girl. My sweetest Victoria.”

58 • A Rap Upon Heaven’s Gate

Conner was the one who spotted it. On the seventh night, stoking the fire with a metal rod left over from incorrectly assembling the tent, he lifted his eyes to a sudden white glow on the horizon. It was a burst of daylight like the sun had forgotten the time and had leapt out of bed, rushing, late to work.

Conner shouted for the others, and his mother and Rob and Violet poured from the tent. Palmer rushed over from the other side of the campsite, buttoning his trousers, having gone downwind for a piss. Together, they watched the glow. It bloomed like a radiant flower. It was so bright it required turning away, required looking at it askance, required giving it the same quarter as the noonday sun.

“Jesus,” Palmer whispered.

There was no doubting that a city had just vanished. Conner had seen bombs go off before. Spotting the blast of a normal bomb was a chore from two dunes away. This came to life from over the horizon.

“Vic,” Rob said, sniffing.

Their mother put a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said, but Conner didn’t think she sounded sure. She couldn’t know. None of them could know.

And then the noise hit after some long consideration. A rumble in their chests and bones. A deep growl of the earth and a howl in the heavens. The wind seemed to shift a moment later, and the sand startled into chaos and turbulence. They held on to one another. Violet took Conner’s hand and squeezed it, and he realized that their little sister was the only one who had ever been there, that she was the only one who had any sense of what had just been harmed. Conner could practically feel her longing to rush that way and see for herself.

“They’ll know we’re here now,” Palmer said.

“They’ve known,” their mother told them. “They’ve always known we’re here. They know we suffer. Now, they’ll give a shit.”

The uncharacteristic language brought silence. A heavy stillness. It took several heartbeats for Conner to realize what was wrong. It would’ve been easy to not notice at all, to go on not noticing for days and days, so steady had been that backdrop of infernal noise that its absence could almost not register. But he heard it, somehow. He heard that quiet far over the horizon.

“Listen,” he whispered. “The drums. They’ve stopped beating.”

••••

There was food and water for five more days, but they made it last eight. Vic had told them not to wait, but they waited. Their mother told them not to hope, but they hoped. Eight more days of camping, of the tent hot at noon and chilly at night, of a quiet shared, a story to pierce the silence, the relief of occasional laughter, the most time ever spent together, time spent talking and thinking. There were stories of Vic to go along with stories of Father. A long wait for some return. If not a person strolling over the horizon, then at least an apparition. If not an apparition, then some word. If not a word, at least a sign.

Palmer spoke of Danvar. A finger in a rip by his belly, he confessed to a murder and their mother held him like he was a boy again. And Conner saw a man in his elder brother’s sobs. It was all life would ever be, as the days and nights drew out and half-caps of water were sipped. No one would ever go back to Springston, for there was no town. They would live in the tent until the food and water was gone, such was the drawing out of night and interminable day as dreams and stories mixed and a week felt like a summer, and the moon went from a sliver to a pregnant disc, and even the rhythms and howls of the wind could be sensed and foreseen, like an old man who has watched the sands with such burning intensity for a wrinkle of years that he could paint a picture of a landscape that is
not yet
but
will be
.

This was how keenly the moments were felt. Especially by the crack in the earth, the Bull’s gash, where a haunting depth opened in the soul of any who stood there, where toes were daringly dangled just to feel the cool air rush up between them, just to pretend that the howl was for the delicately poised, just to imagine a lovely visage down in the darkness screaming
Don’t do it. Step back. You are too bold and lovely and singular to look down in here and upon me.

Conner sat there anyway and swung his legs in the gash, so intimate had the two become the past weeks, so hollow the threat and weak the pull. He dribbled sand through his hand and down toward the center of the earth. Nearby, marbles of glass were flicked to the far side, those small beads formed by Palmer, who spent much of his time showing that he could, no doubt thinking that it would’ve been better had
he
gone, the eldest son.

And on the eighth day, when the hike back should have ended, when they could wait no more, as the last of the water splashed Rob’s tongue and even the moldy heel of the bread was divided among their family, they gathered by the gash in the earth, crossed and re-crossed like a thread leaps and forms stitches, and surveyed that boom-less and quiet horizon.

It was early. The sun a mere hint. A pink ghost lurking. An unusual heaviness to the sky, the lingering night sky, as the stars disappeared. But it was not the light of coming day that swallowed them; it was something in the air. Conner dropped his ker, the sand that normally stirred on the winds succumbing to some mystery, alerted to some presence, a sound like marching in the far sand, and the cool morning grew cooler, the ice in the desert night clung piteously to dawn, fearful of the pink ghost, and Conner heard footsteps. He heard a grumbling. A noise. Something approaching.

“Something’s coming,” Rob said, scrambling to his feet. “Something’s coming!” he shouted.

Palmer and Violet and their mother paused in the dismantling of the tent and ran to the gash to join the two boys, eyes and ears straining in the heavy darkness, tent canvas flapping in a gathering wind, the rhythmic sound of a steady advance, an approach, not of the dead or their long-gone sibling or their father—but of the even more impossible. It struck Rob first and then their mother, pattering across the desert floor, coming with a whoosh of cold wind and a blotting of the stars, a wetness from the heavens, an answer to the long silence, a sign that someone far away was listening.

Their mother fell to her knees and burst into tears.

And the sky wept for its people.

 
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Footnotes