Read The Other Side of the Island Online
Authors: Allegra Goodman
Tags: #Nature & the Natural World, #Social Issues, #Families, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #Individuality, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Family Life, #Weather, #Peer Pressure, #Islands, #General, #Domestic fiction
The Other Side of the Island (6 page)
“Our house is going to be underwater, isn’t it?” Honor asked.
“It’ll be fun,” her father told her. “We’ll see what we can fish out.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble, Will,” said Pamela.
No one spoke for a moment. Then Mrs. Thompson said, “You can stay with us as long as you need to.”
They couldn’t see the storm, but they could hear it. They heard a noise like the rattling of dishes, and they heard the wind howling, and the wail of the Storm Warning sirens that meant everyone should move to high ground.
“What do you do if you’re outside?” Honor asked her father.
“Run for it,” Will said grimly.
Honor shuddered. She could feel the house shaking above them.
“What will happen if the wind gets too strong for the walls?” she asked.
“Then the house could blow off the mountainside,” said Mr.
Thompson. “Or if there’s a mud slide, it could slide down. We could end up in our neighbor’s garden.”
“Look at her face, Daniel,” Mrs. Thompson chided her husband. “Can’t you see you’re frightening her? Even if the walls go,” she told Honor, “we’d be safe underground.”
“Unless there’s an earthquake,” said Helix.
“Why don’t you get out your cards,” said Mrs. Thompson.
“Then the whole house would crumble. . . .”
“Helix Hephaestus Thompson.”
Honor and Helix and the four parents played Cooperation, and they played Truce.
Mrs. Thompson opened tins of oily sardines. Honor had never eaten sardines before. They were silvery and delicious. The adults laid them neatly on crackers and ate them with small bites. Helix and Honor held them by the tails and dangled them into their mouths. Dessert was chocolate-covered caramels dusted in smoky salt. The caramels were so good and so sticky that Honor and Helix begged for seconds and thirds, but they only got two each.
“No fair,” said Helix.
“It’s fair enough,” said Mr. Thompson.
“It’s a special occasion,” said Helix.
“Time for bed,” said Mrs. Thompson, and she spread out puffy down sleeping bags for the children.
“Close your eyes and pretend you’re sleeping,” Helix whispered to Honor. “Then you’ll find out secrets and dangerous stuff.”
It was hard for Honor only to pretend she was sleeping when the sleeping bag was so soft and warm. Even so, she tried to listen for secrets.
“Look at the New Directives, for example,” she heard Mr. Thompson say.
“. . . we’ll all be taken by next year if you believe those,” said Honor’s father.
“So you don’t believe them,” said Mrs. Thompson.
“Is that a question?”
“No.”
“You’re suggesting that we’re Unpredictable.”
“Aren’t we all Unpredictable here?” asked Mrs. Thompson.
Will and Pamela laughed softly. Honor had been drifting off, but the laughter and the word Unpredictable woke her. She looked over at Helix. He was lying on his stomach with his arms folded under his head. His eyes were wide open.
“The New Directives are a sham,” said Honor’s father. “Everybody knows that.”
“Shh, not in front of the children,” said Honor’s mother.
Honor and Helix lay still as could be in the dark.
“No pens and paper in private homes? How could they enforce that?”
“There used to be computers in private homes,” Mr. Thompson pointed out.
“That was fifty years ago,” said Honor’s father. “Before the Flood.”
A smashing noise silenced them for a moment. Something—a window or a tree—had crashed upstairs.
“The Corporation banned telephones and televisions and radios. The Internet. Why not pens and paper, then?”
“No maps, no binoculars.” Honor’s father was reading from a piece of paper. “No telescopes. No sextants. No compasses. No materials for mapmaking, surveying, orienteering, amateur astronomy . . . Ridiculous.”
“If we can’t make our own maps, we have to accept Hers,” said Pamela.
“And follow Her Directives,” said Mr. Thompson.
“Was there ever a time before Her?” Mrs. Thompson murmured.
“Will there be a time after Her? That’s more to the point,” said Will.
“If you believe the Forecaster . . .”
Honor turned her head in the dark toward Helix, but he kept still.
“I don’t believe there is a Forecaster,” said Pamela. “I think those messages come straight from Earth Mother. I think the Counter-Directives are a trap for Partisans.”
“You think they come from the Communication Bureau?”
“Absolutely,” said Pamela. “I think they’ve got a special office to write those up.”
“It’s an elaborate trap, then,” said Mr. Thompson.
“No single person could print all those leaflets and drop them in the City.”
“That’s why they call him the Prophet,” said Will.
“No,” said Pamela. “No one could do that without getting caught. The leaflets come from the Communication Bureau.”
“Eat fruit from trees, not processed food. Learn to swim. Find dark places and study the unregulated sky. Exercise your memory each day,” Will recited. “Patience. Silence. Begin the revolution in yourself.”
“You can’t begin a revolution in yourself,” said Pamela. “It doesn’t work that way.”
The storm raged all night and through the morning. Late in the afternoon they heard the All Clear siren. Helix and Honor rolled up their sleeping bags. Mr. Thompson climbed the stairs and called down, “Not so bad.”
Mrs. Thompson collected the wrappers and boxes and empty cans from the safe room and brought them upstairs to recycle. Together the two families looked out at what was left of the courtyard. The white walls of the house were cracked. All the windows were blown out, and the courtyard was full of shattered glass. The Thompsons’ flowering trees were gone, drowned in the sprinkler pool. Beyond the house, the lush green neighborhood was almost bare; scarcely a leaf remained on the trees or other plants.
The Thompsons asked Honor’s parents to stay, but Will and Pamela were anxious to get home and see what had happened there. Mrs. Thompson asked if they wanted to leave Honor while they went to check.
“No, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Honor’s mother.
“I don’t know if the buses are running,” Honor’s father pointed out. “It might be hard for us to get her back.”
Slowly, the three of them made their way down a road now choked with mud and branches. Orderlies were clearing away piles of twisted metal, shattered glass. Rain fell softly as the family waited for their bus home. “We should put buckets out to collect the rain,” Honor’s father told Pamela. “I don’t know if we’ll have running water.”
“Then we should have stayed with Daniel and Clara,” Honor’s mother said.
“No, we might need to make repairs,” said Will.
“If the house is still above water,” Pamela said.
SIX
“IT’S STILL HERE!” HONOR SHOUTED.
The town house was still there, barely. Water coursed down the terraced hillside, and the lower town houses were submerged in soupy muck. Palm trees lay flat, with their fronds splayed out on the ground. Shattered glass and bits of furniture littered the hillside. Honor saw the leg of a baby doll in the mud.
The Greenspoons were lucky. Their row of houses stood intact. The roofs had not blown off. All the walls were standing. Some of the neighbors had lost their front doors, but the Greenspoons’ door was still shut tight. When Will opened the door, a small rivulet of water rushed out, but the water was only ankle deep on the first floor.
All around them the neighbors were dragging rugs out of their houses. They draped the sopping rugs over metal fences in hopes that they would dry when it stopped drizzling. They carried wet pillows from their houses and wrung them out. There was no electricity. The garbage orderlies had not come, and flies were gathering at the community garbage bins. First the flies were ordinary and black, then bigger flies came, heavy flies the size of bees. And finally strange flies with iridescent eyes swarmed the garbage. Their eyes glowed green and blue and red. The stench of spoiling food filled the air. Rats feasted, tugging and clawing, fighting over scraps. The neighborhood watchtower had fallen, and orderlies were busy building it up again. Without the Watcher, the neighborhood felt wild and lost. A dog swam in the empty lot where Honor used to play with the neighborhood girls. School was closed.
Honor and her parents took brooms and pushed water out the front and back door. They mopped their soaking tiled floor.
“You see, it’s a good thing we never got a carpet,” Will pointed out.
“Neighborhood Watch,” announced Mr. Pratt at the door. Mr. Pratt was wearing rubber boots and a rubber raincoat too. He held his flashlight as usual, even though it was broad daylight. “Everyone accounted for?”
“Yes, sir,” said Will.
“We didn’t see you in the shelter,” said Mr. Pratt.
“We were visiting friends on the hillside,” said Pamela, “and we couldn’t get home.”
“We’ll need names, times, dates.” Mr. Pratt took a white form out of his raincoat pocket. “And you’ll initial here”—he pointed to a line on the form—“and here”—he pointed to another place. “And you’ll sign here.”
“All that just for the night?”
“Yes, unless you want an unexcused absence,” said Mr. Pratt. He added, “Three of our neighbors have returned to the earth.”
“Shh.” Pamela stuck her mop in a bucket and drew closer to Honor.
“Five are still missing,” Mr. Pratt said. “We are volunteering this afternoon to search.”
“Is there still a chance?” Will asked.
“We’d like to find the bodies,” said Mr. Pratt bluntly. “No one wants a watery grave.”
A watery grave. Honor couldn’t stop thinking about those words. If water swept you off, then you were no place. If water sucked you under, then how could anyone ever find you? The ocean would erase your name.
At night Honor listened to the wind and couldn’t sleep. The wind sounded different now that all the trees were down. The wind howled, no longer rustling gently in the palms.
After three days, school opened again. Big striped tents stood as temporary classrooms on the Upper Field. For many weeks Honor went to school in a tent. Orderlies were working night and day to repair the school buildings.
“There is something I must tell you,” Mrs. Whyte announced to the class the first day back. “During the storm there was a great deal of damage. Our pianos were flooded.”
Honor could not help smiling at this. She did not like playing the piano in music class. She would get distracted and forget to count, so that when all the girls were playing together, she came in at the wrong time and stuck out.
“Miss Blessing has ordered new pianos for us,” said Mrs. Whyte, glaring at Honor. “We will have extra music time when they arrive. There is something else I must tell you. Something we must all Accept.”
The girls bowed their heads and tried to look accepting, as they had been taught.
“The storm smashed our aquarium. Our octopus is gone, but he is probably Safe. He is a tree octopus from the forest and he can breathe outside the water. However, I am sorry to tell you that all of our beautiful classroom fish have returned to the earth.”
The girls gasped. Helena and Harriet V. began to cry. They
were still sniffling when the class lined up to go outside for archery.
were still sniffling when the class lined up to go outside for archery.
“I can’t believe it,” said Helena.
“Returned to the earth,” said Harriet V.
Honor shook her head at the two of them. “Don’t be ridiculous. Fish come from the water,” she told them. “Fish can’t return to the earth. They go to a watery grave.”
The other girls stared at her in horror. Helena and Harriet V. cried harder.
At the head of the line Mrs. Whyte folded her arms and gazed at Honor. “Are you making light of what we must Accept?” she asked at last.
Honor shook her head.
“No?” demanded Mrs. Whyte.
“No,” said Honor.
After Honor and her class returned to their regular room, they practiced storm drills every week. Mrs. Whyte blew her whistle once to practice for regular storms, and all the children crouched down under their desks. The teacher blew the whistle twice for hurricanes, and the children lined up and hustled to the storm shelter underground. They walked quickly, but they didn’t run, and Mrs. Whyte timed them with her stopwatch. Honor’s class learned the science of lightning, floods, earthquakes, forest fires, and especially tsunamis. On the first day of each month an air raid siren sounded, a wail everyone could hear all over the island. That siren tested the tsunami warning system. If there were a real tsunami, the siren would warn everyone on the island to run for high ground.
Honor’s class watched films of what tsunamis had done to islands in the past. The films were old, but they were terrifying. Palm trees flailed like grass; waves of water rose so high they smashed all the houses before them. Dead bodies lay puffed up on the beaches.
Something changed in Honor when she saw those films. For the first time she began to understand why New Weather was important. For the first time she understood what Earth Mother was up against. If people did not join hands to secure the world against the storms and seas, then there was no hope. If Enclosure failed, then the last islands would go under. Now history and geography began to mean something to Honor. Now, strangely, she had no trouble reciting from her history text.
Other books
The Wolf's Mate Book 5: Bo & Reika by Butler, R.E.
Break Me: A Stepbrother Romance by Kriss, Julie
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
Run to Me by Diane Hester
Through Darkest America-Extended Version by Barrett Jr, Neal
Song of Princes (Homeric Chronicles #1) by Janell Rhiannon
Through The Storm by Margot Bish
Sister Wife by Shelley Hrdlitschka
Will Power by A. J. Hartley
Chasing Midnight by Courtney King Walker
