Living in Threes (5 page)

Aweret’s secret was heavy inside Meritre, as if she had a baby in her, too, but one made of stone. While her mother slept on the other side of the roof, Meritre retreated behind the screen to the kitchen. She ground the barley into flour, made the bread and stirred up the stew of lentils and onions and salt fish. It was familiar work, and welcome, but her mind kept on spinning through it.

Just after the bread was done, she heard the commotion coming down the street, a boisterous male noise that made her smile in spite of herself.

The smile died. One of them was coughing. The deep, hacking sound brought back every memory and every nightmare of the plague: people coughing up blood, their faces turning black, their eyes rolling up in their heads as they wheezed and gagged and died.

Meritre staggered and almost fell into the cooking fire. Sheer stubbornness saved her. She would
not
faint. There had been enough of that today.

Her brothers tumbled up onto the roof, with her father bringing up the rear. He was still coughing, but not so hard now.

“Stone dust,” he said when Meritre leaped toward him. She must have looked as panicked as she felt: he hugged her tight and kissed her, and stroked her as if she had been the cat. “There now. We’ve started the new statue, and the dust has been worse than usual. A jar or two of beer and I’ll be as good as new.”

She wanted to believe it. She needed to. She brought him his beer and tried not to hover while he drank it.

The boys were starving, loudly. While she fed them, she could stop thinking about her mother having a baby and her father coming home with a cough.

It was going to be well. The plague had taken all the lives it meant to take. Meritre promised herself that.

Whatever she had to do to make it so, she would do. She promised that, too, deep in her heart, where only the gods could hear.

Chapter 5

The sun wasn’t even up when Kristen pulled into the driveway. I was ready and waiting for her, with my head still full of heat and sand and somebody else’s gut-grinding worry.

That was the second dream I’d ever had that I not only hadn’t forgotten, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made more sense, sort of. I’d gone to sleep with the Valley of the Kings in my head. But the whole thing was weird.

Too weird for that hour of the morning. I almost forgot my phone—had to run back in and get it—but Kristen was too full of last night’s date to mind.

She started talking as soon as I got the door shut and the seat belt fastened. Devon this and Devon that and Devon everything else.

I never had got around to asking Cat who Kristen’s date was. Finally I got a word in sideways. “Devon? Devon Mackey?”

She came down to earth for a second. “Of course Devon Mackey. Who did you think it was?”

I hadn’t been thinking at all. At least not about that.

“I know he’s captain of the wrestling team,” Kristen said. “He can’t help it if he’s built like that, really, can he? He’s got it. He might as well use it. He’s thinking about applying to M.I.T. His dad wants him to go to Stanford, but he likes Boston. Besides, can you imagine? A wrestling scholarship to M.I.T. Heads will explode.”

My head was thinking about exploding, but not because of Devon Mackey, wrestling star and future rocket scientist.

Kristen kept on talking about the amazing, incredible, fantastic Devon and the fantastic, incredible, amazing date. I sneaked a look at my phone.
You Have No New Messages
.

Well, not on the phone. In my head…

Two dreams so real they were like living two whole new and completely different lives, worrying about mothers. I got it. I did.

I sucked it up enough to pop off a text to my mom.
Vet @930. Don’t forget.

I didn’t expect an answer. Didn’t get one.

With Kristen’s voice rising and falling in my ear, I watched the road unroll. Mom and I lived on a narrow sandspit between the ocean and the river. Kristen turned off it onto the causeway, up and over and into the sand and the palmettos and the long empty roads that the developers hadn’t raped and pillaged yet.

Mangrove Farm used to be out in the middle of nowhere, but an RV park and a Seven-Eleven had popped up at the intersection, and there was a sign threatening a new condo development.
COMING SOON!
it screamed.

It had been screaming at us for the past three years. Maybe we’d get lucky and
soon
would never come at all.

Kristen shut up when we left the pavement and got onto the dirt road. You had to pay attention to where the ruts were to keep from bouncing off into the palmettos.

“It helps to drive a little bit fast,” I said. “Skim the ruts.”

“Thank you for your expert advice,” Kristen said through clenched teeth. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the steering wheel.

My phone whinnied. Text from Mom.

Honey, I’m sorry. I got called in to work. The lawyers want to settle, and the meeting is at 9. I’ll come as soon after that as I can. Give Bonnie a smooch from me.

Speaking of
soon,
and never happening. Maybe the vet would never show up, either. Maybe Bonnie wasn’t pregnant at all.

The car lurched. Kristen swore. She almost overshot the farm gate, but swerved just in time.

After that much adventure, poop-scooping was restful. Hardly anybody was there yet, but Cat came stumbling in while I was halfway through my third stall. She had a serious case of bed head, half of the short spiky neopunk crop standing straight up and half mashed flat. She’d touched up the purple: it was the exact shade I get when I leave the bluing in Bonnie’s mane too long after a bath.

Rick was already out in the arena, schooling over jumps before the heat came up. I stopped to watch him clear an in-and-out, collect into a beautiful almost-pirouette, and aim at the Wall of Death, which was set at five feet. For Rick that was just a pop-over.

Rick’s not my type and I’m definitely not his, but Rick on a horse is a thing of beauty. He’s a middle-sized guy, mostly legs—on foot he’s kind of ordinary, you know, brown floppy hair, geek glasses. But get him in a saddle and you can’t tell where the horse starts and he leaves off.

I stopped to give him the admiration he deserved, and to crunch down on the jealous part. You’d never catch me dead jumping five feet, let alone six. I’d probably
be
dead if I tried.

It was all perfectly peaceful and ordinary. The part that wasn’t was me holding off on visiting Bonnie in the pasture. I could see her out there, a stocky white shape in the middle of all the big leggy brown ones.

She could see me, too, but she was busy being queen. Bonnie ruled the mare pasture with an iron hoof.

Bonnie’s registered name is Bonamia. Most people think she’s some kind of fat white pony, because she’s short and she’s built like a brick and she’s got serious—I mean serious—opinions about how the world is supposed to work.

Then she moves, and you know there’s something more going on. Bonnie in motion is pure magic. Then you can see she was born to dance in front of kings.

Bonnie is a Lipizzaner. Yes, real people can own one of those. Lipizzaners are really rare, though not nearly as expensive as you might think, and it was our duty to posterity, Mom said, to make sure Bonnie made another one. It was Mom’s idea to do it this year. She’d let me pick the stallion, but she drew up the list I picked him from.

This was supposed to be our family project. She hadn’t been there for the breeding, either—vet, turkey baster, boy-in-a-box shipped all the way from Arizona. Work again.

Egypt I was mad about. This just made me tired.

I finished my stalls, and Cat and I got the water buckets filled. By then Kristen had started her dressage lesson and Rick was on to jump school number two. Her blonde ponytail and his screaming-flames helmet took turns bobbing around the dressage and jumping rings.

It was almost time for the vet—though vet time is like Dad time: it takes as long as it takes.

Cat went down with me to the pasture. Her big bay mare was Bonnie’s BFF; the two of them were waiting at the gate when we got there, with the rest of the ladies-in-waiting hanging back respectfully and the south-pasture geldings keeping a wary distance. Nobody messed with Bonnie and Dora.

As soon as I saw my fat white pony, I forgot everything else but her. I wasn’t making any hopes or plans yet, but she looked even whiter and shinier than usual. There was a glow on her.

She pushed her nose into the halter and I buckled it, and then stood for a long time with my face in her mane, breathing the smell of clean horse. She didn’t pull away as quickly as she usually did. I thanked her for that when I finally stepped back and took a deep breath and looked up to see the vet’s truck pulling in by the nearer barn.

I could say I felt something building around me. I could say Bonnie farts rainbows, too. I wasn’t feeling anything right then but annoyance with Mom and excitement about the vet.

Bonnie danced a little on the way up from the pasture to the wash rack, as if she knew something big was about to happen. Dr. Kay was waiting for us with her laptop that was, among other things, an ultrasound machine. She smiled at me and said to Bonnie, “Well, your majesty. Ready to show us what you’ve got in there?”

Bonnie snorted and pulled ahead of me toward the wash rack. Cat laughed behind me. Maybe Dora did, too. “She knows,” Cat said.

“Now the rest of us get to find out,” said Dr. Kay.

I led Bonnie into the wash rack, which did double duty as a breeding stanchion. Dr. Kay fastened the butt bar and plugged in the ultrasound probe.

Bonnie knew the drill from her breeding exams and her date with the boy-in-a-box. She didn’t exactly like it—would
you
like having somebody’s arm shoved all the way up where the sun don’t shine? But she’d been on board with this from the start, and she wasn’t changing her mind now.

Bonnie is a whole lot smarter than your average horse. On her end of the horse-brains scale, weird is perfectly normal.

I had Bonnie’s leadrope to manage, but while Dr. Kay probed and stretched and peered at the laptop screen, I angled around till I could get a glimpse of Bonnie’s grainy, blurry insides.

The image stopped shifting and turning and zeroed in. There was something in the middle: a perfect black circle with a white dot at the top.

Dr. Kay lit up with a grin. “There’s your baby,” she said.

I burst into tears. It was totally embarrassing, and of course the whole world was there, from Barb the barn owner to Kristen with her Warmblood and Rick with big red Stupid, and Cat and Dora looking as if they’d put on the whole show. The humans were all grinning and clapping and cheering and kindly not noticing that my eyes were running over.

Bonnie got cookies and carrots and a proud pat from Dr. Kay. Nobody said anything about the person who wasn’t there—who should have been. I aimed my phone at the ultrasound screen, which Dr. Kay had frozen and saved, and sent the picture to Mom.

She’d get it when she got it. I told myself I didn’t care.

It was Cat who asked the question I couldn’t get it together to ask. “So now what? Anything special we should do?”