When I’d led them upstairs, knowing it was the first time they’d been in a proper house and how overwhelming it would feel, they hadn’t said anything. Fruitful was still limping badly, holding onto the stair rail, and I thought, Ice pack. After the shower. I took them to the room at the end of the hall and saw their eyes go wide at the sight of the bed. It was king sized, possibly because Gray was sized that way himself, and possibly because he could afford a bedroom big enough for it.
Fruitful asked, “Is this really just for him? That’s so … extra-nice.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “That’s what you say, Outside. It’s cool.”
“Oh,” Fruitful said doubtfully. “It’s a bedroom, though. Shouldn’t it be warm?”
“If it was mine,” Obedience said, “I’d make it prettier. I’d put some flowers in, maybe.” She trailed to a stop after that, because she had no idea how you actually did make a room prettier. You could say that Mount Zion didn’t go much for ornamentation. The girls would never have seen so much as a throw pillow.
Not that this room had any of those. It looked, in fact, like a luxury version of a monk’s cell. It was painted white, like the rest of the house, and the bed, which sat on a black-and-gray-patterned carpet, faced another full wall of windows. The bed had a chunky black leather footboard and headboard, and the simple gray tables on either end held nothing but industrial-chic chrome lights on swinging arms. The sheets were white, the duvet cover was gray, and an enormous photo took up most of the wall space above the bed. Printed in black and white, it showed a mirror-smooth lake, a lone willow tree growing out of the water, and a dark outline of hills and suggestion of silvery mountains in the background. The focus, though, was the tree: the delicate tracery and sinuous shape of the willow’s limbs and trunk reflected in the water beneath, as graceful as if it had been grown that way on purpose by a bonsai artist.
What kind of man had a photo of the Wanaka Tree as his only decoration? I’d have expected an image of the mountains themselves, stark and bold, rather than this kind of elegant simplicity. Not to mention the symbolism.
The girls didn’t notice it, because they didn’t know about the Wanaka Tree. They’d grown up a few kilometers from the lake, and yet they knew so little. The world could be overwhelming, though, if you looked at it all at once. Like looking at the sun.
“Get out of your clothes, and I’ll wash them as you sleep,” I said, instead of talking about all of it: the escape, the past, the future, the family. Time enough for that. I wished so much, though, that I had other things for them to wear. I’d meant to take them back to Dunedin with me as soon as I got them out, putting distance between them and … the others. I’d meant to kit them out with some of my own things there until we could shop. It hadn’t happened, though, so it was time for Plan B, which was putting the uniform back on again and going outside that way, much too close to Mount Zion, branded with its stamp. A thought to make you shiver.
They stripped down with no modesty, because we’d all grown up dressing and undressing, washing and showering, around each other and every other girl and woman on our floor. We knew from the time we were tiny how a pregnant woman’s body changed, and what she looked like after the baby was born. We knew how the pregnancy happened, for that matter, at least more or less. Hard to avoid it when your family lived in a single room, and harder for me than most, as I was the eldest. Not that there was much to see. It happened under the covers, in the dark, and it was over fast.
I’d grown up, though, on women’s stories and women’s confidences. I stood there, now, in my borrowed dressing gown, and watched the girls take off their layers. Loose brown dresses with high necks and long sleeves, white aprons, white caps, white socks, white cotton undies of the type you’d be embarrassed to wear if you were a grandma, and white bras of the decidedly utilitarian type. I piled everything near the door and wished