The Cassandra Read online

  The man began to hum and he had a low, sweet voice. I worried my locked knees would turn to rubber and that I would collapse against him. I shrank back against the glass.

  Martha, meanwhile, must have wrenched the phone away from Mother.

  “You are a horrible person, Mildred,” my sister said. “I can’t remember anyone ever being so selfish and cruel. You’ve gone and made my grown husband weep. Think of all the lives you’ve ruined today, Mildred. If you have any conscience at all, you’ll come back this very instant.”

  I wondered if the whole neighborhood was on the party line, listening.

  “I love you very much,” I said, “and Mother and Walter and the children, too. The instructions are all there, written out neatly. I didn’t forget a thing. And I’ll send you money after my first paycheck. I’ll be making forty a week. Forty! Isn’t that incredible? I’ll send you as much of it as I can.”

  “Come home right this instant, Mildred. Not just for us, but for you. You know you won’t do well there. Your mind, Mildred. You’ll just crack.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, and for a brief moment I met eyes with the tall man who looked like Richard Quine, and when he blinked at me I changed into Susan Peters, beautiful, intriguing, brave. I wasn’t from Omak at all, but from a lovely farm in California, where you could eat fruit from the trees and wade into the ocean in a peach petticoat. “I’ll always love you,” I said, and the man looked away from me, and I became Mildred Lovell Groves again, disappointing daughter and sister.

  “If you know what’s good for you, come home this instant,” Martha said. “Remember what you did to Mother, remember how you get when you’re—”

  The line went dead; I was out of change. I hung up, shaking, and then I tried to return to Beth, but the man refused to move. I was trapped in the little glass booth.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I’m all done here.”

  “Are you now?” he said. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  I glanced up at him and then back down to my feet, where my mother’s old shoes chewed at my toes.

  “Mildred Groves,” I said. “From Omak.”

  “Mildred Groves from Omak,” he said, like it was a funny joke. “Pleased to meet you, Mildred Groves from Omak. I’m Gordon Nyer from Omaha. I’d be off fighting Hitler my goddamn self if it weren’t for my enchanted eye.” He pointed to his right eye. It didn’t focus on anything, just sat unmoving in its socket. It was a ball of glass. I thought it was beautiful, bright blue even though his other eye was a greenish-brown. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mildred Groves of Omak.”

  He thrust out his strong hand and I timidly accepted it. He drew my knuckles up to his lips. My torso tightened and I drew back even farther against the booth, half-worried I would break through the glass panes and fall into the crowd on the other side. He released my hand but continued to lean toward me with his handsome, wolfish face.

  “You’re blocking my friend’s way,” a terse voice said, and he pivoted and there was Beth, her auburn hair backlit by the sun.

  “Hey, Ginger, there’s no need for that tone,” Gordon said. “Miss Groves and I were just making each other’s acquaintance.”

  Beth looked at me and I smiled weakly, but she must have seen the question in my face. She put her palm against Gordon’s right shoulder and pared him away from me.

  “Come here, Mildred,” she said to me, as if I were a frightened pup.

  I came forward and she put an arm around my waist, leading me away.

  “What’s your name, Ginger?” Gordon called from behind us. “I like your style.”

  “None of your business,” Beth said. “Stay away from us.”

  I shrank into her and we made our way onto the smaller bus, the cattle car, that would cart us into the Hanford compound. In a few minutes Gordon, himself, boarded, and when he smiled at me and waved I saw clearly the mockery of it and I crossed my arms over my ribs. I made sure not to look at him for the remainder of the trip to Hanford.

  * * *

  After a good twenty minutes—the bus rumbling along the smooth ribbon of freshly laid asphalt—the Hanford Camp appeared. We disembarked in an orderly line only to join another line for job and bed assignments. I wasn’t bored at all, even as others complained around me. There was so much to see and smell and hear. Hanford was a sprawling compound, far larger than my hometown, a noisy, dusty, abrupt city of long, one-story buildings that looked like they had been raised overnight.

  Directly behind the northern border of the camp was the Columbia River. We’d passed the Columbia at various points during our trip, tracing its path on Highway 97 from Brewster to Wenatchee and then again as we approached the Tri-Cities: Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland. It was wider than two dozen Okanogan Rivers, nearly a mile from bank to bank, so big and powerful I immediately imagined drowning in it. Its gorgonian muscularity wrapped like a flexing limb around the edge of my new home.

  On the eastern side of the river loomed the White Bluffs, pale layers of sandy cliff piled on top of one another into the rock-stippled cake of a giantess. The striped faces of these cliffs loomed over the Columbia with a quiet ghostliness, and behind them rolled the hills of the Saddle Mountains. Until a few months ago, there had been a town here called White Bluffs, but the government had depopulated it in a handful of weeks, forcing residents out for little to no compensation. The Wanapum had been ordered out, too, urged north, out of their traditional fishing grounds. Boundaries reimagined and reordered, a process so sudden and unfeeling it almost seemed like an accident, as though the force determining it all was inhuman, a particularly destructive episode of weather, say, or a contagious disease. The people who had been here vanished. Richland was emptied to make room for more governmental housing. Hanford was here, instead, teeming, necessary, full of the promise of military triumph.

  Many of these details I didn’t know then; I would learn about them later, much later, when information was finally released to dogged journalists.

  Humans have only ever been at the mercy of one another, although that didn’t occur to me then, as I alighted in Hanford and smelled the fresh-cut wood and delighted in the new sights.

  What I thought instead was, Home. Emotional, thrumming, I asked Beth to hold my place in line, and then I wandered away between two buildings to where I could be alone for a few moments and catch my breath. I stepped from the shadow of the edifice and there, a quarter mile away, was the Columbia River and beyond, the bluffs.

  I considered all that had happened to me along the comparatively tiny Okanogan River: The visions, the night-walks, the altercation with Mother. To think of all of that as just droplets in a tributary, discharging into something vaster and far more powerful, was a relief. Now my life would leave its narrow pathway and merge with a larger purpose.

  The big river pulsed with a current I couldn’t see.

  “I’m here,” I murmured. “Finally.”

  The wind picked up, ruffling the sand and the river’s surface. The water nodded.

  TERMINATION WINDS

  Milly.

  Milly, Wake up.

  I was awake. Wasn’t I? There was dust in my hair and grit in my mouth.

  Watery light flooded the stars. The wind slammed into my chest.

  Wake up this instant.

  Snap out of it.

  I wiped the heavy sand from my eyes, straining to remember where I was. I sat cross-legged in an open field in nothing but my briefs and cotton nightgown. To the north squatted short, narrow buildings like coffins awaiting burial, quiet and dark in the dusty twilight. I’d walked here from those buildings. But for what? Even from a great distance I sensed the long, unflagging serpent of the Columbia slithering through the canyon. It called to me: Come, Mildred Groves.

  I will, I called back. Soon.

  I wasn’t alone. I’d seen a rattlesnake. Eyes were on me everywhere here. My power raised their curiosity. My thoughts drifted in and out, hazy and winking like the star
light overhead. How good the night air felt, even with the stinging wind, even with the sharpness of the sand knifing my bare skin.

  There was a coyote, watching me from the grass. There was nothing sneaky or predatory about his demeanor. He watched me with disinterest.

  Hello, I said, but the sound was muffled, my mouth filled with grit.

  You’re sleepwalking.

  Milly, I’ll pinch you if I have to.

  At some point I was pulled along, toward the buildings. A force yanked on my arm, refusing to let go. I followed, half-thinking it was the wind that dragged me, but no, the wind was pushing me the other way. My bare feet left long hesitant trails in the sand. I kept looking over my shoulder at the coyote, who shrank in size as I moved away from him. I was so tired. I closed my eyes and allowed whatever force it was to guide me into bed.

  There are animals out here, Milly. We could be eaten alive.

  Will you remember this tomorrow?

  I awoke at dawn on my cot, the mattress covered with sand. For a moment I blinked, confused, at the triangle of the pitched roof, the blank brown walls, the windowless, long room. There was a loose humming, the lungs of two dozen sleeping women issuing breath in multicolored strings of sound from their simple, narrow cots. The sound gathered into a magnificent ball of noise, its soft yarn spinning overhead. I could reach out and touch it, this gentle, moving thing. I turned my head and saw Beth asleep on the cot next to me, miraculously beautiful just as she was in her waking life. A thick joy poured into me. I’m at Hanford! For another hour I lay happily in bed, while around me the noise changed and the smells shifted—body odor, lavender scent, Dew deodorant, Listerine—as women rose from the cots one by one to ready for work. Some of these women had already been here for a few weeks, assisting in the building of the units, but others, like myself, were here for the early days of production. We had no idea of the outcome, just that it would win the war. We were as dedicated to it—even in its unknowability—as we were to our loved ones. A loud bell sounded from somewhere on the campus, waking the groggiest of the lot. Beth yawned and sat up in alarm, her eyes seeking me out urgently.

  “Last night was crazy,” she said.

  I didn’t like that word. I remembered, keenly, my waking dream, feeling deepened by it, but when Beth pressed me, I feigned ignorance.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You were sleepwalking. You weren’t in your bed and I went outside and found you a good half-mile or more away, sitting on the ground with sand in your mouth. The wind was brutal but you grinned like it was a picnic. Do you remember this?”

  Beth looked tired. I apologized to her for the trouble. She must have been the distant voice that I’d heard, the force that dragged me back to the barracks. Why hadn’t I seen her? It occurred to me that she might have powers of invisibility. I giggled lightly to myself. Magic Beth! Magic Milly!

  “Is this normal? The sleepwalking?”

  I admitted that it was. “Sometimes I wake up in different rooms, or in the yard. A few times I’ve waded into the Okanogan River. Usually I remember a little of it, but it’s always strange, like it’s part of a different world.”

  An alternate kingdom, I thought, delighted.

  “This place is dangerous,” she said, and her tone sobered me. “You shouldn’t be out there alone. There are rattlesnakes. Coyotes. You could be killed, for God’s sake.” She paused here, collecting herself, and I sensed that she was thinking of her sister, Annie. “And the men … if they saw you dressed like that…”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s just the newness of everything.”

  I spoke with a more serious tone now, but the truth was, I was happy. I didn’t want to tell Beth, but the reverie told me that I was finally home. This was where I belonged, where I would exist to my very fullest. The heat of it coursed through me. I was more alive than I had been in years.

  I reached over and clasped her hand, shaking it gently until she smiled hesitantly at me.

  “Don’t worry, please,” I told her. “I’m overjoyed I’m here.”

  Beth relaxed. “Well, you certainly look happy. Well-rested, even. I wish I felt the same. I’m nervous. I hate starting a new job.”

  I loved her even more for admitting her vulnerability.

  “Here’s to the newness,” I said.

  We embraced, sitting on my cot in our nightgowns.

  And then we hurried, dressing in our simple work clothes, primping our hair, making our way to the mess hall for breakfast. We needed to report for our assignments by 8:00 a.m.

  BIG DOG

  The job they’d given me was in Unit B. I was proud to hand the sheet of paper to the woman at the payroll window, Mildred Lovell Groves, Secretary for Dr. Phillip Hall, Unit B. Green Cattle Car from Barracks at 7:45 a.m.

  “Well la-de-da,” the woman said. Payroll was carved into a small brick building, staffed by two women, one of whom leaned slightly out the window as she spoke to me. “This job’s cream of the crop. You come very highly recommended by Mr. Pierce in Omak.”

  She wrote my name and employee number on a card and then handed it to me.

  “This is your punch card. Don’t lose it. There’s a time stamp machine in Unit B, right at the entrance, and you need to be sure to stamp in and out every day and evening, okay?”

  “Sounds terrifically easy,” I said brightly.

  “Yeah, well, you’d be surprised by how many knuckleheads boggle it up.”

  I reassured the woman I wasn’t a knucklehead.

  “A knucklehead never thinks he’s a knucklehead,” she said irritably.

  Her sour attitude didn’t matter to me. I was beaming. I was proud to be a secretary. I was sure they’d assign me as a typist or a stenographer, but now it seemed I had some real clout. I peered at the name Phillip Hall; it had a poetic ring to it. I told this to the woman, wondering if she liked Frost or Yeats.

  “Poetry?” she said. “I don’t have time for poetry. None of us do. The only thing I want when I’m done working is a hot water bottle and an aspirin.”

  A colleague seated at the opposite window teased her. “Nonsense, Dot. You like beer and dancing more than any of us.”

  “True.” Dot sighed. “I do love beer.”

  “Beer is delicious,” I said, and the women exchanged a glance as if they could tell I’d never swallowed even a thimbleful.

  “Or so I’ve heard,” I added more timidly.

  “You’ll get your chance,” the woman who was not Dot said. “Enjoy Unit B, sweetheart.”

  “Easy to go khaki whacky there,” Dot said, laughing.

  I wasn’t sure what khaki whacky meant, but I smiled at them, energized by the attention.

  Then Dot looked to the man waiting behind me and called, “Next!” and he split from the line and stepped up to Dot’s window.

  I left the building’s wooden deck and walked toward the bus stop. There was Beth, crossing the dry earth with Kathy and the other girls in nursing uniforms. They were heading to the clinic together, I guessed, their arms linked at the elbow. I frowned seeing them so immediately friendly like that, and then I chided myself for being silly. Beth would always have other friends. She wasn’t like me. She was popular, beloved. Maybe it made me a more popular person, too, just knowing her. The nurses rounded a corner of one of the dozens of buildings and disappeared into the recesses of the camp.

  I threaded my way through the rows and rows of barracks, hunting down the Unit B bus stop, which I’d been instructed was in the southeast corner of the camp. Hundreds of my colleagues made their way to their own jobs, and we bumped and jostled against one another politely.

  It was marvelous, I thought, how this seven-hundred-acre town sprang up overnight and I was now a part of it. It was a renewal being here, a gift.

  After a bit of wandering and asking around, I found the cattle car stop and stood in line behind the hulking form of a man that I soon recognized was Gordon Nyer. I went very quiet and hoped he would�
�and wouldn’t—turn around and see me.

  He turned.

  He saw me.

  “Mildred Groves from Omak,” he said, and I was, despite myself, touched by his accuracy.

  “Hello, Gordon,” I told him. “You’re assigned to Unit B?”

  “The big dog,” he said. “I requested it specifically. I always get what I want.”

  “I’m a secretary,” I said, and he shrugged as though to say, What else would you be?

  “Where’s your pretty friend?”

  “Beth?”

  “The mean one. Pretty and mean both, that girl.”

  “Yes, Beth,” I said. “She’s not mean. She’s wonderful. She’s protective.”

  Gordon took a step back, eyeing me head to foot. His eyes raked over me, from the old shoes that pinched my feet to my brown stockings and skirt. He reached forward and plucked a long strand of auburn hair from off the chest of my gray blouse. Not my own, I recognized, but Beth’s. His eyes lingered on my breasts and neck.

  “You’re a big girl, in a lot of ways. How old are you? Twenty or more?” Here, I nodded. “You can handle yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “Beth needn’t be so mean.”

  In front of him, a short, wiry man with crooked teeth punched Gordon on the arm.

  “Hey, Gordo,” he said. “Introduce me to your friend, why don’t ya?”

  “This gentlewoman,” Gordon said proudly, as if I were a cow for sale, “is named Mildred Groves. She hails from Omak.”

  “Omak? Well, I’ll be darned! I’m from Tonasket!”

  “You don’t say,” I said cheerfully. “We’re practically neighbors.”

  “The name’s Franklin Toms, but everyone calls me Tom Cat. It’s so great to meet a local girl,” he said. “I miss my mom and sisters already. Is that shameful to say?”