He wakes to see Abe watching Hannah as she sleeps. Oh, Bit thinks. He waits, but Abe lies down. And it is Bit who touches his mother, who pats her face, hands, belly, again and again and again.
In the afternoon, he hides behind the toybox in the Pink Piper while all the other kids pull on their winter things to play outside. He is left alone in the quiet bus. The shouts of the others are muffled by the snowy world outside, and the babies are downstairs with Maria, having a snack or a bottle. He hugs his chest and tells himself the story of the girl and her swan brothers, holds it in his mind and looks at it this way, that way, to find out what it means to him.
Once upon a time, he tells himself, there was a princess. She lived with her six brothers out in the deep forest, hidden from her father’s mean new wife. The stepmother found out where they lived and knitted silk shirts out of magic and threw the magical shirts over the boys and turned them into swans. The princess became sad when her brothers flew away and went into the woods to try to find them. She walked and walked, until she found a little cabin. At dark, she heard the sound of wings and six swans fluttered in the windows. They took off their wings and turned into her brothers, but the boys could be human for only a short time before the robbers who lived in the cottage came home with their booty. She asked her brothers how to reverse the spell, and they said she had to go six years without laughing, singing, or speaking and she must make six shirts out of starflowers.
But remember, they said, if you say even one word, the spell will be broken and we’ll be swans forever.
So the girl went away to collect starflowers and sew. She was quiet as a mouse. One day, some men were walking along and they saw the girl up in her tree where she lived. They called for her to come down and she shook her head and she kept throwing down clothes, trying to get them to leave, until she was naked. Then they dragged her to the king of a faraway place who married her, even though she couldn’t say a word. But when the girl gave birth, the king’s mother stole the baby and told the king that his wife had eaten it. This happened three times until the king believed his wife ate their babies and he said to kill her. The day she was supposed to die was the last day of the girl’s six years of quiet, and she’d sewed everything but one sleeve of one shirt. The brothers flew down to her and she threw the starflower shirts over them and they turned back into people, except that the brother who got an unfinished shirt had a swan’s wing instead of one arm. Then the girl could speak, and she explained what had happened and the babies were brought back and the king’s mother got the electric chair. And the girl and her brothers were happy forever after. The end.
A vision rises before Bit, a celebration: a keg of Slap-Apple under the stars, one boy winging in spirals toward the moon, the girl golden and round as Hannah had been in the summer, the old Hannah, who had stood on a picnic bench and shouted about freedom, love, community. He imagines those babies who lived for so many years without their mother, what it would feel like to be hugged by her for the first time, her warmth at last against their bodies. How they would clutch her to them and never let her go. He imagines not talking for six years, until he is almost twelve, so many years, more than he has been alive. The days stretch out before him. He tries not to cry, but the world he can see from where he is hidden (the loft of the Pink Piper, the heap of hammocks where they’re stored during the day, a baby’s shoe on its side) goes wavery in his eyes.
Last, he thinks of Hannah, her face drawn to something he can’t recognize. This thought fills him with an electric pulse; it thrashes, fishlike, in his gut. He must do something. He must.
He concentrates. He pushes back the words that were already sickly until they die on the bitter part of his tongue. They send bad tendrils into his chest. They heap, a toad, in the cave of his throat. When he walks and eats and plays, he can imagine the slimy thing there, waiting angrily for a word to slip past, for a chance to curse them all.
Tonight, all is peaceful on the surface in the Bread Truck. Hannah has cooked dinner, and the three of them listen to some scratchy voice singing “Your Eyes Have Told Me What I Did Not Know” on a crank Victor that the Motor Pool picked up from a trash heap in Buffalo. Bit is on Abe’s lap, following along as his father reads the newspaper aloud. Bit once points to a caption that says “Goose bites baby” and does his new, silent laugh, and when he looks up at Abe, his father is studying Bit, his lips sucked in at the corners.
Hannah puts down her book and sniffs once, loudly.
Bit sniffs, too. Something somewhere is burning.
Abe flicks his paper down. Bit’s parents gaze at one another. They leap up and in their slippers and bathrobes run out the door.
The cold air roils with smoke. Shadows pour from the doorway; the gong bangs and bangs and bangs. Family Quonset One is on fire.
Abe is running with Bit to the Pink Piper, and he thrusts Bit inside, and the kids who live in the Family Quonsets are being shoved inside, too: Jincy and Sy and Franklin and Ali and Pooh and Molly and Fiona and Cole and Dyllie. The midwives have disappeared. The kids who already live in the Pink Piper run downstairs, and the Pregnant Ladies come over from the Henhouse, shaking muddy snow off their boots, shivering. Flannery and Eden and Saucy Sally pick up the littlest ones and comfort them. Someone thinks Bit is one of the littlest ones and presses him against her taut warmth, and Bit is grateful again for his smallness, to have these soft arms around him.
Where’s Felipe? whispers Flannery, and Imogene, who lives in Family Quonset One, makes big eyes.
Leif and Erik hold Bit up to the window so he can see, though there is not much there: the world across the Quad swirls with yellow and gray, the last of the snow on the ground reflects the fire, the shadows of people dart with buckets.
Dylan sidles over. He is younger than Bit but taller.
It went boom, he says softly. Back where Ricky and Felipe and Maria live. And then Maria had the fire wings.
Shut up, Dylan, says Coltrane, who pushes his little brother and runs up the spiral staircase to where the hammocks are strung.
Dylan’s eyes well up. He comes even closer to Bit.
She did too have the fire wings, he whispers, his voice full of sleep. Also she had hair of fire, Bit. And also a head full of fire, too.
Bit stares so long at the burning Quonset that the world blotches in his eyes. The other kids have gone to sleep. The Pregnant Ladies are at the kitchen table, trying to swallow their sobs with glasses of water or cups of chamomile tea.
Outside, he sees people going slowly back to where they live. Some of the people who lived in the burnt-up Quonset go into Hans and Fritz’s lean-to because those two men are away with Handy; the Pregnant Ladies go back to the Henhouse. Only a few Arcadians remain outside, watching the twisted metal and the embers within. In the dully gleaming dark, Bit recognizes his parents leaning into one another, tall Hannah, tall Abe, her braids on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. Bit shuts his eyes and blindly feels his way into Jincy’s sleeping bag, to keep his parents standing there together.
In the morning, Ricky and Maria and Felipe are gone.
Bit overhears Astrid telling the older kids that the baby had died. She cries, pursing her mouth up over her terrible yellow teeth, the way the horse the Amish bring for harvest draws his lips over a carrot.
Burnt up? says Molly, who cries and cries. Her sister, Fiona, begins to wail into her hands so that only her vast white forehead is visible.