She’s one of the Library Ladies; such creatures everywhere have blue marshmallows for hair. Bit carries the box into the house, and she fills a glass with water and drinks it down. In the pink circle where the mask had been, the moist skin of her cheeks has collected dust; the wrinkles fanning from her lips are making their own mud. I’ll just leave it off, she declares. You are hermits out here, no way you got the SARI. Your mom around?
She’s taking a nap, Bit says.
We passed a hat, the lady says, patting at herself with a tissue. All around town. Your mom’s beloved, you know. And we bought her a computer.
Oh, Bit says, at a loss. Gently, he says, But she already has a computer.
The lady says, Not like this one, she doesn’t. Then she cocks her head to the side and says: Are you well? You don’t look well. Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Who’s taking care of you? Do you have a girlfriend? I know a lovely young woman. Pretty hair. What do you call it? Auburn. Are you sure? Take her number. And Bit is left holding a scrap of paper, which he tosses as soon as the lady is gone.
For an hour or so, Bit gazes at the booklet. Such fine calibrations; such delicate technology! This computer can track the weightless touch of a glance on a holographic keyboard. The booklet says that those who are proficient can do more than twenty words a minute. Bit thinks of what Ellis said on the hike back from the waterfalclass="underline" Hannah could have a month, maybe more. He does the math. If she were to start now and not stop, she could write another of the short popular histories she’d written when she was a professor. Or one long essay. It is no time at all.
Bit struggles with the setup until Grete comes home from the morning practice. Grete, child of the Digital Age, struggles until lunch. They are eating their salads, gazing at the screen and nest of wires, when Glory says from the door, I see you need help.
Grete snorts. Glory’s woolen dress emits a damp heat, and she has a straw of hay in her bonnet. They hadn’t heard her horse on the path; the maples are swarmed with raucous magpies.
Oh, Bit says. It’s. Well. A computer, Glory.
Glory says, I know. I was in IT for five years.
Grete whispers, Is this a joke?
No, Glory says, bending down and fiddling.
They finish their food but stay, fascinated by Glory’s rough hands among the wires. Why’d you leave the world, Glory? Bit says. Why did you come back?
She stands and shrugs. It is lonely, she says. Five years, I was lonely. Then I realized that I was not happy, and would do anything to be taken in and loved. It seems a give-and-take, you know? Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Why can’t you have both? says Grete, frowning. I think you could have both.
You want both, Glory says, you are destined to fail. She looks at Bit. I remember when your people were here, it was the big debate among my family. What to do? We watched with horror! Naked people, drugs, loud music! You were like babies, you could do nothing. You didn’t know how to plow a field. But we couldn’t let you starve. Eventually, we had a meeting and agreed to help enough to feed you, but let you disintegrate on your own. And when you did, there were some of us who felt very smart. Too much freedom, it rots things in communities, quick. That was the problem with your Arcadia.
Bit thinks of the poverty of the last years of his childhood, the kidlets with scrawny limbs and terrible teeth, the drugs, the cash going to relief efforts, to the Midwifery School, to the Trippies and Runaways. He thinks of easygoing Handy, and his pride that started the rift.
Well, says Bit slowly. I guess that’s as good an interpretation as any.
Yeah, but it’s not like you Amish are perfect, Grete says. You’re human, too. I mean, even you guys get sick. What happens if you get SARI? I bet your community would suffer.
There are always diseases, Glory says. You’re too young to remember measles, chicken pox, polio. Spanish influenza killed millions in 1918, and nobody ever hears about it. We have survived other things.
Glory nods toward the cookies she brought. Now. Eat your dessert, she says. Allow me to concentrate, thank you. In fifteen minutes, Glory has the computer running. She settles Hannah before it. They wait as Hannah figures out the mechanism that makes it work.
Bit finds himself holding his breath, urging the computer inside his head, making deals. If you let my mother speak, he thinks, I will repudiate my repudiation of technology.
A smooth, light voice rises and startles them, a voice unlike Hannah’s. Only after it has passed does Bit understand what it said into the dimness of the house: Glory be.
They hear from Cheryl and Diana, who come, sobbing. Muffin and her family are missing in Madagascar, and all the news they can get are pictures of bodies lining the street. As they are leaving, the ladies remember another sorrow and tell how Pooh’s two-year-old granddaughter in Seattle has died in the night, and the family is in lockdown and can’t travel to mourn together. The news touches the bone.
Ellis has watched silently, great-eyed, from a chair in the corner through their visit. When he passes her in the hall, she stops him, and takes his head, and gently leans it against her shoulder. He stays there until Grete comes from her bedroom, sees them, and shuts her door again.
In these quiet days, the house is full of slanted light and music from the ancient turntable. Hannah only ever wants Bach. Bit spoons a dollop of chocolate pie into his mother’s mouth. It is hard for her to swallow, impossible for her to chew. To keep her from losing too much weight, they spend most of their days making her eat.
Hannah glances over at her new computer and eyes out some words. Benefit one to sickness, the sultry computer voice says. I can taste as vividly as when I was a child.
What’s benefit two? Bit says.
He sees Hannah’s eyes return to the keyboard. Benefit two. ., the voice says, and there’s a long pause. He goes to the sink to do the dishes, and when he returns, he peers at the screen, thinking that perhaps Hannah forgot to make the voice speak. But there is only Benefit two. . trailing into nothing.
At last, he gets her joke.
Ellis comes every other day, mostly in the evenings after she’s showered and had dinner and waited for illness to sneak upon her. Bit and she sit together for hours over tea in the kitchen, eating Glory’s pies, while Luisa and Hannah murmur in Hannah’s room and Grete sleeps the sleep of the young. Ellis tells him, piece by piece, about herself. The good little girl, beloved only child of older parents, piano-playing, churchgoing. Summerton was larger then. There was a Farm and Home store, a Newberry’s, a Kmart, a smattering of hippie boutiques from defectors of Arcadia. She went straight to college at seventeen, to medical school at twenty-one. She wanted to fix people. She saw how her mother came back from the rheumatologist’s glowing, her hands having been gently held for an hour, the power of touch. But her parents both died when she was in residency. She was very alone. She was engaged three times (she blushes). She called it off every time, a few months before the wedding. They were nice guys, she says. She didn’t love them.
Bit folds her small brown hand into his. Her nostrils go red and her eyelids do too and there’s something of the bunny about her as she wipes her cheeks on her shoulders. I’m not sure, she whispers, I’m capable of loving anybody.
Ellis, Bit says. Oh, honey, of course you are.
He lifts her knuckles to his mouth and kisses them, tasting the bitter almond of her skin. She stands suddenly, and says a hurried goodbye, and drives off, and all the next day Bit is afraid he’s scared her away. But she comes again at nine that night, and when she enters the house, the cool air in her clothes, she kisses him gravely on both cheeks, next to his lips, and leans her head against his chest and keeps it there for a long moment, just resting.