But she would know. And she wanted to know. One step, out from under the doorframe. Another step, out from under the shadow of the eaves. Another and another, away from that building, and into the lane, along the lane… and no eyes peered from the dark windows, no voices rose to shame her. The cool twilight air touched her everywhere, on her back and sides and breasts and belly, all along her arms and legs, between her legs. It felt — when she calmed enough to notice — very pleasant. Then she saw the lights of the center warm against the blue dusk. Fear chilled her; she could scarcely breathe. Idiot! How could she have been so stupid? If anyone was up there in orbit, if they were watching, they would surely see it. They would know; they might come back.
She hurried now, no longer aware of her bare skin, rushing in to find the light switches and turn them off. Then home, where she put out her hand and had the switch in her fingers before she remembered. She stood there a moment, her muscles cramping with the effort of stopping a familiar movement, before she could take her hand away without moving the switch. Her heart pounded; she could feel the pulse of her fear throughout her body. As her heart slowed, as she calmed, she scolded herself. Foolish, foolish. She could not afford to forget things; there was no one to remind her any more. She ate a cold supper in the darkness inside the house. At least she was inside now, and if it rained she would not get wet. She closed the shutters, making the inside even darker, and felt her way to her bed. Her room felt tiny, airless. Tomorrow she would move to Barto and Rosara’s room, the room she had shared with her husband until he died. But tonight — tonight she would not blunder around in the dark. She pulled down the covers by feel, and was almost asleep when she remembered. She had not been alone like this… in her whole life. She wondered for a long moment that she was not frightened, alone in the dark, the only person on the whole planet. Not frightened at all… she felt safe, safer than she could remember being. She fell asleep as her body found the familiar hollows of her bed. In the morning, as she woke in her own bed in her own house, the familiar smells around her, she did not remember what had happened. She rose as usual, fumbled her way to the light switch in her room, and only when it came on realized that she was naked, and why. The past few days felt dreamlike, unreal. She caught up the robe hanging on its hook, and slipped into it before opening the door, half-expecting to hear snores from Barto and Rosara’s room.
Silence greeted her, the absolute silence of a house in which no one dwells. She looked anyway. Already their bedroom looked different, a room in which no one had lived for some time. Barto had not wanted to waste their packing allotment on linens, so the bed still had the cream bedspread with the broad red stripe, and the pillows in red cases. The open closet gaped, a blind mouth with a rumpled sock for a tongue;
Ofelia grinned, thinking how Barto would complain when he unpacked and found a sock missing. She picked it up, shut the closet door, and latched it. It never had stayed shut on its own. The room still looked strange, and she could not say why. A film of dew slicked the windowsill; as she looked, a slidebug dropped from the ceiling, trailing its tether.
In the kitchen, the cooler hummed blandly. Ofelia ignored it and went out into the garden. Here all felt the same, the plants responding to light and warmth with another day’s growth. She worked her way down the rows, enjoying the silence. Somewhere a sheep bleated, and others answered. Far off, on the far side of the settlement, one of the cattle mooed. These sounds had never bothered her; they did not shatter her peace. She did think she ought to find the cattle and the sheep, and see if any of them needed anything. But in the meantime, there was the warm sun on her head, and the smell of bean blossoms, tomato plants, and the dayvine flowers. When she felt too hot, she let the robe fall open, and finally discarded it, hanging it on a hook in the toolshed. The sun felt like a great warm hand cradling her body; old aches seemed to vanish. When she went back inside, she felt a little feverish. Sunburn, she warned herself, as she opened the cooler. She would have to be careful, at least at first.
After breakfast, she cleaned out the cooler, throwing the stale food into the compost trench. She should check the other coolers. Most of them could be unplugged, kept as spares should she need them. It would be convenient to have a cooler in the center, and perhaps on the far side of the town, for when she went to tend to the cattle.
Most of the coolers had some kind of food in them. Ofelia cleaned them methodically, collecting anything stale or spoiled for compost. She carried the good food — the hard sausages, the smoked meats, the cheeses and pickled vegetables — back to her own house. She was already thinking which gardens to maintain, which to abandon, which to replant for grain for the sheep and cattle. She spent the entire day at this, uncomfortably aware of food spoiling somewhere… something she might not find in time. Not until late afternoon did she realize that even if she found no more, she would still have plenty. It would be a nuisance to clean out smelly coolers later, but she did not have to push herself. At that thought, she quit work at once, and left the Falares’ cooler standing open, half-cleaned. She had already unplugged it. She went into the bathroom she still thought of as “theirs” and took a shower. It still felt daring, defiant, to use the facilities in someone else’s home, even though the Falareses would never know. Still in that defiant mood, she left wet footprints across their tile floor and strolled back down the lane, making herself go slowly.
In the east, a storm was building, a tower of cloud snowy white at its peak, and dark blue-gray below. It would rain this evening; such storms moved inland from the coast every day or so in early summer. In the west, the highlands rose, step by step to distant mountains, but she could not see beyond the forest wall. She had heard about it — the map on the center wall showed the photomosaic made by the survey satellites before the colony was planted.
When she came into her house, the first puffs of wind before the storm tickled the back of her legs. She glanced back outside. Clouds obscured more than half the sky. Surely the ship, if it was still there, couldn’t see her lights. She didn’t want to spend another evening in the dark; she wanted to cook herself a good supper. She turned the lights on with the same feeling of defiance that had driven her to use the Falares’ shower.
The storm rumbled, drifting nearer. Ofelia closed the shutters in the bedroom, leaving those in the kitchen open. She cooked with one eye on the outside, waiting for the wind and rain. When it came, her sausages were sizzling with onions and peppers and sliced potatoes; she scooped the hot mix into a fresh round of flatbread, and sat near the kitchen door, listening to the rain in the garden. Soon the darkening evening filled with the sounds of water: the rush of the rain itself, the drumming on the roof, the melodious drip from eaves onto the doors tones, the gurgle of water moving in the house ditches to the drain beyond. Much better than in the forest. Ofelia finished the last of her supper, and rested her back against the doorpost. A fine spray of water brushed her face and arms as the water rebounded from the ground outside. She licked it off her lips: more refreshing than any shower. The rain continued until after dark. Ofelia finally got up, grunting at her stiff back and legs, and moved her pillow into the other bedroom. The slidebug had spent the day making a web in the corner; she smacked it with her shoe — the only good use of a shoe, she told herself happily — and tore down the web. Slidebugs were not venomous, but their clawed legs prickled, and she had no desire to be wakened by it in the dark.
When she lay down, the bed felt odd. She had slept in this bed when Humberto was alive, but had given it up to Barto and Stefan a year or two later. By the time Stefan died, Barto had considered the room his, and he had invited his first wife Elise to live there. Ofelia had not complained; she had liked Elise, who had died in the second big flood. But then, Barto had married Rosara… so it had been twenty years or more since she’d slept in the big bed. Her body had become used to the narrow one. It took some time tossing and turning and stretching to find her balance in the larger space. Waking to the light filtering through shutters… she stretched luxuriously. Her skin itched slightly, and when she looked it had a faint flush. She would have to wear a shirt again today. But when she looked at her shirts, none of them pleased her. She thought of the houses she’d been in, the things left behind. At Linda’s, there’d been a fringed shawl. Somewhere near there — her mind refused to come up with the name — someone had left a soft blue shirt behind. Or she could make herself a shirt with the leftover fabric in the center.