America Pacifica Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

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  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2011 by Anna North

  Reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Anna North and Little, Brown and Company

  Author photograph by Meggy Wang

  Cover design by Lindsey Andrews, cover photograph by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images

  Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected].

  Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Reagan Arthur Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First e-book edition: May 2011

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  ISBN 978-0-316-13412-5

  For my family

  Contents

  Welcome

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Anna North

  Anna North on Writing America Pacifica

  Books That Influenced America Pacifica

  Books You Might Like if You Liked America Pacifica

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Praise for Anna North’s America Pacifica

  1

  The trouble started when the woman with the shaking hands came to the apartment. Her face was small but fleshy, with a little puffy mouth. She was dressed in shabby, slightly strange clothes—a magenta skirt a little too short for her age, a T-shirt with home-stenciled snowflakes—and her skin was a weird sallow color like she had just fainted or was just about to faint. She said she was a friend of Darcy’s mother, but Darcy’s mother didn’t have friends.

  “You’re all I need,” Sarah would say as she combed the knots out of Darcy’s hair.

  Darcy didn’t like the woman’s hands. The rest of her was long and skinny, but those hands were so plump they were almost knuckleless, and they quivered like dreaming dogs. Hard-core solvent-heads shook like that, but this woman’s pupils were normal, and she didn’t smell like a huffer or twitch and scratch like a snorter. If she wasn’t high she was sick or scared, and they didn’t need any extra illness or worry.

  Darcy started to say that her mother was out and would be out for a while, but then Sarah came down the hall from the bathroom carrying their toothbrush and looking at the woman the way you look at someone you’ve been expecting to see. She had changed out of her wet diving suit and into an old Seafiber jumpsuit with holes in the knees. She was little and hard, like a knife. The woman’s shaky hands were opening and closing.

  “Darcy,” her mother said, in a voice that sounded like it came from a time before all the tenderness and bitterness and songs and rhymes and whispers and private names that had grown between them in the eighteen years of Darcy’s life. “Can you give us a minute?”

  Darcy didn’t like it. The woman’s eyes were moving all over the hallway like they were expecting something to come charging through the wall.

  “What’s this about?” Darcy asked.

  The woman looked at Darcy’s mother and Darcy’s mother looked at Darcy with an expression she had seen on the other mothers but almost never on her own, an expression that said, Please do this and don’t ask me why.

  Darcy obeyed. She left the apartment and the woman walked in. They shut the door and Darcy was alone in the hallway. A wad of underwear lay against the far wall. She walked toward it so they would hear her footsteps. Then she tiptoed back. She knelt by the door of the apartment and pressed her ear against it. The door was made of cheap Seaboard—it smelled like the dirty ocean after a long rain, and if you scratched it, it flaked away under your fingernails. Through it she could make out the women’s whispers, like dishwater swishing in a tub.

  “I swish your note,” the woman was saying. “I never swish it would happen again. I wasn’t ready.”

  “Will you go?” her mother said. “I swish swish swish, but I just can’t do it.”

  Darcy tried to hear the emotion in her mother’s voice, but she was still speaking strangely, as though all along her voice had contained another voice and she was just now unwrapping it.

  “I’ll talk to swish swish,” the woman said. “We’re going to need money, though.”

  Then her voice went so low that Darcy couldn’t hear it. Darcy pulled her necklace up around her chin and tucked the charm into her mouth, an old nervous habit. The charm was silver, a small scaly bullet-shape that her mother had explained was called a pinecone. Darcy had found it folded into Sarah’s oldest, most threadbare shirt when she was doing laundry by herself for the first time, five or six years ago. All Sarah would say was that it had belonged to Darcy’s grandmother and that pinecones grew on trees on the mainland.

  “You can have it if you want,” she had said. “I don’t care about it.”

  For several years after that Darcy had imagined pinecones were fruit and wondered what they tasted like. The charm itself tasted familiar and foreign, like Darcy’s own teeth and like some far-off salty earth, and sucking on it gave her a furtive, inward pleasure.

  “Okay,” she heard her mother say.

  Their footfalls approached the door, and Darcy jumped up and ran into the bathroom. It was dark and swampy. All three stalls were occupied: a set of feet beneath each door shifted slightly. A large flat glossy cockroach glided across the floor. The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in weeks; old human smells lay thickly one on top of the other, piss and shit and menstrual blood and paper towels so sodden with these things that they became almost human themselves. Liberty Ramirez was in the middle stall with one of his pornoflyers—the soft sounds of his masturbation stopped when he heard her come in. Darcy stood against the stained sink and waited for footsteps in the hallway. She heard several minutes of silence. Then the bathroom door opened and the woman came in. Under the fluorescent light,
her skin was fish-belly green.

  “You have a nice apartment,” she said.

  Darcy stared.

  “Are you joking?” she asked.

  The woman smiled. Her teeth slanted inward in the front, like an arrow pointing down her throat. She turned the tap on and jumped back a little when the pipes coughed. Then she stuck her fat shivery hands under the lukewarm water and wiped them on her face.

  “What were you talking to my mom about?” Darcy asked.

  “Oh, just catching up.”

  The woman looked around the bathroom.

  “We don’t have paper towels,” Darcy said. “You have to use toilet paper. Catching up on what?”

  “You know, old times.”

  She lifted the hem of her T-shirt—cheap Seafiber, stained in several places—and dabbed at her face with it.

  “I have to go,” she said. “It was nice talking to you.”

  “Hold on,” Darcy said, but the woman turned and walked out the door without looking back.

  When Darcy came back to the apartment, Sarah was cleaning. The bed was made, their few spare T-shirts were piled in a corner. Sarah was scraping the dried bits of beef food off the hot plate.

  “What did she want?” Darcy asked.

  Sarah looked up, eyes wide with innocence.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. That woman.”

  Sarah laughed, a little high tight laugh that usually meant she was overtired or about to cry.

  “Oh, her,” she said. “She’s crazy.”

  “How do you know her?”

  Sarah turned her back to Darcy and began scraping again. When she answered, she spoke quickly, giving each word as little weight as possible.

  “I used to hang around with her when I was younger.”

  Darcy knew this was a bad sign. Her mother never talked about the mainland, or about coming to Pacifica, or about what it was like to live on the island before it was overcrowded and overbuilt and falling apart at the edges, when it was still an exciting new escape from the frozen, used-up hulk of North America. Darcy knew Sarah had lived in a co-op in Seattle, that she’d come to the island on the first boat when she was just ten years old, that she’d done odd jobs until she got pregnant, when she became a pearl diver, that Darcy’s father’s name was Alejandro, and that he was dead. Everything else that happened to Sarah before Darcy’s birth was off-limits, and Sarah didn’t even get satisfyingly angry when Darcy asked about it. She just put on her faraway face, her face that said, Even though I know everything there is to know about you, there are things about me that you will never know, and gave Darcy the only piece of advice she ever gave: “Don’t get stuck in the past.” Since Darcy had no past beyond a few years of school, a few nights spent huffing cheap solvent out of paper bags, and many boring days of mixing jellyfish powder and spice into imitations of mainland food, she didn’t have much to do with this advice. She’d stopped asking questions that might elicit it. Still, she didn’t like the woman with the shaking hands, and she wasn’t quite ready to let it drop.

  “What did she want?” Darcy asked.

  Sarah stopped scraping and stood still for a moment with the scouring pad hovering in the air. When she turned she wore an expression of nonchalance that looked like it had taken effort to compose.

  “She has this get-rich-quick scheme. Get this: I just put up a hundred dollars, and in the next year a hundred people each send me a hundred dollars.”

  “How come I’ve never seen her before?” Darcy asked.

  “I told her, first of all, does it look like I have a hundred dollars, and second of all, do you think I don’t know what a pyramid scheme is?”

  Sarah finished scraping the hot plate, then opened the window and put the scrapings on the sill. A soot-stained parrot flapped down, made the sound of a bus horn, and began chewing them.

  “That’s all it was?” Darcy asked.

  “Yes, what did you think? Some kind of a drug deal? Or maybe she was coming to tell us we’d won a million dollars from the Board of Trustees in some kind of sweepstakes? If we had a million dollars, the first thing I’d do is knock down this entire building and replace it with a giant urinal, because that’s what it smells like anyway. What about you?”

  Sarah often sounded childlike, especially at the end of a long day, but now she was talking too fast, and her eyes danced with excitement or anxiety. The woman’s sallow face and little pursed mouth chafed at Darcy like sand under fingernails.

  “Do you promise that’s what you were talking about?”

  Sarah put her hands on her hips and made her parody-of-an-exasperated-mother face. Usually this face was a joke—Darcy and Sarah were rarely at cross-purposes, and Sarah was rarely the kind of mother to tell Darcy what to do. But when Sarah spoke, her voice had an edge to it.

  “What is with you?” she said. “Yes, I promise. Now come sit with me. If you give me a foot rub I’ll sing you a song.”

  Darcy took off her mother’s socks and laid them damp and stinking on the windowsill to air. She stuck her head out the window and smelled the hot wet briny breath of the sea, a mile away to the west. The wind was changing; the rains would be coming soon. On the ceiling, last season’s leaks lay dark and spongy, ready to seep like sores again when the weather turned.

  One year the leaks had gotten so bad that the whole ceiling streamed rusty water, like an enormous showerhead, and they had to move all their clothes and Darcy’s makeshift toys to the top of the bed and sleep under a canopy made of garbage bags. The next day the edges of the blanket were slurping up water, and the apartment was oozing into the hallway, and Augusta Beltran came by to ask if they wanted to stay with her. But Sarah put her arm around Darcy’s shoulder, like a wing, and said they didn’t need any help, and that night and the next night and the next they ate their cheese food and seaweed crackers on the inundated bed, and pretended they were sailing on the ocean. They were happy, except for the time that Sarah asked, “We’re fine, aren’t we?” and Darcy knew she had to say yes.

  Sarah’s feet were long and thin, her toes all huddled together. Even in the steaming heat they never got warm. Darcy rubbed her mother’s cracked heels, her blue-veined insteps, the crumpled scar where she’d lost her little toe to frostbite thirty years ago. Her mother’s feet always made her jealous; they had seen her mother through the secret years before Darcy was born. They had shivered in the snow on the mainland, slapped against the deck of the first boat as it crossed the Pacific, scrambled over the sand of the island when it was unbuilt and undirtied and new. They had rubbed against the feet of Darcy’s father, dark and broad and snub-toed like hers, before he died and took half of Darcy’s provenance out of the world.

  Sarah was singing now. It was a song Darcy had never heard before, a song about sunshine. Her mother knew so many songs. Darcy couldn’t sing any of them. She could hear the music in her mind, but it came out of her mouth all thinned and flattened and wrong.

  Sarah shut her eyes; she was sliding out of the room, away into a place she kept for herself in her mind. Darcy rubbed the fine, thin tendons on the tops of her feet. She wished her mother were something she could keep in a closed fist, like a coin.

  “ ’Cause if I never saw the sunshine, baby, then maybe”—she opened her eyes and looked at Darcy like she was someone else—“I wouldn’t mind the rain.”

  Darcy sat in her usual seat on the number 9 bus to Floridatown, next to the green-jumpsuited woman with the small solvent burn on her neck. Usually they didn’t speak, but this morning the woman turned to her, a copy of the news flyer in her hand.

  “You see this?” she asked.

  The printing was cheap, doubled like drunk vision, but today’s headline was a screamer: SEAGUARDS THWART HAWAIIAN ATTACK. Below it was a line drawing—the few working cameras on the island had rotted into hunks of scrap long ago—of a ship with enormous guns jutting from its sides. Twice before in Darcy’s memory they had shot down invader ships, destroyers coming west
from Hawaii. The last time had been ten years ago—Darcy was eight, and for weeks all the kids talked about nothing but boats and torpedoes and wars. Then the threat dimmed, and the western settlements became what they’d always been—far-off enemies, featureless and vaguely fearsome, a role to force the uncool kids to play in games of make-believe. Some of the kids in Darcy’s high school even claimed that all the westerners had died, that a hot ocean current had fried them just like the cold had frozen America. You got in trouble if your teacher heard you say so, but more and more in recent years Darcy had seen underground flyers posted around Little Los Angeles, their blurry type proclaiming, HAWAIIANS DEAD! FIRE THE SEAGUARDS! They were never up for more than a day.

  “This happened yesterday?” Darcy asked.

  The woman nodded. Darcy had never really looked at her face before. Her skin was coffee-colored, and lines sprouted from her eyes. She was still pretty. Darcy gazed into her lap at Founder Tyson’s morning column, all the way on the right edge of the flyer, above the baseball scores. Tyson’s face at the top was as avuncular and strong-jawed as ever. It was the face on the banners that hung across the Avenida, and across Wabash Avenue in Chicagoland, and across every other street big enough to make room for them. It was totally unlike the ancient, sunken face that made its way down from the northern tip of the island for each year’s Founder’s Day parade, turning slightly from side to side, smiling its fixed smile.

  “This weekend’s attack shows us that the Hawaiian threat is still very real,” Tyson’s column read, “and we must maintain vigilance. And yet, this is also a time to remember the blessings of our island, the things that make it worth protecting. As of today, Manhattanville has gone two full months without a cave-in, and although minor cave-ins did occur this week on the western edge of Little Los Angeles, they are being swiftly and diligently repaired.”