He’d forgotten the spring, Charles realized. The spring wasn’t technically on Audubon land, but it was close, bubbling out of the ground in a grassy cleared concavity at the top of a wooded hill. Charles hadn’t been there since winter. A tiny pool filled with running water and native watercress, feeding a stream that ran off down the hill. The spring was less than two miles away, and Charles could take thermoses to fill. He was sick of chemicals.
The trail to the spring was overgrown but trampled. Deer path, probably. The day was hot with thousands of mosquitoes, and Charles hurried through the woods up the hill. By the time he reached the clearing he was breathless and sweaty. There, in the center of the pool, sat a naked Diana.
She had to have heard him. Charles was filled with fury. That Diana had stayed on in his nature center. That she had found his spring. That she had the audacity to sit in it. He stood on the ledge above the pool and waved his thermoses. “Not very sanitary for drinking water now!”
She didn’t answer, just shook her head and crossed her arms over her breasts and glanced behind her to her clothes, maybe ten feet away on the grass.
Charles pictured throwing her clothes into a tree. “I thought you got your water from the spigot in the garden.”
“It’s a peaceful spot here. Was a peaceful spot.”
Charles banged his thermoses together. “Until you spread your human juices all over it.”
“My what?”
Suddenly Charles knew just how he looked and sounded. He thought of the loincloth he had worn during the last three Indian summer celebrations, how he’d imagined it had made him look earthy and appealing. “Getting a little ventilation?” one of the elderly volunteers had asked, making him jump as she flicked the leather with her finger.
“I’ll just go back,” he said now, backing away. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
Diana looked up, startled. “Didn’t you come here to get water? I’ll get out.”
“Oh, no. This is your spring.”
“I can’t say it’s my spring.” Diana stood, one arm across her breasts, the other guarding her crotch. She looked like Venus. “That’s like saying it’s your sun, or my summer.” She backed up to her clothes and, after a second’s hesitation, pulled on her shirt first. “It’s the world’s spring, bubbling out like this,” she went on. “I mean, who can own water?”
“Artesian,” Charles said. “Pushed out of the top of the aquifer.” Using, as he often did, a bit of knowledge as conversation.
They made love on the grass, and when they were done Charles too took his clothes off, and then they stretched out on their bellies and lay—as Charles pointed out—like two happy turtles basking on a shore.
CHAD BURROWED THROUGH the clothes in his chest of drawers. He had no hope of wearing his old pants, but there was a shirt from high school he could still button, barely. He turned to the side and pulled his gut in and looked at himself in the mirror. Not bad. His hair was thinning but not gray. The creases his father had had around his mouth were only fine lines on him.
“What are you doing?” Sharis was standing at the bedroom door. “I thought we could look up my family,” she said, waving something in her hand. Chad turned toward her, confused and embarrassed, then realized what she was holding.
The Triple-A maps of old Ohio had taken on the glow of artifacts, kept in drawers to be carefully unfolded, or preserved between sheets of plastic and hung on walls. Plain City, Van Wert, Bellevue: erased, eradicated, absent. The new maps had no town names at all in the Grid section, only a vast green space, crossed only by the superhighways, labeled “The Heartland Grid.” Some of the maps bore agricultural symbols—ears of corn, sheaves of wheat. There was such a sameness to the maps these days, Chad thought, as if even their designers had become cautious. Yet perhaps in every era there was sameness, so ubiquitous that no one even noticed.
“Be careful,” Chad said, because Sharis’s unfolding the map seemed dangerously quick and young to him.
Sharis sighed and spread the map out on the bed. “There,” she said, pointing. “My mother’s parents were from Greenville. Lloyd and Jessica Henson.”
There was a museum in Indianapolis called the Heartland Heritage Museum. It was filled with school board notes and scenic postcards and sections of gates from large houses and other flotsam that had been, in the confusion and intensity of Grid Day, retrieved. The museum, privately funded, had a warehouse in Indiana close to the Ohio River. Few people were aware of this, but there had been a fire at the warehouse, and the artifacts of northwest Indiana were gone.
Sharis had never mentioned her mother’s parents. Since the boys had been born it was as if her life before had never existed. Chad said, “Are your mother’s parents still living?”
“Dead. But my mother had a big sister. Her name was Aunt Margie and she lived …” Sharis bent over the map, brow wrinkling “… here. Defiance.”
He said, “You think your aunt could still be alive?”
“It’s possible.”
“Was she married? Did she have children?”
“I had a cousin. Rachel. She was two years older than me. They lived in town. I don’t think they’re effs now.”
What was Rachel like? Chad wanted to ask. Did you like her? Did you spend Christmases together? But all those questions seemed too intimate. He blinked. “What about your dad’s side?”
“His parents were divorced. I don’t think I ever met his dad. His mom used to live with us. Meemaw.”
Chad’s mouth went dry. “Your grandmother lived with you? Was she with you when … ?” He couldn’t bring himself to finish.
There had been a fairly concerted effort by the government to promote the Grid transplants to the general U.S. public as heroes (giving up their homes for the common good), but the more vocal transplants tried to grab the microphone with complaints, and after a few years the government’s attitude became benignly forgetful.
“Oh, no,” Sharis said, her eyes still roving the map. “She had another son besides my father, and he got killed in a motorcycle crash, and she had his photo of him beside her bed with a cross next to it, and when my father got all crazy-religious he said his brother’s photo was Meemaw’s idol. He wanted her to burn it. So she left.”
Chad swallowed. “Could your grandmother still be alive?”
“I doubt it. She was already an oldie.” Sharis’s gaze returned to the map. “And I don’t see where she lived. It wasn’t far from us. In Beulah.”
But they couldn’t find a Beulah. “Belle Center?” Chad suggested. “Botkins?”
There were only two and half million transplants, a drop in the American bucket. The Ohio transplants (that was the word that was used, not “refugees”) were settled largely in the Dayton/Cincinnati area (population over six million) or in southeastern Ohio, which was technically part of Appalachia and too hilly and rocky for farming. The Indiana transplants had a new city built for them in the karst country between Indianapolis and the Ohio River. All the transplants got government pensions and housing allowances. “Maria Stein?” Chad, still searching the map, asked Sharis. “Ada?”
Arguing during a meal: there was a weighted moment. Didn’t so-and-so remember fourteen, fifteen years ago before the Grid, when breakfast cereal cost three times what it did now and there was a shortage of corn syrup to make candy? Even Sharis, who was young and healthy, had been