Among Orange Groves

Olivia Mercer lived in the kind of California town that postcards lied about, where the lawns were clipped, the curtains were white, the wives smiled on command, and every front porch looked like it belonged in a magazine, which would have been comforting if any of it had been true inside the houses themselves, and especially inside hers, where the clock over the stove ticked too loudly, the ice in her husband’s glass never lasted long, and every evening arrived with that same sick little feeling gathering beneath her ribs as if night itself had learned her address. She was thirty-one, pretty in the soft polished way the decade approved of, with blonde curls she still set every Thursday night and dresses she still pressed carefully because she had once imagined marriage as a thing made of tablecloths and Sunday drives and hands held at the movies, not flinching when a bottle struck the wall near her shoulder because Harold had lost at cards again, or apologizing to neighbors for the shouting, or learning how to read the dangerous stages of whiskey by the way he loosened his tie. Harold Mercer was the kind of man other men called “high spirited” because they preferred euphemism to honesty, and the kind of husband women lowered their voices about at church socials because everyone knew and nobody said, and on the night everything changed he came home later than usual, smelling of beer and sweat and another disappointment he would certainly decide belonged to someone else. Olivia had just set out his supper and was standing at the sink in a pale blue house dress with a white apron still tied at her waist when she heard his car door slam and then, a moment later, something else beyond it, low at first and strange, not thunder, not an engine, not anything that belonged to Dry River, California, but a humming so deep and bright it seemed to pass through the windows and into her bones. Harold stumbled in, already angry. “What is this?” he snapped, looking at the plate as if she had insulted him personally. “Meat loaf again?” “It’s Wednesday,” Olivia said softly. “You liked it last week.” “Well I don’t like it tonight.” The fork struck the plate, the plate struck the floor, and Olivia stepped back at exactly the same moment the kitchen lights flickered twice, dimmed to a blue glow, and the entire house seemed to hold its breath. Harold frowned toward the window. “What in God’s name—” Outside, the night bloomed silver. The noise drew half the street onto their porches, though few of them would admit later how quickly curiosity overcame propriety, and before Harold could decide whether to rage at the sky or at Olivia, she was already moving toward the back door because something in that light did not feel like danger, not in the ordinary way danger felt, not like fists and broken glass and drunken footsteps in the hall, but like invitation, or rescue, or the impossible shape of a door opening where no door had been before. “Olivia,” Harold barked. “Get back here.” She should have listened, because habit was stronger than courage most days, but the blue light touched the hem of her dress as she stepped into the yard and for the first time in years she kept walking. At the edge of the citrus grove behind their property, where the dry earth flattened near an old irrigation ditch, a craft stood on three luminous struts as casually as if it had every right in the world to be there, smooth and silver and round as a thought from tomorrow, its hull reflecting the moon and the orange trees in long distorted ribbons. A seam in its side had opened. A ramp extended. And halfway down it stood the most extraordinary woman Olivia had ever seen. She was tall, elegant, and composed in a way that made everyone else on earth seem temporary. Her suit shimmered like liquid mercury in the blue-white light, fitting close to a body that belonged in a dream too daring for magazines, and a transparent collar framed her throat and shoulders like a halo made of science. Her dark hair curved in a perfect sleek line beneath a metallic circlet. Her eyes, more silver than gray and startlingly calm, moved over Olivia with alert concern. Then she looked past her. Harold had followed. “What kind of damn carnival trick is this?” he shouted, coming across the yard with all the swagger of a man who believed the universe existed to answer to him. “Olivia, get away from that thing.” The stranger lifted one hand. “Stay where you are,” she said, and though her voice was musical, there was power in it, not loud power but absolute power, the kind that did not need to prove itself. Harold laughed and kept coming. The woman made the slightest movement with two fingers and he stopped so suddenly it was almost comic, as if the air around him had turned to glass. His arms jerked once. His mouth opened. No sound came. Olivia stared. “He is unharmed,” the stranger said. “He is merely contained.” Harold’s eyes bulged with outrage. “You can do that?” Olivia whispered. “Yes.” The woman tilted her head. “Can you walk?” Olivia blinked. “What?” “Can you walk away from him,” the stranger said gently, “if I give you the chance?” It was such a simple question that it felt cruel, because Olivia realized at once how long she had been waiting for someone to ask it as if the answer mattered. “Yes,” she said, though her voice trembled. “I think so.” “Good,” said the woman. “My name is Seraphine.” She did not take Olivia aboard the ship that first night, because the town was already waking into scandal and speculation and the ship’s lights had been seen from as far away as the highway, and instead Seraphine moved with astonishing speed and precision, sealing the craft beneath a refractive veil that made it look, from even a few yards away, like nothing more remarkable than darkness and trees and moonlit dust. Then she followed Olivia into the abandoned packing shed at the edge of the grove, where old crates and rusted tools made poor company but decent cover. “My vessel can remain hidden,” Seraphine explained, glancing around the shed as if trying politely not to insult it. “I, however, am less adaptable to your local clothing customs.” Olivia let out the first startled laugh she had heard from herself in months, then clapped a hand to her mouth as if laughter, too, might be punished. Seraphine noticed everything. “You are afraid even when he is not here,” she said. Olivia looked down. “That isn’t hard to learn.” For a few moments they listened to the town in the distance, car engines starting, voices calling, a dog barking, and then Seraphine reached into a compartment at her belt and produced a small disc that opened like a metal flower into shifting points of light. A map hung between them, not of Earth exactly but of routes and stars and symbols Olivia could not begin to read. “I belong to a refuge network,” Seraphine said. “Across several inhabited systems, there are women who are trapped by law, by violence, by custom, by men who have confused possession with love, and there are places where no local authority will protect them, which is why women like me travel.” “Women like you?” “Women trained to find, extract, conceal, and relocate.” Olivia stared at the floating constellations and then at her. “You cross all that space... for women you’ve never met?” Seraphine’s expression softened. “Often the women I have never met are the ones who need me most.” It should have sounded absurd, and instead it sounded like truth so large Olivia could barely fit it into her chest. The problem, naturally, was that Dry River had a sheriff, and a diner, and neighbors with curtains, and by breakfast the next morning all three had opinions. The sheriff, Martin Bell, broad-shouldered and suspicious in a way he mistook for intelligence, made a slow parade down Olive Street asking about mysterious lights. At Nellie’s Diner, where Olivia worked two mornings a week for pin money Harold called “cute,” the women talked over coffee in tight worried circles. “You look pale,” said June, sliding into the booth opposite her during a quiet moment. June had been Olivia’s closest friend since long before Harold, a sharp-eyed redhead who had never been fooled by his public smiles or his habit of becoming suddenly charming whenever other people were watching, and over the years she had learned to recognize the little signs Olivia tried so hard to hide—the extra makeup near her cheekbone, the long sleeves on warm days, the way she sometimes went quiet when somebody raised his voice across the diner. “Did he hurt you again?” June asked. Olivia’s fingers tightened around the coffeepot. “No more than usual.” June’s jaw hardened. “That sentence ought to be illegal.” “June—” “I mean it. One of these days you’re going to come home with me and simply not go back.” Olivia tried to smile. “And what exactly would I tell Harold?” “Nothing,” June said. “I’ve never understood why women are expected to provide explanations to men who don’t deserve them.” Before Olivia could answer, Betty from the beauty parlor leaned in and said, “Sheriff says folks saw a flying saucer.” June snorted. “If it carries off Harold Mercer, I’m voting for it.” Olivia nearly choked on a laugh. By afternoon, Seraphine was hidden in the little room above June’s detached garage, a place nobody in Dry River had any reason to visit and which June had mostly used for storing old boxes, Christmas decorations and furniture she kept meaning to throw away. June had been Olivia’s closest friend for years, and one of the very few people who had never pretended not to notice what Harold was like, which was why Olivia finally told her the truth even though saying the words aloud still sounded impossible. June stared at Seraphine for almost a full minute. Then she lit a cigarette. “So,” she said, “you really are from outer space.” “Yes,” Seraphine replied. “And you travel around rescuing women from men like Harold.” Seraphine considered that. “That is a simplified description.” June exhaled toward the ceiling. “Around here, honey, it’s a description that’ll do.” Olivia laughed, and the sound surprised her because she had not realized how badly she needed to. The arrangement was simple enough: Seraphine stayed upstairs when anyone unfamiliar came near the house, June brought food when Olivia could not, and Olivia visited whenever she could invent a reason to be away from Harold. Nobody looked up at the little garage window, nobody climbed the outside stairs, and for a short while it almost seemed possible that something as extraordinary as a woman from another world could remain hidden in a town where everyone believed they knew everybody else’s business. The practical difficulties of concealing an interstellar visitor in a small 1950s town turned out to be numerous and occasionally ridiculous. Seraphine could not understand why a woman required three different kitchen appliances to accomplish breakfast, why stockings were considered proper but trousers were controversial, or why television husbands were permitted to be foolish while real husbands were permitted to be cruel. “You laugh when uncomfortable,” she observed that evening as Olivia tried to teach her how to use a hand mixer. “I laugh when something is too sad to answer directly.” “That seems inefficient.” “It’s very American.” Seraphine considered that. “Then I am glad not to be American.” Even frightened, Olivia smiled more in those two hidden days than she had in the previous two years, and with each hour the impossible became familiar, which was perhaps the most dangerous part of all, because she began to want things. Not simply escape, though she wanted that desperately, but conversation, tenderness, curiosity, the shock of being asked what she preferred for supper and realizing she had an opinion, the even greater shock of being looked at not as furniture or function or failure, but as if her thoughts were a landscape worth traveling. Harold, meanwhile, grew louder. His pride had survived the encounter because men like Harold had the miraculous talent of protecting their ego even from reality, and he told anyone who would listen that some drifter had attacked him and that Olivia had been behaving “unnaturally,” a word that in Dry River covered everything from adultery to reading too much. He searched the property, drank harder, shouted more, and once, when Olivia returned from work, slammed her against the hallway wall hard enough to bruise her upper arm. “You think I don’t know you’re hiding something?” he hissed. Olivia’s eyes filled, not with helplessness this time but fury. “You’re right,” she said before she could stop herself. His hand lifted. And the lamp across the room exploded in blue-white light. Harold shouted and stumbled back as every metal object in the hallway shook, rattled, and lifted a fraction from where it rested. Olivia turned. Seraphine stood in the front doorway, having crossed the yard in silence and entered without either of them hearing her. Her expression was cold enough to stop weather. “I warned you once,” she said. Harold blanched. “What are you?” “I am the answer to a question you never thought anyone would ask her,” Seraphine replied. He lunged for the fireplace poker. This time Seraphine did not merely freeze him. A sphere of pale light flared around him like a transparent shell, pinning him where he stood. His shouts became muffled, furious, ridiculous. Olivia could not breathe for a moment. “You shouldn’t have come in here.” “I came because you were in danger.” “The sheriff is already asking questions. June says half the town is peeking through curtains. If they see you, if they find the ship—” Seraphine stepped toward her, and the room suddenly felt smaller, warmer, more honest. “Olivia,” she said softly, “I did not cross eight sectors and three restricted corridors to leave you in the custody of a violent fool because your neighbors enjoy gossip.” Somewhere beneath the fear, something in Olivia gave way. “Don’t speak to me kindly right now,” she whispered. Seraphine’s silver eyes darkened. “Why not?” “Because I may start needing it.” “You already do.” And then Olivia kissed her. It was not graceful, because grief almost never is, and it was not planned, because hope rarely sends ahead a telegram, but it was real in a way every dutiful kiss of Olivia’s marriage had never been. Her hand caught the shining line of Seraphine’s waist, Seraphine’s gloved fingers rose to Olivia’s cheek with astonishing care, and the whole hard narrow world of Dry River seemed, for one suspended aching moment, to fall away. When they parted, Olivia pressed trembling fingers to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said instinctively. Seraphine looked almost puzzled. “I am not.” Image 4 location Inside Olivia’s house, Harold trapped inside a glowing force field while Olivia and Seraphine stand close in the charged aftermath, just before or just after their first kiss. By the next morning, trouble had become official. Sheriff Bell arrived with two deputies and a face full of borrowed authority. Someone had reported strange lights at the Mercer house, Harold had spent half the night trying to convince everyone he had been attacked by a communist weapon, and Mrs. Cormack next door had seen “an indecently tall woman” slipping across the side yard. June intercepted the sheriff on the porch while Olivia hid Seraphine in the root cellar behind the kitchen. “You don’t mind if we take a look around?” Bell asked. “I do mind,” June said, who had come over precisely to do this. “But minding has never slowed men down much.” Bell peered past her. “Where’s your husband, Olivia?” Harold, still sedated by a device Seraphine had applied behind one ear before dawn, was asleep in the bedroom. “Resting,” Olivia said evenly. “Convenient.” Bell stepped into the kitchen anyway. One deputy opened cupboards as if women hid entire visitors from other planets behind canned peaches. The other found the cellar door. Olivia’s heartbeat climbed into her throat. At that exact moment, every radio in the house burst into song. Not static. Song. A lush orchestral melody neither earthly nor entirely unlike a lullaby poured from the kitchen set, the sheriff’s shoulder radio, the patrol car outside, and, according to June later, three homes down the street and the soda fountain too. The deputies jumped. Sheriff Bell cursed. June, because she was June, folded her arms and said, “Well, if the Martians are here, they’ve got lovely taste.” Behind the absurdity, Olivia understood at once. Seraphine was buying time. The sheriff left offended and empty-handed, but suspicion remained like weather, and by evening Olivia was shaking again. “This is getting worse,” she said as she and Seraphine sat in the old packing shed, hidden among crates. “People are talking. Harold won’t stop. The sheriff won’t stop. If they catch you they’ll turn you into a carnival, or a laboratory.” Seraphine was silent for a moment. “And if I leave without you?” Olivia closed her eyes. “There is no version of that which feels survivable anymore.” Seraphine took her hand. “Then come with me.” Olivia laughed weakly. “Just like that?” “No,” said Seraphine. “Not just like that. After consideration, preparation, farewell if you wish, and informed consent. I am not asking you to trade one captivity for another.” Olivia looked at her. “What if your world doesn’t want me?” “My world is not one world. It is a sanctuary station. Women from many worlds live there. Some stay briefly. Some build entire lives. You would be free to leave. Free to remain. Free to choose me, if you wished, and free not to.” Olivia swallowed hard. “You make freedom sound almost indecent.” Seraphine smiled faintly. “That may be why so many men oppose it.” What decided matters in the end was not the sheriff, or the gossip, or even the ship. It was Harold. He woke the following night sober enough to be mean with precision, which was always worse than the blurred version, and he found the scorch marks in the hallway, the misplaced blouse upstairs, and one of Seraphine’s metallic devices half-hidden beneath a cushion where Olivia had sat earlier. His mind could not encompass the truth, but it could scent betrayal, and that was enough. He followed Olivia when she slipped out after midnight. The ship had been moved farther into the grove by then, its veil wavering softly among the trees while June kept watch from her truck at the road. Olivia wore a cardigan over her dress and carried a small suitcase with two blouses, one skirt, a family photograph of herself before marriage, and almost nothing else because almost everything else in her life felt borrowed from somebody else’s expectations. “I knew it,” Harold shouted as he emerged from the trees with a shotgun he was probably too drunk to aim properly. “I knew there was a man.” “There isn’t,” Olivia said, turning toward him. He saw Seraphine then, stepping from the blue-lit edge of the concealed craft, and whatever he thought he understood shattered in his face. “You,” he spat. “You witch.” Seraphine did not move toward him. “Put the weapon down.” “Or what?” “Or I will.” He raised the gun toward Olivia, because of course he did, because men like Harold preferred to ruin what they could not own. The weapon never fired. It melted. Not dramatically, not explosively, but with humiliating efficiency, the barrel softening in his hands and running silver-bright to the ground like a bad idea losing structure. Harold yelped and dropped the stock. A pulse of light struck the earth at his feet and threw him backward into the dust where he lay cursing. Then the sheriff’s car lights flashed from the road. June had not been able to stop that part. Sheriff Bell and one deputy ran into the grove with pistols drawn, halted dead at the sight of the ship, and would likely have started shooting out of pure confusion if Seraphine had not lifted both hands and cast a wide shimmering field over the clearing. Their bullets, when Bell panicked and fired anyway, slowed in the air like lazy bees and fell harmlessly to the ground. “That,” June called from behind the sheriff, because she had followed and apparently lost all fear at some point in the evening, “ought to settle who’s outmatched here.” Bell stared, sweating. “What do you want?” Seraphine’s answer came clear and calm beneath the blue glow. “To remove one woman from a situation your town has tolerated for too long.” Olivia felt every eye on her. The sheriff looked at her as though, for the first time, the decision belonged to her. “Well?” he asked. Her suitcase felt light in her hand. “I’m leaving,” Olivia said. “With her?” he asked, almost choking on the absurdity. Olivia looked at Seraphine, at the silver craft, at June standing with both fists on her hips and pride in her eyes, at Harold swearing helplessly in the dirt, at the orange trees and the house beyond them and the whole narrow life that had once convinced her it was all life could be. “Yes,” she said. “With her.” June hugged her hard before she went. “If there are handsome women in space, send for me,” June said into her hair, and Olivia laughed while crying, which felt appropriately human. “I will.” Betty, who had driven out after following the sheriff, pressed a lipstick into Olivia’s hand as though sending a girl to summer camp. “You can’t go to the stars looking washed out,” she declared, and Olivia loved her a little forever for that. Harold shouted something from where the deputy finally decided to keep him seated and quiet, but it no longer reached her. The inside of the ship was nothing like the movies, not all cold steel and menace, but graceful and luminous, with curved corridors and shifting panels of light that responded to touch. A faint fragrance hung in the air, something clean and mineral and floral all at once. Seraphine guided Olivia gently, never hurrying, never assuming. “If at any point you wish to return,” she said, “you will tell me.” “Even if we’re halfway to Saturn?” Seraphine gave her a look. “We will not be passing Saturn.” Olivia smiled shakily. “I was trying to sound brave.” “You already are brave.” In the central chamber, a wide viewing pane opened above them, and the grove fell away beneath the ship in a hush of rising blue light. Olivia watched her town shrink: the roads, the rooftops, the diner sign, the dark ribbon of highway, the smallness of all the things that had once loomed so large. Her eyes filled again, but this time not from sorrow. Seraphine stood beside her. “You are allowed to grieve what hurt you,” she said quietly. “It still consumed years of your life.” Olivia nodded. “Will that make me foolish?” “No,” said Seraphine. “It makes you someone who survived long enough to leave.” Olivia turned to her then, really turned, in the strange lifting silence between one life and the next. “And if I decide I want more than sanctuary?” she asked. Seraphine’s expression softened into something far warmer than composure. “Then I will consider myself unreasonably fortunate.” Olivia leaned in first this time, and the kiss they shared above the sleeping curve of Earth was slower, steadier, less desperate than the first and therefore somehow even more powerful, not a plea but a choice, not an escape alone but a beginning. The sanctuary lay not on a planet but within a vast orbital haven hidden among rings of pale crystal debris around a blue-white moon in another system entirely, and when Seraphine first brought the station into view Olivia forgot to breathe. It unfolded like a necklace of light in darkness, elegant spires and curved gardens enclosed beneath transparent domes, docking arms extending like welcoming hands, and vessels of a dozen designs drifting gently around it like visiting birds. “There,” Seraphine said softly. “Home, if you would like it.” Inside were women. Women with skin like polished bronze and skin like moonstone and skin the warm brown of Olivia’s own world. Women in uniforms, robes, practical trousers, glittering fabrics, and one woman in overalls carrying a tray of seedlings. Women speaking languages Olivia did not know and laughing in ways she immediately understood. No one stared at her as a curiosity. No one asked what man she belonged to. No one apologized for taking up space. Seraphine showed her the residential gardens, where vines climbed silver trellises beneath a false sky. She showed her the library of translated histories, the quiet rooms reserved for women who needed weeks of sleep and safety before they could speak, the workshops, the observatory, the dining hall, and at last a suite with a curved window looking out over the blue-white moon. “You could stay here until you decide what you want,” Seraphine said. “There are classes if you want to learn navigation, languages, mechanics, law. There are gardens if you want quiet. Work if you want purpose. And if you wish to share my quarters eventually...” She paused, which for her was practically a confession. “I would like that very much.” Olivia turned slowly in the room, touching the smooth edge of the window frame, the fabric on the bed, the reality of choice. Then she looked back at the woman who had crossed galaxies, melted a shotgun, bewildered a sheriff, disrupted a radio network, and kissed her into a future. “I think,” Olivia said, smiling through tears she did not bother to hide, “that I would like to try living somewhere a woman does not have to ask permission to be happy.” Seraphine moved toward her with that same careful grace she had shown from the beginning, as if Olivia’s freedom remained the most delicate and precious thing in the room. “Then stay,” she said. Olivia reached for her hand. “I will.” And because every great journey ought to begin with one honest act, she stood on the threshold of her new life, beneath a sky made by women and among women remaking themselves, and kissed Seraphine once more not as someone being rescued, but as someone who had arrived.