The wall was about as tall as she was, making it hard for her to see what was on the other side. Every now and then, though, she’d get enough of a glimpse to know that the other side consisted of the same rolling landscape marked at intervals with the same barbed gray-green shrubs she was forced to avoid on her own side of the wall, calling the whole point of the wall into question. The shrubs were century plants—she’d done a unit on them around the time Mary and Eddie had been in her classroom. A century plant stayed alive as long as it took to produce one six-foot-long flower stalk and then it died. A kindred spirit, Marjorie thought. She was no longer young but something about the situation made her feel even older than she was. That much she knew, that and the fact that she wasn’t far from a large body of water, the sky a shade of blue-violet more usually thought of as coming from a dactilo port, with handfuls of things falling loose beneath it that turned out to be seagulls.
