The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  “Kieran,” my mother said sharply, “don’t be cruel.”

  “It’s a hard lesson,” my father said back to her, looking over his shoulder. “The McDougals have my pity, and ’tis a shame for the wee Evangeline, but I’d not have St. Andrew for a son-in-law.”

  “Jonathan is not a bad man,” I protested.

  “Listen to yourself! Defending the man who made ye pregnant and hasn’t the decency to be standing here beside ye, giving your family the news!” my father bellowed. “I take it the bastard knows about your state—”

  “He does.”

  “And what about the captain? Do you think he had the spine to tell his father?”

  “I—don’t know.”

  “I doubt it,” my father said, resuming his pacing, his heels clattering loudly against the pine floorboards. “And it’s just as well. I want no part of that family. Do you hear me? No part. I’ve made my decision, Lanore: you will be sent away to have your baby. Far away.” He stared straight ahead, not even a glance in my direction. “We will send you to Boston in a few weeks, when the road is passable, to a place where you can have your child. A convent.” He looked to my mother, who stared at her hands as she nodded. “The sisters will find a home for it, a good Catholic home, to ease your mother’s heart.”

  “You’re going to take my child away from me?” I started to rise from the stool but my father pushed me back down.

  “Of course. You cannot bring your shame back with you to St. Andrew. I won’t have our neighbors knowing you are another of the St. Andrew boy’s conquests.”

  I started crying again, violently. The baby would be all I had of Jonathan; how could I give it away?

  My mother crept over to me and took my hands in hers. “You must think of your family, Lanore. Think of your sisters. Think of the shame if word were to get out in town. Who would want their sons to marry your sisters after such a disgrace?”

  “I would think my failings should be no reflection on my sisters,” I said, hoarsely, but I knew the truth. The righteous townsfolk would make my sisters—and my parents—suffer for my misdeeds. I lifted my head. “So … will you not tell the captain of my condition?”

  My father stopped pacing and turned to face me. “I’ll not give the old bastard the satisfaction of knowing that my daughter could not resist his son.” He shook his head. “You may think the worst of me, Lanore. I pray that I am doing the right thing by you. I only know that I must try to save you from complete ruin.”

  I felt no gratitude. Selfish as I was, my first thought was not of my family and their hurt but of Jonathan. I would be forced to leave my home and I would never see Jonathan again. The thought was a blade pushed into my heart.

  “Must I leave?” I asked, misery breaking my voice. “Why can’t I go to the midwife? Then I could stay. No one would know.”

  My father’s cold stare wounded me more deeply than another blow. “I would know, Lanore. I would know and your mother would know. Some families may condone it but … we cannot let you. It would be a monstrous sin, even worse than the one you’ve already committed.”

  So I was not only a bad daughter and a helpless puppet for Jonathan’s desires, but I had it in my heart to be a godless murderer as well. I wanted to die at that moment, but shame alone was insufficient. “I see,” I said, wiping at the cold wetness on my cheeks, determined to cry no more in front of my father.

  Oh, the shame and the terror I felt that night. Today, looking back, it seems ridiculous to be so ashamed, so terrified. But then, I was just another victim of propriety, shaking and crying in my parents’ house, crushed under the weight of my father’s demands. A helpless soul about to be exiled to the cruel world. It would take many years for me to forgive myself. At the time, I thought my life was over. My father knew me for a harlot and a monster, and he was sending me away from the only thing that mattered to me. I couldn’t imagine going on.

  The worst of winter passed; the short, dark days lengthening and skies that had been perpetually overcast, the color of old flannel, beginning to lighten. I wondered if I, too, was changing incrementally with the baby inside me or if any changes to my body were all in my head. After all, I’d always been slender, and in my predicament had lost my appetite. My clothing did not bind me, as I’d expected it would, but perhaps that was only guilt fanning my imagination. In odd moments, too, I wondered if Jonathan thought about me, if he knew I was being sent away and was sorry for having abandoned me. Perhaps he assumed I’d done as promised, seen the midwife and gotten purged. Perhaps he was distracted by his impending wedding. I had no way of knowing: I was no longer allowed to go to Sunday services and so my only chance to see Jonathan was taken away from me.

  The days passed in dreary sameness. My father kept me employed every minute, from when we woke in the semidarkness of a new day until I laid my head on my pillow at night. Sleep brought no respite, for I frequently dreamed of Sophia: rising from the frigid Allagash, standing like a plume of smoke in the graveyard, circling my house in the darkness as a restless ghost. Perhaps her ghost found some comfort in my suffering.

  I knelt at my bedside before retiring in the evening and wondered if it would be blasphemous to ask God to extricate me from this predicament. If banishment was to be my punishment for my grievous sins, oughtn’t I accept my lot rather than petition God for clemency?

  My sisters grew sad as winter waned and the day of my leaving grew closer. They spent as much time as they could with me, not speaking of my departure, but sitting with me, hugging me, pressing their foreheads against mine. They worked furiously with my mother to mend my wardrobe, not wanting to send me away looking so rustic, and even made me a new cloak of last year’s spring wool.

  The inevitable would not be delayed forever, and one night, when the thaw had settled on the valley in earnest, my father told me that the arrangements had been made. I would leave the next Sunday on the provisioner’s wagon, escorted by the town tutor, Titus Abercrombie. From Presque Isle, we would ride in a coach to Camden, then travel by ship to Boston. The family’s one trunk was packed with my belongings and left by the door, a paper with the name of all my contacts—ship’s captain, mother superior of the convent—sewn into the lining of a petticoat along with all the coin my family could spare. My sisters spent that night huddled against me in our wide bed, unwilling to let go of me.

  “I don’t understand why Father is sending you away.”

  “He wouldn’t listen, no matter how we begged.”

  “We shall miss you.”

  “Will we see you again? Will you come to our weddings? Will you stand beside us at our babies’ baptisms?” Their questions brought tears to my eyes, too. I kissed them gently on their foreheads and held them tightly.

  “Of course you’ll see me again. I’ll only be gone a short while. No more tears, eh? So much will happen while I’m away, you won’t notice my absence at all.” They cried out in denial, promising to think of me every day. I let them cry themselves to exhaustion before lying awake the rest of the night, trying to find peace in the last few hours before dawn.

  When we arrived, the drivers were hitching the horses to the wagons, now empty, having delivered loads of dry goods—milled flour, bolts of fabric, fine needles, tea—to the Watfords’ store the day before. Three large wagons, and six brawny men made the last adjustments to the harnesses and doubletrees, and watched sheepishly as my family huddled around me. My sisters and mother were pressed tight, tears streaming down their faces. My father and Nevin stood to the side, gruff and emotionless.

  One of the drivers coughed, reluctant to impose but anxious to depart on schedule.

  “Time to be going,” Father said. “Into the carriage with you, girls.” He waited while my mother embraced me a last time, as Nevin helped the driver load my trunk into the empty wagon bed. My father turned to me.

  “This is your opportunity to redeem yourself, Lanore. God has seen fit to give you another chance, so do not be frivolous with his benef
icence. Your mother and I will pray that you safely deliver your child, but do not think about refusing the sisters’ assistance in placing the baby with another family. I am ordering you to not keep the child, and if you see fit not to heed my orders, you would do just as well to not return to St. Andrew. If you do not transform yourself into a proper God-fearing Christian, I wish never to hear from you again.”

  Stunned, I went to the wagon, where Titus waited for me. With a chivalrous dignity, he helped me climb onto the bench next to him. “My dear, it is my pleasure to chaperone you as far as Camden,” he said in the stiffly formal, though friendly, tone I’d heard Jonathan mock. I didn’t know Titus well as I’d never taken a class with him and only had stories from Jonathan by which to judge him. He was an older gentleman, on the delicate side, with the constitution of a scholar: bandy arms and legs, a little potbelly that had grown over the years. He’d lost most of his hair, and what was left had turned gray, leaving his bald pate with a wispy fringe in the style of Benjamin Franklin. He was one of the few men in town to wear spectacles, a spindly pair of wire frames that made his pale gray eyes seem smaller and even more watery. Titus spent the summer months in Camden tutoring his cousin’s children in Latin in exchange for his keep, since all of his students in St. Andrew worked on their family farms until school began in the fall.

  As the wagon lurched to life, I cried copiously, returning my mother’s and sisters’ frantic waves through my tears.

  As the town rolled by, the aching in my throat and heart intensified as I watched the only place I’d ever known shrink into the distance and said good-bye to everyone—and to the only one—I’d ever loved.

  THIRTEEN

  FORT KENT ROAD, PRESENT DAY

  The border crossing is not far away. Although Luke hasn’t driven there in years, not since taking the family on some half-assed vacation to the Appalachian Range trail, he’s pretty sure he can still find it without looking at a map. He takes back roads, which are slower and will take longer, but he figures they’ll be less likely to run into any state troopers or other police officers; there are too few of them to watch secondary roads or bother with small towns. The highway, that’s where the trouble is, speeders and overweight long-haul truckers, the money offenses that will bring in revenue for the state.

  He grips the steering wheel in the dead center and steers with one hand. His passenger stares doggedly at the road in front of them, biting her lower lip. She looks even more like a teenager, burying concern under a veil of impatience.

  “So,” he says, trying to warm the air between them. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Well, can you tell me what it feels like to be—what you are?”

  “It doesn’t feel like anything special.”

  “Really?”

  She leans back and puts her elbow on the armrest. “I don’t feel any different, not that I can remember anyway. I don’t notice change on a day-to-day basis and not in the ways that matter. It’s not like I have superpowers or anything. I’m not a character in a comic book.” She smiles to let him know that she doesn’t think it’s a stupid question.

  “That thing you did in the ER, cutting yourself? Did that hurt?”

  “Not really. The pain is very minor, just feels sort of dull, maybe like how surgery would feel if you got a low dose of anesthesia. Only the person who made you like this can hurt you, can really make you feel pain. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten what pain feels like—almost.”

  “A person did this to you?” Luke asks, incredulous. “How did it happen?”

  “I’m getting to that,” she answers, still smiling. “Be patient.”

  The revelation that this miracle is man-made almost makes Luke dizzy, like suddenly looking at a landscape from a different perspective. It seems all the more impossible—more the chance that this is a deception by a pretty and manipulative young woman.

  “Anyway,” she continues, “I’m pretty much the same as I was before except I don’t really get tired. I don’t get exhausted physically. But I get emotionally tired.”

  “Depressed?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably what it is. There are a lot of reasons, I suppose. Mostly, it just gets to me every once in a while, the futility of my life, having no choice but to live through every day, day after day. What is the point of enduring all this time alone, I wonder, except to make me suffer, to be reminded of the bad things I’ve done or the way I might have treated people? It’s not like I can do anything about it. I can’t go back in time and undo the mistakes I’ve made.”

  This is not the answer he expected. He repositions his hand on the wheel while it vibrates hard in his palm as they travel over a rough patch of macadam. “Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”

  She laughs. “Antidepressants, you mean? I don’t think it would do much good.”

  “Medications have no effect on you?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve built up a pretty high tolerance.” She shifts away from him now, facing the window. “Obliteration is the only way out of your head, sometimes.”

  “Obliteration—you mean alcohol? Drugs?”

  “Can we stop talking about this?” Her voice wavers at the end.

  “Sure. Are you hungry? It’s probably been a while since you’ve eaten … Want to stop for a bite? There’s a place that makes good doughnuts over near Fort Kent …”

  She shakes her head noncommittally. “I’m never hungry anymore. I can go for weeks before I think about eating. Or drinking, for that matter.”

  “And what about sleeping? Do you want to take a nap?”

  “Don’t sleep much, either. I just forget about it. After all, the best part of sleeping is having someone next to you, isn’t it? A warm body, a heavy weight leaning against you. It’s very comforting, don’t you think? How your breathing falls into a rhythm together, gets synchronized. It’s heavenly.” Did that mean there hadn’t been a man in her bed in a while? Luke wondered. Then what of the dead man in the morgue, the mussed sheets at the cabin—what did it all mean? Or maybe she was playing him, covering up what she is really like.

  “Do you miss having your wife with you in bed?” she asks, after a beat, prodding him.

  Of course he did, even though his ex-wife had been a light, restless sleeper and frequently jolted him awake when she tried to get comfortable or acted out in a dream. By the same token, he loved seeing her asleep in their bed when he came home from a late evening at the hospital, her long, elegant body draped by the covers, all gently rising and falling curves. The crush of golden hair looped about her head, her mouth slightly open; there was something about seeing her, unaware, that made her beautiful to him, the memory of those intimate scenes forcing a knot to rise in his throat. That is too much to confide to a stranger, his loneliness and regret, so he says nothing.

  “How long has she been gone? Your wife?” Lanny asks.

  He shrugs. “Nearly a year now. She’s going to marry her childhood sweetheart. She moved back to Michigan. Took our two daughters.”

  “That’s—terrible. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t waste your sympathy on me. It sounds as though you’re dealing with something much, much worse.” He has that feeling again, the same one he had outside the morgue, disorientation at the clash of her story with the world as he knows it. How could she possibly be telling the truth?

  Just then, he thinks he sees the flash of a black-and-white patrol car in the rearview mirror as he makes a right turn. Had it been following them the whole time, Luke wonders, and he hadn’t noticed? Could the police be after them? The thought carries a special kind of discomfort for a man who has never been in trouble with the law.

  “What is it?” Lanny asks suddenly, straightening up. “Something’s happened, I can tell by the look on your face.”

  Luke keeps his eye on the rearview mirror. “Take it easy. I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I think we’re being followed.”
>
  PART II

  FOURTEEN

  BOSTON, 1817

  The trip south in the provisioner’s wagon took two weeks. It skirted the eastern edge of the Great North Woods, went wide enough of Mount Katahdin to keep us from seeing the snow-capped mountaintop, then picked up the Kennebec River, which we followed down to Camden. It was a lonely trip through that part of the state; not widely settled now, it was practically empty then. We’d passed trappers and occasionally camped with them for the night, the wagon drivers anxious to have someone to share a bottle of whiskey with.

  The trappers we met were generally French Canadians and were often either stoic or strange, the trade suiting those who were hermits or fierce independents at heart. A few of them seemed to me to be half mad, gibbering to themselves in an unsettling way as they cleaned and oiled their tools before settling down to work on the game they’d caught. Frozen animals would be set by the campfire until they’d thawed enough to be malleable, and then the trappers would take out their narrow-bladed knives and set to skinning. Watching the men peel back the skin and reveal the wet, red bodies made me nauseous and uneasy. Having no desire to sit with them, I’d slink away to the wagons with Titus and leave the drivers to pass the bottle with the trappers in the warm embrace of the campfire.

  While unhappy about my exile, I’d always wanted to see something of the world outside my village. St. Andrew might not have been sophisticated, but I had assumed it was civilized in comparison with most parts of the territory, which were largely unsettled. Aside from the trappers, we saw few other people on our journey to Camden. The Indians who were native to the area had moved on years before, though there were a few living in the white settlements or working with the trappers. There were tales of settlers who’d gone native, leaving their towns to set up camps in imitation of the Indians, but they were few and generally surrendered during their first winter.

  The trip through the Great North Woods promised to be dark and mysterious. Pastor Gilbert warned of evil spirits that lay in wait for travelers. The axmen claimed to have seen trolls and goblins—to be expected, as most of them were from Scandinavian lands where such folklore was common. The Great North Woods represented the wild, the part of the land that had resisted man’s influence. To enter was to risk being swallowed up, reverting to the wild man who was still inside each of us. Most of the people of St. Andrew would claim not to put much stock in this talk in public, but it was a rare soul who went into the woods by himself at night.