by Carrie Ryan
Every moment between us has been buried in this lie.
He nods. He looks miserable. He holds himself guarded as if afraid of what I’ll do. “She’s your twin,” he says softly. “When I first saw you on the beach …” He pauses, shaking his head. “I thought you were Annah.”
I close my eyes, press my face into my hands. How could I not know I had a twin? All these years. How could I have forgotten that? How is any of this possible?
“You knew,” I say. “All this time we’ve been going through the paths, you knew about this village. You knew everything about it.” I think of all those times I was afraid we’d made the wrong decision coming into the Forest. All the moments I was so sure we’d die on the path and no one would ever know. Anger begins to throb inside. “You should have told us,” I tell him. “We were terrified!”
He holds up his hands, his face pale and eyes wide. “No,” he says. “I didn’t know. You have to trust me, I didn’t.”
I snort. Trust? After finding out that from the very beginning he’s been keeping everything from me? I cross my arms over my chest and stare at him.
“Look, I knew I was from the Forest. Of course I knew. And I also knew that you were too. But when you didn’t recognize me … When you told me your name and it wasn’t Abigail … I realized you didn’t remember ….” He presses shaking fingers to the side of his head. “I just wasn’t sure you’d want to know. Like maybe you’d forgotten for a reason. I didn’t want to mess up your life.”
This time I actually do laugh but even to my own ears it sounds desperate. “Mess up my life? Look at it now. I’d say everything’s pretty well messed up.”
He tightens his lips together in a thin line. “I’m sorry,” he says.
And just like that the anger that had been coursing through me is suddenly gone, leaving me feeling weak and defeated. “What happened?” I whisper. Realizing that more than anything else, we’re somehow tied together.
He slumps onto the bench across from me, our knees almost touching. “We were neighbors,” he says. “This was my house. You and Annah lived across the street. There weren’t that many kids our age around to play with—you’d just turned five and I was almost seven.” He stares at the floor as if looking into the past and I try to see it all in my mind but there’s nothing more than haze.
“The paths were forbidden to us but one day I stole the key to the gate and convinced you two to sneak out and go exploring and we got lost.” He stops and looks at me, his eyes hollow, his lips drawn. Words begin to spill from his mouth, urgent words. “You fell and skinned your knee and wanted to go back but I didn’t want to. I was afraid I’d get in trouble because you were hurt and I was mad at you because I wanted to keep playing. So I …” He swallows again. I can feel the pain and desperation radiating from him and I want to reach out and grab his hand but I don’t.
I’m having a hard time catching my breath. A hard time remembering that this story is about me and not some other girl, some stranger.
“Your sister and I kept going down the path.” His eyes flick to meet mine and then bounce away again. Sweat glistens on his temples. “We kept exploring. You asked us to wait for you, not to leave you alone, but I was so …” He rubs a hand over his head, almost clawing at his skin. “Angry. I was mad that you’d tripped and wanted to go home and I didn’t.” He stands up and walks across the room until he’s staring down at the empty table.
I can’t remember anything of what he’s saying. I stare at my knee; there’s a scar there. I thought I knew what it was from. I run my fingers over the puckered skin as Elias talks.
“I pulled Annah down the path with me away from you. We left you crying.” I can hear the tears in his voice, the misery and pain and guilt. “We got lost. I thought I knew where we were and when it started to get dark I tried to go back for you.”
I hurt hearing the words, but not for myself: for him.
“But I couldn’t find you.” He’s barely audible. “You were gone. And then I was too terrified to go back home even if I could find the way. I’d lost you, it was my fault. I was afraid of what your father would say or do. I was afraid of getting in trouble so I ran.”
His throat convulses again and again and again. “I took Annah and ran,” he says, the words coming out in a hot rush like a confession. “I don’t know how long we followed the paths,” he tells me. “It was autumn. It rained enough for water. We found berries and flowers and grapes. We found a way out. A gate at the edge of the Forest hidden by a partially caved-in tunnel in the mountains. It was near the Dark City and when people asked questions about us I just told them she was my sister. That we were looking for our parents. I was able to find enough in the empty villages in the Forest to trade so we could pay the rents in the Dark City. But I could never find our way back home and eventually gave up trying.”
He turns back to face me. He looks like a different person, his face so twisted with self-loathing that I almost gasp. “It was my fault. All of it. She never knew warmth or her parents or a full stomach because of me.”
I’m numb. He rushes toward me and kneels in front of my bench. He takes my hands in his but I can barely feel them. I don’t know what to think, what to say or do. I should hate him for lying to me but I’m also sorry for the pain he’s clearly suffering.
“I’m sorry,” he says, the words a hot rush. I close my eyes, my chest crushed under the weight of this new knowledge. I don’t know how to sort it out. He’s crying now, tears bright in his eyes and his shoulders jerking. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to hate me.”
Do I hate him? I wonder. I stare at him, at his misery, and can’t decide.
“Please,” he begs me. “Please tell me it’s okay.”
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. All I can think about are paths and scraped knees and promises and sisters. It swirls around and around in my head, the whole of it out of reach. It just feels like a story and I wait for it to feel like truth but it doesn’t.
It’s okay,” says a voice from behind me and I jump, not realizing anyone else was there. I stumble from the bench and see my mother and Harry in the doorway. She sweeps into the room and grabs me into a hug, holding my head against her shoulder.
The feel of her is so familiar and I close my eyes, falling into her comfort. She stands back, her hands on my cheeks, her thumbs brushing away the falling tears. “My girl,” she says softly and I nod. Because she’s the only mother I’ve known.
Over her shoulder I see Elias trembling in the corner, his back straight but his lip caught between his teeth. He stares at Harry, his eyes wide. “What?” he asks in a whisper.
Harry walks over until they’re face to face. “You were a child, Elias,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Elias squeezes his eyes tight as if he can block out what’s coming next. “I took them past the gates,” he says, his voice small. “I’m the one who left Abigail—Gabry—behind. I’m the one who didn’t take Annah back. It’s my fault. And now I’ve lost Annah and the village is dead and it’s because of me.” His body is shaking as he gasps for breath.
Harry’s eyes are bright too as he reaches out and grabs Elias’s shoulders. “I’m telling you—none of that is your fault. It’s all okay.” Elias shakes his head but Harry pulls him into a hug and I can hear the way he cries.
My mother wraps her arm around my shoulders, pulling me tight, and I realize that I never knew how much guilt Elias kept trapped inside. How much he’s carried around with him since that day so long ago. What it must have been like when he saw me in the ocean—when he realized that I was still alive.
“What happened to the village?” I finally ask. “Where is everyone—why is it so empty?” I swallow and dig my nails into the skin of my knee, trying to find the courage to push through the question. “What happened to my—our—families?”
My mother sighs, a heavy sound in the stillness of the little house. She walks over to the fireplace. “I don’
t know how much you know, Elias, or how much you remember from the stories I told you, Gabrielle, but Harry and I were raised in this village.”
She looks at Harry as she speaks, as if it’s just the two of them in the room sharing the same memory. “When we were around your age …” She pauses, her cheeks beginning to burn a little red. Harry’s cheeks redden a bit too. I’ve never seen my mother like this around a man and it makes me feel a little embarrassed, as if I’ve read her private thoughts. She clears her throat. “None of that really matters. What matters is that the village was breached. The Unconsecrated got in and some of us escaped down the path to get away.”
She looks at Elias and me. “You have to understand—we were raised to believe there wasn’t anything else in the world but us. We were the last survivors of humanity. We weren’t allowed to ever leave the village and when we ran down the paths to get away, it was terrifying.”
Harry walks across the room to stand near her and I watch how aware she is of his nearness, how they stand together. I’ve heard this story before in bits and pieces but I don’t remember my mother telling me about Harry or what role he played.
“I …” My mother stares at her hands. “I made it to the ocean. Was washed up onshore but I’d left behind Harry and my best friend, Cass, and a little boy named Jacob.” She swallows and I’m about to reach out for her when Harry takes her hand.
She looks into his eyes as she says, “I tried to go back. I asked them to send people after you but they thought I was crazy. They thought I’d washed ashore from a shipwreck and had gone insane from the sun and salt water.” She pauses. “They wouldn’t go after you,” she says in a whisper, talking only to Harry now. “They wouldn’t let me go either.”
Harry squeezes her hand. “It’s okay, Mary,” he says. They stare at each other just a moment longer and I glance away, feeling uncomfortable.
“We made it back to the village,” Harry says, turning to face Elias and me. “They’d been fighting the Unconsecrated, fending them off. The last bastion was the Cathedral—infection had roared inside and they had to set it on fire to kill them. It was the only thing they could do,” he adds softly.
“There weren’t many of us left then. Not a lot of people survived. I married Cass and we tried but were never able to have our own children. We raised Jacob the best we could. Eventually a few others had kids—you, Elias, were one of them. Jacob eventually married and they had twins. That was you, Abigail.” His face washes of color and he clears his throat. “I mean Gabry,” he corrects himself, adding, “and your sister, Annah.”
Just hearing about it all makes it seem so real. “My mother,” I whisper. “What was she like?”
Harry glances at Mary before he continues. “She was born after the breach,” Harry says. “I think that’s part of what Jacob loved about her, that she was born free of all that went on in those days. It also meant that she didn’t understand that part of him, the part of him that grew when he was outside the fences.”
I smile, thinking about her. Wondering about her. I sit on the bench and pull my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs.
Harry pauses again and my mother reaches out and squeezes his hand. He looks into the empty pit of the fireplace. “It isn’t easy for a woman to carry twins,” he says hesitantly, and my heart begins to beat faster, my head feeling light. “And the Sisterhood—the women who used to run the village—they were the caregivers, the Cathedral our infirmary. When it burned we lost everyone who knew anything about medicine. We lost supplies. A simple pregnancy was difficult enough … but the complications with twins …”
I close my eyes and lower my face into my arms, knowing what’s coming next. Not wanting to hear it.
“She died having you and your sister,” he finally says.
All the times I wondered about my mother. When I tried to remember her voice and her smell. When I felt empty and wrong for having forgotten her. It was because I never knew her.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice muffled.
I hear a shuffle as Harry shifts. My mother murmurs something to him. “There weren’t enough of us who survived the breach,” Harry finally says. “When the three of you disappeared …” He takes a deep breath. “Jacob couldn’t get over losing the two of you,” he says, and I lift my head to look at him, the world blurry through the haze of my tears.
“He rallied some of the other villagers and they went out looking for you.” He shrugs and even now I can see the weight of the years on his shoulders. For the first time I realize just how old he and my mother look. Just how much they’ve been through in their lives. He looks at his fingers linked through my mother’s.
“They never came back,” he finishes. “Cass and I stayed behind. She said she’d spent enough time in the Forest and just wanted to live out the rest of her life safe behind the fences. Slowly everyone else died and last year Cass passed away in her sleep.” His voice cracks when he says this and my mother rests her fingers along the side of his neck. He cranes his head down, brushing his cheek against her touch and she smiles softly.
I think about the two of them alone in this village—the only ones left. Never knowing if there ever was a world beyond the Forest and no longer caring. Being content just the two of them, safe. I think about how close I came to choosing the same life and I realize how much I’d have missed.
“I don’t remember any of it,” I whisper. Feeling as though I’ve somehow failed the people who once loved me. Who once stormed into the Forest to find me. “Nothing here is familiar.”
“It’s okay,” my mother says, coming to sit next to me. She pulls my braid off my back, trailing it through her fingers like she’s always done when I’m upset. It would be so easy to believe her words. But I can’t. I can’t let go of the past that easily.
I stand up, needing something but not knowing what. A memory, something to ground myself to this place.
“Which house was mine?” I ask Harry, hoping that somehow it will stir something inside me.
He points. “Across the path, down three doors,” he says.
I walk slowly through the room and my mother starts to follow me. I want her to be with me so badly but I feel as though I need to do this alone. “Can I have a moment—just me?” I ask her and she nods, reluctantly.
Once outside I walk a short distance and then stare at the little cabin in front of me. It looks like the others stretching out on either side of it. Empty. Abandoned. Weeds tangle in what used to be a small yard, a vine overtaking half the house and springing from the chimney.
But there’s something different, something about it that feels off. As if the windows are set slightly farther apart or the roof is slanted at a different angle. I approach it slowly, the sounds of the afternoon fading away.
Its door is closed, the boards warped and gapped. I push it open and something rises inside me. Not a memory, not a vision, but a feeling. Something familiar. An expectation.
Scattered inside is a table, a few chairs. A bench, a counter. Grass trails against my calves as I walk around the room. I stop in front of a wall. Facing me is an old piece of mirror, framed by delicately carved wood.
I know what I’ll see even before I step in front of it. My reflection will be dull and blurred. Specked with the age of the glass. But there will be two of us in the mirror. As there always have been.
Yet when I open my eyes there’s only me staring back. I reach out and touch the surface of the mirror. There’s someone else out there with the same face. The same eyes and chin and ears.
A deep ache blooms inside me, radiating out over my skin. There’s so much I missed because of Elias. But then I think about my mother. About the ocean and the lighthouse and I wonder how I could ever wish to give that up.
If I could choose the life I would have wanted to lead, which one would I pick?
There’s a photo tacked to the wall beside the mirror and I reach out and brush my fingers over it, clearing away a coating of dust.
It’s an old photograph of silver shiny buildings stretching to the sky and marching into the distance. A bright yellow border dances around the image, the words New York City spelled out in big letters. I stare at the photograph, trying to remember it, but I can’t.
I look back at my reflection, wondering how I’ve lost everything. I feel like a stranger, as if it’s been years since I last saw my reflection. I look different—my eyes a little more haunted than they were before, my mouth a little tighter. I look like my mother; I look like Mary. Not physically but in the way that we all look when we’ve faced the reality of our world.
I reach out my hand and touch the mirror. Out there somewhere I have a sister. Excitement and hope prickle over my skin. My reflection smiles at me, possibility gleaming in her eyes.
And then something wavers and shifts in the mirror and I see someone step into the doorway behind me. I turn my head, embarrassed at being caught staring at myself, and find Catcher watching me.
Self-conscious, I tuck a strand of hair that fell loose from my braid behind my ear. I wait for him to ask me what’s going on but instead he just says, “Cira asked me to find you.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten about her. About everything except me, really. “Is she okay?” I ask.
He shrugs, looking past me at the mirror. He steps farther inside, walks slowly around the edge of the room. “I found the others just up the road a bit and told them about the Recruiters—at this point, based on when I saw them last, they’re probably only a day or two behind us. That guy Harry and your mother are helping to gather supplies. He’s the only one in the village, said everyone else either left or died.”
I cross my arms over my chest, my skin suddenly clammy. All these houses now useless and abandoned. What would have happened if I’d never been lost in the Forest? If I hadn’t skinned my knee and we’d all come back at the end of the day? What would have happened to my family?
