In Another Life

by Liesel Browning

  “Hey,” she said. He was dressed in a nice shirt, one she didn’t recognize, but it was a bit rumbled. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen her husband. He looked tired.

  Johnny’s smile looked forced. “You look good this morning,” he said. “You look like you had fun last night.”

  “I’ll fill you in later,” Sadie said. She at least owed it to her husband to let him know that she was back together with Amelia, even if their marriage was a complete and total hoax.

  In fact, everyone in their group was involved in a sham marriage, trying to skirt around SC’s rules. Brooke and Yvette were both there with their husbands; they, too, were childless after a couple of years behind SC’s protective walls.

  Pastor Steve wore his usual calm smile as he stood before the group of a few dozen reproductive disappointments. “I don’t need to tell you all why this group was gathered today,” he said. “I felt that we needed to take the time to bring some issues to light. Let’s get right down to business, then.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Pastor Steve said, and Sadie stifled a groan. “I want you to be happy. God wants you to be happy. After all you’ve been through before you made it to this place…some of the stories you’ve confided to me still break my heart when I think of them. God has put all of us through trials.

  “But He also saw us through. He also got us here. I say it a lot, I know, because it’s too important to forget. And so we must serve Him, first and foremost. And I’m afraid, dear brothers and sisters, that many of us here are guilty of serving ourselves first.”

  Sadie felt herself getting more and more pissed as Pastor Steve went on and on about how they all owed a debt to God and to the community, to mankind itself. “God is on our side,” Pastor Steve declared. “He wants us to win this war. Because we are indeed at war, brothers and sisters. God is our general, and he’s already written the plan of attack. He needs foot soldiers. ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ There was once a time when people thought this no longer applied. They thought the Bible was out of date. But those days are long gone.”

  Sadie sat and listened to this bullshit for over an hour. By calling on Biblical verse, Pastor Steve was telling them to stop having sex outside of their marriages, to save the juice for the baby-making. Sadie had had enough by the time Pastor Steve seemed to be winding down his sermon (but who really knew?).

  “Hold on,” she called out. All eyes were on her. Sadie caught her friend Yvette’s eye for a moment, and Yvette chuckled a little, shaking her head. “Why is it okay for some people, and not for others?” She wasn’t about to declare that Pastor Steve was getting blown by male parishioners, but it was apparently common knowledge, anyway.

  Pastor Steve’s smile did not falter. “This discussion is on childbearing, Mrs. Charles. That hasn’t been an issue for some people.”

  Sadie crossed her arms and sat back in silence. Pastor Steve did, indeed, get to the end of his long-winded missive. He concluded with an announcement that made Sadie’s heart sink. “I’ll be meeting with each couple for personal sessions,” he said. “We’ll talk together and help you get closer to God. Mr. and Mrs. Charles,” he added, addressing Sadie and Johnny directly, “I’d like to meet with you two after lunch this afternoon.”

  “Nice going, Sade,” Johnny whispered. “I had shit to do today.”

  Sadie stared ahead and said nothing as they were dismissed from the group session. Lunch wouldn’t start for a little while, so Sadie asked her husband to take a walk. They headed down the wooden walkway, away from the church and towards the park. “That was bullshit,” Sadie griped.

  “They’re starting to come down hard on things,” Johnny said in a low voice. “It’s getting harder for me to get stuff for the distillery. I don’t think I can do all that shit by hand.”

  “What’ve you been up to lately?” Sadie asked. “You haven’t been with Hank every night, I know that much.”

  “Are you gonna take it the wrong way if I said that it’s probably better that you don’t know?” Johnny asked.

  Sadie crossed her arms again. “I’m not sure how I’m meant to take that,” she admitted.

  “For your own good, you shouldn’t know,” Johnny said, and that’s all he’d mention on the subject.

  As they headed back to the dining hall, not wanting to missing out on being seen at lunch, Sadie said, “So, what do you think this meeting with Pastor Steve’s gonna be like?”

  “He’ll ask us why we’re not fucking,” Johnny said. “And trust me, he knows we’re getting it elsewhere.”

  Sadie wondered if everyone in SC knew her business, just as they seemed to know about Zach and Pastor Steve. If everyone knew, why did it have to be a big thing? Why did this all matter?

  Sadie felt sick all throughout lunch. And if it were possible, the personal session with Pastor Steve was even more mortifying than she and her husband imagined.

  *

  Sadie wasn’t all that surprised when her parents announced that they were splitting up. Most of her friends at school had divorced parents, spending the weekend or holidays with their dads out of town. Some of her friends’ parents were never even married at all. It wasn’t a huge deal, and Sadie’s parents were fighting a lot, anyway.

  Sadie missed her mom when she moved out of Glenn’s house, of course, but she didn’t think the situation was all that strange until her friend Bryn’s mother questioned her about it. “So, you live with your dad in your house?” Mrs. Zmolek asked one time when Sadie was playing with Bryn after school.

  Sadie nodded. “Uh, huh.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Zmolek said slowly, in a way that made Sadie feel a bit uneasy.

  Sadie stayed with her mother on Thursday nights and weekends. She had her own room in her mother’s new apartment, and her mom let her stay up late and watch Netflix on the weekend. Some guy whose name Sadie couldn’t remember even way back then would sometimes come and stay the night in her mom’s bedroom.

  Sadie was with Glenn, back in the house in Manville Heights, the one she started growing up in, on Sunday night until Thursday after school. Glenn shut himself up in his study a lot when he was home, going over his lecture notes, no doubt. Sadie played around on her computer when she wasn’t with one of her friends on her street. But Glenn liked to make sure that they had dinner together, at least…a habit they would keep up when they were on the farm.

  One evening, maybe just a few weeks before the bombs fell, Sadie asked her dad, “Why did Mom move out?”

  Glenn looked surprised. “Because we got divorced,” he said.

  “No, but…why didn’t you move out?”

  Glenn smiled a little. “Do you want me to move out?” he teased.

  Sadie sighed. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I mean…like, isn’t the mom supposed to keep the house?”

  “Well,” Glenn said, “Every divorce is different. And your mother and I thought it would be for the best if she got her own place.” Sadie just nodded. She wasn’t satisfied with this answer, but she didn’t know what to ask next. “Is there something wrong with your mother’s apartment?” Glenn asked after a couple of minutes of their usual awkward silence.

  “Not really,” Sadie said. And that was the end of the conversation.

  Later that evening, Sadie took a break from the stupid game she was playing to go down to the kitchen for a ginger ale. She heard Glenn’s voice coming from his study down the hall. He was yelling at someone…he sounded pissed. Glenn wasn’t usually one to raise his voice, and Sadie was more curious than frightened at the idea of her father being upset. She crept down the hall to listen in.

  “…and you’d have him over when she’s there?” Glenn was furiously questioning someone. Sadie knew he was on his phone, because he paused for a moment before demanding, “Well, if she doesn’t know what’s going on, don’t you think she’s confused?”

  Sadie wasn’t all that confused at that moment. She knew what her dad was talking about, and who he was yellin
g at. She didn’t mind her mother’s boyfriend coming around. He hardly bothered her, only went to her mother’s room and was gone in the morning. Even if Sadie didn’t know the mechanics behind it, she knew that “sex” was something grown-ups did alone together.

  “What do you think?” Glenn snapped into his phone, at Sadie’s mother. Sadie glowered at her father, hidden from view behind the partially-closed door to the study. “No, Daisy, because unlike you, I took my marriage vows seriously…I am gonna make it about that. That’s what it’s all about, honey. And if you’d ever just realized it, none of this would have happened.”

  Sadie heard Glenn slam his phone down. She retreated down the hall, back up to her room. Why was Dad calling Mom and yelling at her? What a jerk.

  Sadie asked her mother about it that Thursday evening, when they sat eating Chinese food together on the couch. Daisy sighed. “Sometimes your dad still gets upset about what happened,” she said. “The divorce. He didn’t really want to split up.”

  Sadie wasn’t sure what to think of this. “Why did you want to?”

  “When your dad and I got married, and had you, we loved each other so much, and we wanted the same things,” Daisy said. She paused to pick a mushroom out of her carton of garlic chicken, popping it into her mouth and chewing before she went on. “But people can change, sweetie. Like, when you used to like playing with those ugly troll doll things, and now you don’t anymore.” Sadie nodded, trying to understand. “I told your dad that he should find a nice girlfriend.”

  “And he got mad?”

  Daisy giggled. “He said I’d broken a vow with God or something.” Sadie didn’t go to church on Sunday anymore, not since she’d started spending her weekends with her mother. Glenn made her go on Wednesday nights, but she laughed when her mom made fun of it.

  Sadie always had a good time with her mom. It was getting close to Christmas, so they went out to Coralridge Mall and bought stuff to send to Daisy’s family in New Hampshire and little things for Sadie’s school friends and teachers. They got ice cream sundaes in the food court and sat watching people out on the ice rink. “Feel like skating?” Daisy teased. The only time Sadie went, she fell on her ass immediately and refused to go out on the ice again.

  Sadie was having such a good time with her mother that she barely noticed the people with their signs in the parking lot, all with some variation of “the end is nigh” printed on them. People like that had been popping up downtown and all over campus for the past few weeks. On that, Daisy and Glenn saw eye-to-eye: they were just scare-mongers, freaking out about the war of words between their president and some other world leaders.

  Sadie and Daisy spent the evening wrapping gifts and watching corny Christmas specials. Sadie went to bed way too late for a school night, but she still had trouble sleeping. She thought about her parents’ fight earlier that week, what her father said to her mother. That she’d broken a vow with God. Sadie might have laughed at all that churchy stuff with her mom, but she wondered if it might be true.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sadie and Johnny managed to have sex after they got back to their apartment from the long, painful meeting with Pastor Steve. He said he wanted to meet with them again in a couple of months, implying that there was only one way out of listening to his lectures again. They decided to give it a try.

  When they were finished, Johnny took a nap. Sadie wondered if he’d been getting enough sleep lately. What was he doing, that he had to be all secretive? How many of SC’s rules was he breaking just to keep up his little moonshine business? It wasn’t as if they needed the extra supplies that he traded for all that terribly.

  Sadie took another shower and thought about going down to Amelia’s apartment. But the thought of having another run-in with Zach…she wasn’t sure if she could handle that, especially since she’d spent half of the session imagining him on his knees with the good pastor’s cock in his mouth.

  So Sadie was glad when Amelia came over on her own volition. “I heard you met with Pastor Steve,” Amelia said when Sadie led her lover inside.

  Sadie groaned. “It was terrible.”

  Amelia giggled. “I met with him a few times when we first came here.”

  “By choice?”

  “I know you won’t want to hear this, but he kind of reminded me of Glenn,” Amelia said. “At least at first. But you know something? I kind of think Pastor Steve’s a fraud.”

  Sadie shrugged. “Probably. I don’t think that really matters.”

  “Well, it was kind of hard to take him seriously after he mixed up the Babylonians with the Ammonites.” Sadie just blinked at her, and Amelia giggled again. “Never mind. I just, I listen to what he says sometimes, and the man talks in circles.”

  “If you came to this conclusion so long ago, why’d you stick with the churchy folks?” Sadie asked. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a drink, though she’d already downed one before sleeping with her husband. “You want anything?”

  “Just a glass of water,” Amelia said. When Sadie came to the table, Amelia went on. “And I guess I just wanted to feel like a part of something. Zach’s been so into the church since he got here, and it used to be different.”

  “Johnny said the council’s cracking down,” Sadie said as she sipped her mixed drink. She thought she’d have a couple more and go to bed early. “He won’t tell me what he’s been doing.”

  Amelia shook her head. “The people at the church have been talking for a while about putting an end to ‘debauchery’ in the community. I just thought it was a bunch of talk.”

  “Well, they’re the ones running things,” Sadie said bitterly. She slugged back more of her drink.

  “Them and the scientists,” Amelia said. She chuckled. “That’s weird, isn’t it?” Sadie shrugged. “I kind of remember that back in the day, science and religion didn’t go so well together. Like, I had friends from church whose parents wouldn’t let them learn about evolution in school.”

  “Evolution?” Amelia was only reminding Sadie of her own lack of schooling.

  With her own grade eight education, Amelia tried to explain Darwinism and evolution to her lover. Sadie was far from dumb, and she could wrap her head around it. As she finished her drink, she frowned, considering all the stuff she’d missed out on.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Amelia said, putting her hand on Sadie’s. “You’re not alone. I think the church takes advantage of how ignorant some people are around here.”

  “That’s for sure,” Sadie said. She decided not to have another drink.

  With Johnny passed out in the bedroom, Sadie and Amelia could only hang out in the living room. Sadie didn’t mind. She wasn’t in the mood to fool around, not after putting so much effort into banging her own husband. But it felt nice just being with Amelia again, sitting so close to her, talking with her.

  *

  A couple of days after Sadie’s mortifying meeting with Pastor Steve, she got some news that took her mind off all that.

  She got home from the auto shop, and was just parking her bike on the rack outside the apartment building when Amelia hurried over to her. “Hey,” Sadie said. Amelia looked excited about something.

  “I talked to Vanessa after school today,” Amelia said. “She got news about Christian!”

  “What’s up, what’s going on?” Sadie asked.

  “They’ve transferred him to the science lab,” Amelia said. “They moved all the virus patients to a special wing there. And he’s out of quarantine. We can go see him…we can go right now!”

  On her bike ride home, Sadie was thinking about heating up some leftovers that Johnny made on the one evening he stayed home. She hadn’t seen him since, and was starting to worry. She had kind of a selfish thought as she considered his doing something that would get him into serious trouble. She thought of how fucked she’d be if her husband got expelled.

  But Sadie wasn’t thinking of any of that now. She was just as eager to see Christian as his mother.
She pulled her bike back out of the rack. “Let’s go,” she said.

  They rode to the north section of the walled-in community. It was busy in the developed part of town, people heading home or squeezing in some late afternoon shopping, but when they continued on the lone road leading to the north gate, it was as though they’d suddenly found themselves in the wilderness. For as far as they could see, there was only dried grass and a few of the tall, mighty cedars, most of them leafless, that had survived the war. The few trees left would be needed for lumber for the new houses and church, unless the council had some other resources, Sadie found herself thinking.

  Sadie forgot about the guarded gate until it finally came into view. But Amelia seemed undeterred as she pedaled up to the uniformed guard. Sadie recognized her as she same friendly lady who let them into Sanctuary Coast over two years before. She relaxed as she pulled up alongside her lover.

  “My son, Christian Kopecky, is a patient up in the lab,” Amelia was explaining. “I was told that his sister and I have authorization to see him.”

  “I’ll have to radio up,” the guard said apologetically. “Give me just a sec.” Amelia visibly squirmed as the guard went to her little hut.

  People pretty much came and went freely around SC. Sadie wondered why the lab had to be built in its own sectioned off portion, when there was still plenty of undeveloped land within SC’s walls. What was the deal with the guarded gate, all the security?

  But the guard was smiling when she emerged, and she gave them no more trouble as she had the gate opened, just wide enough to let them through. As soon as they’d cleared it, they heard it close loudly behind them.

  Amelia was riding at top speed as she led Sadie up to the big white building. It was by far the biggest building in SC, maybe one of the biggest in the new world, Sadie found herself thinking. She thought of the huge hospital her mother used to work in. This place wasn’t comparable in size, but it was still impressive, considering that they still lacked in most of the engineering technology that was available before. No wonder it took ages to build, Sadie thought.