by Лорен Оливер
Bluebeard kept a locked room, a secret space where he stashed his wives. . . . Locked doors, heavy bolts, women rotting in stone prisons . . .
Possible. It’s possible. It fits. It would explain the note, and why she wasn’t in CORE’s system. She might have been invalidated. Some prisoners are. Their identities, their histories, their whole lives are erased. Poof. A single keystroke, a metal door sliding shut, and it’s as though they never existed.
Debbie prattles on. “Good riddance, I say, and they should be grateful we don’t just shoot ’em on the spot. Did you hear about what happened in Waterbury?” She laughs, a sound too loud for the quiet room. Small bursts of pain fire off in my head.
On Saturday morning, in just a single hour, an enormous camp of resisters outside Waterbury was eradicated. Only a handful of our soldiers were injured.
Debbie grows serious again. “You know what? I think the lighting’s better upstairs, in your mom’s room. Don’t you think?”
I find myself agreeing, and before I know it I am also moving. I float up the stairs in front of her. I lead the way to my mother’s bedroom as though I am drifting, or dreaming, or dead.
Lena
A dull feeling settles over us after Alex’s departure. He was causing problems, but he was still one of us, one of the group, and I think everyone—except for Julian—feels the loss.
I walk around in a near daze. Despite everything, I took comfort in his presence, in seeing him, in knowing he was safe. Now that he has gone off on his own, who knows what will happen to him? He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.
Coral is pale, and silent, and wide-eyed. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t eat much, either.
Tack and Hunter talked about going after him, but Raven quickly made them see the foolishness of the idea. He no doubt had many hours’ head start, and a single person, moving rapidly on foot, is even harder to track than a group. They’d be wasting time, resources, and energy.
There’s nothing we can do, she said, careful to avoid looking at me, but let him go.
So we do. Suddenly there is no amount of lanterns that can chase away the shadows that often fall between us, the shades of other people and other lives lost to the Wilds, to this struggle, to the world split in two. I can’t help but think of the camp, and of Pippa, and the line of soldiers we saw threading through the woods.
Pippa said we could expect the contacts from resistance within three days, but the third day winds slowly into evening with no sign of anyone.
Each day, we get a little more stir-crazy. It’s not anxiety, exactly. We have enough food and, now that Tack and Hunter have found a stream nearby, enough water. Spring is here: The animals are out, and we have begun trapping successfully.
But we are completely cut off—from news of what has happened in Waterbury and what is happening in the rest of the country. It’s far too easy to imagine, as another morning washes like a gentle wave over the old, towering oaks, that we are the only people left in the world.
I can no longer bear to be inside, underground. Each day, after whatever lunch we can scrounge up, I pick a direction and start walking, trying not to think about Alex and about his message to me, and usually finding that I can think of nothing else.
Today, I go east. It’s one of my favorite times of day: that perfect in-between moment when the light has a liquid feel, like a slow pour of syrup. Still, I can’t shake loose the knot of unhappiness in my chest. I can’t shake loose the idea that the rest of our lives might simply look like this: this running, and hiding, and losing the things we love, and burrowing underground, and scavenging for food and water.
There will be no turn in the tide. We will never march back into the cities, triumphant, crying out our victory in the streets. We will simply eke out a living here until there is no living to be eked.
The Story of Solomon. Strange that Alex picked that story, of all the stories in The Book of Shhh, when it was the one that so consumed me after I found out he was alive. Could he have known, somehow? Could he have known that I felt just like that poor, severed baby in the story?
Was he trying to tell me that he felt the same way?
No. He told me that our past together, and what we shared, was dead. He told me he never loved me.
I keep pushing through the woods, barely paying attention to where I’m going. The questions in my head are like a strong tide, dragging me back over and over to the same places.
The Story of Solomon. A king’s judgment. A baby cleaved in two and a stain of blood seeping into the floor . . .
At a certain point, I realize I have no idea how long I’ve been walking, or how far I’ve ended up from the safe house. I haven’t been paying attention to the landscape as I go, either—a rookie’s error. Grandpa, one of the oldest Invalids at the homestead near Rochester, used to tell stories of sprites that supposedly lived in the Wilds, switching the location of trees and rocks and rivers, just to confuse people. None of us actually believed in that stuff, but the message was true enough: The Wilds is a mess, a shifting maze, and will turn you around in circles.
I begin retracing my steps, looking for places my heel has left imprints in the mud, scanning for signs of trampled underbrush. I force all thoughts of Alex out of my head. It’s too easy to get lost in the wilderness; if you are not careful, you will be swallowed up in it forever.
I see a flash of sunlight between the trees: the stream. I drew water just yesterday, and should be able to navigate back from here. But first, a quick wash. By this point, I’m sweating.
I push through the last bit of undergrowth, onto a wide bank of sun-bleached grass and flat stone.
I stop.
Someone else is already here: a woman, crouching, forty feet down from me on the opposite bank, her hands submerged in the water. Her head is down, and all I can see is a tangle of gray hair, streaked with white. For a second I think she might be a regulator, or a soldier, but even from a distance I can tell her clothes are not standard-issue. The backpack next to her is patched and old, her tank top is stained with yellow rings of sweat.
A man hidden from view calls out something unintelligible, and she responds, without looking up, “Just another minute.”
My body goes tight and still. I know that voice.
She draws a bit of fabric out of the water, a piece of clothing she has been washing, and straightens up. As she does, my breath stops. She holds the cloth taut between two hands and winds it rapidly around itself, then unwinds it just as quickly, sending a pinwheel of water arching across the bank.
And I am suddenly five years old again, standing in our laundry room in Portland, listening to the throaty gurgle of soapy water draining slowly from the sink, watching her do the same thing with our shirts, our underwear; watching the stippling of water across the tile walls; watching her turn and clip, clip, our clothing to the lines crisscrossing our ceiling, and then turn again, smiling at me, humming to herself. . . .
Lavender soap. Bleach. T-shirts dripping onto the floor. It is now. I am there.
She is here.
She spots me and freezes. For a second she doesn’t say anything, and I have time to notice how different she is than in my memory of her. She is so much harder now, her face so sharp with angles and lines. But underneath it I detect another face, like an image hovering just underneath the surface of water: the laughing mouth and round, high cheeks, the sparkling eyes.
Finally she says, “Lena.”
I inhale. I open my mouth.
I say, “Mom.”
For an interminable minute we just stand there, staring at each other, as the past and present continue to converge and then separate: my mother now, my mother then.
She starts to say something. Just then two men come crashing out of the woods, mid-conversation. As soon as they spot me, they raise their rifles.
“Wait,” my mother says sharply, raising a hand. “She’s with us.”
I’m not breathi
ng. I exhale as the men lower their guns. My mother continues to stare at me—silent, amazed, and something else. Afraid?
“Who are you?” one of the men says. He has brilliant red hair, streaked with white. He looks like an enormous marmalade cat. “Who are you with?”
“My name is Lena.” Miraculously, my voice doesn’t tremble. My mother flinches. She always used to call me Magdalena, and hated the abbreviation. I wonder whether it still bothers her after all this time. “I came from Waterbury with some others.”
I wait for my mother to give some indication that we know each other—that I’m her daughter—but she doesn’t. She exchanges a look with her two companions. “Are you with Pippa?”
I shake my head. “Pippa stayed,” I say. “She directed us to come here, to the safe house. She told us the resistance would be coming”
The other man, who is brown and wiry, laughs shortly and shoulders his rifle. “You’re looking at it,” he says. “I’m Cap. This is Max”—he jerks his thumb toward the marmalade-cat man—“and this is Bee.” He inclines his head toward my mother.
Bee. My mother’s name is Annabel. This woman’s name is Bee. My mother is always moving. My mother had soft hands that smelled like soap, and a smile like the first bit of sunlight creeping over a trimmed lawn.
I do not know who this woman is.
“Are you heading back to the safe house?” Cap asks.
“Yes,” I manage to say.
“We’ll follow you,” he says with a half bow that, given our surroundings, seems more than a little ironic. I can feel my mother watching me again, but as soon as I look at her, she averts her eyes.
We walk in near silence back to the safe house, although Max and Cap exchange a few scattered words of conversation, mostly coded talk I don’t understand. My mother—Annabel, Bee—is quiet. As we near the safe house, I find myself unconsciously slowing, desperate to extend the walk, willing my mother to say something, to acknowledge me.
But all too soon we have reached the splintered over-structure, and the stairway leading underground. I hang back, allowing Max and Cap to pass down the stairs first. I’m hoping my mother will take the hint too and delay for a moment, but she just follows Cap underground.
“Thanks,” she says softly as she passes me.
Thanks.
I can’t even be angry. I’m too shocked, too dazed by her sudden appearance: this mirage-woman with the face of my mother. My body feels hollow, my hands and feet huge, balloonlike, as though they belong to someone else. I watch the hands feel their way down the wall, watch the feet go clomp-clomp-clomp down the stairs.
For a second I stand at the base of the stairwell, disoriented. In my absence, everyone has returned. Tack and Hunter talk over each other, firing off questions; Julian rises from a chair as soon as he sees me; Raven bustles around the room, organizing, ordering people around.
And in the middle of it, my mother—removing her pack, taking a chair, moving with unconscious grace. Everyone else breaks apart into flutter and flurry, like moths circling a flame, undifferentiated blurs against the light. Even the room looks different now that she’s inside it.
This must be a dream. It has to be. A dream of my mother who is not really my mother, but someone else.
“Hey, Lena.” Julian cups my chin in his hands and leans down to give me a kiss. His eyes are still swollen and ringed with purple. I kiss him back automatically. “You okay?” He pulls away from me, and I purposely avoid his eyes.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’ll explain later.” There’s a bubble of air caught in my chest, making it hard to breathe or speak.
He doesn’t know. Nobody knows, except for Raven and maybe Tack. They’ve worked with Bee before.
Now my mother won’t look at me at all. She accepts a cup of water from Raven and begins to drink. And just that—that small motion—makes anger uncoil inside me.
“I shot a deer today,” Julian is saying. “Tack spotted it halfway across the clearing. I didn’t think I had a chance—”
“Good for you,” I cut him off. “You pulled a trigger.”
Julian looks hurt. I’ve been horrible to him for days now. This is the problem: Take away the cure, and the primers, and the codes, and you are left with no rules to follow. Love comes only in flashes.
“It’s food, Lena,” he says quietly. “Didn’t you always tell me that this wasn’t a game? I’m playing for real—for keeps.” He pauses. “To stay.” He emphasizes the last part, and I know that he is thinking of Alex, and then I can’t help but think of him too.
I need to keep moving, find my balance, get away from the stifling room.
“Lena.” Raven is at my side. “Help me get some food on, will you?”
This is Raven’s rule: Stay busy. Go through the motions. Stand up.
Open a can. Pull water.
Do something.
I follow her automatically to the sink.
“Any news from Waterbury?” Tack asks.
For a moment there is silence. My mother is the one to speak.
“Gone,” she says simply.
Raven accidentally slices too hard through a strip of dried meat, and pulls her finger away, gasping, sucking it in her mouth.
“What do you mean, gone?” Tack’s voice is sharp.
“Wiped out.” This time Cap speaks up. “Mowed down.”
“Oh my God.” Hunter thuds heavily into a chair. Julian is standing perfectly rigid, taut, hands clenched; Tack’s face has turned stony. My mother—the woman who was my mother—sits with her hands folded on her lap, motionless, expressionless. Only Raven continues moving, wrapping a kitchen towel around her cut finger, sawing through the dried meat, back and forth, back and forth.
“So what now?” Julian asks, voice tight.
My mother looks up. Something old and deep flexes inside me. Her eyes are still the vivid blue I remember, still unchanged, like a sky to tumble into. Like Julian’s eyes.
“We have to move,” she says. “Give support where it can do good. The resistance is still gathering strength, gathering people—”
“What about Pippa?” Hunter bursts out. “Pippa said to wait for her. She said—”
“Hunter,” Tack says. “You heard what Cap said.” He lowers his voice. “Wiped out.”
There’s another moment of heavy silence. I see a muscle twitch in my mother’s jaw—a new tic—and she turns away, so I can see the faded green number tattooed along her neck, just beneath the vicious spate of angry scars, the products of all her failed procedures. I think about the years she spent in her tiny, windowless cell in the Crypts, chipping away at the walls with the metal pendant my father had given her, carving the word Love endlessly over the stone. And somehow, now, after less than a year of freedom, she has entered the resistance. More than that. She is at its center.
I don’t know this woman at all; I don’t know how she became who she is, or when her jaw began to twitch and her hair began to gray, and she began to pull a veil over her eyes, and avoid the gaze of her daughter.
“So where do we go?” Raven asks.
Max and Cap exchange a look. “There’s something stirring up north,” Max says. “In Portland.”
“Portland?” I parrot the word without meaning to speak. My mother glances up at me, and I think she looks afraid. Then she drops her eyes.
“That’s where you come from, right?” Raven asks me.
I lean back against the sink, close my eyes for a second, and have a vision of my mother on the beach, running ahead of me, laughing, kicking up dark sand, a loose green tunic dress snapping around her ankles. I open my eyes again quickly and manage to nod.
“I can’t go back there.”
The words come out with more force than I intended, and everyone turns to look at me.
“If we go anywhere, we all go together,” Raven says.
“There’s a big underground in Portland,” Max says. “The network is growing—has been since the Incidents. That was only
the beginning. What’s going to happen next . . .” He shakes his head, eyes bright. “It’s going to be big.”
“I can’t,” I repeat. “And I won’t.” Memories are coming fast: Hana running next to me by Back Cove, our sneakers squelching in the mud; fireworks over the bay on the Fourth of July, sending tentacles of light over the water; Alex and me lying, laughing, on the blanket at 37 Brooks; Grace shivering next to me in the bedroom at Aunt Carol’s, wrapping her thin arms around my waist, her smell of grape bubblegum. Layers and layers of memories, a life I have tried to bury and kill—a past that was dead, like Raven always said—suddenly surging, threatening to pull me under.
And with the memories comes the guilt, another feeling I have tried so hard to bury. I left them: Hana and Grace, and Alex, too. I left them and I ran, and I didn’t look back.
“It’s not your decision,” Tack says.
Raven says, “Don’t be a baby, Lena.”
Normally, I back down when Raven and Tack gang up on me. But not today. I push the guilt down under a heavy fist of anger. Everyone is staring at me, but I can feel my mother’s eyes like a burn—her blank curiosity, as though I’m a specimen in a museum, some ancient, foreign tool whose purpose she’s trying to decipher.
“I won’t.” I slam down the can opener, too hard, on the counter.
“What’s the matter with you?” Raven says in a low voice. But it has gone so quiet in the room, I’m sure that everyone hears.
My throat is so tight I can hardly swallow. I realize, all of a sudden, that I am on the verge of tears. “Ask her,” I manage to say, jerking my chin toward the woman who calls herself Bee.
There’s another moment of silence. All the eyes turn on my mother now. At least she looks guilty—she knows she’s a fraud, this woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn’t even acknowledge her own daughter.
Just then Bram comes sailing down the stairs, whistling. He’s holding a large knife, which is wet with blood—he must have been cutting up the deer. His T-shirt is streaked with it too. He stops when he sees us standing there in silence.
