by Tahereh Mafi
“Ella,” I whisper. “What did you do?”
She squeezes my hand; I hear her laugh.
I turn slowly to face her, a wealth of feeling rising up inside me with a force so great it scares me.
“What is this?” I ask, hardly able to speak. “What am I looking at?”
Ella takes a deep breath, exhaling as she clasps her hands together. She’s nervous, I realize.
This astonishes me.
“I had the idea a long time ago,” she says, “but it wasn’t workable back then. I always wanted us to be able to reclaim these old neighborhoods; it always seemed like such a waste to lose them altogether. We’re still going to have to demolish most of them, because the majority are too far gone for repair, but that means we can redesign better, too—and it means we can tie it all into the new infrastructure package, creating jobs for people.
“I’ve been in talks with our newly contracted city planner, by the way.” She smiles tightly. “I never got to tell you about that yesterday. We’re hoping to rebuild these areas in phases, prioritizing the transplantation of the disabled and the elderly and those with special needs. The Reestablishment did everything it could to throw anyone they deemed unfit into the asylums, which means none of the compounds they built made provisions for the old or infirm or all the orphans—which, I mean—of course, you already know all this.” She looks sharply away at that, hugging herself tightly. When she looks up again I’m struck by the potency of her grief and gratitude.
“I really don’t think I’ve said thank you enough for all that you’ve done,” she says, her voice breaking as she speaks. “You have no idea how much it meant to me. Thank you. So much.”
She throws herself into my arms, and I hold her tight, still stunned into silence. I feel all her emotions at once, love and pain and fear, I realize, for the future. My heart is jackhammering in my chest.
Ella has always been deeply concerned with the well-being of the asylum inmates. After reclaiming Sector 45, she and I would talk late into the night about her dreams for change; she often said the first thing she’d do after the fall of The Reestablishment would be to find a way to reopen and staff the old hospitals—in anticipation of the immediate transfer of asylum residents.
While Ella was in recovery, I launched this initiative personally.
We’ve begun staffing the newly open hospitals not only with reclaimed doctors and nurses from the compounds but with supplies and soldiers from local sector headquarters all across the continent. The plan is to assess each asylum victim before deciding whether they need continued medical treatment and/or physical rehabilitation. Any healthy and able among them will be released back into the care of their living relatives, or else found safe accommodations.
Ella has thanked me for doing this a thousand times, and each time I’ve assured her that my efforts were nominal at best.
Still, she refuses to believe me.
“There’s no one in the whole world like you,” she says, and I can practically feel her heart beating between us. “I’m so grateful for you.”
These words cause me an acute pain, a kind of pleasure that makes it hard to breathe. “I am nothing,” I say to her. “If I manage to be anything, it is only because of you.”
“Don’t say that,” she says, hugging me tighter. “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”
“It’s true.”
I never would’ve been able to get things done so quickly for her if Ella hadn’t already won over the military contingent, a feat managed almost entirely through rumor and gossip regarding her treatment of the soldiers from my old sector.
During her brief tenure in 45, Ella gave soldiers leave to reunite with their families, allocated those with children larger rations, and removed execution as a punishment for any infraction, minor or major. She regularly shrugs off these changes as if they were nothing. To her, they were casual declarations made over a meal, a young woman waving a fork around as she raged against the fundamental dignities denied our soldiers.
But these changes were radical.
Her effortless compassion toward even the lowest foot soldiers gained Ella loyalty across the continent. It took little work, in the end, to convince our North American infantrymen and -women to take orders from Juliette Ferrars; they moved quickly when I bade them to do so on her behalf.
Their superiors, however, have proven an altogether different struggle.
Even so, Ella doesn’t see yet just how much power she wields, or how significantly her point of view changes the lives of so many. She refuses herself, as a result, any claim to credit; attributing her decisions to what she calls “a basic grasp of human decency.” I tell her, over and over again, how rare it is to find any among us who’ve retained such decency. Even fewer remain who can look beyond their own struggles long enough to bear witness to the suffering of others; fewer still, who would do anything about it.
That Juliette Ferrars is incapable of seeing herself as an exception is part of what makes her extraordinary.
I take a deep, steadying breath as I hold her, still studying the house in the distance. I hear the muted sound of laughter, the bustle of movement. A door opens somewhere, then slams shut, unleashing sound and clamor, voices growing louder.
“Where do you want these chairs?” I hear someone shout, the proceeding answer too quiet to be intelligible.
Emotional tremors continue to wreck me.
They are setting up for our wedding, I realize.
In our house.
“No,” Ella whispers against my chest. “It’s not true. You deserve every good thing in the world, Aaron. I love you more every single day, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”
This declaration nearly kills me.
Ella pulls back to look me in the eye, now fighting tears, and I can hardly look at her for fear I might do the same.
“You never complain when I want to eat every meal with everyone. You never complain when we spend hours in the Q in the evening. You never complain about sleeping on the floor of our hospital room, which you’ve done every single night for the last fourteen nights. But I know you. I know it must be killing you.” She takes a sharp breath, and suddenly she can’t meet my eyes.
“You need quiet,” she says. “You need space, and privacy. I want you to know that I know that—that I see you. I appreciate everything you do for me, and I see it, I see it every single time you sacrifice your comfort for mine. But I want to take care of you, too. I want to give you peace. I want to give you a home. With me.”
There’s a terrifying heat behind my eyes, a feeling I force myself always to kill at all costs, and which today I am unable to defeat entirely. It’s too much; I feel too full; I am too many things. I look away and take a sharp breath, but my exhalation is unsteady, my body unsteady, my heart wild.
Ella looks up, slowly at first, her expression softening at the sight of my face.
I wonder what she sees in me then. I wonder whether she’s able to see right through me even now, and then I surprise myself for wondering. Ella is the only one who’s ever bothered to wonder whether I’m more than I appear.
Still, I can only shake my head, not trusting myself to speak.
Ella experiences a sharp stab of fear in the intervening silence, and bites her lip before asking: “Was I wrong? Do you hate it?”
“Hate it?” I break away from her entirely at that, finding my voice only as a strange panic seizes me, making it hard for me to breathe. “Ella, I don’t . . . I’ve done nothing to deserve you. The way you make me feel—the things you say to me— It’s terrifying. I keep thinking the world will realize, any second now, how completely unworthy I am. I keep waiting for something horrible to happen, something to reset the scales and return me to hell, where I belong, and then all of this will just disappear. You’ll just disappear. God, just thinking about it—”
Ella is shaking her head. “You and I— Aaron, people like us think good things will disappear because tha
t’s how it’s always been. Good things have never lasted in our lives; happiness has never lasted. And somehow we can only expect what we’ve experienced.”
I’m sustaining full-blown anxiety now, my traitorous body shutting down, and Ella takes my hands, anchoring me.
I look into her eyes even as my heart races.
“But do you know what I’ve realized?” she says. “I’ve realized that we have the power to break these cycles. We can choose happiness for ourselves and for each other, and if we do it often enough, it’ll become our new normal, displacing the past. Happiness will stop feeling strange if we see it every day.”
“Ella—”
“I love you,” she says. “I’ve always loved you. I’m not going anywhere.”
I take her into my arms then, pulling her tightly against me, breathing in the familiar scent of her. When she’s here, right here, it’s so much easier to breathe. She’s real when she’s in my arms.
“I don’t even know how to thank you for this,” I whisper into her hair, closing my eyes against the heat in my head, in my chest. “You have no idea what it means to me, love. It’s the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.”
She laughs then, soft and gentle.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she says, peering up. “The house still needs a lot of work. The exterior is in pretty good shape now, but the inside is still kind of a disaster. We were only able to get one of the rooms ready in time, but it was—”
“We?” I lean back, frowning.
Ella laughs out loud at the look on my face. “Of course we,” she says. “Did you think I did this all on my own? Everyone helped. They all gave up so much of their time to make this happen for you.”
I shake my head. “If people helped, they did it for you,” I point out. “Not me.”
“They care about you, too, Aaron.”
“That is a very generous lie,” I say, smiling now.
“It’s not a lie.”
“It’s possibly the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”
“It’s not! Even Ian helped. He taught me how to frame a wall—and he was so patient—and you know how he feels about me. Even Nouria helped. Well, especially Nouria. We couldn’t have done any of this without Nouria.”
I find this especially surprising, given her undisguised loathing of my existence. “She pulled this area into her protection? Just for me?”
Ella nods, then frowns. “Well. Yes. I mean, sort of. It’s also part of a larger plan.”
I smile wider at that. “Really,” I say.
Nouria’s involvement—and the involvement of the others—makes a great deal more sense if this project is in fact one small part of a broader initiative, though I keep this to myself. Ella seems incapable of believing how much everyone here hates me, and I don’t relish disabusing her of this notion.
“We’re going to build a campus for the Sanctuary,” she explains, “and this is the first phase. We had scouts do a ton of site visits beforehand; these are the best and most functional homes in the surrounding area, because some of them were used in various capacities by the local sector CCR and her subordinates.”
I raise my eyebrows, fascinated.
Ella never told me about this. She’s clearly been hiding this project from me for days—which is both concerning and not. Part of me is relieved to finally understand the distance I’ve felt between us, while the other part of me wishes I’d been involved.
“So, yeah, we’ve reclaimed several dozen acres of unregulated territory here,” she says. “All of which, up until a couple of weeks ago, were under military control. I figured that, as long as we need absolute security—which might be a while—we can’t live like we’re in prison. We’re going to need to expand the Sanctuary, and give our people here a real, viable life.
“It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” Ella adds with a sigh. “The work is going to be brutal. The least I can do is give proper shelter, privacy, and amenities to those dedicating their lives to its reconstruction. I want to rebuild all the houses in this area first. Then I want to build schools, and a proper hospital. We can safeguard some of the original undeveloped land, turning it into parks. I’m hoping it’ll one day become a private campus—a new capital—as we rebuild the world. And then, maybe one day when things are safer, we can let down our walls and reunite with the general public.”
“Wow.”
I detach from her a moment to look up and down the street, then into the distance. What she’s describing is an enormous undertaking. I can’t believe how much space they were already able to reclaim. “This is a remarkable idea, Ella. Truly. It’s brilliant.” I look back at her, forcing a smile. “I only wish I could’ve helped.”
“I really, really wanted to tell you about it,” she says, her brows knitting together. “But I couldn’t say anything because I knew you’d want to come see the area, and then you would’ve noticed all the building materials, and then you would’ve wanted to know why so many people were working so hard on this one house, and then you would’ve wanted to know who was going to live in it—”
“I wouldn’t have asked that many questions.”
She shoots me a hard look.
“No, you’re right.” I nod. “I would’ve ruined the surprise.”
“HEY!”
I spin around at the sound of the familiar voice. Kenji is coming around the side yard of the house. He’s holding a folding chair in one hand, and waving what appears to be a sprig of some kind of flower in the other. “You two coming in or what? Brendan is complaining about losing the light or some shit—he says the sun will be directly overhead in a couple of hours, which is apparently really bad for photos? Anyway, Nazeera is getting impatient, too; she says J needs to start getting ready soon.”
I stare at Kenji, then Ella, dumbfounded. She already looks perfect. “Get ready how?”
“I have to put on my dress,” she says, and laughs.
“And makeup,” Kenji shouts from across the street. “Nazeera and Alia say they need to do her makeup. And something about her hair.”
I stiffen. “You have a dress? But I thought—”
Ella kisses me on the cheek, cutting me off. “Okay, there might be a few more surprises left in the day.”
“I’m not sure my heart can handle any more surprises, love.”
“How’s this for a surprise?” Kenji says, leaning against the folding chair. “This beautiful piece of shit right here?” He gestures at the dilapidated house next door. “This one’s mine.”
That wipes the smile off my face.
“That’s right, buddy.” Kenji is grinning now. “We’re going to be neighbors.”
TWELVE
Ella is soon whisked away by a tornado of women—Nazeera, Alia, and Lily—who come charging out the door in a swarm, enveloping her in their depths before I’ve even had a chance to say a proper goodbye.
There’s little more than a faint squeak from Ella—
And she’s gone.
I find myself standing alone in front of what I’m still processing as my own home, my mind spinning, heart racing, when Kenji walks over to me.
“C’mon, man,” he says, still smiling. “You’ve got stuff to do, too.”
I look at him. “What kind of stuff?”
“Well, first of all, this is for you,” he says, offering me the small sprig I noticed in his hand earlier. “It’s for your lapel. It’s like a, you know—like a—a—”
“I know what a boutonniere is,” I say stiffly. I accept the small spray, examining it now with surprise. It’s a single gardenia nestled against a tasteful arrangement of its own glossy leaves, the stems tied up with a bit of black ribbon, struck through with a pin. The bundle is elegant and shockingly fragrant. Gardenias are in fact one of my favorite flowers.
I look up at Kenji then, unable to hide my confusion.
He shrugs. “Don’t look at me, bro. I have no idea what kind of flower that is. J just told me what she wanted.”
“Wait.” I frown at that, more confused by the moment. “You did this?”
“I just did what she asked me to do, okay?” he says, putting up his hands. “So if you hate the flower you should talk to your fiancée, because it’s not my fault—”
“But where did this flower come from? I saw people with flowers earlier, too, and I didn’t understand where—”
“Oh.” Kenji drops his hands. He stares at me a moment before saying, “The old sector headquarters. You remember how you guys always had these rare flower arrangements at 45? We never knew where or how they were being sourced, but everyone always thought it was strange that the HQ could get fancy orchids or whatever, while civilians couldn’t get their hands on much more than dandelions. Anyway it was Juliette’s idea, actually. She recommended we track down the flower guy who used to carry out orders for The Reestablishment in this area. He helped us get everything we needed—but the flowers weren’t delivered until late last night. Another reason why J wanted to postpone.”
“Right.” I’m stunned. “Of course.”
My astonishment has nothing to do with discovering that Ella is just as impressive and resourceful as I’ve always known her to be; no, I’m simply incapable of believing anyone would go to such lengths for me.
I’m still reeling a bit as I attempt to pin the flower to my sweater, when Kenji holds up a hand again.
“Uh, don’t do that just yet,” he says. “Come on.”
“Why?”
“Because, man, we still have things to do.”
He turns as if to go, but I remain rooted to the ground.
“What kinds of things?” I ask.
“You know.” He makes an indecipherable gesture, frowning at me. “Wedding things?”
I feel myself tense. “If the purpose of my question has not yet been made evident to you, Kishimoto, allow me to be crystal clear now: I am asking you to be specific.”
He laughs at that. “Do you ever do anything anyone asks you to do without first asking a million questions?”
“No.”
“Right.” He laughs again. “Okay. Well, J is probably going to be getting her hair and makeup done for a little while, which means you can help us finish setting up in the backyard. But first, Winston has a surprise for you.”
