He wonders if she came right away to Golda’s house, and how she knew which one was hers. He imagines Judy floating through the camp as they slept, wandering between the houses, her face against the windows, her hand at the latch. Did she try each door in turn, searching for the girl? Did she peer down at them in their beds? At him? Did she look at him?
At least a dozen hours have passed, he guesses. Enough time to have travelled a long way. Golda knows these woods, and Judy knows the route back to the foothills. If they’re still together, by now they’re beyond anyone’s reach.
Sladja has stopped at last. The tremor he has long observed in her seems more severe than usual, and she lays both hands against the corner table as though to steady herself. Oona hasn’t moved.
Eban looks away from both women, and the thoughts he hasn’t wanted begin to come.
What he remembers best about his brother now are the things his mother said. How he was always away, in mind and body, his thoughts elsewhere, his feet hurrying out the door. How nothing seemed to trouble him, except things that made no sense. The wrong things he laughed at. How hard he was to understand.
But if he searches his mind, he catches glimpses there of his brother with his hand out, reaching for Eban’s attention. His brother’s lanky, fragile body. His brother’s crooked, tooth-filled grin, which he showed most often when they were alone. For a time, his brother had enjoyed labelling things. He carried a small notebook in his pocket and a stub of pencil, and he would write things like Eat here. Sleep here. Sit here and lay the notes on the table or bed or chair. Then, for a while, the notes grew more complex and bore no apparent relationship to the surfaces where they were pinned: No more crying Mother and Eban be nice. And one day, there were no more notes. It was always like that with him. Habits flared and ceased. You wouldn’t notice the day they finished but suddenly they were only something you remembered. Why did they start or stop?
Once, after a rain, he gave his brother a hard push into a puddle in the yard. His brother had been pestering him all morning, till their mother in frustration forced them both outside. He’d expected the younger boy to catch himself, but he fell to his hands and knees in the mud. Stricken with shame, Eban tried to help him up, but his brother sat cross-legged in the puddle with his head back, laughing and laughing. Good trick, Eban, he said, mud streaked across his thin face. Good trick!
He remembers his brother returning from a run one evening and entering the room where Eban stood at the window lifting weights. Eban was tired and ready to finish but he didn’t want to stop while his brother watched. So he went on lifting till his arms ached, for an hour, longer, and his brother sat without moving, perched silently on a stool that made him look even leaner and lankier than he was. When Eban at last dropped the barbell to the ground, every muscle burning, he was furious to have lost this silent war of will, but his brother only said, Would you show me how you do that?
When Eban began to learn medicine, his mother made up a test for him every week. He only ever failed one of her tests, a long one on gross anatomy, and she made him sit at the table and study until he could list every part of every organ system. He read till his vision blurred, fell asleep on his books, and woke with the candle burned to nothing and his brother asleep at the table beside him.
He can scarcely remember talking with his brother or whether he ever showed him kindness. He doesn’t know if he’s forgotten or if it never happened. For the first time, he thinks: we were only boys. His brother was younger than Golda when he saw him for the last time. Whatever his brother was, he never had a chance to become it, not while Eban knew him.
Oona is still on the ground, her elbows bent over her knees, at rest and in wait all at once. Her head is bowed and her shoulders heave, but she makes no sound.
And then Sladja makes such a sudden move towards Oona that Eban thinks she’s going to slap her, to punish her for wasting time, for not watching the girl more closely, for every second that she ever turned her eyes away. But instead she falls to the ground.
Oona receives the other woman like she was waiting for her, her long arms wrapping around and around her, and the women close together like two hands on the floor of the girl’s house. They cry together, and the sound shocks the silence. Eban feels frightened and alone and unsure. He stands beside the two women wishing he were anywhere else.
And Judy is wrong. Judy is dangerously wrong. He sees all at once everything these people did, and none of it done for the reasons she told him. They didn’t seek out power or control. They were afraid, like everyone else. They are terribly, terribly afraid, and this fear, he sees, is love.
He always imagined that he would stay when Judy left. He knew that one day she would go. He had done to her something like what these two women had done to Golda, trying to capture what he couldn’t keep, and when he couldn’t even do that, he tried just to stall her, unspooling Judy from him as slowly as he knew how. That was all he’d been able to do. One day, he’d understood, when she wasn’t frightened anymore, she would be gone.
He thinks now of the morning bell without Judy. The night’s dreams without Judy.
And then someone whispers in his ear, so faintly it could be his own head talking to him. “Come with me,” the whisper says, as Oona closes her hand around his wrist and draws him out the door.
She stands just beyond the threshold, looking out at the dawn-lit houses of Heaven. Still he doubts the words he heard, can’t believe she spoke at all, and so he waits for some sign of what she wants from him, but none comes. At last he offers her his arm, which she refuses. Her eyes are dry and fierce, and she is straight and tall and steady.
She begins walking, and after a moment, he follows, and despite her age, he struggles to keep up. He sees no sign of Bobby-Rae, not at the fire and not in any of the houses, and he guesses that he joined his brother in hunting for the girl.
Oona reaches the black house some time before him, and when he arrives, she is standing in the doorway, staring past him into the trees. He tries with his eyes to explain what he cannot say, but she won’t even look at him as she makes her way back to the colony.
He follows her from house to house while she fills a pack with dried food and supplies. Whether she wants him or not, he’ll accompany her when she hunts for the two women. He makes up his mind that he will do that. But to his surprise, once her pack is filled, she shoves it into his hands, accepting help he hasn’t offered.
“Take it,” she says.
Is it a trick? He hesitates now to even lift the pack onto his back.
“I said take it. And go find her if that’s what you want to do. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t pretend to know.”
He draws in a breath, lets his mouth open slightly, maybe testing whether words will come rushing forth with the permission she is granting him now with her own words.
“I did it,” he says and winces. She doesn’t even seem to hear his confession. “I let her out.”
“You let Golda out?” Oona raises her chin, her black eyes narrowing. “You did that?”
He shakes his head. “Judy. I unlocked the door for her…She must have been the one to let out Golda. She would—it’s something she would do.”
Oona turns back in the direction of the houses and steps past him, but he touches her shoulder. “Wait. Please. Wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I don’t…” He tries to think of what to say or ask. “You spoke. You’re speaking to me. You broke the rule.”
She smiles with just one side of her mouth. “I never really understood why Sladja thought it helped us, but I know it makes her feel better to think it does. And I’m old enough to have said most of what I needed to say. But Golda couldn’t take the silence. My sister’s girl. She had it hard enough here. It was the least I could do to talk to her when we were alone. I’d tell her little stories about her mother. Try to reason with her. Try
to soothe her. Just little things like that. She’d never have told Sladja, even before those monsters took her tongue.”
“Those monsters…” He remembers Golda showing them her gaping, empty mouth, the day he and Judy first climbed out of the hole in the floor of the black house. “Was it one of them then? One of the other ones who did that to her?”
Oona makes another half-smile, her face otherwise empty of amusement. “No. No, it wasn’t.” She takes him in with her level, sharp-eyed gaze. “You’re afraid of the wrong thing,” she says.
“I…”
“All of you fear the wrong things. You always have. Sladja too. All of us that came here, all of us that stayed. Everyone up in these hills and I have no idea about the people down below them. No, we have plenty of monsters right here, creeping through these hills, and one of them got hold of her. It took me a while to figure this out, but most people that choose to live in hiding are monsters of one sort or another, or we turn into one after long enough.
“I followed somebody I loved here, and never thought I’d stay this long. You know, I used to live in the city, back when I was a girl. I can tell you there’s nothing much different about those other ones. But the drought went on so long and there just wasn’t enough anymore. If it hadn’t been them, there would have been someone else to blame.”
She tells Eban that Sladja had a runner named Lincoln who used to report to her. She says he went back to the cities every year, though he never told Sladja.
“Lincoln said we got it wrong up here. He said it was because of those other ones that the famine came to an end. He said it made a difference, moving everybody closer. Shutting down the roads and the grid. Setting limits, stopping waste. He says it was because they were different that they were able to do it. He said it made them see farther, see past how people felt about it all and see all the way to what needed to be done. And then, even though it hurt some people, they did it anyway.
“And it makes me think. It makes me remember how one time when we were children, my sister was in the news because she broke her ankle right before she was supposed to compete in some big ice-skating competition. The whole city felt sorry for her. They felt so sorry they started sending cards and flowers. Some of them sent ice skates. It didn’t make any sense. I was a kid and even I could tell that. She had skates. All she needed was a good left ankle, but people couldn’t send that and she had her picture in the paper looking sad, so they sent skates. Maybe a dozen pairs. And meantime there were people right on our street putting water in the milk they gave their kids to make it last till their next payday came.
“People like you and me, people up in these hills, like to think it’s the most important thing about us. The way other people’s stories make us cry like they were our own stories, like we’re feeling their feelings for them. But maybe that’s not very important. Maybe it’s not even good.
“I’m telling you. You’re afraid of the wrong things. You’ve wasted your whole life locked up in these hills and never thought to leave them. That ought to make you terrified.”
Oona presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. “I used to think about going back, when I was younger. Seeing the new cities with my own eyes. Finding out what it was we left all those years ago. But I’m an old woman now, and I know I’ll die here, and that doesn’t matter to me. I like it here. The people used to say we were building a new world here, but it isn’t that. It’s the oldest world there is. Dirt and trees and sleeping on the ground and never being sure you’ll eat tomorrow. That’s what I like about it.”
She hesitates, leaning toward him, laying a hand on his chest. “I don’t know where you’re going but if you find her, my Golda, would you tell her how she has broken our hearts?” She shakes her head then. “Maybe you shouldn’t, though. Maybe just tell her you’ll go with her. Maybe you could make it all the way back to the cities. It could be that it really is better there now. Maybe everything that old man said is true.
“But then again,” she adds, turning her back, “who knows what to believe up here?”
* * *
—
He watches Oona disappear back into Golda’s house and then, with nothing in his head, no plan or intention, he goes into the wood.
He knows only that he wants to move, to put distance between him and the two old women and Golda’s empty house. As he enters the burned wood, he thinks that if he finds a good kill or two, Sladja will forgive him for being away for a couple of hours or days.
The air is warm and the ground soft—each step sinks a little, and he looks back to see the history of his travel in the black, wet dirt. He tells himself not to search for Judy’s footprints.
* * *
—
The night he sat beside his mother as she died, after he had apologized for letting the sick girl into their camp and she pulled her hand from him, she was quiet for a long time. He imagined she was past speech. And then she said, “You didn’t stop me.”
They had never spoken of the day they left the outland. He had rarely let himself remember it even in the dark of his own thoughts. It was three days after the last test. He could still see the faint mark on her hand where she had inserted a pin. He watched it as she spoke to him that morning.
“Eban,” she said, handing him a large pack he had never seen before, “take this and fill it with whatever things you’ll need when we leave this house.”
He didn’t understand. “Leave?”
“We’re going away.”
“Going away where? For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
He searched his mind but couldn’t guess what she meant. “When do we leave?” he asked at last, because he could tell from her face she wouldn’t answer the same question asked again.
“Within the hour.”
He looked at the door his brother had left only a few minutes earlier. “But he won’t be back from his run in time.”
She crossed the room in two steps only, taking his face in her hands. “You remember what I told you. What you read with your own eyes. What’s wrong with your brother can’t be fixed.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him!”
“Think. Remember what you read, what I told you. You know it’s true.”
“It isn’t,” he said, ashamed to feel tears well in his eyes. He hated her face so close to his, hated her seeing him cry. “It isn’t. He’s like us. He’s no different from us.”
But as soon as he had said the word different he heard the lie, because it was what his brother had always been. They had never been the same. And as he thought this, his mother went on holding his head, pressing her own forehead to his, and she hissed the words she must have been preparing for days to tell him. She had known from her younger son’s first weeks in the world that he was not right, too still in his crib, too unhappy in her arms. She’d known it but convinced herself she was wrong.
“It was his father did it to him. He looks just like him, you know. Same queer smile, same way of staring far too long at a person. I never told you what your father was, but you must have guessed.”
He shook his head free from her hands. She had spoken so rarely of his father, and he always thought it pained her to name him, as it pained Eban too. He knew the man had left them, all three of them, before his brother was even born. He had spent his entire life stopping himself from wondering why. But now, though he tried to close his ears, his mother told him.
“He was a sneaky one, your father. You might know him all your life and not see what was wrong with him. He could charm you like that. He was better than most at the pretending of it. You’d have thought he felt and cared like any other person.”
“How did you find out,” Eban whispered.
“I didn’t.” She lifted her eyes from Eban’s at last, looking around the r
oom as if she hadn’t seen it before, or as if she might still be able to find the missing man somewhere inside it. “He hated it in the outland. He was always wanting to go back to the cities. He said he wanted me to go with him, to raise you there, but he knew I was never going to leave the outland again. The first time he left, when you were small, I blamed myself. They do that. Confuse you like that. How I hated him for making me look at myself for the flaw, when it was all in him. And then he came back again and I was that glad to see him, I took him into our house and did everything I could to keep him there. I went after his love like I was trying to keep water in my hands. It was like that, just always falling through, gone as soon as you had it. I wanted a father for you, but it wasn’t why. I wanted him for myself.”
She steadied her voice and faced Eban again. “He went back to the cities fifteen days before your brother was born,” she said softly. “Think of that. Think of the kind of person who would do that. And then there wasn’t any question what he was, because how could a person do a thing like that if there weren’t something broken in their head? It reached and wrecked every cell of the man he was. And it contaminated his seed. The son he never knew has kept him here in my house all these years.”
Eban had never seen his mother as she was in that moment. He looked at the door again, searching for words. “He’ll be back soon,” he said slowly, and only as the words fell from his mouth did he understand what they consented to.
His mother understood it too. “Go get your things,” she said. And an hour later, they left.
So the night she lay dying in her soiled sheets, he knew without question what her accusation meant. You didn’t stop me.
He sat quietly for a long time, touching a damp rag to her white lips like it took all his attention to do so. “No,” he said, when her eyes closed and he thought she was gone, dead or asleep, at any rate beyond hearing anything he said. “I didn’t stop you.”
A sign of annoyance passed over her face, though her eyes didn’t open. The expression was as familiar to him as the sound of her voice. “We left him the house,” she said, so softly he had to lean closer to hear. “He was perfectly safe there. We left him the house.” He felt a slight slackening in her body as she spoke and hated her for it, for the relief she found in those words, which were her last. She drew three more breaths and died, a hint of exasperation showing in the slight pinch of her face.
The Second History Page 26