“Wait. Who’s your Dad?”
“Mr. Scott. Well, Jeffrey, I guess, to you.”
“Jeffrey?” My skin turns cold and I feel a spasm in my neck. “Jeff… from IT?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Jeff from IT… the man my husband told me didn’t exist. Who was one of the “Rememberers,” according to Ethel. He was meeting with all the people who had retained their memories of the time before. And sharing lots of critical information with them to help them put the past together.
Or so she thought. Until one morning her body was found shattered at the bottom of the stairwell.
17
I dream of planes and bombs and singing children. A high, beautiful voice leading everyone in the national anthem. Where did the national anthem go? Where did the nation go?
Animals are floating through a sky filled with big puffy clouds. Giraffes, like we used to see in the zoo. Huge butterflies unlike any in the real world. What real world?
I am in the Silo. It is dark and I am swimming through murky water, thick with algae and sweeping green plants that claw at my ankles, pulling me down. I can’t breathe. I try to scream. I swallow water. They are punishing me. They are poisoning me. They are killing me.
I thrash about, my legs caught by the slippery tendrils of the plants. I hear a voice from far away, “Mommy. Mommy!”
It is my baby, Athena, and she needs me. I can’t breathe. I am drowning. There is no air but still I fight the plants that now tie my ankles and hold me under water, “I’m coming, honey, Mommy is coming!”
The acid-tasting water burbles in my throat and chokes me. I sputter, trying not to swallow. I open my eyes and Rick is over me, pouring something down my throat.
I gag, and it spurts all over the bed. I make strangled sounds and retch.
“Karma. It’s okay. Calm down. You have a fever.”
He’s telling me to calm down but he doesn’t look calm. He looks angry. And frightened. I am covered in sweat and my legs are twisted up in the bedclothes. I pull the sticky nightshift away from my chest. I try to breathe.
Athena stands at the door, her eyes wide. “Are you okay, Mommy?” She brings me her rag doll. “You can hold my doll. She’ll make you feel better.”
I want to weep but I will not in front of her.
“Athena, go back to bed,” Rick says. He pushes her gently away from me. “Mommy—and I—don’t want you to get sick too. You need to stay in the other room while I deal with Mommy. She’ll be better real soon.”
As he says that, he turns back to me and tries to funnel more water into my mouth. “If she’d only drink this,” he mutters, his eyebrows tightening.
I can feel the fever coming on again. I sip, unable to resist the desperate thirst in my body. I lie back and pray for sleep.
I pray for deliverance from this underground tomb.
I would go in a minute if I didn’t need to keep my child safe. Drifting, I remember a childhood prayer.
Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take
No. Let me die, but take Athena and keep her safe. I care nothing for my life here.
I am already in Hell.
18
Six girls now come to my classroom for the supposed art lessons I am giving. We have to be careful even with the cover story—arts are frowned upon down here. No surprise. Creativity leads to freedom of thought.
Rose and Delta have been joined by Mercedes, Steph, Willow and Rachel. They range in age from eleven to eighteen. Every time someone joins us I am more afraid of the consequences if we are discovered. But I can hardly turn a child away from a place where she can tell the truth in safety.
It is a mystery as to why some of the girls remember and none of the boys do… at least not the ones that I’ve met. Delta drinks only soda, but the others drink the water and seem mostly to be unaffected. Maybe it’s the female hormones brought on by adolescence.
It’s rather astonishing that all these girls have managed to safely navigate the confusing taboos about conversation within the Silo despite all those forbidden memories in their young heads. But children are adaptable… or perhaps children are ignored… and if they have sometimes dabbled in openly telling the truth, they have so far survived it. I pray that it remains so.
We start each session by promising to keep the truth quiet and vowing to protect each other. We have a “secret sign”—Delta came up with it. It’s the crossing of the fingers behind their backs that kids used to do when they were fibbing. It’s also, as Willow pointed out, the letter “R” in the sign language alphabet. R for remembering, Rose says. And for her name.
Delta is late today, so we wait a few minutes for her, but finally decide to begin because our time is precious and always fraught with danger. We’ve started the little ceremony, right hands up in the air with our fingers crossed as we recite the words that Delta wrote for the group.
Whether down below
Or up above
We know the only truth is love
Secret memories
We will not tell
We’ll stick together in heaven or hell
The chant is a little melodramatic for my taste, but the girls glow when they say it. I can’t help but think of Girl Scout meetings and the way we used to recite prayers together in church. There are no clubs or churches to join down here. Communities form from where you live and what you do… but there are no overt declarations of loyalty to anything.
Of course, we have no choice about being members of the Silo. Whether because of loyalty or fear of death, we all walk the line.
Willow stands up in front of the group and uses the colored chalk to share a memory she has of a trip to Paris. She’s done a creditable sketch of the Eiffel Tower. Ironically, the class has actually led to the girls learning some artistic skills. We spend each week sharing and reinforcing memories, arguing at times over hazy recollections that differ, and generally shoring up the truth about the time before. It’s a weird sort of reverse geography. Bringing forth buried knowledge of a world that is no longer.
Or is it? The Eiffel Tower could be sitting under a sunny sky surrounded by cafés peopled by Frenchmen enjoying croissants and crepes—just as it was on my honeymoon—on the other side of an ocean that might still exist. Or it could be a former tower turned into melted steel, twisted out of recognition, buffeted by the same toxic clouds visible from our wallscreen. We just don’t know.
Willow is a sharp seventeen, a few months younger than Delta, who recently turned eighteen. Normally the older kids would be shadowing a worker for the job they would someday take over, but there seems to be some laxness regarding kids living in the Up Top. In any case, I don’t pry too much into their lives outside of my classroom, in the hope that less information means less chance of betraying anyone. I don’t even know most of their last names or where they live. Not that they’re torturing anyone for information here in the Silo.
As far as I know.
The door swings open without a knock and I jump up, grabbing the chalk rag and immediately sweeping Willow’s forbidden Paris knowledge off the board in case of a stranger coming in. But it’s Delta, and she’s a mess. Her long hair has come loose of its ponytail and she is breathing hard. A child—woman now, at eighteen—as beautiful as she is sure to attract attention wherever she goes, and it worries me constantly that she is so blatant in her disregard for the taboos everyone else fears.
“Oh my god,” she says, slamming the door behind her and leaning on the knob. “You guys gotta help me.”
The girls gather around her, both excited and alarmed. “What’s the matter, Delta?” Rose asks, taking her friend by the arm and leading her to a tiny chair.
“Are you all right?” Willow gets up and brings her some of the smelly vegetable pulp I make them drink while they’re here. Delta bats it away. Soda is the only thing she’ll
drink, and only thirty-four has it.
“My Dad…” she puffs, “is making me…” she stops to pull her hair back up into its normal ponytail, and I realize that she is going for the drama even in her anxious state. If movies existed in here, she’d be auditioning.
“What?”
“Tell us!” The girls can hardly contain their excitement. For once, they seem like typical kids.
Delta stands up for her announcement, thrilled to be the center of attention. “My Dad says… I have to get married!”
“Really?” Rose looks stunned.
“But that’s okay, right?” Willow says. “You said you and Jared are in love. You said you and he already…” she stops and looks slyly at me, and I groan inwardly when I imagine I know exactly what they are already doing.
“Shh,” Delta says pointedly, nodding in my direction. So I guess they don’t tell me everything. Probably because they figure I’ll try to talk them out of it.
“So what’s the problem?” Willow looks downright pleased now. “You love him, he loves you. He’s nineteen, right? And you’re eighteen, so…”
Delta raises an arm to stop her. “But it’s not Jared. It’s some old guy I don’t even know. Dad says I have to marry somebody named Larry. He’s like… 30. Or even older.”
“Ewww.”
“Gross.”
“What does he look like?” This from Rachel, who rarely speaks up.
Delta sighs in exasperation. “I don’t know. Probably ugly. But it’s not like I’m interested.” Her voice perks up, and the rest of the girls gather closer. “Jared and I are secretly engaged, anyway. He’s just waiting until he gets an official position as a porter—which is soon. The guy he’s shadowing for is complaining about his right knee, so Jared should have his own spot any day now.” She’s looking very happy, and she sits down, her high color lessening. “We were just waiting for that to tell Dad.”
“Wow. You are so lucky!”
The excitement in the room is getting too loud. “Quiet down, girls,” I say, as I hear a noise behind me and the door swings open. A large man is standing in the doorframe.
“Delta,” he says, in a voice brooking no argument. “Come.”
He raises his arm to summon her to his side and she stands up from the kid-size chair, her chin set and her cheeks reddening again.
The other girls simply stare as she walks out of the room with a man who must be her father, his hand wrapped tightly around her wrist. I realize I’m holding my breath after the door shuts with a bang. I glance over to the board and see that the Eiffel Tower is no longer visible, lost in a haze of chalk smear.
The rest of the class is starting to chatter soberly when it comes to me that this is Jeff from IT. Very possibly the man who murdered Ethel.
19
I am surprised the next day to see Delta burst in to my classroom just after the kids leave. The pink in her cheeks is less noticeable than the black eye and swelling on the left side of her face.
“Delta,” I say, coming over to her and taking her by the wrist to pull her inside. She winces and withdraws her hand.
“My Dad…” she says, breathing hard, “My Dad says I really have to marry this guy. Tomorrow night. Tomorrow night!” Her eyes are glistening with fear and she looks like a different person from the confident young woman I have been talking to for the last three months.
“Wait. Sit down.” I don’t touch her again, but gesture toward one of the chairs. She sits.
I lean toward her, wanting very much to give her a hug, but afraid I’ll hurt her. “Did you tell him how you feel?”
“He doesn’t give a shit,” she says, tears dripping on to her coveralls. “It’s like he’s doing this as a favor to his friend. Like I’m… like I’m some kind of a pig he owns or something. That he can sell.” She stands up and walks across the room, her arms wrapped tightly around her torso. “I told him I’m in love with Jared. That I don’t want to marry some old guy… that it’s disgusting and I don’t even know him and….” She stops and turns back, flopping into the chair again. Her voice gets quieter. “I even told him—like this would make him change his mind—that Jared and I had been, you know, doing it.” A fleeting twist of her mouth might have been a smile or a grimace. “To convince him that we were already, kind of, married… that we had to get married. Because we’d already had sex with each other. I told him we were engaged.”
She leans forward onto the table and puts her head in her hands. Her voice is muffled. “He just laughed. He said… now I really have to marry the old guy. Because I sure as hell won’t be seeing Jared again.”
The door swings open and I see a gangly young man, tall and as gorgeous in his way as Delta. He has dark hair that hangs in his face and he walks with a practiced slouch. The two of them are an irresistible pair. In another era, they would have been the models in magazines, wearing the clothes everyone else would want to buy because of the way they hung on their rangy frames. Chiseled chins and startling blue eyes complete the picture. Such beautiful children.
Delta stands and wraps her long arms around him, and he surrounds her with his. He kisses her, defiance in every limb.
She lifts her eyes up to mine and gives me a trembling smile through her tears.
“This is Jared. My father is going to have him killed.”
20
When Rick comes in the door, I’m ready. I’m wearing my sleeping smock, because the coveralls are hopeless when it comes to seduction. I’ve asked Grace to watch Athena in her apartment tonight. My hair is down, the way Rick likes it.
I don’t know which makes me feel more desperate… the fact that I am stooping to sexual enticements to curry favor with my husband, or the fact that I have so few tools to do so. There was a time when champagne, satin sheets and lacy undies could have been brought into the scene. But we live in another century now—the underground century. I would use what I had.
My husband enters the kitchen and looks around. “What’s this?” he says, pointing to the candle sputtering in the middle of our small table. “Where’s Athena?”
“Oh, I thought it could be just the two of us tonight,” I say. “Sort of a… romantic evening.”
I’ve never said anything like this to him, and if he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. I offer him a lick of the spoon that I’m using to stir tonight’s soup. He takes it, and looks bemused.
Putting the spoon down, I press myself against him and let him discover that I’m pantiless. He picks up on that very quickly. I place his hand on my tush and smile at his raised eyebrows.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asks. He doesn’t seem unhappy about it.
“You, maybe…” I say. “If you’re interested.” I groan inwardly at the cheesy line, but Rick groans out loud, pulling me closer.
“Turn off the soup. I’m interested. Right now.”
I take his hand to lead him to the bedroom, but he has other ideas. He moves the candle from the table and leans me across it, face down, lifting my smock over my head and dropping it to the floor. He caresses me from my neck down to my thighs, and then slides his hand in between my legs.
“Yes,” he says.
I haven’t been using any birth control for more than two months now, and I know that every time we couple is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take this time. I moan and start to move as he slides in. After all the anguish of this life, I am still a human being, and the physical needs of the body do not disappear.
I wriggle a little while he positions himself deeper, and I can feel his tension mounting. He lifts me higher onto the table and finds a rhythm. I lose myself in the passion of his need, my need, this blessed temporary release from the world of the Silo.
Some powerful thrusts and breathless, stifled screams, and we both rest, spent, across the table. Rick stands up and rights himself.
“Karma.” He turns me over gently and touches my face with his hand. “You know I love you.”
This surprises m
e. Does he? He has never said so. In this game we play, I am the compliant dope, and he is the savvy fake husband and Daddy. I never knew that love was supposed to be involved.
He’s looking at me. And then I get it. I’m supposed to say I love him back.
I swallow. “Me too,” I say, my fingers crossed behind my back to undo the fib. Gently sliding out from under him, I smile and say lightly, “I’d better check the soup. I didn’t know you were going to get all hot and bothered so quickly.”
He chuckles. It’s a nice sound. I turn to him—now is the moment to see if I can expect any help from him.
“I wanted to ask you something. One of the girls I teach—in my art class? Her name is Delta. She came to us today and said that her father is planning to have her marry a man she doesn’t know. Like, an arranged marriage. Is that… normal?”
Immediately Rick’s face closes down. He gets a look of distaste, and I’m not sure whether it’s for my bringing up a subject he doesn’t think I should even discuss, or that he is suddenly losing his afterglow and it just makes him annoyed.
“Fathers arrange their daughter’s marriages. Of course. How else would it be done?”
“But surely… a young woman is capable of choosing her life partner?”
I know I am blowing my stupid, drug-addled cover here, but I don’t care.
“No, actually, I don’t think that’s true at all. Who would you rather have choose a mate for Athena… me or her… as a teenage girl?”
I don’t tell him my answer. I think he knows. I stir the soup and keep my back to him, trembling with anger and frustration for my daughter and all the women in the Silo… and with fear for Delta.
I pray that I can find some way to help her in time.
21
My classroom is relatively quiet for a moment as I survey all the children munching on their snack of corn cookies and drinking red juice. Dylan comes over to my desk with his cup.
“Can I have some more Mrs. Brewer?”
Karma of the Silo: The Collection Page 7