The Line Between

by Tosca Lee

  I watched, as terrified for him as though I stood there myself.

  His mother howled and fell to her knees as a single step stripped him of eternity. The gate ground on its tracks, locking into place before he was even halfway down the drive.

  And just like that, he was gone.

  I felt somehow that I had been spared—a thing I didn’t dare take to Penitence. Which only made me feel that much more fraudulent as I made my confession to God alone, praying it was enough.

  The following week we assembled again, my head so light I thought I would faint until a young woman was dragged before the gate. Her hair was so disheveled, her face so splotchy and tear-stained that I didn’t recognize her at first. The minute I did, ice pricked my back in the late-summer heat. Lyssa? We’d done our schoolwork together and slept three beds away from each other until she moved to the Factory last spring. She’d always been quiet, saying only what was necessary in a voice too small for a grown woman’s frame, as though she were not a person but a wisp of one, invisible in the right light.

  She collapsed at Magnus’s feet, arms flailing in the space between them as her begging devolved into terrible sobs.

  Magnus read the words. But when he accused her of promiscuity and fornication, I thought I must have heard wrong. I glanced at the chiseled expressions around me, the narrowed gazes taking in the girl they’d only ever half noticed before. But the Lyssa I knew bore no resemblance to the figure on the ground—and even less to the woman of the accusation.

  Someone wailed as the gate opened. But when the Archguardian hauled her to her feet, Lyssa clung to his arm until he had no choice but to summon another Guardian and march her down the road as the gate slid shut behind them.

  I alone stayed to watch the two Guardians return by the Narrow Gate, after which they headed up to lunch—the thought of which made me bend over and retch right there onto the gravel.

  Worst of all, we were never to speak their names, which of course, only made them louder in the silence until I wanted to scream them.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS later during the laundry shift, a girl with catty eyes named Candace whispered that Lyssa and Thomas had been caught together in the storehouse.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I snapped. “Why was she the only one accused of it?”

  “She tempted him. She was a whore,” Candace said. “We’re lucky he’s the only boy she took with her. Maybe,” she said, her eyes glinting a little too much, “they’re out there, right now. Fornicating.”

  Fixing her with a stare, I threw the linens I’d been folding into a bin and marched straight to Penitence to file my first report in years. I couldn’t defend Lyssa, who effectively no longer existed. But I could inform on another for delighting in evil.

  Candace wasn’t seen for three days.

  • • •

  THAT FALL, KESTRAL died in the middle of the night.

  A massive aneurysm, Magnus informed the morning service, had delivered her instantly to the throne room of God where she would wait to rejoin us in her heavenly body when the world was made anew. Which was why we weren’t to mourn.

  But I did anyway.

  Magnus told stories of her piety, which was all we had to remember her by; her body had been removed before dawn, turned over to local authorities.

  The same as my mother’s had been.

  Three weeks later, two marriages were announced at the first fall service: Jaclyn’s, to Magnus.

  And mine.

  Oregon Health & Science University Hospital Portland, Oregon, September

  Dr. Angie Bohlman was a harassment suit waiting to happen. With those curves, that long red hair, and those evergreen eyes, she was the kind of woman who looked like she had paid for medical school by modeling bikinis. The kind of looker Frank Kerns had gravitated to when he was a resident and had even married once, three wives ago. Now at the tender age of sixty-eight, he found it hard to reconcile that a Jon Stolk Award recipient could have gams like that.

  Oh, brave new world.

  Today, as she made room for him to join her at the table in the doctors’ lounge, the best he could hope for with a woman like her was to not spill his flimsy bowl of clam chowder all over himself or pass gas as he sat.

  That, and to glean a little insight like detritus from the whirlwind of her already illustrious career.

  “Dr. Kerns.” She smiled, stabbing tiredly at her salad.

  “How’re things on the neurology service?” he asked, unscrewing the pepper shaker to dump a half teaspoon of the stuff on his bowl, making a mental note to buy this place a real pepper grinder.

  She shook her head. “Crazy with this outbreak of encephalitis. I’ve got seven patients on the floor now, all under fifty, who’ve been here for days. One of them for weeks. All exhibiting symptoms of early-onset dementia but none of them with brain swelling.”

  “Any improvement?” he asked.

  “None. We’ve worked them up for toxins, environmental exposures, heavy metals, drugs, and had immunology consulting . . . I’ve had enough patients complain of flulike symptoms at the onset that I was beginning to think it might be virally mediated, but then I saw yesterday’s Department of Public Health email. Did you read that?”

  Frank had quit reading those things ages ago. “Jog my memory.”

  “Thirteen patients with the exact same symptoms have just been linked to Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington. They all had surgery there within a month of one another.”

  He stirred the pepper into his soup. “Could be some tick-borne disease—have you tested for Powassan? There was memory loss and neurological symptoms in those patients, too.”

  “But why would all those surgical patients at Overlake get it in a cluster like that?”

  “Hard to say.” Frank had long ago accepted the fact that in medicine, much as in religion, you could go crazy plumbing for absolute answers. That one had to expect, and leave room for, a little ongoing mystery. He, too, had been zealous once, in his mission to save the world. Now he just thought what a shame it was to see the lines etched beneath her eyes. She’d lose her looks early to this career.

  “At this point, I’m wondering if I should have the infectious disease chair from the med school take a look.”

  “Oh!” Frank said, with no small amount of pride. “Dr. Chen is the chair of ID. She’s one of my former residents. I can ask her to come over if you like.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, that’d be great,” Angie said, closing the plastic box on the remainder of her lunch.

  “Happy to do it.”

  Alone in the lounge ten minutes later, Frank took his phone from his pocket and frowned. He had meant to call someone but now couldn’t remember whom. He scrolled through his contacts, staring at the names, waiting for one of them to jump out at him. When none did, he opened his reminders, where he discovered a month-old note about a pepper grinder.

  That must have been it, he thought, opening the Amazon app and searching for a good old-fashioned steak-house model.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  The next morning Julie brings up some clothes. “You might feel more comfortable in these,” she says, holding out a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, jacket, and a pair of sneakers—all obviously Lauren’s.

  When I ask her about Jackie’s message, she dials the house phone from her cell and plays it for me on speaker:

  Julie? This is Jaclyn Roth. Sylvia’s daughter. It’s . . . I know it’s been a long time. Wynter’s leaving. She needs a place to stay for a while. Our mom died a few years ago and you know I can’t call Dad. It’s this Wednesday at noon. I hope you get this. Please don’t call this number back—it isn’t mine—or call the New Earth office looking for me. It’ll ruin everything.

  The sound of her voice nearly breaks me. I wonder where she was, how she got a phone. She sounds nervous. There are voices, traffic in the background. She had to have been in Ames.

  “Can you
save this?” I ask after listening to it a third time.

  “Of course,” Julie says gently. “For as long as you like. Or until she’s here with us.” She gives a small smile, one I can’t mirror.

  “She won’t leave Truly,” I whisper.

  Julie takes my hand. “Wynter, one day Truly will be old enough to make her own decisions.”

  But I know Magnus will never let her go.

  • • •

  WHILE LAUREN’S AT school, Julie takes me to a department store to buy clothes, a coat, a pair of winter boots. And though I recognize the virtue of clean underwear, I feel guilty about the amount of money she’s spending on me and have already started a mental running tally of the amount I promise myself I will one day pay back.

  She takes me to the grocery store to buy snacks for the carriage house, and I am overwhelmed by the volume of stuff for sale, the number of brands and varieties of each. Canned tomatoes. Diced tomatoes. Diced tomatoes with onions and peppers. Stewed tomatoes. Italian stewed tomatoes. Tomatoes and chili peppers. Farther down the aisle, I pick up a can of store-brand peas. I’ve spent days every year for the last decade of my life laboriously picking, shelling, washing, and canning peas . . . to the point where I couldn’t stand to eat them—and here they are, on sale for eighty-seven cents.

  I’m just putting the can back when I realize someone is staring at me—a woman with white hair and skin so thin as to be nearly translucent. She’s easily the oldest person I’ve ever seen and gives a little cry as I take in her wrinkled mouth, the shadows beneath her eyes like bruises.

  “Rose?” she says, coming closer, her purse dangling from her bony wrist. “Are you my Rosie?”

  “Sorry, no,” I say, confused. “My name’s Wynter.”

  She gasps and her arms go wide. “My Rosie!”

  I glance around, wondering where Julie went, not sure what to do. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

  She stops as though struck. She looks angry. “Why would you say that? Rosie, come to Mother!”

  She lunges for me and grabs me by the arm. Her eyes are clouded, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. I jerk away and hurry down the aisle.

  “Rosie!” she calls, over and over, barking the name behind me.

  By the time I find Julie, I can still hear the old woman shouting.

  Julie looks up at the sound of the commotion. “What in the—”

  I tell her what happened, but by the time she marches the cart toward the customer service counter, someone there is already on the phone describing the woman as two employees in matching shirts hurry toward the canned vegetable aisle. A moment later the woman is screaming.

  We pay for our groceries, glancing back as shoppers skirt past the aisle, one of them furtively grabbing a box of saltines from the display on the end.

  “If I ever get that bad when I’m old, just put me in a home,” Julie says.

  We’re halfway to the house when we pass a bank with a long line outside of it. The parking lot is full, as are the drive-through lanes, a service truck blocking the ATM lane as someone works on the machine.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “No idea,” she whispers.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, JULIE gives me an old iPhone, saying we’ll get it activated tomorrow.

  “Just in case you need to get hold of us,” she says, programming in her number, Ken’s, Lauren’s, and the police.

  Lauren spends the rest of the evening showing me how to send messages, search the Internet, and take pouty selfies, despite the fact that there’s nothing fascinating to me about my own image and even less about making my lips look huge.

  “Everyone takes selfies,” Lauren says before making me watch some reality show about a girl who takes them all the time and is in love with her own butt.

  Yeah. No danger of that slippery slope for me.

  A few days later, Lauren shows me how to pull up entire series of TV shows on the carriage house TV, which I keep on even when I’m sleeping, if only to stave off the quiet and the voice that comes with it. Having worked every day at the Enclave, I don’t know what to do with myself now that I have no responsibilities. And try as I might, I can’t seem to sleep in past five.

  I think of Shae. Wonder how it was for her, leaving the Enclave. If the first thing she did was eat a giant burger, smoke a cigarette, or find some of the weed she used to talk about.

  On a whim, I grab my phone and pull up Safari. Type in “Shae Decaro” and “San Diego.” Nothing. I delete “Shae” and type in “Coco.”

  Three listings come to the top. I click through and back and finally land on a social media site Lauren spends half her day on. I stare hard at the picture.

  She’s changed her hair. But it’s her.

  I wonder if she can tell I’m looking at her picture. That I searched for her name. I ask Lauren at breakfast, and when she says no, carry my bagel back to the carriage house and reopen the browser. And then I’m struck by a whim.

  Opening a fresh search page, I type in “Magnus Theisen.”

  The screen fills with results, including a website for New Earth I never knew even existed, “CultWatch,” “Former Hybrid CEO Renounces GMOs,” and “Theisen’s Ancient Vision for the Future.” But it’s the pictures of Magnus that stop me cold, his eyes glittering from the screen, staring at me even here, out in the world.

  I shut down the page, heart thudding. Search for Paramore on YouTube. Crank up “Turn It Off.” Play it over and over.

  It takes me twenty minutes to figure out how to set up an account so I can send Shae a message.

  Shae,

  This is Wynter Roth from the Enclave (well, not anymore). I hope you’re okay. Hope to hear from you.

  W.

  I check back the next morning, and the next.

  The third day, her account is gone.

  • • •

  MY PLAN TO help out by keeping house for Julie falls apart when I learn she has a cleaning lady who comes every Friday.

  “But I’ll do it for free!” I say.

  “Hon, give yourself some time to adjust,” she says. “And to think about what you’d like to do with your life. You might’ve finished school early in the cu—the Enclave—but you’ve still got some catching up to do.”

  What I’d like to do with my life. It’s a thing no one’s ever asked me. Lauren seems concerned with nothing more than her friends and her phone. Julie’s life is all about taking care of Lauren, Ken, and herself. Ken—I’m not even sure what Ken does for work except that he owns some kind of company that studies new medicines. Everything they do is about living for this life, today—a thing I no longer know how to do.

  I read a lot. Meanwhile, the novelty of not having a regular schedule has started to make me edgy. Julie finally assigns me responsibility for cleaning my own apartment and doing the laundry. I offer to weed the yard and help cook as well. But all the while, unnamed anxiety has begun to gnaw at the back of my brain—especially when I inevitably turn to the channels I cannot resist.

  The news.

  There have been five new shootings in the last week alone, and there’s more on the threat of cyberattacks by Iraq and Russia. But it’s the rash of crazy people who eclipse political talk shows—including a man who tried to amputate his own leg because he thought it was infested with bugs and a lawyer who shot up his house after aliens moved into it. Also a pro football player who got let go from the Seahawks for tackling demons only he could see during scrimmage.

  I ask questions during dinner: Where did ISIS come from? What’s the difference between terrorism and hate crime, or between either of those and just being crazy?

  “That’s a good question,” Ken says one night over veggie burgers. The fact that I’ve volunteered to cook has altered the way the family eats—at least a few nights a week. “One might even make the argument that extreme hatred is a form of craziness.”

  Three nights later, I’m pulling open a bag of microw
ave popcorn in the carriage house when a breaking news update on TV stops me cold.

  A mudslide in China, nearly a thousand people dead.

  Popcorn tumbles to the floor as the headlines from Magnus’s sermons flash like lightning in the back of my mind.

  Hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides . . . thousands dead . . .

  Sweat breaks out across the back of my neck. I stumble barefoot out the door, hurry down the stairs and across the cold driveway to the main house.

  Inside, the kitchen is empty, the low lights beneath the cabinets illuminating the countertops in a soft orange glow. Deceptively calm. I hurry toward the sound of the TV in the den where I find Ken working and Julie scrolling through a magazine on her tablet.

  “There’s been a mudslide in China,” I say, out of breath.

  Ken looks up from his laptop and Julie blinks at me. A glass of wine sits on the small table beside her as the TV drones on in the background about the uptick in dementia cases across the nation.

  “It’s wiped out an entire town,” I say. “At least a thousand people are dead.”

  “I did see something about that. Tragic,” Ken says, shaking his head.

  I nod, not understanding their lack of concern. My heart is racing, panic biting away at my brain.

  “Hon?” Julie sets down her tablet and then pauses the TV. The anchor freezes, midword. “Things like this happen. They’re terrible every time. But tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados—they’re natural. Well, most of them.”

  “Could be erosion or the aftermath of an earthquake,” Ken says.

  But all I can think is that it’s happening. The terrible things that are supposed to herald the end of the world. And I realize a part of me was watching, checking for the signs ever since I got here, if only to prove Magnus was wrong and that I’m okay.

  Now the full implications hit me like a hammer, knocking the wind from my lungs. Because if Magnus is right . . .

  I can’t breathe. My heart is pounding way too fast.

  “Honey? Wynter.” Julie says, getting up. “Ken.”

  Ken sets his laptop aside, comes over to feel my cheek and head. I want to scream at him that it isn’t a problem with my body. It’s my soul that’s damned—and theirs are, too.