by Amy Engel
The bathroom door opens, and his footsteps pause outside the bedroom. I hold my breath, releasing it slowly when he walks into the room, closing the door behind him. I hear the rustle of clothes, then the bed dips as he lies down beside me. I’m on my back, staring up at the ceiling, my arms at my sides. He doesn’t speak to me, doesn’t touch me. The silence between us gathers and takes on weight, heavy and crushing against my chest. I am thankful that the numbness that descended earlier hasn’t fully lifted, or the pain of this moment might be the thing that finally breaks me, the limit to my endurance breached. I want to reach for him, but what my father did to his sits between us like a mountain I have no idea how to climb. How can he still love me now? How can I expect him to?
“Bishop,” I whisper. It is the only word I can manage, low and choked from my throat. The blankets shift, and Bishop’s hand brushes against mine, slides over it, weaving our fingers together and holding on tight. I suck in a sobbing breath, clench his hand as hard as I can. Tears spill out of my eyes like they’ve been gathering there all day, waiting for this moment to erupt.
He rolls onto his side and so do I, wrapping my arms around his neck as he pulls me against him. He is crying, too, warm tears slick on his face where it touches my cheek. When we kiss, our sorrow mingles, the same way our fathers’ blood did earlier. Bishop shifts over me, yanks off his T-shirt with one hand hooked behind his head. The tears don’t stop, for either one of us, as we move together. The pleasure in my body and the pain in my heart merge into one bright streak behind my eyelids. My fingers dig into his back, desperate and too hard, but I can’t make my hands loosen. I need to reassure myself that he’s here, warm and alive and with me.
After everything, still with me.
Once our tears stop and our breathing settles, we lie on our sides facing each other. The night is dark, but the moon reflecting off the newly fallen snow gives the room a hushed, ethereal glow. My eyelids are puffy from crying, my lips raw from his kisses.
“I feel like it’s my fault,” I tell him. “That I caused it all by coming back here.”
“No,” Bishop says. He has one arm curled under the pillow his head is resting on, the other slung across my waist. “Our fathers were never going to have a happy ending, Ivy. Whether you were here or a thousand miles away. They had a horrible history, and nothing you did, or didn’t do, was ever going to change it.”
“But it was my father who killed yours,” I whisper.
“You’re not responsible for your father. Just like I’m not responsible for mine. They were grown men. They made their own decisions.”
“But your father didn’t do anything,” I protest. “He wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.”
“He did other things, though,” Bishop says. “When I left here earlier, I went to check on my mother. I talked to her about what went on while we were gone. And what your father said was true. My father was having people killed. Not a lot of them. Some he just had arrested or beaten. Some he had put out. And that’s bad enough. But a few he had killed, to send a message about supporting your father. He wasn’t all bad, I know that. But he did bad things.” Bishop reaches up and brushes my tangled hair off my cheek. “So it wasn’t only your father, Ivy. It was both of them.”
“I just wish…”
“You wish what?”
“My father had good ideas for Westfall,” I say. “I really do believe that. I wish he’d been able to see past his hate for your father, so that maybe he could have done something worthwhile.”
“Well, if we’re trading wishes, I wish my father had learned from losing your mother. Even after everything that happened with her, he still clung to the same ideas.” Bishop pauses. “He knew, better than anyone, how wrong it was to take away people’s choices. But it didn’t stop him. He could never admit there might have been another way to do things.”
“They both had chances,” I say. “Chances they didn’t take.”
“It’s not too late, you know,” Bishop says. “To make Westfall into something better.”
“Is that what you want? To stay here and change things?”
“I don’t know. I can’t think that far ahead.” Bishop sighs. “Right now I’m just so tired.”
His soft words make me realize the depth of my own exhaustion, bone deep and heavy across my limbs. I scoot closer to him, rest my hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry about your father.”
He turns his head to brush his lips against my palm. “I’m sorry about yours.” He pauses. “I’d be lying if I said I was sorry about Callie, though. But I am sorry you were the one who had to kill her. I know how much that hurt you.” His words don’t make me angry. This is who Bishop is, especially with me. Honest. After a lifetime of lies, I’m grateful for the pain of truth.
“I wouldn’t go back and change it,” I tell him. “Even if I could. I wasn’t going to let you die, Bishop. Not ever.”
He leans forward and kisses me, lets his mouth linger. “What you said to Callie about you two loving each other more?”
“What about it?” I whisper against his lips.
“You’re good at loving people, Ivy. You love hard. You’re so much better at it than you give yourself credit for.”
“It was you,” I say, my tears close to the surface again. “You taught me how.”
He lifts my hand off his face and pulls it down to rest against his chest. “We taught each other.”
Chapter Twenty-One
We bury our dead at first light. Funerals are different than before the war. No big ceremonies, no coffins, no words of comfort. Maybe all those ways to mark a person’s passing disappeared when the number of dead reached millions. There was no point in having funerals when there were more people dead than alive. Now, we shroud our dead in homespun cotton, place them in unmarked holes in the ground, and save our words for the living.
Bishop and Caleb got up before the sun to dig the single grave. There’s an awful kind of irony in having our fathers buried together, along with Callie. But the ground is too frozen, the space too limited to allow for three separate graves. Sometimes in bad winters mass graves hold more than twenty people at a time. I tell myself they are dead, so what does it matter? I tell myself that maybe this is the resting place they’ve all earned, forced to merge in death as punishment for the hatred and resentment they couldn’t let go of in life.
Bishop stands between Erin and me, clasping both our hands as Ash and Caleb lower the bodies into the ground. Victoria is here, too, but no one else. Callie’s body goes in last, and a curl of dark hair escapes her shroud, floats in the cold morning breeze.
“May they rest in peace,” Bishop says as Caleb and Ash step back from the grave, from the pile of bones and flesh that used to be people we loved.
Erin weeps quietly beside Bishop, but I am empty again of tears. At least for now. The sun is taking its position in the sky, sending streaks of pale orange through the trees. A few birds chatter in the bare branches. The world keeps on spinning, no concern at all for our losses, the depth of our heartbreak. Strangely, it’s a thought that gives me hope. We will survive this moment, this pain. We will outlast it.
“I’ll help Caleb fill in the grave,” Bishop says.
I nod, and he lets go of my hand and his mother’s. As he walks away, I glance at Erin. Her hair is drawn back in a messy ponytail, and she’s wearing a sweater I would swear is President Lattimer’s, too big for her, the arms hanging past her wrists. I don’t know what to say to her, or even if she’d welcome the sound of my voice.
I look into her bloodshot eyes. Neither of us apologizes. We don’t offer or ask for forgiveness. We will never like each other; too much has happened for that. When she looks at me, she will always see the destruction of her family. When I look at her, I will always remember her condemning me to a life beyond the fence. But we’ve reached a kind of understanding, an acknowledgment that somehow we are on the same side now. Because of Bishop. Our love for him will forever be the tie that
binds us together.
We arrive at city hall early, file into the rotunda to wait and see who joins us. “We’ll stay back here,” Caleb says. He and Ash stand near the doorway, as close to being outside as they can get.
“You don’t want to come in, join the discussion?” Bishop asks. The light, mocking note in his voice is almost enough to make me smile.
“Don’t have a dog in this fight,” Caleb says. “But we’re here if you need us.”
“Yeah,” Ash says, “like if all this power starts going to your head. We’re available to knock some sense into you.”
Now both Bishop and I smile, grateful for Caleb and Ash, their constant presence, their allegiance to nothing and no one but us. Bishop hops up to sit on the edge of the stage and offers me his hand so I can sit next to him.
“A lot’s changed since the last time we were on this stage,” he says.
“Yes.” I can still see my father and Callie walking beside me the day I married Bishop, President Lattimer welcoming me to his family. All of them gone now. The day I stood on this stage and pledged my vows to Bishop, I could never have imagined the words I spoke would someday be true. We are no longer married, but I’m more connected to him now than I ever was when we were husband and wife.
A little before noon people begin filling the rotunda until it’s completely packed, the overflow crowd spilling out onto the courthouse steps. Victoria and Erin arrive, and while Erin comes to stand near Bishop and me, Victoria stops to talk to the gathering crowd, offering reassurances and calming the anxious. The crowd shifts restlessly, everyone looking at Bishop for a cue.
“Here goes nothing,” he says under his breath, and I squeeze his hand as he steps forward. “Thank you all for coming,” he calls out in a loud, clear voice. A shiver runs down my spine: pride mixing with apprehension. He sounds very much like his father. He sounds like a leader. “As I’m sure you all know by now,” he continues, “my father died yesterday.” A rumble passes over the crowd like a wave. “And Justin Westfall died as well.” Bishop turns to look at me and motions me forward with a slight frown. “Come up here,” he urges.
I move up next to him, let my eyes scan the crowd. Most people look nervous, scared. They’re waiting for someone to tell them what to do, how to behave. After so many years of having their choices made for them, they no longer remember how to make decisions for themselves.
“Both our fathers made mistakes,” Bishop is saying. “But while they had very different visions for Westfall, I believe they wanted only the best for all of us.”
“What’s going to happen now?” someone calls out. “Who’s in charge?”
And that’s what it comes down to for most of these people. They just want someone to guide them. Bishop glances at me. “I think that’s up to you,” he says. “I think everyone should get a say, a vote.”
A buzz goes through the room, shock and fear, maybe a little excitement. “We want you!” a man yells. “We want a Lattimer!”
“No!” another man cries. “We should all get to vote, like he said.”
“But what about for right now?” a woman chimes in. “We need someone in charge right now. Winter is here!”
We’re rapidly losing control of the room, people shouting over one another, voices rising so that no one can be heard. “Stop!” I yell, surprising myself. And apparently everyone else, too, because the room falls silent. “You’re right. We need someone guiding us until a new government is in place. That should be our first step, figuring out who will run Westfall in the short term.”
“Bishop!” a man yells.
“I second that!” a woman cries.
“Only if he has a Westfall working with him,” someone in the back of the crowd says. “Ivy needs to be a part of it. That way things will be fair.”
I open my mouth to protest; I have no intention of running Westfall, even temporarily, but the man’s suggestion catches on and his words ripple around the room. Victoria looks at Bishop. “It’s a good idea,” she says. “You and Ivy can work together to stabilize things.”
Bishop turns to me. We both know what will happen if we agree. Bishop will become the new leader of Westfall. Or I will. I can see it so clearly: the two of us implementing the best ideas of our fathers, keeping people safe while allowing them their freedom. We could make Westfall the place it always should have been. A legacy we can be proud of. The promise of it snaps through my blood like lightning. But underneath that, the little voice I’m getting better at hearing is already asking if fulfilling my father’s dream is the same as fulfilling my own.
“What do you say?” Bishop asks me. He’s got a faint smile on his lips, and I know he’s seeing the possibilities, too. But I pause, really looking at him. Something in his face is weary, his eyes stoic instead of sparkling. Like he’s already bracing himself for bad news. My heart turns over in my chest.
I want to see the ocean. I’d rather explore than govern. I don’t care enough about the power. I stare at Bishop, hear his words, remember the dream I had for him when I thought I’d never see him again—that he would someday reach the ocean, taste its salty sting.
Bishop has always followed where I led—beyond the fence, back here to Westfall, and now, in this room, he’s willing to do it again. Not because he’s weak or because he doesn’t have his own ideas, but because he loves me and he wants me to have what I need. But I love him, too, and his happiness matters as much to me as my own.
It would be a lie to say a part of me doesn’t want to stay in Westfall indefinitely and carry out my father’s vision, turn it back into a democracy, a place where people are free in all ways. But then I wouldn’t be free. I’d be forever tied to this patch of land, these people, this way of life. Here I will always be Justin Westfall’s daughter, for better and worse. Before I was put out beyond the fence, I couldn’t imagine a life outside Westfall, but now, it’s hard for me to really imagine one inside it. Bishop was right; there’s so much of this world we haven’t seen. And I want to discover it. Westfall feels like my past. The whole wide world feels like my future.
“So, what do you say?” Bishop repeats, and I’d swear the entire room is holding its breath, waiting for my answer.
“Yes,” I say. “My answer is yes.” I pause. “But only for a few months. Just until spring.”
“What do you mean?” Victoria asks. “Why only through the winter?” Around us people’s voices begin to rise, everyone clamoring for more information. Bishop ignores it all, his eyes on me.
“Because I think Westfall will do better in the long term without a Lattimer or a Westfall in charge.” I glance at Victoria, remembering her innate fairness, her determination to try to do the right thing. She’s much better suited to the running of Westfall than either Bishop or I will ever be. “It’s time for everyone here to find a new way, a new path to follow.” I smile at Bishop, take his hand. “And besides, Bishop and I already have plans.”
“We do?” Bishop asks, brow furrowed, but that little dance of amusement flaring to life in his eyes.
“Yes,” I say. “We do. I seem to remember, once upon a time, you mentioning us taking a very long hike.”
“What are you talking about?” Erin says, but I keep my gaze on Bishop. “I don’t understand.”
But Bishop understands. He smiles, his eyes lit up like the sun at daybreak. He steps close to me, pulls me into his arms. “It’ll be rough, Ivy,” he says. “And dangerous.”
I shrug. “So is Westfall. So is life. It will be worth it.” My cheeks hurt from the force of my smile. I loop my arms around his neck and hold on. All around us, voices rage, people shouting over one another. But I don’t hear any of it over the sound of my own joy, the power of my own choice.
Epilogue
The waves are the same color as the sky, a stormy blue-gray swirl. When they hit the shore, it’s with an impossibly loud crash, thundering up the sand toward our bare feet. After so many months of relative silence, broken only by the sounds of o
ur own voices, birds overhead, wind through trees, skittering rocks under our boots, the enormity of the sound is overwhelming, reverberating through my chest. I can already taste the salt in the air, the smell of seaweed thick in my nose. It’s like being in another word, an alternate universe from anything I’ve ever known before. Westfall, and the life I once lived there, seems very far away.
“We’re here,” I say. “I can’t believe we’re finally here.”
Bishop doesn’t answer, his eyes on the far horizon, scanning the vastness of the water. Over all the endless days and nights it took us to reach this spot, I pictured our arrival with running feet and screaming voices, but now, in this moment, we are both subdued. Awed in the face of so much raw power.
“Do you think Ash and Caleb are all right?” I ask, turning my head to scan the bluff above the beach. I can just make out Caleb’s dark head. He gives me a wave, and I raise my arm in return.
“They’re fine,” Bishop says. “Don’t worry.”
When we’d gotten within sight of the ocean, Ash and Caleb had hung back, urging us to go on ahead. Caleb said he needed to scout out the surrounding area, but I know they just wanted to give us some privacy, a chance to be alone at the end of this long journey.
“We didn’t ruin it after all,” I say. That has been my biggest fear, that what Bishop and I talked about the day we looked at his grandfather’s photo album would come to pass—we would get here and the ocean would be spoiled, destroyed, or simply gone. Even knowing that other people had seen the ocean since the war didn’t alleviate my fear. I needed to see it for myself.
“No,” Bishop says, and I can hear the smile in his voice, the sheer relief. “We didn’t.”
I look at him, the line of his profile, the strength of his jaw outlined in dark stubble. He isn’t a boy anymore. The year and a half it’s taken us to reach this spot has finished the job of turning him into a man, sharpened and honed him. He was right that day in Westfall—getting here was rough and dangerous. Nature conspired against us time and again, starvation and exposure our constant companions. A rockslide almost cost Ash her foot; we spent three months waiting for her to heal before we could move on and begin crossing the desert toward what was once Southern California. She still walks with a limp, but she walks.