by Zoe Cannon
She leaned in toward Jake, and the closer she got, the further away everything else felt. At the last second she hesitated, heart pounding, her lips inches from his. He cupped her cheek in his hand and drew her in the rest of the way. She let their lips meet, let the kiss erase everything in her mind.
She was dimly aware that Jake’s dad was still sitting right next to them, but she didn’t care. She didn’t have to care about anything anymore.
* * *
Becca’s phone sat in front of her on her desk, next to her keyboard. She picked it up, stared at it for a moment, put it down again. She ran her fingers along the strip of paper in her hand, now soft and wrinkled from two days of this. She stared at the numbers until her eyes started to cross.
Jake had given her what she wanted. A way out of her helplessness, out of her restlessness. A way to do something. She should have called as soon as she had gotten home from the playground on Friday.
She picked up the phone again. Dialed the first digit.
Surveillance wasn’t listening to her calls. They wouldn’t waste their time listening in on someone who hadn’t done anything suspicious—and anyway, they wouldn’t dare put Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter under surveillance.
Probably.
She put the phone down.
She needed Jake to be here. She needed to kiss him again, to drive the fears from her mind for a little while. There hadn’t been another kiss since she had watched Anna die two days ago. Whenever she went to check on him, she was careful to keep just the right amount of distance between them. She had to figure this out first. She didn’t know what it would mean if they kissed again, what the kisses the other day had meant. Maybe she was using him to forget everything that had gone wrong in her life. Maybe he was her own personal Prince Charming and they would go riding off into the sunset and live happily ever after, if Internal didn’t take them into that little room and shoot them in the head first.
Maybe she loved him.
She shook her head at the thought, even though there was no one to see her. If she were in love with him, things would be clearer. If she were in love with him, she wouldn’t wonder whether she saw him as a way to escape the memories or as her only remaining friend or as something else, something more. Or all of the above. How was she supposed to tell the difference? She needed Heather to help her talk this through, but that wasn’t exactly an option anymore.
Maybe she should go back to the playground and check on him. That would be easy. Simple. No matter what she felt or didn’t feel, she could go check on him.
Except she couldn’t, because she had already gone this morning, to bring food for him and his dad. He didn’t want her coming too often, or staying too long; he worried that someone would notice what she was doing. She had told him she hadn’t seen her mom since Friday morning and that nobody else would pay attention to how often she left the apartment, but he still didn’t think it was safe. Becca wasn’t sure she blamed him—after all, how did she know for sure one of her neighbors wasn’t watching her out the window, noting down every time she made the trip to the playground?
Maybe she should finish her homework, then.
No, she had finished it all yesterday. It hadn’t worked as well as her too-brief times with Jake to block out the image of Anna’s death, but it had helped enough that she had done it all at once, losing herself in the tedium for as long as possible.
Becca reached for her phone again. With her hand hovering over it, she stopped. Was there even any point? Even if she did get in touch with these people, what would she be able to do for them?
The phone rang.
Becca nearly fell out of her chair.
Heart pounding, she looked at the display. Heather again. Was this the fifth time Heather had called today, or the sixth? And that wasn’t counting the texts – at least five times as many, all asking her to pick up the phone, to call her back, to meet her somewhere so they could talk. Becca pushed the phone away. She hadn’t talked to Heather since their conversation at the playground that night. As far as she was concerned, their friendship was over.
She crumpled and flattened the piece of paper in her hand, like she had done so many times over the past two days. She needed to quit putting this off. This was what she wanted, after all.
The phone stopped ringing.
She picked it up again and—quickly, before she could talk herself out of it again—started dialing.
When she hit the last digit, she stopped.
This was what she wanted. What she needed. She couldn’t keep going the way she had been, and this was her only way out.
So why couldn’t she make the call?
Someone knocked at her door. Becca jerked and dropped the phone.
“Becca? Are you in there?” Her mom.
“I thought you were still at work.” Becca hurriedly cleared the number from her phone. She shoved the phone into her pocket and the slip of paper into her desk drawer. Her mom hadn’t even made it home to sleep since the morning Anna had died. Becca hadn’t expected to see her at all today, let alone in the middle of the afternoon.
“Public Relations took a bunch of prisoners off our hands this morning, so things have finally calmed down a little. I may even get to sleep in my own bed tonight.”
Why had she hidden the phone? Her mom wouldn’t be able to tell what she had been doing with it. Logically, she knew that. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that even with the phone and paper hidden away, her mom would see right through her.
Since telling her mom to go away wasn’t an option, she sat back and waited for her to come in. At least this gave her one more excuse for putting off the call.
Her mom eased the door open. “Is this a good time to talk?”
“Actually, I was trying to get some homework done.” She put her hands on her keyboard and tried to look studious.
“I won’t take up too much of your time.” Her mom walked into the room, closing the door gently behind her, and sat down on the bed. “We need to talk about Anna. We should have talked before now. I shouldn’t have left you afterwards the way I did, and I’m sorry. I came back as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to get home all weekend, but I could barely get a bathroom break.”
At the mention of Anna, the loop started playing again behind Becca’s eyes. She would have thought that after seeing it so many times, the impact would have faded. It hadn’t. She flinched as the gun went off again—the hundredth time? The thousandth?
“Are you doing all right?” Her mom sounded so calm about it. As if what had happened was no more serious than a bad dream.
Becca kept her eyes on the keyboard as she answered. “I watched one of my friends die. What do you think?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that. But you need to understand what’s going to happen if you keep going the way you have been.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come sit with me.”
Becca looked at the space on the bed next to her mom. She wanted to get out of her chair, sit beside her, cry on her shoulder. In the old days, that was what she would have done.
She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here.”
The old days were gone.
But her mom still looked like her mom. Why couldn’t she look different, now that Becca knew what she really was?
“I don’t want you to blame yourself for Anna’s death,” said her mom. “She would have been executed whether or not you were there. But I do want you to think about what happened to her. If you keep saying the kinds of things you’ve been saying, you’re going to end up right there in one of those cells—” Her voice broke.
That crack in her calm was worse than hearing her talk about Anna’s death like it was nothing. Becca didn’t want to hear her mom’s grief at the thought of losing her. She wanted her mom to sound just as cold about Becca’s potential execution as she did about Anna’s, so Becca would have one more reason to hate her.
Becca stared out the window so she wouldn’t have to look
at her mom. Outside, two Enforcers strode through the parking lot. Were they coming home, or on their way to drag away some anonymous dissident destined to die like Anna in one of those tiny rooms?
Becca tried to match her mom’s tone, tried to sound like Anna’s death didn’t matter. Like she didn’t see it every time she closed her eyes and sometimes when they were open. “Could we talk about this some other time?” Or maybe never? “I’m kind of busy.”
Her mom’s voice grew sharper. “No. We need to talk about this. We’ve put it off too long as it is. I never should have let things get this far.”
She wanted, needed, to tell her mom everything. How she couldn’t get rid of the images. How she sometimes saw not Anna, but Jake, dying in that room… and sometimes she saw herself in Anna’s place. How she wished she could go back and undo that conversation where she had lied about Anna, where she had condemned Anna to death.
How much it had scared her to see her mom looking down at Anna’s body with blank eyes, and to know that to her this was just a day like any other day.
Deep down, some part of her was still convinced her mom could make it all go away.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” The Enforcers outside had disappeared from view. “I shouldn’t have said those things the other day. I don’t even know what I was thinking.” But even as she said it, she knew there was no point. That excuse had worked on Heather, but it wouldn’t work on her mom.
Her mom reached out and grabbed the arm of Becca’s chair. She spun the chair around to face her. “That’s not enough this time. I explained the confessions to you; I thought that was the end of this. I thought…” Her voice trailed off. Were those tears glinting at the corners of her eyes? Becca couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom cry.
Becca started to speak—but she didn’t have anything to say. She had no way to convince her mom she wasn’t a dissident. The damage had been done.
“I know things haven’t been the same between us lately,” said her mom. “But I still know you. You’re still Becca. I spend every day with dissidents; I know what they’re like. You’re not one of them.”
And what made Becca so different? The fact that her mom didn’t want her to die? Becca held back the angry words, said nothing, tried to keep her face blank. Was this what their relationship was going to be for the rest of her life?
Why was she still upset at the thought of losing her closeness with her mom? She knew what her mom was like now.
Her mom stretched her arm across the gap and took Becca’s hand. The familiar roughness of her skin reminded Becca of all the other times she’d felt that hand around hers, all the times her mom had comforted her when she felt like the world was ending. She needed that now, needed her mom’s soothing voice and sensible answers. She needed her mom to hold her and stroke her hair and tell her everything would be all right.
She knew she should pull her hand away. Her mom had blood on her hands—what had she been doing at work all weekend that had kept her too busy to come home? How many dissidents had died? Instead, Becca clutched her mom’s hand as she fought the urge to scream about all the things her mom had done. As she fought the urge to break down in tears and admit how afraid she was.
“You need to remember who you are,” her mom continued. “That person who said those things the other night about how the country would be better off if the dissidents took over… that isn’t you.”
“And what about you?” The words left Becca’s mouth before she could stop them. “I didn’t think you could make people confess to things they hadn’t done because you thought they’d be more useful that way. I didn’t think you could watch somebody die like it was nothing.”
Her mom gripped her hand harder. “We’ve talked about this. You said you understood. You know why I do what I do.”
“But how do you do it? How can you spend your days doing… whatever you do down there…” She shied away from the visions her mind supplied, tried to push away the thought of Anna lying dead on the concrete floor. “…and then come home and talk to me like it doesn’t mean anything?”
Her mom frowned and tilted her head. “Did you hear something?”
“Don’t change the subject. I want to know. How do you do it?” Suddenly this answer—how her mom could do what she did and still be the person Becca had always known—seemed like the most important thing in the world. But Becca didn’t know which she wanted to hear—that both people could coexist in the same body, or that the mother she had grown up with had been an illusion.
Her mom put her finger to her lips.
Were those footsteps?
A door slammed, too loud to be anywhere but inside the apartment.
Becca knew what it meant to hear footsteps that weren’t supposed to be there, to hear your door open when nobody else had the key. Everybody knew what that meant.
But her mom had said she wouldn’t turn her in. Heather had said she wouldn’t turn her in. And it was two in the afternoon. Enforcement took you away in the middle of the night; everyone knew that. It had to be something else. It had to be.
The footsteps were getting closer.
Her mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. But Becca saw her own fear reflected on her face.
The bedroom door opened.
They walked inside. The Enforcers she had seen out in the parking lot a moment ago. She had the answer to her question now. They weren’t on their way home. They were here for a dissident. They were here for her.
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t understand the things her mom was screaming. It all blended together into a nonsensical jumble. But she could feel her mom’s grip on her hand getting tighter and tighter, until the Enforcers pulled them apart.
Chapter Fifteen
“I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter,” she repeated again and again as the Enforcers shoved her through the same side door she had walked through with her mom just two days ago. She tried to keep her voice from shaking, tried to keep her cuffed hands from shaking, tried to keep her legs from collapsing underneath her. “You can’t do this.”
She had never seen her mom lose control like that before. Even in her arguments with Becca’s dad, Becca had never heard her yell. But when Enforcement had come, she had screamed as they had handcuffed Becca and propelled her, too stunned to fight, out the door. First threats that Becca, in her numb state, couldn’t understand; then, as the door had closed behind them, a wordless scream that made goosebumps rise all over Becca’s body.
The Enforcers hadn’t stopped then, and they didn’t now.
Still, Becca hung on to the hope that they didn’t know. That they thought her mom was just one of many anonymous Internal employees. Once they found out otherwise, they would have to let her go. Hadn’t her name gotten her in to see Heather on that horrible night?
The door closed, shutting out her last glimpse of the afternoon sun.
She might never see the sun again.
They maneuvered her into the elevator like a piece of luggage. Inside the elevator, they stood to either side of her, not moving, not speaking.
“I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter,” she repeated through her tears. “She works here.” The elevator opened onto the maze of hallways underneath 117. The light seemed dimmer now, and the echoes of their footsteps twice as loud. Each of the Enforcers held one of her arms, to keep her from running—where would she go?—and to hurry her along. She stumbled as she tried to keep up; her uneven steps broke the pattern of the echoes.
“She made 117 the best processing center in the country.” She hated when other people talked about her mom like this; now she wove the words around her like armor. “She turned this nothing town into someplace the whole country knows about. You wouldn’t have jobs if it weren’t for her.”
Her desperate words rang through the halls. Still, the Enforcers acted like they hadn’t heard. They kept going, down one hallway and then another, taking Becca f
urther from the real world with every step.
She didn’t know how long they walked before stopping in front of one of the doors. A mix of tears and salty mucus dripped down her face; with her hands cuffed behind her, she couldn’t wipe it away. “She’s going to come for me,” she said as they opened the door. She sounded like Heather had when she had called that night. She could hardly understand herself.
One of the agents shoved her against the wall; the other removed her handcuffs with rough efficiency. Before she could think of taking advantage of her hands’ freedom, the one who had taken off the handcuffs pushed her through the door and closed it behind her. The click of the door as it locked had a horrible finality to it.
“She’s going to come for me,” she repeated to no one.
The cell looked just like the room where Anna had died, except for the metal cot against the far wall. Everything was gray—the walls, the floors, the bed’s threadbare sheets. In the corner of the ceiling, a camera watched her. Its tiny red light was the only spot of color in the room. She took a step forward, and although it might have been her imagination, she thought she saw the camera swivel to follow her.
She couldn’t stop shaking.
With one hand against the wall, she stumbled to the bed. The metal frame squealed underneath her as she sat down on the rock-hard mattress.
How many dissidents had sat on this bed before her? How long had they stayed in this cell before they died?
How long did Becca have before…
No. She’s going to come for me.
A faded bloodstain on the floor caught her eye. It seemed to grow as she looked at it.
She brought her eyes to the ceiling instead—to the camera that, even though she had moved, was still pointed directly at her. “I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter,” she told the camera, praying that someone on the other end would hear. “You have to get me out of here.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as the last of her strength drained out of her. “Please get me out of here.”
Nobody came.
Her shaking got worse.