by Laura Bynum
My mother doesn't ask how I know the woman has a cat. She tips back the rearview mirror so I can no longer see her and quietly drives us home.
Two weeks later, we're out on the front lawn playing Wiffle ball when a long white truck comes tearing up the drive.
There is a cutoff age, the man tells us. Four. I'm two years older than that but don't look it. Could pass for four. My mother says this is a blessing. And the Confederation has lost my records or they'd have known about my special abilities, too. Another blessing.
I know things I'm not supposed to. Mostly through colors people wear around them like their own personal clouds. Each color tells me something different. Bright pink can mean love. Yellow can mean happiness. Blue most times means a person is some kind of teacher--not the kind standing in front of a chalkboard who passes out books and homework, but the kind who makes you feel better just by talking to you. No one's ever just one color, but this doesn't make it any harder. All I have to do is look at them and I know the insides of their hearts. I used to like it until the Pandemic came along and everyone got scared.
When people are upset, their clouds get dark and can take up a whole room. All the time now, mostly down at the square, I see big blobs of dark color where people should be. Outside Mr. Caldwell's pharmacy, in front of the tavern, in the grocery store where we saw the woman fall, the one with the starving cat. Wherever the bright yellow notices are posted. Sometimes, these red-black clouds turn a light moldy brown while their owners are standing in our little town square, looking up at our new flag. This one is all blue with a big white splotch in the center that's supposed to be the new shape of our country. The man standing here in Grandma's kitchen is wearing a suit of the same blue color. Just-after-the-sun-goes-all-the-way-down blue. The color of the sky after all the light is gone.
My mother pulls me behind her and pushes me down with the palm of her hand. I'm skinny and have the wide eyes of youth, but I'm not short. I'm quick but don't have a child's desire to ask too many questions. Stoic, my mother calls it. A good way for a child to have been born these days.
Atop this man's blue suit is a cloak made of ugly purple mist shot through with pulsing bits of red. It tells me he's giddy with his new authority. High on it. This official with his shock of white-blond hair has been told to take what he wants. What he wants right now is my mother. It's in the red parts all around him, like a hundred eyes blinking.
There are more men like him out in the yard, standing around the van where my grandparents and father have already been taken.
"Mommy." I take her hand. Try to pull her away. She won't come, is pretending to listen.
I am here for . . . I have been sent here by . . . I am planning to . . . This man is all about his mission. He's become the same as the men stationed around the square, marching and barking orders through large white tubes. They all have a single stripe on each sleeve and a red handkerchief tied around one arm. Have all become their new suits.
"You're Abigail Sarah Adams, is that correct?" The man's curious blue eyes are fixed on my mother's dress. At the place it tore when they removed my father.
"Yes, sir." My mother is using a foreign tone. Careful, she'd whispered when the other men took away my grandparents. This new voice is soft and quick. All tone and no words. He could hurt us, baby. I hold stock-still, bending in such a way that my calves cramp.
The man is holding a small black machine with a window on its top. He taps a pen with no ink against its surface while asking her questions.
"And she's . . . ?"
"Harper Abigail Adams."
"And she's four?"
"Yes, sir."
"What's her birthday?" The man shuts his mouth as if his questions are over.
"September the thirteenth, 2008," my mother answers without pause. So quick and even, I wonder if I've had it wrong all this time.
"She's awful big for four." He doesn't look down at me. Instead, he puts a finger through the ruined material of my mother's dress. My mother stifles a sob.
She nods and the man withdraws his hand.
"You got a secure room down here? One with a lock?" He motions to me.
I can't see my mother's face. She takes me by the hand and steers me to the long closet behind the bathroom, the one with the washer and dryer and yesterday's clothes still piled on the floor. With her face turned away, she squeezes my palm hard. Don't you say a word with that deep voice. Then lets me go. The swing lock my father attached to the outside of the door scrapes against the wood; hook falls into eye. I turn around too late to catch any trace of my mother or the man just behind her, but I hear them out in the hallway. Up against the wall.
The man's voice begins to rise and fall until my mother asks if he wouldn't please mind being quieter. If he wouldn't mind, please. His voice goes away but the scraping sounds continue. So I count the scratches our old dog Vixen has left during her numerous closet lockups. Count louder as a banging starts up against the plaster hall, eight, nine, ten . . . I put my finger on the wood and trace its scars. Think of my torn jeans that were new a day ago, the one leg peeking out of the trash. Of my favorite movie that was taken away because I didn't clean my room and how, just a week ago, that was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I think of anything that's other than now until now ends and the door reopens.
My mother is crying when she comes back in. No longer cares if I see her smeared mascara. "Come on, honey." Before I can take a step, she picks me up and carries me, baby-style, to the waiting van.
We're taken to the local community center, a flat, wide building shaped like the sheet cakes they sell at fund-raisers. My mother thought we'd be put in the same line but I'm pulled out of her arms as soon as we come through the front door. She's swallowed up by a bunch of blue suits and somehow disappears. Or maybe I'm the one who goes away. All I remember is we're together and then we're not. We're at the community center and then I'm in the hospital, a strange nurse holding my hand and a bandage on my neck. The lights above me make me want to throw up. My throat stings as if I've swallowed glass.
"Hush now." The nurse has kind eyes with bags of excess flesh beneath. They swing as she whispers, "It'll be active in an hour. Best not to talk until you've had time to learn what not to say." I'm being moved down a hall with bright bulbs every few feet. They blink at me as we go. Tell me something bad is coming. Something worse than my neck.
I'm moved into a room with a tiled ceiling where the sad-eyed nurse tells me I'm going to be traveling to a nice big building full of children. Then after a while I'll be traveling again to a nice new family that will make sure I want for nothing. Traveling, she says. As if it were a vacation. I give her credit for trying not to tell me the why behind all this traveling. But I have to hear the words. Stare at her until they come. They reacted poorly to the injections, the nurse says. It was a flaw in the serum. A venom hiding behind the cure. People over and under a certain age often couldn't process something in the yellow fluid. But the older ones got their shots anyway because, What was the other choice? To get sick? Become contagious? Put all you kids at risk?
"The shots are mandatory, darlin'. That means your family didn't have a choice." The old nurse takes my hand. Wipes at her running nose with the back of a sleeve. "You just keep quiet for a year or two and you'll be just fine."
I don't remember much of what happened next. I cried. The old nurse stayed long past her shift. I traveled to an adoption center. Traveled on to a new life with new parents. Traveled on until I wasn't me anymore. Somehow on my way to somewhere else, I lost my abilities. Couldn't see colors anymore. Thought maybe the doctors had cut out this special part of me when they'd put in my slate.
Contagious becomes a word I hear every day for the next few years, wrapped tightly around places the Confederation doesn't want us to go. Like a barbed-wire fence.
apostasy
discriminate
ego
fossil
heresy
kin
dred
obstreperous
offline
veracity
fos-sil: any remains, impression, or trace of a living thing of a former geologic age, such as a skeleton, footprint, etc.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AUGUST 5, 2045. NIGHT.
I wake up in Ezra's easy chair, spittle leaking down my chin. Casually, I stretch my arms overhead, clean my face with the back of one hand. Ezra has been watching. She puts down her hairbrush and frowns.
"Finally."
Ezra's eyes are bright green beneath a mask of indigo shadow painted across her lids. The rest of her face has been dusted with pink sparkles. The effect is ethereal. Even beautiful. But I don't know how a man could make love to a woman who looks so alien. Maybe it's what they like.
Through her dining room window, I see the sun is down. "What time is it?"
"Late."
I lick my lips and push myself upright. "Can I have some water?"
Ezra answers slowly, in time with the application of her light silver mascara. It looks like snow caught in her lashes. "Can . . . I . . . have . . . some . . . water . . . what?"
"Can I have some water, now?"
The retort makes Ezra smile. I catch her biting her lips in the mirror. "In a minute." She zips closed her makeup bag and adjusts her red sash between petite breasts. "How were you going to pay earlier?"
"Pay for what?"
"The water." She sits down on the sofa and begins working a pair of thigh-high stockings up each leg. "Were you going to use your pay card?"
"I'm not a complete idiot. I have someone else's."
Ezra stops pulling at her panty hose and looks up."Whose?"
"Nobody you know . . ."
"Whose! Candace Hillard's?" She springs off the sofa, her nylons a tether between her ankles. She stumbles, righting herself on my chair. "Have you used it before? Did you pay for anything with it on the way to the break site?"
She knows Candace?
"It's not Candace's!" I shout, then add, "I was assigned to monitor a woman who died during her punitives. She was poor. If there are no real funds to pilfer, they don't even bother to close their accounts."
Ezra pulls up her hose, then goes back to the couch and grabs her brush. She yanks at her hair, spraying each strand away from her face like the petals of a sunflower, as if nothing's been said. She's avoiding something. It's all over her. A cherry-colored cape floating down her back and around her shoulders. I'm afraid I know what it is.
"Did Candace and I have the same recruiter?"
Ezra stops spraying her hair. She turns away from the mirror to look me in the eyes. "Yes."
"If Candace had survived, would you have recruited me?"
"Candace was your beta, Harper. We wanted you."
"What do you mean, she was my Beta?"
"She was your understudy. Your tester . . ."
"She was . . . what?" I stumble. Can't find the words. "Testing my break for me?"
"Yes," Ezra says. "We'd never recruited someone under such scrutiny before."
"But Candace was the Alpha Monitor . . ."
"Candace wasn't the one we needed. You were."
Before I can stop it, out comes a new question. One whose answer I want even less. "You know the man who killed Candace, don't you? The Blue Coat I saw out at the farm."
"You really want to get into that now?" Ezra grinds. "Now?"
No. It's too much. Too many answers leading to more questions and all of them making me dizzy.
"I'm thirsty. Is it safe to use the tap?" I push out of my seat and go to the kitchen, where Ezra won't see my flushed cheeks.
"There's a pitcher of water in the fridge. Use that." Ezra's voice is loud. I turn around and find her standing in the doorway, watching me.
I clear my face and push past Ezra toward the refrigerator. Inside, I find more food than I've ever seen in one place. Bacon. Tomatoes. Gallons of milk. Clear, lidded containers packed tight. Each shelf is full. Perishables are lined up in rows, back to front to maximize space. I pull out the only clear pitcher. Hold it over my empty glass and pour.
"Did Candace know she was the Beta?" I ask.
"Jesus, Adams. Why this sudden need for hard answers?"
I don't know, Ezra. Maybe it's because I've lived so much of my life hiding from the truth. Or maybe it's just because I'm good and goddamned sick of being afraid. But I don't say either of these things.
Ask again, "Did Candace know she was the Beta? Did she know she was testing the process?"
"Yes. And she was happy to do it."
Spilled water hits the counter. "And what about her daughter? What about Hannah?"
Ezra walks across the room. She picks up the pitcher and pours the water for me. "No one could have anticipated that. Now, that's enough. No more."
I lean against the table and stare at the full glass. "Who's my recruiter?"
"Goddamnit, Adams . . ."
"Is he a Manager? Does he work in Tracking and Data?"
Ezra lights a cigarette and answers on a stream of smoke, "You've already met him. You tell me."
She knows about the one encounter we had in the alley. The thought makes me blush. "It was raining. I never saw his face."
"Uh-huh." Ezra opens her mouth to say something else, but doesn't.
Her silence infuriates me. I'm not going to beg her for answers.
"Where are the matches?" I walk to the counter and begin opening drawers. "Just in case you never come back, I'll need to boil water. Right?"
Ezra nods at the far drawers. "Last one down."
I rifle through a mess of pens, batteries, little scraps of paper containing handwritten phone numbers. Come up with no matches.
"All the way back." Ezra points.
I push deeper until my fingers come into contact with a rectangular box. It's black with an image of a brick building and a phone number on its cover. One of her johns. His grubby hands have left a shining bit of color on the slick black cover. A glowing sludge brown. Nobody I'd want to meet, much less screw. I push back the cover and look at the red-tipped sticks lined up inside. They look fresh enough, will keep me from such dependence on her.
We get into Ezra's car, don't speak on the way back to the farm. Once there, she throws the car into Park and turns around in her seat. Something about her face is different. It's less enraged than usual.
"Adams . . ."
"What?" I don't want her to be soft with me. To apologize for telling me about Candace and not my recruiter. Or for telling me I was effectively the reason Hannah was killed. And Candace. "What!" I shout.
Ezra turns and looks through the front windshield. "I'll be back in the morning."
I tell her I won't hold my breath.
Ezra doesn't come at first light. Or by noon when the sun is straight overhead and I no longer cast a shadow. So I decide to build my first fire.
I set a ring of stones next to the creek where the ground is hard, yards away from anything that might too easily catch fire. With one strike of the match, the kindling is lit and the smoke is filtered through the canopy of trees above. Making the fire was easy. All I needed was the match.
I collect creek water in my iron pot and set it over the embers, then bring down the remaining jars of food. Breakfast is warmed vegetables eaten right off my fingers and hot, germ-free water. It's a too-short task that leaves the sun still hovering just over the horizon. Leaves me with pulpy, idle hands and an active mind.
What if Ezra doesn't come? How will I find my trainer, and the others? Will they be able to come get me? What if Ezra is the only one who can transport me?
Fear like this infects the quiet. Makes every rustle and bump something else in my mind. I go back to the house, to the room above the kitchen. Spend the afternoon reading chapters from each of the books. At least a third of the words are new to me. They frustrate and tantalize like a door opened slightly, a slice of universe revealed on the other side. They come in nearly every sentence, often two or
three per line. A man couldn't liberate himself from his wife. A woman who became paralyzed lost her ability to sculpt, to paint portraits, to make art. The list is small at first. Then, in a piece about the necessity of investigative reporting, it grows a hundredfold. Solitude. Culture. Fulfill. Fulfillment. Democracy. Lifestyle. And so on. The list of words I don't know is infinite and I become what the government expected an educated me to become. Angry.
What about these words is so dangerous? Would they have allowed us a glimpse into our own form of poverty? Revealed different boundaries existing between the possible and the impossible, the moral and the immoral, the decent and the unconscionable? Allowed us to discover we've been living according to someone else's definition of joy? The truth of it rushes up on me. I put the books back in the box. The Grapes of Wrath. The Reader's Digest with the red cover.
I've followed the sun around the room, enjoying the feel of it on my face. And now the moon's up in the low sky and I'm sitting in the near dark. And Ezra's still not here.
Again. It shouldn't surprise me. I'm surprised to find it does.
I bring the books downstairs and stack them on the table. I'll start reading Old Jeremiah when I get back from the creek, if my eyes can adjust to the poor light. Tomorrow, I'll walk into town, find the boy with the pockmarked face. I'll ask him to take me to the resistance. Screw Ezra. She's not the alpha and the omega. I'll find other ways to get to my trainer. I'm no good to them dead on this green prairie. They've chosen me for a reason. Even if I was chosen second.
The sun is still bobbing above the far horizon. I have just enough time to boil a fresh pot of water before the fire becomes brighter than the fading air. I run to the creek. Gather wood and the grass I've laid out to dry. Stack them in the ash-filled pit. Then realize I've left Ezra's matches in the kitchen.
"Damn it." I won't have time to boil anything. I pick up a small branch and throw it hard into the rows of corn. It means a bad night's coming. Nothing to drink means no sleep. Dehydration is like that. Like a gnat stuck in your ear, buzzing.
Halfway back to the farmhouse, a trail of gray smoke appears over the tall grass. I rise up on my toes. Not over the grass, over the road. It's a car. I start to run. I've left the books out on the table . . . and the matches . . .