Alex grasps my face, bends down to look in my eyes. His face is blazing now, full of hope.
“You don’t have to go through with it,” he says. His words come tumbling out. He’s obviously been thinking about this for a long time and only trying not to say it. “Lena, you don’t have to do anything. We could run away together. To the Wilds. Just go and never come back. Only—Lena, we couldn’t ever come back.
You know that, right? They’d kill us both, or lock us up forever… But Lena, we could do it.”
Kill us both. Of course, he’s right. A lifetime of running: that’s what I’ve just said I wanted. I take a quick step backward, feeling suddenly dizzy. “Wait,” I say.
“Just hold on a second.”
He releases me. The hope dies in his face all at once, and for a moment we just stand there, looking at each other. “You weren’t serious,” he says finally.
“You didn’t mean it.”
“No, I did mean it, it’s just—”
“It’s just that you’re scared,” he says. He walks to the window and stares out at the night, refusing to look at me. His back is terrifying again: so solid and impenetrable, a wall.
“I’m not scared. I’m just…” I fight a murky feeling. I don’t know what I am. I want Alex and I want my old life and I want peace and happiness and I know that I can’t live without him, all at the same time.
“It’s okay.” His voice is dull. “You don’t have to explain.”
“My mother,” I burst out. Alex turns then, looking startled. I’m as surprised as he is. I didn’t even know I was going to say the words until I said them. “I don’t want to be like her. Don’t you understand? I saw what it did to her, I saw how she was… It killed her, Alex. She left me, left my sister, left it all. All for this thing, this thing inside of her. I won’t be like her.” I’ve never really spoken about this, and I’m surprised by how difficult it is. Now I have to turn away, feeling sick and ashamed that the tears have started again.
“Because she wasn’t cured?” Alex asks softly.
For a moment I can’t speak, and I just let myself cry, silently now, hoping he can’t tell. When I have control of my voice, I say, “It’s not just that.”
Then all of it comes rushing out, the details, things I’ve never shared with anyone before: “She was so different from everybody else. I knew that—that she was different, that we were different—but it wasn’t scary at first. It just felt like our little, delicious secret. Mine, and hers, and Rachel’s, too, like we were in a cocoon. It was… It was amazing. We kept all the curtains drawn so no one could see in. We used to play this game where she would hide in the hallway and we would try to run past her and she would leap out and grab us—playing goblin, she called it. It always ended in a tickle war. She was always laughing. We were all always laughing. Then every so often when we got too loud, she would clap her hands over our mouths and get all tense for a second, listening. I guess she was listening for the neighbors, to make sure none of them were alarmed. But no one ever came.
“Sometimes she would make us blueberry pancakes for dinner, as a treat. She picked the blueberries herself. And she was always singing. She had a beautiful voice, just gorgeous, like honey—” My voice cracks, but I can’t stop now. The words are pouring, tumbling out.
“She used to dance, too. I told you that. When I was little I would stand with my feet on top of hers. She would wrap her arms around me and we would move slowly around the room while she counted out the beat, tried to teach me about rhythm. I was terrible at it, clumsy, but she always told me I was beautiful.”
Tears make the floorboards blur beneath my feet.
“It wasn’t all good, not all the time. Sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I’d hear her crying. She always tried to muffle it by turning into her pillow, but I knew. It was terrifying when she cried.
I’d never seen a grown-up cry before, you know? And the way she did it, the wailing… like some kind of animal. And there were days she didn’t get out of bed at all. She called those her black days.”
Alex moves closer to me. I’m shaking so badly I can hardly stand. My whole body feels like it’s trying to expel something, cough something up from deep in my chest. “I used to pray that God would cure her of the black days. That he would keep her—keep her safe for me. I wanted us to stay together. Sometimes it seemed like the praying worked. It was good most of the time. It was more than good.” I can barely bring myself to say these words. I have to force them out in a low whisper. “Don’t you get it? She left all that. She gave it up—for, for that thing. Love. Amor deliria nervosa—whatever you want to call it. She gave me up.”
“I’m sorry, Lena,” Alex whispers, behind me. This time he does reach out.
He starts drawing long, slow circles on my back. I lean into him.
But I’m not done yet. I swipe at the tears furiously, take a big breath.
“Everyone thinks she killed herself because she couldn’t stand to have the procedure again. They were still trying to cure her, you know. It would have been her fourth time. After her second procedure they refused to put her under—they thought the anesthesia was interfering with the way the cure was taking. They cut into her brain, Alex, and she was awake.”
I feel his hand stiffen temporarily, and I know he’s just as angry as I am.
Then the circles start up again.
“But I know that’s not really why.” I shake my head. “My mom was brave.
She wasn’t afraid of pain. That was the whole problem, really. She wasn’t afraid.
She didn’t want to be cured; she didn’t want to stop loving my dad. I remember she told me that once, just before she died. ‘They’re trying to take him from me,’ she said. She was smiling so sadly. ‘They’re trying to take him, but they can’t.’ She used to wear one of his pins around her neck, on a chain. She kept it hidden most of the time, but that night she had it out and was staring at it. It was this strange, long, silver dagger-thing, with two bright jewels in the hilt, like eyes. My dad used to wear it on his sleeve. After he died she wore it every day, never took it off even to bathe…”
I suddenly realize that Alex has removed his hand and taken two steps away from me. I turn around and he’s staring at me, white faced and shocked, as though he’s just seen a ghost.
“What?” I wonder if it’s possible I’ve offended him in some way. Something about the way he’s staring makes fear start beating at my chest, a frantic flutter.
“Did I say something wrong?”
He shakes his head, an almost imperceptible motion. The rest of his body stays as straight and tense as a wire stretched between two posts. “How big was it? The pin, I mean.” His voice sounds strangely high-pitched.
“The point isn’t the pin, Alex, the point is—”
“How big was it?” Louder now, and forceful.
“I don’t know. Like the size of a thumb, maybe.” I’m completely baffled by Alex’s behavior. He has the most pained look on his face, as though he’s trying to swallow a whole porcupine. “It was originally my grandfather’s—made just for him, a reward for performing a special service for the government. Unique.
That’s what my dad always said, anyway.”
Alex doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns away, and with the moon shining down on him, and his profile so hard and straight, he could be built out of stone. I’m glad he’s not staring at me anymore, though. He was starting to freak me out.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks finally, slowly, as though every word is an effort.
It seems like a weird thing to ask in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation, and I start to get annoyed. “Were you even listening to me?”
“Lena, please.” There it is: the strangled, choking note again. “Just answer me. Are you working?”
“Not until Saturday.” I rub my arms. The wind blowing in has a chilly edge to it. It lifts the hair on my arms, mak
es goose bumps prick up on my legs.
Autumn is coming. “Why?”
“You have to meet me. I have—I have something to show you.” Alex turns back to me again, and his eyes are so wild and black, his face so unfamiliar-looking, I take a step backward.
“You’ll have to do better than that.” I try to laugh, but what comes out is a little gurgling sound. I’m scared, I want to say. You’re scaring me. “Can you at least give me a hint?”
Alex takes a deep breath, and for a minute I think he won’t answer me.
But he does.
“Lena,” he says at last. “I think your mother is alive.”
Chapter Twenty-One
LIBERTY IN ACCEPTANCE;
PEACE IN ENCLOSURE;
HAPPINESS IN RENUNCIATION
— Words carved above the gates at the entrance to the Crypts
When I was in fourth grade, I went on a field trip to the Crypts. It’s mandated that every child visit at least once in elementary school as part of the government’s anticrime, antiresistance education. I don’t remember much about my visit except for a feeling of utter terror, a dim impression of coldness, of blackened concrete hallways, slicked with mold and moisture, and heavy electronic doors. To be honest, I think I’ve successfully blocked out most of the memory. The whole purpose of the trip was to traumatize us into staying on the straight-and-narrow, and they definitely had the traumatize part right.
What I do remember is stepping out afterward into the bright sunshine of a beautiful spring day with a sense of overwhelming, overpowering relief—and also confusion, as I realized that in order to exit the Crypts we actually had to descend several staircases to the ground floor. The whole time we’d been inside, even as we climbed, I had the impression of being buried underground, locked several stories under the surface of the earth. That’s how dark it was, how close and bad-smelling: like being encased in a coffin with rotting bodies. I also remember that as soon as we got outside Liz Billmun began to cry, just sob right there while a butterfly flapped around her shoulder, and we were all in shock because Liz Billmun was super tough, and kind of a bully, and hadn’t even cried the time she broke her ankle in gym class.
I had sworn that day that I would never, ever return to the Crypts for any reason. But the morning after my conversation with Alex I’m standing outside its gates, pacing, one arm wrapped around my stomach. I wasn’t able to force anything down this morning except the thick black sludge my uncle calls coffee, a decision I am now regretting. I feel like acid is eating my insides.
Alex is late.
Overhead, the sky is packed tight with enormous black storm clouds. It’s supposed to thunderstorm later, which seems fitting. Beyond the gate, at the end of a short, paved road, the Crypts looms black and imposing. Silhouetted against the dark sky, it looks like something out of a nightmare. A dozen or so tiny windows—like the multiple staring eyes of a spider—are scattered across its stone façade. A short field surrounds the Crypts on this side, enclosed within the gates. I remember it from my childhood as a meadow, but it is actually just a lawn, closely tended and bare in patches. Still, the vivid green of the grasswhere the grass is actually managing to assert itself through the dirt—seems out of place. This seems like a place where nothing should flourish or grow, where the sun should never shine: a place on the edge, at the limit, a place completely removed from time and happiness and life.
I guess, technically, it is on the edge, since the Crypts is sitting right on the eastern border, flanked on its rear by the Presumpscot River, and beyond that, the Wilds. The electrified (or not-so-electrified) fence runs directly into one side of the Crypts, and begins again on its other side, the building itself serving as a seamless connective bridge.
“Hey.”
Alex is coming down the sidewalk, his hair whipping up around his head.
The wind is definitely chilly today. I should have worn a heavier sweatshirt. Alex looks cold too. He’s keeping his arms folded across his chest. Of course he’s just wearing a thin linen shirt, the official guard uniform he wears at the labs. He has his badge swinging around his neck, too. I haven’t seen him with it since the first day we spoke. He’s even wearing a pair of nice jeans, crisp dark ones with cuffs that aren’t totally ragged and stepped on. This was all part of the plan: to get us both in, he needs to convince the prison administrators that we’re on official business. I take comfort in the fact that he’s still wearing his scuffed-up sneakers with the ink-stained laces, though. Somehow that little familiar detail makes it possible to be here, with him, doing this. It gives me something to focus on and hold on to, a tiny flash of normalcy in a world that has suddenly become unrecognizable.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. He stops several feet away from me. I can see the concern in his eyes, even if he manages to keep the rest of his face composed.
There are guards circulating the yard and standing just beyond the gate. This is no place for us to touch or reveal any kind of familiarity with each other.
“That’s okay.” My voice cracks. I feel like I might have a fever. Ever since Alex and I spoke last night my head has been spinning, and my body has been burning one second and icy the next. I can hardly think. It’s a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It’s a miracle I’m even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.
My mother might be alive. My mother might be alive. That is the single idea in my mind, the one that has supplanted the possibility of all other rational thought.
“Are you ready to do this?” He keeps his voice low and toneless in case the guards will overhear us—but I can detect the note of worry running underneath it.
“I think so,” I say. I try to manage a smile, but my lips feel cracked and dry as stone. “It might not even be her, right? You could be wrong.”
He nods, but I can tell he’s sure he hasn’t made a mistake. He’s sure that my mom is in here—this place, this above-ground tomb—has been there all this time.
The idea is overwhelming. I can’t think too much about the possibility that Alex is right. I need to concentrate, focus all my energy on just staying on my feet.
“Come on,” he says. He walks in front of me, like he’s leading me on official business. I keep my eyes trained on the ground. I’m almost glad that the presence of the guards requires Alex to ignore me. I’m not sure I could handle a conversation right now. A thousand feelings swirl through me, a thousand questions whip around my mind, a thousand suppressed hopes and desires, buried long ago—and yet I can’t hold on to anything, not a single theory or explanation that makes any kind of sense.
Alex had refused to tell me more after his declaration last night. “You have to see,” he kept repeating dumbly, as though it was the only thing he knew how to say. “I don’t want to get your hopes up for nothing.” And then he’d told me to meet him at the Crypts. I think I must have been in shock. The whole time I kept congratulating myself for not freaking out, for not screaming or crying or demanding an explanation, but when I got home later I realized I had no memory of the walk at all and hadn’t been keeping an eye out for regulators or patrols. I must have just marched stiffly down the street, blind to everything.
But now I get the point of shock, of numbness. Without the numbness I probably wouldn’t have been able to get up and dressed this morning. I wouldn’t have been able to find my way here, and I wouldn’t be taking careful steps forward now, pausing a respectful distance behind him as Alex shows his ID badge to a guard at a gate and begins gesturing to me.
Alex launches into an explanation he has obviously rehearsed. “There was an… incident at her evaluation,” he says, his voice icy. He and the guard are both staring at me: the guard, suspiciously; Alex with as much detachment as he can muster. His eyes are steel, all the warmth drained out of them, and it makes me nervous to know that he can do that so successfully—become someone else, someone who doesn’t have any attachment to me. “Nothing too severe. But her parents and my s
uperiors thought she might benefit from a little reminder about the dangers of disobedience.”
The guard flicks his eyes over me. His face is fat and red, the skin on either side of his eyes protruding and puffy, like he is a mound of dough in the middle of rising. Soon, I fantasize, his eyes will be concealed behind flesh altogether.
“What kind of incident?” he says, snapping his gum. He shifts the enormous automatic rifle he is carrying to his other shoulder.
Alex leans forward, so that he and the guard are separated through the gate by only a few inches. He drops his voice, but I can still hear him. “Her favorite color is the color of sunrise,” he says.
The guard stares at me for a split second longer and then waves for us to pass through. “Stand back while I get the gate,” he says. He disappears into a guard hut, similar to the one at the labs where Alex is stationed, and after a few seconds the electronic gates shudder inward. Alex and I start across the courtyard, toward the building entrance. With every step, the hulking silhouette of the Crypts looms a little larger. The wind picks up, whirling bits of dust across the bleak yard, sending a lone plastic bag tumbling and skipping across the grass, and the air is filled with the kind of electricity that always comes before a thunderstorm—the kind of crazed, vibrating energy that makes it seem like something huge could happen at any second, like the whole world could just dissolve into chaos. I would give anything to have Alex turn around, smile at me, and offer me his hand. Of course, he can’t. He strides quickly ahead of me, spine stiff, eyes forward.
I’m not sure how many people are confined in the Crypts. Alex estimated it to be about three thousand. There’s hardly any crime at all in Portland—thanks to the cure—but occasionally people do steal things or vandalize or resist police procedurals. Then there are the resisters and sympathizers. If they aren’t executed immediately, some of them are left to rot in the Crypts.
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