“You’re still carrying that thing?” Brooke asked with astonishment.
“They’ve got places with reception here, right?”
Brooke exchanged a glance with Milo. It was true; Shaw Station had data hubs connected via satellite.
“Okay,” Brooke said, taking the phone from Holly and meeting her daughter’s dark, hopeful eyes. There was probably some way to find Robin on the Internet, though she couldn’t guess where to begin. “I’ll try.”
When Sal’s chin began dropping to her chest, Brooke and Milo ferried both girls onto the bed and tucked them in. They were asleep in seconds.
Brooke watched their sleeping faces. Sal’s eyelids fluttered, and she flinched and whimpered in her sleep—the same high, muffled whine she’d made as a toddler, having her first nightmares.
Brooke felt Milo watching her and looked up to meet his gaze. Gold-flecked hazel eyes, brows arched like blackbirds’ wings. The bones of his face, the shape of him, the warmth of him. She should have left him alone, walked away when she first felt her heart move, but she had always loved him, against caution.
“When were you on Highway 12?” Brooke asked, giving in to a sudden impulse.
“What?”
“Outside Buffalo Cross, on Highway 12, you said you’d been that way before.”
“Oh, that. I was Holly’s age.”
“Where were you going?”
“The city, with my mum.”
“You never told me you’d gone there.”
“We didn’t get through,” he said. “You know how it was, right after the state fell. Things were shutting down. Mum had her birth certificate, so they had to let her in, but I was born out here and they wouldn’t let me go with her.”
“Why did she want to go?” Brooke had never known Milo’s mother to talk much about her upbringing in the city. She’d been so much a part of the community in Buxton—volunteer, librarian, town councilor—it was hard to remember that she hadn’t always been there.
“She wanted me to meet her family,” Milo said. “She missed them. And I think she was scared.”
“Scared?”
“You know. Being dark.”
Brooke could hear the fatigue in his voice.
“I’m sorry for the stuff my mom said.”
Milo raised his eyebrows. “I remember wondering if Mum was even planning to come back from that trip,” he said. “Or if she was just fed up. She packed so much stuff. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t let me through. Maybe she was trying to take me home.”
Brooke imagined arriving in a Buxton where there was no Milo. She would have moved on in the spring as she’d planned.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for staying.”
Milo smiled, and though he wasn’t touching her, Brooke felt the quiet hum respond in her bones just the same.
Home.
They drew the dusty blind and climbed in on either side of the girls, shoving their heavy, unconscious forms to the center to make room. Brooke slept nearest the door, with the rifle next to the bed. Other than some teenagers shouting drunkenly in the night, nothing disturbed their rest.
THE EXCHANGE STATION was housed in a former trade school. Fluorescent tubes lit the lofty space that had once been the foyer, and the floor was waxed to a high polish. Brooke didn’t remember the place being so rich. The flow of trade must have steadied in the years since she’d left. Oil, agriculture, drugs—the city needed to be fed, and the country needed money; it had always been so.
“I can’t cash this without ID,” the woman at the counter told her, pushing the check back at Brooke through a semicircular hole in her glass shield. Her fingernails were long and painted a thick wine color, with sequins stuck to them. “I don’t know you.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I don’t know this is you.” She tapped the name on the check with the tip of a talon: click, click. “Brooke Holland. I’ve got no way of knowing.”
“Ask him,” Brooke said, gesturing at another exchange officer seated farther down the counter. The woman was twenty-five, if that, but the man was older, thin and mousy, past sixty; Brooke thought she remembered his face.
The woman sighed and heaved herself up off her stool to confer with the other officer. He looked up from the check and peered at Brooke without approaching. Something flashed in his expression, too quick for Brooke to interpret.
“Could be,” Brooke heard him say. “Looks like the mother.”
“Well, they made it out to her, so if that’s her I have to cash it,” the woman said.
“It’s got a serial number,” the man said. “They’ll pay it out either way.”
The woman stumped back to the counter. “It’s going to take a while,” she said, making to slide her window shut.
“Wait,” Brooke said, digging the old phone Holly had given her out of her pocket. “I need the Internet, too.”
The woman sighed again and slid Brooke a plasticized card listing rates.
“I don’t know how this works,” Brooke said, returning to Milo and the girls with a sticky note bearing the wireless password in the woman’s big, rounded letters.
“This thing is so old, I don’t know if it’ll even power up,” Milo said, taking the phone and the sticky note from Brooke.
“It will,” Holly said. “The new battery’s good.”
Milo held down a button on the side of the phone until the glass lit up blue. After a moment, the blue was replaced by an image of Brooke and the girls on their porch at home. Brooke had forgotten all about the photo. Milo had taken it when they were a few years into cranberry farming. Sal was a baby, drowsing in a bouncy chair. Brooke was steadying Holly where she sat on the porch railing, grinning to show the gap where she’d just lost her first tooth. That was the reason for the photo, Brooke remembered now. Milo had been capturing Holly’s lost tooth to show his mother in town.
Milo poked a symbol in the corner and a keyboard appeared. He typed in the letters from the sticky note carefully, then waited. A green wheel twirled in the middle of the screen, and finally a mess of colorful headlines and pictures appeared, ads that popped out of nowhere and traveled across the screen. Holly and Sal crowded over his shoulders, staring.
“What do you know?” Milo said. “That’s incredible.”
“It’s working?”
“Yeah. Where do you want to go?”
Brooke named the e-mail platform, hoping it still existed; it was the only thing she remembered. Milo tapped the screen.
They waited. The screen changed. Milo handed her the phone.
The site looked different than Brooke remembered, but slowly, it came back to her, how to touch her finger in the box and get the keyboard to show. Holly and Sal reached out, unable to contain their curiosity.
“Give me some space,” Brooke said. “You can see it after.”
Brooke entered the password her teacher had made her memorize so long ago. It worked; a window opened. There were still those initial messages from when she and her siblings had first gotten their accounts (Ha-ha, Callum says look up pornos). But there were others, too, bolded. Unread. Brooke’s breath quickened when she realized what they were.
He’d written intermittently in the years after she left.
Just in case, read one subject line.
Another: Callum.
Another: Moving . . .
The last one was from only a year ago, on her birthday: Are you out there?
He was working at a restaurant. He had a boyfriend named Rafe. Anita’s kids were in school; they took after Anita, but mostly in good ways. He sent her an address in the city, and later another one, after they moved in with Rafe.
Robin said he knew Brooke would never see his messages, but he wanted to believe she was alive. Delia’s shot had grazed him that day in the alley; he was only lucky she hadn’t stopped to check. When he recovered from the shock and saw Brooke lying there, motionless, he’d left to get help, but Edmund and Anita,
returning to the spot, found her body gone. For years, Robin had given up the idea of leaving—their family was in mourning, and he felt responsible—but later, after it all fell apart anyway, he still had the money he’d saved, so he’d gone to the city with the kids. He hadn’t been back to see Emily. It was too much, he said, too crazy. If Brooke was alive, he hoped she’d found something better.
Brooke read each of the messages twice, three times, laughing, wiping away tears when they blurred the words. When she looked up, the manicured officer was still at her counter. Holly and Sal were off exploring the far edges of the room with Milo. The phone battery was at 50 percent.
Brooke tapped on the arrow to reply.
For several minutes, she sat frozen, unable to think what to say to her brother. She had to tell him about Emily. That almost seemed easier than the rest of it.
In the end, she said nothing of how she’d gotten out of Shaw Station alive and left him behind. When they came face to face, she would try to explain. For now, she settled on a brief account—Buxton, the farm, Milo and the girls. She did not tell him what had happened to bring her home, nor how Emily had died. “It was quick,” she told him. “She’s buried in the garden.”
She told him how happy she was to hear about his life, and that he was safe. She wasn’t sure when she’d be able to check e-mail again, or how long until she could come find him, and meet Rafe and the children, but she would come, somehow, someday. She and Milo had the farm, still, and decisions to make. She told him she missed him, that his messages meant more than she could say.
She hesitated over how to end the letter. I love you felt too much like goodbye. So she just wrote her name.
WHEN THE EXCHANGE officer had counted the bills out for Brooke, and Milo had pried the phone away from the girls, who had discovered (how?) a game of stacking marbles, they went in search of food and the other things they would need for their trip home.
They had outfitted themselves in new winter coats and boots and were standing in front of a grocery store window, listening to Holly point out ingredients she’d read about and never seen before, when a man approached and gestured Brooke aside. She recognized him as the mousy older man from the exchange station.
“You’re Brooke Holland?”
“Yes,” Brooke answered, instinctively cautious. Holly’s explanation of umeboshi paste trailed off.
“What are you here for?” The man was nervous. His eyes darted around.
“Groceries,” Brooke said.
“Are you staying in Shaw Station?”
“Why?” Brooke asked. She could feel Milo and the girls listening.
“Word’s got around,” the man said. “If anyone thinks you’re selling—”
“I’m not selling anything. I told you, I’m buying groceries.”
“You can’t be coming in as an independent. If they think you’re trying to get a line through the exchange station—”
“We’re not staying. Don’t worry.”
“You’d be putting a lot of people at risk.”
“I said, we’re leaving.”
“Then you’d better hurry.” The man was moving away before he’d even stopped speaking.
THEY PACKED QUICKLY. Milo and Holly were tense, Sal a nervous wreck. Brooke wanted to reassure them that it wasn’t like before, that no one in Shaw Station wanted to bother with them, that they were simply getting out of the way of trouble. But she knew it wouldn’t be so simple to dismiss their fears again.
When they were dressed and ready, Brooke retrieved the saddle and paid for the room. Their host seemed disappointed to see their money go until Brooke asked if there was a way to get off the property unseen; then the girl’s face closed, she gave clipped directions to an alley behind the motel, and the door shut. Brooke heard a bolt slide.
Brooke led them through a tangle of back alleys, away from the center of town. Rather than go straight to Highway 12 and have their route observed, she took them down to the river. At dusk and dawn, people fished there, but at midday, the shore was deserted, hidden from view by sedge grass.
They followed the old footpath along the river, heading for the edge of town. The air was cold, and they wrapped their new coats more closely around them. In the distance, Brooke saw a green and white sign pointing the way up a rise of land to a picnic area and scenic lookout. There would be a view of the highway from the top.
Brooke hesitated. Below her, the river flowed past a boat landing, where it looked as if someone had lately been living; bits of a dismantled shelter were littered through the reeds. She knew this place. It was the same landing she and Robin had found that day, empty save for what Brooke had taken for a sandy-colored boulder.
Cawley’s chin was not yet split, then. Brooke’s shoulder not ripped. Robin not gone to the city in charge of orphaned children. They were still children themselves, that day, running through late summer grass, the sun on their skin. Soon, a siren would sound, calling them back to their parents, but not yet.
Brooke remembered standing out in the river, her feet on the burning rock. There’d been no sign of the snake until Cawley had shouted, pointing off to the right, and they had seen it swim out from the reeds into open water, head high, body a liquid line.
When the snake reached the middle of the river, the current had pulled it downstream, right past them. The three of them had watched amazed, as the snake fought to maintain its course. Then it was clear of the current and making once again for the far shore, only its head visible.
Finally, it was too small to trace and they lost sight of it.
Acknowledgments
In drafting and revising The Captive, I was greatly assisted by the thoughts and words of Howard Akler, Emily Anglin, Saul Davis, Susan Kernohan, Bob Kotyk, Mark Mann, Adina Muskat, Jocelyn Parr, Aidan Roman-Crossland, Hannah Spear, Julia Tausch, and Adam Wilkins. Thank you, friends.
Ray Bucknell shared valuable advice on horses, and James Robinson on guns. All errors that remain are my own. Historian Derek Murray’s graduate work on the failed settlement narrative attached to my home community of Brudenell, Ontario, provided inspiration and helped clarify my thinking, as did Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Thank you to the Toronto Arts Council for supporting an early draft of this work.
Thank you to my agent, Martha Webb, for her clear sight, straight talk, and kind support, and for finding this book an excellent home.
Thank you to Jennifer Lambert, Sara Birmingham, and Zack Wagman, for their patience with a first-time author, for their excellent edits, and for treating this book with greater generosity and respect than I ever anticipated. Thank you as well to the excellent teams at HarperCollins Canada and Ecco who helped bring The Captive into the world, including heroic copy editor Sue Sumeraj.
Affection and appreciation to my outstanding colleagues at Frontier College, who do the vital work of raising literacy in Canada every day, and who sustained my efforts to be a working mom and a writer in the same lifetime.
Two writers of great heart have especially helped me over the years in ways big and small. Thank you to Sandra Gulland for giving me my first job and showing me this path even existed. And to dear friend Pasha Malla for directions, roadside repairs, and the occasional lift along the way. You will call it nothing, but it is not.
Deepest love and gratitude to my parents, my brother, and our motley family, to Etan’s family, and, most of all, to our children.
Finally, I am forever thankful to Etan Muskat—story genius, feminist, true heart—who makes everything better. Huspant, you figured this book out with me, you adjusted our lives a hundred different ways so I could write it, and you kept the kids happy while I did. You inspire me, you make me laugh, and you give me strength. You’re the best.
About the Author
FIONA KING FOSTER was raised in Brudenell, Ontario, a rural community now misleadingly referred to as a ghost town. Her writin
g has been featured in a number of publications, including the Globe and Mail and Maisonneuve. She lives in Toronto and works with the national literacy organization Frontier College. The Captive is her first novel.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at harpercollins.ca.
Praise for The Captive
“Fiona King Foster has written a tension-wire novel, suspenseful from the first line to the last. A story about a fractured country quickly transforms into a study of the ways in which the darkest parts of our history follow us around like shadows.”
—OMAR EL AKKAD, AUTHOR OF American War
“The Captive is a wonder, a wild horse in the sure and steady hands of the brilliant Fiona King Foster. Electrifying and otherworldly, The Captive gives us a new feminist heroine, an Offred traversing Cormac McCarthy’s hazardous dreamscapes. . . . It stays with you, leaving a profound impression—ghostly, gorgeous, and moving.”
—CLAUDIA DEY, AUTHOR OF Heartbreaker and Stunt
“Rarely does a first novel feel so fully, expertly realized as Fiona King Foster’s The Captive. There’s everything here you’d want from a book: compelling characters, suspenseful storytelling, crystalline language, and a portrait of a near-future that, though troubled, pulses with a human heartbeat of love, and honor, and hope.”
—PASHA MALLA, AUTHOR OF Kill the Mall
“In this riveting debut, Foster vividly brings to life a gritty, hardscrabble, and all too plausible near-future and a resolute heroine who defends those she loves throughout a harrowing ordeal. The Captive is a propulsive, word-perfect thriller about the ghosts that haunt us and the strengths that lie within.”
—SALEEMA NAWAZ, AUTHOR OF Songs for the End of the World
Copyright
The Captive
Copyright © 2021 by Fiona King Foster.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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