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It’s a famous proverb—one that comes, incidentally, from the Book of Magdalena, a passage of the Book I know well. Magdalena is my namesake. I used to scour those pages, looking for traces of my mother, for her reasons and her message to me.
Book 9, Proverb 17. I type 917 into the keypad: If I’m right, I have only one number to go. I’m about to try final digits at random, when something within the yard flutters, catches my eye. Four white paper lanterns, stamped with the DFA logo, have been strung up above the porch. They are flapping in the wind, and one has been stripped almost loose of the string; it dangles awkwardly, like a semi-severed head, tapping a rhythm against the front door. Except for the DFA logo, the lanterns look like decorations you might find at a child’s birthday party. They look strangely incongruous above the massive stone porch, swaying high above the bleak yard.
A sign. Has to be.
9174. The gate clicks as the locks retract, and I’m in.
I slip into the front yard quickly, closing the gate behind me, taking in as much as I can. Five floors, including a sunken basement level; curtains all drawn, everything dark. I don’t even bother with the front door. It will be locked, and if there are guards anywhere, they are no doubt waiting in the hall. Instead I slip around the side of the house and find the concrete stairs that lead to a warped wooden door: the basement entrance. A small window set in the brick should allow me to see inside, but a set of heavy wooden window slats obscures the view completely. I will have to go in blind, and pray that there are no guards at this entrance.
This door is also locked, but the doorknob is old and loose, and should be relatively easy to pick. I drop to my knees and take out my knife. Tack showed me how to pick locks once with the narrow tip of a razor, not knowing that Hana and I had perfected the skill years ago. Her parents used to keep all the cookies and sweets locked in a pantry. I wedge the knife tip in the narrow space between the door and its frame. It takes just a few moments of twisting and jiggling before I feel the lock release. I tuck the knife into the pocket of my wind breaker—I’ll need it close now—take a breath, and push through the door and into the house.
It is very dark. The first thing I notice is the smell: a laundry smell, of lemon-scented towels and dryer sheets. The second thing I notice is the quiet. I lean against the door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. Shapes begin to assert themselves: a washer and dryer in the corner, a room crisscrossed with laundry lines.
I wonder whether it was here that Julian’s brother was kept; whether he died here, alone, curled on the cement floor, under dripping sheets with the smell of moisture clotting his nostrils. I push the image quickly from my mind. Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.
I exhale a little bit. There is no one with me down here—I can feel it.
I move through the laundry room, ducking under several pairs of men’s briefs, which are clipped to a line. The thought flashes through my mind that one of them might be Julian’s.
Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.
Beyond the laundry room is a small pantry stacked with household cleaning supplies, and beyond that, a set of narrow wooden stairs that leads to the first floor. I ease my way onto the stairs, moving at a crawl. The stairs are warped and look like they will be loud.
At the top is a door. I pause, listening. The house is silent, and a feeling of creeping anxiety starts snaking over my skin. This is not right. It’s too easy. There should be guards, and regulators. There should be footsteps, muffled conversation—something other than this deadweight silence, hanging heavy like a thick blanket.
The moment I ease open the door and step out into the hallway, the realization hits me: Everyone has gone already. I’m too late. They must have moved Julian early this morning, and now the house is empty.
Still, I feel compelled to check every room. A panicked feeling is building inside of me—I’m too late, he’s gone, it’s over—and the only thing I can do to suppress it is to keep moving, keep slipping soundlessly across the carpeted floors and searching every closet, as though Julian might appear within one.
I check the living room, which smells of furniture polish. The heavy curtains are pulled shut, keeping out a view of the street. There is a pristine kitchen and a formal dining room that looks unused; a bathroom, which smells cloyingly of lavender; a small den dominated by the largest television screen I have ever seen in my life. There is a study, stacked with DFA pamphlets and other pro-cure propaganda. Farther down the hall, I come across a locked door. I remember what Julian told me about Mr. Fineman’s second study. This must be the room of forbidden books.
Upstairs, there are three bedrooms. The first one is unused, sterile, and filled with the smell of must. I feel, instinctively, that this was Julian’s brother’s room, and that it has remained shut up since his death.
I inhale sharply when I reach Julian’s room. I know it is his. It smells like him. Even though he was a prisoner here, there are no signs of struggle. Even the bed is made, the soft-looking blue covers pulled haphazardly over green-and-white-striped sheets.
For a second I have the urge to climb into his bed and cry, to wrap his blankets around me the way I let him wrap his arms around my waist at Salvage. His closet door is open a crack; I see shelves filled with faded denim jeans, and swinging button-down shirts. The normalcy of it almost kills me. Even in a world turned upside down, a world of war and insanity, people hang their clothing; they fold their pants; they make their beds.
It is the only way.
The next room is much larger, dominated by two double beds, separated by several feet of space: the master bedroom. I catch a glimpse of myself in a large mirror hanging over the bed and recoil. I haven’t seen my reflection in days. My face is pale, my skin stretched tight over my cheekbones. My chin is smeared with dirt, and my clothing is covered with it too. My hair is frizzing from the rain. I look like I belong in a mental institution.
I rummage through Mrs. Fineman’s clothing and find a soft cashmere sweater and a pair of clean, black denim jeans. They’re too big around the waist, but once I belt the pants I look almost normal. I remove my knife from my backpack and wrap the blade in a T-shirt so I can safely carry it in the pocket of my wind breaker. I ball up the rest of my clothes and stuff them into the very back of the closet, behind the shoe rack. I check the clock on the bedside table. Eight thirty a. m.
On my way downstairs, I spot a bookshelf in a hallway alcove, and the small statue of a rooster perched on the highest shelf. I can’t explain what overcomes me, or why it matters, but all of a sudden I need to know whether Thomas Fineman has been keeping the key to the second study there all these years. He’s the kind of man who would do that, even after the hiding place had been discovered by his son. He would trust that the beating had served as a sufficient deterrent. He would do it as a test and a tease, so that every time Julian saw the stupid thing, he would remember, and regret.
The bookshelf isn’t particularly big, and the last shelf isn’t very high—I’m sure Julian could easily reach it now—but I have to stand on a footstool to get at the rooster. As soon as I pull the porcelain animal toward me, something rattles in its belly. The head of the rooster unscrews, and I tip a metal key into my palm.
Just then I hear the muffled sound of footsteps, and someone saying, “Yes, yes, exactly. ” My heart stops: Thomas Fineman’s voice. At the far end of the hallway, I see the handle on the front door begin to rattle as he works a key in the lock.
Instinctively, I jump off the footstool, still clutching the key in my palm, and whirl around to the locked door. It takes me a few seconds of fumbling before I can make the key fit, and in that time I hear the front door locks slide open, two of them, and I am frozen in the hallway, terrified, as the door opens a crack.
Then Fineman says, “Damn it. ” Pause. “No, Mitch, not you. I dropped something. ”
He must be on the phone. In the time it takes him to pause and scoop up whatever he has dropped, I manage to get the key in the lock, and I slip quickly into the forbidden study, closing the door a split second before the front door closes as well, a double-heartbeat rhythm.
Then the footsteps are coming down the hall. I back away from the door, as though Fineman will be able to smell me. The room is very dim—the heavy velvet curtains at the window are imperfectly closed, allowing a bare ribbon of gray light to penetrate. Towers of books and artwork spiral toward the ceiling like twisted totems. I bump into a table and have to spin around, catching a heavy, leather-bound volume at the last second, before it thuds to the floor.
Fineman pauses outside the study door, and I could faint. My hands are shaking.
I do not remember whether I put the head back on the rooster.
Please, please, please, keep moving.
“Uh-huh,” he is saying into the phone. His voice is flinty, clipped: not at all the upbeat drawl he uses when he speaks on radio interviews and at DFA meetings. “Yes, exactly. Ten a. m. It’s been decided. ”
Another pause, and then he says, “Well, there really is no choice, is there? How would it look if I tried to appeal?”
His footsteps retreat up the stairs and I exhale a little, although I’m still too afraid to move. I’m terrified I’ll bump into something again and disrupt one of the piles of books. Instead I wait, frozen, until Fineman’s footsteps once again pound down the stairs.
“I got it,” he is saying, as his voice grows fainter: He is leaving. “Eighteenth and Sixth. Northeastern Medical. ”
Then, faintly, I hear the front door open and shut, and I am once again left in silence.
I wait another few minutes before moving, just to be absolutely sure that I’m alone, that Fineman won’t be coming back. My palms are so sweaty I can barely return the book to its place. It is an oversized volume, stamped with gold lettering, perched on a table next to a dozen identical books. I think it must be a kind of encyclopedia until I see the words EASTERN SEABOARD, NEW YORK—TERRORISTS, ANARCHISTS, DISSENTERS etched on one of the spines.
I feel, suddenly, as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. I squat down, peering at the spines more closely. They are not books, but records: an enumerated list of all the most dangerous incarcerated criminals in the United States, divided by area and prison system.
I should leave. Time is running out, and I need to find Julian, even if I’m too late to help him. But the compulsion is there, equally strong, to find her—to see her name. It’s a compulsion to see whether she has made it onto the list, even though I know she must have. My mother was kept for twelve years inside Ward Six, a place of solitary confinement reserved exclusively for the most dangerous resisters and political agitators.
I don’t know why I care. My mother escaped. She scratched through the walls, over years, over a decade—she tunneled out like an animal. And now she is free somewhere. I have seen her in my dreams, running through a portion of the Wilds that is always sunny and green, where food is always abundant.
Still, I have to see her name.
It doesn’t take me long to find Eastern Seaboard, Maine—Connecticut. The list of political prisoners who have been incarcerated in the Crypts in the past twenty years spans fifty pages. The names are not listed alphabetically, but by date. The pages are handwritten, in chicken scrawls of varying legibility; this book has obviously passed through many hands. I have to move closer to the window, to the thin fissure of light, to read. My hands are shaking, and I steady the book on the corner of a desk—which is, itself, almost completely concealed with other books, forbidden titles from the days before the cure. I’m too focused on the list of names—each one a person, each one a life, sucked away by stone walls—to care or look closer. It gives me only marginal comfort to know that some of these people must have escaped after the bombing of the Crypts.
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