“Portland?” I parrot the word without meaning to speak. My mother glances up at me, and I think she looks afraid. Then she drops her eyes.
“That’s where you come from, right?” Raven asks me.
I lean back against the sink, close my eyes for a second, and have a vision of my mother on the beach, running ahead of me, laughing, kicking up dark sand, a loose green tunic dress snapping around her ankles. I open my eyes again quickly and manage to nod.
“I can’t go back there.”
The words come out with more force than I intended, and everyone turns to look at me.
“If we go anywhere, we all go together,” Raven says.
“There’s a big underground in Portland,” Max says. “The network is growing—has been since the Incidents. That was only the beginning. What’s going to happen next . . .” He shakes his head, eyes bright. “It’s going to be big.”
“I can’t,” I repeat. “And I won’t.” Memories are coming fast: Hana running next to me by Back Cove, our sneakers squelching in the mud; fireworks over the bay on the Fourth of July, sending tentacles of light over the water; Alex and me lying, laughing, on the blanket at 37 Brooks; Grace shivering next to me in the bedroom at Aunt Carol’s, wrapping her thin arms around my waist, her smell of grape bubblegum. Layers and layers of memories, a life I have tried to bury and kill—a past that was dead, like Raven always said—suddenly surging, threatening to pull me under.
And with the memories comes the guilt, another feeling I have tried so hard to bury. I left them: Hana and Grace, and Alex, too. I left them and I ran, and I didn’t look back.
“It’s not your decision,” Tack says.
Raven says, “Don’t be a baby, Lena.”
Normally, I back down when Raven and Tack gang up on me. But not today. I push the guilt down under a heavy fist of anger. Everyone is staring at me, but I can feel my mother’s eyes like a burn—her blank curiosity, as though I’m a specimen in a museum, some ancient, foreign tool whose purpose she’s trying to decipher.
“I won’t.” I slam down the can opener, too hard, on the counter.
“What’s the matter with you?” Raven says in a low voice. But it has gone so quiet in the room, I’m sure that everyone hears.
My throat is so tight I can hardly swallow. I realize, all of a sudden, that I am on the verge of tears. “Ask her,” I manage to say, jerking my chin toward the woman who calls herself Bee.
There’s another moment of silence. All the eyes turn on my mother now. At least she looks guilty—she knows she’s a fraud, this woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn’t even acknowledge her own daughter.
Just then Bram comes sailing down the stairs, whistling. He’s holding a large knife, which is wet with blood—he must have been cutting up the deer. His T-shirt is streaked with it too. He stops when he sees us standing there in silence.
“What’s up?” he says. “What’d I miss?” Then, as he takes in my mom, Cap, and Max: “Who are you?”
The sight of all that blood makes my stomach heave. We’re killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses. Before I can begin crying, I wrench away from the sink and push past Bram so roughly, he lets out a yelp of surprise. I pound up the stairs and throw myself outside, into the open air and the warm afternoon and the throaty sound of the woods opening up to spring.
But even outside I feel claustrophobic. There’s no place to go. There’s no way to escape the crushing sense of loss, the endless exhaustion of time sawing away at the people and things that I’ve loved.
Hana, Grace, Alex, my mother, the sea-spray salt-air Portland mornings and the distant cries of the wheeling seagulls—all of them broken, splintered, lodged somewhere deep, impossible to shake loose.
Maybe, after all, they were right about the cure. I am no happier than I was when I believed that love was a disease. In many ways, I am less happy.
I get only a few minutes away from the safe house before I stop fighting the pressure behind my eyes. My first cries are convulsions, and bring up the taste of bile. I let go completely. I sink onto the tangle of undergrowth and soft moss, put my head between my legs, and sob until I can’t breathe, until I’m spitting up on the leaves between my legs. I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind—by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.
I hear footsteps behind me and know, without turning around, that it will be Raven. “Go away,” I say. My voice sounds thick. I drag the back of my hand across my cheeks and nose.
But it’s my mother who responds. “You’re angry at me,” she says.
I stop crying at once. My whole body goes cold and still. She squats down beside me, and even though I’m careful not to look up, not to look at her at all, I can feel her, can smell the sweat from her skin and hear the ragged pattern of her breathing.