There are more of us than you think: That’s another one of Alex’s favorite expressions, his constant refrain. Sympathizers everywhere, uncured and cured, positioned as regulators, police officers, government officials, scientists. That’s how we’ll get past the guard huts, he tells me. One of the most active sympathizers in Portland is matched with the guard who works the night shift at the northern tip of Tukey’s Bridge, right where we’ll be crossing. She and Alex have developed a sign. On nights he wants to cross over, he leaves a certain flyer in her mailbox, the stupid photocopied kind that takeout delis and dry cleaners give out. This one advertises for a free eye exam with Dr. Swild (which seems pretty obvious to me, but Alex says that resisters and sympathizers live with so much stress they need to be allowed their little private jokes) and whenever she finds it she makes sure to put an extra-large dose of Valium in the coffee she makes for her husband to drink during his shift.
“Poor guy,” Alex says, grinning. “No matter how much coffee he drinks, he just can’t seem to stay awake.” I can tell how much the resistance means to him, and how proud he is of the fact that it is there, healthy, thriving, shooting its arms through Portland. I try to smile, but my cheeks feel stiff. It still blows my mind that everything I’ve been taught is so wrong, and it’s still hard for me to think of the sympathizers and resisters as allies and not enemies.
But sneaking over the border will make me one of them beyond a shadow of a doubt. At the same time, I can’t seriously consider backing out now. I want to go; and if I’m honest with myself, I became a sympathizer a long time ago, when Alex asked me whether I wanted to meet him at Back Cove and I said yes. I seem to have only hazy memories of the girl I was before then—the girl who always did what she was told and never lied and counted the days until her procedure with feelings of excitement, not horror and dread. The girl who was afraid of everyone and everything. The girl who was afraid of herself.
When I get home from the store the next day, I make a big point of asking Carol if I can borrow her cell phone. Then I text Hana: Sleepover 2nite w A? This has been our code recently whenever I need her to cover for me. We’ve told Carol we’ve been spending a lot of time with Allison Doveney, who recently graduated with us. The Doveneys are even richer than Hana’s family, and Allison is a stuck-up bitch. Hana originally protested against using her as the mysterious “A,” on the grounds that she didn’t even like to think about pretend hanging out with her, but I convinced her in the end. Carol would never call the Doveneys to check up on me. She’d be too intimidated, and probably embarrassed—my family is impure, tainted by Marcia’s husband’s defection and, of course, by my mother, and Mr. Doveney is the president and founder of the Portland chapter of the DFA, Deliria-Free America. Allison Doveney could hardly stand to look at me when we were in school together, and way back in elementary school, after my mother died, she asked to switch desks to be farther away from me, telling the teacher that I smelled like something dying.
Hana’s response comes almost immediately. U got it. C u tonight.
I wonder what Allison would think if she knew I’d been using her as cover for my boyfriend. She would freak out for sure, and the thought makes me smile.
A little before eight o’clock I come downstairs with my overnight bag slung conspicuously over my shoulder. I’ve even let a little bit of my pajamas poke out. I’ve packed the whole bag exactly as I would have if I were really going to Hana’s. When Carol gives me a flitting smile and tells me to have a good time, I feel a brief pang of guilt. I lie so often and so easily now.
But it’s not enough to stop me. Once outside I head toward the West End, just in case Jenny or Carol is watching from the windows. Only after I reach Spring Street do I double back toward Deering Avenue and head for 37 Brooks. The walk is long, and I make it to Deering Highlands just as the last of the light is swirling out of the sky. As always, the streets here are deserted. I push through the rusted metal gate that surrounds the property, slide aside the loose slats covering one ground-floor window, and hoist myself into the house.
The darkness surprises me, and for a moment I stand there, blinking, until my eyes adjust to the low light. The air feels sticky, and stale, and the house smells like mildew. Various shapes begin to emerge, and I make my way into the living room, and to the mold-spotted couch. Its springs are busted and half of its stuffing has been torn out, probably by mice, but you can tell that once it must have been pretty—elegant, even.
I fish my clock out from my bag and set the alarm for eleven thirty. It’s going to be a long night. Then I stretch out on the bumpy couch, balling my backpack underneath my head. It’s not the world’s most comfortable pillow, but it will do.
I close my eyes and let the sounds of the mice scrabbling, and the low groans and mysterious tickings of the walls, lull me to sleep.
I wake up in the darkness from a nightmare about my mother. I sit up straight, and for one panicked second don’t know where I am. The faulty springs squeal underneath me and then I remember: 37 Brooks. I fumble for my alarm clock and see that it’s already 11:20. I know I should get up but I still feel groggy from the heat and the dream, and for a few more moments I just sit there, taking deep breaths. I’m sweating; the hair is sticking to the back of my neck.
My dream was the one I usually have but this time reversed: I was floating in the ocean, treading water, watching my mother perched on a crumbling ledge hundreds and hundreds of feet above me—so far I couldn’t make out any of her features, just the blurry lines of her silhouette, framed against the sun. I was trying to call out a warning to her, trying to lift my arms and wave at her to go back, away from the edge, but the more I struggled the more the water seemed to drag at me and hold me back, the consistency of glue, suctioning my arms in place and oozing in my throat to freeze the words there. And all the time sand was drifting around me like snow, and I knew at any second she would fall and smash her head on the jagged rocks, which poked up through the water like sharpened fingernails.
Then she was falling, flailing, a black spot growing bigger and bigger against the blazing sun, and I was trying to scream but I couldn’t, and as the figure grew larger I realized it wasn’t my mother headed for the rocks.
It was Alex.
That’s when I woke up.
I finally stand, slightly dizzy, trying to ignore a feeling of dread. I go slowly, gropingly, to the window, and am relieved once I’m outside, even though I’m in more danger on the streets. But at least there’s a bit of a breeze. The atmosphere in the house was stifling.
Alex is already waiting for me when I arrive at Back Cove, crouching in the shadows cast by a group of trees that stand near the old parking lot. He is so perfectly concealed that I almost trip over him. He reaches up and draws me down into a crouch. In the moonlight his eyes seem to glow, like a cat’s.
He gestures silently across Back Cove, to the line of twinkling lights just before the border: the guard huts. From a distance they look like a line of bright white lanterns strung up for a nighttime picnic—cheerful, almost. Twenty feet beyond the security points is the actual fence, and beyond the fence, the Wilds. They’ve never looked quite so strange to me as they do now, dancing and swaying in the wind. I’m glad Alex and I agreed not to speak until we crossed over. The lump in my throat is making it difficult to breathe, much less say anything.
We’ll be crossing over at the tip of Tukey’s Bridge, on the northeast point of the cove: if we were swimming, a direct diagonal from our meet-up point. Alex pumps my hand three times. That’s our signal to move.
I follow him as we skirt the perimeter of the cove, being careful to avoid the marshland; it looks deceptively like grass, especially in the dark, but you can get sucked down almost knee deep before you realize the difference. Alex darts from shadow to shadow, moving noiselessly on the grass. In places he seems to vanish completely before my eyes, to melt into darkness.