Even after the iron gates clang shut behind us and the Crypts recedes in the distance, the feeling of being penned in on all sides doesn’t go away. There’s still a terrible, squeezing pressure in my chest, and I have to struggle to suck in full breaths.
An ancient prison bus with a wheezing motor carries us away from the border, to Deering. From there Alex and I walk back toward the center of Portland, staying on opposite sides of the sidewalk. Every couple of feet he swivels his head to look at me, opening and closing his mouth, like he’s pronouncing a series of inaudible words. I know he’s worried about me, and probably waiting for me to break down, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes or speak to him. I keep my eyes locked straight ahead of me, keep my feet cycling forward. Other than the terrible pain in my chest and stomach, my body feels numb. I can’t feel the ground underneath me or the wind zipping through the trees, skating past my face; can’t feel the warmth of the sun, which has, against all odds, broken through the terrible black clouds, lighting the world up a strange greenish color, as though everything is submerged under water.
When I was little and my mother died—when I thought she’d died—I remember going out for my first-ever run and getting hopelessly lost at the end of Congress, a street I’d been playing on my whole life. I turned a corner and found myself in front of the Bubble and Soap Cleaners and had been suddenly unable to remember where I was, and whether home was to the left or to the right. Nothing looked the same. Everything looked like a painted replica of itself, fragile and distorted, like I was caught in a fun house hall of mirrors reflecting my regular world back to me.
That’s how I feel now, again. Lost and found and lost again, all at once. And now I know somewhere in this world, in the wildness on the other side of the fence, my mother is alive and breathing and sweating and moving and thinking. I wonder if she is thinking about me, and the pain shoots deeper, makes me lose my breath completely so I have to stop walking and double up, one hand on my stomach.
We’re still off-peninsula, not far from 37 Brooks, where the houses are separated by large tracts of torn-up grass and run-down gardens, full of litter. Still, there are people on the streets, including a man I take for a regulator right away: Even now, just before noon, he has a bullhorn swinging from his neck and a wooden baton strapped to one thigh. Alex must see him too. He stays a couple of feet away from me, scanning the street, trying to appear unconcerned, but he murmurs in my direction, “Can you move?”
I have to fight my way through the pain. It is radiating through my whole body now, throbbing up into my head. “I think so,” I gasp out.
“Alley. On your left. Go.”
I straighten up as much as I can—enough, at least, to hobble into the alley between two larger buildings. Halfway down the alley there are a few metal Dumpsters, arranged parallel to one another, buzzing with flies. The smell is disgusting, like being back in the Crypts, but I sink down between them anyway, grateful for the concealment and the chance to sit. As soon as I’m resting, the throbbing in my head subsides. I tilt my head back against the brick, feel the world swaying, a ship cut loose from its mooring.
Alex joins me a few moments later, squatting in front of me, brushing the hair away from my face. It’s the first time he’s been able to touch me all day.
“I’m sorry, Lena,” he says, and I know he really means it. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Twelve years,” I say simply. “I thought she was dead for twelve years.”
For a while we stay there in silence. Alex rubs circles on my shoulders, arms, and knees—anywhere he can reach, really, like he’s desperate to maintain physical contact with me. I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.
She’s out there somewhere, breathing, thirsty, eating, walking, swimming. Impossible, now, to contemplate going on with my life, impossible to imagine sleeping, and lacing up my shoes for a run, and helping Carol load the dishes, and even lying in the house with Alex, when I know that she exists: that she is out there, orbiting as far from me as a distant constellation.