The flyers are just the beginning. I notice that there are more regulators on the streets than usual, and there are rumors—neither confirmed nor denied by Mrs. Hargrove, who comes over to deliver a scarf that my mother left—that there will soon be a raid. Mayor Hargrove is insistent—both on television and when we once again dine with his family, this time at their golf club—that there is no resurgence of the disease and no reason to worry. But the regulators, and the offers of rewards, and the rumors of a possible raid, tell a different story.
For days there is not even a whisper of another underground gathering. Every morning I rub concealer into the Devil’s Kiss on my neck, until at last it disperses and breaks apart, leaving me both relieved and saddened. I haven’t seen Steve Hilt anywhere—not at the beach, not at Back Cove or by the Old Port—and Angelica has been distant and guarded, although she manages to slip me a note explaining that her parents have been watching her more closely since the news of Sarah Sterling’s exposure to deliria.
Fred takes me golfing. I don’t play, so instead I trail behind him on the course as he shoots a near-perfect game. He is charming and courteous and does a semi-decent job of pretending to be interested in what I have to say. People turn to look at us as we pass. Everyone knows Fred. The men greet him heartily, ask after his father, congratulate him on getting paired, although no one breathes a word about his first wife. The women stare at me with frank and unconcealed resentment.
I am lucky.
I am suffocating.
The regulators crowd the streets.
Lena still doesn’t call.
Then one hot evening at the end of July, there she is: She barrels past me on the street, her eyes trained deliberately on the pavement, and I have to call her name three times before she will turn around. She stops a little way up the hill, her face blank—unreadable—and makes no effort to come toward me. I have to jog uphill to her.
“So what?” I say as I get closer, panting a little. “You’re just going to walk by me now?” I meant for the question to come out as a joke, but instead it sounds like an accusation.
She frowns. “I didn’t see you,” she says.
I want to believe her. I look away, biting my lip. I feel like I could burst into tears—right there in the shimmering, late-afternoon heat, with the city spread out like a mirage beyond Munjoy Hill. I want to ask her where she’s been, and tell her I miss her, and say that I need her help.
But instead what comes out is: “Why didn’t you call me back?”
She blurts out at the same time: “I got my matches.”
I’m momentarily taken aback. I can’t believe that after days of abrupt and unexplained silence, this is what she would say to me first. I swallow back all the things I was going to say to her and make my tone polite, disinterested.
“Did you accept yet?” I say.
“You called?” she says. Again, we both speak at the same time.
She seems genuinely surprised. On the other hand, Lena has always been hard to read. Most of her thoughts, most of her true feelings, are buried deep.
“I left you, like, three messages,” I say, watching her face closely.
“I never got any messages,” Lena says quickly. I don’t know whether she is telling the truth. Lena, after all, always insisted that after the cure we wouldn’t be friends—our lives would be too different, our social circles too remote. Maybe she has decided that already the differences between us are too great.
I flash back to how she looked at me at the party at Roaring Brook Farms—the way she jerked away when I tried to reach out to her, lips curling back. Suddenly I feel as though I am only dreaming. I am dreaming of a too-colored, too-vivid day, while images pass soundlessly in front of me—Lena is moving her mouth, two men are loading buckets into a truck, a little girl wearing a too-big swimsuit is scowling at us from a doorway—and I am speaking too, responding, even smiling, while my words are sucked into silence, into the bright white light of a sun-drenched dream. Then we are walking. I am walking with her toward her house, except I am only drifting, floating, skating above the pavement.
Lena speaks; I answer. The words are only drifting too—they are a nonsense-language, a dream-babble.
Tonight I will attend another party in Deering Highlands with Angelica. Steve will be there. The coast is once again clear. Lena looks at me, repulsed and fearful, when I tell her this.
It doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore. We are sledding once again—into whiteness, into a blanket of quiet.