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.