Still, I have to see her name.
It doesn’t take me long to find Eastern Seaboard, Maine—Connecticut. The list of political prisoners who have been incarcerated in the Crypts in the past twenty years spans fifty pages. The names are not listed alphabetically, but by date. The pages are handwritten, in chicken scrawls of varying legibility; this book has obviously passed through many hands. I have to move closer to the window, to the thin fissure of light, to read. My hands are shaking, and I steady the book on the corner of a desk—which is, itself, almost completely concealed with other books, forbidden titles from the days before the cure. I’m too focused on the list of names—each one a person, each one a life, sucked away by stone walls—to care or look closer. It gives me only marginal comfort to know that some of these people must have escaped after the bombing of the Crypts.
I easily find the year my mother was taken—the year I turned six, when she was supposed to have died. It is a section of five or six pages, and probably two hundred names.
I track my finger down the page, feeling dizzy for no reason. I know she will be in the book. And I know, now, that she is safe. But still, I must see it; there is a piece of her that exists in the faded ink traces of her name. Her life was taken by those pen-strokes—and my life was taken too.
Then I see it. My breath catches in my throat. Her name is written neatly, in large, elegant cursive, as though whoever was in possession of the log at the time enjoyed the looping curls of all the l’s and a’s: Annabel Gilles Haloway. The Crypts. Ward Six, Solitary Confinement. Level 8 Agitator.
Next to these words is the prisoner’s intake number. It is printed carefully, neatly: 5996.
My vision tunnels, and in that moment the number seems lit up by an enormous beam. Everything else is blackness, fog.
5996. The faded green number tattooed on the woman who rescued me from Salvage, the woman with the mask.
My mother.
Now my impressions of her are shuffling back, but disjointed, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite interconnect: her voice, low and desperate and something else. Pleading, maybe? Sad? The way she reached out, as though to touch my face, before I swatted her away. The way she kept using my name. Her height—I remember her being so tall, but she is short, like me, probably no more than five-four. The last time I saw her, I was six years old. Of course she seemed tall to me then.
Two words are blazing through me, each one a hot hand, wrenching my insides: impossible and mother.
Guilt and twisting disbelief: shredding me, turning my stomach loose. I didn’t recognize her. I always thought that I would. I imagined she would be just like the mother in my memories, in my dreams—hazy, red-haired, laughing. I imagined she would smell like soap and lemons, that her hands would be soft, smoothed with lotion.
Now, of course, I realize how stupid that is. She spent more than a decade in the Crypts, in a cell. She has changed, hardened.
I slam the book closed, quickly, as though it might help—as though her name is a scurrying insect between the pages, and I can stamp it back into the past. Mother. Impossible. After all that, my hoping and wishing and searching, we were so close. We were touching.
And still she chose not to reveal herself. Still, she chose to walk away.
I am going to be sick. I stumble blindly down the hall, out into the drizzle. I am not thinking, can hardly breathe. It is not until I’ve made it to Sixth Avenue, several blocks away, that the cold begins to clear the fog from my mind. At that point I realize I’m still clutching the key to the forbidden study in one hand. I forgot to lock it again. I’m not even sure I closed the front door behind me—for all I know I have left it swinging open.
It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. I am too late to help Julian. I am too late to do anything but watch him die.
My feet carry me toward 18th Street, where Thomas Fineman will be attending his son’s execution. As I walk, head down, I grip the handle of the knife in my wind breaker pocket.
Perhaps it is not too late for revenge.