“Both.” Carol reached out quickly and smudged the heart away. “Stop that.” A look of fear flashed across her face.
“No one’s looking,” I said. I leaned my head against the window, feeling suddenly exhausted. I was going home. No more bumping up against commuters, fumbling for easy picks, feeling the mix of shame and elation when a target worked out. No more peeing behind a folding screen in the middle of the night, trying not to wake anyone else up. I’d be cured right away, probably by the end of the week.
A small part of me was glad. There’s always some relief in giving up.
“Why do you have to be so difficult?” Carol said.
I turned to look at her. My kid sister. We’d never been close. I’d wanted to love her, really. But she had always been too different, too cautious, likely to tell, impossible to play with.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t give you any trouble again.”
I slept for most of the trip back to Portland, my hands tucked in my jacket and my forehead resting against the window, and the ID of Conrad Haloway cupped in my right palm.
now
I’ve been on Ward Six for eleven years, with nothing but old stories, old words, for comfort. Scratching my way through minutes that feel like years, and years that have run by me like sand, like waste.
But now, waiting for Thomas to give me the signal, I find I have no patience left.
I remember that’s how it was when I was pregnant with Lena. The last two weeks seemed longer than the rest of the months combined. I was so fat and my ankles were so swollen, it took energy just to stand. But I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t wait, and in the dark hours, after Rachel and my husband were asleep, I walked. I paced the room that would soon be hers back and forth: twelve steps across, twenty on the diagonal. I kneaded my feet on the carpet. I held my stomach, tight as a bowl, with both hands, and felt her gentle stirrings, her faint heartbeat pulsing under my fingertips like a distant drum.
And I spoke to her. I told her stories of who I’d been and who I’d wanted to be and the world she was about to enter and the world that had come before.
I said I was sorry.
I remember one time I turned and saw Conrad standing in the doorway. He stared at me, and in that moment the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn’t quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes—maybe a kind of understanding.
“Come to bed, Bells,” was all he said.
Now I find I must walk as well. I can’t lie down anyway: The hose left bruises on my legs and spine, and even the touch of the sheet is painful. I can hardly bring myself to eat, but I know I must. Who knows how long I’ll be out in the Wilds before the scouts find me, or if they even will? I have nothing but a pair of cotton slippers and a cotton jumpsuit. And the snow lies in heavy drifts along the frozen river; the trees will be bare, the animals in hiding.
If I can’t find help, I’ll die within two, three days. Better to die out there, though, in the world I have always loved—even now, after all it has done to me.
Three days pass with no word. Then a fourth and a fifth. The disappointment is constant, suffocating. When the sixth day passes with no sign from Thomas, I begin to lose hope. Maybe he has been found out. Another day goes by. I get angry. He must have forgotten about me.
My bruises have turned to starbursts, big explosions of improbable colors, yellows and greens and purples. I’m no longer worried or angry. All my hope, the energy that I’ve been eking from thoughts of escape, abandons me at once. I lose even the desire to walk.
I’m filled with black thoughts: Thomas never intended to help me. The planned escape, the braiding of the rope, the scouts—all of it has been a dream, a fantasy that has kept me going all these years.
I stay in bed, don’t bother to get up except when I have to relieve myself, and when at last the dinner tray is shoved in through a narrow slot in the door.
And then I freeze: Underneath the small plastic bowl filled with pasta cooked into a lump is a small square of paper. Another note.
Thomas has written in all caps: TONIGHT. BE READY.
My stomach goes into my throat, and I’m worried I might be sick. Suddenly the thought of leaving these walls, this room, seems impossible. What do I know about the world outside? What do I know about the Wilds, and the resistance that survives there? When I was taken, I had only just begun my involvement with the movement. A meeting here, a document passed from hand to hand there …
I’ve been dreaming of escape for eleven years, and now, when the time has finally come, I know I’m not ready.
then