My mother and I talk around the campfire while we eat; we talk late into the night until Julian pokes his head out of the tent, sleepy and disoriented, and tells me I should really get some sleep; or until Raven yells at us to shut the hell up.
We talk in the morning. We talk as we walk.
We talk about what my life in the Wilds, and hers, have been like. She tells me that she was involved in the resistance even when she was in the Crypts—there was a mole, a resister, a cured who still had sympathies for the cause and worked as a guard in Ward Six, where my mother was imprisoned. He was blamed for my mother’s escape and became a prisoner himself.
I remember him: I saw him curled, fetus-like, in the corner of a tiny stone cell. I haven’t told my mother this, though. I haven’t told her that Alex and I gained admittance to the Crypts, because it would mean talking about him. And I can’t bring myself to speak about him—not with her, not with anyone.
“Poor Thomas.” My mother shakes her head. “He fought hard to get placed in Ward Six. He sought me out deliberately.” She looks at me sideways. “He knew Rachel, you know—long ago. I think he always resented that he had to give her up. He stayed angry, even after his cure.”
I squeeze my eyes shut against the sun. Long-buried images begin flashing: Rachel locked in her room, refusing to come out and eat; Thomas’s pale, freckled face floating at the window, gesturing for me to let him in; crouching in the corner on the day they dragged Rachel to the labs, watching her kick and scream and bare her teeth, like an animal. I must have been eight—it was only a year after my mom died, or after I was told she had died.
“Thomas Dale,” I blurt out. The name has stuck with me all these years.
My mom passes her hand absentmindedly through a field of waving grasses. In the sun, her age, and the lines on her face, are starkly obvious. “I barely remembered him. And of course, he had changed a great deal by the time I saw him again. It had been three, four years. I remember I caught him hanging around the house once when I came home early from work. He was terrified. He thought I would tell.” She barks a laugh. “That was just before I was…taken.”
“And he helped you,” I say. I try to force his face into clarity in my mind, to make the details resurface, but all I see is the filthy figure curled on the floor in a grimy cell.
My mom nods. “He couldn’t quite forget what he had lost. It stayed with him. It does, you know, for some people. I always thought it did for your father.”
“So Dad was cured?” I don’t know why I feel so disappointed. I didn’t even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.
“He was.” A muscle twitches in my mom’s jaw. “But there were times I felt…There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn’t matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me.” She brings her hand unconsciously to her neck, as though feeling for the necklace she wore—my grandfather’s military pendant, given to her by my dad. She used it to tunnel her way from the Crypts.
“Your necklace,” I say. “You still aren’t used to being without it.”
She turns to me, squinting. She manages a small smile. “There are some losses we never get over.”
I tell my mother about my life too, especially what has happened since crossing from Portland, and how I came to be involved with Raven, Tack, and the resistance. Occasionally we bring up memories from the time before, too—the lost time before she went away, before my sister was cured, before I was placed in Aunt Carol’s house. But not too much.
As my mother said, there are some losses we never get over.
Certain subjects remain completely off-limits. She doesn’t ask what compelled me to cross in the first place, and I don’t volunteer to tell her. I keep Alex’s note in a little leather pouch around my neck—a gift from my mom, procured from a trader earlier in the year—but it is a memento from a past life, like carrying the picture of someone who is dead.
My mother knows, of course, that I have found my way into loving. Occasionally, I catch her watching me with Julian. The look on her face—pride, grief, envy, and love commingled—reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.
My dad was cured. And you can’t love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of.
Julian and I have found our rhythm again. It’s as though we have skated over the past few weeks, skated over Alex’s long shadow, and landed neatly on the other side. We can’t get enough of each other. I’m amazed by every part of him again: his hands, his low, gentle way of speaking, all his different laughs.