“What?” She laid on her side to face me; reached over and touched my cheek.
“First, I have to admit,” I said, “that I don’t believe in God. But that night when I begged you not to pull the trigger, for a split second, just long enough to make me hate myself for thinking something so selfish in the worst possible moment, I prayed to whoever or whatever was listening, to give you to me. I needed you and I didn’t know why. I wanted you, not just to help you, but I wanted you for myself. And like you”—my gaze swept over her eyes and her mouth—“I didn’t care what for, even if it was to see me to my end, be the one to take my life out of hatred for me because of your sister’s death. Or even just to be the one to bury me. I wanted and needed you, Thais, and I prayed to whoever was listening.”
I kissed her weeping mouth, tasted the salt of her tears.
I took a deep breath. “What have you done to me?” I said, smiling over at her.
“I’m a sorceress,” Thais joked, smiling back. “Didn’t you know?”
I touched my lips to the bone underneath one eye, and then the other. “That you are,” I said. “I’ve been bewitched by a sorceress.” My mouth found the side of her neck, her ear lobe; my tongue found the shell of her ear; Thais shivered.
I made love to her again. And when we were too tired to move anymore, too exhausted to speak, we lay together in the heat of the room listening to each other’s heartbeats, hearing a thousand unspoken words so powerful they did not need voices.
50
THAIS
It was Tuesday. Again. Atticus and I sat on the back porch sipping coffee, waiting for Jeffrey to come running through the woods any moment now.
“It breaks my heart to think about how he might’ve been treated by others,” I said angrily. “He’s so kind—I don’t know how anyone can be so cruel.”
“Cruelty is a human defect,” Atticus said. “Like racism and bigotry and homophobia and all that other shit that sometimes makes me ashamed to be human.”
Surprised by his confession, I decided against taking another drink, and I set the mug on the table between us.
“I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about such things.”
“Yeah, I do,” he said. “I’ve seen things, Thais…really bad stuff…” He shook his head, stared into the woods as if the chilling images were torturing his thoughts.
“What have you seen?” I asked raptly.
I wanted to know, but, a part of me didn’t, the same part that could never erase the terrible things I had seen.
ATTICUS
I continued to stare into the woods as the scenes played in front of my eyes: the hangings, the bodies burned alive, the brutal, archaic executions—I breathed in sharply, and tried to shake the memories out of my head.
Then I looked at her.
“Let’s just say there are only…certain kinds of people in Lexington City,” I hinted.
“Certain kinds?”
I nodded. And then I looked away, unable to shake those memories from my head, after all. I never could.
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
I thought back to my time in Lexington; I thought of the people: the soldiers, the citizens in the street waiting for supplies, the workers, the wives, the women in the brothel; it was so easy to remember each face, even those I’d only seen in passing. But what kind of people were they? What did they all have in common?
“I went on one scouting mission after I joined Wolf’s army,” Atticus began. “I’d been there for a year before I signed up to be a scout; I didn’t know what went on outside the city with Wolf’s men—I knew they were bastards; I knew they weren’t good men, but what I didn’t know was just how cruel they were, how…inhumane.”
He looked down at his hand, opened and closed it three times; I heard the bones in his fingers crack lightly.
Sensing his guilt, I reached out and touched his wrist; he looked away from his hand and into the woods again.
“What I saw…I couldn’t do anything; it happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to react. After that day, I decided scouting wasn’t the job for me. So, I put in for city patrols, and that’s what I did until I was appointed temporary Overseer.”
He scoffed, shook his head. “I actually thought I could change things if I became Overseer.”
“I know you could have,” I said.
He scoffed again, and drank down the last of his coffee.
“Thank you for the confidence,” he told me, “but the reality is that no one could’ve changed the things I wanted to change there. Not even if I’d killed Wolf and Rafe. The rest of the men—most, anyway—were just as bad. If I tried to take away their women, and tell them that people of all races were welcome in Lexington, they would’ve killed me on the spot.”
The faces of Lexington’s residents went through my mind again, but this time in a different light as realization finally set in—they were all White. Every single one of them. I tried to recall any person of color—just one—but I couldn’t. Wait—did Marion count? I thought he might’ve been Latin. No, I resolved, accepting that he was just incredibly tanned.
Fernando and Emilia…Oh no…
The terrible truth about their deaths became real then. And it broke my heart.
I could only imagine what horrors Atticus could have seen on that scouting mission he spoke of. And I was glad he did not tell me.
“Tell me about your mother,” Atticus changed the subject; he turned to look at me and smiled with encouragement.
But just as Atticus did not want to talk about his past in Lexington City, I did not want to talk about my mother.
Hiding the true measure of my discomfort, I smiled at him and said, “How about you tell me about yours?”
(Thais had no idea how much worse this topic was for me than the one before it.)
I turned around fully on the chair to give Atticus my undivided attention.
“Tell me something funny you remember about her,” I encouraged. “What color was her hair? What did she love to do? Tell me anything.”
“There is one thing I remember,” Atticus said after a moment. “She had the foulest mouth for someone so kind—but I’ll never forget her beating my legs with a switch when I said goddammit once.” He pointed at me. “Once being the keyword—I never said it again after that while under the same roof as her. But she used every curse word there was, except for that one. I always thought it was strange, one of her weird quirks.”