I feel, suddenly, as though I am back in my dream, standing on a cliff as the solid ground disintegrates underneath me, transforms into the sand in an hourglass, running away under my feet. I feel the way I do in that moment when I realize that all the ground has vanished, and I am standing on a bare blade of air, ready to drop.
“It’s terrible, you see? Look at what the disease did to her. Who knows how many hours she spent scrabbling along these walls like a rat.”
Frank and Alex are standing behind me. Frank’s words seem to be muffled by a layer of cloth. I take a step forward into the cell, suddenly fixated on a shaft of light, extending like a long golden finger from a space in the wall that has been chipped clear away. The clouds must have begun to break apart outside: Through the hole, on the other side of the stone fortress, I see the flashing blue of the Presumpscot River, and leaves shifting and tumbling over one another, an avalanche of green and sun and the perfume of wild, growing things.
The Wilds.
So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years.
And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Food for the body, milk for your bones, ice for the bleeding, a belly of stones.”
—A folklore blessing
Even after the iron gates clang shut behind us and the Crypts recedes in the distance, the feeling of being penned in on all sides doesn’t go away. There’s still a terrible, squeezing pressure in my chest, and I have to struggle to suck in full breaths.
An ancient prison bus with a wheezing motor carries us away from the border, to Deering. From there Alex and I walk back toward the center of Portland, staying on opposite sides of the sidewalk. Every couple of feet he swivels his head to look at me, opening and closing his mouth, like he’s pronouncing a series of inaudible words. I know he’s worried about me, and probably waiting for me to break down, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes or speak to him. I keep my eyes locked straight ahead of me, keep my feet cycling forward.
Other than the terrible pain in my chest and stomach, my body feels numb. I can’t feel the ground underneath me or the wind zipping through the trees, skating past my face; can’t feel the warmth of the sun, which has, against all odds, broken through the terrible black clouds, lighting the world up a strange greenish color, as though everything is submerged under water.
When I was little and my mother died—when I thought she’d died—I remember going out for my first-ever run and getting hopelessly lost at the end of Congress, a street I’d been playing on my whole life. I turned a corner and found myself in front of the Bubble and Soap Cleaners and had been suddenly unable to remember where I was, and whether home was to the left or to the right. Nothing looked the same. Everything looked like a painted replica of itself, fragile and distorted, like I was caught in a fun house hall of mirrors reflecting my regular world back to me.
That’s how I feel now, again. Lost and found and lost again, all at once. And now I know somewhere in this world, in the wildness on the other side of the fence, my mother is alive and breathing and sweating and moving and thinking. I wonder if she is thinking about me, and the pain shoots deeper, makes me lose my breath completely so I have to stop walking and double up, one hand on my stomach.
We’re still off-peninsula, not far from 37 Brooks, where the houses are separated by large tracts of torn-up grass and run-down gardens, full of litter. Still, there are people on the streets, including a man I take for a regulator right away: Even now, just before noon, he has a bullhorn swinging from his neck and a wooden baton strapped to one thigh. Alex must see him too. He stays a couple of feet away from me, scanning the street, trying to appear unconcerned, but he murmurs in my direction, “Can you move?”
I have to fight my way through the pain. It is radiating through my whole body now, throbbing up into my head.
“I think so,” I gasp out.
“Alley. On your left. Go.”
I straighten up as much as I can—enough, at least, to hobble into the alley between two larger buildings.
Halfway down the alley there are a few metal Dumpsters, arranged parallel to one another, buzzing with flies. The smell is disgusting, like being back in the Crypts, but I sink down between them anyway, grateful for the concealment and the chance to sit. As soon as I’m resting, the throbbing in my head subsides. I tilt my head back against the brick, feel the world swaying, a ship cut loose from its mooring.
Alex joins me a few moments later, squatting in front of me, brushing the hair away from my face. It’s the first time he’s been able to touch me all day.
“I’m sorry, Lena,” he says, and I know he really means it. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Twelve years,” I say simply. “I thought she was dead for twelve years.”
For a while we stay there in silence. Alex rubs circles on my shoulders, arms, and knees—anywhere he can reach, really, like he’s desperate to maintain physical contact with me. I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.
She’s out there somewhere, breathing, thirsty, eating, walking, swimming. Impossible, now, to contemplate going on with my life, impossible to imagine sleeping, and lacing up my shoes for a run, and helping Carol load the dishes, and even lying in the house with Alex, when I know that she exists: that she is out there, orbiting as far from me as a distant constellation.
Why didn’t she come for me? The thought flashes as quickly and clearly as an electrical surge, bringing the pain searing back. I squeeze my eyes shut, drop my head forward, pray for it to pass. But I don’t know who to pray to. All at once I can’t remember any words, can’t think of anything but being in church when I was little and watching the sun blaze up and then fade away beyond the stained- glass windows, watching all that light die, leaving nothing but dull panes of colored glass, tinny and insubstantial-looking.
“Hey. Look at me.”
Opening my eyes takes a tremendous effort. Alex looks hazy, even though he’s crouching no more than a foot away from me.
“You must be hungry,” he says gently. “Let’s get you home, okay? Are you okay to walk?” He shuffles back a little, giving me space to stand.
“No.” It comes out more emphatically than I’d intended, and Alex looks startled.
“You’re not okay to walk?” A little crease appears between his eyebrows.
“No.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice at a normal volume. “I mean I can’t go home. At all.”
Alex sighs and rubs his forehead. “We could go over to Brooks for a while, hang out at the house for a bit. And when you feel better—”
I cut him off. “You don’t get it.” A scream is welling inside of me, a black insect scrabbling in my throat. All I can think is: They knew. They all knew— Carol and Uncle William and maybe even Rachel—and still they let me believe all along that she was dead. They let me believe she had left me. They let me believe I wasn’t worth it. I’m filled, suddenly, with white-hot anger, a blaze: If I see them, if I go home, I won’t be able to stop myself. I’ll burn the house down, or tear it apart, plank by plank. “I want to run away with you. To the Wilds. Like we talked about.”
I think Alex will be happy, but instead he just seems tired. He looks away, squinting. “Listen, Lena, it’s been a really long day. You’re exhausted. You’re hungry.
You’re not thinking clearly—”
“I am thinking clearly.” I haul myself to my feet so I don’t look so helpless. I’m angry at Alex, too, even though I know this isn’t his fault. But the fury is whipping around inside of me, undirected, gaining force.
“I can’t stay here, Alex. Not anymore. Not after—not after that.” My throat spasms as I swallow back the scream again. “They knew, Alex. They knew and they never told me.”
He climbs to his feet too—slowly, like it hurts him. “You don’t know that for sure,” he says.
“I do know,” I insist, and it’s true. I do know, deep down.
I think of my mother bent over me, the floating pale whiteness of her face breaking through my sleep, her voice—I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.—sung quietly in my ear, the sad little smile dancing on her lips. She knew too. She must have known they were coming for her, and would take her to that terrible place. And only a week later I sat in a scratchy black dress in front of an empty coffin with a pile of orange peels to suck on, trying to keep back tears, while everyone I believed in built around me a solid, smooth surface of lies (“She was sick”; “This is what the disease does”; “Suicide”). I was the one who was really buried that day. “I can’t go home and I won’t. I’ll go with you.
We can make our home in the Wilds. Other people do it, don’t they? Other people have done it. My mother—” I want to say, My mother is going to do it, but my voice breaks on the word.
Alex is watching me carefully. “Lena, if you leave— really leave—it won’t be like it is for me now. You get that, right? You won’t be able to go back and forth. You won’t be able to come back ever. Your number will be invalidated. Everyone will know you’re a resister.
Everyone will be looking for you. If anyone found you—if you were ever caught . . .” Alex doesn’t finish his sentence.
“I don’t care,” I snap back. I’m no longer able to control my temper. “You were the one who suggested it, weren’t you? So what? Now that I’m ready to go, you take it back?”
“I’m just trying to—”
I cut Alex off again, rattling on, coasting on the anger, the desire to shred and hurt and tear apart. “You’re just like everybody else. You’re as bad as all the rest of them. Talk, talk, talk—it comes so easily to you. But when it’s time to do anything, when it’s time to help me—”
“I’m trying to help you,” Alex says sharply. “It’s a big deal. Do you understand that? It’s a huge choice, and you’re pissed, and you don’t know what you’re saying.”
He’s getting angry too. The tone of his voice makes something painful run through me, but I can’t stop speaking. Destroy, destroy, destroy: I want to break everything—him, me, us, the whole city, the whole world.
“Don’t treat me like a child,” I say.
“Then stop acting like one,” he fires back. The second the words are out of his mouth I can tell he regrets them. He turns partially away, inhales, and then says, in a normal tone of voice, “Listen, Lena. I’m really sorry.