“What was her name?”
“Grace,” I say. My throat is squeezing up, and now I’m combining selves and places, combining lives. My mom disappeared before Grace was even born; besides, Grace was my cousin. But strangely, I can picture it: my mother lifting Grace, swooping her around in an enormous circle while music piped from the fuzzy speakers; the three of us galloping down the long wooden hallways, pretending to be catching a star. I open my mouth to say more, but find I can’t. I am on the verge of crying, and have to swallow back the feeling, hard, while my throat spasms.
Julian is quiet for a minute. Then he says, “I used to pretend things too.”
“Yeah?” I turn my face into my pillow so the trembling in my voice will be muffled.
“Yeah. In the hospitals, mostly, and the labs.” Another beat. “I used to pretend that I was back at home. I’d change the noises into other things, you know? Like the beeping of the heart monitors—that was actually just the ‘beep-beep-beep’ of the coffee machine. And when I heard footsteps I would pretend they were my parents’, even though they never were; and I would pretend the smell—you know how hospitals always smell like bleach, and just a little bit like flowers?—was because my mother was washing the sheets.”
The clenching in my throat has subsided, and I can breathe more easily now. I’m grateful to Julian; for not saying that my mother’s behavior seems unregulated, for not being suspicious or asking too many questions. “Funerals smell like that too,” I say. “Like bleach. Like flowers, too.”
“I don’t like that smell,” Julian says quietly. If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat. He says, “I used to pretend to be an explorer, too. I used to think about what it would be like to go to … other places.”
I think of finding him after the DFA meeting: sitting alone in the dark, staring up at those dizzying images of mountains and woods.
“Like where?” I ask, my heart speeding up a bit.
He hesitates. “Just around,” he says finally. “Like to other cities in the USA.”
Something tells me he’s lying again; I wonder if he was really talking about the Wilds, or other places in the world—the unbordered places, where love still exists, where it was supposed to have consumed everyone by now.
Maybe Julian senses that I don’t believe him, because he rushes on. “It was just kid stuff. The kind of stuff I did on overnights to the labs, when I had tests and procedures and things like that. So I wouldn’t be scared.”
In the silence, I can feel the weight of the earth above our heads: layers and layers of it, airless and heavy. I try to fight off the feeling that comes to me: We will be buried here forever. “Are you scared now?” I ask.
He pauses for just a fraction of a second. “I’d be more scared if I were alone,” he says.
“Me too,” I say. Again, I feel a rush of sympathy for him. “Julian?”
“Yeah?”
“Reach out your hand.” I’m not sure what makes me say it—maybe it’s the fact that I can’t see him. It feels easier with him in the dark.
“For what?”
“Just do it,” I say, and I can hear him shifting; he is already moving, stretching his hand across the space between our cots. I reach out and find his hand, which is cool and large and dry, and he jerks a bit as our skin comes into contact.
“Do you think we’re safe?” he asks. His voice is hoarse.
I’m not sure whether he is referring to the deliria, or whether he is asking about the fact that we are trapped here, but he lets me lace my fingers through his. He has never held hands with someone before, I can tell. It takes him a moment of fumbling to understand how to do it.
“We’ll be okay,” I say. I don’t know whether I believe it or not. He gives my hand a quick squeeze, surprising me—there are some things, I guess, that come naturally, even if you’ve never done them before. We hold hands across the dark, and after a while I hear his breathing slow and deepen, and I close my eyes and think of waves pulling slowly on a shore. After a little while I am asleep too, and dream of being on a carousel with Grace, and watching, laughing, as all the wooden horses slowly break from their positions and begin galloping up into the air.
then
For three days, the weather holds. The woods are a symphony of cracking and snapping, as the trees and the river slough off their ice. Fat, jewel-colored droplets of water rain down on our heads as we move through the woods, looking for berries, animal burrows, and good places to hunt. There is a great feeling of release and celebration, almost as if spring has really come, even though we know this is only a temporary reprieve. Raven is the only one who seems no happier.
We must be on constant lookout for food now. On the third morning, Raven nominates me to check the traps with her. Every time we find one empty, Raven curses a little under her breath. The animals have mostly gone underground.
We hear the animal before we get to the last trap, and Raven quickens her pace. There is a frantic sound of scrabbling against the brittle leaves that carpet the forest floor, and a panicked chittering, too. A large rabbit has its hind leg caught in the metal teeth of the trap. Its fur is stained with spots of dark blood. Panicked, the rabbit tries to pull itself forward; then falls back, panting, on its side.
Raven squats and removes a long-handled knife from her bag. It is sharp but spotted with rust and, I imagine, old blood. If we leave the rabbit here, I know it will twist and turn and writhe until it bleeds out from the leg—or, more likely, it will eventually give up and die slowly of starvation. Raven will be doing it a favor by killing it quickly. Still, I can’t watch. I’ve never been on trap duty. I don’t have the stomach for it.
Raven hesitates. Then, suddenly, she shoves the knife into my hand.
“Here,” she says. “You do it.” I know it’s not squeamishness on her part; she hunts all the time. This is another one of her tests.
The knife feels surprisingly heavy. I look at the rabbit, scrabbling and sputtering on the ground. “I—I can’t. I’ve never killed anything before.”
Raven’s eyes are hard. “Well, it’s time to learn.” She puts two hands on the squirming rabbit—one on its head, one on its belly, stilling it. The rabbit must think she’s trying to help. It stops squirming. Even so, I can see the rapid, desperate pattern of its breathing.
“Don’t make me,” I say, both ashamed because I have to plead with her and angry for being made to.
Raven stands up again. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she says. “This isn’t a game, Lena. And it doesn’t end here, or when we go south, or ever. What happened at the homestead…” She breaks off, shaking her head. “There is no room for us anywhere. Not unless things change. We’ll be hunted. Our homesteads will be bombed and burned. The borders will grow, and cities will expand, and there will be no Wilds left, and nobody to fight, and nothing to fight for. Do you understand?”
I say nothing. Heat is creeping up the back of my neck, making me feel light-headed.
“I won’t always be around to help you,” she says, and kneels again, one knee in the dirt. This time she parts the rabbit’s fur with her fingers, exposing a pink, fleshy bit of neck, a throbbing artery. “Here,” she says. “Do it.”
It strikes me then that the animal under her hands is just like us: trapped, driven out of its home, desperately fighting for breath, for a few more inches of space. And suddenly I am blindingly angry at Raven—for her lectures, and her stubbornness, and for thinking that the way that you help people is by driving them against a wall, by beating them down until they fight back.
“I don’t think it’s a game,” I say, and I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“What?”
“You think you’re the only one who knows anything.” I’m clenching my fists, one against my thigh, one around the handle of the knife. “You think you’re the only one who knows about loss, or being angry. You think you’re the only one who knows about running.” I’m thinking of Alex, and I hate her for that, too; for bringing that back to me. The grief and anger is swelling, a black wave.
“I don’t think I’m the only one,” Raven says. “We’ve all lost something. That’s the rule now, isn’t it? Even in Zombieland. They lose more than most, maybe.” She raises her eyes to mine. For some reason I can’t stop shaking.
Raven speaks with quiet intensity. “Here’s something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you’ll always be taking it from someone else. That’s a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.”
My breath stops. For a moment the world stops turning, and everything is silence and Raven’s eyes.
“But you know all about that, don’t you, Lena?” She never raises her voice, but I feel the words physically—my head starts pounding, my chest is full of searing pain. All I can think is Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, and I’m falling into the long dark tunnels of her eyes, back to that terrible dawn at the border, when the sun seeped across the bay like a slow stain.
She says, “Didn’t you try to cross with someone else? We heard the rumors. You were with somebody…” And then, as though she’s only just remembering, although now I see that she has known—of course she has known—all along, and hatred and fury are welling up so fast and thick I think I will drown. “His name was Alex, wasn’t it?”
I am in midair, lunging at her, before I realize I’ve moved. The knife is in my hand and I am going to drive it straight into her throat, bleed her and gut her and leave her to be picked apart by the animals.
Just as I land on top of her, she jabs me in the ribs, pushing me off balance. At the same time her left hand clamps around my right wrist and she pulls me down, hard, driving the knife straight into the rabbit’s neck, exactly where she had been exposing its artery. I let out a small cry. I am still holding the knife, and she wraps her fingers around my hand to keep it there. The rabbit jerks once under my hand and then goes still. For a moment I imagine that I can still feel its heartbeat skimming under my fingertips, a quick echo. The rabbit’s body is warm. A small bit of blood seeps out from around the tip of the knife.
Raven and I are so close I can smell her breath and the sweat on her clothes. I try to jerk away from her, but she just grips me tighter. “Don’t be angry at me,” she says. “I’m not the one who did it.” For emphasis, she forces my hand down a little farther. The knife goes another half inch into the rabbit, and more blood bubbles up around its tip.
“Fuck you,” I say, and suddenly I’m crying for the first time since I came to the Wilds; for the first time since Alex died. My throat closes up, and I can barely choke the words out. My anger is ebbing away now, replaced with a crazy grief for the stupid, dumb, trusting animal, who was running too fast and didn’t look where it was going and still—even after its leg was scissored in the trap—believed it might escape. Stupid, stupid, stupid.