Delirium: The Complete Collection (106 page)

“Portland?” I parrot the word without meaning to speak. My mother glances up at me, and I think she looks afraid. Then she drops her eyes.

“That’s where you come from, right?” Raven asks me.

I lean back against the sink, close my eyes for a second, and have a vision of my mother on the beach, running ahead of me, laughing, kicking up dark sand, a loose green tunic dress snapping around her ankles. I open my eyes again quickly and manage to nod.

“I can’t go back there.”

The words come out with more force than I intended, and everyone turns to look at me.

“If we go anywhere, we all go together,” Raven says.

“There’s a big underground in Portland,” Max says. “The network is growing—has been since the Incidents. That was only the beginning. What’s going to happen next…” He shakes his head, eyes bright. “It’s going to be big.”

“I can’t,” I repeat. “And I won’t.” Memories are coming fast: Hana running next to me by Back Cove, our sneakers squelching in the mud; fireworks over the bay on the Fourth of July, sending tentacles of light over the water; Alex and me lying, laughing, on the blanket at 37 Brooks; Grace shivering next to me in the bedroom at Aunt Carol’s, wrapping her thin arms around my waist, her smell of grape bubblegum. Layers and layers of memories, a life I have tried to bury and kill—a past that was dead, like Raven always said—suddenly surging, threatening to pull me under.

And with the memories comes the guilt, another feeling I have tried so hard to bury. I left them: Hana and Grace, and Alex, too. I left them and I ran, and I didn’t look back.

“It’s not your decision,” Tack says.

Raven says, “Don’t be a baby, Lena.”

Normally, I back down when Raven and Tack gang up on me. But not today. I push the guilt down under a heavy fist of anger. Everyone is staring at me, but I can feel my mother’s eyes like a burn—her blank curiosity, as though I’m a specimen in a museum, some ancient, foreign tool whose purpose she’s trying to decipher.

“I won’t.” I slam down the can opener, too hard, on the counter.

“What’s the matter with you?” Raven says in a low voice. But it has gone so quiet in the room, I’m sure that everyone hears.

My throat is so tight I can hardly swallow. I realize, all of a sudden, that I am on the verge of tears. “Ask her,” I manage to say, jerking my chin toward the woman who calls herself Bee.

There’s another moment of silence. All the eyes turn on my mother now. At least she looks guilty—she knows she’s a fraud, this woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn’t even acknowledge her own daughter.

Just then Bram comes sailing down the stairs, whistling. He’s holding a large knife, which is wet with blood—he must have been cutting up the deer. His T-shirt is streaked with it too. He stops when he sees us standing there in silence.

“What’s up?” he says. “What’d I miss?” Then, as he takes in my mom, Cap, and Max: “Who are you?”

The sight of all that blood makes my stomach heave. We’re killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses. Before I can begin crying, I wrench away from the sink and push past Bram so roughly, he lets out a yelp of surprise. I pound up the stairs and throw myself outside, into the open air and the warm afternoon and the throaty sound of the woods opening up to spring.

But even outside I feel claustrophobic. There’s no place to go. There’s no way to escape the crushing sense of loss, the endless exhaustion of time sawing away at the people and things that I’ve loved.

Hana, Grace, Alex, my mother, the sea-spray salt-air Portland mornings and the distant cries of the wheeling seagulls—all of them broken, splintered, lodged somewhere deep, impossible to shake loose.

Maybe, after all, they were right about the cure. I am no happier than I was when I believed that love was a disease. In many ways, I am less happy.

I get only a few minutes away from the safe house before I stop fighting the pressure behind my eyes. My first cries are convulsions, and bring up the taste of bile. I let go completely. I sink onto the tangle of undergrowth and soft moss, put my head between my legs, and sob until I can’t breathe, until I’m spitting up on the leaves between my legs. I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind—by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

I hear footsteps behind me and know, without turning around, that it will be Raven. “Go away,” I say. My voice sounds thick. I drag the back of my hand across my cheeks and nose.

But it’s my mother who responds. “You’re angry at me,” she says.

I stop crying at once. My whole body goes cold and still. She squats down beside me, and even though I’m careful not to look up, not to look at her at all, I can
feel
her, can smell the sweat from her skin and hear the ragged pattern of her breathing.

“You’re angry at me,” she repeats, and her voice hitches
a little. “You think I don’t care.”

Her voice is the same. For years I used to imagine that voice lilting over those forbidden words:
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it
. Her last words to me before she went away.

She shuffles forward and squats next to me. She hesitates, then reaches out and places her palm against my cheek, and turns my head toward hers so I’m forced to look at her. I can feel the calluses on her fingers.

In her eyes, I see myself reflected in miniature, and I tunnel back to a time before she left, before I believed she was gone forever, when her eyes welcomed me into every day and shepherded me, every night, into sleep.

“You turned out even more beautiful than I’d imagined,” she whispers. She, too, is crying.

The hard casement inside me breaks.

“Why?” is the only word that comes. Without intending to or even thinking about it, I allow her to draw me against her chest, let her wrap her arms around me. I cry into the space between her collarbones, inhaling the still-familiar smell of her skin.

There are so many things I need to ask her:
What happened to you in the Crypts? How could you let them take you away? Where did you go?
But all I can say is: “Why didn’t you come for me? After all those years—all that time—why didn’t you come?” Then I can’t speak at all; my sobs become shudders.

“Shh.” She presses her lips to my forehead, strokes my hair, just like she used to when I was a child. I am a baby once again
in her arms—helpless and needy. “I’m here now.”

She rubs my back while I cry. Slowly, I feel the darkness drain out of me, as though pulled away by the motion of her hand. Finally I can breathe again. My eyes are burning, and my throat feels raw and sore. I draw away from her, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand, not even caring that my nose is running. I’m suddenly exhausted—too tired to be hurt, too tired to be angry. I want to sleep, and sleep.

“I never stopped thinking about you,” my mother says. “I thought of you every day—you and Rachel.”

“Rachel was cured,” I say. The exhaustion is a heaviness; it blankets out every feeling. “She got paired and she left. And you let me think you were dead. I’d still think you were dead if—”
If it weren’t for Alex
, I think, but don’t say. Of course my mother doesn’t know the story of Alex. She knows none of my stories.

My mother looks away. For a second I think she will begin to cry again. But she doesn’t. “When I was in that place away, thinking of you—my two beautiful girls—was the only thing that kept me going. It was the only thing that kept me sane.” Her voice holds an edge, an undercurrent of anger, and I think of visiting the Crypts with Alex: the stifling darkness and echoing, inhuman cries; the smell of Ward Six, the cells like cages.

I persist, stubbornly: “It was hard for me, too. I had no one. And you could have come for me after you escaped. You could have told me…” My voice breaks, and I swallow. “After you found me at Salvage—we were touching, you could have
shown me your face, you could have said something….”

“Lena.” My mom reaches out to touch my face again, but this time she sees me stiffen, and she drops her hand with a sigh. “Did you ever read the Book of Lamentations? Did you read about Mary Magdalene and Joseph? Did you ever wonder why I named you what I did?”

“I read it.” I read the Book of Lamentations at least a dozen times at least; it is the chapter of
The Book of Shhh
I know the best. I looked for clues, for secret signs from my mother, for whispers from the dead.

The Book of Lamentations is a story of love. More than that: It’s a story of sacrifice.

“I just wanted you to be safe,” my mother says. “Do you understand that? Safe, and happy. Anything I could do…even if it meant I couldn’t be with you…”

Her voice gets thick and I have to look away from her, to stop the grief from welling up once again. My mother aged in a small square room with only a bit of eked-out hope, words scratched on the walls day by day, to keep her going.

“If I hadn’t believed, if I hadn’t been able to trust that…There were many times I thought about…” She trails off.

There’s no need for her to finish her sentence. I understand what she means: There were times she wanted to die.

I remember I used to imagine her sometimes standing on the edge of a cliff, coat billowing behind her. I would
see
her. For one second, she would always remain suspended in the air, hovering, like a vision of an angel. But always, even in my head,
the cliff disappeared, and I would see her falling. I wonder if, in some way, she was reaching out to me through the echoes of space on those nights—whether I could sense her.

For a while we let silence stretch between us. I dry the moisture from my face with my sleeve. Then I stand up. She stands with me. I’m amazed, as I was when I realized that she had been the one to rescue me from Salvage, that we are roughly the same height.

“So what now?” I say. “Are you taking off again?”

“I’ll go where the resistance needs me,” she says.

I look away from her. “So you
are
leaving,” I say, feeling a dull weight settle in my stomach. Of course. That’s what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: They leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

A free world is also a world of fracture, just like
The Book of Shhh
warned us. There is more truth in Zombieland than I wanted to believe.

The wind blows my mother’s hair across her forehead. She twists it back behind her ear, a gesture I remember from years ago. “I need to make sure that what happened to me—what I was made to give up—doesn’t happen again to anyone.” She finds my eyes, forcing me to look at her. “But I don’t want to leave,” she adds quietly. “I—I’d like to know you now, Magdalena.”

I cross my arms and shrug, trying to find some of the hardness I have built during my time in the Wilds. “I don’t even
know where to begin,” I say.

She spreads her hands, a gesture of submission. “Me neither. But we can, I think.
I
can, if you’ll let me.” She cracks a small smile. “You’re part of the resistance too, you know. This is what we do: We fight for what matters to us. Right?”

I meet her eyes. They are the clear blue of the sky stretched high above the trees, a ceiling of color. I remember: Portland beaches, kite flying, macaroni salads, summertime picnics, my mother’s hands, a lullaby-voice singing me to sleep.

“Right,” I say.

We walk back, together, to the safe house.

T
he Crypts looks different from the way I remember it.

I’ve been here only once before, on a school trip in third grade. Weirdly, I don’t remember anything about the actual visit, only that Jen Finnegan threw up in the bus afterward, and the air stank like tuna fish, even after the bus driver opened all the windows.

The Crypts is situated at the northern border and backs up onto the Wilds and the Presumpscot River. That’s why so many prisoners were able to escape during the Incidents. The exploding shrapnel took out huge chunks of the border wall; the inmates who made it out of their cells just ran straight into the Wilds.

After the Incidents, the Crypts was rebuilt, and a new, modern wing was attached. The Crypts was always monstrously ugly, but now it is worse than ever: The steel-and-cement addition runs up awkwardly against the old building, made of blackened stone, with its hundreds of tiny barred windows. It’s a sunny day, and beyond the high roof, the sky is a vivid blue. The whole scene feels off to me: This is a place that should never see sunlight.

For a minute, I stand outside the gates, wondering whether I should turn around. I came by municipal bus, which took me all the way from downtown, emptying as we got closer and closer to this, its final destination. At last, I shared the bus with only the driver and a large, heavily made-up woman wearing nurse’s scrubs. As the bus rolled away, kicking up sprays of mud and exhaust, for a wild second I thought of running after it.

But I have to know. I must.

So I follow the nurse as she shuffles toward the guard hut just outside the gates and flashes her ID card. The guard’s eyes flick to me, and I wordlessly pass him a piece of paper.

He scans the photocopy. “Eleanor?”

I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak. In the photocopy, it’s impossible to make out many of her features, or distinguish the dishwater color of her hair. But if he looks too closely, he’ll see the details don’t line up: the height, the eye color.

Fortunately, he doesn’t. “What happened to the original?”

“Went through the dryer,” I reply promptly. “I had to apply to SVS for a replacement.”

He turns his gaze back to the photocopy. I hope he can’t hear my heart, which is beating loud and hard.

Getting the photocopy was no problem. A quick phone call to Mrs. Hargrove this morning, a proposed cup of tea, a twenty-minute chat, an expressed desire to use the bathroom—and then a two-minute detour to Fred’s study instead. I couldn’t risk being identified as Fred’s future wife. If Cassie
is
here, it’s possible that some of the wardens know Fred, too. And if Fred finds out I’ve been poking around the Crypts…

He has already told me I must not ask questions.

“Business?”

“Just…visiting.”

The guard grunts. He hands back my paper and waves me on as the gates begin to shudder open. “Check in at the visitors’ desk,” he grunts. The nurse gives me a curious look before scuttling ahead of me across the yard. I can’t imagine there are many visitors here.

That’s the whole point. Lock them up and let them rot.

I cross the yard and pass through a heavy, bolted steel door, and find myself in a claustrophobic entrance hall, dominated by a metal detector and several massive guards. By the time I get through the door, the nurse has already unloaded her purse onto the conveyor belt and is standing with her arms and legs spread as a guard moves over her body with a wand, checking her for weapons. She hardly seems to notice; she’s busy chatting with the woman manning the check-in desk to the right, which is situated behind bulletproof glass.

“Same as always,” she’s saying. “The baby kept me up all night. I’m telling you, if 2426 gives me more problems today, I’ll put his ass on lockdown.”

“Amen,” says the woman behind the desk. Then she turns her eyes to me. “ID?”

We repeat the procedure all over again: I slide the paper through the gap in the window, explain that the original was ruined.

“How can I help you?” she asks.

I’ve been crafting my story carefully for the past twenty-four hours, but still I find the words come haltingly. “I—I’m here to visit my aunt.”

“You know what ward she’s in?”

I shake my head. “No, see…I didn’t even know she was here. I mean, I just found out. For most of my life, I thought she was dead.” The woman shows no reaction to this statement. “Name?”

“Cassandra. Cassandra O’Donnell.” I squeeze my fists and focus on the pain running through my palms as she keys the name into her computer. I’m not sure whether I’m hoping her name will come up or not.

The woman shakes her head. She has watery blue eyes and a mass of frizzy blond hair, which in this light appears to be the same dull gray as the walls. “Nothing here. You got an intake month?”

How many years ago did Cassie disappear? I remember overhearing at Fred’s inauguration that he has been
without a pair for three years.

I hazard a guess. “January or February. Three years ago.”

She sighs and hauls herself out of her chair. “Only went computerized last year.” She passes out of view, then returns with a large, leather-bound book, which she sets down on her side of the counter with a bang. She flips forward a few pages, then opens a window in the glass and slides the book out to me.

“January and February,” she says shortly. “It’s all organized by date—if she came through here, she’ll be there.”

The book is oversized, its pages crisscrossed with spidery writing, intake dates, prisoner names, and corresponding prisoner numbers. The period from January through February runs several pages, and I’m uncomfortably aware of the woman watching me impatiently as I move my finger slowly down the column of names.

There’s a tight feeling in my stomach. She’s not here. Of course, I might have the dates wrong—or I might have been wrong altogether. Maybe she never came to the Crypts at all.

I think of Fred laughing, saying,
She doesn’t get much of an audience these days
.

“Any luck?” the woman asks, without real interest.

“Just a second.” A bead of sweat rolls down my spine. I flip to April and continue my search.

Then I see a name that stops me:
Melanea O
.

Melanea. That was Cassandra’s middle name; I remember overhearing that at Fred’s inauguration, and seeing it on the letter I stole from Fred’s study.

“Here,” I say. It makes sense that Fred would not have entered her under her real name. The point, after all, was to make her disappear.

I push the book back through the plate-glass window. The woman’s eyes slide from
Melanea O
to the inmate number assigned to her: 2225. She keys this into the computer, repeating the number under her breath.

“Ward B,” she says. “New wing.” She types a few more commands into her keyboard, and a printer behind her shudders to life, regurgitating a small white sticker with
VISITOR—WARD B
printed neatly across it. She slides it through the window to me, along with another, thinner, leather-bound book. “Sign your name and date in the visitors’ log, and mark the name of the person you’re visiting. Place the sticker on your chest; it must be visible at all times. And you’ll have to wait for an escort. Go on through security and I’ll page someone down here to get you.”

She runs through this last speech quickly, tonelessly. I fish a pen from my bag and write Eleanor Latterly in the allotted position, praying she doesn’t ask to see my ID card. The visitor’s log is very slender. Only three visitors have come here in the past week.

My hands have begun to shake. I have trouble wrestling off my jacket after the security guards instruct me that it must go on the conveyor belt. My bag and shoes are also placed in trays for inspection, and I have to stand with my arms and legs spread, as the nurse did, as one of the men pats me down roughly, waving a wand between my legs and over my breasts.

“Clear,” he says, stepping aside to let me pass. Just past security is a small waiting area, outfitted with several cheap plastic chairs and a plastic table. Beyond that, I see various hallways branching, and signs pointing the way to different wards and portions of the complex. A TV is playing in the corner, muted: a political broadcast. I avert my eyes quickly, just in case Fred comes on the screen.

A nurse with tufts of black hair and a shiny, greasy face comes slapping down the hallway toward me, wearing blue hospital clogs and floral scrubs. Her name card reads
JAN
.

“You for Ward B?” she pants at me, when she comes close. I nod. Her perfume is vanilla, sickly sweet and too strong, but it still can’t completely conceal the other smells of the place: bleach, body odor.

“This way.” She pads in front of me to a heavy set of double doors, using a hip to bump them open.

Beyond the doors, the atmosphere changes. The hallway we’ve entered is sparkling white. This must be the new wing. The floors, walls, and even the ceiling are made of the same spotless paneling. Even the air smells different—cleaner and newer. It’s very quiet, but as we move down the hall, I hear the occasional sounds of muffled voices, the beeping of mechanical equipment, the
slap-slap-slap
of another nurse’s clogs down another hallway.

“Been here before?” Jan wheezes. I shake my head, and she shoots me a sidelong glance. “Thought not. We don’t get many visitors around here. What’s the point, I say.”

“I just found out that my aunt—”

She cuts me off. “Gonna have to leave your bag outside the ward.” Pant, pant, pant. “Even a nail file will do it in a pinch. And we’ll have to give you some slippers. Can’t have you wearin’ those laces in the ward. Last year one of our guys strung himself up to a pipe, quick as a flash, when he got hold of some laces. Dead as a doornail by the time we found him. Who’re you here for?”

She says all this so quickly, I can barely follow the thread of her conversation. An image flashes: someone swinging from the ceiling, laces knotted around the throat. In my mind, the person swings, revolving toward me. Weirdly, it’s Fred’s face I picture, huge and bulging and red.

“I’m here to see Melanea.” I watch the nurse’s face, see the name means nothing to her. “Number 2225,” I add.

Apparently, people go solely by their numbers in the Crypts, because the nurse lets out a noise of recognition. “She won’t give you no trouble,” she says conspiratorially, as though she’s sharing a great secret. “She’s quiet as a church mouse. Well, not always. I remember the first few months, she was shouting and shouting. ‘I don’t belong here! I’m not crazy!’” The nurse laughs. “’Course, that’s what they all say. And then you start listening, and they’ll run your ear off talking little green men and spiders.”

“She’s—she’s crazy then?” I say.

“Wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t, would she?” Jan says. She obviously doesn’t expect an answer. We’ve arrived at another set of double doors, this one marked with a sign that reads
WARD B: PSYCHOSIS, NEUROSIS, HYSTERIA
.

“Go on and grab yourself a pair of slippers,” she resumes cheerfully, pointing.

Outside the doors are a bench and a small wooden bookcase, on which several plastic-sheathed hospital slippers have been placed. The furniture is obviously old, and looks strange in the middle of all the gleaming whiteness. “Leave your shoes and your bag right here. Don’t worry; no one will take ’em. The criminals are in the old wards.” She laughs again.

I sit on the bench and fumble with my shoelaces, wishing I’d thought to wear boots or flats instead. My fingers feel clumsy.

“So she screamed?” I prompt. “When she first came, I mean.”

The nurse rolls her eyes. “Thought her husband was tryin’ to do her in. Shouted conspiracy to anyone who’d listen.”

My whole body goes cold. I swallow. “‘Do her in’? What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry.” Jan waves a hand. “She went quiet pretty soon. Most of ’em do. Takes her medicine regular-like, doesn’t give nobody no trouble.” She pats my shoulder. “Ready?”

I can only nod, although
ready
is the last thing I feel. My body is filled with a need to turn, to run. But instead I stand up and follow Jan through the double doors into another hallway, as spotlessly white as the one we have just passed through, lined on both sides with white, windowless doors. Each step seems to be harder than the last. I can feel the chilly bite of the floor through the slippers, which are tissue-thin, and every time I put a heel down, a shiver runs all the way up my spine.

Too soon, we reach a door marked
2225
. Jan raps twice on
the door, hard, but doesn’t seem to expect a response. She removes her key card from around her neck, holds it up to the scanner to the left of the door—“We got all new systems after the Incidents; neat, huh?”—and, when the lock slides open with a click, pushes the door open firmly.

“Got a visitor,” she calls cheerfully as she passes into the room. This last step is the hardest. For a second I think I won’t be able to do it. I have to practically throw myself forward, over the threshold, into the cell. As I do, the air leaves my chest.

She is sitting in the corner, in a plastic chair with rounded corners, staring out of a small window fitted with heavy iron bars. She doesn’t turn when we enter, although I can make out her profile, which is just touched with the light filtering in from outside: the small, ski-jump nose, the exquisite little mouth, the long fringe of lashes, her seashell-pink ear and the neat procedural scar just beneath it. Her hair is long and blond, and hangs loose, nearly to her waist. I estimate that she’s about thirty.

She is beautiful.

She looks like me.

My stomach lurches.

“Morning,” Jan says loudly, as if Cassandra won’t hear us otherwise, even though the room is tiny. It’s too small to contain all of us comfortably, and even though the space is bare except for a cot, a chair, a sink, and a toilet, it feels overcrowded. “Brought somebody to see you. Nice surprise, isn’t it?”

Cassandra doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even acknowledge us.

Jan rolls her eyes expressively, mouths
I’m sorry
to me. Out loud, she says, “Come on, now. Don’t be rude. Turn around and say hello like a good girl.”