The Dead-Tossed Waves (36 page)

The Sisterhood has gathered. We have been discussing isolation. Cutting the village off from everything. Hoping that in doing so we may be safe from the continued assaults by those searching for a place to survive the Return. What we will ultimately decide will be in God’s hands as our survival has ever been in His hands
.

Similar pages float everywhere, catching in the grass, sticking to the debris, floating toward the fence. Elias steps
forward, thick bunches of paper clutched in his fist where he’d plucked them from where they snagged on the gravestones.

Just then someone else walks out of the ruins of the old building, his head bent over a few dusty bottles. “Mary, I think these might still be okay. The Sisterhood never said anything about—” He looks up as he eases out of the dark of the crumbled walls and into the light. He stops, one hand held over his eyes to block the sun, when he sees me standing there.

His mouth opens and his gaze jumps to my mother’s face, confused as to what’s going on.

My mother grasps my hand, her smile wide as if she’s the happiest woman in the world at this moment. I stare at her, realizing how few times I’ve seen her so unabashedly happy. Clearly this is someone my mother knows well.

“Harry,” my mother says, squeezing my hand tightly. “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Gabry.”

He starts to smile, tilting his head to the side a bit, as if he’s hearing the trail of a song in the air and trying to place it. He makes his way through the debris toward me and I try to remember if my mother’s ever mentioned his name before. If I should know him. I feel awkward standing here, dirty from so many days on the path, thirsty and hungry.

Just then I hear a sharp intake of breath and I turn slightly. Elias stands just behind me. His face is ashen, his mouth open. The papers he’s been holding flutter from his fingers.

“Elias, is something wrong?” I ask him.

“Elias?” Harry speaks the name softly, delicately, as if afraid that saying it too loud would break it. He squints and turns back to me. There’s a question on his lips. A hint of recognition in his eyes.

“Annah?” he asks, his voice nothing more than a whisper. I know that name. It’s Elias’s sister’s name. The one he’s been looking for; the one he joined the Recruiters for. I start to shake my head.

But Harry is not done. “Abigail?”

Everything inside me stops. My heart no longer beats. My lungs no longer breathe. My ears can hear only one thing: the echo of that name on Harry’s lips.

I know that name. I know the sound it makes coming from this man. After all these years it comes back to me like a lullaby in a dream.

And then chaos breaks. The dog barks again as Catcher tries to come near. Harry yells a command to him but he just keeps growling, his fur bristled. Cira collapses, retching into the grass. I pull my fingers from my mother’s grasp. She tries to reach for me but I step back.

Behind me Elias bolts, sprinting toward the village. My mother reaches for me again but I brush her away. “Help her!” I shout at her, pointing to Cira. “She’s hurt and needs your help.”

“Gabry …,” she starts to say, but I’m already running after Elias, questions burning holes through my memories.

I
try to call after Elias but I’m running so hard I can barely catch my breath. He sprints toward the cluster of houses, cutting between them as if he somehow knows where he’s going, which I don’t understand. He takes a hard left and I stumble chasing after him. The sun’s high in the sky, beating down hard and every footfall stirs up puffs of dust.

I wait for people to call out to us, to see faces in the windows and doors of the cottages I pass, but there’s no one. Weeds spill from doorways and grasses grow from roofs caved in long ago. It’s as if the earth is slowly claiming what was once hers.

Ahead of me down a narrow street Elias dashes into one of the buildings and I slow to a jog until I’m standing in the doorway. Inside sunlight filters through broken window shutters, illuminating the dust motes and causing them to glitter. I suck in a breath. It takes a moment for my vision to adjust to the dim interior and when I do I see Elias standing in the middle of a small sparsely furnished room. His back is to me, his
arms limp by his sides. He barely moves, only his shoulders rising and falling.

I want to say something but it feels as though this space is somehow sacred. He turns, his eyes skimming over everything in the room: the table under the window, benches arranged around the fireplace, the narrow bed shoved against the far wall.

When he finally turns to me his eyes are wide, his lips parted as if he still feels the same shock I do.

“That man,” I say, my voice quiet in the dim light. “How did he seem to know you?”

Elias just stands there and I ease into the shadows, the cool of the darkness soft against my skin. His eyes follow my movement but he doesn’t reach out to me, doesn’t move at all.

“Why did he think he knew my name?” Hearing the words out loud causes my skin to prickle and I realize that I’m more afraid to hear the answer than I thought I would be. But I have to know. “Why did he call me by your sister’s name?”

He takes a step forward and I flinch a little. I don’t mean to but I don’t understand what’s going on and I don’t know if I should trust him. If I can even trust myself. He walks to the other side of the room and traces his finger across the table under the window. His touch marks a deep groove in the dust.

I think about the night I first met Elias on the beach. I think about how stunned he looked when he first saw me, how he reached out to touch me as if he knew me. My breath catches as a sudden and absurd thought occurs to me:
Did
he know me?

Everything in the room is so still. It’s as if I’ve walked out of time. Behind me outside I hear nothing, not even the moans of the Mudo.

“Elias,” I ask, my voice shaking now. “Do you know me?”

He trails his finger off the table and along the top of a chair and then he stops, his knuckles white as he grips the back of it.

And I break. Tired of his silence. Tired of not knowing if I can trust him. Tired of being so near to him every day and not knowing anything about him. “Tell me what’s going on!” I shout, lashing a fist out to my side and banging it against the wall. The sound startles both of us, his eyes snapping up to meet mine.

My knuckles throb but I grit my teeth, refusing to let him know it hurts. I open my mouth to shout again but he cuts in before I have a chance.

“Yes,” he says finally. His voice sounds as scared and dazed as I feel. “Yes, I knew who you were.”

The room seems to swirl around me. I press my uninjured hand to my forehead and stumble toward the fireplace and fall onto one of the benches.

“Tell me,” I say again before I lose the nerve.

He keeps walking slowly around the room as if he needs something to occupy his body while he thinks. “The girl …” He clears his throat. “The woman I’m looking for … she’s not my sister,” he says. His voice sounds like water washing over broken rocks.

He stops in front of me, staring at his fingers. “She’s yours,” he says, finally raising his eyes to meet mine.

“I …” My mouth is suddenly dry. I feel a wrenching inside as though I’ve found the missing piece that holds everything together. Edges of memories blur and fade inside me. I feel as if the room’s grown too small, as if I’ve been buried too deep in the sand and the tide is cresting around my head. I find myself swallowing again and again and again as I try to make sense of it.

I have a sister. So many emotions crash against each other at once that I don’t know what to hold on to. What does she look like? What does she sound like? What does she love and hate and care about? Who is she?

One truth struggles to the surface of it all. “You’ve known,” I say. Of course he’s known. That’s why he’s still here. That’s why he was always there. At every turn when I was alone he was there. He’s known from the beginning while I’ve known nothing.

Every moment between us has been buried in this lie.

He nods. He looks miserable. He holds himself guarded as if afraid of what I’ll do. “She’s your twin,” he says softly. “When I first saw you on the beach …” He pauses, shaking his head. “I thought you were Annah.”

I close my eyes, press my face into my hands. How could I not know I had a twin? All these years. How could I have forgotten that? How is any of this possible?

“You knew,” I say. “All this time we’ve been going through the paths, you knew about this village. You knew everything about it.” I think of all those times I was afraid we’d made the wrong decision coming into the Forest. All the moments I was so sure we’d die on the path and no one would ever know. Anger begins to throb inside. “You should have told us,” I tell him. “We were terrified!”

He holds up his hands, his face pale and eyes wide. “No,” he says. “I didn’t know. You have to trust me, I didn’t.”

I snort. Trust? After finding out that from the very beginning he’s been keeping everything from me? I cross my arms over my chest and stare at him.

“Look, I knew I was from the Forest. Of course I knew. And I also knew that you were too. But when you didn’t recognize me … When you told me your name and it wasn’t
Abigail … I realized you didn’t remember ….” He presses shaking fingers to the side of his head. “I just wasn’t sure you’d want to know. Like maybe you’d forgotten for a reason. I didn’t want to mess up your life.”

This time I actually do laugh but even to my own ears it sounds desperate. “Mess up my life? Look at it now. I’d say everything’s pretty well messed up.”

He tightens his lips together in a thin line. “I’m sorry,” he says.

And just like that the anger that had been coursing through me is suddenly gone, leaving me feeling weak and defeated. “What happened?” I whisper. Realizing that more than anything else, we’re somehow tied together.

He slumps onto the bench across from me, our knees almost touching. “We were neighbors,” he says. “This was my house. You and Annah lived across the street. There weren’t that many kids our age around to play with—you’d just turned five and I was almost seven.” He stares at the floor as if looking into the past and I try to see it all in my mind but there’s nothing more than haze.

“The paths were forbidden to us but one day I stole the key to the gate and convinced you two to sneak out and go exploring and we got lost.” He stops and looks at me, his eyes hollow, his lips drawn. Words begin to spill from his mouth, urgent words. “You fell and skinned your knee and wanted to go back but I didn’t want to. I was afraid I’d get in trouble because you were hurt and I was mad at you because I wanted to keep playing. So I …” He swallows again. I can feel the pain and desperation radiating from him and I want to reach out and grab his hand but I don’t.

I’m having a hard time catching my breath. A hard time
remembering that this story is about me and not some other girl, some stranger.

“Your sister and I kept going down the path.” His eyes flick to meet mine and then bounce away again. Sweat glistens on his temples. “We kept exploring. You asked us to wait for you, not to leave you alone, but I was so …” He rubs a hand over his head, almost clawing at his skin. “Angry. I was mad that you’d tripped and wanted to go home and I didn’t.” He stands up and walks across the room until he’s staring down at the empty table.

I can’t remember anything of what he’s saying. I stare at my knee; there’s a scar there. I thought I knew what it was from. I run my fingers over the puckered skin as Elias talks.

“I pulled Annah down the path with me away from you. We left you crying.” I can hear the tears in his voice, the misery and pain and guilt. “We got lost. I thought I knew where we were and when it started to get dark I tried to go back for you.”

I hurt hearing the words, but not for myself: for him.

“But I couldn’t find you.” He’s barely audible. “You were gone. And then I was too terrified to go back home even if I could find the way. I’d lost you, it was my fault. I was afraid of what your father would say or do. I was afraid of getting in trouble so I ran.”

His throat convulses again and again and again. “I took Annah and ran,” he says, the words coming out in a hot rush like a confession. “I don’t know how long we followed the paths,” he tells me. “It was autumn. It rained enough for water. We found berries and flowers and grapes. We found a way out. A gate at the edge of the Forest hidden by a partially caved-in tunnel in the mountains. It was near the Dark City
and when people asked questions about us I just told them she was my sister. That we were looking for our parents. I was able to find enough in the empty villages in the Forest to trade so we could pay the rents in the Dark City. But I could never find our way back home and eventually gave up trying.”

He turns back to face me. He looks like a different person, his face so twisted with self-loathing that I almost gasp. “It was my fault. All of it. She never knew warmth or her parents or a full stomach because of me.”

I’m numb. He rushes toward me and kneels in front of my bench. He takes my hands in his but I can barely feel them. I don’t know what to think, what to say or do. I should hate him for lying to me but I’m also sorry for the pain he’s clearly suffering.