When She Woke (25 page)

Hannah took a quick shower and got dressed. The idea of putting her dirty clothes back on was distasteful, so she chose clean underwear, socks, khakis and a sweater from the chest of drawers. She looked in the mirror and saw her mother’s face: the high cheekbones and voluptuous mouth, the black, catlike eyes and thick, slanting brows. It hit her then, that the mirror was the only place she’d ever see her mother’s face again. They’d never been truly close, but now Hannah felt a surge of love and longing for her. Would she search for Hannah in her own mirror from time to time, or would she shun her own likeness, not wanting to be reminded of her daughter’s disgrace?

Back in the dining room, Susan and Anthony were already seated and having breakfast. The tracksuits had been replaced by business attire that managed to convey the identical impression of ever-so-slightly humorous bad taste. Susan had a large rhinestone panda pinned to the lapel of her unflattering red suit, and Anthony wore khakis, a blue blazer and a polka-dotted bow tie that was perfectly askew. They looked like a bank teller and a high school math teacher, certainly not terrorists on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Breakfast was set on the sideboard. As Hannah filled her plate, the gray cat rubbed against her, twining between her legs. “Hello, Emmeline,” she said, bending down to stroke the soft head. Paul and Kayla entered the room, the latter still half-asleep. Her posture was slumped, her eyes swollen, her face desolate. Hannah knew that look, that feeling:
He is gone.
The echo of its roar sounded in her own head, and she muted it forcibly. Neither of them could afford to show weakness. She caught Kayla’s eye and gave her a look, accompanied by a slight, upward jerk of her chin. Kayla straightened a little and went to fill her plate.

Once everyone was seated, Susan got quickly to the point. “Well, Kayla, we’ve decided to offer you the same choice we offered Hannah.”

Kayla’s eyes flew to Hannah’s. “What choice is that?”

With a glance of warning at Hannah, Susan and Anthony launched into their tag-team description of the road, but where with Hannah they’d emphasized its possibilities, with Kayla, they stressed its dangers and the sacrifices it required. Hannah could see her friend becoming more and more dubious, especially when she learned that the road was one-way only.

“I don’t know,” she said, obviously torn. “Never to see my little sister again, or my aunts and uncles and cousins?” She looked at Hannah. “Did you say yes?”

Hannah nodded, and Kayla turned back to Susan. “You know I’m due for renewal on January fifth. Can we make it to wherever we’re going by then?”

“There are no guarantees,” Susan replied. “The road is unpredictable. And so is the virus.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you may not have that long. Some people start fragging out early. Others go two or three weeks before they feel anything. And of course, the ramp-up varies from person to person. If you’re one of the sensitive ones, you could be completely fragmented in a matter of a few days.”

Kayla bit her lip and stared down at her plate.

“However hard you imagine the road to be,” Simone said, “it will be more hard. The feeble and the doubtful do not survive it. You must not take it unless you are certain this is what you want.”

Kayla was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said, looking at Hannah with an unhappy, sheepish expression. “If I had sixteen years to serve like you do, I wouldn’t think twice. But my sentence is only for five. Maybe I should take my chances here.”

Hannah was incredulous. She’d put herself on the line with these people for Kayla’s sake, and now she was backing out?
Abandoning me, just like Aidan did.
The thought was unlooked-for, and it released a flood of pent-up rancor that Hannah saw had been there for some time, roiling just beneath the surface of her love for him.
I sacrificed our child’s life, and my own, for his sake, and the coward deserted me.
As painful as the realization was, the anger felt good. And it beat the hell out of mourning Saint Aidan.

“If you aren’t sure, then you shouldn’t go,” Anthony was saying to Kayla.

Hannah felt Paul’s eyes on her, prodding her:
Don’t let them separate you.
She studied her friend, evaluating her with the same dispassion she’d trained on Paul, TJ, the Green on the subway. She saw fear and doubt and vulnerability, intelligence and pluck. What she did not see was cowardice. If she were in Kayla’s position, would she not have the same reluctance to give up her whole life? Except Kayla wasn’t in the position she thought she was, and Hannah knew that unless she said something, they’d allow her to decide unknowing.

“Your stepfather’s dead,” Hannah said.

Kayla stared at her for a moment, stunned, and then turned to Susan. “Is it true?”

A grudging nod. “He died of sepsis two days ago.”

“That son of a bitch. He would have to up and die.” Kayla’s voice splintered on the word, and Hannah could see that beneath her bravado, she was deeply shaken. Her expression turned grim as she absorbed the implications. “Murder’s what, ten years minimum?” Another nod from Susan. “Son of a
bitch.
”

“At least he’ll never touch your sister again,” Hannah said.

“Yeah, there’s that.” Kayla took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Guess it’s two for the road.”

S
USAN HAD TOLD
them they’d be leaving in a few days, but a week and a half later, they were still cooped up in the house, waiting. “There’s been a delay,” was all the explanation they were given. Susan and Anthony were gone during the days, presumably to their respective, respectable jobs, and either Simone or Paul babysat. Hannah and Kayla felt increasingly caged and irritable. They couldn’t go outside and were forbidden to access the net—to keep them from contacting anyone they knew, Hannah supposed—which meant they weren’t even allowed to turn on the vid unless one of their minders was in the room with them. There was little to do besides eat, worry and play with the cats. Susan and Anthony’s nondigital library, such as it was, consisted mainly of cookbooks, military histories and women’s self-help books with wince-inducing titles like
How to Feed Your Inner She-Wolf.
Hannah suspected that all of it—the books, the dubious taste in clothing, the cutesy decor—was an elaborate camouflage. She imagined them leading a totally different life somewhere else: in a sleek condominium, perhaps, where they drank French wine and discussed politics over elegant dinners.

Except at night, Hannah and Kayla were allowed to wander the house freely, but every few days, and always in the early evening when Susan and Anthony were home and Simone was there, the women were locked in their rooms for an hour or two without explanation. After the second time, Hannah saw five used coffee cups on the dining room table. She figured the visitors were other Novembrists, coming to report to and scheme with Susan and Anthony, and she wondered how many members of the group there were and what they did in their other lives. It was disconcerting to think that she might have met one of them, shaken hands at church or made small talk in line at the grocery store, and never known it.

Fortunately, Paul was their daytime minder much more often than Simone. His kindness was a reassuring counterweight to the nerve-wracking state of limbo in which they found themselves; that, and his cooking, which was very good. He prepared sumptuous lunches to distract them and put flesh on their scarecrow figures: chicken parmesan, asparagus risotto, spinach soufflé. Hannah had never had such food in her life—her mother was a conventional cook, and she herself had never been interested enough to learn beyond the basics—and the flavors astonished her, often making her moan out loud. But when Paul served the food, his eyes rested on Kayla, and when she ate with gusto, they lit with pride and pleasure.

She began to bloom under his attention. Her despondency over TJ lifted a little, and her wit and irreverence reasserted themselves. She tried to banter with him, but more often than not, her flirtatious remarks left him tongue-tied. Hannah observed them, trying to suppress her envy. How wonderful it must feel, to be wanted by a man—a decent, attractive, unchromed man—in spite of your red skin. Paul seemed impervious to the fact that Kayla was a Chrome. When he looked at her, it was plain that what he saw was a desirable woman.

Hannah’s thoughts returned constantly to her family and Aidan, her mind circling around them like a June bug on a fishing line. Aidan was the most insistent presence of them all. There was no escaping him, even in sleep. He was waiting behind her eyelids, erupting jubilant from the lake, rocking Pearl in his arms, unbuttoning Hannah’s dress, his mouth following the path of his fingers. Once, after a particularly erotic dream, she touched herself, pretending it was him, but the pleasure turned bitter afterward, when she opened her eyes and saw the vacant space beside her. She speculated fifty times a day about where he was, what he was doing, whether he thought of her, and then castigated herself for her weakness. She had to let him go. So she told herself, fifty times a day, but it was like letting go of her own lungs, her own beating heart, and she wasn’t yet ready for that death.

And then one afternoon, she was sitting with Kayla and Paul in front of the vid searching for something to watch, when suddenly, as though she’d conjured him, there was Aidan.

“Stop search,” she said. He was on a stage in a large arena, preaching to a group of teenagers. It was a live show. The camera panned over the crowd, lingering on the rapt, adoring faces of the young women.

“I’m really not in the mood for a sermon tonight,” Kayla said crossly. “Continue search.”

“Go back,” Hannah said. The camera zoomed in on Aidan.

“What is
up
with you?”

“Shh, I want to see this.”

“Fine, watch what you want,” Kayla snapped. She got up and flounced from the room. Paul swore and went after her.

Hannah stared at Aidan. The last time she’d seen him, on the vid of his swearing-in ceremony in September, he’d looked sad and drained. Now, just three months later, his face was shiny and pink with vitality. His eyes were lit with passion, his movements across the stage powerful and exuberant. And his words! He was afire with the spirit of God. She could see it passing like an electric current from his lips to the ears of his mesmerized listeners, many of whom stood with their arms stretched up to the ceiling, eyes closed, swaying back and forth to the cadence of his voice. Hannah watched, hurt warring with furious incredulity. Here she was, a Chrome, a fugitive, targeted by the Fist, running for her life. And he looked . . . happy.

Her spirit puddled within her, a leaden thing, shapeless and abject. How remote he must be from her, and from the love they’d shared, to look like that. Had it ever been real, or had it just been a vivid dream? She didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence before her eyes was damning, irrefutable.

He had let her go.

She had been dead for some time now and not even known it.

FOUR
THE WILDERNESS

H
ANNAH DID LITTLE BUT SLEEP
in the days that followed. The alternative—to stay awake brooding about Aidan, missing her family, worrying about Kayla’s looming renewal date and watching the growing attraction between her and Paul—was intolerable. There was nothing to break the monotony of the days, nothing to keep the darkness at bay. Even Christmas failed to lift her spirits, despite the efforts of their minders to make it festive. Susan and Anthony played carols on the vid and gave Hannah and Kayla gifts of warm jackets, gloves and sturdy boots. Simone was absent, but Paul arrived on Christmas morning with bags of groceries and spent the day cooking, with Kayla as his sous chef. Hannah sat listlessly in front of the vid, a prisoner to the memories summoned by the happy sounds and smells emanating from the kitchen. At home, she would have been peeling potatoes while her mother kneaded dough and Becca basted the turkey. Her father would have poked his head in every so often, hoping to steal morsels of food, and her mother would have pretended to be vexed and shooed him theatrically from the kitchen. Aunt Jo would have brought her famous buttermilk pie, and Hannah’s cousins would have come bearing homemade pralines, ginger bread and casserole dishes of macaroni and cheese and sweet potatoes studded with marshmallows. The women would have chatted in the kitchen while the men watched football and talked politics in the living room. When dinner was served, they’d have all joined hands while her father led them in prayer.

No prayers were said in Susan and Anthony’s household, not that day or any other. Anthony opened a bottle of red wine and poured it round. He raised his glass and said, “Merry Christmas, everyone.” Hannah took a cautious sip. She’d only drunk alcohol once before, some pink box wine her boyfriend Seth had procured the night of their high school graduation. If his plan had been to get her tipsy enough to have sex with him, it had backfired; she got sick after two cups of the stuff, and he spent the next hour holding her hair while she retched.

This wine, though, was altogether different. It was lush on her tongue and tasted of cherries, vanilla and, faintly, leather. She downed the first glass more quickly than she’d intended and began to feel a pleasant, floating detachment from herself and the others. The sensation of being unmoored, of drifting outside the present moment and watching it grow vague and unimportant, like something seen in the rearview mirror of a slowly moving car, intensified as she drank the second glass. When she reached for the bottle to pour herself a third, Susan moved it out of her reach.

“Oh, let her have it,” Anthony said. “It’s Christmas, and she’s far from home among strangers. If she wants a little oblivion, who can blame her?”

Hannah stumbled to bed that night and was locked in alone as usual. But when she woke the next morning, her mouth thick with fur and waves of pain pulsing through her head, Emmeline’s warm weight was lying across her abdomen and chest, and the cat’s paws were kneading her in rhythm with its purring. A kindness, a gift—Hannah couldn’t be certain from whom, but she had a strong hunch it had been Anthony. She lay there for a long while, stroking the cat’s sleek body, grateful for the brief reprieve from loneliness.