When She Woke (39 page)

She went due north from Maxon, crossing into Maryland and then Pennsylvania on back roads, and finally caught I-81 in Harrisburg. It would have been faster to hug the coast and then take I-87 up, but that would have meant driving across four state borders rather than two, through too many densely populated areas. The heavy snowfall slowed her progress further, but she soon realized it was more of a blessing than a curse. It acted as a cloak for her and a distraction for the state troopers, who were too busy helping the wounded and distraught passengers of wrecked and stranded vehicles to be on the lookout for escaped Chromes. She passed at least a dozen accident sites, illuminated fitfully, like half-remembered nightmares, by the lurid red and blue lights of the police cars and ambulances. She looked straight ahead as she went by, leaving the victims to their tragedies, not wanting their suffering etched in her own memory.

She was unused to driving in such treacherous conditions, but the van was more than equal to the task. Even so, the miles passed with torturous slowness. She’d hoped to drive straight through to Champlain, but as dawn approached she hadn’t even made the New York state line. She’d have to sleep another day in the van, and that meant she’d have to stop somewhere and buy a blanket or a sleeping bag. Even wearing every single article of clothing she possessed, she’d nearly frozen to death in Greensboro, and it was a good twenty-five degrees colder here in northeastern Pennsylvania than it had been there. She’d considered taking a blanket from Aidan’s house, an act of petty theft that in the end she couldn’t bring herself to commit. She had stolen enough from Alyssa Dale.

On the outskirts of Scranton, she saw the familiar holographic bull’s-eye of a Target and exited. The snow-encrusted parking lot was nearly deserted, but the lights inside the store were on. She parked, bundled up and hurried to the entrance, worried that they’d refuse her business. But when the rent-a-cop saw her, he brought his hand to his holstered firearm in warning but made no move to stop her, and as she passed the checkout area, she saw that one of the cashiers was a Yellow. The camping section was on the far side of the store. She walked down aisle after aisle crammed with merchandise, wondering that there should be so much stuff, so much of which was unnecessary—though she wouldn’t have felt that way a year ago. Then, she couldn’t have possibly lived without any number of things: her port, her morning coffee, her good scissors, her Bible. Her sister, her parents, Aidan.

She chose the highest-rated sleeping bag they had, stopped in the food section to pick up some snacks and bottled water, and headed for the checkout stands. The Yellow cashier had a customer, but she waited for him, even though there was no line at the other register. Hannah expected some sort of recognition to pass between them, a kinship similar to what she’d experienced with the motorcyclist, but the Yellow was brusque and hostile. She was stung at first, but then a kind of empathy kicked in. Why wouldn’t he be surly, this balding middle-aged man who wore no wedding ring, who worked the graveyard shift at a small-town Target and had been forced to live as a Chrome for who knew how long? This could easily have been her own life, if she’d stayed in Dallas and served out her sentence. She thanked him politely when he thrust her bags at her, thinking that whatever she’d been through and whatever she had yet to go through were worth it, to avoid such a fate.

As she left the store, she saw a sign above the door: H
APPY
N
EW
Y
EAR FROM ALL OF
U
S AT
T
ARGET!
She paused, registering belatedly that it was after midnight. A new year had begun. Where would she be, next January 1? In a house or an apartment, in the country or the city, with a roommate, a boyfriend, a husband, a cat? She auditioned all these scenarios, trying them out one by one in the empty space in her mind, but none of them lingered or took on any dimension. Right now, all she could see before her was white.

S
HE PARKED IN
the lot of a giant outlet mall a few miles down the road and slept soundly, for nearly twelve hours, bundled into her sleeping bag on the floor of the van. It was dark again when she woke, and the snow had stopped. She checked the temperature— eleven degrees, with a windchill of six—and opted to pee awkwardly into a cup, wrinkling her nose at the smell in the enclosed space. She poured it out the window, then brushed her teeth, splashed some water on her face and headed back to the interstate. On the way she passed a White Castle. Her stomach immediately started clamoring for a burger, fries and a cup of coffee, but after a short, ferocious battle between it and her brain, she settled for another soggy sandwich from the cooler. She ate every last unappetizing bite, telling herself wryly that it was the taste of freedom.

The interstate had been sanded, so the driving went faster, and she was hopeful she’d be able to make Champlain by midnight. She stopped at a service center near Syracuse to charge the van. The temperature had dropped to three degrees, and she needed to do more than pee, so she risked going inside to use the restroom. The giant vid in the brightly lit seating area was on, and a large group of people were clustered in front of it, some of them openmouthed. They were so fixated on the screen that they didn’t even notice there was a Red in their midst. Hannah paused to watch.

She saw a perky blonde news anchor—the annoying type still trying, at forty, to be adorable—with a shot of the National Cathedral floating behind her. Then the picture cut to Aidan speaking from the pulpit, red-faced and impassioned. Hannah felt a tilting inside of her, a seismic shifting.
No. No, you promised.
She walked toward the vid as if she were walking along the ocean’s floor, her limbs slowed by the water’s resistance, the sounds that reached her ears warped and nonsensical. She moved into the crowd, straining to hear.

“… New Year’s Day service ended in an uproar,” the anchor was saying with breathless excitement, “with the collapse of Secretary of Faith Aidan Dale just after he delivered a fiery and unexpected sermon denouncing melachroming as quote ungodly, unconstitutional and inhumane, end quote, and calling upon the Congress and a very surprised President Morales”—quick cutaway to the flabbergasted faces of the president and first lady—"to rescind the practice. He then further shocked the congregation and the world by confessing to having had an extramarital affair with an unnamed woman.”

The picture cut back to Aidan. “Behold me now as I truly am,” he said, “a sinner who walked among you, hiding behind a mask of godliness while deceit burned in my heart. For over two years, I broke my marriage vows, in thought and in deed. I betrayed my God and my wife”—cut to a close-up of a stone-faced Alyssa Dale—"and all of you, who believed in me.” The picture cut back to Aidan. His complexion was ashen. “But the Lord is merciful! He has shown His mercy by bringing me here, to this holy place, and giving me this precious chance to reveal my shame and hypocrisy in the hope of salvation. Praised be His name! His will be done!” Aidan’s face suddenly contorted, and he clutched his chest. He staggered, and then his knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

Part of Hannah fell with him, her own heart spasming, her own breath leaving her body. Was he dead then? She couldn’t see him; he was surrounded by a teeming knot of people, Alyssa among them, sobbing now. Someone—the surgeon general—was pumping Aidan’s chest. The picture cut to him being wheeled from the cathedral in a stretcher with Alyssa walking beside it, holding his hand. “Doctors at Walter Reed hospital have confirmed that Secretary Dale suffered a mild heart attack. They report that he’s conscious, and his vital signs are stable.”

Conscious. Stable.
The words registered. Hannah’s heart resumed beating, her lungs expanded and took in air.
Oh, thank God,
she said, and then she acted on it, falling to her knees on the floor, bowing her head and praying, the same five simple words, over and over:
Thank You for his life.
At some point, she became aware of movement around her, followed by a charged stillness. She looked up and saw that everyone was kneeling in front of the vid, their heads bent in silent prayer. She experienced a moment of incandescent wonder, a sense of being connected, not just to these people, but to everyone and everything alive: every beating heart, every fluttering wing, every green shoot thrusting itself up out of the earth, seeking, as she was, the sun.

Thank You for his life. And for mine.

S
HE WALKED INTO
whiteness: cold, stark, alien, beautiful. A full moon lit her way, limning the bare branches of the trees in silver and turning the snow into a diamond-spangled carpet gaudy as a magician’s cloak. The cold was brutal at first and blade-sharp in her lungs, but after fifteen minutes of wading through foot-deep snow and scrambling out of hidden troughs that swallowed her to the hips, her blood began to warm. The harsh rasp of her breathing was a reassuring counterpoint to the hush of the forest.

When a half hour had passed, she took off the jammer ring and dropped it into the snow without hesitating, well aware that without it she’d be detectable, not just by the Novembrists but also by the border police. She’d left her backpack in the van, following an impulse she hadn’t understood at the time, but now, moving forward unencumbered by anything except the watch and the clothes she wore, she grasped why:
You must set foot upon the path with nothing but yourself.
It felt right and necessary, this letting go, this total surrender. She had never in her life been this vulnerable, or felt this powerful.

She walked for another ten minutes, another twenty. Her legs ached, and her jeans were wet and heavy. Was that a flicker of light ahead of her? She stopped and stared in its direction, but it was gone, and when it didn’t reappear she decided she must have imagined it. It wouldn’t be hard, here in this eldritch place, to see will-o'-the-wisps, fairy lights that would lead her under a snow-covered mound to a hundred years of oblivious slumber. The more she thought about it, the more alluring the idea was: to sleep peacefully for a century and wake to a different world, one with no melachroming, no disease, no famine, no violence or hate.

She shivered. How long had she been standing here? She couldn’t feel her face or her feet, and her upper body was wet with cooling sweat. She was conscious, distantly, that she was in danger of freezing to death and tried to force her legs into motion, but they were logs, stiff and uncooperative. She looked down at the snow, thinking how lovely it would be to let herself fall into it as she’d let the ring fall, to sink down into that soft, glistening white. A last surrender. A sweet and endless welcoming.

And then she saw the lights, two of them, closer than before. This time they didn’t disappear. They grew brighter and sharper, dispelling her lassitude. The Novembrists, or the police? Hannah fumbled for the pistol, but her gloved hand was too clumsy. She pulled the glove off with her teeth and let it fall to the snow. Released the safety, curled her hand around the butt, her finger around the trigger. Turned the gun inward and up, pressing the barrel into the soft hollow at the bottom of her rib cage. She would not go back; only forward, one way or another. She watched the lights come toward her, two lambent eyes, two all-knowing orbs that held her destiny. Freedom, or death?

In the seconds before she learned the answer, she envisioned her life as it might be, furnished the white space with a large, jewel-toned rug, a sofa upholstered in velvet the deep rose of a lover’s sigh, a glass coffee table upon which sat a vase of red roses in full bloom. She added music: Ella singing, Kayla and Paul laughing, all three of them sounding as though they’d never known pain. Kayla and Paul were sitting on the sofa, holding glasses of garnet wine. His bare feet were propped on the coffee table, and hers were tucked beneath her legs. His arm encircled her, and his thumb was lightly caressing her bare shoulder, which was the color of light filtered through amber. Kayla said something, and Hannah heard her own laughter, bright and airy, mingle with theirs.

The lights were upon her now, blindingly bright. The forest and the snow and the moon vanished; all she could see were the lights. She put her free hand up to shield her eyes.

“What is your name?” The voice was a man’s, with the same French lilt as Simone’s.

“Hannah Payne.”

“And why are you here?”

The Henleys had asked her that, and she’d answered them truthfully. How different, and how much more rich and vibrant, her truth was now. “Because,” she said, “it’s personal.”

The lights went away, but her eyes were still too dazzled to see. She heard the crunch of feet on snow and finally made out a pale face, white teeth: a man, smiling at her. She let go of the gun, felt herself falling sideways. The man took hold of her shoulders and pulled her upright. Kissed her frozen cheeks, right and then left.

“Bienvenue,
Hannah. Welcome to Québec. You are safe now, and so is your friend. Simone asked me to tell you that Paul found her and is bringing her here.”

Hannah went back then, to the space in her mind that was no longer empty and white. She saw a bedroom with gleaming wood floors and a standing mirror, a bed with a deep violet coverlet, sheer curtains billowing from a breeze scented with the riotous promise of spring. There was a sleeping figure in the bed, lit by a patch of morning sun. Her hair was long and dark, fanned across the pillow, and her skin was a honey-toned pink that would deepen to golden brown in the summertime to come.

She woke, and she was herself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a novel is an inherently solitary and often crazy-making pursuit. But there are people who see you through it, who inspire and inform and soothe and prod and tolerate and love you, and generous organizations that house and feed you when you’re in the throes of creation. I’m especially indebted to the following:

First, my ingenious and opinionated uncle John, who planted the seed for
When She Woke
sometime in the early nineties over a meal and a bottle of wine in Hulls Cove, Maine. We were discussing the drug problem in America, and he said, “I think all drugs should be legal and provided by the government. They just ought to turn you bright blue.” The conversation stuck in my mind and eventually bore this dark, strange, red fruit.