Requiem

Lena

A dull feeling settles over us after Alex’s departure. He was causing problems, but he was still one of us, one of the group, and I think everyone—except for Julian—feels the loss.

I walk around in a near daze. Despite everything, I took comfort in his presence, in seeing him, in knowing he was safe. Now that he has gone off on his own, who knows what will happen to him? He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

Coral is pale, and silent, and wide-eyed. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t eat much, either.

Tack and Hunter talked about going after him, but Raven quickly made them see the foolishness of the idea. He no doubt had many hours’ head start, and a single person, moving rapidly on foot, is even harder to track than a group. They’d be wasting time, resources, and energy.

There’s nothing we can do, she said, careful to avoid looking at me, but let him go.

So we do. Suddenly there is no amount of lanterns that can chase away the shadows that often fall between us, the shades of other people and other lives lost to the Wilds, to this struggle, to the world split in two. I can’t help but think of the camp, and of Pippa, and the line of soldiers we saw threading through the woods.

Pippa said we could expect the contacts from resistance within three days, but the third day winds slowly into evening with no sign of anyone.

Each day, we get a little more stir-crazy. It’s not anxiety, exactly. We have enough food and, now that Tack and Hunter have found a stream nearby, enough water. Spring is here: The animals are out, and we have begun trapping successfully.

But we are completely cut off—from news of what has happened in Waterbury and what is happening in the rest of the country. It’s far too easy to imagine, as another morning washes like a gentle wave over the old, towering oaks, that we are the only people left in the world.

I can no longer bear to be inside, underground. Each day, after whatever lunch we can scrounge up, I pick a direction and start walking, trying not to think about Alex and about his message to me, and usually finding that I can think of nothing else.

Today, I go east. It’s one of my favorite times of day: that perfect in-between moment when the light has a liquid feel, like a slow pour of syrup. Still, I can’t shake loose the knot of unhappiness in my chest. I can’t shake loose the idea that the rest of our lives might simply look like this: this running, and hiding, and losing the things we love, and burrowing underground, and scavenging for food and water.

There will be no turn in the tide. We will never march back into the cities, triumphant, crying out our victory in the streets. We will simply eke out a living here until there is no living to be eked.

The Story of Solomon. Strange that Alex picked that story, of all the stories in The Book of Shhh, when it was the one that so consumed me after I found out he was alive. Could he have known, somehow? Could he have known that I felt just like that poor, severed baby in the story?

Was he trying to tell me that he felt the same way?

No. He told me that our past together, and what we shared, was dead. He told me he never loved me.

I keep pushing through the woods, barely paying attention to where I’m going. The questions in my head are like a strong tide, dragging me back over and over to the same places.

The Story of Solomon. A king’s judgment. A baby cleaved in two and a stain of blood seeping into the floor . . .

At a certain point, I realize I have no idea how long I’ve been walking, or how far I’ve ended up from the safe house. I haven’t been paying attention to the landscape as I go, either—a rookie’s error. Grandpa, one of the oldest Invalids at the homestead near Rochester, used to tell stories of sprites that supposedly lived in the Wilds, switching the location of trees and rocks and rivers, just to confuse people. None of us actually believed in that stuff, but the message was true enough: The Wilds is a mess, a shifting maze, and will turn you around in circles.

I begin retracing my steps, looking for places my heel has left imprints in the mud, scanning for signs of trampled underbrush. I force all thoughts of Alex out of my head. It’s too easy to get lost in the wilderness; if you are not careful, you will be swallowed up in it forever.

I see a flash of sunlight between the trees: the stream. I drew water just yesterday, and should be able to navigate back from here. But first, a quick wash. By this point, I’m sweating.

I push through the last bit of undergrowth, onto a wide bank of sun-bleached grass and flat stone.

I stop.

Someone else is already here: a woman, crouching, forty feet down from me on the opposite bank, her hands submerged in the water. Her head is down, and all I can see is a tangle of gray hair, streaked with white. For a second I think she might be a regulator, or a soldier, but even from a distance I can tell her clothes are not standard-issue. The backpack next to her is patched and old, her tank top is stained with yellow rings of sweat.

A man hidden from view calls out something unintelligible, and she responds, without looking up, “Just another minute.”

My body goes tight and still. I know that voice.

She draws a bit of fabric out of the water, a piece of clothing she has been washing, and straightens up. As she does, my breath stops. She holds the cloth taut between two hands and winds it rapidly around itself, then unwinds it just as quickly, sending a pinwheel of water arching across the bank.

And I am suddenly five years old again, standing in our laundry room in Portland, listening to the throaty gurgle of soapy water draining slowly from the sink, watching her do the same thing with our shirts, our underwear; watching the stippling of water across the tile walls; watching her turn and clip, clip, our clothing to the lines crisscrossing our ceiling, and then turn again, smiling at me, humming to herself. . . .

Lavender soap. Bleach. T-shirts dripping onto the floor. It is now. I am there.

She is here.

She spots me and freezes. For a second she doesn’t say anything, and I have time to notice how different she is than in my memory of her. She is so much harder now, her face so sharp with angles and lines. But underneath it I detect another face, like an image hovering just underneath the surface of water: the laughing mouth and round, high cheeks, the sparkling eyes.

Finally she says, “Lena.”

I inhale. I open my mouth.

I say, “Mom.”

For an interminable minute we just stand there, staring at each other, as the past and present continue to converge and then separate: my mother now, my mother then.

She starts to say something. Just then two men come crashing out of the woods, mid-conversation. As soon as they spot me, they raise their rifles.

“Wait,” my mother says sharply, raising a hand. “She’s with us.”

I’m not breathing. I exhale as the men lower their guns. My mother continues to stare at me—silent, amazed, and something else. Afraid?

“Who are you?” one of the men says. He has brilliant red hair, streaked with white. He looks like an enormous marmalade cat. “Who are you with?”

“My name is Lena.” Miraculously, my voice doesn’t tremble. My mother flinches. She always used to call me Magdalena, and hated the abbreviation. I wonder whether it still bothers her after all this time. “I came from Waterbury with some others.”

I wait for my mother to give some indication that we know each other—that I’m her daughter—but she doesn’t. She exchanges a look with her two companions. “Are you with Pippa?”

I shake my head. “Pippa stayed,” I say. “She directed us to come here, to the safe house. She told us the resistance would be coming”

The other man, who is brown and wiry, laughs shortly and shoulders his rifle. “You’re looking at it,” he says. “I’m Cap. This is Max”—he jerks his thumb toward the marmalade-cat man—“and this is Bee.” He inclines his head toward my mother.

Bee. My mother’s name is Annabel. This woman’s name is Bee. My mother is always moving. My mother had soft hands that smelled like soap, and a smile like the first bit of sunlight creeping over a trimmed lawn.

I do not know who this woman is.

“Are you heading back to the safe house?” Cap asks.

“Yes,” I manage to say.

“We’ll follow you,” he says with a half bow that, given our surroundings, seems more than a little ironic. I can feel my mother watching me again, but as soon as I look at her, she averts her eyes.

We walk in near silence back to the safe house, although Max and Cap exchange a few scattered words of conversation, mostly coded talk I don’t understand. My mother—Annabel, Bee—is quiet. As we near the safe house, I find myself unconsciously slowing, desperate to extend the walk, willing my mother to say something, to acknowledge me.

But all too soon we have reached the splintered over-structure, and the stairway leading underground. I hang back, allowing Max and Cap to pass down the stairs first. I’m hoping my mother will take the hint too and delay for a moment, but she just follows Cap underground.

“Thanks,” she says softly as she passes me.

Thanks.

I can’t even be angry. I’m too shocked, too dazed by her sudden appearance: this mirage-woman with the face of my mother. My body feels hollow, my hands and feet huge, balloonlike, as though they belong to someone else. I watch the hands feel their way down the wall, watch the feet go clomp-clomp-clomp down the stairs.

For a second I stand at the base of the stairwell, disoriented. In my absence, everyone has returned. Tack and Hunter talk over each other, firing off questions; Julian rises from a chair as soon as he sees me; Raven bustles around the room, organizing, ordering people around.

And in the middle of it, my mother—removing her pack, taking a chair, moving with unconscious grace. Everyone else breaks apart into flutter and flurry, like moths circling a flame, undifferentiated blurs against the light. Even the room looks different now that she’s inside it.

This must be a dream. It has to be. A dream of my mother who is not really my mother, but someone else.

“Hey, Lena.” Julian cups my chin in his hands and leans down to give me a kiss. His eyes are still swollen and ringed with purple. I kiss him back automatically. “You okay?” He pulls away from me, and I purposely avoid his eyes.

“I’m okay,” I tell him. “I’ll explain later.” There’s a bubble of air caught in my chest, making it hard to breathe or speak.

He doesn’t know. Nobody knows, except for Raven and maybe Tack. They’ve worked with Bee before.

Now my mother won’t look at me at all. She accepts a cup of water from Raven and begins to drink. And just that—that small motion—makes anger uncoil inside me.

“I shot a deer today,” Julian is saying. “Tack spotted it halfway across the clearing. I didn’t think I had a chance—”

“Good for you,” I cut him off. “You pulled a trigger.”

Julian looks hurt. I’ve been horrible to him for days now. This is the problem: Take away the cure, and the primers, and the codes, and you are left with no rules to follow. Love comes only in flashes.

“It’s food, Lena,” he says quietly. “Didn’t you always tell me that this wasn’t a game? I’m playing for real—for keeps.” He pauses. “To stay.” He emphasizes the last part, and I know that he is thinking of Alex, and then I can’t help but think of him too.

I need to keep moving, find my balance, get away from the stifling room.

“Lena.” Raven is at my side. “Help me get some food on, will you?”

This is Raven’s rule: Stay busy. Go through the motions. Stand up.

Open a can. Pull water.

Do something.

I follow her automatically to the sink.

“Any news from Waterbury?” Tack asks.

For a moment there is silence. My mother is the one to speak.

“Gone,” she says simply.

Raven accidentally slices too hard through a strip of dried meat, and pulls her finger away, gasping, sucking it in her mouth.

“What do you mean, gone?” Tack’s voice is sharp.

“Wiped out.” This time Cap speaks up. “Mowed down.”

“Oh my God.” Hunter thuds heavily into a chair. Julian is standing perfectly rigid, taut, hands clenched; Tack’s face has turned stony. My mother—the woman who was my mother—sits with her hands folded on her lap, motionless, expressionless. Only Raven continues moving, wrapping a kitchen towel around her cut finger, sawing through the dried meat, back and forth, back and forth.

“So what now?” Julian asks, voice tight.

My mother looks up. Something old and deep flexes inside me. Her eyes are still the vivid blue I remember, still unchanged, like a sky to tumble into. Like Julian’s eyes.

“We have to move,” she says. “Give support where it can do good. The resistance is still gathering strength, gathering people—”

“What about Pippa?” Hunter bursts out. “Pippa said to wait for her. She said—”

“Hunter,” Tack says. “You heard what Cap said.” He lowers his voice. “Wiped out.”

There’s another moment of heavy silence. I see a muscle twitch in my mother’s jaw—a new tic—and she turns away, so I can see the faded green number tattooed along her neck, just beneath the vicious spate of angry scars, the products of all her failed procedures. I think about the years she spent in her tiny, windowless cell in the Crypts, chipping away at the walls with the metal pendant my father had given her, carving the word Love endlessly over the stone. And somehow, now, after less than a year of freedom, she has entered the resistance. More than that. She is at its center.

I don’t know this woman at all; I don’t know how she became who she is, or when her jaw began to twitch and her hair began to gray, and she began to pull a veil over her eyes, and avoid the gaze of her daughter.

“So where do we go?” Raven asks.

Max and Cap exchange a look. “There’s something stirring up north,” Max says. “In Portland.”

“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.

“Shhh.” 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 remember how I used to have nightmares in which I would stand, helpless, as she walked off the edge of a cliff, coat billowing behind her. For one second, she would remain suspended in the air, hovering, like a vision; then all at once she would fall. 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 high 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.