“It’s just right, Adam. Thank you.” With care, I remove the bundle from my backpack and lower it into the earth. If you don’t look at the queue of abandoned cars, it’s not an altogether disagreeable landscape. Prairie grass, a gentle hill with more shades of green than what you thought existed, a view unhindered by telephone wires or electric cables. Certainly, it is a resting place one thousand times better than the
silo floor. Yet, I have to ask Charlie once again to forgive me—this time, for leaving him in no-man’s-land.
Adam has collected a posy of wildflowers. He hands it to me. I gently lay them on top of the bundle.
“Aren’t you going to say something?”
Quietly, so quietly even the spirits won’t hear, I say, “You rest here, Charlie, but you will always live in my heart.”
Adam digs in his pocket and pulls out a key. It’s from Dobbs’s ring. He places it gently on top of the bundle. “Everyone ought to have their own key.” He recites both the Our Father and the Pledge of Allegiance. And then there isn’t anything left to do but fill the hole.
I shovel the dirt and pat down the sod. We gather stones to circle the grave. Adam stakes a car antenna in the middle of the mound. He bows his head. I’d pray, too, but I know one of two things will happen—either there’ll be no words, or I’ll start and never get stopped. When I sling the backpack over my shoulder, it feels heavier than it did before. What things need bearing now?
Adam gives the graveyard one last look. “I don’t want to be buried in a place like this. When I die, I want to be put on a boat and get pushed out to sea.”
By the time we get back to the Buick, Adam is shivering uncontrollably. My joints have seized up. I can’t seem to bend my knees. After wrapping the drape tightly around Adam, I check the survival kit. Dobbs has sealed in a Ziploc bag three packs of matches. I crack the window just enough for fresh air, then pat Adam’s leg. “I won’t be long.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to collect some wood so we can build a fire.”
Adam begs me to reconsider. “It’s not safe out there.” He stares out the window. Evening is almost upon us. “I don’t want you to leave me alone. What if that horrible bird comes back and breaks in and attacks me?”
“Birds don’t attack, son.” I don’t want to explain how much more
the temperature will drop or what it will be like a few hours from now when the cold goes after our organs, so I hand him the egg. “You’ve got your little buddy to keep you company. And I’ll be back in two shakes. You can’t see it from here, but just a little ways up the street is a dead tree—”
“Dead?” He looked nowhere near as appalled as when we were in the graveyard.
“It’s not just people who die, Adam. You know that.”
He is shaking his head as though this is all news to him.
“If you get scared, just honk the horn.”
I close the door and hurry up the road again. It is the thought of a warm fire that keeps me from falling down. That and the insects. The road is now teeming with millipedes the length of garden snakes and cockroaches so bold even the threat of a shoe coming down on them is no deterrent. Beside me, the field is awash in strange blue phosphorescence, and the same unsettling noises from last night start to ring out from every direction, as though some otherworldly animal kingdom is starting to stir.
I collect as much wood as will fit in the backpack and what my arms can carry, not nearly enough to keep a fire burning through the night. Perhaps my legs have it in them for one more trip. I hurry back just as a car horn begins blaring.
“I’m coming; I’m coming.”
The fire sends sparks into the air and Adam back behind the Buick door. It takes much coaxing for him to get close enough to benefit from the heat. I hold out my palms toward the flames. It pops and cracks and spits out an ember, and Adam gives a cry of alarm. He fetches his umbrella. I tell him it’s not a good idea to prop it so close to the fire, so he sits three feet away with his egg instead. After a while, he draws closer. Once he’s sure that the flames aren’t going to reach out and grab him, he kneels and leans toward the warmth. He smiles, closes his eyes, and tilts his head a little.
The flames burn green at their tips and give off a faint whiff of boot polish. The deadwood is quickly reduced to coals that tinkle like Mama’s wind chimes. There is a physical ache to thinking about Mama now, a pressure that builds up behind my eyes and turns everything blurry. I’ve always thought of Mama waiting—maybe not waiting for me in the house on Fall Leaf Road, but waiting in some living room where she knows the exact number of hours I’ve been gone. That Mama might have moved her waiting to the shores of eternity is too much to bear.
Adam is transfixed by the glowing embers and the short bursts of flame they occasionally throw up. Just as with the body of water earlier today, he becomes brazen. More than once I have to caution him not to touch the white ash. He blackens the end of a stick and then scrapes it against the ground.
Adam,
he writes.
“I’m starving,” he says, after a long silence. We’ve finished off the apples and the blackberries, and there is nothing left in Dobbs’s survival kit except a packet of powdered milk.
I fetch the pot from the car. Away from the hearth, the cold is an assault. I can’t remember ever being this cold before. It’s like being gripped by a burglar and shaken vigorously enough to empty the contents of my pockets.
“But we haven’t got anything to cook,” Adam remarks.
I sit on my haunches beside him. “I don’t want you to get upset now,” I begin. “But we have to eat.”
He agrees until he sees me looking at his egg. He jerks it away from me. “You can’t eat Buddy!”
“Listen to me, Adam. We have to eat. If we don’t, we won’t have energy tomorrow to do anything. We won’t be able to—”
“I don’t want to do anything! I want to stay here and take care of Buddy.”
The campfire casts a glow on our faces. Adam’s is full of indignation
and hurt and fear. Mine obviously needs to show more assertiveness. “We’re going to eat the egg, and tomorrow we’ll see if we can’t find you another one.”
“I don’t want another one!” he screams. The sound echoes across the night.
We don’t have time to argue because already the fire is petering out. “Give me the egg, Adam.”
He whips away, jumps to his feet, and disappears into the blackness. I know he aims to lock himself in that car again, and the fire is going to burn out, and we are going to be two ashen stick figures by the time the sun rises. I go after Adam. I grab his arm as he reaches for the door handle, and somehow, in the tussle, there is an awful cracking sound.
Adam holds up his hands, yolk dripping from them. He turns a shrieking, crazed face to me. “Look what you’ve done!
Look what you’ve done!
”
Collecting another bundle of wood, I berate myself. In a car down the road is my child. Ever since doing Dobbs in, ever since we came Above and found it godforsaken, I have been waiting for the right moment to comfort him. Comfort him for everything, my wrongdoings especially. Now, he won’t let me.
I think he is letting me know just how angry he is when I hear the horn start up blaring again, until I realize that there is also the sound from earlier. Engines. I peer into the darkness at two headlights. They are moving very fast. Dropping the firewood, I start to run toward them.
The horn keeps blaring and the lights come to a halt next to the car and my chest feels like it is about to crack open. Coughing and wheezing, I keep running. I try shouting to let Adam know I’m coming, but my lungs erupt with resin instead. The horn stops. Voices are telegraphed across the tarmac by a cable of bright white light. We’ve been found.
I can hear Adam’s voice. He must be telling them where I am. I see
three figures move in front of the headlights, Adam’s distinct by his stoop.
“Over here! I’m coming!”
I’m only a few cars away. They can see me. And yet one of the figures takes Adam to a vehicle. Shoves him, actually. “Mom!” he cries out. “Mom!”
The engine revs. With a lurch, it bounces across the ditch and into the field, taking Adam with it.
It says, “No airway obstruction. Head and neck are otherwise unremarkable. Cardiopulmonary systems seem stable. Pressures normal. Start a large-bore IV. Draw a blood culture, and run a set of chemistries.”
I try to get up, see what all the fuss is about, and realize I don’t have any legs or arms. All that’s left of me is my mind. It should be fixed on a single task, but I can’t think what. Seems like I was on my way somewhere—to heaven, maybe.
An angel moves in front of the not-sun. The angel’s eyes are very red. The angel hasn’t had enough sleep. Without warning, she directs a tine of light into my eye. “Pupils are not obtunded, but she is somewhat photophobic.” The beam clicks off, but it’s too late; it has scrambled my thoughts.
Something is clamped around my mouth to keep me from talking. I try pulling it off, but the angel stops me. “No, you must leave the mask on until your breathing treatment is over.”
Heaven is a very tiring place, so tiring I can’t keep from drifting
away from the brightness and the jangling sounds to the beautiful darkness.
From far away someone keeps asking the same thing. I wish the soul being addressed would hurry up and do as told, so everything can go back to being quiet again.
“Open your eyes, ma’am.” The order is repeated, this time close enough for me to detect the smell of mothballs. “I need you to look at me.”
Through a crack in my eyelids, I see a tall white-haired woman in a white jacket. It is to me she is talking. The not-sun is gone. The angels are gone. Heaven is gone, too. To make doubly sure I am not dead, I chance a look at my body. Everything’s where it ought to be. I watch my hand raise five fingers, see the shadow forming beneath them.
“Right, keep them open.”
I look around me. Indoors, except the spatial dimensions are all wrong. Instead of being smooth and vertical, the walls are ribbed and curved. Reflexively, I bring my arms up over my head. The wall doesn’t collapse but arches over me and disappears behind a black plastic curtain across the way.
The woman holds up three fingers, and asks me in a heavy accent to count them. I inspect the tube in my arm. It runs to a bag that is hooked onto a towel rack on the corrugated wall. Also attached to the wall is a long string of bulbs.
“How many fingers?” she persists.
Minnesotan? German? “Three.”
“Do you know what day this is?”
I shake my head.
“Do you remember how you got here?”
Again, I let my body answer for me.
“Neither of you were carrying any identification. Can you tell me what you were doing in the Disposal Zone?”
It all rushes back in one quick wave: Dobbs dead in a puddle of
blood, Adam and me in the car, then on foot, an ocean where streets used to be, Charlie in a poorly marked grave, a motorbike making off with my child. “Adam!” I try sitting up, but there’s a block of lead on my chest.
“Easy.” The woman puts her hand on my shoulder. “You had an asthma attack. It is best not to try getting up right now.”
“My son!” My voice is raspy and sore from screaming—vaguely, I recall hooded figures and motorbikes.
“He’s right here.” The woman parts the black curtain. Adam is in the bed next to mine, being tended to by figures in green outfits.
“Adam! Are you all right?”
He looks at me, the whites of his eyes showing, his teeth clenched as though on a piece of wood. In his fist is a mess of twine, our leash.
“We made it, my boy. We’re safe.” Found, rescued, restored—all the words I was beginning to believe would never apply to us I say to him now. But there is this stupid mask over my face and what I say sounds ghastly. No wonder he looks even more alarmed. I give him a thumbs-up, and just as he is about to return the gesture, one of the figures draws back the sheet covering his naked torso. He reacts by curling into a ball. Instead of reassuring him, she tries to straighten his legs. Adam yelps, and scoots up to the head of the bed. “No, no, no, no.”
“Go easy with him. He is not used to strangers,” I instruct, pulling the mask away from my mouth. To Adam, I say, “Son, you don’t have to worry; these are nice people.” These are the good guys is what I mean, because we’ve both heard Dobbs talk so much about Scalpers. “We’ve been outside for two days without much to drink or eat,” I explain to the woman beside me.
“I see.” She introduces herself as Harriet Fletcher, the attending physician. Clearly, I am expected to give more details.
“He’s never been outside before. Could you please dim the lights? I think he’d do better if it wasn’t so bright.”
Adam has regained control over the covers again. Burying himself under them, he begins humming and rocking. The attendants have fallen back and seem to be awaiting further instructions from the doctor.
“He’s never been outside before?”
Shielding my eyes with one hand, I take my first look in seventeen years at another person. Her skin is a funny color, like she’s been overcooked. Either she spends a lot of time looking directly into the sun or frowning because her forehead is scored with lines. Her lips are flattened into a broad line. It does not look quite like a smile. There is no hint of makeup, but she has obviously spent a great deal of time teasing her short hair in such a way as to cover the bald spots. Curious how I have lost the ability to gauge a person’s age. She cannot possibly be a hundred and twenty.
“We were—”
Hostages
doesn’t seem like the right word.
Captives
neither. “I was taken. A long time ago. We’ve been kept.” Surely she can see how relieved and grateful I am.
But Harriet Fletcher seems to be distracted by a spot on the cuff of her coat. “I see.” In the middle of explaining about Dobbs, she asks me my name.
“His name is Adam, and mine’s Blythe,” I tell her. “Blythe Hallowell.”
“Well, Mrs. Hallowell, once we get the wound tended to, we’ll have him up and about in no time.” She replaces the mask over my mouth.
I couldn’t have hoped for greater news, but I need to correct her on one point. “Miss,” I say. “My mother is Mrs. Hallowell—Irene. Hank Hallowell is my father, from Eudora.” I lift the mask slightly so she can hear me better. I tell her my phone number.
“You are very lucky we found you in time,” she says, not, “I’ll bring you the telephone.”
“There is also a cut on his leg from a rusty piece of metal.” When I get no response to this other than a curt nod, I have to add, “He’s never been vaccinated.”
“We will continue to keep a close watch.”
“Shouldn’t he get a tetanus shot, just to be on the safe side?”
She cocks her head to one side. “You’re not from the Renu Project, are you?”
I frown. “Where?”
I don’t understand. Have we done something wrong? “Where are we?” Because, come to think of it, this is like no hospital I’ve ever seen. An army barracks, more like it.
“The infirmary at Sunflower.”
“Sunflower Ordnance Works?” “The scab of the county” was what Grandpa used to call it, telling us how Eudora’s folks resisted the building of a munitions plant in the Second World War. Not that they had anything against bombs or war for that matter. What they didn’t want were empty stores, abandoned trailers, and unused Quonset huts when the war was over.
“We don’t call it that anymore, but yes.”
The confirmation brings me close to tears. Six miles, that’s how far we are from Eudora. Only six miles!
“Are we at war?” I ask. That would explain the blackout, the exodus of cars, the graves. Hadn’t I smelled gunpowder in the air?
Perhaps I have asked this with a little too much eagerness because the lines on Harriet Fletcher’s forehead have bunched together. “You said you’d been ‘taken.’ How long ago exactly?”
“Seventeen years.” She doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the other details—who took me and why—as she is in the date.
“And you said your son has never been outside?”
“That’s right. As I said, we were locked away in a missile silo. It’s off County Road—”
“And you can confirm this by what means?”
“Confirm?”
She excuses herself without answering my question and walks over to Adam.
Beside him is a portable table with instruments and jars. She speaks to Adam in a soothing tone, asking him the very questions for which I have just given her answers. In response, Adam draws the sheet over his head and remains silent.
I lift the mask. “He’s not going to let you do that.” Adam is terrified, and the mention of blood does not help. I fight to get the covers off me so I can get out of bed.
Harriet Fletcher touches Adam’s arm, and he knocks the needle straight out of her hand. He bolts off the bed, landing hard on his bad knee. He yanks out his IV and scuttles under the bed.
“It’s okay, young man. A little prick, that’s all.” Harriet Fletcher’s knees creak something terrible when she crouches next to the bed. She reaches her hand toward Adam. Her voice becomes high. “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Adam is making growling sounds. I can’t seem to get myself untangled from the tubes. “Adam, she’s a doctor; it’s okay.”
“I have something for you, if you come out.” Seeing Adam is not about to take the bait, the woman rises to her feet with some effort and gives her instruction in a tone that means business. “Two milligrams Lorazepam. We’re not going to get anywhere without sedation.”
Freed of mask and tubes and covers, I swing my legs over the side of the bed. As soon as I try standing, the ground begins to list. I try to catch my breath and realize there isn’t enough air to go around. Air is being drained from the room somehow. The floor begins to tilt to such an extent I lean back to avoid being splattered against the corrugated wall. There is nothing to grasp on to for balance, and the floor rises up and smacks me upside the head.
I look over at Adam. “I’m okay.”
He’s even more panicked now.
I try crawling to him. “These people are nice, Adam. You’ve got to let them—”
Something goes wrong with his face. His expression closes in on itself, and he slumps over. Hands latch onto his legs. They drag him out from under the bed and swing him back onto the bed as if he’s a sack.
“What have you done to him? Don’t pull him like that! You’re going to hurt him!”
I try rushing to him, but an arm fences me in and drags me back to my bed. I insist on my release and when that doesn’t work, I kick and pull and finally sink my teeth into the arm.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
And then something very stinging happens to my thigh. The lights start to flicker and dim, and the voices run together in a dull drone. The baby I named Freedom, Charlie, Adam, Mama—they’re all calling me. I walk toward them and step into a very deep hole.
The woman is afflicted by the same unfortunate color as Harriet Fletcher and also has very little hair, a fact she is trying to conceal with an ill-fitting headscarf. She wears a single item of clothing—a cross between a raincoat and a choir robe. Not once does she look at me, not even when I call out a greeting.
I look around. Near the door is a rack of wooden crutches. Underneath the beds are old-fashioned chamber pots. No telephone, no television, no familiar face. Shouldn’t there be a policeman by now?
“Do you know if they’ve managed to make contact with my parents?”
The woman does not turn around, but a wisp of a voice flits by the window above me. Is someone spying on us?
I strain the silenced air for other fragments, but there is nothing except the brightness. I can’t think straight with it being so bright. Even when you close your eyes, there’s no way around it—it bleeds straight through your eyelids. The brightness has a smell, too; sharp enough to make your nose sting. Unless you want it to stick to your gums, it’s best to keep your mouth closed. If only there were one giant lightbulb, I could smash it into a thousand pieces and be done with it; I could think. Instead, there is row after row of bulbs.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
It occurs to me when I start banging my hand on the bedside table that the woman is not ignoring me; she is unable to hear me.
Adam wakes up disoriented. “What are you doing?”
From his suitcase, I fish out his notebook and a pen. “Just a minute, son.” The woman turns when she catches me waving. I hold the sheet so she can read its emphatic demand:
Please fetch Dr. Fletcher.
She hurries from the room and returns moments later with a carbon copy of herself. They bring us trays of food.
I wave the piece of paper again, but all I get is polite nodding.
“We need to speak to the doctor right away. It’s very important.”
Blank stare.
I mouth, “Im-por-tant.”
On the other side of the paper, I scribble my name, my parents’ names and telephone number, and in big beseeching letters, I add,
Please call
. One of them takes the paper. I start thanking her profusely until I see her fold it into an impossibly small square and stick it in her pocket as though she intends to forget it.
“Why are they looking at me like that?” Adam is peering at them over the top of his sheet. Each time the one with the tray tries to hand him his food, he yelps in protest and raises the sheet again.
“He doesn’t like it if you get too close.” I flag them, then gesture. Somehow, the message gets across. They leave his tray on the bedside table and keep to the other side of the aisle, where they watch him with unabashed fascination.
“What’s wrong with them, Mom?”
“They’re deaf, Adam.” From the flapping of hands, they appear to be having a very animated conversation. As though choreographed, they lift imaginary spoons to their mouths, indicating for Adam to do likewise.
Adam glances at his tray. “What is it?”
He used to beg me for food stories when we were Below. I’d tell him about pies, and he’d savor my words as though they were loaded on the end of a fork. Now, you’d swear he was being served roadkill.
“I don’t know, but you should probably get something in your stomach.” Only the carrots are recognizable. So that Adam will follow my example, I take a bite. The meat is gamy and tough.
Adam accepts his tray this time and acknowledges the women with an ever-so-slight nod. “It’s good,” he mumbles, after a spoonful. He looks directly at them and is rewarded for this effort with applause. He gives them a thumbs-up, which they both find terribly amusing. My son is having his first conversation with deaf people.
The women are elated with Adam’s progress until he pushes aside his tray, leaps out of bed, and retches violently on the floor.
I shove another piece of paper at one of the women.
Dr. Fletcher. Right now!
In a clean hospital gown and settled back in bed, Adam is still apologizing when the doctor finally comes. Ignoring me, she marches straight over to Adam’s bed. To her credit, she leaves a little room between herself and Adam and makes an effort to speak softly. “How is our patient doing today? I hear lunch didn’t agree with you.”
Adam starts winding the twine into a ball. Even from here, I can see his hands trembling.
“Don’t worry, young man. No more needles.” She apologizes for last night and tells him that it was necessary to sedate him to clean his
wound and do the necessary blood work. She addresses me next, saying, “Fortunately, the laceration is superficial. Much of the redness and swelling has subsided, so I don’t think we are dealing with an infection.”
“Thank you for helping us.”
She acknowledges this with the slightest of nods. “You want to tell me what happened?”
Adam has that wide-eyed look again. It’s about all he can do to shake his head, so I repeat the details—the date I was taken, a physical description of Dobbs, my parents’ address and telephone number. I give her a rough sketch of the last seventeen years, leaving out details Adam doesn’t need to hear, as well as the small matter of killing Dobbs.
“You’ve been through quite a lot, haven’t you, Adam?” She’s good with him, almost maternal. “You don’t need to worry; nobody here is going to hurt you.”
As reassuring as this clearly is to Adam, it awakens in me a possessiveness. Exactly how I felt whenever Dobbs took Adam into his private quarters is how I feel with her. I tell myself Adam is my son, not my property. I am going to have to share him.
“We would like to do some additional testing on Adam.”
Out the corner of my eye I can see Adam shaking his head.
“It shouldn’t take long, and he’ll just be a few doors down,” she continues. “We’ll have him back by dinnertime.”
Alarmed that they might have picked up something in those blood tests, I ask, “He’s not sick, is he?”
Leukemia
is all I can think.
“No, nothing like that.” She turns to Adam, who looks like he might be a flight risk, and lowers her voice. I catch just a few words—something about him and her having a private talk. I realize suddenly what this is about. They want to question Adam without me being present, the way they do children who are abused by their parents. They think I hurt him.
“The man who kept us did that to Adam. They were fighting. It all happened very quickly. I didn’t even know Adam had a weapon.” Why do I sound so guilty?
“I see.”
“My mother was only defending herself when she killed Mister!” Adam blurts.
Harriet Fletcher flicker-blinks. “I’m sorry—did you just say she killed someone?”
Realizing his words have made things worse, Adam now clams up and winds twine for all he’s worth.
I draw my legs to my chest. “Is someone coming for us?” I ask. Someone who can vouch for me. “I have a list of people’s names, if you can’t get ahold of my parents. Sheriff Rumboldt—I don’t know if he’s still in charge at the station—he’ll tell you.” The deaf women are peering at me through narrowed eyes.
“The authorities have been notified,” Harriet Fletcher replies, her attention fixed on Adam. “It will take them a while yet to reach us, and in the meantime, we will continue with our tests.” She assures Adam that it is okay to come out from under the covers, that he isn’t in any trouble. When asked what his favorite thing to eat is, he murmurs through the sheets that he likes ramen and jerky.
“Well, let’s see what we can do.” She signs to the women, and one of them scurries off. “Do you like technology, Adam? When my son was your age he was always into the latest gadgets.” She takes a walkie-talkie out of her pocket and turns the knob until a hiss of static fills the air.
Adam can’t resist. He lowers the covers, brushes the hair out of his eyes.
“It’s called a two-way.” After giving instructions about how to operate it, she hands it to him. She retrieves a second device from the deaf woman and proceeds to transmit a message to him. “We’re glad you’re here, Adam.”
He stares at the device in his hand, seems incredulous that her voice can come out from its tiny holes. He pushes the button. “Hello.”
The bribe works. Adam allows her to apply a clean dressing to his wound. Instead of looking at his injury, he stares intently at her, as though committing every blemish and wrinkle to memory.
“Feel like stretching your legs now?” she asks.
Getting out of bed, Adam has me hold the end of the twine. Spooling it out from the ball, he allows Harriet Fletcher to lead him down the center aisle for a stroll. If the doctor thinks this is peculiar, she does not remark on it. The two deaf women are observing the goings-on with the same enthused looks on their faces.
“They seem quite taken with my son,” I mention as Harriet Fletcher passes by my bed.
She can’t quite decide whether to put her hand on Adam’s arm, so it lingers in the space above it. “He is a remarkable find.”
Adam is not altogether displeased with her pronouncement. I, on the other hand, feel this is an odd choice of words. Find? Like he’s some artifact from an archeological dig?
“It’s rather careless what you did,” she continues, steering him past the deaf women.
“What I did?”
“Taking him out there without any means of protection.” She can barely conceal her disapproval.
“We were escaping!” I try not to sound hysterical when I tell her once again that I was kidnapped, that we were held underground for years, and that I would like very much to speak to someone who can help me find my family. Raising my voice sets off another round of coughing.
Handing Adam off to a deaf woman, she comes to my side and tries to get me to put the mask on.
I push it away.
“If you refuse your breathing treatments, your lungs will not get better.” Her expression means to convey just how much I am trying her
patience, and I look back at her in such a way that she will know that I don’t care if my lungs harden, I don’t care if I turn into cement and crack in two the next time I cough, I’m not taking anything that keeps me from thinking straight.
“I’m fine,” I insist, but she already has the blood pressure cuff attached to my upper arm.
She goes from buckram to downright chummy. “Do you mind if I ask whether you have had any other live births?”
I am still deciding how best to answer when Adam pipes up, “Tell her about Charlie.”
Harriet Fletcher’s head swings from me to Adam and back to me. She already thinks I am capable of hurting Adam—what will she make of the dead child who doesn’t belong to me? What will she make of the baby I didn’t raise, whose whereabouts are unknown to me? My explanation—rambling and rife with omission—ends with where we buried Charlie.
None of this seems to make any impression. “How about any live births since Adam?” She peers at me as though she’s trying to thread a needle and finding difficulty with the focal point. “What I mean is, Mrs. Hallowell, are you capable of bearing children?”
If my life depended on it, I couldn’t say when last I had my period. And I can’t think why she still needs to be corrected on the issue of marital status. Only in Dobbs’s mind were we ever married, and now that mind is no more. “It’s ‘Miss,’ ” I snap. “And no.”
“I see.” Whatever piqued her curiosity is now gone. Her attention shifts again to Adam, who, having gone as far as the twine will allow, is reeling himself back to his bed. “As I said, the testing won’t take long. A couple of hours, at the most. What do you say, Adam? Are you ready to come with me?”
You’d have to be blind to mistake Adam’s frozen posture as the go-ahead. So that Harriet Fletcher will drop the matter, I say, “No more tests.”
She approaches me as though having to penetrate an unbearable stench. “I understand your hesitation about being separated from your
son. I know you think you are protecting him, and I am not saying you haven’t done an admirable job of it in the past.”
Admirable job. Protecting my son. I’ve lied to my son, is what I’ve done. I’ve prepared him not at all for the ways people can deceive and manipulate.
“But if you can put aside your own needs and wishes for a moment and think about what is best for Adam—”
I leap out of bed. “You know what? I think Adam and I will find our own way from here.” Adam’s jaw drops when I tell him to change into his clothes. I pack the bottled water that came on our lunch trays into the suitcase. Six miles is the distance from here to Eudora. If Adam and I put our backs into it, we can be there in a couple of hours.
Harriet Fletcher is pinching the bridge of her nose and looking up at the ceiling when I grab the extra bandages from the bedside table drawer. It is to Adam she speaks. “Your mother intends to leave our compound. Is that what you want, Adam?”
Adam’s head flicks from me to her to me again.
“I don’t know what she has led you to believe about the world, Adam, but it can be a very dangerous place. She intends to take you out there without a gun, without any ammunition, without any knowledge of the safe passages. And to what end? Except for a few old people and a herd of buffalo, Eudora isn’t anything but a ghost town. Is that where you want to go, Adam?”
What she says frightens me as much as it does Adam. Nevertheless, I throw the backpack over my shoulder. Better out there than in here, where people don’t seem to respect free will. First free, I tell myself. Now, will. “Adam wants to go where I want to go.”
“You, my dear, want to go home, and it is my fault for not having been straight with you sooner. What I am trying to say is that your home is not how you left it.”