Authors: Hillary Jordan
“We might as well eat while we wait,” Paul said to Simone.
She shrugged. “Go ahead. I am not hungry.”
The dining room table was set for three. Simone took one of the empty places and drank coffee while the rest of them had supper. Their hosts were brimming with the Christmas spirit. The plates were decorated with Christmas trees and the napkins embroidered with poinsettias. A reindeer-antler candelabra dominated the table, and mistletoe hung from the archway leading to the living room. They ate in silence. Hannah’s mind was a jumble of unasked questions: What would happen if these people decided she and Kayla weren’t trustworthy? Would they actually let them go, knowing the two women could identify them? Paul seemed kind enough, but Simone was another matter. Hannah remembered the strength of the other woman’s grip and how fragile her own bones had felt in comparison. There was no doubt in her mind that Simone would do whatever was necessary to protect herself and her “mission.”
The sound of a door opening interrupted this disturbing train of thought. “Wait here,” Simone told Paul. She got up and went into the kitchen. Hannah couldn’t see the newcomers, but she could hear them, a man and a woman, speaking too low for her to make out what they were saying.
Paul rapped his knuckles on the table, drawing Hannah and Kayla’s attention to him. “Listen to me, both of you,” he said, in a soft voice at odds with the intensity of his expression. “They’re going to try to separate you. They’ll make it sound attractive, try to convince you it’s in your best interest. They may even tell you they
have
to separate you, but don’t let them.” He looked at Kayla. “If you do, you’ll be in danger.”
“What do you mean, we’ll be in danger?” she said.
“Not Hannah, just you.”
“Why just me?”
“You aren’t supposed to be here. You’re not part of our mission.”
“I don’t understand,” Kayla said.
“Just do as I say. No matter what they promise, you insist on staying together.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Kayla asked.
But Hannah knew, even before she saw his eyes drop to his hands. He was warning them in part out of simple humaneness, because that was his nature, but he had another, equally compelling motive, and it had more to do with passion than compassion. Paul raised his eyes to Kayla, and the expression in them gave Hannah a pang of jealousy. She ducked her head, caught off guard. Who or what exactly was she jealous of? But before she could examine her feelings, Simone strode back into the room and ordered Hannah to follow her. To Kayla and Paul, she said, “Stay here.”
Hannah complied with reluctance. In the archway, she turned and looked back at her friend. The swift glance they exchanged held an entire conversation:
Don’t let them make you afraid.
I won’t if you won’t.
We survived the Henleys, we can survive this.
If we stick together.
If we stay strong.
And if we can’t?
We have to, or they win.
“Come,” Simone said, impatiently. Hannah followed her down a hallway to a small, nondescript bedroom. “You will sleep here.”
“What about Kayla?”
“What about her?”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“You must be very tired,” Simone said. “Go rest yourself. You will have need of it.” She left, closing the door firmly behind her.
H
ANNAH DIDN’T THINK
she’d be able to sleep, but she did, almost immediately, falling asleep on top of the covers with the lamp on. She woke in pitch dark, disoriented, and then remembered where she was and why. “Lights on,” she said, but nothing happened. They must have disabled the room’s smartmode to prevent her from unlocking the door or windows. She fumbled for the lamp and turned it on manually. The windows were tightly shuttered and there was no clock or vid in the room, but she guessed it was still the wee hours; she felt too groggy to have had a full night’s sleep. She went to the bathroom, did her business and brushed her teeth. She longed for a shower but settled for washing her face and hands. She wanted to be ready when they came for her.
She tried the door to the hall and found it locked. She pressed her ear up against the wood but was unable to hear any voices or other sounds of human presence. Next she tried the windows. The shutters were metal and mechanized, but there was no switch. She broke two fingernails trying to pry them open and finally gave up.
The too-familiar sense of being pent, confined, took hold of her. It evoked an image, not of the mirrored oubliette of the Chrome ward, nor of the narrow halls and lowering rooms of the Straight Path Center, but of her little workroom over the garage, a place she’d once seen as a haven. She pictured herself there, head bent, deft fingers pushing white thread through white silk and taffeta, the stitches so tiny as to be invisible—as invisible, Hannah now realized, as she herself had been in the small white room in the white stucco house in the middle-class, mostly white suburb where she’d been born and lived her whole life and expected she would always live unless her future husband had a job that took her elsewhere. She saw her fingers making the tiny stitches, thousands upon thousands of them, all alike, while her mind hungered for forbidden things on the other side of the white walls, things so hazy and inchoate she couldn’t name them, and then she heard her mother call, “Hannah, come and set the table,” and watched herself set aside her needle and her imaginings, her myriad questions and gossamer dreams, and say, “Coming, Mama.”
She struck the door with her fist. How long did they mean to keep her here? What if they’d harmed Kayla or taken her away? Hannah beat on the door until her hand was too sore to continue, then leaned back against it and scanned the room, taking in the tan carpet and off-white walls, the cheap colonialish furniture, the tasteful floral bedspread and botanical prints: decor that reminded her of every hotel room where she’d ever met Aidan. How she’d grown to hate those rooms—their anonymity and cheerful banality, their imperviousness to the people who passed through them, made love and argued in them, showered and pissed and shit in them, all evidence of their presence wiped away, rinsed down the drain, vacuumed up as if they’d never been there. Hannah prowled the room restlessly, searching for traces of its past inhabitants. She opened the drawers of the dresser and found a motley assortment of clean, nondescript men’s and women’s clothing: cotton T-shirts, jeans, socks, underwear, all used. Who had last worn these things? Regular people—a category, she was aware, that no longer included her—or fugitives like herself? There was nothing in the closet but a few forlorn-looking jackets and windbreakers, nothing beneath the bed except dust balls, nothing under the mattress. But as she started to get up from the floor, her eyes were drawn to the underside of the bedside table. Something was written there, carved into the faux wood. She couldn’t read it—it was upside down—so she lay on her back and maneuvered her head between the narrow legs of the table. Incised in neat, blocky letters was a short poem:
Ruts of love in the bed—
This is how Menelaus
Described the absence of Helen
The words perforated her heart. She didn’t know who Menelaus and his Helen were, but what he’d felt for her, and what the man or woman who’d painstakingly carved these letters into the table must have felt for someone, once, was as familiar and inescapable to her as the throbbing of her fingers after hours of needlework or the cramping of her abdomen before her period.
He is gone. And who am I, without him?
She sat up and was confronted with the bleak expanse of the bed. Unable to bear the thought of getting into it alone, she pulled the pillows from it and curled on the floor with one between her knees and the other hugged to her chest. Her love was gone, and his absence from her bed, from her life, was permanent. The waves pounded her until she cried herself to sleep.
A
KNOCK WOKE
her, and Simone’s head appeared in the doorway. She considered Hannah, her pale eyes missing nothing. “Go wash your face,” she said, with unwonted gentleness. “I will wait for you outside.” Hannah had the feeling she wasn’t the first woman Simone had seen weeping in this room.
In the dining room, Paul was sitting at the table next to a couple in their fifties. Kayla wasn’t with them.
“Hello, Hannah,” the woman said, with a welcoming smile. “I’m Susan.”
“And I’m Anthony,” said the man.
They were on the chubby side, both of them, with pleasant, ordinary features. They wore tracksuits that made them seem at once benign and a little ridiculous. Susan’s was a throbbing shade of lavender, and her fingernails were painted to match. Anthony was balding, with a double chin and a rueful countenance that seemed to say,
Yes, I’m everything you think I am.
The two of them, Hannah thought, were a perfect match for the house.
“Please, sit down,” Susan said, gesturing at the chair across from her. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” If her appearance was conventional and a little silly, her voice was anything but. It seemed to peal within Hannah, mellifluous and powerful, impossible to ignore.
She remained standing. “Where’s Kayla?” she asked. It came out thick and nasal; her nose was still clogged from crying.
“Here,” Anthony said, holding out a box of tissues. Feeling uncomfortably exposed, Hannah took one and blew her nose.
“Kayla’s sleeping now,” Susan said. “She was very tired. I’m afraid we kept her up late.”
“I want to see her.”
“She’s fine. All we did was ask her some questions.”
Hannah’s eyes darted to Paul. He didn’t move his head, but he blinked once, slowly and deliberately.
“And now,” Susan said, “we have a few we’d like to ask you, and I’m sure you have some for us as well. Won’t you join us and have some coffee?”
Trust me,
that beautiful voice said.
I have only your best interests at heart.
“Who are you people? Why did you help me?”
Susan leaned forward, locking eyes with her. “It’s personal,” she said.
Hannah shook her head, not understanding, and then she did, and her arms broke out in gooseflesh. “Oh my God, you’re Novembrists.”
The Novembrists were infamous, a shadow pro-abortion group named after the 11/17 bombers, the militants responsible for blowing up the Missouri state capitol two weeks after the governor signed the SOL laws. The Novembrists rarely resorted to violence, however; intimidation and public humiliation were their preferred weapons. In keeping with their motto, “Abortion is personal,” their attacks were always against individuals who were vocal opponents of choice. Hannah’s mother had been a volunteer for the Womb Watchers when the Novembrists released shocking holos of Retta Lee Dodd, the Watchers’ founder, pole-dancing nude in a strip club as a young woman. More recently, they’d rocked the Trinity Party—and stunned every evangelical in the state of Texas, including Hannah and her family—by exposing the Trinitarian lieutenant governor as a homosexual who was partial to underage male prostitutes. The Novembrists were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but as far as Hannah knew, none of the group’s members had ever been caught.
“That’s right. The government calls us terrorists, but we think of ourselves as freedom fighters. Raphael is one of us.” Susan cocked her head, appraising Hannah frankly. “You could have betrayed him. Most women tell what they know rather than add three years to their sentence. Why didn’t you?”
“Because he was kind. And besides, I doubt I’ll be around long enough to serve the extra time. I’m familiar with the survival rate for female Reds.” As Hannah said the words she felt a wave of cold pass through her. This wasn’t the first time she’d had the thought that she could die, be killed or reach a place so dark she killed herself, but voicing it made it suddenly, horribly real.
“We can help you be one of the exceptions,” Anthony said.
“Help me how?”
“That depends on you,” Susan said. “On your will and your courage.”
“Let’s say I’m willful and courageous. Then what?”
“Why don’t you sit down, and we’ll discuss it.”
Her eyes roved over their four faces: Simone’s taut and watchful, giving nothing away; Paul’s earnest and intense; Anthony’s and Susan’s amiable, completely at odds with their shrewd, assessing eyes. Except for Paul, she didn’t trust any of them, and even he clearly had his own agenda. Still, they were offering her hope. Even if it was only a glimmer, that was more than she’d had five minutes ago.
She pulled out the chair and sat. “I’ll take some of that coffee,” she said.
T
HEY ASKED HER TO TELL
them about herself, and Hannah obliged, sketching her upbringing, her family, her work. She had the sense that they were less interested in the particulars of her answers than in what they revealed about her beliefs and her character. When the narrative got to her pregnancy, Anthony asked her who the father was. “It’s personal,” she replied tartly, and he and Susan bobbed their heads as if the answer pleased them. Hannah covered the abortion in one sentence, and they didn’t try to excavate further, but they questioned her at length about the police interrogations and her weeks in jail. Susan did most of the asking and was plainly in charge. When Hannah spoke of her time in the Chrome ward—her shame and lethargy, her mental deterioration—Paul got up and started pacing the room restlessly.
All four of them perked up when she began to recount her experiences at the Straight Path Center, and when she described the enlightenment sessions, their expressions turned avid and their questions pointed: Did the Henleys live at the center? How often did they go out? Was Hannah sure she hadn’t caught the enlightener’s last name, or the names of any of the doctors who’d visited? It dawned on Hannah, with a flash of pure glee, that Bob and the Henleys could be in for a nasty, personal surprise one of these days.