“I’m sorry, Lena,” Alex whispers, behind me. This time he does reach out. He starts drawing long, slow circles on my back. I lean into him.
But I’m not done yet. I swipe at the tears furiously, take a big breath. “Everyone thinks she killed herself because she couldn’t stand to have the procedure again. They were still trying to cure her, you know. It would have been her fourth time. After her second procedure they refused to put her under—they thought the anesthesia was interfering with the way the cure was taking. They cut into her brain, Alex, and she was awake.”
I feel his hand stiffen temporarily, and I know he’s just as angry as I am. Then the circles start up again.
“But I know that’s not really why.” I shake my head. “My mom was brave. She wasn’t afraid of pain. That was the whole problem, really. She wasn’t afraid. She didn’t want to be cured; she didn’t want to stop loving my dad. I remember she told me that once, just before she died. ‘They’re trying to take him from me,’ she said. She was smiling so sadly. ‘They’re trying to take him, but they can’t.’ She used to wear one of his pins around her neck, on a chain. She kept it hidden most of the time, but that night she had it out and was staring at it. It was this strange, long, silver dagger-thing, with two bright jewels in the hilt, like eyes. My dad used to wear it on his sleeve. After he died she wore it every day, never took it off even to bathe. . . .”
I suddenly realize that Alex has removed his hand and taken two steps away from me. I turn around and he’s staring at me, white faced and shocked, as though he’s just seen a ghost.
“What?” I wonder if it’s possible I’ve offended him in some way. Something about the way he’s staring makes fear start beating at my chest, a frantic flutter. “Did I say something wrong?”
He shakes his head, an almost imperceptible motion. The rest of his body stays as straight and tense as a wire stretched between two posts. “How big was it? The pin, I mean.” His voice sounds strangely high-pitched.
“The point isn’t the pin, Alex, the point is—”
“How big was it?” Louder now, and forceful.
“I don’t know. Like the size of a thumb, maybe.” I’m completely baffled by Alex’s behavior. He has the most pained look on his face, as though he’s trying to swallow a whole porcupine. “It was originally my grandfather’s—made just for him, a reward for performing a special service for the government. Unique. That’s what my dad always said, anyway.”
Alex doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns away, and with the moon shining down on him, and his profile so hard and straight, he could be built out of stone. I’m glad he’s not staring at me anymore, though. He was starting to freak me out.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks finally, slowly, as though every word is an effort.
It seems like a weird thing to ask in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation, and I start to get annoyed. “Were you even listening to me?”
“Lena, please.” There it is: the strangled, choking note again. “Just answer me. Are you working?”
“Not until Saturday.” I rub my arms. The wind blowing in has a chilly edge to it. It lifts the hair on my arms, makes goose bumps prick up on my legs. Autumn is coming. “Why?”
“You have to meet me. I have—I have something to show you.” Alex turns back to me again, and his eyes are so wild and black, his face so unfamiliar-looking, I take a step backward.
“You’ll have to do better than that.” I try to laugh, but what comes out is a little gurgling sound. I’m scared, I want to say. You’re scaring me. “Can you at least give me a hint?”
Alex takes a deep breath, and for a minute I think he won’t answer me.
But he does.
“Lena,” he says at last. “I think your mother is alive.”
Chapter Twenty-One
LIBERTY IN ACCEPTANCE;
PEACE IN ENCLOSURE;
HAPPINESS IN RENUNCIATION
—Words carved above the gates at the entrance to the Crypts
When I was in fourth grade, I went on a field trip to the Crypts. It’s mandated that every child visit at least once in elementary school as part of the government’s anticrime, antiresistance education. I don’t remember much about my visit except for a feeling of utter terror, a dim impression of coldness, of blackened concrete hallways, slicked with mold and moisture, and heavy electronic doors. To be honest, I think I’ve successfully blocked out most of the memory. The whole purpose of the trip was to traumatize us into staying on the straight-and-narrow, and they definitely had the traumatize part right.
What I do remember is stepping out afterward into the bright sunshine of a beautiful spring day with a sense of overwhelming, overpowering relief—and also confusion, as I realized that in order to exit the Crypts we actually had to descend several staircases to the ground floor. The whole time we’d been inside, even as we climbed, I had the impression of being buried underground, locked several stories under the surface of the earth. That’s how dark it was, how close and bad-smelling: like being encased in a coffin with rotting bodies. I also remember that as soon as we got outside Liz Billmun began to cry, just sob right there while a butterfly flapped around her shoulder, and we were all in shock because Liz Billmun was super tough, and kind of a bully, and hadn’t even cried the time she broke her ankle in gym class.
I had sworn that day that I would never, ever return to the Crypts for any reason. But the morning after my conversation with Alex I’m standing outside its gates, pacing, one arm wrapped around my stomach. I wasn’t able to force anything down this morning except the thick black sludge my uncle calls coffee, a decision I am now regretting. I feel like acid is eating my insides.
Alex is late.
Overhead, the sky is packed tight with enormous black storm clouds. It’s supposed to thunderstorm later, which seems fitting. Beyond the gate, at the end of a short, paved road, the Crypts looms black and imposing. Silhouetted against the dark sky, it looks like something out of a nightmare. A dozen or so tiny windows—like the multiple staring eyes of a spider—are scattered across its stone façade. A short field surrounds the Crypts on this side, enclosed within the gates. I remember it from my childhood as a meadow, but it is actually just a lawn, closely tended and bare in patches. Still, the vivid green of the grass—where the grass is actually managing to assert itself through the dirt—seems out of place. This seems like a place where nothing should flourish or grow, where the sun should never shine: a place on the edge, at the limit, a place completely removed from time and happiness and life.
I guess, technically, it is on the edge, since the Crypts is sitting right on the eastern border, flanked on its rear by the Presumpscot River, and beyond that, the Wilds. The electrified (or not-so-electrified) fence runs directly into one side of the Crypts, and begins again on its other side, the building itself serving as a seamless connective bridge.
“Hey.”
Alex is coming down the sidewalk, his hair whipping up around his head. The wind is definitely chilly today. I should have worn a heavier sweatshirt. Alex looks cold too. He’s keeping his arms folded across his chest. Of course he’s just wearing a thin linen shirt, the official guard uniform he wears at the labs. He has his badge swinging around his neck, too. I haven’t seen him with it since the first day we spoke. He’s even wearing a pair of nice jeans, crisp dark ones with cuffs that aren’t totally ragged and stepped on. This was all part of the plan: to get us both in, he needs to convince the prison administrators that we’re on official business. I take comfort in the fact that he’s still wearing his scuffed-up sneakers with the ink-stained laces, though. Somehow that little familiar detail makes it possible to be here, with him, doing this. It gives me something to focus on and hold on to, a tiny flash of normalcy in a world that has suddenly become unrecognizable.