The beach looks hopelessly and impossibly remote. I can’t imagine how we got out so far. My arms feel heavy and useless, and I think of my mother, and her jacket filling slowly with water.
I take deep breaths, trying to keep my mind from spinning, trying to focus.
There’s no way for anyone to know that Alex is an Invalid. I didn’t know. He looks normal, has the scar in the right place. There’s no way anyone could have heard us talking.
A wave lifts and breaks against my back. I stumble forward. Alex reaches out and grabs my arm to steady me, but I twist away from him just as a second round of waves surges over us. I get a mouthful of seawater, feel the salt stinging my eyes and am momentarily blinded.
“Don’t,” I stutter. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Lena, I swear. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” I can’t think straight, can hardly even breathe.
“What do you want from me?”
“Want…?” Alex shakes his head. He looks genuinely confused—and hurt, too, as though I’m the one who did something wrong. For a second I feel a flash of sympathy for him. Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second when I let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyes go bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he has closed the space between us and he’s wrapping his warm hands over my shoulders—fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out—and saying, “Lena. I like you, okay? That’s it. That’s all. I like you.” His voice is so low and hypnotic it reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I think of enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his.
And then I’m stumbling backward, paddling away from him, my shirt and shoes heavy with water, my heart hammering painfully against my chest and my breath rasping in my throat. I’m kicking off the ground and sweeping forward with my arms, half running, half swimming, as the tide lifts and drags at me so I feel like I can only creep forward an inch at a time, so I feel like I’m moving through molasses. Alex calls my name, but I’m too afraid to turn my head and see if he’s coming after me. It’s like one of those nightmares where something’s chasing you but you’re too afraid to look and see what it is. All you hear is its breath, getting closer and closer. You feel its shadow looming up behind you but you’re paralyzed: You know that any second you’ll feel its icy fingers closing on your neck.
I’ll never make it, I think. I’ll never make it back. Something scrapes across my shin and I begin to imagine that the bay around me is full of horrible underwater things, sharks and jellyfish and poisonous eels, and even though I know I’m panicking I feel like falling backward and giving up. The beach is still so far, and my arms and legs feel so heavy.
Alex’s voice gets whipped away by the wind, sounding fainter and fainter, and when I finally work up the courage to look over my shoulder I see him bobbing up and down by the buoys. I realize I’ve gone farther than I thought, and at the very least Alex isn’t following me. My fear eases up, and the knot in my chest loosens. The next wave is so strong it helps skim me over a steep underwater ridge, drops me to my knees into soft sand. When I struggle to my feet the water hits me just at the waist, and I slosh the rest of the way to shore, shivering, grateful, exhausted.
My thighs are shaking. I collapse onto the beach, gasping and coughing.
From the flames of color licking across the sky over Back Cove—orange, reds, pinks—I’m guessing it’s close to sunset, probably around eight o’clock. Part of me wants to just lie down, spread my arms and stretch out and sleep all through the night. I feel like I’ve swallowed half my weight in salt water. My skin stings and there’s sand everywhere, in my bra and underwear and between my toes and under my fingernails. Whatever scraped my shin in the water left its mark: a long trickle of blood snakes around my calf.
I look up, and for one panicked second I can’t find Alex by the buoys. My heart stops. Then I see him, a dark spot cutting quickly through the water. His arms pinwheel gracefully as he swims. He’s fast. I haul myself to my feet, grab my shoes, and limp up to my bike. My legs are so weak it takes me a minute to find my balance, and at first I weave crazily up and down the road like a toddler just learning to ride.
I don’t look back, not once, until I’m at my gate. By then the streets are empty and quiet, night about to fall, curfew about to come down like a giant warm embrace, keeping us all in our places, keeping us all safe.
Chapter Eleven
Think of it this way: When it’s cold outside and your teeth are chattering, you bundle up in a winter coat, and scarves, and mittens, to keep from catching the flu. Well, the borders are like hats and scarves and winter coats for the whole country! They keep the very worst disease away, so we can all stay healthy!
After the borders went up, the president and the Consortium had one last thing to take care of before we could all be safe and happy. The Great Sanitation* (sometimes called “the blitz”) lasted less than a month, but afterward all the wild spaces were cleared of the disease. We went in there with some old-fashioned elbow grease and scrubbed the problem spots away, just like when your mom wipes the kitchen counters down with a sponge, easy as one, two, three…
*Sanitation
1. The application of sanitary measures for the sake of cleanliness or protecting health
2. The disposal of sewage and waste
Here is a secret about my family: My sister contracted the deliria several months before her scheduled procedure. She fell in love with a boy named Thomas, who was also uncured. During the day, she and Thomas spent all their time lying in a field of wildflowers, shielding their eyes against the sun, whispering promises to each other that could never be kept. She cried all the time, and once she confessed to me that Thomas liked to kiss away her tears. Still, now, when I think of those days—I was only eight at the time—I think of the taste of salt.
The disease slowly worked its way deeper and deeper inside of her, an animal chewing her from within. My sister couldn’t eat. What little we could convince her to swallow came up just as quickly, and I was afraid for her life.
Thomas broke her heart, of course, to nobody’s surprise. The Book of Shhh says: “Amor deliria nervosa produces shifts in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which result in fantasies and delusions that, once revealed, lead in turn to psychic devastation” (See “Effects,” p. 36). Then my sister did nothing but lie in bed and watch the shadows shift slowly across the walls, her ribs rising up under her pale skin like wood rising through water.
Even then she refused the procedure and the comfort it would give her, and on the day the cure was to be administered it took four scientists and several needles full of tranquilizer before she would submit, before she would stop scratching with her long, sharp nails, which had gone uncut for weeks, and screaming and cursing and calling for Thomas. I watched them come for her, to bring her to the labs; I sat in a corner, terrified, while she spit and hissed and kicked, and I thought of my mom and dad.
That afternoon, though I was still more then a decade away from safety, I began to count the months until my procedure.
In the end my sister was cured. She came back to me gentle and content, her nails spotless and round, her hair pulled back in a long, thick braid. Several months later she was pledged to an IT tech, roughly her age, and several weeks after she graduated from college they married, their hands linked loosely under the canopy, both of them staring straight ahead as though at a future of days unmarred by worry or discontent or disagreement, a future of identical days, like a series of neatly blown bubbles.
Thomas was cured too. He was married to Ella, once my sister’s best friend, and now everybody is happy. Rachel told me a few months ago that the two couples often see each other at picnics and neighborhood events, since they live fairly close to each other in the East End. The four of them sit, making polite and quiet conversation, with not a sole flicker of the past to disturb the stillness and completeness of the present.
That’s the beauty of the cure. No one mentions those lost, hot days in the field, when Thomas kissed Rachel’s tears away and invented worlds just so he could promise them to her, when she tore the skin off her own arms at the thought of living without him. I’m sure she’s embarrassed by those days, if she remembers them at all.
