than the whole ground floor of Carol and William’s apartment. The ceiling stretches up into darkness and a gigantic chandelier hangs above us, winking dully in the limited shafts of light that sneak through the boarded-up windows. If you listen hard, you can hear mice moving quietly in the walls. But somehow it’s not gross or frightening. Somehow it’s kind of nice, and it makes me think of woods and endless cycles of growth and death and regrowth— like what we’re really hearing is the house folding down around us, centimeter by centimeter.
“There’s no music,” I say.
He shrugs, winks, holds out his hand. “Music is overrated,” he says.
I let him draw me toward him so we’re standing chest to chest. He’s so much taller than I am, my head barely reaches his shoulder, and I can feel his heart drumming through his chest, and it gives us all the rhythm we need.
The best part of 37 Brooks is the garden in the back. An enormous overgrown lawn winds between ancient trees, so thick and gnarled and knotted their arms twist overhead and form a canopy. The sunlight filters through the trees and spots the grass a pale white. The whole garden feels as cool and quiet as the library at school. Alex brings a blanket and leaves it inside the house.
Whenever we come we take it and shake it out on the grass, and all three of us lie there, sometimes for hours, talking and laughing about nothing in particular.
Sometimes Hana or Alex buys some food for a picnic, and one time I manage to swipe three cans of soda and a whole carton of candy bars from my uncle’s store, and we get totally crazy on a sugar high and play games like we did when we were little—hide-and-seek and tag and leapfrog.
Some of the tree trunks are as wide as four garbage pails mashed together, and I take a picture of Hana, laughing, trying to fit her arms around one of them.
Alex says the trees must have been here for hundreds of years, which makes Hana and me go silent. That means they were here before—before the borders were shut down, before the walls were put up, before the disease was driven into the Wilds. When he says it, something aches in my throat. I wish I could know what it was like then.
Most of the time, though, Alex and I spend time alone and Hana covers for us. After weeks and weeks of not seeing her at all, suddenly I’m going to Hana’s every single day—and sometimes twice in one day (when I see Alex; and then when I actually see Hana). Fortunately, my aunt doesn’t pry. I think she assumes we had a fight and are making up for lost time now, which is kind of true anyway and suits me fine. I’m happier than I can ever remember being. I’m happier than I can ever remember even dreaming of being, and when I tell Hana I can never in a million years repay her for covering for me, she just crooks her mouth into a smile and says, “You’ve already repaid me.” I’m not sure what she means by that, but I’m just glad to have her back on my side.
When Alex and I are alone we don’t do much—just sit and talk—but still time seems to shrivel away, fast as paper catching on fire. One minute it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. The next minute, I swear, the light is draining from the sky and it’s almost curfew.
Alex tells me stories about his life: about his “aunt” and “uncle,” and some of the work they do, although he’s still pretty vague about what the sympathizers and the Invalids are aiming for and how they’re working to achieve it. That’s okay. I’m not sure I want to know. When he mentions the need for resistance, there is a tightness to his voice, and anger coiling underneath his words. At those times, and only for a few seconds, I’m still afraid of him, still hear the word Invalid drumming in my ear.
But mostly Alex tells me normal stuff, about his aunt’s Frito pie and how whenever they get together his uncle gets a little too tipsy and tells the same stories about the past over and over. They’re both cured, and when I ask him whether they aren’t happier now, he shrugs and says, “They miss the pain, too.”
This seems incredible to me, and he looks at me out of the corner of his eye and says, “That’s when you really lose people, you know. When the pain passes.”
Mostly, though, he talks about the Wilds and the people who live there, and I lay my head on his chest and close my eyes and dream of it: of a woman everyone calls Crazy Caitlin, who makes enormous wind chimes out of scrap metal and crushed soda cans; of Grandpa Jones, who must be at least ninety but still hikes through the woods every day, foraging for berries and wild animals to eat; of campfires outside and sleeping under the stars and staying up late to sing and talk and eat, while the night sky goes smudgy with smoke.
I know that he still goes back there sometimes, and I know he still considers it his real home. He nearly says as much when I tell him one time that I’m sorry I can’t go home with him to check out his studio on Forsyth Street, where he has lived since starting at the university—if any of his neighbors saw me going into the building with him, we’d be finished. But he corrects me really quickly, “That’s not home.”
He admits that he and the other Invalids have found a way to get in and out of the Wilds, but when I press him for details he clams up.
“Someday maybe you’ll see,” is all he says, and I’m equal parts terrified and thrilled.
I ask him about my uncle, who escaped before he could stand trial, and Alex frowns and shakes his head.
“Hardly anybody goes by a real name in the Wilds,” he says, shrugging. “He doesn’t sound familiar, though.” But he explains that there are thousands and thousands of settlements all around the country. My uncle could have gone anywhere—north or south or west. At least we know he didn’t go east; he would have ended up in the ocean. Alex tells me that there are at least as many square miles of wilderness in the USA as there are recognized cities. This is so incredible to me that for a while I can’t believe it, and when I tell Hana she can’t believe it either.
Alex is a good listener, too, and can stay silent for hours while I tell him about growing up in Carol’s house, and how everybody thinks Grace can’t speak and only I know the truth. He laughs out loud when I describe Jenny, and her pinched look and old-lady face and habit of looking down her nose at me like I’m the nine-year-old.
I feel comfortable talking about my mother with him too, and how it used to be when she was alive and it was just the three of us—me, her, and Rachel. I tell him about the sock hops and the way my mom used to sing us lullabies, even though I can only remember a few snatches of the songs. Maybe it’s the way he listens so quietly, and stares at me steadily with his eyes bright and warm, and never judges me. One time I even tell him about the last thing my mom ever said to me, and he just sits and rubs my back when suddenly I feel like I’m about to cry. The feeling passes. The warmth of his hands draws it out of me.
And, of course, we kiss. We kiss so much that when we’re not kissing it feels weird, like I get used to breathing through his lips and into his mouth.
Slowly, as we get more comfortable, I start to explore other parts of his body too. The delicate structure of his ribs under his skin, his chest and shoulders like chiseled stone, the soft curls of pale hair on his legs, the way his skin always smells a little bit like the ocean—all beautiful and strange. Even crazier is that I let him look at me, too. First I’ll only let him pull my shirt aside and kiss my collarbone and shoulders. Then I let him draw my whole shirt over my head and lie me down in the bright sunshine and just stare at me. The first time I’m shaking. I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I’m suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he’s looking at me thinking I’m wrong or deformed.
But then he breathes, “Beautiful,” and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.
That night, for the first time in my life, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and don’t see an in-between girl. For the first time, with my hair swept back and my nightgown slipping off one shoulder and my eyes glowing, I believe what Alex said. I am beautiful.
But it’s not just me. Everything looks beautiful. The Book of Shhh says that deliria alters your perception, disables your ability to reason clearly, impairs you from making sound judgments. But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself. Even the dump, shimmering in the heat, an enormous mound of scrap metal and melting plastic and stinking things, seems strange and miraculous, like some alien world transported to earth. In the morning light the seagulls perched on the roof of city hall look like they’ve been coated in thick white paint; as they light up against the pale blue sky I think I’ve never seen anything so sharp and clear and pretty in my life. Rainstorms are incredible: falling shards of glass, the air full of diamonds. The wind whispers Alex’s name and the ocean repeats it; the swaying trees make me think of dancing. Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.
The Book of Shhh also doesn’t mention the way that time will start to run away from you.
Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers. Every time I come down to the kitchen and see that the calendar has flipped forward yet another day I refuse to believe it. A sick feeling grows in my stomach,
