Delirium: The Complete Collection (28 page)

The locks on the door release with a click. Frank leans his shoulder against it, straining, and it slides open just enough for us to squeeze by into the hallway beyond. Alex goes first, then me, then Frank. The passage is so narrow we have to go single file, and it’s even darker than the rest of the Crypts.

But the smell is what really hits me: a horrible, rotting, festering stink, like the Dumpsters by the harbor, the place where all the fish intestines get discarded, on the hottest day. Even Alex curses and coughs, covering his nose with his hand.

Behind me, I can imagine Frank grinning. “Ward Six has its own special perfume,” he says.

As we walk I can hear the barrel of his gun, slapping against his thigh. I’m worried I might faint, and I want to reach out and steady myself against the walls, but they are coated with fungus and moisture. On either side of us, bolted metal cell doors appear at intervals, each outfitted with a single grimy window the size of a dinner plate. Through the walls we can hear low moaning, a constant vibration. It’s worse, somehow, than the screeches and screams of earlier: This is the sound people make when they’ve long ago given up hope that anyone is listening, a reflexive sound, meant just to fill the time and the space and the darkness.

I’m going to be sick. If Alex is correct, my mother is here, behind one of these terrible doors—so close that if I could rearrange the particles and make the stone melt away, I might put my hand out and touch her. Closer than I ever thought I would be to her again.

I am filled with competing thoughts and desires:
My mother cannot be here; I would rather she was dead; I want to see her alive
. And filled, too, with that other word, pressing itself underneath all my other thoughts:
escape, escape, escape
. A possibility too fantastic to contemplate. If my mother had been the one to break out, I would have known. She would have come for me.

Ward Six consists of just the one long hallway. As far as I can tell, there are about forty doors, forty separate cells.

“This is it,” Frank says. “The grand tour.” He pounds on one of the very first doors. “Here’s your boy Thomas, if you want to say hello.” Then he laughs again, that awful cackling sound.

I think about what he said when we first entered the vestibule:
He’s
always
here, nowadays.

Ahead of us, Alex does not respond, but I think I see him shudder.

Frank nudges me sharply in the back with the barrel of his gun. “So what do you think?”

“Awful,” I croak out. My throat feels like it has been encircled with barbed wire. Frank seems pleased.

“Better to listen and do as you’re told,” he says. “No use ending up like
this
guy.”

We’ve paused in front of one of the cells. Frank nods toward the tiny window, and I take a hesitant step forward, pressing my face up to the glass. It’s so grimy it’s practically opaque, but if I squint I can just make out a few shapes in the obscurity of the cell: a single bed with a flimsy, dirty mattress; a toilet; a bucket that looks like it might be the human equivalent of a dog’s water bowl. At first I think there’s a pile of old rags in the corner too, until I realize that this thing is the “guy” Frank was pointing out: a filthy, crouching heap of skin and bones and crazy, tangled hair. He’s motionless, and his skin is so dirty it blends in with the gray of the stone walls behind him. If it weren’t for his eyes, rolling continuously back and forth as though he is checking the air for insects, you would never know he was alive. You would never even know he was
human
.

The thought flashes again:
I would rather she be dead
. Not in this place. Anywhere but here.

Alex has continued down the hall, and I hear him draw in his breath sharply. I look up. He is standing perfectly still, and the expression on his face makes me afraid.

“What?” I say.

For a moment he doesn’t answer. He is staring at something I cannot see—some door, presumably, farther down the hall. Then he turns to me abruptly, a quick, convulsive shake.

“Don’t,” he says, his voice a croak, and the fear surges, overwhelms me.

“What is it?” I ask again. I start down the hall toward him. It seems, all of a sudden, that he is very far away, and when Frank speaks up behind me, his voice too sounds distant.

“That’s where she was,” he is saying. “Number one-eighteen. Admin hasn’t coughed up the dough to get the walls patched, yet, so for now we’re just leaving it as is. Not a lot of money around here for improvements. . . .”

Alex is watching me. All his control and confidence has vanished. His eyes are blazing with anger, or maybe pain; his mouth is twisted into a grimace. My head feels full of noise.

Alex holds up his hand like he’s thinking of blocking my progress. Our eyes meet for just a second and something flashes between us—a warning, or an apology, maybe—and then I am pushing beyond him into cell 118.

In almost every way it is identical to the cells I’ve glimpsed through the tiny hallway windows: a rough cement floor; a rust-stained toilet, and a bucket full of water, in which several cockroaches are revolving slowly; a tiny iron bed with a paper-thin mattress, which someone has dragged into the very center of the room.

But the walls.

The walls are covered—
crammed
—with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.

Love.

Looped huge and scratched, just barely, in the corners; inscribed in graceful script and solid block lettering; chipped, scratched, picked away, as though the walls are slowly melting into poetry.

And on the ground, lying curled up against one wall, is a dull silver chain with a charm still attached to it: a ruby-encrusted dagger whose blade has been worn down to a small nub. My father’s charm. My mother’s necklace.

My
mother
.

All this time, during every long second of my life when I believed her dead, she was here: scratching, burrowing, chipping away, encased in the stone walls like a long-buried secret.

I feel, suddenly, as though I am back in my dream, standing on a cliff as the solid ground disintegrates underneath me, transforms into the sand in an hourglass, running away under my feet. I feel the way I do in that moment when I realize that all the ground has vanished, and I am standing on a bare blade of air, ready to drop.

“It’s terrible, you see? Look at what the disease did to her. Who knows how many hours she spent scrabbling along these walls like a rat.”

Frank and Alex are standing behind me. Frank’s words seem to be muffled by a layer of cloth. I take a step forward into the cell, suddenly fixated on a shaft of light, extending like a long golden finger from a space in the wall that has been chipped clear away. The clouds must have begun to break apart outside: Through the hole, on the other side of the stone fortress, I see the flashing blue of the Presumpscot River, and leaves shifting and tumbling over one another, an avalanche of green and sun and the perfume of wild, growing things. The Wilds.

So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years.

And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the
O
has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Food for the body, milk for your bones,

ice for the bleeding, a belly of stones.
—A folklore blessing

E
ven after the iron gates clang shut behind us and the Crypts recedes in the distance, the feeling of being penned in on all sides doesn’t go away. There’s still a terrible, squeezing pressure in my chest, and I have to struggle to suck in full breaths.

An ancient prison bus with a wheezing motor carries us away from the border, to Deering. From there Alex and I walk back toward the center of Portland, staying on opposite sides of the sidewalk. Every couple of feet he swivels his head to look at me, opening and closing his mouth, like he’s pronouncing a series of inaudible words. I know he’s worried about me, and probably waiting for me to break down, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes or speak to him. I keep my eyes locked straight ahead of me, keep my feet cycling forward. Other than the terrible pain in my chest and stomach, my body feels numb. I can’t feel the ground underneath me or the wind zipping through the trees, skating past my face; can’t feel the warmth of the sun, which has, against all odds, broken through the terrible black clouds, lighting the world up a strange greenish color, as though everything is submerged under water.

When I was little and my mother died—when I thought she’d died—I remember going out for my first-ever run and getting hopelessly lost at the end of Congress, a street I’d been playing on my whole life. I turned a corner and found myself in front of the Bubble and Soap Cleaners and had been suddenly unable to remember where I was, and whether home was to the left or to the right. Nothing looked the same. Everything looked like a painted replica of itself, fragile and distorted, like I was caught in a fun house hall of mirrors reflecting my regular world back to me.

That’s how I feel now, again. Lost and found and lost again, all at once. And now I know somewhere in this world, in the wildness on the other side of the fence, my mother is alive and breathing and sweating and moving and thinking. I wonder if she is thinking about me, and the pain shoots deeper, makes me lose my breath completely so I have to stop walking and double up, one hand on my stomach.

We’re still off-peninsula, not far from 37 Brooks, where the houses are separated by large tracts of torn-up grass and run-down gardens, full of litter. Still, there are people on the streets, including a man I take for a regulator right away: Even now, just before noon, he has a bullhorn swinging from his neck and a wooden baton strapped to one thigh. Alex must see him too. He stays a couple of feet away from me, scanning the street, trying to appear unconcerned, but he murmurs in my direction, “Can you move?”

I have to fight my way through the pain. It is radiating through my whole body now, throbbing up into my head. “I think so,” I gasp out.

“Alley. On your left. Go.”

I straighten up as much as I can—enough, at least, to hobble into the alley between two larger buildings. Halfway down the alley there are a few metal Dumpsters, arranged parallel to one another, buzzing with flies. The smell is disgusting, like being back in the Crypts, but I sink down between them anyway, grateful for the concealment and the chance to sit. As soon as I’m resting, the throbbing in my head subsides. I tilt my head back against the brick, feel the world swaying, a ship cut loose from its mooring.

Alex joins me a few moments later, squatting in front of me, brushing the hair away from my face. It’s the first time he’s been able to touch me all day.

“I’m sorry, Lena,” he says, and I know he really means it. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Twelve years,” I say simply. “I thought she was dead for twelve years.”

For a while we stay there in silence. Alex rubs circles on my shoulders, arms, and knees—anywhere he can reach, really, like he’s desperate to maintain physical contact with me. I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.

She’s out there somewhere, breathing, thirsty, eating, walking, swimming.
Impossible, now, to contemplate going on with my life, impossible to imagine sleeping, and lacing up my shoes for a run, and helping Carol load the dishes, and even lying in the house with Alex, when I know that she exists: that she is out there, orbiting as far from me as a distant constellation.

Why didn’t she come for me?
The thought flashes as quickly and clearly as an electrical surge, bringing the pain searing back. I squeeze my eyes shut, drop my head forward, pray for it to pass. But I don’t know who to pray to. All at once I can’t remember any words, can’t think of anything but being in church when I was little and watching the sun blaze up and then fade away beyond the stained-glass windows, watching all that light die, leaving nothing but dull panes of colored glass, tinny and insubstantial-looking.

“Hey. Look at me.”

Opening my eyes takes a tremendous effort. Alex looks hazy, even though he’s crouching no more than a foot away from me.

“You must be hungry,” he says gently. “Let’s get you home, okay? Are you okay to walk?” He shuffles back a little, giving me space to stand.

“No.” It comes out more emphatically than I’d intended, and Alex looks startled.

“You’re not okay to walk?” A little crease appears between his eyebrows.

“No.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice at a normal volume. “I mean I can’t go home. At all.”

Alex sighs and rubs his forehead. “We could go over to Brooks for a while, hang out at the house for a bit. And when you feel better—”

I cut him off. “You don’t get it.” A scream is welling inside of me, a black insect scrabbling in my throat. All I can think is:
They knew
. They all knew—Carol and Uncle William and maybe even Rachel—and still they let me believe all along that she was dead. They let me believe she had left me. They let me believe I wasn’t worth it. I’m filled, suddenly, with white-hot anger, a blaze: If I see them, if I go home, I won’t be able to stop myself. I’ll burn the house down, or tear it apart, plank by plank. “I want to run away with you. To the Wilds. Like we talked about.”

I think Alex will be happy, but instead he just seems tired. He looks away, squinting. “Listen, Lena, it’s been a really long day. You’re exhausted. You’re hungry. You’re not thinking clearly—”

“I
am
thinking clearly.” I haul myself to my feet so I don’t look so helpless. I’m angry at Alex, too, even though I know this isn’t his fault. But the fury is whipping around inside of me, undirected, gaining force. “I can’t stay here, Alex. Not anymore. Not after—not after that.” My throat spasms as I swallow back the scream again. “They knew, Alex. They knew and they never told me.”

He climbs to his feet too—slowly, like it hurts him. “You don’t know that for sure,” he says.

“I
do
know,” I insist, and it’s true. I do know, deep down. I think of my mother bent over me, the floating pale whiteness of her face breaking through my sleep, her voice—
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.
—sung quietly in my ear, the sad little smile dancing on her lips. She knew too. She must have known they were coming for her, and would take her to that terrible place. And only a week later I sat in a scratchy black dress in front of an empty coffin with a pile of orange peels to suck on, trying to keep back tears, while everyone I believed in built around me a solid, smooth surface of lies (“She was sick”; “This is what the disease does”; “Suicide”).
I
was the one who was really buried that day. “I can’t go home and I won’t. I’ll go with you. We can make our home in the Wilds. Other people do it, don’t they? Other people
have
done it. My mother—” I want to say,
My mother is going to do it
, but my voice breaks on the word.

Alex is watching me carefully. “Lena, if you leave—really leave—it won’t be like it is for me now. You get that, right? You won’t be able to go back and forth. You won’t be able to come back
ever
. Your number will be invalidated. Everyone will know you’re a resister. Everyone will be looking for you. If anyone found you—if you were ever caught . . .” Alex doesn’t finish his sentence.

“I don’t care,” I snap back. I’m no longer able to control my temper. “You were the one who suggested it, weren’t you? So what? Now that I’m ready to go, you take it back?”

“I’m just trying to—”

I cut Alex off again, rattling on, coasting on the anger, the desire to shred and hurt and tear apart. “You’re just like everybody else. You’re as bad as all the rest of them. Talk, talk, talk—it comes so easily to you. But when it’s time to
do
anything, when it’s time to
help
me—”

“I’m
trying
to help you,” Alex says sharply. “It’s a big deal. Do you understand that? It’s a huge choice, and you’re pissed, and you don’t know what you’re saying.” He’s getting angry too. The tone of his voice makes something painful run through me, but I can’t stop speaking. Destroy, destroy, destroy: I want to break everything—him, me, us, the whole city, the whole world.

“Don’t treat me like a child,” I say.

“Then stop acting like one,” he fires back. The second the words are out of his mouth I can tell he regrets them. He turns partially away, inhales, and then says, in a normal tone of voice, “Listen, Lena. I’m really sorry. I know you’ve had—I mean, with everything that happened today—I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

It’s too late. Tears are blurring my vision. I turn away from him and start chipping at the wall with a fingernail. A minuscule portion of brick crumbles away. Watching it tumble to the ground reminds me of my mother, and those strange and terrifying walls, and the tears come faster.

“If you cared about me, you would take me away,” I say. “If you cared about me at all you would go right now.”

“I do care about you,” Alex says.

“You don’t.” Now I know I
am
being childish, but I can’t help it. “She didn’t either. She didn’t care at all.”

“That’s not true.”

“Why didn’t she come for me, then?” I’m still turned away from him, pressing a palm against the wall, hard; feeling like it, too, might collapse at any second. “Where is she now? Why didn’t she come looking for me?”

“You know why,” he says, more firmly. “You know what would have happened if she was caught again—if she was caught with you. It would have meant death for both of you.”

I know he’s right, but that doesn’t make it any better. I keep going stubbornly, unable to stop myself. “It’s not that. She doesn’t care, and you don’t care. Nobody cares.” I draw my forearm across my face, swiping at my nose.

“Lena.” Alex puts a hand on each of my elbows and guides me around to face him. When I refuse to meet his eyes, he tilts my chin upward, forcing me to look at him. “Magdalena,” he repeats, the first time since we met that he has ever used my full name. “Your mother loved you. Do you understand that? She loved you. She still loves you. She wanted you to be safe.”

Heat rushes through me. For the first time in my life I am not afraid of the word. Something seems to yawn open inside of me, to stretch out, like a cat trying to soak up the sun, and I’m desperate for him to say it again.

His voice is endlessly soft. His eyes are warm and flecked with light, the color of the sun melting like butter through the trees on a warm autumn evening.

“And I love you too.” His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly over my lips. “You should know that. You have to know that.”

That’s when it happens.

Standing there in-between two disgusting Dumpsters in some crappy alley with the whole world crumbling down around me, and hearing Alex say those words, all the fear I have carried with me since I learned to sit, stand, breathe—since I was told that at the very heart of me was something wrong, something rotten and diseased, something to be suppressed—since I was told that I was always just a heartbeat away from being damaged—all of it vanishes at once. That thing—the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core—stretches and unfurls even further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before.

I open my mouth and say, “I love you too.”

It’s strange, but after that moment in the alley I suddenly understand the meaning of my full name, the reason my mom named me Magdalena in the first place and the meaning of the old biblical story, of Joseph and his abandonment of Mary Magdalene. I understand that he gave her up for a reason. He gave her up so she could be saved, even though it killed him to let her go.

He gave her up for love.

I think, maybe, my mother had a sense even when I was born that she would someday have to do the same thing. I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give
them
up.

Alex and I talk about all the things I’ll be leaving behind to go with him to the Wilds. He wants to be absolutely sure that I know what we’re getting into. Stopping by Fat Cats Bakery after closing and buying the day-old bagels and cheddar buns for a dollar each; sitting out on the piers and watching the gulls shriek and circle overhead; long runs up by the farms when the dew glistens off every blade of grass as though they’re encased in glass; the constant rhythm of the oceans, beating under Portland like a heartbeat; the narrow cobblestone streets of the old harbor, shops crowded with bright, pretty clothes I could never afford.

Hana and Grace are my only regrets. The rest of Portland can dissolve into nothing, for all I care: its shiny, spindly false towers and blind storefronts and staring, obedient people, bowing their heads to receive more lies, like animals offering themselves up to be slaughtered.

“If we go together, it’s just you and me,” Alex keeps repeating, as though needing to make sure I understand—as though needing to be sure that
I’m
sure. “No going back. Ever.”