The Outside (26 page)

“Then can I see my family?” I asked.

“I will ask,” the medic said. “Please understand, that’s all I can do.”

Alex grunted in displeasure. I glanced at Frau Gerlach. She nodded, placed a calming hand on my shoulder. She seemed resigned to this occupation of soldiers. But it appeared that she had been working closely with Jasper. He handed her a pair of gloves and she wordlessly began to open plastic packages containing instruments.

“What do you intend to do?” Alex asked. “Not that we have any say in it, but just out of idle curiosity.”

“Fair enough,” Jasper said. “We want to do a physical exam. Check for bite marks. Measure your pulse and respiration. Take blood, skin, and hair samples.”

“We’re not contagious,” Alex said. “The bioluminescence is generated by a DNA mutation. An injection of the serum that we gave to your captain.”

“We just want to be sure,” he said.

I lowered my head. This would be the least of the indignities I’d suffered today. The medic led Alex out of the paddock for privacy while I got undressed for Frau Gerlach. The midwife had seen more nudity than any other person in my community, but I still felt blisteringly exposed under her gaze. She hung the gas lantern from the same spot in the ceiling where I had dangled for the vampire like a piece of meat. As Judy had at Water’s Edge, she combed through my hair, ran her fingers over my face and neck, had me lift my arms. The silence was heavy as she worked, reminding me of what I might yet face.

“Do you think that my parents will speak to me?” I asked.

I heard her breath come out in an exhalation. “You’re under the
Bann und Meidung
still, for certain.”

“But you’re talking to me.” I crossed my arms over my chest and shivered.

I heard a thin smile in her voice. “No one Plain can see me talking to you, dear.”

I frowned. Frau Gerlach had always obeyed the
Ordnung
assiduously. I didn’t know what bothered me more: that she was breaking the rules, or that she wouldn’t admit to breaking them. “The
Ordnung
is still being followed?”

She snorted as she made me pick up my feet to look at the soles, as if I were a horse that had thrown a shoe. “There is much picking and choosing, that is certain. Some of the young men have been off playing soldier with the military men. Neighbors are turning against neighbor, accusing each other of harboring Darkness and summoning the soldiers to ransack their homes for petty grudges. This is a bad time for faith.”

My heart sank to hear it.

“This vaccine you bring . . . what does it do?” I heard the curiosity in her voice.

“It changes people. It makes us . . . inedible to the Darkness. It changes our biology.”

I reached for the lantern, shuttered it. Only a thin crack of light trickled around the seams. Perhaps Frau Gerlach thought that I was only preserving my modesty. But my naked skin glowed, glowed like foxfire in the semidark. Without the clothes, I was brighter than I had been before. My hands twitched to cover myself, but I stilled them to face Frau Gerlach’s judgment.

The midwife looked at me, unafraid. I knew that she had seen many more terrible things than this, especially since the Darkness had entered our community. She was always the one called in at the beginnings of life, to bring babies into the world, and at deaths, to prepare the dead. She had seen everything in between.

“Hnh. The Elders will not like that,” she said. She said it in such a matter-of-fact way that it brought a smile to my face. It was as if I stood before her with a full face of makeup, holding a cell phone, not a genetically altered woman who might no longer be considered human under their rules.

“They did not listen to the Hexenmeister when he told them how to stop the Darkness,” I reminded her. “Why would they listen to me now?”

“What is done is done,” she said with her quiet pragmatism. “We must look to the future.”

She uncovered the lantern, looked me over from head to toe. Her fingers were cool and did not tremble. She nodded. “Get dressed.”

I reached for my clothes.

“No. Take these.” She handed me the bundle she’d brought with her.

Tied in an apron were Plain clothes, like the kind I’d left the village in: a simple black cotton dress, apron, bonnet, underclothes, and shoes. They weren’t mine.

“They should fit you, though the shoes might be a bit large,” Frau Gerlach said. “My feet are bigger than yours.”

“Thank you,” I said, stepping into the dress. I fastened it with a clutch of straight pins that had been tucked into the seams. After the luxury of buttons as fasteners, my fingers were clumsy on the pins. I stabbed myself once and popped my finger into my mouth.

“Your parents have not seen you yet,” Frau Gerlach said, tying the apron behind me. “Better that they see you exactly as they remember you.”

My eyes welled with tears. “Did you tell them that I’ve come back?”

She shook her head. “No. And Herr Stoltz won’t either.”

There was a knock at the paddock, and Frau Gerlach told the medic to come in. He was holding some plastic vials.

She held my hands, and there was a ghost of sadness on her face. “You will have to tell them yourself. Tell them, and the Elders, and hope for the best.”

***

The medic was kind to us, as kind as he could be. He listened to my heart and looked at my tonsils. He asked me to take deep breaths while pressing a metal stethoscope against my back. He took my temperature and plucked out a strand of my hair to put in a vial. He scraped a bit of skin from my arm and clipped a piece of my nail. He swabbed the inside of my mouth and took blood from the crease of my arm with a syringe.

I looked away as he did it, feeling dizzy. It was odd. I’d seen so much blood and violence, but this small thing made me squeamish. It was almost as if I’d walked back into the life of an ordinary girl when I’d stepped into Frau Gerlach’s clothes.

When we were released from our separate paddocks, Alex asked, “Are we through here?”

“I’m through with you,” Jasper said. “For now. But I suspect that these fellows will want to keep an eye on you.”

Simmonds stood between us and the door, flanked by two soldiers.

“Are we free to go? Or under arrest?” Alex’s hands balled into fists.

Simmonds shook his head. “You’re not under arrest. But please understand that I can’t let you run around unescorted.”

“But this is my home,” I said quietly.

“That may have been true,” Simmonds said. “But not anymore. This is just as much for your own protection as ours.”

“C’mon, Bonnet. Let’s go.” Alex grabbed my hand and led me by the hand past Simmonds, past the soldiers and the tank. The two men fell into step behind us. I could hear their boots clomping in the straw.

He dragged open the barn door and I stepped out into the night.

I could see a distant light burning on the first floor of my house.

Home.

I picked up my skirt and began to wade through the tall grass toward the light.

I was conscious of a sliver of moon overhead, of the chill slicing through the sleeves of my borrowed dress, of the soldiers and Alex behind me. I was aware of the dim glow I cast, brighter than the moon, as I sailed over familiar ruts and rills, startling a rabbit from its hiding place. I turned at the edge of the vegetable garden, dodged between bits of laundry on the line, barely registering that there were both Plain and military pants hanging out. I rushed up to the back step, my breath burning in the back of my throat and my heart knocking against my rib cage.

I hesitated. Part of me wanted to rip open the door and plunge into the warmth that I knew was inside, to bask in that firelight I could see just through the window.

But another part of me knew that I might not be welcome.

I knocked on the screen door. It was a feeble, rattling sound, like bird bones in a can.

I waited, shifting from one foot to the other. I heard scraping inside, and the front door opened. I held my breath.

My mother’s silhouette appeared. She opened the screen door. In a flash, I saw her as she was now: gaunt, with a taut, worried expression on her face. Her eyes widened in horror. The door fell back with a hiss, and slammed against the frame.

I reached out to snatch the door handle. “Mother. Mother, it’s me.”

My gaze fell on my hand, glowing green in the darkness. I knew that she was afraid. The look on her face was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever seen. In that instant, I don’t know what it was that she saw, whether she thought that I was an angel, as I had thought of Matt’s people. Did she think that I was something terrible come to her doorstep? Or, most horrifyingly, did she think that I was simply myself?

But I couldn’t step back and turn away. I couldn’t.

I wrenched the door handle back and lunged into the house after her. My mother backpedaled across the kitchen floor. She slammed against the table, knocking a bowl against the floor and shattering it.

“Mother, it’s me!”

Barking echoed, and I heard the clatter of dog claws on the hardwood floors. Two golden retrievers tackled me, and I stumbled backwards. Warm tongues washed my face, and I scrubbed my hands through their fur.

“Copper! Sunny!” I buried my face in Sunny’s ruff. Around my feet, smaller dogs milled. Her puppies, who had just been born when I’d been turned out, were now knee-high balls of russet fur with legs.

“Katie?” my mother whispered.

I disentangled myself from the dogs and stepped into the light of a gas lamp. I opened my arms. My eyes stung, fearful with the idea that she didn’t want me anymore.

She looked me up and down. In this light, I knew that my eyes no longer glowed. They looked like hers—gray like winter clouds. My skin had become opaque and milky. I was ordinary.

She reached toward me, choking on a sob. Her arms wrapped around me fiercely, so tight that I couldn’t breathe. My hands clasped her hard, and I felt her shoulders shake.

“Katie . . . is it really you?”

“Yes, Mother.”

And for that moment, everything was all right in my world. I was home. My mother was holding me, and I was weeping into her shoulder. I was five years old again, safe and secure.

“How is this possible,
liewe
?” she whispered, using her pet name for me—“dear.” She pulled back and pressed her hands to my cheeks. “Is it as they said . . . that the dead have risen up and that Christ is coming?”

I looked into her naked, open face, full of hope. And then I looked past her. My father was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at me as if I were a ghost.

And then I understood. They had thought I was dead. They had thought that I had stepped Outside, been devoured. I felt a pang of grief at that, that they grieved for me. I took a step toward my father. “Father . . .”

He remained rooted in place, his eyes round and his lips unmoving.

A small figure scurried down the stairs, shoved past him, shrieking, with bonnet strings flying: “Katie, Katie!”

I fell to my knees and hugged Sarah. Her arms were tight around my neck, and she babbled into my shoulder, “Mother said that you had gone to heaven.” I felt her doll slapping against my back.

I shot a glance at my mother, in shock. That was a lie. I would not have gone to heaven if I were dead. I would simply have been caught out, become nothing, suspended between heaven and hell.

And that’s how I felt now.

My mother bit her lip and looked away. I felt the weight of my father’s gaze on all of us.

“Where have you been?” Sarah asked.

I kissed her cheek. “I went Outside.”

“On
Rumspringa
?” She frowned. “They said it’s dangerous Outside.”

“Yes. On
Rumspringa
.” I had to lie to her. If my parents hadn’t told her the truth of what had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to say it to her. “Seeing the Outside world.”

“Are there cars and trains and airplanes?”

“Not as many as you might think.”

“Sarah,” my father said. “Please go to your room for a little while. We have to talk to Katie.” His voice was constricted, as if it held unshed tears.

I clasped my little sister in my arms again, and then she reluctantly unwound herself from me. She solemnly handed me her rag doll. I remembered when my mother and I had made it for her, wound the yarn into the head and hand-sewn the now threadbare dress. We made it in the Amish fashion—with no face. No graven images.

I clutched the doll to my chest and watched Sarah climb the stairs.

We waited until the door slammed upstairs. My father glanced out the screen door. I knew that he could see the soldiers there. And Alex, glowing. One of them had offered him a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke before. It seemed odd seeing an angel smoke.

My mother drew me to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair for me. The dogs followed and sat down on the floor beside us. “Tell us what happened.”

I placed the doll in my lap. I took a deep breath and told her the story, from the time I’d set foot Outside, through the snakebite and losing Ginger, up through our time at the lake. I glossed over many of the violent details. But I think that she guessed, as she squeezed my hand during the pauses in my tale, when I could not find words.

“And we brought it with us. This . . . elixir that causes us to shine in the dark.”

I lapsed into silence at last, running my finger over an uneven seam I’d made in Sarah’s doll, along the arm. Copper had rolled over on my feet, warming them. He was snoring.

“You’re alive,” my mother said. “That’s all that matters.”

I felt my father’s shadow over me. I looked up, desperately craving his approval. I wanted him to say that he loved me, that I could go upstairs to my room and sleep under my old quilt.

He bent down and gave me a hug. I heard a tremor in his chest, felt the prickliness of his beard against my cheek. He kissed my forehead.

He looked me levelly in the eyes. “I love you, my beloved daughter. And I always will. You have no idea how joyful that you being here makes me. But the
Bann
is still in place.”

I swallowed. I felt the bile of resentment rising in the back of my throat. I wanted my parents to welcome me with open arms, to forget the
Bann
.