Veracity (9 page)

"Towed?"

"You didn't think they were going to leave it here?"

"How far is Bond?"

"Three miles. Why?"

"Which way?" The answer is north. I just want her to stop sounding so superior.

"What do you care?"

I don't answer.

Ezra takes a couple of steps toward the bed. She's checking to see if my eyes are still shut. "Take a right at the end of the drive, go three miles, take another right at Route 54. Stay
straight and you'll drive right through it. Oh, but you'd be walking, huh?" she sounds pleased to add.

I'd like to spar with her, use my newly expanded freedom of speech to tell her what I think of her
help,
but the room has resumed spinning so I keep it brief. "You don't like me."

Ezra doesn't respond like I thought. She leans down and whispers in my ear, "You want to know why? Because you're the worst kind of whore. You and your kind make me and mine look like Mary Fucking Poppins." Whoever that is.

She turns to leave and I hold out a hand. "Is Veracity safe?"

Ezra pauses at the threshold. "Yes."

"Where is she?"

"Not in Wernthal. That's all you need to know."

"They haven't gone after her?"

"No."

"Are we watching her?"

Ezra sighs. "What happened to Hannah is not going to happen to Veracity. Enough with the questions. Go to sleep."

The room is going away along with Ezra and her invective. I lie back down and close my eyes. Behind them, I find an image of Candace's daughter waiting. It's the
before
picture when Hannah was a long, dangling girl, feet swinging beneath her mother's desk. In this image, she was exuberant. Full of questions. Never able to hold still. Then comes the
after
. The picture channel 4 broadcast toward the end showing a stick figure in a hospital bed, the skin of her face and arms gray and patchy. Her copper-colored eyes hollowed out. The Confederation went after her, Candace's daughter. She was used as bait to lure back the errant mother.

Maybe I'm being vain. I don't take up a knife and puncture my carotid, flicking out my slate along with a bit of that vital artery. I don't open that juncture where arm meets hand, or bruise the most lovely part of the body, the crease where neck meets head. I work death upon my body from the inside out. I choose pills. Seventeen Occlusia. Medication the government provides to keep us happy. It was the first method in a brief list. The
how,
my only decision. The Confederation would have used my daughter to flush me out. They would have brought her to Wernthal Central Hospital and tortured her until I came running, like they did with Hannah.

I have to sever ties to my child in such a way the government will classify her as
Unloved By Her Mother
. As
Not Likely to Produce a Return,
no matter what they do to her. I have to get her reassigned to new parents. The recruitment letter assured me that the resistance had enough people on the inside to make sure Veracity's new home would be far away. Beyond the easy reach of the Confederation.

Veracity, or
Sarah
as called by her court-appointed name, has been sent off to spend a week with my ex-husband's sister and brother-in-law on the East Coast. Anne is the kind, quiet, motherly type with no children of her own. She was my first choice. Her husband, David, has a quick smile and a good sense of humor. He works as an engineer and provides them a Class III house. Three thousand square feet. Five
bedrooms, two and a half baths. Too much room for a couple that desperately wants kids. They were my first choice. Both of them. But they're family and, therefore, too obvious. My recruiter has promised to find Veracity new parents who will be like Anne and David. Kind, if not familiar. A different home the Confederation can't remove her from.

Anne has flown out to get Veracity so she won't have to fly back to their house alone. I say my good-bye as dispassionately as possible, as if it's meant to last just the span of a long weekend and not a lifetime. I make it all the way through the main terminal doors and out to the taxi stand before collapsing onto the cement. A man asks if I need help. I can't answer. Don't remember hobbling to my car. Getting in. Finding the key, all the other actions required to get me from the airport back home.

What happens next is like a scene from someone else's life. A woman with long blonde-brown hair sits down at her kitchen table with a bottle of Occlusia. She removes seventeen pills with crystalline precision and lays them out on her table-top like a swarm of bees. Black and yellow, they buzz and flutter. She produces a glass of water, downs the swarm. It's that simple.

The woman goes to the front hall and sits down on the cool tile to watch the door. Fifteen minutes in, as planned, she calls for help. There's no blacking out, just tremendous vomiting and spasms. She rocks back and forth in front of the toilet, side to side, while being hoisted into the ambulance. She vomits off the side of the gurney while being rushed down the slick white hospital corridors. Ruins her second-favorite blouse.

Of the rest, there is no memory. For a few sour moments, she simply isn't. She lets her sound waves go flat. No activity on the machine. No signals, no prescience. Then, a pulse. A beat. My words,
my
words,
my words
. . .
dum-dum
, dum-
dum
, dum-dum. Back to being monitored, back to being here.

For three days, Chalmers Hospital keeps me on suicide
watch. When the officials come to do the standard interview, my eyes are swollen shut by a continuous stream of tears. I can't see the men. They're dark shapes explaining in monotone voices what will happen to my daughter. She's being reassigned to a new family. It's best for all concerned. I don't disagree.

I'm released. Go home and languish on my sofa.

The skin beneath my eyes is still black, my hair forgotten. Most days I pull it up into a ponytail to exempt me from the process of running a brush through the long, uneven strands. I wear whatever clothes I manage to lay out the night before. Eat only if my path takes me past the refrigerator. I'm a mess. Forgetful in the most basic ways.

Mornings are the worst. I arrive to the conscious world, my life unremembered. I'm given a few seconds of blissful ignorance before the memories come rushing in. And then I drown. Every single day.

The Confederation doctors and Mr. Weigland all tell me the same thing. I am to eat. To bathe. To go on with my life as if nothing's happened. I feel it as yet another abandonment. To live without Veracity seems crass. What will she think of me, continuing on without her? Haven't I always said it would be impossible?
Keep on goin', Harper.
Bullshit. I've lost my child. What else can matter?

A week later, Mr. Weigland comes to my apartment. He walks in behind a bouquet of yellow daisies, his eyes everywhere but on me. He puts his hand on my arm, asks why I haven't come to him. Do I know my job is still there? It is. It's waiting for me. I'm to come back the following Monday, resume my duties. Just the same as before.

"It'll do you good to get back into a schedule," he says. And he's right. He leans in, presses a paper napkin into my hand. Kisses me, barely, on the top of my head and leaves.

The napkin contains one poorly handwritten line.
Fake it 'til you make it
.

It's an act of trust. I can't return such kindness with
anything but the same and burn the soft swatch of paper immediately over a gas burner.

It's good advice. I need to do the small things, the daily things that will help me forget what I won't be coming home to. I rearrange the furniture. Go back to work.

At first, the office feels completely the same. On the surface, not much has changed except for a pile of top clearance files that's grown precariously high in one corner. I delve into the work that's familiar and distracting and more soothing than I'd anticipated. It's not until late morning of my first day back that I begin to notice the Monitors passing by. They're being tender with me. Furtive. They walk by in groups. Up and down the center aisle until the moment feels right and then they begin stopping at my cubicle door. Asking me how I am, expressing their remorse for my loss. Some mean it and some are there strictly to see if I'm staying or leaving.

I've just been sprung from Chalmers Hospital. For the next six to twelve months I'll be on Red Watch. My home, my car, my work will be monitored. A special set of Monitors back at the hospital will review my schedule, my diet, and my words--all of it, every day. They'll then report back to Mr. Weigland, who'll report back to his superiors. If I say I need a break, this is the one time in my life I'll get one. All because I'm important.

When I'm gone, others will be forced into BodySpeak early. About half of my first-day-back visitors are scared to death their number will get called. Their worry is fatiguing. Eventually, I tell them so. Ask them to go away.

It's the end of the day. I know it by the masses of people who're queuing up at the elevators, ready to leave. I go to turn off my computer and feel someone behind me.

It's Evans, the mailman. The man who delivered my recruitment letter. "Hello, Miss Adams."

"Hi, Evans."

Seventy years old, Evans has a back rounded by arthritis and long yellow teeth that make him look slightly feral, the exact opposite of who he is. He's polite and thoughtful. Is always asking questions about Veracity. Wanting to know how I'm acclimating to the litany of bumps in the road of life. He knows more about the people working here than our Human Resources Department. How and why, I never think to ask.

"You've had a lot of visitors today," he says. "I hope you don't mind one more."

I unplug my earphones. Turn off my computer. For kind Evans, I lie, "I don't mind."

He puts a hand on my shoulder. Wants me to look at him when he talks. "Miss Adams, I've come to make sure you're still planning that trip we talked about earlier this summer. The one to Chesney." He's shrouded in an uncharacteristic yellow-gold today, a color that turns his liver-spotted skin green. "I noticed you haven't let Human Resources know about it yet." He's worried I'll forget myself. Say something that will net me a punitive or blow his cover. He's right to be worried. My mind is elsewhere.

I pat Evans's hand, still on my shoulder. His skin is loose. It slides over the bones as if not attached. "I'm sorry. I've changed my mind about a vacation this year."

Vacation.
Evans smiles sorrowfully at our use of such a term. What we're discussing is just the opposite. "Oh, Miss Adams."

I shake my head. "I don't think I could enjoy it."

"That's not always why someone takes a
vacation
, is it? Some of the best things I've done in my life have been done on vacation."

I grab my purse, my keys that are already out on my desk. "Good night, Evans." I leave without looking back. "Thank you anyway."

I drive to the grocery store and go straight to the liquor aisle. It's become my routine. The choice of alcohol
is inconsequential. Whatever comes into contact with my outstretched hand comes into contact with my bloodstream. White wine. Red wine. Brandy. Whiskey. Never anything cold. Nothing that requires me to so much as open the cooler door.

I have my fist bound tightly around a bottle of pinot noir when someone grabs me and pulls me away toward the back door. I'm removed from the liquor aisle and the few customers sober enough to notice. Wine still in tow, I'm taken out into the rear alley and pushed up against a wall. The arms binding mine loosen to perform whatever punitive has come up in my file, and I'm glad for it. This is how it will end. Not with me joining the resistance but being raped and murdered out here with rain coming down in hard, cold drops. I stand quietly, complicitly, with my arms bent painfully behind me. I smile for the first time in weeks. The hurt will finally end. To me, it's a miracle.

The man's hand fumbles across the muscle of my thigh. Searches until it finds the bottle of wine and pulls it free.

He's not here to rape me. Murder me. Take away the pain. I close my eyes.

"No."
It is a plea.

This man isn't a Blue Coat come to call out the worst numbers. This is a man I've met maybe without realizing it. Someone who could have walked past my desk, or ridden with me on the elevator just once, maybe twice. I have the smallest memory of his scent. And a familiarity with the warm blue at the heart of his colors. He doesn't work at the Murdon Building where I would have felt him, even floors away, or caught his iridescent prints left behind here and there. Still, I'm sure that's where we must have met. It's the only place I ever go besides home. How I recognize him, I don't know. Right now, it's enough that he recognizes me.

"You're my recruiter. Aren't you?" I whisper.

His jaw against my head, the man nods in confirmation. He holds me as the grief begins to flow, and I let him.

My recruiter knows to lean in so I can clutch and sob against the wall, so no one walking by can see me beneath him. Knows to stroke the skin of my hands so I can retch up everything I've been keeping locked away. Knows to put his cheek against the top of my skull. Softly, imperceptibly, press his lips to the top of my head.

He says nothing to me. Doesn't ask if I've been restored to my mission, to my recruitment into the resistance. He holds me until I'm all cried out, and then he goes. My recruiter is the only person today who's provided me assurances, requiring no assurances in return.

I don't know what color his eyes are, or the color or cut of his hair. I don't know how young or old he might be and will have to erase from my memory the green-blue aura his hands left on the brick wall. I don't want to know him the next time we meet. Anonymity is what I've chosen because I need him as a blank slate. The fantasies I hold about my recruiter are as important to me as the man himself. There may come a day when I'll want to know who he is and what he does. But not until I'm ready and not unless I'm ready. Right now, I need him to be perfect. And, in this world, there's not one chance he could be even slightly close.