When She Woke (38 page)

S
OMETIME LATER
H
ANNAH
sat up and got to her feet, swallowing her groan of pain so as not to wake him. Making love on a wooden floor had not, in retrospect, been the wisest choice given the tender state of her backside. She tiptoed from the room, closing the door behind her, and headed downstairs in search of a glass of water. It ought to have been unsettling, walking naked through Aidan’s house, Alyssa’s house, but instead it gave Hannah a sense of power, primitive and deeply satisfying. She felt certain that neither of them had ever walked unclothed in this or any other house they’d ever lived in. Even in the dark, even if they were completely alone, they would put on a robe. Once, Hannah would have too, but she was no longer that person.

According to the clock in the kitchen it was just after eleven in the morning. There was an almost completely brown banana in a bowl on the counter, and she peeled it and gulped it down in three bites. She hadn’t eaten since the cookie in Reverend Easter’s office, and before that, since the soggy half-sandwich and bag of chips she’d stuffed in her mouth yesterday afternoon, right before she’d left Greensboro. She eyed the fridge and the coffeemaker longingly but settled for the banana and the water and headed back upstairs to shower. She didn’t dare linger; Aidan might wake and come seeking her, and she didn’t want him to see her, not yet.

And maybe not at all,
she thought, studying her garish reflection in the bathroom mirror. Why break the enchantment and sully what they’d shared, and their memories of it? For she had gotten her wish: their union had been perfect, complete. And as with Simone, healing. Hannah had been objectified by men ever since she was chromed, treated as a thing to be used and disposed of. Being with Aidan had offset that ugliness, restoring her balance. Cleansing her of hate.

In the past, she’d experienced their lovemaking as an intimate incursion—a piercing, not just of her body but of her being. She’d welcomed it, even though the puncture wounds never quite healed; even though a small part of her was always left aching and empty. But today had been different. Today, for a few precious minutes, she’d felt that she and Aidan were truly one: that he was inside of her, and she was inside of him. His dream came back to her:
We stood side by side in a circle of golden light, and I knew that if I could hold that light in my hand I’d be united, not just with you, but with God.
Perhaps that’s what mortal love was, she reflected: a faint, fleeting glimpse of what it would be like to be one with God. This morning, with Aidan, she’d felt true exaltation for the first time in her life.

And tonight, she was painfully aware, she would have to leave him.

He was still asleep when she returned to the bedroom. She paused in the doorway, gazing down at him in the light from the bathroom window. Her eyes confirmed what her hands had told her earlier: he’d grown thin, almost gaunt. Even so, he was beautiful. If anything, his fragility made him more so, lending him the potent allure of the ephemeral: a firefly, a rose in full bloom whose beauty sears the heart because it will soon be gone. She shivered, chilled by the thought.

Aidan stirred, and she slipped inside and closed the door before he could see her. “I’m cold,” she said, getting into bed. “Come join me.”

He got up, stumbled, banged a knee or an elbow against the bedpost. “Ow!” A rueful laugh. “You might have let me get my pants all the way off.”

“I was in a hurry.”

He slid in beside her and pulled her to him. “Well, you needn’t be, my love, not ever again. We have the rest of our lives.” She didn’t move or make a sound, but Aidan’s body went taut. “What’s wrong?”

A part of her wanted to lie to him, to give him the gift of this last day together, unburdened by the knowledge that they must part. But in the end she found that she couldn’t. She’d crossed into a place where truth, even if it was brutal, was all she had to offer. And so she pulled out of his embrace and told him: about her ordeal at the Straight Path Center, her near-capture by the Fist of Christ, her deliverance by strangers (she said only that it was a group opposed to the Fist), her flight from Texas and near-enslavement and near-rape by Farooq. She spared him her amorous encounter with Simone but none of her trials, though she knew the telling would wound him. Only the full truth would make him let her go.

He was agitated during her account, moving restlessly in the bed and letting out sporadic exclamations of shock and distress. Hannah stopped with her arrival here, postponing for now the moment when they’d have to speak of the future. Aidan lay silent and still. She reached for his hand and found it ice cold. His entire body was cold and clammy, and she wrapped her own around it to warm him.

He released a ragged breath. “How can you ever forgive me?” he asked.

She’d known this was where he would go, but it exasperated her nonetheless. “There’s nothing to forgive, Aidan. I’m not a child that you’ve wronged or led astray.” She felt him tense a little, and she softened her tone. “What I’m trying to say, what I need you to understand, is that at every point along the way I made my own choices, the choices that felt right for me, and that I’m prepared to live with the consequences. What I won’t live with ever again are shame and regret, and I hope you won’t, either.”

“You sound … different. Changed.” Was that dismay she heard in his voice?

“I am,” she said. “More than you know.”

“You’re so strong, so certain.”

She shook her head. “You can’t imagine how lost I’ve felt in the last six months. I doubted everything: you, God. Most of all myself.”

“Doubted,” he said. “Past tense.” The joy in his voice tore at her.

“Yes. Past tense.” As Aidan soon would be. Hannah’s eyes burned, and she shut them tightly. He hadn’t thought ahead, to where her story inevitably led; hadn’t yet seen the place where their paths would have to branch. Very soon she’d have to take him there and extinguish his happiness. But not yet. For just a little longer, she’d allow him the bliss of ignorance.

“I’
LL HAVE TO
leave you in a little while,” Aidan said, after they’d made love again. “I need go home and tell Alyssa.”

Hannah lay with her head in the nook of his shoulder. It fit there as snugly as if it had been made to, like a ball in its proper socket.

Except it hadn’t, and wasn’t.

“No,” she said quietly. “There’s no point.”

He sat up abruptly, dislodging her head. “What do you mean?”

She sat up too, facing him in the dark. “These people I told you about, the people who saved me from the Fist and offered me the road … they made me swear never to be in contact with anyone from my past life again. Never.” She felt him recoil from the enormity of the word, felt it hunkering over them in the dark.
Sundered,
she thought.

“Nonsense. They can’t ask you to do that.”

“Aidan, if they found out I’d even spoken with you, much less seen you, they’d kill us both. And if you came with me they
would
find out eventually, no matter where we went. There’s no place we can hide.”

A silence. “Because of who I am,” he said finally. Hannah had never heard him sound so bitter. She longed to comfort him but held herself back.

“There has to be somewhere,” he insisted. “Some remote island in Asia or Africa where they’ve never heard of me.”

“It’s too dangerous,” she said. “I won’t subject you to that.”

But for a moment, she considered it; envisioned them lying in a hammock next to a rustic jungle lodge, ringed by rain forest encircled by a cerulean blue sea. Her head in the nook of his shoulder, her arm draped across his chest, their legs intertwined. Adam and Eve, before the fall. Minus the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“I don’t care about the danger,” he said.

The vision shimmered and melted away, a last chimera, acknowledged and gone. “But I do,” Hannah said. “I can’t live like a fugitive forever.”

This was the truth, but only a small part of it. The greater truth, which she’d kept at bay for some days now, came to her with quiet certitude: if she and Aidan had ever fit together, they didn’t anymore. She’d traveled too far from him, a distance immeasurable in days or miles, and would soon travel even farther. He couldn’t follow her where she was going, and she couldn’t go back. She didn’t
want
to go back, to the world she’d been raised in and the person she’d been in it; the person he’d expect her to be if she stayed with him. Alyssa was his Elinor: mild, virtuous, sensible. Hannah didn’t yet know who she was, but she wanted the chance to find out. And if she stayed with Aidan, she never would. She’d just be putting herself into another box.

But Hannah couldn’t say that to him; it would just hurt him needlessly, because he wouldn’t understand. How could he, being the man he was, leading the life he led? So when he started to object, she found his mouth, put her fingers over it and spoke to him in the language of his world.

“God has important work for you to do, my love.”
Your God, who is no longer mine.
“It’s why He put you on this earth: to lead people to Him through your faith. ‘I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not … I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things I will do unto them, and not forsake them.’”

The Henleys had perverted the meaning of the words, but now, Hannah felt their beauty and their power. There were so many people in the world who were suffering, who needed help, hope, light. And Aidan gave it to them. Whatever his faults, he was a true man of God. “You can’t walk away from that, Aidan. Not for me or for anyone.”

“No. I gave my word to God, and to you, that I’d reveal the truth. That I’d acknowledge my love for you even if you were lost to me. I owe you that much.”

“If you owe me anything at all, it’s to fulfill your purpose. If you go through with this, you shatter the hope and faith of thousands of people.”
My parents and Becca included.

Aidan’s body was still rigid, resisting. “And you shatter mine,” Hannah added. “If the press learned my name I’d be notorious. My picture would be all over the vids. If anyone recognized me, and someone’s bound to eventually, they’d report me to the police.”

He was silent for a very long time. She waited, stroking his forehead, trying to allay the pain and confusion she knew were roiling beneath her hand. He breathed out, a great gust of air in which she heard exhaustion and surrender.

“You’re right of course,” he said. “It’s liberating, isn’t it, when your path becomes clear at last?” His voice was a swan gliding across a lake, the face of Mary looking down on her baby son.

Hannah frowned, hearing echoes of the vidmail he sent her. “So you’re saying you won’t do it?”

His hand came up and stroked her cheek. “I’ll never do anything to put you in danger again.”

She wished she could see his face. She didn’t trust it, this glassy calm. She took his hand and gripped it hard. “Promise me.”

“I won’t fail you, my love, I promise. You’re my better angel.”

He drew her down into his embrace and stroked her back, her hair, her arms. Memorizing her, she knew. Soothed by his touch, she gave in to her weariness and drifted into sleep, much as she had in the car that October day so long ago.

But this time, when she woke, he wasn’t there beside her. She listened, felt the emptiness of the house echo in the chambers of her heart.
Gone, gone, gone.
This time, forever.

The door to the bedroom was open, the darkness breached by the faintly throbbing violet light of dusk seeping in from the hallway. She groped for the flashlight, but it wasn’t on the bedside table where she’d left it. She risked turning on the lamp and saw it lying by Aidan’s pillow. A note was pinned beneath it.

As she read it she began to weep, pressing it with both hands to her breast, where no burning drop of wax had fallen to warn her.

S
HE DROVE INTO
whiteness: cold, stark, alien, beautiful. The farther north she went, the more the landscape became all of those things. And yet, as strange as it was to her, it didn’t feel intimidating. If anything the whiteness seemed to beckon her onward, northward, a tabula rasa promising nothing at all, except a chance to begin again. A new life, empty of Aidan, her parents, Becca.

She mourned their loss as she drove, even as she accepted its necessity. Her family wouldn’t recognize her any longer. And if they knew the full truth, they’d be horrified by who she’d become, and she’d resent them for it and chafe under the strictures they’d expect her to live by. Better, she told herself, that they believed her dead. And better that Aidan stayed with his wife in his world, a world that bore no resemblance to the one Hannah hoped to create for herself in Canada. She envisioned the white space she’d seen at Stanton’s, the one she intended to furnish according to her own tastes and desires. Aidan would be uneasy and out of place there, and her family wouldn’t even cross the threshold.

Kayla, however, would be right at home. If she survived. She
would
survive, Hannah told herself, willing it to be true. Paul would find her—might already have found her—and bring her north, and the two of them would find Hannah. She prayed for that all through the night, uncertain to Whom or what, but with a feeling that almost resembled faith.