When She Woke (27 page)

Hannah’s leg was growing numb from the weight of Kayla’s head, but she didn’t shift her position. She might not be able to keep Becca safe, but she was determined to do everything in her power to protect Kayla. And so, Hannah reckoned, was Paul, who kept glancing back at them with wistful eyes. She wondered whether they’d made love. Kayla hadn’t confided in her, but then the two women had had almost no time alone together since they’d arrived at the safe house. Kayla and Paul certainly could have stolen some private hours during the day, when Susan and Anthony were out and Hannah was sleeping. Imagining them together gave her a pang. To be kissed and enfolded in a man’s arms, to feel the warm press of his weight against her and hear his voice murmuring endearments in her ear—would she ever know that again? Looking down at Kayla’s sleeping face, Hannah hoped she had known it with Paul. After all she’d lost, and all she was faced with, she deserved some sweetness in her life. On the heels of that thought came another:
And if she does, then just maybe, so do I.

They’d been traveling for several hours when Simone pulled off the highway and stopped at a juice station. The change in motion woke Kayla. “Where are we?” she asked, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Almost to the Louisiana border,” Paul said.

“I need to use the restroom,” Hannah said.

“Me too,” Kayla said. “And I’m getting hungry.”

Paul tapped on a cooler sitting on the floor between the two seats. “There are sandwiches and chips in here. Help yourselves.”

Kayla reached for the lid, but Simone stopped her with a curt, “Not now. We will eat after we cross the frontier.” She told Paul to charge the van while she went to get coffee and the restroom key.

“God, she’s a piece of work!” Kayla said, the instant Simone and Paul closed the doors behind them. “I’d bet money she practices that sourpuss expression in the mirror, except it would crack if she did. She—”

Hannah cut her off, aware that they didn’t have much time. “We need to talk. You’re not having any symptoms, are you?”

“No. But I’m not due for nine days yet. And hopefully there’ll be a grace period. If there isn’t . . .”

“Listen to me, if you start to feel anything, anything at all, you tell me right away. And don’t let on to the others.”

“Why not?”

“I heard them talking about it yesterday with Susan and Anthony. They think you’re a liability. Simone has orders to kill you if you go into fragmentation.”

Kayla’s eyes widened. “And what did Vincent say?”

“Who’s Vincent?”

Kayla’s hand flew to her mouth.

“That’s Paul’s real name?”

“Yeah. They all take the names of famous feminists. Susan B. Anthony. Simone de Beauvoir. Alice Paul.”

With the exception of Susan B. Anthony, the names were unfamiliar, and even she was just a face on an old coin in Hannah’s father’s collection. Something tugged at her memory. “Rafael,” she murmured, making the connection. Not Raphael, the archangel of healing, but Rafael Patiño, the governor of Florida, assassinated soon after he’d vetoed the Sanctity of Life laws passed by the state legislature. Hannah had been twelve. Her parents had had one of their rare arguments that night, when her mother adamantly refused to pray with her father for the governor’s soul. Becca, the peacemaker as always, went to soothe her, while Hannah knelt with her father on the living room floor and prayed. Afterward he put his hand on the crown of her head and told her she was his good girl. She could feel it now, a phantom of that warm, approving weight, and it twisted her heart into a tight, dry strand.

“Hannah!” Kayla gave her arm an impatient shake. “What did Vincent say?”

“He argued with them. But in the end, he agreed that you couldn’t be allowed to jeopardize the mission.”

“Then he was playing them,” Kayla said. “He’d never let Simone hurt me.”

“I don’t know, Kayla. I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he meant it.”

“And I’m telling you, he didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

Kayla’s certainty, and the undisguised tenderness that infused it, irritated Hannah. “Just because you’re sleeping with him doesn’t mean you can trust him,” she said.

“I do trust him, completely. I know him, Hannah.”

“Like you knew TJ?”

Though the comment must have wounded her, Kayla didn’t show it. She just looked at Hannah steadily, with a quiet dignity that filled her with chagrin.
Who’s the caustic bitch now?

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “I guess I’m jealous. Not because you have Paul—Vincent—but because you have
someone.
Because you’re not alone with this.” She gestured at her face. “I know it’s small of me.”

Kayla gave Hannah’s leg a forgiving squeeze. “Love’s a bitch, isn’t it? It spoils you for being on your own.”

“Yeah.” And for being with anyone else, Hannah reflected. Even after all that had happened, she still couldn’t imagine ever loving another man. She wondered, not for the first time, whether loving her had spoiled Aidan for being with Alyssa. Hannah had never asked him about their relationship, whether they were intimate. She’d hoped not. But now that she was out of the picture, he would almost certainly go back to his wife’s bed, if he hadn’t already. If he’d ever left it in the first place.

Hannah saw Simone leave the mart and stride toward the rest-room. They had a few minutes at most.

“Listen,” she said, “there’s something else I have to tell you. Some of the other women they’ve sent this way have disappeared. They plan to use us as bait to try and catch whoever’s behind it. Simone suspects someone named George, but Paul thinks it’s two women named Betty and Gloria.”

Kayla’s face was troubled but unsurprised. “I know. I was going to tell you. Vincent told me last night. He said to be on our guard, but not to worry, he’ll be watching over us.” She paused and looked at him out the window. Softly, she said, “He talked about coming to Canada and finding me there. I think he’s in love with me.”

“Do you love him?”

Kayla sighed. “I don’t know. I love the way he looks at me. I love how he touches me, like I’m . . .” She trailed off, searching for the right word.

“Like you’re something fine. Something incredibly precious.” Hannah’s eyes burned, and she squeezed them shut. She would not cry.

“You still love him, the guy who got you pregnant.”

“Yes.”
Even if he no longer loves me.
“But it’s all jumbled up with anger and hurt. It’s not clean anymore.”

Kayla let out a short laugh. “Is it ever?”

“I thought it was, in the beginning, but who was I kidding? He was married. Still is.”

“That how come you never say his name?”

Hannah didn’t answer at first. She hadn’t said it aloud in six months and had never spoken it to anyone but him. “Reverend Dale,” she’d said, but not his first name, the one she cherished. The one that was forbidden. She’d held it behind her teeth like a coiled snake for two years. Long enough, she decided.

“His name is Aidan. Aidan Dale.”

“Whoa! As in Secretary of Faith Aidan Dale? The Right Reverend Holier-Than-Thou?”

“He’s not, actually. He’s one of the humblest people I’ve ever known.”

“Holy crap! Aidan Dale. He must’ve been scared shitless you’d talk.”

“No. I think he wanted me to name him as the father. He practically begged me to at my sentencing.” Hannah heard a
thunk
and looked outside. Paul/Vincent was unhooking the charge cable, and Simone was headed their way.

“Look, I know you think you can trust Paul, and I hope you’re right. But promise me you’ll talk to me first if you start to feel anything funny.” Kayla gave her a halfhearted nod, and Hannah gripped her friend’s arm hard. “Promise. And stop calling him Vincent, don’t even think of him as Vincent. If that slipped out in front of Simone there’s no telling what she’d do.”

“O
kay,
Sergeant Payne, I promise.” Kayla smiled, and Hannah felt a rush of love and gratitude for her. And to think, if it hadn’t been for the horrible Henleys, they wouldn’t have found each other.

Paul drove them around to the side of the station where the restroom was. Kayla went first, then Hannah. The room was filthy and rank with the smell of urine. The walls were covered in graffiti: E
MILIA ES UNA PUTA;
F
UCK
A
LLAH AND THE CAMEL HE RODE IN ON; STOP THE BLOODSHED, KILL
M
ORALES!!!
The drawings were even more disturbing: a Blue being lynched, his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging out, above hangman-style letters reading
B L U E C O L L A R
; a robed Chinese man with a Manchu-style queue holding his penis, peeing on an image of the earth. Six months ago, Hannah would have felt a mix of revulsion and shock that anyone was capable of such ugliness and rage. Not that she’d been oblivious to the violence that existed in the world; she was a city girl, albeit a sheltered one, and her father’s near-death in the terrorist attack had disabused her of any notion that she and those she loved were invulnerable. But she’d thought of that as a freak occurrence, something from another, distant reality that had intruded on her own. Now, looking at the sordid scrawls, the revulsion was still there, but the shock was absent. In the world she inhabited now, hatred and violence were commonplace, and she was uncomfortably aware, not just that it seethed in the hearts of people all around her, but of her own capacity for it.

When she returned to the van, Simone was in the passenger seat, and the crates were open in the front. Kayla was already inside hers, sitting with her knees pressed to her chest. Hannah’s nervousness must have shown on her face, because Paul said, “The opening is hinged, see? And the crate locks from the inside, not the outside. To let yourself out, you just flip this latch.” He demonstrated. She glanced at Simone. The other woman gave her a hard, assessing look. Hannah took a last breath of fresh air and crawled inside. Paul swung the door closed, and she fumbled for the latch and locked it. Soon afterward, she felt the van moving.

“You okay in there?” Paul asked.

“I’m feeling mighty perishable,” Kayla said, “but other than that I’m dandy.”

Hannah smiled. “Me too,” she said, discovering it was true. The pitch-blackness helped; she couldn’t see how confined she was. But the crate also had a pleasant, sawn-wood smell that reminded her of her father’s shop in the garage. Carpentry was his hobby, and Hannah had always loved to watch him work. One of her favorite possessions was a dollhouse he’d made for her when she was five. Becca had gotten one too, and every year for their birthdays and Christmas he’d given them one or two pieces of miniature furniture, meticulously crafted to look like the real thing. The tiny dining room chairs were stuffed and upholstered in red velvet, the tiny dresser drawers could be opened and closed, the toilet lid raised and lowered. As she got older Hannah had started to make her own decorations, needlepointing miniature rugs and sewing little curtains and bedspreads. Even after she outgrew the dollhouse, she never packed it away. It held pride of place in her bookshelf, a vivid reminder of her father’s love for her.

Another cherished thing that she had lost.

Paul called out a warning as they approached the checkpoint. They slowed, and Hannah held her breath. She could almost feel the eyes of the police scouring the van, deciding whether or not to stop them. Her lungs were beginning to burn when she felt the van accelerating, and Simone said, “We’re through. You can get out now.” Hannah’s breath escaped in a loud whoosh.

Simone passed out the food. Hannah’s appetite, which had been nonexistent since she’d seen Aidan on the vid, had returned, and she wolfed down the sandwich. Wordlessly, Simone handed her the other half of her own. As Hannah ate it, she studied the other woman, thinking what a puzzle she was: harsh and ruthless one minute, kind and generous the next.

“Where are we headed?” Kayla ventured to ask, around a mouthful of tortilla chips.

“Eastern Mississippi, close to the Alabama border,” Paul replied. “A little town called Columbus.”

“Good thing we’re going in December,” Kayla said.

“Why’s that?” Hannah asked.

“Because most of the year it’s hotter than a red-assed bee. I visited there when I was applying to colleges. I don’t know how anybody can stand to live there. I like to melted during the campus tour.”

“Well, Dallas isn’t exactly the North Pole.”

“No, but we don’t have humidity like they do. It’s like being in Satan’s favorite sauna. I never sweated so much in my whole life.”

Paul chuckled, and Simone said, with undisguised impatience, “If the three of you are finished with your chitchat, I am trying to think.”

A bruised silence descended on the van.
Some people just can’t stand to see other people happy,
Hannah thought. And then she recalled, with a twinge of guilt, her own sour reaction to Kayla’s happiness about Paul.
Please, God, don’t let me become like that.
The plea was reflexive, and its futility struck Hannah the instant after it was dispatched. God, if He existed, didn’t answer the prayers of the faithless or the damned.

H
ANNAH HAD NEVER
been to Louisiana—in fact, she’d never been anywhere outside her home state—but to her eye, it looked no different from East Texas. The same monotonous green line of pine trees sped past, punctuated every few miles by the falsely cheerful glow of the same dozen holosigns in endless repetition: M
C
D
ONALD’S,
BKFC, F
UJIT
J
UICE,
C
OMFORT
I
NN
, M
OTEL
6. The effect was surreal, as though the van were traveling in circles, going nowhere.

They got back in the crates near the Mississippi border and passed through the checkpoint without incident. They reached Columbus four hours later, just as the sun was beginning to set. Hannah got to her knees and peered over Simone’s shoulder out the windshield. The town’s outskirts were a generic string of chain stores and restaurants, but once they were off the highway the tackiness gave way to historic charm. Downtown Main Street was lined with vintage two-story brick buildings, once home to smalltown mainstays like the general and feed stores, now housing boutiques and restaurants. An old art deco movie theater advertised a 2-D-era double feature:
The Ten Commandments
and
Ben-Hur.
Hannah tried to remember the last movie she’d seen in an actual theater; something animated, when she was very young.