Symptoms of Amor Deliria Nervosa
PHASE ONE
preoccupation; difficulty focusing
dry mouth
perspiration, sweaty palms
fits of dizziness and disorientation
reduced mental awareness; racing thoughts; impaired reasoning skills
PHASE TWO
periods of euphoria; hysterical laughter and heightened energy
periods of despair; lethargy
changes in appetite; rapid weight loss or weight gain
fixation; loss of other interests
compromised reasoning skills; distortion of reality
disruption of sleep patterns; insomnia or constant fatigue
obsessive thoughts and actions
paranoia; insecurity
PHASE THREE (CRITICAL)
difficulty breathing
pain in the chest, throat, or stomach
difficulty swallowing; refusal to eat
complete breakdown of rational faculties; erratic behavior; violent thoughts and fantasies; hallucinations and delusions
PHASE FOUR (FATAL)
emotional or physical paralysis (partial or total)
death
If you fear that you or someone you know may have contracted deliria, please call the emergency line toll-free at 1-800-PREVENT to discuss immediate intake and treatment.
I’d never understood how Hana could lie so often and so easily. But just like anything else, lying becomes easier the more you do it.
Which is why, when I get home from work the next day and Carol asks me whether I don’t mind having hot dogs for the fourth straight night in a row (the result of a shipment surplus at the Stop-N-Save; we once went a whole two weeks having baked beans every day), I say that actually, Sophia Hennerson from St. Anne’s invited me and some other girls over for dinner. I don’t even have to think about it. The lie just comes. And even though I still feel sweat pricking up under my palms, my voice stays calm, and I’m pretty sure my face keeps its normal color, because Carol just gives me one of her flitting smiles and says that that sounds nice.
At six thirty I get on my bike and head to East End Beach, where Alex and I agreed to meet.
There are plenty of beaches in Portland. East End Beach is probably one of the least popular—which of course made it one of my mother’s favorites. The current is stronger there than it is at Willard Beach or Sunset Park. I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t mind. I’ve always been a strong swimmer. After that first time—when my mother released her arms from around my waist and I felt both the surging panic and the thrill, the excitement—I learned pretty quickly, and by four I was paddling out by myself all the way past the breaks.
There are other reasons why most people avoid East End Beach, even though it’s only a short walk down the hill from Eastern Prom, one of the most popular parks. The beach is nothing more than a short strip of rocky, gravel-flecked sand. It backs up against the far side of the lab complex, where the storage and waste sheds are, which doesn’t make for particularly pretty scenery. And when you swim out at East End Beach you get a clear view of Tukey’s Bridge and the wedge of unregulated land between Portland and Yarmouth. A lot of people don’t like being so close to the Wilds. It makes them nervous.
It makes me nervous too, except that there’s a part of me—a tiny, little flick of a part—that likes it. For a while after my mom died I used to have these fantasies that she wasn’t dead, really, and that my father wasn’t dead either—that they had escaped to the Wilds to be together. He had gone five years before her, to prepare everything, to build a little house with a woodstove and furniture hewed from tree branches. At some point, I imagined, they would come back and get me. I even imagined my room down to the smallest detail: a dark red carpet, a little red and green patchwork quilt, a red chair.
I had the fantasy only a few times before I realized how wrong it was. If my parents had escaped to the Wilds it would make them sympathizers, resisters. It was better that they were dead. Besides, I learned pretty quickly that my fantasies about the Wilds were just that—make-believe, little kiddie stuff. The Invalids have nothing, no way of trading or getting red patchwork quilts or chairs, or anything else for that matter. Rachel once told me that they must live like animals, filthy, hungry, desperate. She says that’s why the government doesn’t bother doing anything about them, doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. They’ll die out soon enough, all of them, freeze or starve or just let the disease run its course, turn them against each other, have them raging and fighting and clawing one another’s eyes out.
She said as far as we know that’s already happened—she said the Wilds might be empty now, dark and dead, full of only the rustle and whispers of animals.
She’s probably right about the other stuff—about the Invalids living like animals—but she’s obviously wrong about that. They’re alive, and out there, and they don’t want us to forget it. That’s why they stage the demonstrations. That’s why they let the cows loose in the labs.
I’m not nervous until I get to East End Beach. Even though the sun is sinking behind me, it lights the water white and makes everything shimmer. I shield my eyes against the glare and spot Alex down by the water, a long black brushstroke against all that blue. I flash back to last night, to the fingers of one of his hands just pressed against my lower back, so lightly it was like I was only dreaming them—the other hand cupping mine, dry and reassuring as a piece of wood warmed by the sun. We really danced, too, the kind of dancing that people do at their wedding after the pairing has been formalized, but better somehow, looser and less unnatural.
He has his back toward me, facing the ocean, and I’m glad. I feel self-conscious as I plod down the rickety, salt-warped stairs that lead from the parking lot to the beach, pausing to unlace and kick off my sneakers, which I carry in one hand. The sand is warm on my bare feet as I set off toward him.
An old man is coming up from the water, carrying a fishing pole. He shoots me a suspicious glance, then turns to stare at Alex, then looks at me again and frowns. I open my mouth to say, “He’s cured,” but the man just grunts at me as he walks past, and I can’t imagine he’d bother to call the regulators, so I don’t say anything. Not that we’d get in trouble trouble if we were caught—that’s what Alex meant when he said, “I’m safe”—but I don’t want to answer a lot of questions and have my ID number run through SVS and all of that. Besides, if the regulators did haul ass all the way out to East End Beach to check out “suspicious behavior,” only to discover it was some cured taking pity on a seventeen-year-old nobody, they’d definitely be annoyed—and guaranteed to take it out on someone.
Taking pity. I push the words out of my mind quickly, surprised by how difficult it is to even think them. All day I tried not to worry about why on earth Alex would be so nice to me. I even imagined—for one brief, stupid second—that maybe after my evaluation I’d get matched with him. I’d had to shunt that thought aside too. Alex has already received his printed sheet, his recommended matches—he would have gotten it even before his cure, directly after the evaluations. He’s not married yet because he’s still in school, end of story. But he will be, as soon as he finishes.
Of course, then I started wondering about the kind of girl he’s been matched with—someone like Hana, I decided, with bright blond hair and an irritating ability to make even pulling her hair into a ponytail look graceful, like a choreographed dance.
There are four other people on the beach: a mother and a child, one hundred feet away, the mother sitting in a faded fabric folding chair, staring blankly toward the horizon, while the child—who is probably no more than three—toddles in the waves, gets knocked over, lets out a shriek (of pain? pleasure?) and struggles back to her feet. Beyond them a couple is walking, a man and a woman, not touching. They must be married. Both have their hands clasped in front of them, and both look straight ahead, not talking—and not smiling, either, but calm, as though they are each surrounded by an invisible protective bubble.
Then I’m coming up behind Alex and he turns and sees me, smiles. The sun catches his hair, turns it momentarily white. Then it smolders back to its normal golden-brown color.
“Hi,” he says. “I’m glad you came.”
I feel shy again, stupid holding my ratty shoes in one hand. I can feel my cheeks getting hot, so I look down, drop my shoes, turn them over once in the sand with my toe. “I said I would, didn’t I?” I don’t mean for the words to come out so harshly and I wince, mentally cursing myself. It’s like there’s a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.
Thankfully, Alex laughs. “I just meant that you stood me up last time,” he says. He nods toward the sand. “Sit?”
“Sure,” I say, relieved. I feel much less awkward once we’re both settled in the sand. There’s less chance of falling over or doing something dumb. I draw my legs up to my chest, resting my chin on my knees. Alex leaves a good two or three feet of space between us.
We sit in silence for a few minutes. At first I’m searching frantically for something to say. Every beat of silence seems to stretch into an infinity, and I’m pretty sure Alex must think I’m a mute. But then he flicks a half-buried seashell out of the sand and hurls it into the ocean, and I realize he’s not uncomfortable at all. After that I relax. I’m even glad for the silence.
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
“Tide’s going out,” Alex says. He chucks another seashell in a high arc, and it just hits the break.
“I know.” The ocean is leaving a litter of pulpy green seaweed, twigs, and scrabbling hermit crabs in its wake, and the air smells tangy with salt and fish. A seagull pecks its way across the beach, blinking, leaving tiny thatched claw prints. “My mom used to bring me here when I was little. We’d walk out a little bit at low tide—as far as you can go, anyway. Crazy stuff gets stranded on the sand—horseshoe crabs and giant clams and sea anemone. Just gets left behind when the water goes out. She taught me to swim here too.” I’m not sure why the words bubble out of me then, why I have the sudden urge to talk. “My sister used to stay on the shore and build sand castles, and we would pretend that they were real cities, like we’d swum all the way to the other side of the world, to the uncured places. Except in our games they weren’t diseased at all, or destroyed, or horrible. They were beautiful and peaceful, and built of glass and light and things.”
Alex stays silent, tracing shapes in the sand with a finger. But I can tell he’s listening.
The words tumble on: “I remember my mom would bounce me in the water on her hip. And then one time she just let me go. I mean, not for real real. I had those little inflatable thing-ies on my arms. But I was so scared I started bawling my head off. I was only a few years old but I remember it, I swear I do. I was so relieved when she scooped me back up. But—but disappointed, too. Like I’d lost the chance at something great, you know?”
“So what happened?” Alex tips his head to look at me. “You don’t come here anymore? Your mom lose her taste for the ocean?”
I look away, toward the horizon. The bay is relatively calm today. Flat, all shades of blue and purple as it draws away from the beach with a low sucking sound. Harmless. “She died,” I say, surprised by how difficult it is to say. Alex is quiet next to me and I rush on, “She killed herself. When I was six.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, so low and quiet I almost miss it.
“My dad died when I was eight months old. I don’t remember him at all. I think—I think it kind of broke her, you know? My mom, I mean. She wasn’t cured. It didn’t work. I don’t know why. She had the procedure three separate times, but it didn’t . . . it didn’t fix her.” I pause, sucking in a breath, afraid to look at Alex, who is as still and silent next to me as a statue, as a carved piece of shadow. Still, I can’t stop speaking. I realize, strangely, that I’ve never told the story of my mother before. I’ve never had to. Everyone around me, everyone in school, all my neighbors and my aunts’ friends—they all knew about my family already, and my family’s shameful secrets. That’s why they always looked at me pityingly, from the corner of their eyes. That’s why for years I rode a wave of whispering into every room, was slapped with sudden silence when I entered—silence and guilty, startled faces. Even Hana knew before she and I were desk partners in second grade. I remember because she found me in the bathroom stall, crying into a piece of paper towel, stuffing my mouth with it so no one would hear, and she kicked the door right open with a foot and stood there staring. Is it because of your mom? she said, the first words she ever spoke to me.
“I didn’t know there was something wrong with her. I didn’t know she was sick. I was too young to understand.” I keep my eyes focused on the horizon, a solid thin line, taut as a tightrope. The bay edges farther from us, and as always I have the same fantasy I did as a child: that maybe it won’t come back, maybe the whole ocean will disappear forever, drawn back across the surface of the earth like lips retracting over teeth, revealing the cool, white hardness underneath, the bleached bone. “If I had known, maybe I could have . . .”
At the last second my voice falters and I can’t say any more, can’t finish the sentence. Maybe I could have stopped it. It’s a sentence I’ve never spoken before, never even allowed myself to think. But the idea is there, looming up solid and unavoidable, a sheer rock face: I could have stopped it. I should have stopped it.
We sit in silence. At some point during my story the mother and child must have packed up and gone home; Alex and I are all alone on the beach. Now that the words aren’t bubbling, rushing out of me, I can’t believe how much I’ve shared with a next-to-perfect stranger—and a boy, no less. I’m suddenly, itchingly, squirmingly embarrassed. I’m desperate for something else to say—something harmless, about the tide or the weather—but as usual my mind goes totally blank now that I actually need it to function. I’m afraid to look at Alex. When I finally work up the courage to shoot him a tiny sidelong glance, he’s sitting, staring out at the bay. His face is completely unreadable except for a tiny muscle, which flutters in and out at the base of his jaw. My heart sinks. Just like I feared—he’s ashamed of me now, disgusted by my family’s history, by the disease that runs in my blood. At any second he’ll stand up and tell me it’s better if he doesn’t speak to me anymore. It’s weird. I don’t even really know Alex, and there’s an impassable divide between us, but the idea upsets me anyway.
I’m two seconds away from jumping up and running away, just so I won’t have to nod and pretend to understand when he turns to me and says, Listen, Lena. I’m sorry, but . . . and gives me that all-too-familiar look. (Last year there was a rabid dog loose on the Hill, biting and snapping at everyone, frothing at the mouth. It was half-starved, mangy, flea-riddled, and missing one leg, but still it took two cops to shoot it down. A crowd gathered to watch, and I was there. I stopped on the way back from my run. For the first time in my life I understood the look that people had been giving me forever, the same curl of the lip whenever they hear the name Haloway. Pity, yes—but disgust, also, and fear of contamination. It was the same way they were looking at the dog while he circled and snapped and spit; and then a mass exhalation of relief when the third bullet finally took him down and he stopped twitching.)
Just when I think I can’t take it anymore, Alex reaches over and barely skims my elbow with one finger. “I’ll race you,” he says, standing up and beating the sand off his shorts. He reaches a hand out to me and helps me up, a smile flickering back on his face. I’m endlessly grateful to him in that second. He’s not going to hold my family’s past against me. He doesn’t think I’m dirty or damaged. He pulls me to my feet, and I think he squeezes my hand once I’m standing, a quick pulse, and I’m startled and happy, thinking of my secret sign with Hana.
“Only if you’ve got a thing for total humiliation,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows. “So you think you can beat me?”
“I don’t think. I know.”
“We’ll see about that.” He cocks his head to the side. “First one to the buoys, then?”
That throws me. The tide doesn’t go out too far in the bay; the buoys are still floating on at least four feet of water. “You want to race into the bay?”
“Scared?” he asks, grinning.
“I’m not scared, I’m just—”
“Good.” He reaches out and brushes my shoulder with two fingers. “Then how about a little less conversation, and a little more—Go!”
He screams out the last word and takes off at full speed. It takes me two whole seconds to launch myself after him, and I’m calling out, “No fair! I wasn’t ready!” and both of us are laughing as we splash through the shallows in our clothes, the little ripples and dips of the ocean floor now exposed by the tide’s retreat. Shells crunch under my feet. I get my toe caught in a tangle of red and purple seaweed and nearly do a face-plant. I push myself off the wet sand with a palm and get my balance again, have almost caught up to Alex, when he ducks down and scoops up a handful of wet sand, whirling around to peg me with it. I shriek and duck out of the way, but a bit of it still catches me on the cheek, dribbling down my neck.
“You are such a cheater!” I manage to gasp, out of breath from running and laughing.
“You can’t cheat if there are no rules,” Alex shoots back over his shoulder.
“No rules, huh?” We’re splashing shin deep now and I start palming water at him, making a splatter pattern over his back and shoulders. He turns around, sweeping his arm across the surface of the water, a glittering arc. I twist to avoid it and end up slipping and falling elbow deep, soaking my shorts and the bottom half of my T-shirt, the sudden cold making me gasp. He’s still slogging forward, his head craned back, his smile dazzling, his laugh rolling off and away so loud I imagine it dipping past Great Diamond Island and over the horizon, reaching all the way to other parts of the world. I scramble up and haul after him. The buoys are bobbing twenty feet ahead of us and the water is at my knees, and then my thighs, and then all the way to my waist, until both of us are half running and half swimming, frantically paddling forward with our arms. I can’t breathe or think or do anything but laugh and splash and focus on the bright red bobbing buoys, focus on winning, winning, I have to win, and when we’re only a few feet away and he’s still in the lead and my shoes are leaden and filled with water, my clothes dragging me down like my pockets have been weighted with stones, without thinking I leap forward and tackle him, wrestling down into the water, feeling my foot connect with his thigh as I rocket off of him and reach out to slap the nearest buoy, the plastic shooting away from my hand when I hit it. We must be a quarter mile off the beach, but the tide’s still going out so I can stand, the water hitting me at my chest. I raise my arms triumphantly as Alex comes up spluttering water, shaking his head so water pinwheels from his hair.
“I won,” I pant out.
“You cheated,” he says, pushing forward a few more steps and collapsing with both arms behind him, looped over the rope stringing along the buoys. He arches his back so his face is tilted up toward the sky. His T-shirt is completely soaked, and water beads off his eyelashes, trickles down his cheeks.
“No rules,” I say, “so no cheating.”
He turns to me, grinning. “I let you win, then.”
“Yeah, right.” I splash him a little and he holds up his hands, surrendering. “You’re just a sore loser.”
“I don’t have much practice at it.” There’s that confidence again, that semi-infuriating easiness of his, the tilt of his head and the smile. But today it’s not infuriating. Today I like it, feel like it’s somehow rubbing off on me, like if I was around him enough I would never feel awkward or frightened or insecure.
“Whatever.” I roll my eyes and hook one arm over the buoys next to him, enjoying the feel of the currents swishing around my chest, enjoying the strangeness of being in the bay with my clothes on, the stickiness of my T-shirt and the sucking of my shoes on my feet. Soon the tide will turn and the water will come in again. Then it will be a slow, exhausting swim back to the beach.
But I don’t care. I don’t care about anything—I’m not worried about how in a million years I’ll explain to Carol why I’ve come home soaking wet, with seaweed clinging to my back and the smell of salt in my hair, not worried about how long I have until curfew or why Alex is even being nice to me. I’m just happy, a pure, bubbly feeling. Beyond the buoys the bay is dark purple, the waves brushed over with whitecaps. It is illegal to go beyond the buoys—beyond the buoys are the islands and the lookout points, and beyond them is open ocean, ocean that leads to unregulated places, places of disease and fear—but for that moment I fantasize about ducking underneath the rope and swimming out.
To our left we can see the bright white silhouette of the lab complex and beyond it, distantly, Old Port, all the docks like gigantic wooden centipedes. To our right is Tukey’s Bridge, and the long string of guard huts that runs its length and continues up along the border. Alex catches me looking.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” he says.
The bridge is mottled gray-green, all coated in backsplash and algae, and it looks like it’s keening slightly into the wind. I wrinkle my nose. “It looks kind of like it’s rotting, doesn’t it? My sister always said that someday it would fall into the ocean, just topple right over.”
Alex laughs. “I wasn’t talking about the bridge.” He tilts his chin just slightly, gesturing. “I meant past the bridge.” He pauses for just a fraction of a second. “I meant the Wilds.”
Beyond Tukey’s Bridge is the northern border, located along the far side of Back Cove. As we’re standing there the lights in the guard huts click on, one after another, shining out against the deepening blue sky—a sign that it’s getting late and I should be going home soon. Still, I can’t force myself to leave, even as I feel the water around my chest start to bubble and eddy, the tide turning. Beyond the bridge the lush greens of the Wilds move together in the wind like an endlessly re-arranging wall, a thick wedge of green cutting down toward the bay and separating Portland from Yarmouth. From here we can just make out the barest section of it, an empty place marked with no lights, no boats, no buildings: impenetrable and strange and black. But I know that the Wilds extend back, go on for miles and miles and miles all through the mainland, all across the country, like a monster reaching its tentacles around the civilized parts of the world.
Maybe it was the race, or beating him to the buoys, or the fact that he didn’t criticize me or my family when I told him about my mother, but in that moment the giddiness and happiness is still flowing strong and I feel like I could tell Alex anything, ask him anything. So I say, “Can I tell you a secret?” I don’t wait for him to answer; I don’t have to, and knowing that makes me feel dizzy and careless. “I used to think about it a lot. The Wilds, I mean, and what they were like . . . and the Invalids, whether they really existed.” Out of the corner of my eye I think I see him flinch slightly, so I press on, “I used to sometimes think . . . I used to pretend that maybe my mom didn’t die, you know? That maybe she’d only run away to the Wilds. Not that that would be any better. I guess I just didn’t want her to be gone for good. It was better to imagine her out there somewhere, singing. . . .” I break off, shaking my head, amazed that I feel so comfortable talking to Alex. Amazed, and grateful. “What about you?” I say.
“What about me what?” Alex is watching me with an expression I can’t read. Like I’ve hurt him, almost, but that doesn’t make any sense.
“Did you used to think about going to the Wilds when you were little? Just for fun, I mean, like a game.”
Alex squints, looks away from me, and grimaces. “Yeah, sure. A lot.” He reaches out and slaps the buoys. “None of these. No walls to run into. No eyes. Freedom and space, places to stretch out. I still think about the Wilds.”
I stare at him. Nobody uses words like that anymore: freedom, space. Old words. “Still? Even after this?”
Without meaning to or thinking about it I reach out and brush my fingers, once, against the three-pronged scar on his neck.
He jerks away from my touch as though I’ve scalded him, and I drop my hand, embarrassed.
“Lena . . . ,” he says, in the strangest voice: like my name is a sour thing, a word that tastes bad in his mouth.
I know I shouldn’t have touched him like that. I’ve overstepped my boundaries, and he’s going to remind me of it, of what it means to be uncured. I think I will die of humiliation if he starts to lecture me, so to cover my discomfort I start babbling. “Most cureds don’t think about that kind of stuff. Carol—that’s my aunt—she always said it was a waste of time. She always said there was nothing out there but animals and land and bugs, that all the talk of Invalids was make-believe stuff, kid stuff. She said believing in Invalids is the same thing as believing in werewolves or vampires. Remember how people used to say there were vampires in the Wilds?”
Alex smiles, but it’s more like a wince. “Lena, I have to tell you something.” His voice is a little stronger now, but something about his tone makes me afraid to let him speak.
Now I can’t stop talking. “Did it hurt? The procedure, I mean. My sister said it was no big deal, not with all the painkillers they give you, but my cousin Marcia used to say it was worse than anything, worse than having a baby, even though her second kid took, like, fifteen hours to deliver—” I break off, blushing, mentally cursing myself for the ridiculous conversational turn. I wish I could rewind back to last night’s party, when my brain was coming up empty; it’s like I’ve been saving up for a case of verbal vomit. “I’m not scared, though,” I nearly scream, as Alex again opens his mouth to speak. I’m desperate to salvage the situation somehow. “My procedure’s coming up. Sixty days. It’s dorky, huh? That I count. But I can’t wait.”
“Lena.” Alex’s voice is stronger, more forceful now, and it finally stops me. He turns so that we’re face-to-face. At that moment my shoes skim off the sand bottom, and I realize that the water is lapping up to my neck. The tide is coming in fast. “Listen to me. I’m not who—I’m not who you think I am.”
I have to fight to stand. All of a sudden the currents tug and pull at me. It’s always seemed this way. The tide goes out a slow drain, comes back in a rush. “What do you mean?”
His eyes—shifting gold, amber, an animal’s eyes—search my face, and without knowing why, I’m scared again. “I was never cured,” he says. For a moment I close my eyes and imagine I’ve misheard him, imagine I’ve only confused the shushing of the waves for his voice. But when I open my eyes he’s still standing there, staring at me, looking guilty and something else—sad, maybe?—and I know I heard correctly. He says, “I never had the procedure.”
“You mean it didn’t work?” I say. My body is tingling, going numb, and I realize then how cold it is. “You had the procedure and it didn’t work? Like what happened to my mom?”
“No, Lena. I—” He looks away, squinting, says under his breath, “I don’t know how to explain.”
Everything from the tips of my fingers through the roots of my hair now feels as if it’s encased in ice. Disconnected images run through my head, a skipping movie reel: Alex standing on the observation deck, his hair like a crown of leaves; turning his head, showing the neat three-pronged scar just beneath his left ear; reaching out to me and saying, I’m safe. I won’t hurt you. The words start rattling out of me again but I don’t feel them, hardly feel anything. “It didn’t work and you’ve been lying about it. Lying so you could still go to school, still get a job, still get paired and matched and everything. But really you’re not—you’re still—you might still be—” I can’t bring myself to say the word. Diseased. Uncured. Sick. I feel like I’ll be sick.
“No.” Alex’s voice is so loud it startles me. I take a step back, sneakers slipping on the slick and uneven bottom of the ocean floor, and nearly go under, but when Alex makes a move to touch me I jerk backward, out of his reach. Something hardens in his face, like he’s made a decision. “I’m telling you I was never cured. Never paired or matched or anything. I was never even evaluated.”
“Impossible.” The word barely squeezes itself out, a whisper. The sky is whirling above me, all blues and pinks and reds swirling together until it looks like parts of the sky are bleeding. “Impossible. You have the scars.”
“Scars,” he corrects me, a little more gently. “Just scars. Not the scars.” He looks away then, giving me a view of his neck. “Three tiny scars, an inverted triangle. Easy to replicate. With a scalpel, a penknife, anything.”
I close my eyes again. The waves swell around me and the motion, the lift and the drop, convinces me I really will throw up, right here in the water. I choke down the feeling, trying to hold back the realization that is battering at the back of my mind, threatening to overwhelm me—fighting back the feeling of drowning. I open my eyes and croak out, “How . . . ?”
“You have to understand. Lena, I’m trusting you. Do you see that?” He’s staring at me so intently I can feel his eyes like a touch, and I keep my eyes averted. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“How?” I repeat, louder now. Somehow my brain gets stuck on the word lie and makes an endless loop: No way to avoid evaluations unless you lie. No way to avoid procedure unless you lie. You must lie.
For a moment Alex is silent, and I think he’s going to chicken out, refuse to tell me anything more. I almost wish he would. I’m desperate to rewind time, go back to the moment before he said my name in that strange tone of voice, go back to the triumphant, surging feeling of beating him to the buoys. We’ll race back to the beach. We’ll meet up tomorrow, try to wheedle some fresh crabs from the fishermen at the dock.
But then he speaks. “I’m not from here,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t born in Portland. Not exactly.” He’s speaking in the tone of voice that everyone uses when they’re about to break you apart. Gentle—kind, even—like they can make the news sound better just by speaking in a lullaby voice. I’m sorry, Lena, but your mother was a troubled woman. Like you won’t somehow hear the violence underneath.
“Where are you from?” I don’t have to ask. I know already. The realization has broken, spilled, overrun me. But a little part of me believes that as long as he doesn’t say it, it’s not true.
His eyes are steady on mine, but he tilts his head back—back toward the border, beyond the bridge, to that endlessly moving arrangement of branches and leaves and vines and tangled, growing things. “There,” he says, or maybe I just think he says it. His lips barely move. But the meaning is clear.
He comes from the Wilds.
“An Invalid,” I say. The word feels like it’s grating against my throat. “You’re an Invalid.” I’m giving him a final chance to deny it.
But he doesn’t. He just winces slightly and says, “I’ve always hated that word.”
Standing there, I realize something else: that it wasn’t a coincidence whenever Carol made fun of me for still believing in the Invalids, whenever she would shake her head without bothering to look up from her knitting needles—tic, tic, tic, they went together, flashing metal—and say, “I suppose you believe in vampires and werewolves, too?”
Vampires and werewolves and Invalids: things that will rip into you, tear you to shreds. Deadly things.
I’m suddenly so frightened a desperate pressure starts pushing down in the bottom of my stomach and between my legs, and for one wild and ridiculous second I’m positive that I’m about to pee. The lighthouse on Little Diamond Island clicks on, cuts a wide swath across the water, an enormous, accusatory finger: I’m terrified I’ll get caught up in its beam, terrified it will point in my direction and then I’ll hear the whirling of the state helicopters and the megaphone voices of the regulators shouting, “Illegal activity! Illegal activity!” The beach looks hopelessly and impossibly remote. I can’t imagine how we got out so far. My arms feel heavy and useless, and I think of my mother, and her jacket filling slowly with water.
I take deep breaths, trying to keep my mind from spinning, trying to focus. There’s no way for anyone to know that Alex is an Invalid. I didn’t know. He looks normal, has the scar in the right place. There’s no way anyone could have heard us talking.
A wave lifts and breaks against my back. I stumble forward. Alex reaches out and grabs my arm to steady me, but I twist away from him just as a second round of waves surges over us. I get a mouthful of seawater, feel the salt stinging my eyes and am momentarily blinded.
“Don’t,” I stutter. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Lena, I swear. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” I can’t think straight, can hardly even breathe. “What do you want from me?”
“Want . . . ?” Alex shakes his head. He looks genuinely confused—and hurt, too, as though I’m the one who did something wrong. For a second I feel a flash of sympathy for him. Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second when I let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyes go bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he has closed the space between us and he’s wrapping his warm hands over my shoulders—fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out—and saying, “Lena. I like you, okay? That’s it. That’s all. I like you.” His voice is so low and hypnotic it reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I think of enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his.
And then I’m stumbling backward, paddling away from him, my shirt and shoes heavy with water, my heart hammering painfully against my chest and my breath rasping in my throat. I’m kicking off the ground and sweeping forward with my arms, half running, half swimming, as the tide lifts and drags at me so I feel like I can only creep forward an inch at a time, so I feel like I’m moving through molasses. Alex calls my name, but I’m too afraid to turn my head and see if he’s coming after me. It’s like one of those nightmares where something’s chasing you but you’re too afraid to look and see what it is. All you hear is its breath, getting closer and closer. You feel its shadow looming up behind you but you’re paralyzed: You know that any second you’ll feel its icy fingers closing on your neck.
I’ll never make it, I think. I’ll never make it back. Something scrapes across my shin and I begin to imagine that the bay around me is full of horrible underwater things, sharks and jellyfish and poisonous eels, and even though I know I’m panicking I feel like falling backward and giving up. The beach is still so far, and my arms and legs feel so heavy.
Alex’s voice gets whipped away by the wind, sounding fainter and fainter, and when I finally work up the courage to look over my shoulder I see him bobbing up and down by the buoys. I realize I’ve gone farther than I thought, and at the very least Alex isn’t following me. My fear eases up, and the knot in my chest loosens. The next wave is so strong it helps skim me over a steep underwater ridge, drops me to my knees into soft sand. When I struggle to my feet the water hits me just at the waist, and I slosh the rest of the way to shore, shivering, grateful, exhausted.
My thighs are shaking. I collapse onto the beach, gasping and coughing. From the flames of color licking across the sky over Back Cove—orange, reds, pinks—I’m guessing it’s close to sunset, probably around eight o’clock. Part of me wants to just lie down, spread my arms and stretch out and sleep all through the night. I feel like I’ve swallowed half my weight in salt water. My skin stings and there’s sand everywhere, in my bra and underwear and between my toes and under my fingernails. Whatever scraped my shin in the water left its mark: a long trickle of blood snakes around my calf.
I look up, and for one panicked second I can’t find Alex by the buoys. My heart stops. Then I see him, a dark spot cutting quickly through the water. His arms pinwheel gracefully as he swims. He’s fast. I haul myself to my feet, grab my shoes, and limp up to my bike. My legs are so weak it takes me a minute to find my balance, and at first I weave crazily up and down the road like a toddler just learning to ride.
I don’t look back, not once, until I’m at my gate. By then the streets are empty and quiet, night about to fall, curfew about to come down like a giant warm embrace, keeping us all in our places, keeping us all safe.