Лорен Оливер: Requiem

Three days: three days of strained conversation and silence. I know he is wondering what has changed, and whether it can be changed back. I know I’m hurting him. There are questions he is forcing himself not to ask, and things he is struggling not to say.

He is giving me time. He is patient, and gentle.

“You look pretty in this light,” he says.

“You must be going blind.” I intend it as a joke, but my voice sounds harsh in the thin air.

Julian shakes his head, frowning, and looks away. The leaf, a vivid yellow, is still tangled in his hair, behind his ear. In that moment, I’m desperate to reach out, to remove it, and run my fingers through his hair and laugh with him about it. This is the Wilds, I’ll say. Did you ever imagine? And he’ll lace his fingers through mine and squeeze. He’ll say, What would I do without you?

But I can’t bring myself to move. “You have a leaf in your hair.”

“A what?” Julian looks startled, as though I’ve recalled him from a dream.

“A leaf. In your hair.”

Julian runs a hand impatiently through his hair. “Lena, I—”

Bang.

The sound of a rifle shot makes us both jump. Birds start out of the trees behind Julian, temporarily darkening the sky all at once, before dispersing into individual shapes. Someone says, “Damn.”

Dani and Alex emerge from the trees beyond the tents. Both of them have rifles slung across their shoulders.

Gordo straightens up.

“Deer?” he asks. The light is nearly all gone. Alex’s hair looks almost black.

“Too big for a deer,” Dani says. She is a large woman, broad across the shoulders with a wide, flat forehead and almond-eyes. She reminds me of Miyako, who died before we went south last winter. We burned her on a frigid day, just before the first snow.

“Bear?” Gordo asks.

“Might have been,” Dani replies shortly. Dani is harder-edged than Miyako was: She has let the Wilds whittle her down, carve her to steel.

“Did you hit it?” I ask, too eager, though I already know the answer. But I am willing Alex to look at me, to speak to me.

“Might have just clipped it,” Dani says. “Hard to tell. Not enough to stop it, though.”

Alex says nothing, doesn’t register my presence, even. He keeps walking, threading his way through the tents, past Julian and me, close enough that I imagine I can smell him—the old smell of grass and sun-dried wood, a Portland smell that makes me want to cry out, and bury my face in his chest, and inhale.

Then he is heading down the embankment as Raven’s voice floats up to us: “Dinner’s on. Eat up or miss out.”

“Come on.” Julian grazes my elbow with his fingertips. Gentle, patient.

My feet turn me, and move me down the embankment, toward the fire, which is now burning hot and strong; toward the boy who becomes shadow standing next to it, blotted out by the smoke. That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy, an illusion.

For three days he has not spoken to me or looked at me at all.

Want to know my deep, dark secret? In Sunday school, I used to cheat on the quizzes.

I could never get into The Book of Shhh , not even as a kid. The only section of the book that interested me at all was Legends and Grievances, which is full of folktales about the world before the cure. My favorite story, the Story of Solomon, goes like this:

Once upon a time, during the days of sickness, two women and an infant went before the king. Each woman claimed that the infant was hers. Both refused to give the child to the other woman and pleaded their cases passionately, each claiming that she would die of grief if the baby were not returned solely to her possession.

The king, whose name was Solomon, listened to both their speeches, and at last announced that he had a fair solution.

“We will cut the baby in two,” he said, “and that way each of you will have a portion.”

The women agreed that this was just, and so the executioner was brought forward, and with his ax, he sliced the baby cleanly in two.

And the baby never cried, or so much as made a sound, and the mothers looked on, and afterward, for a thousand years, there was a spot of blood on the palace floor that could never be cleaned or diluted by any substance on earth. . . .

I must have been only eight or nine when I read that passage for the first time, but it really struck me. For days I couldn’t get the image of that poor baby out of my head. I kept picturing it split open on the tile floor, like a butterfly pinned behind glass.

That’s what’s so great about the story. It’s real. What I mean is, even if it didn’t actually happen—and there’s debate about the Legends and Grievances section, and whether it’s historically accurate—it shows the world truthfully. I remember feeling just like that baby: torn apart by feeling, split in two, caught between loyalties and desires.

That’s how the diseased world is.

That’s how it was for me, before I was cured.

In exactly twenty-one days, I’ll be married.

My mother looks as though she might cry, and I almost hope that she will. I’ve seen her cry twice in my life: once when she broke her ankle and once last year, when she came outside and found that protesters had climbed the gate, and torn up our lawn, and pried her beautiful car into pieces.

In the end she says only, “You look lovely, Hana.” And then: “It’s a little too big in the waist, though.”

Mrs. Killegan— Call me Anne, she simpered, the first time we came for a fitting—circles me quietly, pinning and adjusting. She is tall, with faded blond hair and a pinched look, as though over the years she has accidentally ingested various pins and sewing needles. “You’re sure you want to go with the cap sleeves?”

“I’m sure,” I say, just as my mom says, “You think they look too young?”

Mrs. Killegan—Anne—gestures expressively with one long, bony hand. “The whole city will be watching,” she says.

“The whole country,” my mother corrects her.

“I like the sleeves,” I say, and I almost add, It’s my wedding . But that isn’t true anymore—not since the Incidents in January, and Mayor Hargrove’s death. My wedding belongs to the people now. That’s what everybody has been telling me for weeks. Yesterday we got a phone call from the National News Service, asking whether they could syndicate footage, or send in their own television crew to film the ceremony.

Now, more than ever, the country needs its symbols.

We are standing in front of a three-sided mirror; my mother’s frown is reflected from three different angles. “Mrs. Killegan’s right,” she says, touching my elbow. “Let’s see how it looks at three-quarters, okay?”

I know better than to argue. Three reflections nod simultaneously; three identical girls with identical ropes of braided blond in three identical white, floor-skimming dresses. Already, I hardly recognize myself. I’ve been transfigured by the dress, by the bright lights in the dressing room. For all my life I have been Hana Tate.

But the girl in the mirror is not Hana Tate. She is Hana Hargrove, soon-to-be wife of the soon-to-be mayor, and a symbol of all that is right about the cured world.

A path and a road for everyone.

“Let me see what I have in the back,” Mrs. Killegan says. “We’ll slip you into a different style, just so you’ll have a comparison.” She slides across the worn gray carpet and disappears into the storeroom. Through the open door, I see dozens of dresses sheathed in plastic, dangling limply from garment racks.

My mother sighs. We’ve been here for two hours already, and I’m starting to feel like a scarecrow: stuffed and poked and stitched. My mother sits on a faded footstool next to the mirrors, holding her purse primly in her lap so it won’t touch the carpet.