Hillary Jordan - When She Woke

The driver’s door swung open, and John Payne got out, keeping the door between himself and Hannah. She approached him slowly, carefully, like a bird she was afraid of startling into flight. When she was still a few feet away, she stopped, uncertain. Her father stared at her without speaking. Tears were streaming down his face.

“Daddy?”

His chest heaved and he let out a choked sob. The sound lacerated her. Only once, at her grandmother’s funeral, had Hannah ever seen her father cry. Her own eyes welled as he moved from behind the car door and held his arms out to her. She walked into them, felt them enfold her. She had never been more grateful for anything in her life than for this tenderness, this simple human warmth. She thought of the last few times she’d been touched: by the guard earlier, by the medic who’d strapped her down and injected her with the virus, by the bailiff in the courtroom, by the horrid police doctor. To be touched with love was a kind of miracle.

“My beautiful Hannah,” her father said, stroking her hair. “Oh, my sweet, beautiful girl.”

HE’D BROUGHT A cooler of food: turkey sandwiches, potato chips, an apple, a thermos of coffee. Plain fare, but after thirty days of nutribars, it tasted ambrosial. He was silent while she ate, his eyes fixed on the road. They were heading north on I-35, toward Dallas. Toward home. A tendril of hope unfurled in her mind. Maybe her mother had forgiven her, at least enough to let her move back in.

As if he were following her thoughts, her father said, “I can’t take you home. You know that, don’t you?”

The tendril turned brown, crumbled to powder. “I do now.”

“If you would just talk to us, Hannah. Just tell us—”

She cut him off. “I can’t. I won’t.” It came out shrill and defiant. In a milder tone, she said, “Telling you wouldn’t help anything anyway.”

Her father’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, turning the knuckles white. “It would help me track the bastard down, so I could beat the living daylights out of him.”

“Adjusting. You are out of your lane,” said the pleasant voice of the computer. The steering wheel jerked slightly to the left under her father’s hand, and he made a frustrated sound.

Hannah looked down at the half-eaten sandwich in her lap, her appetite gone. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. The apology was rote to her ear, a dying echo that had traveled too far from its original source, its meaning all but lost from overrepetition. She had said those words so many times—to him, to Becca, to her mother, to the ghost of her child, to God—knowing they weren’t enough and never would be; knowing she’d feel compelled to keep saying them over and over again even so. Her life had become an apologetic conjugation: I was sorry, I am sorry, I will be sorry, with no hope of a future perfect, an I will have been sorry.

Her father let out a long breath, and his body relaxed a little. “I know.”

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“There’s a place in Richardson run by the Church of the Risen Lord. It’s called the Straight Path Center.” Hannah shook her head; she hadn’t heard of either. “It’s a kind of halfway house for women like you. If it works out, you can stay there for up to six months. That’ll give us time to find you a job and a safe place to live.”

The “us” reassured her, and the fact that the center was in Richardson, just south of Plano. “When you say ‘women like me’ …”

“Nonviolent Reds, as well as Yellows and Oranges. They don’t accept Blues, Greens, or Purples. I wouldn’t send you there if they did.”

“Have you seen the place?”

“No, but I spoke with the director, Reverend Henley, and he seems like a sincere and compassionate man. I know he’s helped many women find a path back to God.”

Back to God. The words kindled a bright flare of longing within her, doused almost instantly by despair. She’d prayed to Him every day in the jail, before and during her trial, kneeling on the hard floor of the cell until her knees throbbed, begging for His forgiveness and mercy. But He’d remained silent, absent as He’d never been before. With every day that passed Hannah felt more desolate, like an abandoned house falling into ruin, cold wind whistling through the chinks. Finally, the day she was sentenced and taken to the Chrome ward, she acknowledged the inescapable truth: there would be no forgiveness or mercy for her, no going back to Him. How could there be, after what she’d done?

“But understand,” her father continued, “this isn’t vacation Bible school. They’ve got strict rules there. You break them and you’re out. And then God help you, Hannah. We can’t afford to get you a place of your own, even if your mother would let me pay for it.”

“I know, Daddy. I wouldn’t expect you to.” They had no family money, and his salary was modest. It occurred to her now that without her income to supplement his, her parents would have to live much more frugally—one more thing for which she could reproach herself. “But who’s paying for this center?”

“The 1Cs are sponsoring you. Reverend Dale himself appealed to the council.”

Shame scalded her, and she saw it reflected in her father’s face. Hannah, and by extension, the Payne family, was a charity case now. She remembered how she used to feel when she worked in the soup kitchen, putting trays of food into the hands of its ragged supplicants, people who stank of poverty and desperation, whose eyes avoided hers. How she’d pitied them, those poor people. How generous, how virtuous she’d felt helping them. Them—p eople totally unlike herself and her family, people who had fallen to a place she would never, ever go.

“He’s also the reason you got in,” her father said. “The center has a long waiting list.” When Hannah didn’t reply, he said, “We’re lucky Reverend Dale has taken such an interest in your case.”

She imagined how it must have felt for Aidan to make those calls. Had he pitied her? Felt benevolent? Thought of her as one of them ?

“Yes,” she said woodenly. “We’re very lucky.”

WHEN THEY MERGED onto Central the expressway was jammed as usual, and Hannah and her father proceeded the ten miles to Richardson at a crawl. He turned on the sat radio and navved to a news station. Hannah listened with half an ear. The Senate had passed the Freedom From Information Act eighty-eight to twelve. Right-wing militants had assassinated President Napoleón Cifuentes of Brazil, toppling the last democratic government in South America. Continued flooding in Indonesia had displaced more than two hundred thousand additional people in October. Syria, Lebanon and Jordan had withdrawn from the United Nations, citing anti-Islamic bias. The quarterback of the Miami Dolphins had been suspended for using nano-enhancers. Hannah tuned it out. What did any of it have to do with her now?

A family of three pulled up alongside them, pacing them. When the young boy in the backseat saw Hannah, his eyes went wide. She put her hand over the side of her face, but she could feel him staring at her with a child’s unselfconscious directness. Finally, she turned and made a scary face at him, baring her teeth. His eyes and mouth went wide, and he said something to his parents. Their heads whipped around. They glared at her, and she felt a stab of remorse. Of course the boy was staring; she was a freak. How many times had she herself stared with morbid fascination at a Chrome, knowing it was impolite but unable to help herself? Though they were a common sight in the city, especially Yellows, they still drew the eye irresistibly. Hannah wondered how they endured it. How she would endure it.