I’m at the edge of a big white cliff made out of sand. The ground is unsteady. The ledge I’m standing on is starting to crumble, to flake away and tumble down, down, down—thousands of feet below me, into the ocean, which is whipping and snapping so hard it looks like one gigantic, frothing stew, all whitecaps and surging water. I’m terrified I’m going to fall, but for some reason I can’t move or back away from the edge of the cliff, even as I feel the ground sifting away from underneath me, millions of molecules rearranging themselves into space, into wind: Any second I’m going to fall.
And just before I know that there’s nothing underneath me but air—that at any split second I’m going to feel the wind shrieking around me as I drop down into the water—the waves lashing underneath me open up for a moment and I see my mother’s face, pale and bloated and splotched with blue, floating just below the surface. Her eyes are open, her mouth is split apart as though she is screaming, her arms are extended on either side of her, bobbing in the current, as though she is waiting to embrace me.
That’s when I wake up. That’s when I always wake up.
My pillow is damp, and I’ve got a scratchy feeling in my throat. I’ve been crying in my sleep. Gracie is folded next to me, one cheek squashed flat against the sheets, her mouth making endless, noiseless repetitions. She always gets into bed with me when I’m having the dream. She can sense it, somehow.
I brush her hair away from her face and pull the sweat-soaked sheets away from her shoulders. I’ll be sorry to leave Grace when I move out. Our secrets have made us close, bonded us together. She is the only one who knows of the Coldness: a feeling that comes sometimes when I’m lying in bed, a black, empty feeling that knocks my breath away and leaves me gasping as though I’ve just been thrown in icy water. On nights like that—although it is wrong and illegal—I think of those strange and terrible words, I love you, and wonder what they would taste like in my mouth, try to recall their lilting rhythm on my mother’s tongue.
And of course I keep her secret safe. I’m the only one who knows that Grace isn’t stupid, or slow: There’s nothing wrong with her at all. I’m the only one who has ever heard her speak. One night after she’d come to sleep in my bed I woke up in the very early morning, the nighttime shadows ebbing off our walls. She was sobbing quietly into the pillow next to me, pronouncing the same word over and over, stuffing her mouth with blankets so I could barely hear her: “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.” As though she was trying to chew her way around it; as though it was choking her in her sleep. I’d put my arms around her and squeezed, and after what felt like hours she exhausted herself on the word and fell back to sleep, the tension in her body slowly relaxing, her face hot and bloated from the tears.
That’s the real reason she doesn’t speak. All the rest of her words are crowded out by that single, looming one, a word still echoing in the dark corners of her memory. Mommy.
I know. I remember.
I sit up and watch the light strengthen on the walls, listen for the sounds of the seagulls outside, take a drink from the glass of water next to my bed. Today is June 2. Ninety-four days.
I wish, for Grace, the cure could come sooner. I comfort myself by thinking that someday she will have the procedure too. Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.
Someday we will all be saved.
By the time I drag myself down to breakfast—feeling as though someone is grinding sand into both of my eyes—the official story about the incident at the labs has been released. Carol keeps our small TV on low while she makes breakfast, and the murmur of the newscasters’ voices almost puts me back to sleep. “Yesterday a truck full of cattle intended for the slaughterhouse was mixed up with a shipment of pharmaceuticals, resulting in the hilarious and unprecedented chaos you see on your screen.” Cue: nurses squealing, swatting at lowing cows with clipboards.
This doesn’t make any sense, but as long as no one mentions the Invalids, everyone’s happy. We’re not supposed to know about them. They’re not even supposed to exist; supposedly, all the people who live in the Wilds were destroyed over fifty years ago, during the blitz.
Fifty years ago the government closed the borders of the United States. The border is guarded constantly by military personnel. No one can get in. No one goes out. Every sanctioned and approved community must also be contained within a border—that’s the law—and all travel between communities requires official written consent of the municipal government, to be obtained six months in advance. This is for our own protection. Safety, Sanctity, Community: That is our country’s motto.
For the most part, the government has been successful. We haven’t seen a war since the border was closed, and there is hardly any crime, except for the occasional incident of vandalism or petty theft. There is no more hatred in the United States, at least among the cured. Only sporadic cases of detachment—but every medical procedure carries a certain risk.
But so far, the government has failed to rid the country of the Invalids, and it is the single blemish on the administration, and the system in general. So we don’t talk about them. We pretend that the Wilds—and the people who live there—don’t even exist. It’s rare to hear the word even spoken, except when a suspected sympathizer disappears, or when a young diseased couple is found to have vanished together before a cure can be administered.
One piece of really good news is this: All of yesterday’s evaluations have been invalidated. All of us will receive a new evaluation date, which means I get a second chance. This time I swear I’m not going to screw it up. I feel completely idiotic about my meltdown at the labs. Sitting at the breakfast table, with everything looking so clean and bright and normal—the chipped blue mugs full of coffee, the erratic beeping of the microwave (one of the few electronic devices, besides the lights, Carol actually allows us to use)—makes yesterday seem like a long, strange dream. It’s a miracle, actually, that a bunch of fanatical Invalids decided to let loose a stampede at the exact moment I was failing the most important test of my life. I don’t know what came over me. I think about Glasses showing his teeth, and the moment I heard my mouth say, “Gray,” and I wince. Stupid, stupid.
Suddenly I’m aware that Jenny has been talking to me.
“What?” I blink at Jenny as she swims into focus. I watch her hands as she cuts her toast precisely into quarters.
“I said, what’s wrong with you?” Back and forth, back and forth. The knife dings against the edge of the plate. “You look like you’re about to puke or something.”
“Jenny,” Carol scolds. She is at the sink, washing dishes. “Not while your uncle is eating breakfast.”
“I’m fine.” I rip off a piece of toast, slide it across the stick of butter that’s getting melty in the middle of the table, and force myself to eat. The last thing I need is a good old family-style interrogation. “Just tired.”
Carol turns to look at me. Her face has always reminded me of a doll’s. Even when she’s talking, even when she’s irritated or happy or confused, her expression stays weirdly immobile. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“I slept,” I say. “I just had a bad dream, that’s all.”
At the end of the table, my uncle William starts up from his newspaper. “Oh, God. You know what? You just reminded me. I had a dream last night too.”
Carol raises her eyebrows, and even Jenny looks interested. It’s extremely unusual for people to dream once they’ve been cured. Carol once told me that on the rare occasions she still dreams, her dreams are full of dishes, stacks and stacks of them climbing toward the sky, and sometimes she climbs them, lip to lip, hauling herself up into the clouds, trying to reach the top of the stack. But it never ends; it stretches on into infinity. As far as I know, my sister Rachel never dreams anymore.