Scarecrow

She woke on the third morning.

I was there. I’d been there every morning, in the chair beside the bed, since Dr. Halloway first let me in. I’d learned the machines. I’d learned which beeps meant nothing and which meant the nurses would come running. I’d learned that Maddy brought tea at seven and that the light came through the window at a quarter past and lay across the foot of the bed in a long gold bar.

It was lying there when Mother opened her eyes.

She didn’t move at first. She lay still and looked up at the ceiling. White. Smooth. Nothing like the rough wooden boards of the front room, with the knot over the stove that looked like a face.

I watched her see it.

Then I watched her breathe in. Deeply. Without coughing. The first deep breath I’d seen her take in a year. I watched her feel how easy it was, and stop, halfway, and go very still.

I watched her taste the air.

Warm. Wet. Green. Full of growing things. And underneath, faint, like the inside of the filter shed, metal and electricity.

Her eyes closed.

”Oh,” she said. Very quietly. ”Oh, no.”

She knew before I said anything. Of course she did. She’d lived inside that air for twenty years.

She turned her head on the pillow, slowly, and found me in the chair.

”Lucas,” she said.

”Hey.”

”Where are we?”

I could have said the hospital. I could have said you’re safe. I could have said a lot of things that were true.

”New Halcyon,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were clear. Clearer than I’d seen them in months. The stabilizer had done that.

”He came,” she said.

”He came.”

”Before.”

”Five minutes before,” I said. ”Maybe less. He had a satellite on the house. He watched your heat going down. He brought a doctor.” I swallowed. ”You’d stopped breathing, Mother. For a long time. And then the windows started to rattle.”

She closed her eyes.

”And you let him in,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t an accusation either, not quite. It was something worse than both. It was the voice she’d used on the porch, years ago, when Father came in from the field with his hands shaking and said he’d taken a town apart.

”You were dying,” I said.

”I know I was dying, love. I was there.”

”I couldn’t—”

”I know.”

”He said five minutes. He stood at the bottom of the steps and said I had to decide. And you took a breath behind me, and it was so small, and I—” My voice went somewhere I couldn’t follow it. ”I couldn’t let you go. Not when someone was standing right there who could stop it. I couldn’t.”

She didn’t say anything.

She reached out across the blanket, slowly, the tube in her arm pulling, and found my hand, and held it.

Her grip had something in it again. Not much. But something.

”No,” she said. ”I suppose you couldn’t.”

She asked what he wanted. I told her.

All of it. The garden on the roof. Avalon. The penthouse on the sixtieth floor. The slate in my pocket that I still hadn’t looked at. The stabilizer, and the law, and the Council, and frightened people are very careful with their medicine.

She listened with her eyes closed. She didn’t interrupt.

Then I told her about the Retention Act.

Her eyes opened.

”Thirty-one families,” I said. ”Eight months after the locks. They let them come back. Lifetime service contracts. The lower floors. A stipend. And the stabilizer, as soon as it was ready. Nineteen years, some of them.” I made myself keep going. ”He drew up the list. He said Father wasn’t controllable. He said he was frightened of him. He said he was asked if you should be offered a place on your own, and he said you’d never accept. He said he never asked you.”

Mother was very still.

”He said that,” she said.

”Yes.”

”That I was never asked.”

”Yes.”

She looked up at the white ceiling for a long time. Something was happening in her face that I didn’t understand. Not anger. Not grief. Something stranger. Like someone doing a sum and getting a different answer from the one they’d been sure of for nineteen years.

”I knew about the Retention Act,” she said slowly.

I stared at her.

”A trader at the ridge settlement told us. The first winter. You were a few months old.” She was speaking carefully, as though she were picking her way across ice. ”Your father went to the dome. On foot. Alone. He was gone four days. When he came back, he told me they’d offered us places. Both of us. On the list.”

The machines beeped softly.

”He said he’d said no,” said Mother. ”For both of us. He said they wanted him on a leash, and they wanted you, when you came, and he wouldn’t do it. He said he’d rather build a filter out of a truck.” Her voice had gone very quiet. ”I was so angry with him. For a month. That he’d chosen for me. And then I wasn’t, because he was right. And I never thought about it again.”

She turned her head and looked at me.

”Halvard says I was never asked,” she said. ”Trevor said we were, and he refused.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

”Then one of them lied to me,” said Mother.

She closed her eyes. And for a long time, she didn’t say anything else at all.

The twins came in at eight.

I heard them in the corridor first. Garnet’s feet, running, and Maddy’s voice saying walk, love, walk, and Garnet not walking. Then the door with the round window banged open and she was in the room, and stopped dead at the end of the bed with her hair wild and her mouth open, because Mother was looking at her.

Not asleep. Not with her eyes closed under a mask. Looking at her, with clear eyes, and smiling.

”There’s my girl,” said Mother.

Garnet didn’t move for one second. Then she was on the bed. Very carefully. Remembering the tubes, remembering the machines, going round them the way Dr. Halloway had shown her, until she was lying alongside Mother with her face pressed into her shoulder. She didn’t cry. She just held on.

Mother’s hand came up and found her hair.

”Knots,” she said. ”At the back.”

”Lucas brushes it,” said Garnet into her shoulder. ”Every morning. He starts at the ends.”

Mother’s eyes found mine over the top of Garnet’s head. They were wet.

”Does he,” she said.

Genny stood in the doorway.

She didn’t come in straight away. She stood with her hand on the frame and looked at Mother for a long time, with the same expression she’d had looking at the number on the chart. As if she were checking it. As if she didn’t trust it to stay.

Mother looked back at her.

”Come here,” Mother said.

Genny came. She stood beside the bed, very straight. Then, without a word, she reached down and took the chart off its hook at the foot of the bed, and read it.

Mother watched her do it.

”The marker’s down again,” said Genny, without looking up. ”Since yesterday. And your oxygen’s ninety-one.” She hung the chart back up. ”It was seventy-four in the field. At the end.”

The room was very quiet.

”Genny,” said Mother. ”Look at me.”

Genny looked at her.

And then her face did what it had done at the edge of the bed in the front room, at dusk, three nights ago, when Mother had said something against her ear. It cracked along one line, and then another. She stood there by the bed with her fists clenched at her sides, perfectly straight, and cried, without making a single sound.

Mother held out her other arm. The one without the tubes.

Genny went into it.

Garnet told her about the scarf.

She told it very seriously, sitting up on the bed, with her hands moving. How Mother had opened her eyes on the path and said his coat will be cold. How she’d run back. How she’d tied it twice, over the collar, in a loose knot at the front, the way Mother tied it.

”So it won’t be cold,” Garnet finished. ”While we’re gone.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a while. I saw her swallow.

”I don’t remember saying that,” she said at last.

”You did,” said Garnet firmly. ”I heard.”

”Then thank you, darling. That was exactly right.”

Garnet glowed.

After a while, Maddy came in to say the doctor wanted to see Mother alone, and took the twins down the corridor for breakfast. Garnet went, looking back over her shoulder all the way to the door. Genny went without looking back, which was how I knew it had cost her more.

Then it was just us.

Mother lay back against the pillows and looked at the ceiling.

”You know what he’s doing,” she said.

”Yes.”

”He’s not even hiding it.”

”No. He said it’s arithmetic.”

”It is,” said Mother. ”That’s what makes him good at it.” She was quiet for a moment. ”In the field, he’d have had to wait. For me to die, and then for you to be lonely enough. That could have taken years. Now he doesn’t have to wait for anything. He just has to keep me alive.”

I didn’t say anything.

She turned her head and looked at me.

”I want you to hear me say this,” she said. ”Once. And then I won’t say it again, because it isn’t fair to you, and I know it isn’t.” Her hand tightened on mine. ”I would rather have died in my field, in the bed by the stove, with Garnet singing and my hand in her hair, than be the thing that man holds you with.”

I’d known she would say it. I’d known since the windows rattled.

It didn’t make it easier to hear.

”I know,” I said.

”Do you?”

”Yes.” I made myself look at her. ”And I’d rather you didn’t.”

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she let out a breath, long and slow, without a single cough in it.

”Your father used to say that,” she said. ”Exactly that. Whenever I told him I’d rather do something that would get me killed.” Something that was almost a smile. ”And I’d rather you didn’t. He never once won the argument. He just kept saying it until I gave in.”

”Did it work?”

”Every time,” said Mother. ”Curse him.”

She looked up at the white ceiling. At the vent in it, breathing out clean warm air, the air she’d been thrown out of nineteen years ago.

”Well,” she said softly. ”Here I am. Back on the inside.”

She laughed. Just a little. It didn’t turn into a cough.

Then she said, ”Get me a pencil, love. And some paper. If I’m going to be the thing he holds you with, I’d better start being useful.”