All the times I wondered about my mother. When I tried to remember her voice and her smell. When I felt empty and wrong for having forgotten her. It was because I never knew her.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice muffled.
I hear a shuffle as Harry shifts. My mother murmurs something to him. “There weren’t enough of us who survived the breach,” Harry finally says. “When the three of you disappeared …” He takes a deep breath. “Jacob couldn’t get over losing the two of you,” he says, and I lift my head to look at him, the world blurry through the haze of my tears.
“He rallied some of the other villagers and they went out looking for you.” He shrugs and even now I can see the weight of the years on his shoulders. For the first time I realize just how old he and my mother look. Just how much they’ve been through in their lives. He looks at his fingers linked through my mother’s.
“They never came back,” he finishes. “Cass and I stayed behind. She said she’d spent enough time in the Forest and just wanted to live out the rest of her life safe behind the fences. Slowly everyone else died and last year Cass passed away in her sleep.” His voice cracks when he says this and my mother rests her fingers along the side of his neck. He cranes his head down, brushing his cheek against her touch and she smiles softly.
I think about the two of them alone in this village—the only ones left. Never knowing if there ever was a world beyond the Forest and no longer caring. Being content just the two of them, safe. I think about how close I came to choosing the same life and I realize how much I’d have missed.
“I don’t remember any of it,” I whisper. Feeling as though I’ve somehow failed the people who once loved me. Who once stormed into the Forest to find me. “Nothing here is familiar.”
“It’s okay,” my mother says, coming to sit next to me. She pulls my braid off my back, trailing it through her fingers like she’s always done when I’m upset. It would be so easy to believe her words. But I can’t. I can’t let go of the past that easily.
I stand up, needing something but not knowing what. A memory, something to ground myself to this place.
“Which house was mine?” I ask Harry, hoping that somehow it will stir something inside me.
He points. “Across the path, down three doors,” he says.
I walk slowly through the room and my mother starts to follow me. I want her to be with me so badly but I feel as though I need to do this alone. “Can I have a moment—just me?” I ask her and she nods, reluctantly.
Chapter 37
Once outside I walk a short distance and then stare at the little cabin in front of me. It looks like the others stretching out on either side of it. Empty. Abandoned. Weeds tangle in what used to be a small yard, a vine overtaking half the house and springing from the chimney.
But there’s something different, something about it that feels off. As if the windows are set slightly farther apart or the roof is slanted at a different angle. I approach it slowly, the sounds of the afternoon fading away.
Its door is closed, the boards warped and gapped. I push it open and something rises inside me. Not a memory, not a vision, but a feeling. Something familiar. An expectation.
Scattered inside is a table, a few chairs. A bench, a counter. Grass trails against my calves as I walk around the room. I stop in front of a wall. Facing me is an old piece of mirror, framed by delicately carved wood.
I know what I’ll see even before I step in front of it. My reflection will be dull and blurred. Specked with the age of the glass. But there will be two of us in the mirror. As there always have been.
Yet when I open my eyes there’s only me staring back. I reach out and touch the surface of the mirror. There’s someone else out there with the same face. The same eyes and chin and ears.
A deep ache blooms inside me, radiating out over my skin. There’s so much I missed because of Elias. But then I think about my mother. About the ocean and the lighthouse and I wonder how I could ever wish to give that up.
If I could choose the life I would have wanted to lead, which one would I pick?
There’s a photo tacked to the wall beside the mirror and I reach out and brush my fingers over it, clearing away a coating of dust. It’s an old photograph of silver shiny buildings stretching to the sky and marching into the distance. A bright yellow border dances around the image, the words New York City spelled out in big letters. I stare at the photograph, trying to remember it, but I can’t.
I look back at my reflection, wondering how I’ve lost everything. I feel like a stranger, as if it’s been years since I last saw my reflection. I look different—my eyes a little more haunted than they were before, my mouth a little tighter. I look like my mother; I look like Mary. Not physically but in the way that we all look when we’ve faced the reality of our world.
I reach out my hand and touch the mirror. Out there somewhere I have a sister. Excitement and hope prickle over my skin. My reflection smiles at me, possibility gleaming in her eyes.
And then something wavers and shifts in the mirror and I see someone step into the doorway behind me. I turn my head, embarrassed at being caught staring at myself, and find Catcher watching me.
Self-conscious, I tuck a strand of hair that fell loose from my braid behind my ear. I wait for him to ask me what’s going on but instead he just says, “Cira asked me to find you.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten about her. About everything except me, really. “Is she okay?” I ask.
He shrugs, looking past me at the mirror. He steps farther inside, walks slowly around the edge of the room. “I found the others just up the road a bit and told them about the Recruiters—at this point, based on when I saw them last, they’re probably only a day or two behind us. That guy Harry and your mother are helping to gather supplies. He’s the only one in the village, said everyone else either left or died.”
I cross my arms over my chest, my skin suddenly clammy. All these houses now useless and abandoned. What would have happened if I’d never been lost in the Forest? If I hadn’t skinned my knee and we’d all come back at the end of the day? What would have happened to my family?
“We’re leaving tomorrow. The path continues on the other side of the village and you and everyone else will go down that and I’ll pull down the fences—flood the village with Mudo so the Recruiters can’t get through.” His voice is so flat, so impersonal that I flinch.
I turn back around and look at the mirror. Look at what used to be my home. I’ve only just found it and already I have to leave. I close my eyes, searching for a memory to hold on to. Something to take with me. But nothing comes. Carefully I pull the picture of New York City off the wall and slip it into my pocket.
“Your mother—I mean Mary—is with Cira now trying to do something about the blood infection but she wants to talk to you,” he says in that same voice.
“So you know,” I say, not even bothering to ask it as a question. He knows that Mary isn’t my mother.
He shrugs and walks out of the little cottage. His indifference stings me. He’s supposed to be my friend. He’s supposed to be someone I can trust—someone I thought I was falling in love with. I rush to catch up with him as he weaves along empty walkways.
“Catcher, wait,” I call out to him, but he doesn’t even slow down. When I finally reach him I grab his arm, the heat of his skin a searing reminder of his infection. I pull him around until he faces me.
His eyes are ragged and red. I haven’t noticed how hollow his cheeks have become and I wonder if he’s been eating recently.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Gabry?” he asks, and in his words I can hear the despair. He grips my shoulders so desperately that I’m almost afraid of him. “You could have trusted me,” he says softly, his voice cracking.
I don’t know what to tell him, how to explain how I didn’t even want to face the idea of who I was before. He moves his hand from my shoulder to my neck, his fingers trailing along the base of my skull, warming me. He leans down until his forehead touches mine and between us is nothing but heat.
“Do you ever think about what might have happened that night if I’d climbed the coaster?” he asks. “How things might have been different?” His thumb slides along my neck. “If only I hadn’t been afraid of heights.”
I think back to that night. I can see the outline of the chipped unicorn on the carousel. I can smell the salt in the air, taste it against the back of my throat. I remember how I gave him an excuse to stay behind.
I’ve thought of that moment so many times. I’ve replayed that night a million different ways. If I hadn’t been so scared; if I’d only waited a heartbeat longer before swinging, none of this would have happened. None of us would be here now.
But I don’t tell him this. Instead I say, “My mother used to tell me that sometimes it’s worth letting go of those things, worth forgetting.”
He smiles just a little, the corner of his mouth curving up.
“You survived, that’s what’s important. That’s what matters.” I slip my fingers between his until we’re gripping each other.
“I don’t know,” he says, staring at the place where our bodies touch. “I don’t know what the difference between surviving and existing is anymore. What are the Mudo? They exist. I think life has to be about more than that—or else what separates us from them?”
I think of Elias then. Of the night we escaped the town and how he stood by the bridge with the Souler he called Kyra and told me that there was no difference between us and them. I didn’t want to believe what he was saying then but now I’m not so sure. It’s hard to stand in a forgotten village in the last gasp of survival and wonder if that’s all we’re doing anymore. Struggling to hold on against a losing battle.
I swallow, thinking about what I wish I’d told Elias then. “What about love?” I ask Catcher softly. “That’s something that separates us. That’s what life is about.”
He pulls his head away from mine and traces the edge of my face with his fingers. His smile is wistful and it scares me because I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know who he is anymore—not the way I used to.
“What happens when you don’t have love?” he asks. “What happens when you can’t?”
A hollow feeling begins to expand inside me. He sounds the way Cira did the last time I saw her before she cut herself: He sounds like he’s giving up. “You have me,” I tell him. “You have me and Cira.”
He steps back away from me and I hold on to him as long as I can until we’re no longer touching. Around us are empty cottages and cabins, weeds and the whirring of crickets as evening begins to pull tight around the village.
“Could you have ever loved me?” he asks. His voice is raw.
My breath catches. “Yes,” I whisper, feeling as though I’m losing something by saying the word. I try to remember my dreams from before but I can’t anymore. Once I was able to see a future for us so clearly. My life was Catcher; it was being his. I always thought that losing him would be losing that future as well. But now when I close my eyes and try to imagine Catcher and me together I see nothing.
He doesn’t ask the question I’m most afraid of: Do I love him now? Because I don’t know anymore. My eyes blur with tears and I bite my lip trying to hold them back.
Catcher stares at his hands. “Do you think there’s anything left in them after they turn?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” I think about the Soulers and their Mudo. I wonder if they believe there’s something left, something they’re preserving. If it really is eternal life. The ultimate resurrection. I used to think the Mudo were nothing but monsters but now I’m not sure.
“I think I’m scared that’s what I’ll become,” he says. “I think that’s what terrifies me the most. That somehow I’ll be trapped.”
I don’t want to think about Catcher like that, don’t want to imagine having to kill him one day. I reach out and take his hand in mine again. “I won’t let that happen.”
He follows the outline of my fingers with his thumb. The silence weaves around us.
“Elias is a good person,” Catcher finally says. “He looks at you the same way I used to. The same way I wish I could now.”
I can feel my skin turning red, heat crawling up my neck. I want to tell Catcher that Elias is a liar; that all this time he’s kept my past from me.
“Elias isn’t you,” I say instead. “You’ve known me your whole life. We’ve always known each other. It’s supposed to be us.” Why can’t Catcher understand this? Why does he keep pulling away from me?
He trails his hand along my jaw, tilting my head back toward his, and I think that maybe this time he’ll kiss me. For once it will be like before. “He’ll keep you safe,” he whispers instead.
“You keep me safe, Catcher,” I tell him, needing him to understand. Afraid that if I can’t make him see that he’s the future I’d always expected, it will never happen. That I don’t know what will happen instead.
He shakes his head. “I can’t keep anyone safe anymore,” he says. “Cira’s asking for you because she wants to say good-bye. She’s dying, Gabry.” And with that he turns and continues down the walkway, leaving me alone in the shattered evening air, trying to force my body to remember to breathe.
Chapter 38
I follow Catcher through the cluster of overgrown cottages to Harry’s, which sits apart from everything else, far away from the huddle of the large burned building that hulks at the other end of the village. Harry’s house is large and spacious with rambling rooms surrounding a large courtyard. Gardens thrive around the outside, elegantly drawn waterways with waterfalls meandering through beds of flowers and past rows of neatly planted vegetables. The black dog lies in the doorway to a patio, his nose and ears in the sun but the rest of him tucked into shade. He rumbles as Catcher draws near, lifting a lip to bare his teeth.