My mother has chosen to join the Unconsecrated. And I am quite sure that my brother will blame me for her choice. He'll ask me why I allowed her to make this decision for herself, why I did not stand in for her and tell the Guardians to kill her.
I am not sure I will know what to tell him.
It is a complicated process, giving a living human over to the Forest of Hands and Teeth. The Guardians found out years ago that the transfer cannot be done too early because a live human cast into the Forest is nothing but food for the Unconsecrated who will tear at their flesh and eat until there is nothing left.
But at the same time it's too dangerous to have the Infected in the village. The Guardians will not run the risk of having someone Return amongst the living and there is no certainty about when the Infected will die and Return. Everything depends on the severity of the bite: with a small, simple bite, it may take days for the infection to spread and kill, while a gruesome attack can cause someone to Return within heartbeats.
And so the Guardians have devised a complicated system of gates and pulleys that keep the infected in a sort of purgatory between the living and the Unconsecrated. This is where my mother is now and I sit nearby, listening to her pop her jaw and clack her teeth like a cat lusting after a bird as the infection roars through her body. She is too sick to talk now, too ravaged to even understand.
A rope is tied securely around her left ankle and she picks absently at its frayed ends. We are all waiting for the inevitable but know that, judging from her wound, it will take at least a day. The turn doesn't always come quickly to the Infected.
I'm there with her on the safe side of the fence. But I am not alone because they are afraid I'm not to be trusted and that the sight of my mother as one of the Unconsecrated will cause me to do something terrible and stupid like throwing open all the gates and causing a breach. A Guardian—one of my brother's friends—has been posted to keep watch over me and my mother. He will be the one to operate the gates and he will be the one to kill me if I stray too close to her after she turns. It is the agreement that I struck with the Sisters in order to be with my mother at this time: I can be near her, but if I'm bitten then I am to be instantly put to death.
I sit with my knees pulled in tight and my arms wrapped around my shins. I can no longer feel my feet, as if blood refuses to spread so far from my heart.
I am waiting for my mother to die.
Time becomes nothing to me but a march toward my mother's Return. I wish it were a solid thing, something I could grab and shake and stop. Instead, it slips away from me, the day continually unfurling. People from the village come to console me but they don't know what to say. My brother's wife, Beth, has sent word that she prays for us, but the Sisters will not allow her to leave her bed for fear of her losing the child.
I have seen Harry standing a distance away, the harsh after noon sun glaring from his face. I'm glad he doesn't try to approach me, doesn't try to speak to me about this morning when he held my hand under the water and kept me from my mother.
I wonder if he still thinks that we are going to the Harvest Celebration together next week. It won't be canceled, even in light of my mother's death. As the Sisterhood always reminds us: this is the way after the Return—life must continue. It is our cycle to bear.
As the sun sets Cassandra brings me dinner and sits with me. It is a painfully beautiful sunset and the colors reflect off Cass's pale face and hair. The Guardian has kept his distance this evening, knowing that the end must be getting near. I have been alternating between hope that my mother turns quickly and is soon out of her misery and dread that she will turn too quickly and I will have lost her forever.
After a while I say, “Cass, do you believe in the ocean? Do you think it's still out there?” I'm watching the way the light plays off the tops of the trees in the Forest, the way everything in sight undulates.
“Remind me what your mother used to say about the ocean again?” she asks. Her voice is soft and kind.
“Nothing but water,” I remind her. Cass has always indulged my fancies, has always listened as I repeated the stories of life before the Return that have been passed down by the women of my family. Once, her mother forbade her to speak with me because she said I was filling Cass's head with lies and blasphemy. But our village is too small for such an edict to ever take hold.
“I just don't see how there could ever be that much water in the world, Mary,” she tells me. She has told me this many times before. Her eyes are bright as she turns from the sunset to look at me. “I cannot imagine a place out there without Unconsecrated.” She knots her eyebrows together. “Because why would we be here rather than there?”
A tear gathers in the corner of her eye, the fading sun glinting off it as it bulges and spills down her cheek, the image of my mother in her pen too much for her to bear. I pull Cass close and let her lay her head in my lap, her face turned away from the Forest, and stroke her hair the way my mother used to stroke my own. We watch as the lanterns come on in the village. My mother used to tell me about the times when she was a child when the Sisters would crank up the old generator on Christmas Eve. It's one of the stories I have never shared with my friend and I think about telling Cass this—about how once a year this little village used to outshine the sky.
But she is snuffling now, her weeping over, and I don't want to fill her head with more fancies tonight.
When she leaves she begs me to come with her. But I cannot. I tell her that I must be here when it happens and she raises her hands to her mouth as if the horror is too much and then she turns and runs back to the safety of the village.
I want to run with her, to escape from where I am and forget this day. But I stay, my fingers trembling and the air thick in my throat. I need to face what my mother becomes. I owe her this much after this morning, after leaving her to wander alone.
I return to staring at the fence. Watching the light slide down the sky, casting crisscrossed shadows on the ground at my feet. I blur my eyes, throwing my surroundings out of focus. The fence does not exist when I do this. As if we are all one world.
“Mother?” I whisper at daybreak. There was a new moon last night and I spent the hours in the darkness listening to the rustling of dry leaves behind the fence, my mind imagining the worst possible scenarios. Every creak I heard was the fence breaking, every scratching the Unconsecrated finally finding weakness in the metal.
Now the air is gray and moist and I crawl on my hands and knees closer to the pen that holds my mother. She is there, in the middle on the ground and she is so still that for a moment I think she has died and is about to Return. Bile and terror rise in my throat but are trapped. I feel the need to scream but I am utterly silent with my mouth open and my teeth bared.
My legs tangle in my skirts and I claw at the ground and am almost to the fence when I hear the Guardian behind me. I look back at him, pleading with him. “She is still alive,” I tell him, because I just know that she is. He looks over his shoulder into the mist and, seeing that we are alone, he nods as if giving me permission and I lace my fingers around the thin rusted metal of the fence, feeling its sharp cold edges bite into my palms.
“The ocean,” my mother murmurs. Sharp as a crack she whips her head around and I see that her eyes are wide and unfocused but lucid. She crawls toward me until our hands are linked together through the fence.
“The ocean, Mary, the ocean!” She is speaking so urgently now, her mouth moving rapidly. I am afraid that the Guardian will think she is crazy and has turned and that he will kill me but I can't pull my hands back because my mother's grip is too tight.
“So beautiful, the ocean.” She repeats the words over and over again, her eyes becoming bright with unshed tears. “The water, the waves, the sand, the salt!” She is shaking the fence now and it causes undulations to ripple outward to either side, the metal swaying back and forth. I am amazed that she has this strength; she has been dying for so many hours.
“It consumes me,” she says, her voice only a whisper. She reaches one finger through the wire and strokes my wrist. “My little girl,” she tells me. “Do not forget my little girl.” Tears slip out of her eyes and I hear the Guardian shout behind me and then my mother slumps to the ground, her fingers slipping away from mine.
In the moment between my mother's death and her Return, I stop believing in God.
The Guardian quickly grabs the end of the rope tied to my mother's left ankle as I scoot away from the fence. It is anchored over a system of pulleys lashed to branches high above and he heaves against it, the other end of the rope dragging my mother to the edge of her pen. The Guardian pulls a lever, a gate rises and her lifeless body slides into the Forest of Hands and Teeth. He cuts the rope, reverses the lever and the gates grind shut. For a heartbeat the world is silent around us, the sound of our own breathing muffled by the mist.
His duty complete, my mother's body given fully over to the Unconsecrated, the Guardian places a hand on my shoulder. Whether it is to comfort me or to hold me back does not matter. I imagine that I can feel his pulse through his fingertips. We are both so alive in that moment surrounded by so much death.
I can't decide if I want to watch my mother Return. If I can bear to see it. But I can't help but wonder what that moment is like. Is there a spark or an instant where she will remember me? Where she will remember her old life from before?
My mother used to tell me stories about how, long before the Return, the living used to wonder what happened after death. She said that whole religions were born and evolved around this one simple uncertainty.
Now that we know what happens after death, a new question has risen up to take the place of the old: why?
Suddenly, regret screams through me. I wonder if I should have dressed her in something different. If I should have put her in warmer clothes or better shoes. If I should have pinned a note to the inside of her dress telling her that I love her. I wonder how long it will take for her to find my father and if she will recognize him. An image of the two of them holding hands at the fence line flits across my mind.
She is on her feet before I even know what's happening. She stares at me and for a moment all I can think is Mother and then she opens her mouth and my world shatters with her screams that fall off into moans as her vocal cords give way.
I cannot bear it and I start to move toward her, struggling under the weight of the Guardian's hand, but then I hear my name being called out in warning.
It is Jed. I didn't hear him approach but I can smell him now, the scent of woods and work and the smoke from our house. I don't bother to look at him, I just know that he is behind me and I sag back against him. He's home from his rotation on the fence line just in time to see our mother die and Return.
Later, the Guardian in him will question me and chastise me. Because I allowed my mother to make this choice and because I failed both him and her by dallying near the stream. Because I was too selfish to understand that my mother would go to the Forest without me and because I was not there to stop her.
But for now he is my brother and both our parents are gone and we are all we have left.
Chapter 3
The first thing the Sisters do when Jed walks me back to the Cathedral is strip off my clothes and half-drown me in the sacred well. I wait to see if the water will burn off my flesh now that I no longer believe in God but nothing happens as the Sisters chant prayers and scrub my body. Through the water and past the arms of the Sisters, I see Jed being escorted from the Cathedral.
They pull me out of the holy water, my eyes stinging and my long hair like a spiderweb over my face so that I sputter and cough. “You will stay here within the Cathedral walls,” the Sisters tell me. “We cannot have you going back to the fence line.”
I understand this and I know that no amount of protesting will change their minds. But still, it irritates me that they think I would be so stupid as to go after my mother.
She no longer exists.
A blanket finds its way to my shoulders and I am led along a hallway I never noticed before, down a set of stairs and into a room with stone walls, a stone floor, a cot and a window that looks out past the graveyard toward the Forest. I want to laugh; if they are so afraid of my doing something drastic after facing my mother's death why do they place me in a room that overlooks the site where she turned? I can clearly see the series of gates through which she was dragged and I can even see a few Unconsecrated pressing against the fence line. Their moans slip lightly through the open window.
“Why can't I go home?” I ask as they close the door behind me.
The oldest, Sister Tabitha, pauses on the threshold. “It is better that you stay here.”
“But what about my brother?” I cross my arms over my chest, cupping my elbows in my hands and folding in on myself.
She doesn't answer. Then the door closes and I can hear the lock slide into place. I am alone with the sound of the Unconsecrated.
For a while I watch the sun travel across the sky. I notice that in the heat of the day the Unconsecrated abandon their post at the fence and wander back into the woods, shuffling away to down themselves in a sort of eternal hibernation that is only broken when they sense human flesh nearby.
I watch the fences for a glimpse of my mother that never comes.
There is no moon that night and I watch as stars fill the dark emptiness. Clouds creep in heavy and low so that there is nothing more to see outside and so I move to my cot and sit down, not bothering to light the candle placed on a small table by the door.
I want to sleep, I want dreams to pull me from this world and make me forget. To stop the memories from swirling around me. To put an end to this ache that consumes me.
A thin sliver of light infiltrates the bottom sill of the wooden door and I can just see the walls surrounding me. A cricket chirrups somewhere. I wrap the blanket around my shoulders and over my head and pull my knees up to my chest and silently heave for my mother.