The Testaments

21

I was sitting in Ada’s car, trying to absorb what she’d told me. Melanie and Neil. Blown up by a bomb. Outside The Clothes Hound. It wasn’t possible.

“Where are we going?” I said. It was a limp thing to say, it sounded so normal; but nothing was normal. Why wasn’t I screaming?

“I’m thinking,” Ada said. She looked into the rear-view mirror, then pulled into a driveway. The house had a sign that said ALTERNA RENOVATIONS. Every house in our area was always being renovated; then someone would buy it and renovate it again, which drove Neil and Melanie crazy. Why spend all that money on tearing the guts out of perfectly good houses? Neil would say. It was hiking up the prices and shutting poor people out of the market.

“Are we going in here?” I was suddenly very tired. It would be nice to go into a house and lie down.

“Nope,” said Ada. She took out a small wrench from her leather backpack and destroyed her phone. I watched as it cracked and slivered: the case shattered, the metal innards warped and fell apart.

“Why are you wrecking your phone?” I said.

“Because you can never be too careful.” She put the remains into a small plastic bag. “Wait’ll this car goes past, then get out and toss it into that trash bin.”

Drug dealers did this—they used burner phones. I was having second thoughts about having come with her. She wasn’t just severe, she was scary. “Thanks for the lift,” I said, “but I should go back to my school now. I can tell them about the explosion, they’ll know what to do.”

“You’re in shock. It’s no wonder,” she said.

“I’m okay,” I said, though it wasn’t true. “I can just get out here.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, “but they’ll have to report you to Social Services, and those folks will put you into foster care, and who knows how that’ll turn out?” I hadn’t thought about that. “So once you’ve ditched my phone,” she continued, “you can either get back in the car or keep on walking. Your choice. Just don’t go home. That’s not a command, it’s advice.”

I did as she’d asked. Now that she’d laid out my options, what choice did I have? Back in the car I began to sniffle, but except for handing me a tissue, Ada didn’t react. She made a U-turn and headed south. She was a fast and efficient driver. “I know you don’t trust me,” she said after a while, “but you have to trust me. The same people who set that car bomb could be looking for you right now. I’m not saying they are, I just don’t know, but you’re at risk.”

At risk—that’s what they said on the news about children who’d been found battered to death despite multiple warnings by the neighbours, or women who’d hitchhiked because there was no bus and were found by someone’s dog in a shallow grave with their necks broken. My teeth were chattering, though the air was hot and sticky.

I didn’t quite believe her, but I didn’t disbelieve her either. “We could tell the police,” I said timidly.

“They’d be useless.” I’d heard about the uselessness of the police—Neil and Melanie regularly expressed that opinion. She turned the car radio on: soothing music with harps in it. “Don’t think about anything yet,” she said.

“Are you a cop?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said.

“Then what are you?”

“Least said, soonest mended,” she said.

We stopped in front of a large, square-shaped building. The sign said MEETING HOUSE and RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS (QUAKERS). Ada parked the car at the back beside a grey van. “That’s our next ride,” she said.

We went in through the side door. Ada nodded at the man sitting at a small desk there. “Elijah,” she said. “We’ve got errands.”

I didn’t really look at him. I followed her through the Meeting House proper, with its empty hush and its echoes and its slightly chilly smell, then into a larger room, which was brighter and had air conditioning. There was a row of beds—more like cots—with women lying down on some of them, covered with blankets, all different colours. In another corner there were five armchairs and a coffee table. Several women sitting there were talking in low voices.

“Don’t stare,” said Ada to me. “It’s not a zoo.”

“What is this place?” I said.

“SanctuCare, the Gilead refugee organization. Melanie worked with it, and so did Neil in a different way. Now, I want you to sit in that chair and be a fly on the wall. Don’t move and don’t say boo. You’ll be safe here. I need to make some arrangements for you. I’ll be back in maybe an hour. They’ll make sure you get some sugar into you, you need it.” She went over and spoke to one of the women in charge, then walked quickly out of the room. After a while, the woman brought me a cup of hot sweet tea and a chocolate-chip cookie, and asked if I was all right and if I needed anything else, and I said no. But she came back anyway with one of the blankets, a green-and-blue one, and tucked it around me.

I managed to drink some of the tea, and my teeth stopped chattering. I sat there and watched the foot traffic, the way I used to watch it in The Clothes Hound. Several women came in, one of them with a baby. They looked really wrecked, and also scared. The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, “You’re here now, it’s all right,” and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that’s happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you’re safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn’t waste time crying before.

Words came out of the women in snatches and gasps:

The women in charge handed them tissues. They said calm things like You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong. That’s another thing I’ve learned.

After an hour or so, Ada came back. “You’re still alive,” she said. If it was a joke, it was a bad one. I just stared at her. “You have to dump the plaid.”

“What?” I said. It was like she was speaking some other language.

“I know this is tough for you,” she said, “but we don’t have time for that right now, we need to get moving fast. Not to be alarmist, but there’s trouble. Now let’s get some other clothes.” She took hold of my arm and lifted me up out of the chair: she was surprisingly strong.

We went past all the women, into a back room where there was a table with T-shirts and sweaters and a couple of racks with hangers. I recognized some of the items: this was where the donations from The Clothes Hound ended up.

“Pick something you’d never wear in real life,” said Ada. “You need to look like a totally different person.”

I found a black T-shirt with a white skull, and a pair of leggings, black with white skulls. I added high-tops, black and white, and some socks. Everything was used. I did think about lice and bedbugs: Melanie always asked whether the stuff people tried to sell her had been cleaned. We got bedbugs in the store once and it was a nightmare.

“I’ll turn my back,” said Ada. There was no change room. I wriggled out of my school uniform and put on my new used clothes. My movements felt very slowed down. What if she was abducting me? I thought groggily. Abducting. It was what happened to girls who were smuggled and made into sex slaves—we’d learned about that at school. But girls like me didn’t get abducted, except sometimes by men posing as real estate salesmen who kept them locked in the basement. Sometimes men like that had women helping them. Was Ada one of those? What if her story about Melanie and Neil being blown up was a trick? Right now the two of them might be frantic because I hadn’t turned up. They might be calling the school or even the police, useless though they considered them.

Ada still had her back to me, but I sensed that if I even thought about making a break for it—out the side door of the Meeting House, for instance—she would know about it in advance. And supposing I ran, where could I go? The only place I wanted to go was home, but if Ada was telling the truth I shouldn’t go there. Anyway, if Ada was telling the truth it would no longer be my home because Melanie and Neil wouldn’t be in it. What would I do all by myself in an empty house?

“I’m done,” I said.

Ada turned around. “Not bad,” she said. She took off her black jacket and stuffed it into a carry bag, then put on a green jacket that was on the rack. Then she pinned up her hair and added sunglasses. “Hair down,” she told me, so I pulled off my scrunchie and shook my hair out. She found a pair of sunglasses for me: orange mirror ones. She handed me a lipstick, and I made myself a new red mouth.

“Look like a thug,” she said.

I didn’t know how, but I tried. I scowled, and pouted my lips that were covered in red wax.

“There,” she said. “You’d never know. Our secret is safe with us.”

What was our secret? That I no longer officially existed? Something like that.

22

We got into the grey van and drove for a while, with Ada paying close attention to the traffic behind us. Then we threaded through a maze of side streets, and pulled into a drive in front of a big old brownstone mansion. In the semicircle that might once have been a flower garden and even now had the remains of some tulips among the uncut grass and dandelions, there was a sign with a picture of a condo building.

“Where is this?” I said.

“Parkdale,” said Ada. I’d never been to Parkdale before, but I’d heard about it: some of the drug-head kids at school thought it was cool, which was what they said about decaying urban areas that were now re-gentrifying. There were a couple of trendy nightclubs in it, for those who wanted to lie about their age.

The mansion sat on a large scruffy lot with a couple of huge trees. Nobody had cleaned up the fallen leaves for a long time; a few stray rags of coloured plastic, red and silver, shone out from the drift of mulch.

Ada headed towards the house, glancing back to make sure I was following. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I felt a little dizzy. I walked behind her over the uneven paving; it felt spongy, as if my foot could go through it at any moment. The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we’d studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.

Heavy stone steps led up to the front porch. It was framed by a stone archway with a name carved into it in the Celtic lettering you sometimes see on older buildings in Toronto—CARNARVON—surrounded by stone leaves and elvish faces; they were probably meant to be mischievous, but I found them malignant. Everything seemed malignant to me right then.

The porch smelled of cat piss. The door was wide and heavy, studded with black nailheads. The graffiti artists had been at work on it in red paint: that pointy writing they do, and another more legible word that might have been BARF.

Despite the slummy look of the door, the lock worked with a magnetic key fob. Inside was an old maroon hall carpet and a flight of broad stairs winding upwards, with beautiful curved banisters.

“It was a rooming house for a while,” said Ada. “Now it’s furnished apartments.”

“What was it at first?” I was leaning against the wall.

“A summer house,” said Ada. “Rich people. Let’s get you upstairs, you need to lie down.”

“What’s ‘Carnarvon’?” I was having a little trouble getting up the stairs.

“Welsh place,” said Ada. “Somebody must’ve been homesick.” She took my arm. “Come on, count the steps.” Home, I thought. I was going to start sniffling again. I tried not to.

We got to the top of the stairs. There was another heavy door, another fob lock. Inside was a front room with a sofa and two easy chairs and a coffee table and a dining table.

“There’s a bedroom for you,” said Ada, but I had no urge to see it. I fell onto the sofa. All of a sudden I had no strength; I didn’t think I could get up.

“You’re shivering again,” said Ada. “I’ll turn down the AC.” She brought a duvet from one of the bedrooms, a new one, white.

Everything in the room was realer than real. There was some kind of houseplant on the table, though it might have been plastic; it had rubbery, shiny leaves. The walls were covered with rose-coloured paper, with a darker design of trees. There were nail holes where there must have been pictures once. These details were so vivid they were almost shimmering, as if they were lit from behind.

I closed my eyes to shut out the light. I must have dozed off because suddenly it was evening, and Ada was turning on the flatscreen. I guess that was for my benefit—so I would know she’d been telling the truth—but it was brutal. The wreckage of The Clothes Hound—the windows shattered, the door gaping open. Scraps of fabric scattered over the sidewalk. In front, the shell of Melanie’s car, crumpled like a burnt-out marshmallow. Two police cars visible, and the yellow tape they put around disaster areas. No sign of Neil or Melanie, and I was glad: I had a horror of seeing their blackened flesh, the ash of their hair, their singed bones.

The remote was on an end table beside the sofa. I turned off the sound: I didn’t want to hear the anchor’s level voice talking as if this event was the same as a politician getting onto a plane. When the car and the store vanished and the newsman’s head bobbed into view like a joke balloon, I switched the TV off.

Ada came in from the kitchen. She brought me a sandwich on a plate: chicken salad. I said I wasn’t hungry.

“There’s an apple,” she said. “Want that?”

“No thank you.”

“I know this is bizarre,” she said. I said nothing. She went out and came in again. “I got you some birthday cake. It’s chocolate. Vanilla ice cream. Your favourites.” It was on a white plate; there was a plastic fork. How did she know what my favourites were? Melanie must have told her. They must have talked about me. The white plate was dazzling. There was a single candle stuck into the piece of cake. When I was younger I would have made a wish. What would my wish be now? That time would move backwards? That it would be yesterday? I wonder how many people have ever wished that.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked. She told me, and I went into it and was sick. Then I lay down on the sofa again and shivered. After a while she brought me some ginger ale. “You need to get your blood sugar up,” she said. She went out of the room, turning off the lights.

It was like being home from school when you had the flu. Other people would cover you up and bring you things to drink; they would be the ones dealing with real life so you didn’t have to. It would be nice to stay like this forever: then I would never have to think about anything again.

In the distance there were the noises of the city: traffic, sirens, a plane overhead. From the kitchen came the sound of Ada rustling around; she had a brisk, light way of moving, as if she walked on her toes. I heard the murmur of her voice, talking on the phone. She was in charge, though what she was in charge of I couldn’t guess; nonetheless I felt lulled and held. Behind my closed eyes I heard the apartment door open, and then pause, and then shut.

23

When I woke up again, it was morning. I didn’t know what time it was. Had I slept in, was I late for school? Then I remembered: school was done. I would never be going back there, or to anywhere else I knew.

I was in one of the Carnarvon bedrooms, with the white duvet covering me, still wearing the T-shirt and leggings, though I didn’t have the socks or shoes on. There was a window, with a roller shade pulled down. I sat up carefully. I saw some red on the pillowcase, but it was only lipstick from yesterday’s red mouth. I was no longer nauseous and dizzy, but I was fuzzy. I scratched my head all over and gave my hair a tug. Once when I had a headache I’d been told by Melanie that pulling your hair increased the circulation to the brain. She said that’s why Neil did it.

After I stood up, I felt more awake. I studied myself in the big wall mirror. I wasn’t the same person as the day before, although I looked similar. I opened the door and went along the hall to the kitchen in my bare feet.

Ada wasn’t there. She was in the living room, sitting in one of the easy chairs with a mug of coffee. On the sofa was the man we’d passed when going in through the side door at SanctuCare.

“You woke up,” said Ada. Adults were in the habit of stating the obvious—You woke up was something Melanie might have said to me, as if it was an accomplishment—and I was disappointed to find that Ada was no exception in this way.

I looked at the man and he looked at me. He was wearing black jeans and sandals and a grey T-shirt that said TWO WORDS, ONE FINGER and a Blue Jays baseball cap. I wondered if he knew what his T-shirt actually meant.

He must have been fifty, but his hair was dark and thick, so maybe he was younger. His face was like creased leather, and he had a scar up the side of his cheek. He smiled at me, showing white teeth with a molar missing on the left. A tooth missing like that makes a person look illegal.

Ada nodded her chin over at the man: “You remember Elijah, from SanctuCare. Friend of Neil’s. He’s here to help. There’s cereal in the kitchen.”

“Then we can talk,” said Elijah.

The cereal was the kind I liked, round Os made from beans. I brought the bowl into the living area and sat down in the other easy chair, and waited for them to speak.

Neither of them said anything. They glanced at each other. I ate two spoonfuls, tentatively, in case my stomach was still unsettled. In my ears I could hear the crunching of the Os.

“Which end first?” said Elijah.

“The deep end,” said Ada.

“Okay,” he said and looked directly at me. “Yesterday was not your birthday.”

I was surprised. “Yes it was,” I said. “The first of May. I turned sixteen.”

“In reality you’re about four months younger,” said Elijah.

How do you prove your birth date? There must have been a birth certificate, but where did Melanie keep it? “It’s on my health card. My birthday,” I said.

“Try again,” said Ada to Elijah. He looked down at the carpet.

“Melanie and Neil were not your parents,” he said.

“Yes they were!” I said. “Why are you saying that?” I felt tears building in my eyes. There was another void opening in reality: Neil and Melanie were fading, changing shape. I realized I didn’t know much about them really, or about their past. They hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t asked. Nobody ever asks their parents much about themselves, do they?

“I know this is distressing for you,” said Elijah, “but it’s important, so I’ll say it again. Neil and Melanie were not your parents. Sorry to be so blunt, but we don’t have much time.”

“Then who were they?” I said. I was blinking. One of the tears made it out; I wiped it away.

“No relation,” he said. “You were placed with them for safekeeping when you were a baby.”

“That can’t be true,” I said. But I was less convinced.

“You should’ve been told earlier,” said Ada. “They wanted to spare you the worry. They were going to tell you on the day they…” She trailed off, clamped her lips shut. She’d been so silent about Melanie dying, as if they hadn’t been friends at all, but now I could see that she was truly upset. It made me like her more.

“Part of their job was to protect you and keep you safe,” said Elijah. “I’m sorry to be the messenger.”

On top of the new-furniture smell of the room, I could smell Elijah: a sweaty, solid, practical-laundry-soap smell. Organic laundry soap. It was the kind Melanie used. Had used. “Then who were they?” I whispered.

“Neil and Melanie were very valued and experienced members of the—”

“No,” I said. “My other parents. My real ones. Who were they? Are they dead too?”

“I’ll make more coffee,” said Ada. She got up and went into the kitchen.

“They’re still alive,” said Elijah. “Or they were yesterday.”

I stared at him. I wondered if he was lying, but why would he have done that? If he’d wanted to make things up, he could have made up better things. “I don’t believe any of this,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re even saying it.”

Ada came back into the room with a mug of coffee and said did anyone else want one, help yourself, and maybe I should have some time to myself to think things over.

Think what over? What was there to think? My parents had been murdered, but they weren’t my real parents, and a different set of parents had appeared in their place.

“What things?” I said. “I don’t know enough to think anything.”

“What would you like to know?” said Elijah in a kind but tired voice.

“How did it happen?” I said. “Where are my real…my other mother and father?”

“Do you know much about Gilead?” Elijah asked.

“Of course. I watch the news. We took it in school,” I said sullenly. “I went to that protest march.” Right then I wanted Gilead to evaporate and leave us all alone.

“That’s where you were born,” he said. “In Gilead.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“You were smuggled out by your mother and Mayday. They’d risked their lives. Gilead made a big fuss about it; they wanted you back. They said your so-called legal parents had the right to claim you. Mayday hid you; there were a lot of people looking for you, plus a media blitz.”

“Like Baby Nicole,” I said. “I wrote an essay about her at school.”

Elijah looked down at the floor again. Then he looked straight at me. “You are Baby Nicole.”