Page 22 of Trade (After the End #7)

I don’t know who drags me back into the bunker.

When the metal door slams shut, and the stale, musty air fills my lungs again, a hysterical cry is wrenched from my throat.

They don’t even spare me a glance. They haul me down the corridors lined with litter and boxes, past storerooms, hiking me up to carry me down the short flights of stairs, ignoring my pitiful moans.

The lounging guards along the way leer or stare blank-faced.

We reach an elevator bank, and when we emerge on Level B, the expressions change. There are sharp intakes of breath from people we pass. Shocked murmurs. Someone gasps, “Gloria!”

The guards loosen their holds on my upper arms and let me limp along under my own steam.

The pain competes with panic, each buffeting me in turn as the ceiling presses down and the walls close in around me.

Has the air always been this choked with dust?

Is the light this dim, or is it my swollen eyes?

Instinct screams at me to run, to fight my way out before I’m buried forever, but every step is agony, so I have to stumble along in the wrong direction while my brain shouts and shouts to no effect.

The guards bring me to the infirmary, and as soon as we cross the threshold, I’m swarmed by health techs. They ease me onto a gurney and roll me into a curtained exam bay with stern expressions and eyes warm with compassion.

“You’re going to be okay, Gloria,” a nurse tells me while she cuts off my coveralls with a pair of scissors. “You’re home now. We’re going to take good care of you. You’re safe now.”

She believes it.

“It’s all over now,” she murmurs as she gently peels strips of coveralls away from my bloody skin.

She’s right. It’s over now.

It’s all over now.

* * *

They keep me in the infirmary for five days. Mostly, I’m left to myself. Susan Jordan comes by with some papers for me to sign. I do so without argument, and then I close my eyes and pretend to fall asleep.

I picture Dalton, lying on his stomach by the lake, and imagine his chest rising and falling.

I’m a thirty-nine-year-old woman. I’ve long since outgrown superstition and wishful thinking, but still, in my head, I make his lungs work, and if my mind wanders, I panic when I realize I’ve lost focus, as if I’ve let him die.

I should never have asked him to take me to the lake. I should’ve come right back.

I should’ve stayed awake that night and kept watch.

I should have fought. I’m so smart with my nose in books and an encyclopedia of trees and plants in my head, but I can’t throw a punch or use a knife, can’t disarm a man, can’t do anything truly useful.

I lie in the bed, every bone in my body hurting like hell, breathing for Dalton in my head and hating myself.

Then one afternoon, the doctor tells me I’m good enough to go home.

The nurse dresses me in drawstring pants and a top that ties shut.

They give me fabric slippers with thin plastic soles, and an orderly escorts me out of the infirmary.

In the elevator, I’m surprised when he presses the button for Level C rather than Level K. My pulse speeds up. I don’t want to go anywhere near Neil Jackson or the rest of them.

“Where are we going?” I ask the orderly, a young man I don’t recognize.

“Your quarters,” he says.

“I live on K. In a dorm.”

“That’s not what I was told,” he says, unbothered, and goes back to staring at the letters that light up above the sliding doors.

He leads me right back to the quarters I shared with Bennett.

“I don’t live here anymore,” I say as the orderly bangs on the square window, still covered with the curtain I made out of a pair of my mother’s old coveralls that the Bursar deemed too worn for use.

“Take it up with Admin,” he says as he turns the knob and opens the door for me without waiting for anyone to answer.

As I shuffle inside, Bennett rises suddenly from his usual seat on the sofa where he was reading a book.

I glance around the room where I lived for twenty years, my entire married life.

The watercolor collages I did in the style of Adolphe Millot in senior year art seminar are still mounted on the concrete wall with putty—our heirloom vegetables, our kitchen garden exhibit, our tree collection with my favorite American elm in pride of place.

The paper is yellowed and curling at the edges.

Dad’s chair is still in the corner. The metal shelves we inherited from Bennett’s grandparents have been moved to the wall across from the foot of the bed.

My dad’s books are stacked on the low wall that separates the sleeping area from the main room. They belong on the shelves, and the shelves belong across from the sofa.

“Where’s Meghan?” I ask.

They were right. There’s not nearly enough space in here for three people. There’s hardly enough air for me, and my busted ribs still won’t allow me to take a full breath. How did I live in this dingy cell and not go crazy?

Maybe I did; maybe I was crazy all along. I was deluded. Doesn’t that count?

I stare at Bennett while his gaze darts around the room like he’s looking for an escape. He won’t find one. We’re trapped here together.

I take in his waxy complexion and the grown-out lines of his high-and-tight.

He’s overdue for a haircut. Nothing in this bunker has shrunk more than him.

Did he never quite fill out his coveralls, or has he lost weight?

Was his face always so readable? He’s miserable, guilty as hell, and furious about it.

He clears his throat. “It was decided that it would be best if she returned to her parents for the meanwhile.”

“Who decided?”

“The decision was made jointly.”

A chuckle slips out of my mouth, high-pitched and raw. No one loves the passive voice like a head of department. It was decided. The decision was made jointly. Decisions make themselves, don’t you know. No one can be held responsible.

“I don’t want to be here,” I tell him. I don’t figure it matters, but I want to be sure he knows.

“Well, she’s all yours now, sir,” the orderly says, taking that as his cue to leave. He casually slaps the doorframe on his way out.

Bennett shoves his hands in his pockets. He can’t stand the sight of my injuries. His eyes catch on my black eye or the suture on my lip and drop immediately to the floor as a flush crawls up his pasty neck.

“Gloria—” he begins and then drifts into silence.

I don’t care what he’s come up with to say.

I know this man better than anyone else alive.

There is no doubt in my mind he has long since convinced himself everything he did was completely justified.

Last night or this morning, whenever he knew this moment would happen, he began to rehearse his explanations in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and shaved, and probably while he laced his boots and boiled water for coffee, too.

I’ve heard him do it a hundred times, muttering through an argument he was going to make later to Neil or the Assembly, workshopping the perfect words, the perfect tone.

I don’t want to hear whatever he’s come up with to excuse himself.

“Save it,” I tell him and wander to the nook we jokingly called our primary suite. She slept there with him.

Linens are laundered monthly. I bet at least one of her long hairs is stuck to the sheet.

I conjure up the idea and force myself to stare it in the face without blinking, like the doctor pricked at my skin to test the numbing agent before he stitched up my lip, and my heart gives a little flip-flap as I realize I don’t care. Not even a little. Not at all.

She was sleeping in my bed. I was sleeping under the stars.

I take the clothes and sundries stacked on the right half of the shelves—Bennett’s side—and toss them on the bed.

“Gloria?” Bennett’s voice takes on a stern tone. A month ago, it would’ve caused a worm of worry to squirm in my belly. A month ago, if I had heard that note of warning, I’d have made a joke, played innocent, or dropped it and lived to fight another day.

At least that’s what I told myself. I never got around to the fighting, though, did I?

Dalton fought. I gave up. Gave in. Left him.

A cowardly sheep until the end. No, not a sheep.

A mole. Blind. Burrowed deep in the hole I dug for myself.

The well-behaved woman. Upstanding citizen.

Outwardly compliant. Inwardly scared to death.

I ignore Bennett and drag the shelves back to their place in the living area, ignoring the stabbing pain in my side.

“Should you be doing that?” he asks, but he doesn’t budge from his place by the sofa.

I take Dad’s books and put them back on the shelf where they belong, the way he organized them by the Dewey Decimal System—botany and then agriculture, pest control, field and specialty crops, so on and so forth.

When I’m finished, I stand back and look at my work, expecting—hoping—to feel something, but there’s nothing inside me but impotent rage and a roaring grief I can’t listen to for even a second, or I’ll be deafened.

“You’re such a sad excuse for a man,” I say, not even turning to look at Bennett. “All those years, tearing myself up, wondering why Dad picked you instead of me.”

I glance at him over my shoulder. His face is flaming red. Oh, he’s furious, but he would never dare hit me. He’s still convinced that he’s civilized, even though he sent me to be raped, and from all appearances, there’s no conflict over that in his mind.

I want to scream the truth at him. This place isn’t real. It’s a mass delusion.

Or does he already know?

How much of a villain is he?

I want to yell at him that I saw a lake that stretched farther than the eye can see.