Delirium

Page 51

“I know,” she says, but she still won’t look at me.

“They—they took my mother, Hana.” I wasn’t planning to tell her, initially. I didn’t want to talk about it. But the words rush out.

She glances up at me sharply. “What are you talking about?”

I tell her the story of the Crypts then. Amazingly, I keep it together. I just tell her about everything in detail.

Ward Six and the escape, the cell, the words. Hana listens in frozen silence. I’ve never seen her so still and serious.

When I’m finished speaking, Hana’s face is white. She looks exactly like she did when we were little and used to stay up at night, trying to freak each other out by telling ghost stories. In a way, I guess my mother’s story is a ghost story. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”

I nod, staring out at the ocean. I wonder whether what we learned about the other parts of the world—the uncured parts—is accurate, whether they’re really as wild and ravaged and savage and full of pain as everyone has always said. I’m pretty sure this, too, is a lie. Easier, in many ways, to imagine a place like Portland—a place with its own walls and barriers and half-truths, a place where love still flickers into existence but imperfectly.

“You see why I have to leave,” I say. It’s not really a question, but she nods.

“Yeah.” Hana gives her shoulders a tiny shake, as though trying to rouse herself from a dream. Then she turns to me. Even though her eyes are sad, she manages a smile. “You, Lena Haloway,” she says, “are a legend.”

“Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. But I feel better. She has called me by my mother’s name, so I know she understands. “A cautionary tale, maybe.”

“I’m serious.” She brushes her hair out of her face, staring at me intently. “I was wrong, you know.

Remember what I said at the beginning of the summer?

I thought you were afraid. I thought you were too scared to take any chances.” The sad smile tugs at her lips again. “Turns out you’re braver than I am.”

“Hana—”

“That’s okay.” She waves a hand, cutting me off. “You deserve it. You deserve more.”

I don’t really know what to say to that. I want to hug her, but instead I wrap my arms around my waist, squeezing. The wind coming off the water is biting.

“I’ll miss you, Hana,” I say after a minute.

She walks a couple of steps toward the water, kicks sand in an arc with the toe of her shoe. It seems to hang in the air for a fraction of a second before scattering.

“Well, you know where I’ll be.”

We stand there for a while, listening to the tide sucking on the shore, the water heaving and tumbling with bits of rock: stone whittled to sand over thousands and thousands of years. Someday maybe this will all be water. Someday maybe it will all get sucked into dust.

Then Hana spins around and says, “Come on. Race you back to the track,” and takes off, running, before I can say, Okay.

“No fair!” I call after her. But I don’t try very hard to catch up. I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both.

Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

But that isn’t it, exactly.

The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last- minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God.

Love: It will kill you and save you, both.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

—From the cautionary tale Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, reprinted in 100 Quotes to Know for the Boards, by The Princeton Review