She turned the picture over and read the faded lines of script there. ‘Bob and Marilyn Hardicourt, D.C. Honeymoon 2035’. She laid the image down carefully and picked up the folded piece of paper. It was also bent slightly into a bowl shape from being squeezed into the compartment. The paper was very thin and crinkled noisily as she unfolded it. She smoothed the paper cautiously and read the faded blue script.
“Bobby — The one watch you were missing is now yours.
Happy Anniversary.
You remind me, every time I see your face, of the beautiful man who stole my heart when you caught my hat on the hills that windy spring day.
Below that and in the border spaces, tiny and cramped writing ran in a circle around the page. It was harder to read and less neat, as if it had been written in a hurry. The ink was black instead of blue and written in a different hand. It was very hard to make out the small words but she rotated the paper around as she read:
‘I’m hiding this for you, Thomas, in hopes that you will find it someday. I don’t know what has happened or where you are, but I can’t find you, my son. Your mother couldn’t last this way. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep her here with us but she was never meant to be underground. There is no sunshine in these silos and this isn’t the way people are meant to live. She jumped. So many have that I hardly know how so many people can still be left inside. I don’t know what happened save that there was a nuke but now the details are getting away from me. There’s more than that out there. You can watch the world getting eaten away. Nukes don’t do that. I was injured and in the hospital for a time. When I came out, everything had changed and everyone was different. Your mother started to forget things. Everyone did, except me. I ran out of my asthma medicine a few days ago and now I’m forgetting too. I can feel it slipping away. So I’m writing this now, before it’s all gone. Your brother, Garrod, is with me and safe. He doesn’t remember anything now except that I’m his father. He doesn’t even remember his mother and she’s only been gone a week. I love you. I have always loved you. I will always love you. — Dad (Bob Hardicourt)’
Marina almost stopped breathing as she parsed out the cramped words. Her hands were shaking so badly that the paper crackled, dangerously close to tearing, and she let it go to drift the rest of the way to the surface of the bench.
Chapter Three
The words buzzed around in her head and a sense of unreality surrounded her. Now and then she glanced at the two papers, one face up and the other face down, to ensure they were really there. The fog lifted for a moment at some point and she suddenly realized she had no idea how much time had passed as she sat there absorbed by this inconceivable mystery.
Having no desire to explain anything about her find, she folded the paper carefully and inserted it and the image back into the watch. She closed it tightly, listening to be sure she heard the tiny click of the catch. She put the watch back into its box and put that back into the larger box so it wouldn’t look opened at all. If something happened or someone else came to find the object and the hidden contents, she certainly didn’t want that person to know that she had already seen it.
She put her things away and left the space, operating almost robotically as she made her way out of the fabber sector and toward the main stairwell. She made the trip four levels up without really noticing her surroundings or taking note of those she greeted out of habit along the way. She arrived at her compartment to find that she had very little time before she might expect her family to return home.
Dinner was put together in a hurry but was presentable nonetheless. Working just one level above the Bazaar and within a few levels of other shopping meant that her family enjoyed a varied diet and spent more than they probably should on food. Their assigned cafeterias provided a good breakfast and always packed her take away lunch, a privilege of her work, but she couldn’t remember the last time they ate dinner there aside from fish day. That only came about once every month or two. The family always made a point of being there on time for fish day and ready to feast.
The rest of the time the fresh produce, grains and oils of the market made up the bulk of their meals. The sticky sweetness of thick jams or tart fruits were pleasures they felt worth the expense. Today she made a salad topped with some of the herbed goat cheese her favorite seller set aside for her at the bazaar. To provide some warmth and substance, she quickly warmed a bit of leftover root vegetable stew and corn cakes. She was filling cups with a fresh batch of tea when the door opened and the chatting duo made up of her husband and daughter breezed into the compartment.
Neither of them seemed to notice that Marina was distracted. Sela recited every detail of her day while they ate dinner with only the occasional interruption by Joseph to tone down the stories or add some point of clarification. Marina knew that she smiled in the right places, encouraged at the correct times and asked the appropriate questions, but she couldn’t have recounted even a single thing that was said once the meal was over.
She escaped to their small sitting area and pretended to read a book about learning to knit. As her family washed up the dinner dishes and planned their next day, Marina delved back into her thoughts and the dangerous find she had made.
Part of her was angry that this discovery had been foisted upon her. Though she had no frame of reference, she could only imagine that having such a letter and image would be enough to send her to remediation. It would have to be if expressing curiosity about the outside was enough to be sent for an evaluation at least.
In all her years she had never even heard of such a thing as that image. She knew and remembered the endless array of stories that kids told to each other as they grew up, each one a lesson of consequences or morality. Many of them were entirely fantastical and unbelievable but even those didn’t come close to this horrifying find of hers. It was evidence any eye could see. It was as logical and objective as a Historian’s viewpoint. She turned a page in her knitting book unread as she considered all that she had heard in her life, whether from children’s tales or classes or history.
One of the most commonly whispered stories of the schoolroom was the scary story about the ghostly figure seen wandering across the screen Up Top, forever trying to get back into the silo. There were more about naughty children being squeezed out by the silo walls and into some frightening netherworld. That one had kept Marina from walking too close to a wall for a long time for fear of it happening to her.
There were others but one in particular, from a time when she was old enough to understand the way the world around her operated, tickled at her mind. Someone had jumped from the stairwell and those occurrences, while rare, were a fact of life. It happened. It was sad but people moved on.
After one such jumper had made a particularly bad mess on a section of the stairs any child leaving the mid-level school rooms would encounter, they had been kept after school for what seemed like hours while the remains were dealt with. With nothing to do but wait, the telling of jumper stories was inevitable. Most dealt with a particularly gory jump or a jumper who had survived or some variation on that theme.