Becca tried to match her mom’s tone, tried to sound like Anna’s death didn’t matter. Like she didn’t see it every time she closed her eyes and sometimes when they were open. “Could we talk about this some other time?” Or maybe never? “I’m kind of busy.”
Her mom’s voice grew sharper. “No. We need to talk about this. We’ve put it off too long as it is. I never should have let things get this far.”
She wanted, needed, to tell her mom everything. How she couldn’t get rid of the images. How she sometimes saw not Anna, but Jake, dying in that room… and sometimes she saw herself in Anna’s place. How she wished she could go back and undo that conversation where she had lied about Anna, where she had condemned Anna to death.
How much it had scared her to see her mom looking down at Anna’s body with blank eyes, and to know that to her this was just a day like any other day.
Deep down, some part of her was still convinced her mom could make it all go away.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” The Enforcers outside had disappeared from view. “I shouldn’t have said those things the other day. I don’t even know what I was thinking.” But even as she said it, she knew there was no point. That excuse had worked on Heather, but it wouldn’t work on her mom.
Her mom reached out and grabbed the arm of Becca’s chair. She spun the chair around to face her. “That’s not enough this time. I explained the confessions to you; I thought that was the end of this. I thought…” Her voice trailed off. Were those tears glinting at the corners of her eyes? Becca couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom cry.
Becca started to speak—but she didn’t have anything to say. She had no way to convince her mom she wasn’t a dissident. The damage had been done.
“I know things haven’t been the same between us lately,” said her mom. “But I still know you. You’re still Becca. I spend every day with dissidents; I know what they’re like. You’re not one of them.”
And what made Becca so different? The fact that her mom didn’t want her to die? Becca held back the angry words, said nothing, tried to keep her face blank. Was this what their relationship was going to be for the rest of her life?
Why was she still upset at the thought of losing her closeness with her mom? She knew what her mom was like now.
Her mom stretched her arm across the gap and took Becca’s hand. The familiar roughness of her skin reminded Becca of all the other times she’d felt that hand around hers, all the times her mom had comforted her when she felt like the world was ending. She needed that now, needed her mom’s soothing voice and sensible answers. She needed her mom to hold her and stroke her hair and tell her everything would be all right.
She knew she should pull her hand away. Her mom had blood on her hands—what had she been doing at work all weekend that had kept her too busy to come home? How many dissidents had died? Instead, Becca clutched her mom’s hand as she fought the urge to scream about all the things her mom had done. As she fought the urge to break down in tears and admit how afraid she was.
“You need to remember who you are,” her mom continued. “That person who said those things the other night about how the country would be better off if the dissidents took over… that isn’t you.”
“And what about you?” The words left Becca’s mouth before she could stop them. “I didn’t think you could make people confess to things they hadn’t done because you thought they’d be more useful that way. I didn’t think you could watch somebody die like it was nothing.”
Her mom gripped her hand harder. “We’ve talked about this. You said you understood. You know why I do what I do.”
“But how do you do it? How can you spend your days doing… whatever you do down there…” She shied away from the visions her mind supplied, tried to push away the thought of Anna lying dead on the concrete floor. “…and then come home and talk to me like it doesn’t mean anything?”
Her mom frowned and tilted her head. “Did you hear something?”
“Don’t change the subject. I want to know. How do you do it?” Suddenly this answer—how her mom could do what she did and still be the person Becca had always known—seemed like the most important thing in the world. But Becca didn’t know which she wanted to hear—that both people could coexist in the same body, or that the mother she had grown up with had been an illusion.
Her mom put her finger to her lips.
Were those footsteps?
A door slammed, too loud to be anywhere but inside the apartment.
Becca knew what it meant to hear footsteps that weren’t supposed to be there, to hear your door open when nobody else had the key. Everybody knew what that meant.
But her mom had said she wouldn’t turn her in. Heather had said she wouldn’t turn her in. And it was two in the afternoon. Enforcement took you away in the middle of the night; everyone knew that. It had to be something else. It had to be.
The footsteps were getting closer.
Her mom didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. But Becca saw her own fear reflected on her face.
The bedroom door opened.
They walked inside. The Enforcers she had seen out in the parking lot a moment ago. She had the answer to her question now. They weren’t on their way home. They were here for a dissident. They were here for her.
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t understand the things her mom was screaming. It all blended together into a nonsensical jumble. But she could feel her mom’s grip on her hand getting tighter and tighter, until the Enforcers pulled them apart.
Chapter Fifteen
“I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter,” she repeated again and again as the Enforcers shoved her through the same side door she had walked through with her mom just two days ago. She tried to keep her voice from shaking, tried to keep her cuffed hands from shaking, tried to keep her legs from collapsing underneath her. “You can’t do this.”
She had never seen her mom lose control like that before. Even in her arguments with Becca’s dad, Becca had never heard her yell. But when Enforcement had come, she had screamed as they had handcuffed Becca and propelled her, too stunned to fight, out the door. First threats that Becca, in her numb state, couldn’t understand; then, as the door had closed behind them, a wordless scream that made goosebumps rise all over Becca’s body.
The Enforcers hadn’t stopped then, and they didn’t now.
Still, Becca hung on to the hope that they didn’t know. That they thought her mom was just one of many anonymous Internal employees. Once they found out otherwise, they would have to let her go. Hadn’t her name gotten her in to see Heather on that horrible night?
The door closed, shutting out her last glimpse of the afternoon sun.
She might never see the sun again.
They maneuvered her into the elevator like a piece of luggage. Inside the elevator, they stood to either side of her, not moving, not speaking.
“I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter,” she repeated through her tears. “She works here.” The elevator opened onto the maze of hallways underneath 117. The light seemed dimmer now, and the echoes of their footsteps twice as loud. Each of the Enforcers held one of her arms, to keep her from running—where would she go?—and to hurry her along. She stumbled as she tried to keep up; her uneven steps broke the pattern of the echoes.
“She made 117 the best processing center in the country.” She hated when other people talked about her mom like this; now she wove the words around her like armor. “She turned this nothing town into someplace the whole country knows about. You wouldn’t have jobs if it weren’t for her.”