The Testaments(33)
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:
If they say I have to go back…
I had to leave my boy behind, isn’t there any way to…
I lost the baby. There was no one…
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.