The Testaments(52)

“Because of me?” I said.

“Not everything is because of you. Anyway this is what happened. Your mother gave you to some trusted friends; they took you north up the highway, then through the woods into Vermont.”

“Were you one of the trusted friends?”

“We said we were deer-hunting. I used to be a guide around there, I knew people. We had you in a backpack; we gave you a pill so you wouldn’t scream.”

“You drugged a baby. You could’ve killed me,” I said indignantly.

“But we didn’t,” said Ada. “We took you over the mountains, then down into Canada at Three Rivers. Trois-Rivières. That was a prime people-smuggling route back in the day.”

“Back in what day?”

“Oh, around 1740,” she said. “They used to catch girls from New England, hold them hostage, trade them for money or else marry them off. Once the girls had kids, they wouldn’t want to go back. That’s how I got my mixed heritage.”

“Mixed like what?”

“Part stealer, part stolen,” she said. “I’m ambidextrous.”

I thought about that, sitting in the dark among the plumbing supplies. “So where is she now? My mother?”

“Sealed document,” said Ada. “The less people who know that, the better.”

“She just walked off and left me?”

“She was up to her neck in it,” said Ada. “You’re lucky you’re alive. She’s lucky too, they’ve tried to kill her twice that we know of. They’ve never forgotten how she outsmarted them about Baby Nicole.”

“What about my father?”

“Same story. He’s so deep underground he needs a breathing tube.”

“I guess she doesn’t remember me,” I said dolefully. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”

“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,” said Ada. “She stayed away from you for your own good. She didn’t want to put you at risk. But she’s kept up with you as much as she could, under the circumstances.”

I was pleased by this, though I didn’t want to give up my anger. “How? Did she come to our house?”

“No,” said Ada. “She wouldn’t risk making you a target. But Melanie and Neil sent her pictures of you.”

“They never took any pictures of me,” I said. “It was a thing they had—no pictures.”

“They took lots of pictures,” said Ada. “At night. When you were asleep.” That was creepy, and I said so.

“Creepy is as creepy does,” said Ada.

“So they sent these pictures to her? How? If it was so secret, weren’t they afraid—”

“By courier,” said Ada.

“Everyone knows those courier services leak like a sieve.”

“I didn’t say courier service, I said courier.”

I thought a minute. “Oh,” I said. “You took them to her?”

“Not took, not directly. I got them to her. Your mother really liked those pictures,” she said. “Mothers always like pictures of their kids. She’d look at them and then burn them, so no matter what, Gilead wouldn’t ever see them.”



* * *



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After maybe an hour we ended up at a wholesale carpet outlet in Etobicoke. It had a logo of a flying carpet, and it was called Carpitz.

Carpitz was a genuine carpet wholesaler out front, with a showroom and a lot of carpets on display, but in back, behind the storage area, there was a cramped room with half a dozen cubicles along the sides. Some of them had sleeping bags or duvets in them. A man in shorts was sleeping in one, sprawled on his back.

There was a central area with some desks and chairs and computers, and a battered sofa over against the wall. There were some maps on the walls: North America, New England, California. A couple of other men and three women were busy at the computers; they were dressed like the people you see outside in the summer drinking iced lattes. They glanced over at us, then went back to what they were doing.

Elijah was sitting on the sofa. He got up and came over and asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, and could I have a drink of water please, because all of a sudden I was very thirsty.

Ada said, “We haven’t eaten lately. I’ll go.”

“You should both stay here,” said Garth. He went out towards the front of the building.

“Nobody here knows who you are, except Garth,” Elijah said to me in a low voice. “They don’t know you’re Baby Nicole.”

“We’re keeping it that way,” said Ada. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Garth brought us a paper bag with some wilted croissant breakfast sandwiches in it, and four takeouts of terrible coffee. We went into one of the cubicles and sat down on some used-furniture office chairs, and Elijah turned on the small flatscreen that was in there so we could watch the news while we were eating.

The Clothes Hound was still on the news, but nobody had been arrested. One expert blamed terrorists, which was vague because there were a lot of different kinds. Another said “outside agents.” The Canadian government said they were exploring all avenues, and Ada said their favourite avenue was the waste bin. Gilead made an official statement saying they knew nothing about the bombing. There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians.