Hannah

One day passed, then two, then three, without any news about Kevin, just the same answer of ‘We’re looking for him, when I have news I’ll share it with you’ that I received from my mother every time I asked her about him. Time dragged by as I waited for news about Kevin. Most of my time I spent sitting on the beach, looking out at the ocean which had claimed him. Lisa and Miranda did their best to be there for me but I was beyond their comforting. As each day gave way to the next my hopes of seeing Kevin grew fainter. The truth was that I didn’t want Miranda and Lisa with me; I just wanted to be alone. Nothing could make me forget about Kevin being gone. I loved him; the pain caused by the thought of him being gone couldn’t be understood by Lisa or Miranda, they still had each other. I felt a need to feel what I was feeling alone, to privately come to terms with the vast multitude of feelings that took turns assailing me: grief over Kevin possibly being dead, regret at not having made more of the time he was with us, confusion over whether I could trust my mother, and, more than any of the others, anger, at Prospera, my mother, my grandfather and at my inability to do anything about my anger. I couldn’t look for him, I couldn’t look for evidence to prove that he’d been the victim of foul play, I couldn’t air any of my suspicions publicly in an attempt to drum up public pressure on the governing authorities to get them to come clean, were I to do any of these things all that would happen was I would end up like Kevin: eliminated for the sake of the greater purpose that Prospera served.

I wanted to be alone because the truth was that I was alone, we all were. When tragedy struck we had no recourse, no opportunities for closure. The tight-knit community that Prospera was supposed to be was a myth. All of us, as individuals, were subject to the laws of obedience and silence that Prospera demanded we follow for the sake of its continued functioning. First Martha whose baby my mother unilaterally decided would be killed and now the disappearance of Kevin; I’d seen with my own eyes too much of the other side of Prospera for me to believe that it was anything but an evil place. Every day I sat watching the ocean feeling my hope in seeing Kevin again draining away and feeling myself being rapidly consumed by the most opaque sadness. At night I couldn’t sleep. Alone, in the dark, my thoughts were more difficult to live with than they were in the day. After five days there was still no news about Kevin and I was fast approaching the point at which I gave up on ever seeing him again. Until, that fifth night, there was a knock on my bedroom window at a bizarrely late hour.

“Kevin!” I said when I saw his face, more loudly than I should have.

He was standing to the side of my window on the thin stone ledge that separated the first floor from the second floor. I instantly opened my window and he climbed into my room, taking great pains to be as quite as possible. He was dishevelled, dirty and he smelled, none of which mattered to me. I was just happy to see him, so happy that I threw my arms around him and hugged him tightly despite his malodorous scent. There was so much that I wanted to ask him: What happened on the boat? How did he escape? Where had he been sleeping? How had he been surviving? I had so many questions for him racing through my mind that I couldn’t get one out and I ended up not saying anything.

“Do you have any food in the house? I’m starving,” He asked me.

“Sure, wait here.”

I very quietly left my room and went downstairs to the kitchen to get the plate of food that I hadn’t eaten at dinner due to my loss of appetite. On my plate was a pork chop, salad and a roll of bread. I returned to my room with it and Kevin wasted no time in devouring all of it.

“This is my first time eating meat in five days; I’ve been sneaking into the village at night and stealing fruit from the orchards and vegetables from the farms.”

“How have you been sneaking in and out of the village? They’ve been watching the coast non-stop since your disappearance.”

“I found a place where I’m able to climb over the mountain. I took a couple of hard falls the first couple of times I tried it but now I’m able to do it almost expertly.”

“You’ve been staying on the other side of the mountain? In the forest?”

“I found a cave where I sleep, and there’s a stream where I get water.”

“They’re saying that what happened to you was an accident; that they’re out there looking for you so that they can bring you back.”

“I’ve seen them in the forest; I’ve had to work really hard to stay out of their sight. And as for what happened to me being an accident, I don’t believe that for a second.”

“It is possible that they’re telling the truth; I mean, why would they try to eliminate you when there were others on the boat watching, some of whom looked up to you and considered you a friend?”

“They wanted it to look like an accident so that they could get away with it. They want me dead, I’ve known that for a long time and this proves it; I can never come back here.”

“Why did you come and see me then?”

“To let you know that I’m still alive, and to tell you that I’m going to try and make contact with the outside world.”

“You can’t do that! You won’t survive! Nobody who’s ever ventured far into the forest has come back alive!”

“That’s what they told us, but I don’t believe anything they’ve ever told us. We already know that what they told us about the sharks in the ocean was a lie; I’ve been living in the forest for a week so what they told us about it being full of bears and wolves the size of houses was also clearly a lie, and I’m willing to bet that what they told us about the outside world being completely obliterated by nuclear bombs was also a lie.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if by coming back here you’d be safe and by going off in search of the outside world you would be putting yourself in danger?”

“Hannah, you know I’m right. This is my only shot at survival, I have to do this. I’m going to sneak into the village one more time tomorrow night to steal as much food as I can and then I’m leaving; this is the last time we’ll ever see each other.”

Kevin left no room for doubting the seriousness of his words. The finality of them was absolute, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room and paralyzing me. It didn’t seem real to me that Kevin would be alive and I wouldn’t be able to see him. The idea of it was so strange that I didn’t know how to react and allowed the moment of our separation to go by without saying or doing anything to create an indelible memory of it. Kevin said good-bye, climbed out of my window and was gone, never to be seen by me again. That night I was up all night, unable to sleep a wink. The next day, during our first recess at school, I pulled Darren, Lisa and Miranda far away from everyone and informed them of Kevin’s appearance at my window and of his plan for escaping to safety. Like I had been they were all relieved to hear that he was still alive and were also doubtful about his ability to make it through the forest, fearful that if he tried it would be the death of him.

“You have to talk to your mother again, find out if she was being sincere when she said that they don’t want to do any harm to Kevin,” Darren suggested.

“Do you know how many lies my mother has told? How convincing she’s able to appear when she’s lying? She can’t be trusted.”

“What about your grandfather, the head of the Ethics Committee? Have you spoken to him?”

“I understand him less, far less, than I understand my mother; talking to him is not an option.”

“Is there anything that we can do to help Kevin?” Lisa asked, “You said that he was going to be coming back tonight to steal more food from the farms, we could meet him there.”

“He said he hasn’t eaten meat since he’s been gone, we could sneak some out of the drums by the lake for him to eat during his trip, and we could put together some supplies for him: tools, warm clothing, a blanket, definitely a bar of soap,” I said.

“This may be our last chance to save him; are you sure you don’t want to trust your mother and the governing authorities and tell them where he’s going to be tonight?” Miranda asked me.

“No! And don’t you dare tell them behind our backs! You could be condemning him to death if you do!”

“You don’t have to worry about that happening, she’s changed, her blind faith in Prospera is long gone,” Lisa said, turning her head and looking at Miranda with a smile on her face.

“Took you long enough,” I said to Miranda.

“I think we should go with Hannah’s idea, we should do everything we can to help Kevin,” Lisa said, “We should all bring some food, the clothes will have to come from Darren, and we’ll need to put together a list of the most essential instruments he’ll need.”

We agreed that Lisa was right, and after school got to work collecting everything we thought Kevin might need to help him get through the forest: a piece of flint, a hatchet for chopping wood, a frying pan for cooking, two blankets, a water canteen, a lantern, two small bottles of oil (one for burning and one for cooking), a knife, antiseptic cream and bandages in case he gets hurt and enough meat to last him a few days. The meat we wrapped in paper and tied with a string and placed in a satchel along with everything else, except the blankets which we rolled together and secured to the satchel. Not knowing exactly what time Kevin would be returning to the village we all left our houses as soon as we possibly could and headed to the orchards to wait for him. Because my parents worked late into the night I was the last one to arrive. Lisa, Darren and Miranda were waiting among the apple trees, the most logical place to wait for Kevin since most of the other fruits had been picked for pickling in honey in barrels ahead of the winter.

It was cold out. At home we would have been under two blankets with a fire burning in our room keeping us warm. Outside, all we had to keep us warm were our thick winter robes that we were wearing over our pyjamas. We sat close together at the base of one of the trees in an effort to keep ourselves warm. We were too nervous to talk, fearful of being heard and detected by someone who might be outside and in our vicinity. The hours went by in utter silence; the wait was so long that Miranda fell asleep on Lisa’s shoulder. They looked really sweet together; it was wrong that what they had was forbidden in Prospera. Waiting for Kevin to arrive that night afforded me plenty of time to reflect on the series of events that had gotten us to where we were as well as on what it all meant for my future in Prospera. With all of the misgivings that I had about the ways in which so many things were done in Prospera I didn’t understand how it could be possible for me to one day assume a role on the Ethics Committee. Things were done in Prospera in a certain way because that’s the way they’d always been done, as head of the Ethics Committee it would be my job to uphold all of those practices and traditions; how could I do that if there were so many that I disagreed with and would always disagree with? I could never look upon Lisa and Miranda as being abnormal because of the way they felt about each other; I could never look upon Kevin’s curiosity and intelligence with anything but admiration, and rather than forcing people to submit to having their babies killed I would try to find a humane way of ensuring the sustainability of Prospera. If I was confident about Prospera’s willingness to adopt the kinds of changes I would want to make as a member of the Ethics Committee I wouldn’t be so dubious about my suitability for the role, and if I wasn’t going to become a member of the Ethics Committee then what was I going to do? I had been studying from the ‘Dark Books’ so most likely I would be put to work in one of the influential committees like the Education Committee. But would I be happy there? Was it possible for me to be happy in Prospera with everything that I knew, especially with not having Kevin with me?

None of these thoughts that I was having would be easy to resolve; they were so troubling that I had become completely absorbed in them and had I been alone they would have caused me to miss Kevin’s arrival. Fortunately Darren was alert and was able to spot him as he was moving swiftly from tree to tree grabbing as much low hanging fruit as he could. We waited for him to get close to us before we made our presence known to avoid him getting spooked by us and running off.

“Kevin!” I jumped out from behind the tree and said to him when he was about two trees away.

“Hannah?” He asked, clearly astonished to see me there, “What are you doing here?”

“We brought some things for you that we thought would help you on your journey, here,” I said, holding out the bag to him.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the bag from me.

“Are you really going to try and make it to the outside world?” Darren asked him.

“It’s my only option; I can’t come back here and I can’t keep living in the forest forever.”

“Do you really think that you can make it?” Lisa asked him.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

“How will you live in the outside world if you don’t know anything about it?” Lisa asked him.

“I’ll be fine, and like I said, I have no other options.”

“What if the outside world really has been destroyed by nuclear war and is uninhabitable? What will you do, will you come back?” Miranda asked him.

“I don’t think that’s what I’ll find, I think that’s a lie they’ve been telling us to scare us into staying here.”

“If you’re right, will you come back and tell us about the outside world?” Miranda asked him.

“I don’t plan on coming back, no matter what I find.”

“So this is really it then? We’re never going to see you after this?” I asked him.

“I told you that last night.”

I had thought that I had digested most of the shock from Kevin’s announcement the previous night that I wouldn’t be seeing him again. I hadn’t. Looking at him that night I couldn’t accept never seeing him again. At that moment, all at once, my problems with Prospera and my inability to conceive of life without Kevin confluenced and came to a head.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, Hannah, it’s too dangerous,” Kevin responded.

“I can’t stay here; I don’t trust this place anymore, and I can’t be happy knowing that you’re out there somewhere and I can’t see you.”

There was silence after I said this. Kevin, I gleaned from the look on his face, was struggling to decide whether he should allow me to join him.

“I’m coming too.”

“Miranda?” Lisa turned to her and asked, flabbergasted by what she’d heard.

“If we stay here we have two options: we stop seeing each other or we continue seeing each other and live in constant fear of what happened to Kevin happening to us; I don’t want to stay in a place that won’t allow us to be together, so I’m going too,” Miranda said to Lisa, taking her face in her hands, “come with us,” she said, looking imploringly into Lisa’s eyes.

“How can we leave? We’ve got no plan, we only packed enough supplies in that bag for one person; what happens if we run out of food and water and still have a long way to go before we’re out of the forest?”

“I don’t care about any of that; I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with something should that be the case, and this might be the only chance we get to be together without fear of any consequences.”

“If you’re coming with me we’re going to need to go now, the cave where I’ve been sleeping isn’t close and we’re going to need to wake up early and start moving to avoid being spotted by a search party.”

With that Kevin walked off, leaving it up to us to decide if we were going with him. I followed him without hesitation and was shortly followed by Miranda, pulling Lisa along by her arm.

“Are you guys seriously leaving? For good?” Darren asked from behind us.

“You’re welcome to come with us,” Miranda said back to him, not slowing her gait.

Darren didn’t follow us; he remained rooted to the ground where he was standing and watched us walk away. None of us were expecting Darren to follow us; four years ago when we went into the forest he was the only one who’d stayed behind.

Leaving Prospera that night, I felt immeasurably more exhilarated than I had when we’d gone into the forest. This was for good, we were leaving behind our sheltered lives in Prospera to fend for ourselves in the wild, after which we’d have to adapt to whatever awaited us in the outside world. A brand new chapter in our lives was beginning, one that was full of mystery and discovery.