Tomorrow (19 page)

Freya’s lip
s part. She drops her head to examine the documents made out in eighteen-year-old Amy Lewandowski’s name, and then nods hesitantly.

I hope she understands
, and that she means it. But I don’t want to put her through this if it means we’ll fail or the effort will strain her mentally. “Look, I know we need to get away from here,” I say to Elizabeth. “But if we reach the border and she still won’t say anything we’re going to attract unwanted attention. Can she even handle this?”

“We’ll do most of the talking for her,”
Elizabeth insists, laying out a back story for customs. I’ll be Amy’s boyfriend. Elizabeth will say she’s Amy’s aunt and she’s driving the two of us to California for Amy’s mother’s wedding.

The second marriage story is a nice touch
—countless people get divorced here and now, while in the U.N.A. the vast majority of marriages lasted. That doesn’t mean the marriages of the future were necessarily stronger, only that gushi gave people a place to escape to where the state of their real life marriages often didn’t matter as much.

“Why California?”
I ask. Elizabeth’s pulled herself together and is thinking on her feet—I’m relieved and surprised to see that, but I’m not sure we’re ready to carry out her plan yet. A single look at the gunshot wound under Elizabeth’s headband or one wrong word from Freya could push us into more trouble than we’re capable of crawling out from under.

“In case the border guard report
s back to anyone about us,” Elizabeth replies. “We tell them Sacramento but stop in Seattle instead.”

“Pick up new identification and book flights out
of the country,” I add, my eyes swimming to Freya. “Do you understand what we’re talking about? Do you remember what happened to you?” I’m desperate to know how much damage we’re dealing with.

“Don’t
ask her about that now,” Elizabeth protests, her eyes harsher than her tone. “Save any complicated questions for later. You can see how fragile she seems. We don’t want to risk upsetting her and we need to keep her focused on the basics of our story.” Elizabeth’s features soften as she gazes into the backseat. “We’re heading to California for your mother’s wedding on Saturday. I’m your aunt Elizabeth and this here is…” She looks to me for confirmation.

“Chris,” I say.

“Chris,” Elizabeth repeats. “We’ll be gone five days. You’re Amy Lewandowski and you’re…”

“Eighteen
.” I point to the ID in Freya’s hands. “Born on November 13, 1967. Just like it says there. You’re Canadian and live in Vancouver. Can you remember all that?”

This time Freya nods readily,
like she wants to please us. “Amy,” she echoes. “Canadian. My mother’s getting married in California on Saturday.”

It’s amazing to hear her voice. Like a genuine miracle.
“Right,” I say happily. “Good.”

Freya’s eyes zoom back to her window and stay there. I give
Elizabeth directions to the border: Highway 99 South, which becomes the I-5 in Washington State. I’ve heard other people discuss the route often enough to remember it.

We pull into a gas station to fill up and so
I can dump the gun and most of the groceries before we get on the 99. Then Elizabeth goes to the bathroom to clean what’s left of her ear. While she’s gone, Freya and I switch seats—if Elizabeth really were her aunt, Freya would be riding up front with her. Climbing out of the car, Freya seems steady on her feet and I want to throw my arms around her and hold on to her for a minute, but she slips nervously past me like I’m a stranger.

The drive
down 99 is mostly quiet, punctuated every five minutes or so by Elizabeth’s repetition of our cover story. Freya successfully parrots Elizabeth each time. I hold back all the questions I want to ask, and Freya offers no explanations of her own. She’s lucid but like a deer caught in headlights.

T
wenty minutes later we’re at the Washington border, part of the convoy of traffic winding around the Peace Arch. Because of Reagan’s death, both flags atop the monument are at half-mast, and although I’ve lived in Canada for fifteen months it strikes me as strange that the United States and Canada are two nations rather than one. Growing up I always knew them both as the U.N.A. Truthfully, they still seem that way to me. In my mind the border’s an illusion that hasn’t yet been erased.

There are only a
few cars ahead of us in the rapidly shortening customs line. Four. Three. Two. One. We’re next. Elizabeth turns expectantly to Freya. “Freya,” she says loudly, her hand tapping Freya’s shoulder. “
Freya
.”

I unbuckle my seatbelt and lean forward
s in my chair to look at her. Freya’s fallen back to sleep at the worst possible time. “You said we shouldn’t wake her up,” I counter. “We need to get out of here.” I glance over my shoulder at the cars gathered behind us. We have to turn around somehow, go back where we came from.

But
Elizabeth’s driving onward. She’s decided it’s show time, whether we can pull it off or not. Elizabeth rolls down her window, the border guard in the tiny hut to our left gazing down at us. “Citizenship?” he asks.

“Canadian,”
Elizabeth says, handing him each of our driver’s licenses. “All of us.”

The border guard
flips quickly through the documents. He smiles through his greying beard, pointing at Freya with his thumb. “Looks like you brought a sleeper with you.”

Elizabeth
pauses, her moment of reticence reeking of guilt.
We shouldn’t have chanced crossing yet
.
Her panic to get away has ruined us.
Then Elizabeth’s right hand flies out to stroke Freya’s hair. “The poor thing isn’t feeling well,” she says. “A touch of food poisoning from the fish she had for supper last night.”

Freya wriggles in her seat, gasping
into consciousness like someone saved from drowning.

“
Wakey, wakey,” the border guard says in a tone midway between comical and someone who enjoys the power that comes with his job a little too much. “So where are you folks going?”

“
Sacramento.” Elizabeth replies. “My sister—her mother—is getting married.”

“And you?” He
wags a finger at me in the backseat.

I tilt my head to indicate F
reya/Amy. “I’m her boyfriend.” That much is the truth and the words slide easily off my tongue. “Her wedding date.”

“How long will the three of you be staying in the United States?”

“Five days,” Freya blurts out in a dry voice.

The border
guard chuckles at Freya’s enthusiastic joining of the conversation. “Well, don’t eat any bad fish.” He hands Elizabeth our licenses and adds, “Have a good day.”

M
y shoulders unknot as we leave the custom station in our wake. Elizabeth pulled it off but she shouldn’t have rushed Freya. We can’t afford to make mistakes, and I can’t trust her judgement.

My fingers squeeze Freya’s arm before
I lean back in my chair and snap my seatbelt on. “Good job.”

“Thank you,” she says meekly.

Within minutes she’s out again and my eyelids are heavy too. I need to stay awake, to make sure Elizabeth doesn’t screw us over somehow or make a wrong move, and for a while longer I do. My throat’s dry and I gulp down some of the juice I salvaged from the groceries in the trunk. Then I lay into Elizabeth, in barbed whispers, for defying her own advice about not waking Freya and being patient with her.

While
Elizabeth’s defending herself I drift away, her voice fading into the hum of the car chugging along the highway. Last night left me exhausted, and between glances out the window I dream snatches of dreams—visions of my mothers dancing together in a future life, of Freya and me paddling in Elaho, of the two of us having lunch on a roof terrace in Ronda, and of art classes with Seneval that end in her death.

Nothing’s really over. Everything stays with you
. The past. The future. Your dreams. Your fears. The people you’ve lost and the ones you’re afraid to lose. Nothing is ever finished.

That’s how it feels
each time I wake up, that I’ll be looping through my life forever. Until the last instance, when I catch Freya staring into the backseat, watching me like I’m an exotic zoo animal. Her eyes clear my mind of everything but her. “You’re awake,” I observe.

“Am I?”
Her lashes blink with a rapidness anyone from the U.N.A. would recognize. It’s what people of the future did at the moment of exiting gushi and returning to real life. An automatic reaction to clear gushi visions and adjust their eyes to reality. Only gushi hasn’t been invented yet.

“Of course you are,” I say gently
but firmly. “You’re wide awake.”

The view from outside the window catches my eye
, diverting my attention: tall buildings, long city blocks, and a monorail zooming almost directly over our heads.
We made it to Seattle.

“We just arrived,”
Elizabeth tells me. “I don’t know the city. Where do you think we should go?”

I don’t know Seattle either. It was abandoned before I was
born.

So we drive like the tourists we are
, Elizabeth and I craning our necks as we cruise around in circles. We pass the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market, and an area that appears to be a business district. Then we swing around and head north again, crossing over the bay. On a nondescript street a few blocks from the University of Washington, we stumble across a motel. It looks like the kind of place we can afford and I instruct Elizabeth to give the person at the front desk a sob story about her credit cards and baggage being stolen. The same story worked for me once, but with her middle-aged office clerk persona, Elizabeth will be believed more readily than I would.

Left alone in the parking lot I finally return my
gaze to Freya, who has stopped her rapid blinking but whose profoundly confused eyes worry me. “Everything’s under control,” I assure her. “Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine. The hard part is over with—we got across.”

Freya grinds her lips together and glances down at her chipped purple nails. “I don’t…
I don’t understand,” she stammers. “What is this? How come I can’t stop it?”

This is exactly what I was afraid of when
I saw her eyelashes flutter in that telltale way. She thinks everything she’s seeing and hearing is gushi, that she’s somehow stuck. There hasn’t been a case of gushi cementing since 2039 but I might suspect the same thing in her place.

“I’ll explain everything when we get inside.” I don’t want her to go into shock
and cause a scene before we can get her safely into the motel room. “It’ll just be a few minutes now. But trust me, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“The way you repeated that is making me nervous,” Freya admits. “We’re in
a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”

“Not
nearly as much as before.” I don’t know how much she remembers about being taken but Elizabeth’s advice to save the complicated questions for later echoes in my mind. Regardless, I can’t resist asking the one that’s been looping through my head since Freya first opened her eyes. “Do you remember me?”

Freya nods
soberly. It’s the answer I was hoping for, yet it still feels wrong. “Do you remember me?” she asks.

“I remember everything about you.” My hand reaches for hers, closing tenderly around her cool fingers.

Freya peers down at our linked hands. Silence envelopes us. It feels strangely like the first time we touched. Like this is brand new again and together we’re something not yet decided.

W
e’re still holding hands when Elizabeth opens the car door and interrupts the quiet minutes later. “We’re hours early for their regular check-in time but we’re in luck,” Elizabeth chirps proudly. “They had a room for us. I had to pay them a deposit because of the credit card situation but they’ll refund it when we check out.” Her chin slopes down as she takes in the image of our hands. “I told them you were siblings so you shouldn’t do that anywhere motel staff could see.”

Freya snatches her
fingers back, two splotches of red forming on her cheeks. I feel the sensation of her fingers against mine even when they’re gone. I grab Freya’s charity box clothes from the trunk and Freya and I trail Elizabeth through the lobby and up to our room. Surveying its matching queen-size beds, I realize I should’ve stolen a change of clothes for myself too. My head fills up with things that still need to be done as I pile Freya’s clothes on the bureau behind me. The fake passports. Money for plane tickets. Flying someplace new where they’ll never find us and creating different lives for ourselves while hoping the threat of Minnow’s virus has been neutralized by the very people who could be searching for us right now.

If
Elizabeth thinks she can depend on me to scratch the first thing off our list, she’s wrong. I’m not leaving Freya alone again.

“Stretch out and lie down, Freya,”
Elizabeth advises, motioning to the beds. Freya lowers herself tentatively onto the nearest mattress, her feet still solidly on the floor. She tugs restlessly at her miniskirt, trying to make it cover more of her thighs than it was designed to.