Contain (31 page)

Dad's eyes roll toward the sound.
They're no longer focused. “K-k-killll . . .
her.”

My heart freezes. How could he be
thinking of Mom, thinking about her that way?

“
Kill . . . .
” He
starts to choke.

“
Shhh
,” I tell him, and his eyes roll back toward me. “Dad, it's
okay. It's okay. You can rest now. I'm okay. We'll be
okay.”

I'm babbling now, I know it. I know I
should just shut up, but I don't want to hear the things he's
saying. I just want him to close his eyes and go to sleep. “It's
okay. I'm not angry. I'm not mad anymore.”

The bleeding has stopped.

“
Please, Dad, just close
your eyes.
Shhhh
.”

But he doesn't. His face relaxes, but
his eyes remain open. The tension that was always there in his
forehead and cheeks dissipates. His fingers uncurl. His arm
drops.

“
Dad!
”

I feel the backs of his fingers brush
my cheek.

“
You
must
,” he whispers, the words so clear that
I can't be sure I'm not just imagining them. “
Save themmmm
 . . . .”

And then his eyes finally close, and
he's gone.

I wake with a start, gasping for air, forcing it into my lungs like
a man given the briefest of reprieves from a vicious sea determined
to claim him. Like a man who expects to be sucked back beneath the
smothering waves at any moment. I draw the air in and let it out,
and suck it back in again, waiting for the darkness to engulf me.
My head spins from the pressure of knowing that my father is gone
forever. From knowing that I am the only one of my family left
alive on this earth.

My face and fingertips grow numb as
the shock returns. But sleep doesn't come.

Eventually, my breathing grows
shallow, slows to its resting rhythm and depth. The only sound to
my ears is the soft rush of it through my nose and the distant chug
of the machines far away, churning, churning, churning water into
electricity that is no longer needed.

Light from the hallway slips in
beneath the door, casting a sooty haze over my world. Floating
above my head, Mia Largent's polygonal flowers wink down at me,
muted shades of gray in an even grayer gloom. The clock on the wall
says it's just past one in the morning. Which day it is no longer
matters. Three years have passed, or six. A hundred. I don't
know.

I am alone.

Everything that happened after my
father exhaled his last breath is a jumble. It feels like months
have passed, but I can't remember taking any meals. I'm not hungry.
I have no urges but one, not to rise, or eat, or even to live. Only
to die.

Yet as badly as I desire the end, my
body refuses to succumb to my grief. My heart continues to pump
with relentless dependability.

It was Bix who came and got me. I
remember that now, Bix who lifted me from my father's body and
guided me away. A clatter of noise surrounded me— yelling, crying,
wailing. None of the voices mine. Numb, I let him lead me from one
place to another, while the group swirled around me, a hazy
coalescence of bodies and sounds trying desperately to regain a
sense of control in a world where there is no sense and even less
control.

I remember sitting in the meal room
upstairs, Level One, though I don't remember climbing the steps to
get there. I remember it was crowded, and there was a lot of
shouting. Bren whispering in my ear, holding me, weeping. I
struggle to recall what was said. My mind fills with an image of
Seth Abramson standing in front, trying to calm everyone. Someone
has to be in charge, and he is the obvious choice.

I hear him tell us that the killer has
been caught. “Jonah Resnick has been locked away,” he announces.
“He has confessed to everything. We can all rest easy now. We need
to move forward with the business of surviving.”

I remember someone saying we should
banish Jonah. Someone else suggests we throw him from the catwalk
into the rapids below the bypass gates. “If he lives, he lives. Let
him deal with the world out there on his own if he
does.”

Of course, everyone knows that no one
could survive that fall, not into those churning waters. Not onto
those rocks.

His fate soon becomes a moot point. He
will die, alone and starving, in the dark. A sentence befitting the
crimes he committed.

Later, Bix tells me that Seth Abramson
has moved to seal all the usual access points to Levels Five and
Six, mobilizing every able-bodied adult to assist. They're
relocating the remaining food stock into rooms only he has access
to. The keeper station is locked up, the broken window boarded over
and the outside door welded shut. The door from the stairwell has
been bolted closed. Wood from spare crates has been nailed over the
elevator door.

“
I suppose if someone
really wanted to, they could climb down from Level Four,” Bix
says.” But who would want to go down there? Those levels are
haunted now. Just being inside the same building with them gives me
the creeps.”

Haunted.

The word makes me think of Level Ten.
Bren always said she thought she heard voices down there, crying.
It so totally spooked her that she refused chores requiring her to
go there. But there were no ghosts. The voices and crying were from
the living, not the dead. I know that now.

But Levels Five and Six are haunted.
This whole place is. And I will never be able to unhear their
voices.

“
Jonah Resnick can rot in
his cell, for all I care,” Bix says, sitting beside me in my
quarters at some point in time between then and now. Weeks later?
Days? Hours? I don't know.

His words parrot the speech Mister
Abramson gave right after the murders upstairs. I remember how,
delirious with grief, his face streaked with tears and splattered
with the blood of the deceased, Seth blamed Jonah's incredible
selfishness for nearly tearing the group apart. “An evil boy,” he
wailed.

His verdict was delivered
with uncharacteristic swiftness, bitterly critical for a man who
was usually so mild mannered. “I lost two good friends
today.
We
lost two
good friends. And so soon after losing our doctor and Rory Newsom,
as well. All at the hands of this . . . this madman,
this
child
of
evil!”

Hannah's words refuse to
leave me. They trouble my mind endlessly:
You don't know him. He's not like that. He's kind.
Compassionate.

So blind. How could we be so blind?
How could I?

“
He's not caring.” That's
what I'd told her. He only knows how to hate.

You're wrong, Finn. He's
just confused. I know he doesn't hate you.

Our blindness has been our
downfall.

“
Jonah Resnick confessed.”
These are Mister Abramson's final words that night, before he sends
Jonah to be locked away in a room on Level Nine. And so the dungeon
really has become its namesake. “You all heard him. He admitted to
it. He confessed to everything.”

The meeting ended shortly after that.
I don't remember leaving.

I don't remember coming back to my
quarters.

Just flashes of things afterward: Bix
sitting with me for a while. Bren, too. Even Hannah, once. All of
them talking to me, whispering, mourning. But mostly I slept and
didn't listen. I dreamed. And each time I did, it was my father and
me who can't escape the Wraiths on the road, trying to get the bus
to stop.

I lie here and wonder how long have I
been drowning in the tasteless, odorless, soundless numbness of
shock? How long has it been smothering me, leaving me hanging onto
life in a place that was never meant for the living?

Too long.

But a new numbness infuses me now.
This one has a different flavor and feel. A different texture. It
tastes like the numbness of understanding.

It tastes of resolution.

I know now what needs to be
done.

So, at long last, after years
compressed into moments, and mere seconds expanded into an eternity
of pain, I rise from my bedroll. I get dressed.

My eyes catch for a moment
on my father's pad, still rumpled from the last time he lay down on
it.
How long has it been?

I pull on a faded tee shirt that feels
a size too small. I've grown out of all the clothes I came with.
This is a hand-me-down from my father. He'll no longer need
it.

I am calm. I feel nothing because of
my calmness.

I slip out into the hallway, the heavy
wrench in my hand. So powerful. So potent. And I make my way down
to the dungeons. I must finish this.

Because there's no worse curse than
being alone.

It doesn't take me long to find the room, and though I expect the
steel door to be unguarded — why go through the trouble if he
can't escape and nobody will let him free? — I am surprised
and disappointed to find that Linda Resnick couldn't even be
bothered to be with her son. I understand that she's mourning the
death of her husband at her son's hand, but what kind of mother
leaves her child to rot alone in a dank, dark, barren cell, even if
he's an accused murderer?

It makes me pause. Does her absence
mean something? The woman would know her son better than anyone
else. She would know his true nature.

Or perhaps not. She never felt to me
like a person who spent much time contemplating others and their
needs. I always just assumed it was because she was always
oppressed in the shadow of the two men in her life, but now I
wonder.

I'm torn as I make my way down the
darkened hallway accompanied only by silence — save the
ever-present rumble of the turbines, whose sound has become as
invisible to me as the beating of my own heart — silence which
empties my darkened mind and permits Hannah's voice to fill it.
What am I to make of her plea to look deeper than I really want
to?

He's not the person you
think he is.

But then again, who really
is?

Not me.

So I press on. I find Jonah's cell,
and I put all doubt to rest.

* * *

Two hours later, and it's after three o'clock when I finally leave
Level Nine. My hands are black and sticky, coated with thick
unspeakable grime, and my arms and back ache from swinging the
wrench so hard and so many times that, for a while, I had lost
feeling in my whole body. My clothes are destroyed. They will never
come clean. They're rags anyway.

I stop briefly in the seldom-used
washroom on Level Four, risking the chance that someone will be
there and see me, but the hallway is empty, and my footsteps go
unheeded by anyone except me.

I clean up as best as I can, then I
head to my quarters where I change, discarding the tattered shorts
I have worn out and outgrown. I don a threadbare pair of jeans that
had belonged to my father and boots whose treads have long since
been sacrificed to innumerable steps within these walls. They are
thin and hard and they rub my feet in places I am not used to them
being rubbed.