ESCAPE

Hannah

News of Kevin’s disappearance travelled fast. One of the boy’s on the fishing crew was particularly fond of Kevin and was unable to remain calm about what had happened when the boat returned to dock despite being told to do so by the crew leader. He talked loudly and hysterically about how Kevin had been knocked overboard and had swum off into the distance. The people who were gathered at the deck to witness the haul of fish come in all overheard him, returned to the village and started talking about it. There was no time for the governing authorities to take control of the story; the news that Kevin had been knocked overboard by an oar and had swum away spread through the village like wildfire.

The news reached me when I was walking to the library to do some studying and I overheard it being discussed at our residential area’s food collection point. Upon hearing the news my body and mind completely shut down. I dropped all of the books I was carrying to the floor and stood motionless for a number of seconds. I needed to be shaken out of my paralysis by Esmeralda, the woman who was supervising the food collection point. Returning to full consciousness I quickly picked up the books that I remembered nobody else was supposed to see and ran to the Central Administration building to confront my mother. All I had heard from the conversation that had been taking place at the food collection point was that the fishing boat had returned without Kevin, instantly bringing to mind the incident years ago when a boy of similar age hadn’t returned on the fishing boat and had been declared dead at sea. The weather that day, I remembered, had also been cloudy and windy. The thought entered my mind that perhaps they chose days when there would be bad weather to get rid of somebody on the boat so that they could label it as an accident that had resulted from the bad weather.

When I reached my mother’s office in the Central Administration building there was no talk of a freak weather related accident. My mother was being informed of the situation by an Ethics Committee staff member who, from what I briefly heard before I entered, was telling her that Kevin may still be alive and that they had a number of options for how to deal with the situation.

“What did you do?” I entered and asked my mother, who was sitting behind her desk.

“Jacob, could you leave us please,” my mother said to him calmly and peremptorily, a request he immediately complied with, “Hannah, sit down, we need to talk.”

“What did you do to Kevin?” I asked, unable to restrain my anger.

“Nobody did anything to Kevin, what happened was an accident.”

“You’re lying! How could you do this? You know how much he means to me.”

“Hannah, you need to compose yourself. What happened to Kevin was an accident; that oar striking him on the back of his head was pure clumsiness.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Is there any reason why Kevin would have interpreted this as a malicious act?”

“Yes, you’ve had it in for him for years, taking him out of school and making him work in the stables, assigning him to the fishing boat which has claimed lives before; he’s known for a long time that you don’t want him as a citizen of Prospera.”

“We had very specific reasons for doing all of those things, reasons that I won’t go into now because we’re pressed for time; Kevin may still be alive and we need to find him, do you know of anywhere that he might have gone?”

“Why do you want to find him?”

“So that we can bring him back safely and explain to him that this was all a misunderstanding and that there is no reason for him to be afraid of anything.”

“How can I believe you, given everything that I know and have seen?”

“Do you think that we wanted to kill Kevin and leave his body out at sea? Killing each other is what they do in the outside world; it is not what we do here! The people who founded Prospera did so to escape all of that, there has never been one single incident of one person killing another person here! You should know better than to suggest as much.”

It simply wasn’t possible for me to believe that my mother was telling me the truth, not after all that we’d lived through and not with the way she was speaking to me. It was clear that her tone of voice, her demeanour and the words with which she’d spoken that they were all intended to assuage my doubts. Who is this woman? I asked myself. I had seen so many different sides of my mother that it was becoming impossible for me to identify the real Diane. At that moment the person sitting before me was not my mother, it was the deputy head of the Education Committee and a Prospera prefect whose sole interest was in achieving the most satisfactory outcome to the crisis that she found herself faced with. I didn’t give my mother any information about how they might go about locating Kevin; I didn’t have any information to give and if I did I wouldn’t have given her any of it, to do so would have been a potentially fatal betrayal of Kevin.

I was scared, more than I’d ever been before. In all the years that we’d been suspicious and distrustful of Prospera never before had what we feared been so real. I had thought often before about the possibility that a day would come when I wouldn’t see Kevin and would never see him again. The day that I had been living in fear of had arrived, and none of the time that I had spent imagining what it would be like had prepared me for what actually losing Kevin would do to me. I walked out of my mother’s office and the Central Administration building feeling numb from head to toe. There was the possibility that he was still alive out there somewhere for me to cling to, but he couldn’t survive on his own and there was nowhere for him to escape to. And what would happen if he was found? Was my mother telling the truth, would he be brought back safely? Or would they finish the job? More than anything else it was the powerlessness I felt that was causing me to desert my body. A crew of fresh men was going to be taking the fishing boat out to look for Kevin, while I could do nothing but wait for news. That news might come soon, informing me that they’d found him alive or that they’d found his body, or it might take days, in which case they would be declaring him dead and would cease searching for him.

I walked home like an apparition, in despair, feeling hopeless and abandoned, unsure of how I should approach the future. Investing hope in him coming back felt too risky and resigning myself to having lost him forever was too painful. When I arrived home my house was empty, freeing me to express how I was feeling without restraint. I ran up to my room, threw myself on my bed and cried as if Kevin was dead. My body retched with every deep sob, my pillow was soaking wet in a matter of seconds. I curled up into a ball clutching my pillow to my face, screaming into it. The thought of Kevin being gone was tearing me apart from the inside out. Had I been left alone I would have remained in my bed crying and wailing into my pillow until I fell asleep from exhaustion, after which I would have woken up and started crying all over again. Lisa and Miranda arrived at my house not long after I’d thrown myself on my bed and started crying and gave me something more substantial to hold onto than a pillow. Holding onto my friends and letting go of all of my feelings, I was able to eventually get sufficient control of myself to talk through the situation with them.

“Is he still alive?” Lisa asked me when my crying had subsided and I’d removed my head from their shoulders.

“Possibly, they say he swam away from the boat after he got knocked overboard.”

“There are only two places he could’ve swum to: the other side of either of the sea cliffs,” Lisa said.

“That’s if he didn’t tire himself out swimming and drown,” I said, giving voice to a worry I’d only just developed.

“You know Kevin would never let something like that happen, he’s too strong, which means he’s definitely still alive,” Miranda said, her words typifying her trademark optimism, “We have to go look for him.”

“We can’t, if they find out we’re not afraid to swim far out into the ocean it’ll mean big trouble for us,” Lisa said, her words typifying her trademark rationality and sagacity.

“But if we don’t look for him…”

“If we go looking for him we might also lead them right to him,” Lisa said, cutting off Miranda, “Have you talked to your mother about this?” She turned to me and asked.

I nodded my head, communicating to her that I had.

“What did she say about what happened?”

“She said that it was an accident, clumsiness on the part of one of the crew members.”

“Do you believe her?”

I shook my head.

“If Kevin is alive, it’s not in the interests of the governing authorities to bring him back,” Lisa said.

“What do you mean?” Miranda asked her.

“He would have been out in the ocean a long time; if he comes back alive it would reveal to everyone that the ocean isn’t as dangerous as they’d been told it is.”

“So then we have to go and look for him and bring him back ourselves, before they find him and do something to him,” Miranda said animatedly.

“No, if Kevin is alive he’s most likely figured all of this out himself; we need to trust that he can take care of himself and figure out a way to get himself to some kind of safety,” I said.

This wasn’t an easy conclusion for me to reach. I trusted Kevin’s intelligence and abilities more than anyone else’s but how could I live with myself if he was still alive and we did nothing to help him and the news reached us that he was dead? I reassured myself about my decision by reminding myself that there was nothing else I could do. Everything that Lisa had said was correct; the risks involved, to us and to Kevin, should we decide to try and find him, were too great. Despite having reached this conclusion and this decision I was still in a state of overwhelming panic. Having Lisa and Miranda there with me was a big help. It felt good not to be attacking and yelling at each other like we had been only a few days earlier on the beach. Not being able to trust my own mother their friendship was all I could count on to aid me in getting through this episode; that we had gotten back to being concerned about and trusting of each other was wonderful.