Hannah

Nobody understood what I was going through; how could they? They’d never had a child pulled out of them as death, as a still, hideous malformation. Lisa was right to prevent me from seeing the foetus; had I seen it the image of it would have haunted my every waking second and given me nightmares every night. I hadn’t been given the chance to say goodbye to it; the child that I’d carried in my womb for five months had emerged from me and been taken away without me having any form of contact with it whatsoever, as if my failure as a mother to bring a healthy child to term had stripped me of the right to achieve closure on its death.

The thought that our child was dead—disposed of as medical waste—because I had been a failure as a mother wouldn’t release its tight grip of me. Over and over, day after day, I thought back to the weeks leading up to my miscarriage and wondered what would have been the outcome had I done something when I’d first started experiencing cramps. I couldn’t escape the question of whether our child would have survived had I acted or was it doomed from the beginning? Miranda was trying her best to help me through the most difficult time of my life but I wasn’t in the mood to be helped, all I wanted was to be alone, to be left to feel the full grief of losing my child. Somehow I managed to find the will to do things when Kevin asked me to. The child that had been lost had been ours and in the wake of its death Kevin had continued to go on with his daily life, burying what he was feeling as was typical of him. I couldn’t add to the burden that he was suffering through in silence, not when he was suppressing what he was feeling to allow me to feel the full extent of my grief.

Kevin didn’t talk much but that didn’t mean I understood him any less or that he understood me any less. From when we were small children we’d had an intuitive understanding of each other and this time was no different. He sympathised with my desire to return to Prospera and see all of its familiar faces, my mother’s especially. My mother had never been the warmest person; she performed all of her responsibilities in the village with an unflappable efficiency that made her look cold to those observing her. Only I and a few others knew the truth about what was beneath that stone façade: a woman of compassion who struggled everyday with conflicted feelings about the extraordinary sacrifices Prospera asked of its people in the interest of preserving the peace and prosperity of the village. My mother, who had sat across from women and told them that they had no choice but to submit to an abortion because the village’s resources couldn’t support any more people, was the person that I wanted to see. She understood all too well what the pain I was going through was like having had to deal with so many women who’d gone through the same thing under duress; she understood what was required to accept the flaws of a society and live in it regardless. There was so much that I wanted to talk with her about, not just my miscarriage. I wanted to talk with her about the truth of this world, that it hadn’t been destroyed by nuclear war and that for all of its problems it actually functioned reasonably well. My own personal opinion of it had changed a great deal because of Morgan’s execution and how close to home that had struck; the objective reality though was that the vast majority of the 11 billion people on the planet were not affected by war. I wanted to tell my mother that the paranoia about change and progress that enveloped Prospera was not entirely merited and that the constraints of the village could be loosened without inviting anarchy upon it.

But I had to get there first, a journey for which I required help. I couldn’t imagine making it back to Prospera without Kevin, without whom we wouldn’t have made it here to the outside world; having him with me on the journey back was absolutely essential. I started emerging from the darkness that I had been trapped in only after Kevin came into the bedroom, sat next to me on the bed and told me that he would accompany me back to Prospera. The next day I left the bed and resumed responsibility for all of my daily functions, taking that burden off Miranda, who had continued to demonstrate the strength and maturity that she had developed since leaving Prospera. She’d been by my side taking care of me the whole time that I’d been grief stricken. Everybody trusted her to do it, most importantly Kevin. Not for a second did anyone doubt her. I thought that the best way I could thank her for everything that she’d done for me was to do as much as I could to alleviate any concerns they had about my mental state. Two days after Kevin told me that he would come back to Prospera with me I went to the stables to get my horse Charlotte for a ride around the farm to inspect things.

“She’s been missing you,” Charlie said to me, a teenage refugee that we’d hired to work in the stables.

“I’ve missed her too,” I said, nuzzling the horse.

I had been missing her. Coming from Prospera where we relied on horses for almost everything we had a deep affinity for them and I had an especially deep affinity for Charlotte, a horse that Frank had surprised me with. She’d belonged to a friend of his, one of the neighbouring farmers, who didn’t have the time to help her recover from a leg injury that she’d sustained. Charlie and I had worked together for weeks to help Charlotte overcome her injury and in the process I had developed a deep bond with her. Horses were wonderful creatures that way; like dogs they identified with human emotions and responded sympathetically. Nuzzling Charlotte, I felt like she was communicating to me how much she had missed me and was also offering me her condolences for my loss. I led her out of her pen, mounted her when we were out of the stable and set off with greater energy than I’d had before I’d seen her. Work on the farm was continuing as normal. I hadn’t been out of the picture long enough for my absence to have had a telling effect, everybody was continuing with work that didn’t require very much supervision. That day they were harvesting a field of potatoes and loading them into crates for the delivery truck from the Food Assistance program that was going to be there the next morning to pick them up. They were all working just fine and only stopped to greet me, welcome me back, enquire about my health and say how sorry they were for what had happened to me.

It was heartening to see their faces and to be reminded of all the good work that we’d been doing together for months, at the same time it was saddening to think about leaving behind what we had worked so hard to accomplish. The fields around us, at one point nothing but barren dirt, had green life sprouting from every piece of land, crops that produced grain and vegetables that fed people that had been driven from their homes and their towns by a stupid war. I had seen with my own eyes when working with Sister Bernadette how much what we were doing meant to those whose plates our food ended up on. No matter what, the farm had to be kept going, it couldn’t be allowed to collapse and become fallow as it had when Frank had been forced to commit increasing amounts of his time to the Chamber of Commerce to help with refugee resettlement. The work that was being done was too important; as desperate as I was to get back to Prospera I wasn’t going to do so without first ensuring that the farm would continue to be productive. Frank was still too busy with his work at the Chamber of Commerce to take over and Cathy had never had much of an interest in farming. I needed to find somebody else, one of the workers, and familiarize them with the management of the entire farm. There were several candidates that I considered, Charlie included, none of whom I was able to readily decide upon. I talked about it that night in the cottage with the others at the kitchen table during dinner, my first dinner with them for days, during which Kevin put forward an unexpected solution to my problem.

“I’ll run the farm, if it’s that important to you.”

“Aren’t you coming with me back to Prospera?”

“I’m going to help you get there, once you’re over Guardian Mountain I’m coming back.”

“I thought you were coming back with me!”

“They tried to kill me; I’m not going back there.”

“This means we’re not going to see each other ever again.”

“I know.”

When we’d been talking about returning to Prospera I had assumed that Kevin would be coming all the way with me, finding out that he wasn’t took the wind out of me. I realized then how divergent our experiences had been, both in Prospera and here in the outside world. Kevin, Lisa and Miranda had no interest in returning to Prospera. To them it was a place that had tried to kill Kevin and wouldn’t recognize Lisa and Miranda’s love. They had left that place and arrived in a world where such fears were unnecessary and their destinies were their own to choose. They didn’t spend hours weighing the shortcomings of absolute freedom against the guarantees of a controlled state, they didn’t possess the knowledge about what went on in Prospera and why that I did, they hadn’t spent any time studying the history of this world and the dynamics of its politics and economics; they were content to be in a place that wasn’t Prospera which they regarded as nothing more than a persecutory state.

I was more than a little disappointed in them for not fully comprehending what Prospera represented and I knew that it would be a waste of time for me to try and get them to understand what I understood about Prospera. I suddenly felt intensely alone at the dinner table, separated from my friends and my boyfriend by a chasm of thought. Had I been brainwashed? I wondered later that night when I was lying in bed, unable to sleep. Had my mother’s lessons been more than just lessons? Was it by design that I was unable to break away from Prospera the way the others had? It made sense that the people in charge of running the village would need to be the most committed believers in the philosophy of the system by which the village was governed; had my mother been turning me into one of those committed believers? Had the truths about Prospera and the outside world that she’d shared with me all been a part of a campaign to turn me into exactly the sort of person they wanted serving on the Ethics Committee?

I didn’t get to sleep that night, my mind racing with these questions. I was sitting at the kitchen table the next morning when Kevin—always the first one to wake up—came and sat with me.

“Did you get any sleep last night?” He sat opposite me with his cup of coffee and asked.

“No, I couldn’t stop thinking,” I answered, taking a sip from my coffee.

“About going back to Prospera on your own?”

“About why I’m the only one who wants to go back.”

“I thought you wanted to see your mother.”

“It’s more than that; I’ve been feeling this way ever since we first arrived here. I was thinking last night that it’s because I was somehow brainwashed by my mother in the time that she was my instructor.”

“I wouldn’t put that past Prospera; I’d say that’s certainly possible. Do you still want to go back?”

“Yes, the answers to all of these questions that I’m looking for are in Prospera; I want to go back now more than I did before.”

Kevin hadn’t done anything to convince me to stay since I’d told him in the hospital that I wanted to go back to Prospera. I didn’t take that as him not caring that I was leaving; he knew that I couldn’t be talked out of what I’d decided and he didn’t want me to be any more torn about my decision than I was already. Leaving him was by far the hardest part of the decision that I’d made. I was hoping that after returning to Prospera I could find out the truth about what had happened to Kevin, get them to guarantee his safety and prevail upon them to allow me to return to the outside world and bring him back to the village with me. Yes, this was extremely wishful thinking on my part; the village elders would never allow such a thing, I wasn’t even sure if they were going to allow me to return. There had been those that had come through Huntingdale on their way to Prospera that hadn’t reached Prospera and hadn’t been seen again in Huntingdale; I could end up suffering the same fate they had, which was at best some form of imprisonment and at worst, death. What had happened to those people was one question in a long list of questions that I was desperate for answers to, answers that I was willing to take the enormous risk of going back to get.