RETURN

Miranda

We weren’t all that surprised when Kevin said to us that Hannah wanted to return to Prospera. She had a connection to Prospera that was stronger than the rest of ours because of all the time that she’d spent with her mother learning things about the village that we knew nothing about. We’d all become relatively settled in the outside world with everything that we were doing, but like Hannah we also felt a tug in the direction of Prospera, our home. Being away from it for six months, many of the fears and worries that we’d had when we’d been there seemed in retrospect much less serious than they had when they had driven us to flee. Even so, none of us felt strongly about returning. We’d come to like the things they had in this world that in Prospera they felt they had to guard against and the thought of returning to that primitive way of life didn’t appeal to us very much at all. And for me and Lisa, there was no forgetting the fear that we’d felt about the possibility that we might be targeted for being lesbians. We had no intention of returning to a place where we couldn’t freely be with each other and Kevin had no intention of returning to a place where they had tried to kill him. If Hannah was serious about returning to Prospera we would have to help her get back, the journey through the woods was far too treacherous for her to make it alone. Kevin would no doubt help her to get back, I hadn’t yet discussed with Lisa if we would go with them.

Lisa hadn’t been the same since she’d helped Hannah through her miscarriage. She’d been calm and purposeful throughout the entire episode but once Hannah was safely in the hands of Sister Audrey and Dr Ahmad at the clinic and we had returned home the effect that it had taken on her was plain for all of us to see. She became withdrawn and reticent, at times she would stop in the middle of doing something and just stare into space; she startled easily, and at night she cried. Kevin and I understood why she was so shaken. When I’d been in the bathroom with the foetus I had unwrapped the towel a little and quickly folded it back having only seen a little of the foetus. It was a funny pink and brown colour, wrinkly and terribly misshapen. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Lisa to put her hands on it and help pull it out of Hannah. For it to have been Hannah, a close friend, that she’d had to help through such an ordeal, only made it worse.

A cloud of death was hanging over all of us. Morgan’s execution, followed later that night by Hannah’s miscarriage, had brought a pall down over the farm. Cathy had once again succumbed to her grief having pulled herself together to be of assistance to Hannah. During the day I spent all of my time in the farmhouse, taking care of Kristin and consoling Cathy, and in the evenings I was in the cottage with Lisa, holding her in bed while she cried. I felt bad for Kevin, who was going through all of this alone. Sitting next to Hannah when she had been giving birth he had also seen the disfigured mass that his child had been born as. Like he always did Kevin dealt with his feelings silently on his own; even if any of us were to offer him our support I doubted he would accept it.

With everything that was going on it was easy to understand Hannah’s desire to return to Prospera, a place where we were ensconced in an environment that protected us from ever having to feel anything too painful. I didn’t feel that going back was the right thing to do not only because Lisa and I didn’t want to return to being afraid of being with each other but also because there was nothing real about life in Prospera. It was all fantasy, and we had become accustomed to the harsh reality of the real world. Even with Mattis’s inexorable approach we didn’t feel that the danger he posed rose to a level that necessitated flight.

The much bolstered US forces were facing no resistance as they made their way inexorably north through Canada. The war was over, it was only a matter of time before it became official; what we were all interested in was what was going to happen after. All of the early indicators pointed to the United States remaining as occupiers. The biggest advantage of the large numbers of troops that Mattis had committed to the war was the army’s ability to leave behind sufficient troops in the towns they entered to hold them effectively while the rest of the army marched on. #OI became no more of a nuisance than a mosquito. Attacks by the group on towns that the US army had moved on from resulted in a 100% casualty rate among the #OI fighters. In no time the group became irrelevant. The casualties they were suffering completely demoralized the members and the attacks stopped; Mattis had at last rid himself of his greatest annoyance. The day that Hannah came home, four days after her miscarriage, the breaking news story that was covered all day was the capture of Calgary by the Americans. As had been the case the previous few weeks the capture of Calgary had been done without the use of any violence. Immediately US soldiers started taking the place of all law enforcement officers in the streets, the mayor was removed from office and replaced by an American administrator who wasted no time in installing his own staff and the American flag—a bald eagle head with two crossed duelling pistols underneath it set on a blue background with a red border—was flown above the City Municipal Building. The takeover of Alberta’s capital city was completed with remarkable speed and efficiency and foretold a swift takeover of the country as a whole.

With Hannah returning home from the clinic we weren’t as concerned by the story as we perhaps should have been. Kevin was given the day off from the butchery and together with Cathy three of us went to pick her up from the clinic. We didn’t need to help her out of the clinic but she was still incredibly weak, I suspected more from the psychological trauma of what she’d endured than the physical trauma. Sister Audrey told us when we were packing her things in her room to make sure she got plenty of rest, that she took her medication and to be watchful for any signs of infection.

“I’ll be there to check on her, so there’s nothing to worry about,” Lisa said to her.

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After her brilliance on the night of Hannah’s miscarriage there was nobody who wasn’t reassured by Lisa saying that she would be around to help. In our eyes Lisa had changed during the night of the miscarriage, taking on an elevated stature among us similar to Kevin’s. We’d seen that we could rely on her and trust her no matter the situation. In the days ahead it wasn’t going to be Lisa taking care of Hannah, it was going to be me taking care of her in addition to taking care of Kristin and consoling Cathy. My hope was that it wouldn’t be long before Cathy returned to normal. She’d always wanted to be of as much help to us as possible and I was going to need her help.

Cathy was far more capable than her father gave her credit for. I had faith in Cathy to be there for us if we needed her and I knew that Kevin, Lisa and Hannah felt the same. Were we to return to Prospera it would mean leaving Cathy behind and probably never seeing her ever again, another reason I had zero enthusiasm for Hannah’s plan to return. And it wasn’t just Cathy; Frank and Kristin had become like family to us, they felt more like our adoptive parents than people who were kind enough to put us up in their cottage. Despite that, Hannah was adamant that she wanted to return to Prospera. The time that she’d spent in this world had not been sufficient to sever her bond to Prospera and her homesickness had become too powerful for her to resist any more. Her miscarriage was what had pushed her to the finality of her decision. Because of the way that we were living independently on our own it was easy for us to forget that we were still only 17 years old, still children. After what Hannah had been through, it made perfect sense that she would want to see her mother.

Once we had established that there was no changing Hannah’s mind about returning we stopped discussing the issue and focused on other pressing concerns that we had, like how I was going to manage on my own at home taking care of Kristin, Hannah and Cathy. Kevin and Lisa were also concerned about my ability to do everything on my own; unfortunately they were too busy with their jobs to do anything about it. Taking care of Kristin alone was a round-the-clock job. Her cancer treatments had left her very weak and she needed help performing most of her daily functions. Every day in the morning I made her soup for breakfast and helped her to use the toilet, take a bath and change into new clothes; in the afternoon I made her lunch and all throughout the day if ever she needed anything, like help getting to the toilet, I was there for her too. In the evening after he came home Frank took over from me, feeding Kristin her dinner and helping her bath before they went to bed. When Cathy had been taking care of Kristin with me it hadn’t felt like a burdensome responsibility at all; doing it on my own for a few days following Morgan’s execution it proved to be an exhausting job. I needed either Cathy or Hannah to snap out of the grief induced daze that they were in soon so that one of them could take some of the responsibility off my shoulders. Given the tragedies that they’d been through my expectation was that it would be Cathy who would be the first to return to a basic level of consistent functionality.

The miscarriage had devastated Hannah. Her depression was worse than it had been when Kevin had gone missing at sea and when she’d first arrived here and learned about the disorderliness of this world. She didn’t want to eat, bathe or get out of bed, making her harder to take care of than Kristin. I tried as hard as I could but there were times when I couldn’t get her to do what she needed to do; I would let her go mornings and afternoons without eating and would enlist Kevin’s help in the evening to get her to eat something for dinner. Getting her to bath was even harder because it was something she didn’t have to do. For as many as three days she wouldn’t bath until we forced her to. After several days of Hannah showing no signs of progress we started worrying about suicide. Fearful of what she would do if I left her alone for too long I rushed through everything when I was with Kristin and ran back to the cottage to keep an eye on Hannah, telling Cathy before I left to listen out for her mother. Cathy didn’t let me down and assumed responsibility for taking care of her mother full time, allowing me to concentrate on Hannah. I’d sit next to her on the bed and try talking with her, often getting no response. Hannah was in her own world of darkness and hopelessness, unable to move on from the death of her baby and refusing to let go of the belief that returning to Prospera was the solution. She talked about it with Kevin a lot, about how desperate she was to leave this world behind and return to a place where everything made sense to her, where she could see her mother again.

Hannah had been affected by the video of Morgan’s execution almost as much as Cathy had been. Together with her miscarriage it had been the deciding factor in her decision to return. Since taking the trip to Montreal with Frank and coming back and using the farm to produce food for the refugees Hannah had been able to put most of her thoughts about the chaos of this world as compared to the perfection of Prospera at the back of her mind. Morgan’s execution, the closeness of it, the coldness of it, had pushed all of those thoughts back to the forefront of her mind and with the Americans continuing to push north through Canada Hannah could no longer embrace the idea that the freedom that people enjoyed in this world was worth the disharmony that it gave rise to.

Desperate to see her improve, Kevin informed us one evening in the kitchen that he was going to help Hannah get back to Prospera. Lisa and I had serious concerns about his decision. The journey through the forest was a perilous one, the first time we’d made it we’d been attacked by wolves and it was entirely possible that we’d been lucky to have only had one such encounter, there could be other dangers that we didn’t know about. And if they did make it through the woods there was the issue of how Prospera would react to their return. They’d probably come up with a story about us being eaten by bears or wolves while in the forest to ensure that Prospera citizens continued to live in fear of entering Eternal Forest. Returning from the outside world with knowledge of all the lies that we’d been told there was no way that they’d let us back in. We represented the greatest threat imaginable to the social harmony of Prospera; going back wasn’t only dangerous, it was potentially fatal.

“They wouldn’t kill Hannah, her family is too important,” Kevin said.

“Their control over the entire village is at stake, that she’s from an important family isn’t going to matter,” Lisa said.

“I’m prepared to take that risk,” Kevin responded with finality.

The dangers that were involved in a return to Prospera were well known to Kevin but he wasn’t deterred by them at all. He would do anything for Hannah no matter what was required. One way or another he was going to get her back to Prospera.