Miranda

We were all worried about Hannah. Cathy was also worried; she expressed as much to us but was hesitant to check in on Hannah personally, unsure of what Hannah’s reaction would be given the newness of their relationship. We talked a lot about Hannah during our drives to see Cathy’s mother in hospital, among other things. Cathy said that I was the easiest to talk to, which I completely understood; the others were all too busy worrying about making a living or ensuring that Prospera remained a secret. I was much more relaxed. I knew after just a couple of hours with her that Cathy didn’t warrant the level of suspicion that Hannah thought she did, and I knew after spending a few hours sampling the new things in this world—like cartoons, milkshake, soda and Fruit Loops—that we didn’t need to be as afraid as Hannah was.

Her paranoia, which had grown rapidly during the time we’d been here, fuelled by the knowledge that she was acquiring from the library, had not gone unnoticed by us. Lisa said that she thought that the reason for Hannah’s difficulty in acclimating to this world was that she had spent too much time with her mother learning about how Prospera worked to accept the mechanics of this world. We had few opportunities to open Hannah’s eyes to the positive things in this world with her spending hours at a time sitting in Frank’s study doing nothing but reading. Being consumed by the history of a war that had produced thousands of casualties and seeing images of the destruction caused by the vicious weapons they had in this world, her succumbing to depression was perhaps inevitable. The job for us was to get her out of it. There was a therapist at the hospital, Dr Fields, who worked with the terminally ill cancer patients and who really appreciated me and Cathy coming to the hospital and playing violin and piano duets in the family room. Cathy said that we could probably get her to make time to see Hannah, an idea I didn’t think was very good. The state that Hannah was in had been brought on by her absorption of too much about this world in too short a space of time; getting her to accept help for such a personal issue from someone she didn’t know and wasn’t comfortable with would only make things worse. She needed time, space, and someone to teach her about this world in a way that left her with a positive impression of it, in much the same way her mother had educated her about the workings of Prospera.

Hannah and I had undergone a role reversal; ordinarily I would have been the one who needed to be extricated from a deep depressive state. I had Lisa to thank for me not being afflicted by any form of despair. Our ability to freely be with each other was enough for me to cast aside any apprehensions I might have had about this world. I doubted that Hannah was getting from Kevin what I was getting from Miranda. Kevin wasn’t the most romantic or demonstrative person and while his trustworthiness and dependability were endearing qualities they didn’t make him any more suited to providing Hannah with the sensitive treatment she needed. He was also busy, working nine hours a day at the butchery and coming home exhausted from the physically demanding work. Lisa was also busy with her studies, which left her not only with less time for Hannah but less time for me as well. The course that Cathy had helped her get into was a six month abridged course that would equip her with the certifications that she needed to start working at the clinic. They were desperate for personnel at the clinic and were impressed enough with Lisa’s medical knowledge to hire her once she’d acquired a few certifications. Cathy taught Lisa how to use a computer just like she did for Hannah; that made it easier for Lisa to complete courses like Electronic Medical Records Management.

With all of the others so preoccupied there was nothing for me and Cathy to do but spend time with each other. Since the day she’d given me the violin and discovered how well I could play Cathy and I had become very close. Her mother had taught her to play the piano at an early age and Cathy had kept it up ever since. After I’d played Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Melancolique to demonstrate to Cathy the level of my skill we played a number of sonatas for piano and violin together, starting with Cathy’s favourite, Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 5, Spring. Lisa had a few requests of her own, most notably Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 2 (She loved the Presto) and Mozart’s Sonata for Piano and Violin, K301. We had ourselves a salon concert in Cathy’s living room and had a lot of fun. The following evening when we were sitting down to dinner Frank announced that he’d followed through on getting Miranda an interview at the clinic and that the interview would be in the afternoon the next day. Cathy drove Miranda to her interview and helped her register for courses online; she would write her exams at the library. From then on it was me and Cathy. After she’d dropped Kevin off at the butchery in the morning we sat on the couch in the living room in the main house, ate Fruit Loops and watched cartoons until Hannah would ask to be taken to the library. Cathy didn’t go back to working at her father’s convenience store and so had a lot of time on her hands, time that we spent sitting in her room listening to contemporary music (I was developing a real liking for punk and pop rock) and talking about the things in this world she was desperate for us to experience, like malls and water parks. In the meantime there was plenty of fun to be had in Huntingdale and on the farm. We rode horses around the farm, sometimes racing each other, went for swims in the borehole, jumped onto haystacks behind the barn from off the roof. She taught me how to ride her quad-bike, and offered to teach all of us how to drive to make things easier for us.

We asked Hannah to join us every time we went to do something fun but she was always reading, then she was depressed. Our efforts to facilitate a turnaround in her mental state were all futile; she got so bad that she stopped having dinner with the rest of us at the main house, which had become a daily routine. Frank took note of her consistent absence after three evenings and expressed that he was concerned by it.

“I haven’t seen Hannah in days; is she okay?”

“She’s not feeling well; she’s having a bit of a hard time being away from home and adjusting to our new circumstances,” Lisa answered.

“In that case she needs to be made to feel more at home here; Catherine, wasn’t that what you said you were going to do?”

“Dad, I don’t know her well enough to get that involved, she’d think I was intruding.”

“Well somebody has to do something to get her out of her slump; I’ll try talking with her.”

A man of his word, Frank came down to the cottage with us to check on Hannah. She was sitting at the table in the kitchen waiting for us to return with the plate of food we’d been bringing her every night that she hadn’t been joining us at the main house for dinner. Frank pulled out a chair across the table from Hannah and sat down. The rest of us went to our rooms to give them some privacy after we’d left Hannah’s plate in the kitchen. Lisa and I, unable to deny our curiosity, put our ears against the door and eavesdropped.

“The others tell me that you’ve been feeling down lately; is there anything we can help with?”

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“I don’t think so; I think I just want to be left alone.”

“Too many people have suffered as a result of this war, I know that personally from all the refugees that I’ve dealt with over the years. I understand that being victims of it yourselves you would feel a considerable amount more pain than someone like me who hasn’t experienced any personal loss because of it but you can trust us here; we want to help in any way we can.”

“The world we lived in was just so perfect; I’m finding it impossible to understand how things like this war can happen.”

“Things like this war always happen; if people are desperate enough they’re capable of anything.”

“But it’s wrong! Isn’t that enough to stop things like this from happening?”

“We live in a world of moral relativism, people weigh their ethics against their needs and whichever is greater is the path they choose.”

“Things should work better than that; people shouldn’t be resorting to such violent means like they’re animals.”

“When you’re trying to make sense of a tragedy it’s hard to look beyond the shortcomings of man that had caused it, but you can’t allow that to blind you to the many kind and good people in this world. I’m going on a trip in two days to Montreal to meet some refugees and bring them up here, there’s about fifty of them, why don’t you come with me and see for yourself the work that’s being done to help those affected by this war.”

Hannah agreed to accompany Frank on his trip, for the reason that he suggested but also to see what a big city looked like with her own eyes. We’d seen pictures of them in the atlas but the true scale of them, according to Cathy, could only be truly grasped by experiencing them in person. We all hoped that Frank would be able to do for Hannah what we hadn’t been able to. There were reasons to believe that he could. In his short time with her in the kitchen he’d gotten her to open up about her thoughts and feelings, which we had been unsuccessful in doing. What we knew about Hannah having grown up with her was that on her own she wasn’t very strong; she’d always looked at things through the perspective of others and followed their lead. Her mother and Kevin had always been the two that she’d relied on for things. Their views were contradictory and as a result of that Hannah had never formed her own concrete set of convictions, which explained the difficulty she was having letting go of Prospera and accepting this world as our new home. Frank had enough authority and trustworthiness about him for Hannah to take to him and lean on him the way she had with her mother and Kevin, and with him being from this world he could get Hannah to accept it as her new home in a way that the rest of us couldn’t.

Hannah showed remarkable improvement following Frank’s visit to the cottage. In the morning she got out of bed, put together Kevin’s lunchbox for him and kissed him goodbye when Cathy drove down to the cottage to take him to work. When Cathy returned Hannah joined us on the couch and ate Fruit Loops and watched cartoons with us. She appeared to be having fun with us but she only stayed with us for about an hour, after which she returned to the study to read through the atlas, a sign that she was prepared to open herself up to this world.

Lisa never joined me and Cathy, except to occasionally listen to us play music and to accompany us on trips to the grocery store to buy what we needed in the cottage with Kevin’s wages. A heavy sense of guilt was growing within me as I watched Kevin and Lisa working so hard. I was doing nothing and couldn’t imagine what I was going to do. Cathy said it was okay, that there was nothing for me to worry about; her mother was so impressed by my violin playing that there was no way she and her father would ever pressure me to get just any job for the sake of earning an income. The pressure placed on people by the ‘economy’ system that they had in this world was becoming clear to us. It was easy to see why no such system existed in Prospera; it fostered competition that led to conflict, inequality, greed and selfishness; it was a part of this world that I, like Hannah, vehemently did not like. Also weighing heavily on me was the amount of time I was spending with Cathy. Lisa was working hard to obtain the certifications she needed to start working as a nurse; sometimes she was busy for as long as six hours a day. A distance grew between me and Lisa as Cathy and I became closer. After a few days Cathy started asking me an increasing amount of questions about my relationship with Lisa and what it was like to be a lesbian. Cathy had a boyfriend, a refugee named Morgan who had survived a fragmentium strike that had killed his parents and sister. She really liked him but only saw him very seldom because he was deeply involved in the #OverthrowImperialism resistance movement, travelling all over the country and participating in attacks on oil infrastructure and US troop positions. There wasn’t a day that went by that Cathy didn’t worry about his safety; the only time she felt any relief from her worry was when he made contact with her via phone call or text message. Frank didn’t approve of her seeing him, he thought Morgan was unstable and would only end up hurting her. Cathy’s separation from her boyfriend and her father’s disapproval of him was the cause of a significant amount of strain on her. She tried to conceal it but it was clear from her interest in the four of us that she wished for more normalcy in her love life. Her questions about me and Lisa went beyond longing for normalcy; they betrayed an inordinate amount of curiosity. She wanted to know how different being with a girl was than being with a boy, a question I couldn’t answer having never been with a boy. She followed this up with questions about our lovemaking, the frequency and nature of it. She asked me how long I had known I was a lesbian, how long had Lisa and I been together, how did we get together and become a couple; the questions kept coming and I kept asking myself why was she so interested in knowing every granular detail about me and Lisa until, one afternoon when we were in the borehole and holding onto either side of the ladder and talking to each other, she kissed me out of the blue.

The kiss lasted no longer than a couple of seconds. Just as the initial shock that I felt was about to give way to anger, Cathy defused the situation by nonchalantly saying “Just wanted to know what it felt like,” before climbing out of the borehole, drying herself with her towel and heading back to the house. I stayed in the water for a while after she’d left, questioning what to make of what had just happened. My choices were between treating it with as much seriousness as Cathy had or treating it with as much seriousness as it felt like it deserved. It was entirely possible that Cathy had been quick to dismiss the kiss as something frivolous to hide from me any genuine feelings she had for me for the sake of not being the cause of anything between me and Lisa, which, if true, required that I give the kiss a great deal of serious contemplation. The absolute last thing that I wanted was to lose Lisa, especially when it was so important for all of us to stick together. If Cathy felt more than she was letting on then I had to do something to ensure that there was no chance of what happened ever happening again. As much as I liked Cathy I would not allow her to jeopardize what I had with Lisa. I returned to the cottage after I’d gotten out of the water, not to the main house. Lisa was in our room studying as she was for most of every day. I knew that she was studying hard but I went to her anyway and made myself a distraction. Lisa put down her pen and pushed aside her books without the slightest bit of complaint. She was glad that I’d come to see her; she’d been studying non-stop for two hours and desperately needed a break. We had lunch together, after which we started kissing and fell into lovemaking.

Lying next to her on the bed that afternoon, I couldn’t understand why I had been spending so much time with Cathy and had allowed the distance I had felt between me and Lisa to form. Hannah was right, the things that they had in this world that we didn’t have in Prospera were nothing more than distractions. Those distractions had seduced me to the extent that my relationship with Lisa had been placed in jeopardy. In all the ways that this world could test us I hadn’t expected that a friendship formed over Fruit Loops and cartoons would be one of them. Henceforth I decided to heed Hannah’s advice to always be careful of everything; my relationship with Lisa was too important for me to risk it by allowing my inexperience and naivety to expose us to dangers in this world that we didn’t yet fully appreciate.