Mrs. Benjamin, “blur to almost nothing in this place. Wink is neither here nor there. Some parts are more your world—and others are more ours. It is in these parts that we are hidden. Our true beings, our true selves, are sealed up in little inaccessible pockets, floating on the borders of our world. We stay anchored,” she says, and brushes the side of her head, “through these, the sleepers in our skulls. We are safe, but we are trapped. We are trapped in this physical location, and we are trapped in these bodies, which we are forced to use to preserve us, just as sea turtles hide their eggs in the sand.”
“But if Mother returns, then we would no longer be stuck halfway,” says Parson. “And we would no longer be confined to this place.”
“Our world would be pulled through to yours,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The very skies would change. We would be free.”
Mona’s head begins swimming as she realizes what they mean. (And how, she thinks stupidly, do they know about sea turtles?) She still does not really understand what she saw on the other side, with those red stars and glittering, volcanic fields, but to imagine such things coming through to here, able to do as they please…
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Mona.
They do not answer.
“You wanted me to understand,” says Mona. “You sent me up to the lab so I’d understand enough for you to tell me the rest, to get around your Mother’s rules. You want me to do something about this. But why? Isn’t that what you want to happen? Don’t you want to be freed?”
“Us?” says Parson. “No. No, we do not wish for that to happen.”
“Why, though?” asks Mona.
Mrs. Benjamin asks, “How well did you love your parents, Miss Bright?”
“I only had the one,” says Mona. “And I wasn’t too fond of him.”
“So why should we be any different?”
Mona stares at her as she realizes what she means. Of all the things she’s heard, somehow this is the most bewildering. “So… this is all some kind of… fucking teenage rebellion?”
“You make it sound so trite,” says Parson. “You went past the borders of this place to get to Coburn. So you must have seen the barrier.”
Mona thinks, and recalls. “I saw white columns that didn’t want to let me pass…”
“Yes. She put them there. We cannot pass them. We are trapped here, at Her choosing. We live by Her rules, and Her rules alone.”
“We did not know another way of living,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Until we came here. But part of growing up is being forced to be on your own.”
“And we have been on our own these past thirty years,” says Mr. Parson. “And some of us have grown up.”
“What do you mean?” asks Mona.
The two of them hesitate. There is genuine insecurity in their faces (which Mona realizes is remarkable—do the things in their heads actually feel?), like they are about to divulge an embarrassing secret.
“When we came here to this place, and took on these lives… something happened that Mother did not expect, or intend,” says Parson. “We were not sure what to do with the people living here. We did not even know where we were. But then some of us began to examine our surroundings. And… adapt.”
“They watched your television,” said Mrs. Benjamin. “And read your books. They lived in your houses, looked at your pictures. They learned to talk like you. To look like you. To act like you. And they began to think that here they could have something they had never possessed before. They could find something here they’d never even dreamed of. In this small, quiet place, filled with so many small, quiet people, they could be something they had never been.”
“What?” says Mona.
Parson’s face contorts into one of utter disgust. He turns to Mona, and when he speaks his contempt is almost overwhelming: “They believed they could be happy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Listen:
Down the street from Mrs. Benjamin’s house are Mr. and Mrs. Elm, who live in a very nice bungalow with an impeccably groomed garden of irises. Their grass is trim; their gutters are clean of leaves; and their drapes are of a subtle off-white that works wonderfully with the robin’s-egg blue of the window trim. But the indisputable pride and joy of the Elm household is hidden from the street, and hardly ever seen: for in their garage, almost concealed by a leaning stack of oil cans and dented old Dagmar