“Oh, my darling,” I said, through a throat so tight, it was hard to get the words out. “Of course I’m coming. Of course I am.”
Most of us were quiet on the drive. Frankie, because she was tense with the need to hold back the pain, and Gray, because he was coldly, murderously furious. And Honor, because she could read a room.
“I wasn’t sure, before,” Oriana said, the two of us holding Frankie between us in the back seat, “that we were right to leave. Or I thought you were, Frankie, but I thought—maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe I don’t … fit, Outside. But I’m going to have to, aren’t I? I can’t go back there. It isn’t right to be able to hurt somebody like that. It isn’t fair.”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t fair. It’s not fair to hurt them, and it’s not fair to put them in a box. Nobody should have to live in a box. And of course you fit Outside. There are all sorts of ways to fit, not just one way. You don’t have to be like me, or Frankie, or Honor, or anybody. You just have to be yourself.”
“Even if I don’t go to University?” she asked. “I’m not clever like you two. Or I am, but I’m only clever in my … my hands. Is that enough?”
“Yes,” I said. “There are heaps of things a person can do. Look at Gray. Look at Honor, and Iris. You need to finish school, but after that, you can decide what your way is.”
“Will you help me, though?” she asked.
“I promise,” I told her. And I meant it. I’d been guilty of doing the same thing Mount Zion did. Of putting my sister into a box. Of telling her there was only one way.
Not anymore.
Wanaka’s version of a hospital was the back entrance to a medical building, with one doctor and one nurse in attendance and nobody else around, but they knew what to do, and so did the policewoman, when she came. The indignity of a full sexual assault exam, then, of photographs and swabs and urine samples and reciting the terrible details, and Frankie, chilled and hurting and exhausted, clutching my hand tight. Wanting me there, because I understood.
The nurse was still working, photographing the injuries, collecting evidence, and Frankie was still enduring it. But this couldn’t wait. Not one more minute. I pulled the heated blanket closer around her neck, took both her hands in mine, pressed them tight, and said, “Darling. You know how much I love you.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said, gasping as a swab scraped tender, abraded flesh. “Because you … sometimes you seemed like you just wanted to be with Gray, and then Honor said she was leaving, too, and I … I wasn’t sure.”
“So you went back with Gilead,” I said. “When he said he’d hurt us. Because you weren’t sure we wanted you anyway.”
“I tried to remember …” Her chin was starting to tremble, and the tears were coming at last. “That you came before. I was in the Punishment Hut that first night, and you found me and got me out anyway, so I tried to think that you’d do it again, somehow. But I wasn’t in the Punishment Hut this time. I was locked in our room, and I couldn’t get out. Gilead said I’d stay locked in there until I was …” A heaving-in of breath. “Until I was pregnant. I tried to tell myself you were coming, that you wouldn’t leave me there, but you didn’t, and I … I was so scared. Worse than any time before. I realized I’d been so wrong to believe him that it would be different, and I’d been so stupid, and I thought … what if she doesn’t come? What if I’m really alone? What if he kills me this time? What if they let him?”
This love. This pain. “I was always coming,” I said. “I’ll always come. And now I’m going to tell you the truth. Are you ready to hear it?”
“Yes,” she said. She was crying, the tears running down her red, swollen face. She wasn’t even trying to wipe them away. She was utterly exhausted, drained by terror and pain. But she needed to hear this.
I said, “Everything he did to you. All of this. He did it to me, too. I know how much it hurts, and how dirty you feel now, how small, how ashamed.