In a clinic somewhere, humans gave her injections and strapped her onto a bed surrounded by curtains. They kept her there for at least a day as she worked through the last obvious signs of her illness. Once, when she was released to use a bedpan, she tried to get up and walk away. A nurse and a police officer stopped her. They did not want to touch her. They used long plastic pipes to prod her back into bed.
The next day, she was tied to a gurney and rolled into the back of a white van. The van took her to a big warehouse. There, she saw hundreds of children lying on rows of camp beds. Crushed and dusty crates had been pushed into a pile at the back of the warehouse. The floor blackened her bare feet. The whole building smelled of old wood and dust and disinfectant.
They gave her soup in a squeeze bottle, cold soup. It tasted awful. All that night she cried out for Kaye and for Mitch in a voice so hoarse and weak she could barely hear it herself.
The next trip—in a bus across the desert and through many towns and cities—took a day and a night. She rode with other boys and girls, sitting upright and even sleeping on a bench seat.
She heard the guard and driver talking about the nearest city, Flagstaff, and understood she was in Arizona. As the bus slowed and jolted off the two-lane highway, Stella saw shiny metallic letters cemented into a brick arch over a heavy steel gate: Sable Mountain Emergency Action School.
Time came in confused jerks. Memory and smell mingled and it seemed that her past, her life with Kaye and Mitch, had gone down the drain with the disinfectant.
After they finished taking pictures again and recording their names, the attendants segregated the boys and girls and gave them hospital robes that flapped open at the back and moved the girls in a line across a concrete walkway, under the open evening air, into a mobile trailer unit, twelve new kids in all.
The trailer already held fourteen girls.
One of the girls stood by the bed where Stella lay and said, “Hello/Sorry.”
Stella looked up. The girl was tall and black-haired and had wide, deep brown eyes flecked with green.
“How are you feeling-KUK?” the girl asked her. She seemed to have a speech problem.
“Where am I?”
“It’s kind of like-KUK home,” the girl said.
“Where are my parents?” Stella asked, before she could stop herself. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and fear.
“I don’t know,” the girl answered.
The fourteen gathered around the new girls and held out their hands. “Touch palms,” the black-haired girl told them. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Stella tucked her hands into her armpits. “I want to know where my parents are,” she said. “I heard guns.”
The black-haired girl shook her head slowly and touched Stella under the nose with the tip of her finger. Stella jerked her head back.
“You’re with us now,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
But Stella was afraid. The room smelled so strange. There were so many and they were all fever-scenting, trying to persuade the new girls. As she felt the scent doing its job, Stella wanted to get away and run.
This was nothing like she had imagined.
“It’s o-KUK-ay,” the black-haired girl said. “Really. It’s okay here.”
Stella cried out for Kaye. She was stubborn. It would be weeks before she stopped crying at night.
She tried to resist joining the other children. They were friendly but she desperately wanted to go back and live in the house in Virginia, the house that she had once tried to run away from; it seemed the best place on Earth.
Finally, as weeks passed into months and no one came for her, she started listening to the girls. She touched their hands and smelled their scenting. She started to belong and did not resist anymore.
The days at the school were long and hot in summer, cold in winter. The sky was huge and impersonal and very different from the tree-framed sky in Virginia. Even the bugs were different.
Stella got used to sitting in classrooms and being visited by doctors.
In a blur of growth and young time, she tried to forget. And even in their sleep, her friends could soothe her.
PART TWO
SHEVA + 15
“Activist SHEVA parents held in federal detention for two years or more without charges, under Emergency Action rules, may finally have their cases reviewed by state circuit courts, in apparent defiance of secret Presidential Decision Directives, says an unnamed source in the office of California’s attorney general.”
“Visitation rights for SHEVA parents at EMAC schools may be restored on a case-by-case basis, according to Cabinet-level administration officials testifying before Congress. No further details have been made available. Civilian Review of National Health and Safety, a government watchdog group associated with the Green Party, says it will protest this change in policy.”
“‘They set off bombs. They torch themselves and block traffic. Their children carry diseases we can’t begin to imagine. Hell, the parents themselves can make us sick and even kill us. If it’s a choice between their civil liberties and keeping my own beautiful, normal children disease free, then to hell with liberty. I say screw the ACLU. Always have, always will.’”
“Fifteen years and the strain is killing us. It cannot go on.
“When we suspend habeas corpus and nobody blinks, when our neighbors and relatives and even our children are hauled away in unmarked trucks and we huddle in fearful relief, the end of an entire way of life, of the American philosophy and psychology, is near, too near, perhaps upon us already.
“A government based on fear attracts the worst elements, who corrupt it from within. A shaky edifice, a government against its people, any of its people, must soon collapse.”
1
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The clouds over the capital were swollen and green with rain. The air felt close and sticky. Kaye took a government car from Dulles. She wore a trim gray suit with a pale yellow blouse, ruffled collar and sleeves, sensible walking shoes, dress pumps in her bag. She had carefully made up her face late in the morning and touched up in a restroom at Dulles. She knew how she looked: pale, thin, face a deeper shade of powdery beige than her wrists. Middle-aged and frail. Too much time spent in laboratories, not enough looking at the sun or seeing the sky.
She could have been any one of ten thousand professional workers leaving the long blocky tan-and-gray buildings around Washington, waiting for traffic to clear, stopping off for a drink or a coffee, meeting coworkers for dinner. She preferred the anonymity.
Last night, Kaye had carefully studied the briefing folio from Senator Gianelli’s office. What she had read in that folio she could clearly see on the drive from Dulles. The capital was losing the last of its self-respect. On some streets, garbage pickups had been delayed for weeks without explanation. National guard and regular army troops walked around the streets in trios, firearms slung and clips loaded. Military and security vehicles—Humvees, bomb-squad trucks, armored personnel carriers—sat on key streets, humped up on sidewalks or blocking intersections. Concrete barriers that shifted every day and multiple checkpoints with armored ID kiosks made travel to government buildings tortuous.