The Survivors

Chapter Five: Homecoming, pt. 2

  But I couldn't say that to Lizzie. I would have to soften the blow. "It isn't something I see for myself. I can't explain why," I said. Lizzie was hurt. She was a perpetual mother, care-giving her greatest strength. I sensed her dismay.

  "You have no plans to marry?" she asked.

  "You've never married!" I said.

  "But I am not alone," she said. I gave her a surprised look. She hesitated. The elders decided early that they could not make a marriage commitment to one another for fear that they could not sustain their culture if they were committed to each other individually, especially because there were fewer men than women among the original fourteen. With Hannah and William too young to bear children, their numbers were even more strained. Given that they were convinced their purpose from God was to build this society and keep it here together, these were serious concerns. I suspected it was a very difficult time for them, reconciling their supernatural circumstances with their human-life morals. It was exactly the opposite of my struggle.

  In the end, Rebecca had been the first to get pregnant, by John, and he decided he couldn't bear to let her go through it alone. He asked permission to call her his wife. Sympathizing, they allowed it. The compromise was that their child had to be raised by all the elders equally. After that, no one knew who belonged to whom. No one knew their parentage, and parents weren't allowed to care for their own children until the child was old enough not to identify anyone specifically as a parent. They had done this to ensure loyalty to the whole family, and so individual immediate families wouldn't break off together. Their plan had worked.

  "How's that?" I asked.

  "I have Andrew," she said. Suddenly, Andrew's alliance to me made far more sense.

  I smiled lovingly at Lizzie. "I'm so happy for you. It makes me feel so much better that you have someone here with you, someone who loves you so."

  "And you don't want that?" she asked.

  "I have never met a man I would want to be with," I said. But then a sparkling face glimmered across my mind.

  Cole.

  Just the idea of him-embarrassingly, I most vividly remembered his wet body in the towel-made my breath catch a little. I smiled, thinking of the way he dragged his hand through his wet hair, shaking it out of his eyes when it fell again. I thought about the electricity I had felt when his hand had touched the bare skin of my back when we danced, when his lips had so gently pressed against my forehead. It was a moment before I realized I had stopped breathing entirely.

  "What is it?" Lizzie asked, trying to interpret my rapt expression.

I inhaled. "Nothing," I said, trying unsuccessfully to wipe the smile off my face. I was very glad that no one in my family could feel my emotions the way I could feel theirs. I was even gladder that no one could read my mind.

"I wish you didn't have to go," she said, pulling me toward her. Her grasp was strong. I hadn't felt that strength, that security, in so long. When I hugged humans, they always felt breakable.

We heard the door inside open. Lizzie and I glided back inside and down the hallway at an exceptional pace. We were anxious to hear the elders' plan.

  As I took my seat, I looked around the room, reminded of how strange the group of elders was. The one who had stopped aging first, Hannah, appeared to be only twelve years old, William not far ahead of her. The oldest, per se, was James; he hadn't stopped aging until he was sixty-two years old. Among the fourteen faces staring at me, there was a fifty-year age range in their appearances. It was hard, after living among mortals, to recognize all these faces as those of my elders, as authorities over me. The world outside our walls was influencing my perceptions more than I thought, just as they had feared.