Chapter Text
Okay, so, she doesn’t get the baby.
Nichole. Her sister.
Of course, they explain it to her at the embassy, after she leaves. After she’s rescued — which, by the way, didn’t feel as much like being rescued as it did being shoved through the eyehole of a needle into a waiting—
They tell her all about it: about how much the world outside has changed, about how she’s safe and protected and how her parents — your real parents, sweetie, are on the way to take you home .
Whatever that means.
It’s two women. She thinks it’s because they had assumed she would wilt at the very prospect of a man speaking to her, but of course she can’t know for sure.
The room is a warm blue, and the three of them are sitting on too-small chairs, huddled around a too-small table that is too close to the ground. Their knees knock together when one of them speaks too loudly; there is a man with a gun standing in the far corner.
The women are wearing high-necked dresses with seafoam-colored burlap aprons. They’re trying to put her at ease, she guesses, trying to look like Marthas. Instead, they barely pass for particularly nervous Commanders’ wives — the faded teal of their dresses is just this side of blue and a Martha would never be caught dead in something so … mass-produced.
Like, Hannah’s eleven and even she knows better than that.
The two of them watch everything she does with a sort of unaffected attention. The room they’re in seems to be a playroom of some kind, with padded mat floors and bright walls. There are block towers for toddlers and watercolor sets for bigger kids. It all feels familiar to Hannah, though she knows she’s never been here before.
Gilead wouldn’t have ever had something like this; the toys are too rich and this shade of blue wouldn’t be used to paint walls outside of a Commander’s house. She figures it might be from the time from before , what little she can remember of it, anyway.
In front of her on the table is an array of toys: an electronic tablet, molding clay, a picture book, an embroidery set, a carved wooden horse. She hasn’t touched any of them since they brought her here. Doesn’t feel like she should.
This does remind her of home — of Gilead, she corrects herself. It reminds her of the tests they did in the early days at the Moses and Bithia Center before she made it to the Mackenzies. Those memories are jumbled and half-formed, and they always make her stomach hurt for hours after they come to her. She’d prefer not to think of them, but it gets harder and harder the longer they keep her in this room.
She’d prefer not to be here at all, but that doesn’t seem to matter any.
The women either don’t notice or don’t care about her discomfort. (Women in Gilead didn't care either, so at least that’s consistent.) Instead, they seem to be running down a list of things, updates about her brave new world and what she can expect in her life from now on.
Despite the reassurance Hannah assumes they’re meant to provide, she finds them stuffy and jittery in turns. If she didn’t know better, she’d almost say they seemed anxious, nervous around her specifically. She doesn’t know why — can’t fathom why two grown women are looking at her with the same fluttering looks she and other girls used to flash particularly mean Aunts during embroidery lessons.
All Hannah can do is stare at these women. She doesn’t have the chance to ask, even if she’d wanted to. They’re speaking at her instead of with her, barely a breath between them for her to get a word in edgewise even when they ask her for one. The information is swift and simple, doled out in efficient lumps between conjunctive outbursts.
They tell her all about June and her father and Auntie Moira. They tell her about a woman named Emily and the country named Canada. They tell her about the country she used to be from, America, about how it’s in Canada now. That that’s where all her people are. Her family.
And the baby.
The baby — her sister — is slid between what she might expect once she gets home and what her new life in Little America might look like in contrast to her life in Gilead. They, of course, tell her about Nichole.
And she really doesn’t get Nichole.
“Hannah.”
June is short. Her mother.
It’s strange.
Hannah figures that first part is okay. Hannah’s short, too, after all. And Tabitha, her other mother, had also been quite short. Hannah figures that has to mean something.
They’re in a new room now. June, a new harried-looking woman with a stack of papers, and Hannah all sit in cushioned chairs in a corner closest to the door. This room is a pale yellow, complete with a few plastic trees and a magazine rack.
Hannah had flinched at the print covers when they’d first put her in here. She’d remembered a story she had overheard a few Marthas whispering about once: a Commander’s wife, a book, and a thumb. Her mind conjured up faces of girls she knew who’d had the rod taken to them for writing their own names during free drawing periods.
But then she’d remembered the women from the first room explaining the new new rules of this place. That girls could have books here, and no one would hurt her for reading anymore.
Not in this country , one of them had said. We don’t do that here.
She didn’t know if she believed any of that. She hadn’t even had time to test it before June had stumbled into the room behind her, the frazzled woman swiftly in tow.
“Hannah.”
June is shorter than Hannah remembers her to be, and wider. Stronger, maybe. Rounder in the face and in her wrists. June’s hands, when they go to reach for her, are scuffed up like an old pair of shoes. She has a faint cut almost bisecting her right eyebrow. She smells like apples.
June is crouched and half-kneeling right in front of her, looming just over Hannah like she’s trying to swallow her with her body. Maybe she will, Hannah thinks. I bet I could fit in there.
She comes just short of touching Hannah before the woman rests a hand on June’s shoulder.
“Ms. Osbourne,” she says, frowning at June’s back. Says the name like how Marthas chide babies, like June is stupid.
“Hannah,” June says again. It’s urgent, though her face doesn’t change.
But she obeys, even if it’s only Hannah who sees it. Her posture corrects just so so she’s standing at a more respectable angle. Her hands come to rest in front of her, just below her belly, and one locks onto the other’s wrist with a hold that sucks the blood out of June’s knuckles. Hannah hears the joints in June’s jaw grind closed.
It’s like she’s missing the headdress, the wings. Then she’d be a—
“Why don’t we all sit, hm?”
Hannah is looking at June, June is looking at the floor, and it takes Hannah several moments before she realizes the woman is looking at her. She peers up at her as the woman’s eyes flit all over her body.
The woman blinks. “Would you like that, sweetie?”
Would she like that?
No.
No, she most certainly would not like to sit . She would like to be away from this place. She would like to be far from here in her bedroom at home. She would like to be in her kitchen baking scones, or curled up by the fire knitting something for her father.
But they have to be here, she knows. She knows that. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that everything is running together. She’d like to be home, but she can’t remember where home is, exactly.
See, Hannah remembers it both ways:
One bedroom that’s pink with wooden floors and a rocking horse in the corner, and one bedroom with green walls and a thick purple carpet that she’d lay on to watch Sunday cartoons. One kitchen with a gas range and a tiered chef’s oven, and one kitchen with a flat, electric stovetop that had concentric water rings burnt into the quick boiler. One fireplace with crackling maplewood and wool that doesn’t pill, and one fireplace that only comes on a small TV, long before she knows her hands can be useful at anything.
Her father wears glasses and has very large hands. He was shot by a Guardian, last she saw.
Her father is a Commander.
Her brain feels like it’s splitting in two and it hurts, but since she knows she has to be here, she’d rather just get it over with.
They sit.
After a few moment’s conversation, she divines that the woman’s name is Rachel and that she’s “here to help,” whatever that means.
“I want to help you and June here figure out what’s next,” Rachel explains, trying to finger pieces of stray hair out of her loose plait. She looks very tired. “We’re just going to talk now, okay sweetie?”
She hadn’t noticed before, but June is the first person to call her Hannah here. The only one, so far. The Eyes who hadn’t really been Eyes (her rescuers, Hannah supposes) had called her the girl. The women in the dresses in the playroom had called her Agnes, only once, before just … not referring to her. Now she’s sweetie, twice, to a woman who touches June and can’t keep her hair adequately braided.
She means to say some of this, perhaps, or something entirely different. But her mind has snagged on something.
In the rush to sit, the lip of June’s pant leg ended up under Hannah’s boot. Her shoes are clean, so Hannah’s not worried about the mess. But the position leaves June effectively trapped, only a hair's breadth away from touching Hannah if she’d moved wrong.
And something about that last sweetie… June’s face screws up and she moves wrong.
Their legs brush for a moment, simple and soft.
She looks down. Hannah watches June’s feet as they snake around the legs of the chair, like she’s strapping herself in for something. Her knees bend very exactly where the cushion ends without her body touching the back of the chair. June’s feet just barely scrape the ground like this.
No wonder we fell down, her mind produces. No wonder they caught us.
“You have very short legs.”
June coughs. “Yes,” she says. “I suppose— I guess I do.”
Hannah says, “They slow you down.”
The pained breath June sucks in makes her look up.
June’s face is twisted again and her eyes are very wide. There’s something in them, Hannah thinks, like dirt or sadness. But she doesn’t move to wipe anything away and Hannah doesn’t move to soothe her.
Nobody says anything for a long time after that. There’s a faint hum in the lights and stuttered growls of air coming out of the ceiling vents.
Hannah is fine with this until she isn’t, and she restrains herself until she can’t anymore. Then:
“Were you faster when you ran away?” she asks. “With your baby, I mean.”
June stares at her blankly for a moment, like she doesn’t quite understand the words. Her eyebrows slowly pull together in the middle. “Do you mean… Are you talking about Nichole?”
Unless there was another baby the blue-dressed women didn’t tell her about.
Maybe June is stupid, Hannah thinks. She nods instead of saying so.
“I didn’t… We didn’t— together, I mean, we didn’t come here together.”
“They took her, too?”
Another breath. “Yes.”
Hannah blinks.
“You cried,” she says. “When I saw you, in the snow. It was cold and you cried a lot.”
June swallows, nodding. “I was very sad.”
There are tears in her eyes now. Hannah can see them when June turns her head toward the light more. They glisten, like particularly shiny buttons, and they make Hannah feel… She feels good, oddly enough. Best she’s felt since coming here.
In Gilead, her parents taught her that crying was okay sometimes, in certain amounts. The Aunts at school had been more blunt about it. Nobody wants a self-pitying woman, Agnes, but you’re allowed to be sad sometimes.
She’s curious. “Are you sad now?”
“I— Among other things, yes,” June says. She furiously paws at her eyes for a moment before flashing a shy smile at Hannah. “Just a little bit. I’m very happy to see you again.”
Hannah tries to understand this. She has often been sad about her embroidery or when her custards didn’t set properly. June looking at her now…
This isn’t any sadness she’s familiar with.