Page 31 of Ringer
“I think so,” Calliope said, angling her hand to examine her nails, as if she’d lost interest in the conversation.
“Please, Calliope, we need you.” Pete’s voice was gentle and made Gemma ache: it was the voice he’d used when he lifted her shirt in the basement and, without blinking, saidbeautiful. She wondered now if that had been put on too, to appease her, as he was trying to appease Calliope.
Was there anything in the world that wasn’t just pretend?
Pretend or not, it worked. Calliope smiled again. “I made a path back,” she said, addressing Pete directly. “You can follow me.”
Gemma went slowly, leaning heavily on her walking stick with every other step. Almost immediately she fell behind, though Pete stopped and waited for her whenever he saw that she was struggling,
Calliope often darted ahead, vanishing among the trees, so they had to call her back. She touched everything: tree bark, slender branches pale and new, even thepulp of rotten leaves, bending down to run her fingers in the dirt. Gemma couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, free at last in a world she didn’t know at all, and wondered at how unafraid she seemed.
Gemma had been enclosed too, in a way, bound by her father’s rules and her mother’s concern, and yet she understood now why people released from prison sometimes wished to go back. She longed for walls, for narrow hallways, for doors that locked. She longed for her old life back, for its sharp angles and clarity: who was wrong, who was right.
In this new world, things doubled and mutated. People had faces beneath their faces. Dr. Saperstein was a monsterandhe wasn’t. She was afraid he’d been right about the replicas raised at Haven. Calliope was made of the same material as Gemma was, and she was also a monster. Whenever Gemma caught her eye, Calliope smiled, but always a fraction of a second too late. She remembered what Saperstein had said:To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.
Calliope had said she had made a path, left markers so she would be able to find her way back, but if she had, Gemma couldn’t see them. It all looked the same to her, and as the sun rose and the insects rose with it, hovering in swarms, buzzing around Gemma’s wounded hand, she began to think Calliope was either lost or deliberatelyleading them through the same narrow tunnel of trees. Gemma was so exhausted her vision was blinking out, periodically going to black. She didn’t know why April was always going on and on about saving the trees—there sure as shit seemed to be plenty of trees already, doing fine.
Just when she was about to call for another rest, Pete shouted. And limping toward them, she saw a low post-and-beam fence, rudimentary and half-rotten, and beyond it: fields. Pastures and farmland. Cows blinking sleepily in the sun.
Farmland meant farms meantpeople. And people meant they were saved.
“See?” Calliope said. “I told you I could find my way back.”
Despite everything, Gemma could have kissed her. She laughed, and a group of birds startled, as if they, too, were shocked by the sound. “You’re brilliant,” she said, and couldn’t help it: she put her arms around Calliope, as she would have with April. Calliope tensed, and in her arms she felt so small, trembling slightly, a fine wire coiled and coiled almost to breaking, and Gemma felt terrible and guilty. Calliope just stood there, arms pinned to her sides, and Gemma realized she had likely never been hugged, not once in her life.
It wasn’t her fault she had been made this way, forcedto observe and imitate, strange and kind and cruel by turns. Maybe she could be taught. She could learn.
Maybe Gemma could teach her.
As she pulled away, Calliope smiled—a real smile this time, that lit her face all the way to her eyes. And looking at her, Gemma’s vision doubled again, but this time she saw not herself but the face of that lost sister, the original daughter,Emma.An echo seemed to reach her from a lost world, and she knew then that Calliope was her chance to sew the past and the present together. She could love Calliope, and by loving Calliope she could make up for what her father had done, for the fact that she was alive in Emma’s place.
Calliope seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. She put her hand on Gemma’s heart. She pressed, and Gemma realized she was reading her pulse, trying to get the measure of her heartbeat: the only way she knew to care for someone else.
“You can be mine,” Calliope said. “You can be my replica.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 18 of Lyra’s story.
NINETEEN
IT WAS LIKE WALKING INTO a portrait: the red barn, its weathered doors partially open; a tidy white house with faded curtains sitting in a dip of land, an old stone well and a bucket lying next to it on the grass, all bound together in the middle of so many rolling fields Gemma thought of a ship moored to an ocean of green.
Gemma couldn’t shake the idea that no one had been home in a hundred years. There were no cars in the driveway. She saw no wires, no satellite braced to the roof, nothing but old-fashioned rakes and shovels, neatly cleaned, as if polished by invisible hands after the original owners had departed. The cows in the pasture stared at them with deep and mournful eyes, and they, too, could have been ancient, could have been standing there for ten decades. Gemma’s relief gave way again to anxiety. It was wrong. It was like a photo with a too-obvious filter:somehow, beneath the brightness, you could see a truth that wasn’t nearly so pretty.
Pete veered toward the barn doors, maybe thinking he might find someone at work. But Calliope grabbed his wrist and shook her head.
“Don’t,” she whispered. For the first time, she looked really afraid. “The barn is where the animals go to die.” It was funny, what she knew and didn’t know.
“The barn is where the animals go tosleep,” Pete corrected her. But he let Calliope pull him toward the house.
Only when they came around the house and saw a buggy did Gemma understand.
“Amish,” Pete said.
“There won’t be a telephone,” Gemma said, fighting down a fear that she couldn’t exactly justify. Where was the family who lived here? They hadn’t driven off, obviously. They weren’t out catching a movie. The fields glimmered in the sun and yet there was no one turning them, raking, planting—Gemma didn’t know exactly what, but she knew on farms there was always work to be done.
Calliope was already at the front door. She turned back to gesture them inside. “Come, Gemma-Pete,” she said, as if their names were a single thing. “Come see.” In her dress, she looked as if she truly belonged. It was as if she learned by absorption, and had, like a chameleon,changed her skin to match her new surroundings.
“Well, whoever lives here will have to come back eventually,” Pete said. “We can rest. Have something to eat. Wait it out.” He managed a small smile. “At least we know they aren’t on a road trip.”
