“With what?” said Ada. “Didn’t bring my Gilead veil. We’ll get in the back. Best we can do.”
The van we’d come in was gone, and there was a different one—a delivery van that said SPEEDY DRAIN SNAKING, with a picture of a cute snake coming out of a drain. Ada and I climbed into the back. It held some plumbing tools but also a mattress, which was where we sat. It was dark and stuffy in there, but we were moving along quite fast as far as I could tell.
* * *
—
“How did I get smuggled out of Gilead?” I asked Ada after a while. “When I was Baby Nicole?”
“No harm in telling you that,” she said. “That network was blown years ago, Gilead shut down the route; it’s wall-to-wall sniffer dogs now.”
“Because of me?” I said.
“Not everything is because of you. Anyway this is what happened. Your mother gave you to some trusted friends; they took you north up the highway, then through the woods into Vermont.”
“Were you one of the trusted friends?”
“We said we were deer-hunting. I used to be a guide around there, I knew people. We had you in a backpack; we gave you a pill so you wouldn’t scream.”
“You drugged a baby. You could’ve killed me,” I said indignantly.
“But we didn’t,” said Ada. “We took you over the mountains, then down into Canada at Three Rivers. Trois-Rivières. That was a prime people-smuggling route back in the day.”
“Back in what day?”
“Oh, around 1740,” she said. “They used to catch girls from New England, hold them hostage, trade them for money or else marry them off. Once the girls had kids, they wouldn’t want to go back. That’s how I got my mixed heritage.”
“Mixed like what?”
“Part stealer, part stolen,” she said. “I’m ambidextrous.”
I thought about that, sitting in the dark among the plumbing supplies. “So where is she now? My mother?”
“Sealed document,” said Ada. “The less people who know that, the better.”
“She just walked off and left me?”
“She was up to her neck in it,” said Ada. “You’re lucky you’re alive. She’s lucky too, they’ve tried to kill her twice that we know of. They’ve never forgotten how she outsmarted them about Baby Nicole.”
“What about my father?”
“Same story. He’s so deep underground he needs a breathing tube.”
“I guess she doesn’t remember me,” I said dolefully. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”
“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,” said Ada. “She stayed away from you for your own good. She didn’t want to put you at risk. But she’s kept up with you as much as she could, under the circumstances.”
I was pleased by this, though I didn’t want to give up my anger. “How? Did she come to our house?”
“No,” said Ada. “She wouldn’t risk making you a target. But Melanie and Neil sent her pictures of you.”
“They never took any pictures of me,” I said. “It was a thing they had—no pictures.”
“They took lots of pictures,” said Ada. “At night. When you were asleep.” That was creepy, and I said so.
“Creepy is as creepy does,” said Ada.
“So they sent these pictures to her? How? If it was so secret, weren’t they afraid—”