Red Zone Son

Chapter 39

Adah

When the doorbell rings I hope it’s Solo. I’m always hoping it’s him. Ever since he surprised me by coming back from militia duty that one time, I run to open the door, which opens perfectly now that he fixed it. I run this time too, and open the door, which I guess I should’ve locked when I left for school this morning, oops, Solo would scold me if he knew I forgot. But it’s not like there are random thieves running around or like I have anything worth stealing. And at any rate, it’s a dark-haired woman in a cute black dress suit and bright blue cape standing on the front porch. She looks like she might be a little older than Solo. Her hair is gorgeous, thick and wavy, and her eyebrows are perfectly plucked.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“You’re Adah Williams?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, a sliver of unease worming its way into me. She knows my name – does that mean she’s from the militia? Did something happen to Solo?

“My name is Mary Khouri,” she says. “I work with the militia, and I was assigned to a task that involved your brother. Can I come in?”

She’s polite but her question lands like a lead weight in my gut. I manage a nod, my mouth suddenly dry. “Sure,” slips out, quieter than I intended. I step back and let her come into the house. Solo told me earlier this summer that the militia was going to have him do some work that didn’t let him send me any letters for a while, so I haven’t heard from him since June. It’s October now, almost Solo’s twentieth birthday. I’ve been doing more nails since people seem to like how I do them, so I have enough saved to send him a package, but I haven’t since he told me not to, that they don’t let anybody keep what’s sent to them. Which I think is very mean. I told Solo that, and he laughed, and said he agreed with me that the militia is not nice.

We’re sitting down, her on our off-white couch that’s backed up against our front window and me across from her in a chair I drag in from the kitchen. “Did something happen to Solo?” I ask as soon as I sit down.

“He’s not dead,” Mary immediately replies. “I’m not here in any official capacity. The militia hasn’t sent me. I’m doing this as a favor to your brother, whom I got to know a little as we were working together over the summer. He’s been declared missing since I last saw him.”

Declared missing? Like the militia lost him? I’m extremely confused. How can the militia have lost him? Did he run away from them or something? That doesn’t sound like Solo. He told me he was going to stick it out until God let him go, and at any rate, if he had run away from them, wouldn’t he have run to me?

“The militia can’t find him?” I ask.

Mary makes a face that says kind of. “I can’t share any details, but yes, essentially. The militia is working on recovering him so that he can return to you as soon as possible.”

Well, it doesn’t sound like Solo ran away from the militia then. I think he’d be in trouble and they’d be sending him to a prison camp instead of letting him come home to me. I still don’t understand how he can be missing, though. I know Mary said she can’t share any details, but can’t she tell me something that makes sense, at least?

“He was drafted,” I tell her. “He never wanted to join the militia. But he wouldn’t have run away.”

Her eyes flicker, and suddenly I realize that she’s trying not to cry. A knot forms in my stomach. Why does she look so sad? Is it for Solo, or for me? As Mary gets up to leave I follow suit, holding the door open. She walks away, and I'm left with a mess of thoughts, none of them making sense.

I turn to go back inside when I notice there’s a pile of mail out on the front porch that the mail drone keeps adding to. I pick everything up and bring it all inside, my hands feeling very cold. Most of it is junk but there’s this one letter that’s got all this complicated legalese in it that I don’t understand, something about some Policy #4291 by the militia council, something about the empty houses in this neighborhood, the ones which belonged to people who fled a while ago to the blue zone or who got arrested right after the Great Splintering.

I start to cry. If Solo were here, he’d read it and figure it out for me. But I’m by myself, and Solo is missing…

That night, I watch a filmed production of the musical Miss Saigon. The next day, I listen to the songs on repeat, especially Kim’s Nightmare and the Fall of Saigon which are about a Vietnamese girl getting left behind by an American soldier during the war the old US military had there. It’s easier for me to feel things through music. It’s easier if I’m able to push it onto characters on a screen. And I love musicals, I always have.

It’s not until Solo’s birthday comes and goes, and the weeks stretch into months, and it’s cold outside all the time, and I miss him so much I can’t breathe that I start to truly realize what being missing means. It means nobody knows where Solo is. It means he’s not home. It means… he… he might not ever…

***

By my last day of school in June, I still haven’t heard from Solo or anyone else in the militia. Solo’s militia pay is still continuously getting deposited into my account, though, so I know he must still be missing and not confirmed dead. I’m thinking about going to the militia base to try and find out what I can now that school is over, but when I come home and open the door I see a White couple, a man and a woman, closer to Umma and Dad’s age than mine, sitting in my living room. They don’t have very good fashion sense but they don’t look ratty or anything, they look normal except why in the world are they on my couch?

I stare at them. They stare back at me. I don’t even know what to say. Did I leave the door unlocked again when I went to school? Why are they even here? Who are they?

To my surprise, the man asks me the exact questions running through my head. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I – this is my house,” I respond. “I live here.”

“No, this house is ours,” he replies. He seems as confused as me. “Under the reclamation policy of the Westsylvania Militia Council, we own it now, because it’s empty. You need to leave right now, young lady.”

What? That’s crazy. I step inside and push the door shut behind me. I’m not going to leave my house I’ve been living in since birth just because some random person told me to. These White people aren’t in charge of me. But it’s so weird to have them sitting there, it feels like a violation or something, so I run past them to go upstairs to my room. Once inside, I shut the door and lock it. The next thing I know, I hear fists pounding on my door and I jump to my feet, my heart racing. It’s the man, he’s shouting at me, telling me I need to leave their house right now, but that’s crazy, who even are these people?

“My brother’s in the militia!” I shout at him through the closed door. “He’s going to come back and make you leave!”

At that, he lets off. Once I’m sure he’s gone back downstairs and isn’t listening at my door, I call Alice. She doesn’t pick up, so I text her. This crazy couple came into my house saying the militia council’s reclamation policy means they can take it over bc it’s empty, but it’s not, I literally live here, do you know what they’re talking about?

Alice texts back. sorry I’m at work I can’t talk but what? the reclamation policy stuff is true, my mom told me about it, but they’re only supposed to take over empty houses

I don’t want to bother her at work, I know her family’s been struggling lately with bills so I send her a few emoticons :go work: :talk later: :love you: before calling Nadia who I befriended at school last year. “Do you know about the militia’s reclamation policy?” I ask her as soon as she picks up. It looks like she just got home from school too. Her bedroom e-poster that rotates through different photos from musicals – that’s how I got to know her, through theater class – is next to her head halfway inside her camera’s shot.

“I didn’t until like four months ago,” she replies, yawning. Her pale face is backlit by the sun shining in the window behind her. “Our neighbor’s house was empty for a long time, and then like four months ago this family showed up to move in but the crazy thing was that this other couple showed up two weeks after that, claiming that the house was actually theirs, that the militia had given it to them and not the first family. They all had this huge screaming fight about it in the street. Both of them waving papers around claiming that their paper was the one that was the real one.”

For some reason, my palms are getting sweaty. “What do you mean, papers?”

“I don’t know. They both had papers from the militia or something, I guess.”

Now my mind is racing. I’m thinking of that letter I got from the militia months and months ago, the one I didn’t understand, the one I put down somewhere and now have no idea where it is. I probably threw it out by accident. I don’t think I’d even remember it now except I do remember opening it after Mary came and told me Solo was missing.

Did I mess something up by losing that letter?

My insides feel tight, squashed, and I’m breathing heavily. I guess Nadia can tell that something is wrong, because she asks, “Why are you acting like someone just hit you?”

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just… I…” I hesitate. Should I tell her? I’m not that close friends with Nadia. “Someone came to my house and is claiming it’s theirs… they said they got it through the reclamation policy.”

Nadia sits up in her bed. Her eyes bore into mine through the display. “The militia must’ve made a mistake! Call their police line! Tell them!”

Call the militia’s police line? No, I’m not going to do that. They wouldn’t listen to me anyway, I’m just a girl, and not even White, although I’m not going to tell Nadia that, I don’t talk to any of my White friends about race. And besides, I’m beginning to think it wasn’t the militia that made the mistake, but me. I think maybe I was supposed to respond to that letter they sent me but I didn’t, and so now maybe this house legally or something belongs to the couple sitting downstairs in my living room?

“I have to go,” I tell Nadia. My stomach is churning and it’s not just because I’m hungry. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll text you if they don’t leave.”

“Oh, okay,” she says. “My family is going up to Lake Erie for the summer so I won’t be around but yeah, text me.”

We say goodbye then hang up but I stay sitting on my bed that I made this morning. I don’t know what to do. All I can think about is how much I wish Solo was here to make things better. And also about how I don’t think I can tell anyone else about this problem because I feel like if they find out about the letter I didn’t reply to, that they’re going to tell me it’s my fault and that I have to leave the house, and I won’t, I won’t, I’ll die before I do that.

I just won’t go. I don’t care what they do to me. I won’t go. It’s my house! And the couple downstairs should know that! Even if they got a paper from the militia granting them this house, even if I did mess up when I didn’t answer that letter, when they saw me they should’ve been like oh, sorry, we didn’t realize someone already owned this house and was living here, we’ll go back to our old place and try to apply for another house. That’s what I would do! Instead of trying to steal someone’s home from them!

I stay in my room until it’s dinnertime, and then I go downstairs, steeling myself. When I get to the kitchen I see that they already cooked and ate. There are dishes everywhere, the kitchen is a mess. I can’t believe it. I bought those groceries yesterday, did they really use the food that I bought to cook themselves dinner? I move aside the dirty dishes and begin to make my own dinner, and while I’m making it, I hear behind me an irregular thumping sound, and I look and see that it’s the woman standing in the open dining room looking at me in the kitchen. “You need to leave,” she says.

“Look, lady, I’m not leaving, this is my house,” I reply. I look her up and down, and notice that she’s got a twisted foot, that she can’t really even stand up straight without holding on to something. It must be a post-Splintering injury because she doesn’t have a bionic replacement.

“You can call me Mrs. Bole,” the woman replies. “And if you’re not going to leave, you have to do the dishes and clean the kitchen to earn your keep.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. This lady is telling me I have to earn my keep? Like she thinks this house is really hers? Why doesn’t she just call the militia’s police line to throw me out then?

Wait a second. There has to be a reason they haven’t called the police line either. Maybe they think the militia made a mistake, like Nadia said. They must think that or they would’ve already called the police line to have me thrown out. They must be worried that if they contact the militia someone will look into it and find out that I live here and cancel their claim. They don’t know I didn’t answer that letter!

My insides feel just the tiniest bit less tight. I’m able to breathe again. Maybe if I’m stubborn enough and refuse to leave then they’ll give up and go back to their hotel or wherever they were staying before they applied for a house under the reclamation policy. Maybe they’ll realize they shouldn’t try to take someone’s home from them even if they have papers that say they can.

I look at her. “Mrs. Bole, this is my house. I’m not doing anything for you.”

She approaches with a limp, and suddenly her hand flies out, connecting sharply with my cheek. A moment of shock is quickly replaced by a swell of anger in my chest. She wouldn’t dare hit me if Umma and Dad were here. She wouldn’t dare hit me if Solo were here. And then the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “You’re only trying to steal my house because I’m an orphan, but God loves orphans, He punishes those who take advantage of orphans. He’s going to get you back for me, He’s going to make you burn in hell.”

Mrs. Bole’s face gets extremely red. “How dare you say that to me!” she screams. I hear footsteps thumping down the stairway and then Mr. Bole is in the kitchen, he’s grabbing me by both arms, and I think he might actually physically throw me out of the house on the sidewalk, and I’m so mad, I feel myself doing what I always do when I get mad, I stop thinking and just want to scream, so I do, I scream at him, “You’re going to go to hell too, and my brother’s going to send you there, I told you my brother’s in the militia and when he comes back home he’s going to kill you for doing this!”

Mr. Bole lets go of me at once. He pulls back out of the kitchen, and although Mrs. Bole glares at me, and neither of them leave the house, they don’t bother me while I slowly pull myself together to finish my dinner and eat it. I leave my dishes out too, because screw them, and then I go back to my room and play Les Miserables’ Castle On A Cloud on my vintage CD player as loud as I can on repeat until it’s time for me to go to sleep.