I’ve leaving on the next shipment. There are two placements remaining. If you need to get something to Africa, send it by airmail. There won’t be another opportunity until the guard changes in the old capital. Be on your best behavior.

I folded Gilda’s letter tightly and stashed it into my bra. I picked up my shopping bags from the ground at my feet and moved off down the gravel path that would past the cemetery to the street where a row of brick houses stood side by side with barely any yard between. I walked past the church, not looking at anyone, thinking about Gilda’s words. Cryptic for a reason. Dangerous and full of hope. Sacred.

She was going to Canada. That’s what we called Africa in the letters. She was being smuggled out, and there were two spots left with the smuggler. The pick up location would be the ruins of the US Post Office outside of Fulbright. It would happen in four days. It would be the last one of the year. If I stayed behind, she didn’t want me to end up in the stocks. I was so practiced at reading and deciphering Gilda’s messages that I hadn’t had to wonder about anything the letter contained.

Two spots left. I couldn’t go alone and leave the kids with Mark. I didn’t want them to grow up here, where they would have to learn to conform and repress. I couldn’t go with just one of them. How would I ever choose between them? And the thought of sending them alone without me made me shudder. What would await them, orphans, in Canada? And what would Mark do to me once he learned what had happened?

Assuming they made it to Canada at all. Not everyone did. There were quotas for how many refugees for political asylum they could take each year. Going west wasn’t an option. We didn’t have an open border with the Free State of New England, a territory composed of what used to be New York, New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. There wasn’t any point in going south either. Connecticut and Rhode Island had never fully recovered from the collapse of the United States. It was a lawless land riven with drugs, gangs, disease and despair. North was the only choice, into the territory that Canada had adsorbed. But it had to be done carefully. If you were caught, you would rot into the stocks.

Was it worth it though? If Mira and Simon made it out of here, wasn’t my life worth giving for that?

I continued up the street, towards the cul-de-sac where my story and half stone house sat. It looked older than it was. All of Fulbright was built when Massachusetts became its own nation, modeled after colonial America, carved out of the land that used to be a state park. It was intended as a refuge, but the militia had quickly seized it and made it part of the new regime.

I opened the gate to the yard where I had left Mira and Simon with my neighbor, Maddie, and her two boys, Isaac and Jacob. My children were on the swings, and her boys, significantly younger than mine at ages two and three, were chasing each other around the yard with sticks.

“Everyone doing okay?” I asked as I approached. I didn’t know Maddie well, but I trusted her to watch my twins for a the time it took me to do the shopping. We helped each other in this way often. She had been married to Tom, the man next door, four years ago, purchased on the bridal market. She had come from outside of Fulbright. It always seemed to me that she didn’t belong here.

“Everyone is great,” she said. “The little boys were in the sandbox for a while. Your two mostly were on the swings and the slide,” she said.

Simon came running up to me, his face sweaty and cheeks red from outside play. “Did you buy apples?” he asked.

“A few,” I said. “They didn’t have many today.” I handed him the shopping bags. “Take this inside with your sister and start putting it away for me.”

He took the bags without complaint, calling for Mira as he headed for the back door of the house. She jumped from the swing mid-arc, landing clumsily before she found her footing and jogged to house. They disappeared into the kitchen.

Maddie had crossed her arms as I was watching my twins. It was a stance that signaled how uncomfortable she was, either with me or with something she was hiding. I was cautiously curious. “Are you cold?” I asked.

She shook her head, not looking at me, watching her boys chase one another around my yard. “Well, I guess we should go,” she said.

I was disappointed, and it led me to be reckless. “Was there something on your mind?”

She slid her eyes to me. I studied her face, the way her eyes grew wide and unfocused, the subtle twitching of her brow, the slight pout of her lip. She grew a quick breath through her nose, holding it for too long. “Tom doesn’t like me,” she said.

I pretended to know what she was talking about. “Nobody likes being beat, Maddie, but it’s not something you can escape from. You just have to find the people who understand how hard it is, and endure.” Mark didn’t beat me. Plenty of men did beat their wives though.

“That’s not what I mean,” she whispered.

I leaned forward, and she realized that she was trapped. The fear grew in her eyes, her whole demeanor shifting to one of penitence. I didn’t want her penance. I wanted her honestly. I craved honesty in my life. There was too much dishonest harmony around me. It kept me alive, but it was suffocating. “What do you mean?” I asked.

I could see the clockwork inside her calculating the risk of lying versus telling the truth. “Tom doesn’t like me because…I’m a woman.”

It made sense. Tom, a bachelor until nearly age 40, buying a woman as a wife. He was hiding. I looked at her eyes more closely, wondering if she had seen her 20th birthday yet, wondering why he parents had agreed to sell her at such a young age to a man who didn’t live in the same community. Perhaps she was hiding too. I thought about the two placements, silently considering how I would tell Mark that the parents of the two boys next door disappeared and we had to adopt them. But would she leave her boys behind to be free? Why would she make a choice I was unwilling to make for myself?

“Don’t say anything else,” I said carefully, my tone a mix of reassurance and warning. “Not to me, not to anyone.” She nodded, swallowing her fear noisily. “You’ll be safer that way,” I said. I smiled at her and the tears that had threatened to spill from her eyes finally did.

She wiped her face with her hand, then called to her children. I waved to them happily as they exited my yard. I watched her go through the front door of her house before I went into my own. I thought about those two little boys, living with two closeted parents, wishing there were four placements with Gilda, and not just two.

The placements had to go to Mira and Simon, and I would have to live with the consequences.