I wrote everything out for Maddie. No code. She would need to understand everything as it was. Just like Gran did for me when I first joined the network. I hid this letter in the basket under the bathroom where I keep my menstrual supplies. Mark would never look there. It reminds him how different we are, and how powerless he is to change the way things work. There was a time when I thought I could trust Mark. When he married me, it seemed that he cared about me for who I was, not just as the woman who would give him sons. One night I ventured to tell him about my Untie Mat, a toe in the water, to see if I could reveal more. He smacked me and told me never to talk to him about Untie Mat again.

I cried to Gran that night. That’s when she told me about the letter writers.

I wrote out a second letter to Gilda. It was a tricky situation with Gilda leaving, and me knowingly doing something that would compromise me. Gilda would have to tell the woman who recruited her that she was going to Canada too. It would be the responsibility of that woman to make contact with me. But I was going to end up in the stocks, so that woman would have to make contact with Maddie instead. It was easiest to use the location that Gilda and I had used for last year to make pass the first letter. Maddie and Gilda’s recruiter could decided on a different location later.

I stuffed the letter explaining everything into the wall and replaced the loose brick. I took my shopping bags up and made my way back home to where I had left Mira and Simon to play in the yard. Maddie had offered to watch them again. It would be the last afternoon they would play there. Tomorrow they would be smuggled out of Massachusetts, and if they were lucky, they’d be in Canada shortly after. I fought the tears forming in my eyes as I walked. A woman crying was suspicious, especially to men. They only liked when we smiled.

Maddie was happily playing with the children when I arrived home, some game that involved running and freezing in place. I had purchased a few things for her at the grocery, and she helped me separate the items from my own when she saw me enter through the fence. I sent Mira and Simon inside to put the groceries away. Maddie gathered her own bag and her children and went home. I had slipped the letter into the bag as we sorted. She would find it, and after my children were gone, and I was in the stocks, hopefully she would follow its instructions to go to the loose brick in the wall. And if everything else worked according to plan, there would be a letter waiting for her from Gilda’s contact.

The plan had no room for error. If I was wrong about Maddie, I had just exposed everyone. But if I was right about her, then one day she might be able to escape too.

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. Mark would be home soon. I could not afford to let him see me cry.

As I tucked the children in that night, I whispered to each one of them how much I loved them. There was a heaviness in the words that I didn’t normally feel. My voice cracked because I knew it would be the last time I performed this ritual. If they noticed they didn’t comment. I lingered a little too long over them.

Mark was suspicious of my moodiness. “Did something happen today?” he asked, as I turned back the covered and joined him in bed.

“No,” I said, sinking into the mattress, attempting to escape his prying. “I’m just tired.”

He too didn’t comment. He didn’t really care.

I didn’t sleep. I waited until the clock showed 2:15, it’s huge red numbers like monster’s eyes peering at me in the dark. I dressed, crept out of bed, down the hall to Mira’s room. I gently shook her awake. She was confused and sleepy. “Mommy…what…?”

I shushed her. “We need to go. I can’t tell you why.” I woke Simon the same way, gave the same instructions. I grabbed the small bag I had packed for them from the back of the coat closet in the hallway. I had practiced a silent exit many times to make sure that we could get away without waking Mark. The door of the house closed at 2:19.

We stayed in the shadows as best we could. My heart hammered. The children were practically running to keep up with my quickened pace. We went across yards, and public lots and down alleys and through parks and play grounds, until we were outside the limits of Fulbright, trekking across fields and farms. Finally, we made it to the ruin of the US Postal Office. I checked my watch. It was 2:59. The smuggler was supposed to arrive at 3:15.

Gilda was standing against the back wall of the old building, ushering people through broken window to hide inside while they waited for the smuggler to show up. I had no idea how many were already inside, but I watched her help 2 people through before she notice me and the kids. No one stood between us, and she left her place at the building and came towards me quickly.

“Emily,” she said, a question hanging in the air. She looked at the kids, then back at me. “The last two?” She was shaking her head.

“Gilda, please,” I said. “Please.”

“I can’t take your children from you,” she said. “I can’t do that to you.”

“You have to,” I said. The children were both now clinging to me, having figured out why were outside of Fulbright in the middle of the night. They had heard stories of people disappearing from Massachusetts all their life. Now they were about to do it themselves.

“Mommy, don’t send us away,” Simon said. He was pulling on my arm. “I want to stay with you.”

But Mira was silent. Mira, at only seven, already knew what life would be like for her if she staying. She cried silent, fat tears and remained at stoic as stone.

Gilda was about to say something more, when we heard the truck pulling up to the building. It’s lights were off, and as soon as it parked, they killed the engine. A person climbed out of the driver’s seat, and pulled something from their pocket. It was a flashlight, and the driver clicked it on and off three times quickly.

“It’s safe,” Gilda said. She took off towards the truck and I followed, the kids clinging to me as I moved after her. She called into the old post office, and then we were being handed children, and helping women climb through the window. Two men came last. I turned around to see that the driver had opened the back of the truck, and was similarly helping women and children climb into it. When everyone else had gone the driver looked at the two of us and the kids and said, “Can’t take both of you. Which one of you is going?”

Gilda and I looked at each other, and before I could say anything, she pushed me towards the truck, saying, “Go, Emily.”

“No, Gilda. Take the kids. Go to Canada. Get away from here.”

“No,” she said again, more forcefully. “Go with you children, Emily. They need their mother.”

My hands were trembling so hard that I almost dropped the bag I was packed. “But, Gilda, they’ll put you back in the stocks,” I said.

“You think they won’t do that to you?” she said.

“Ladies, we have to go,” the driver said. She came towards us, and lifted Mira from the ground, pushing her into the truck. She stifled a cry. Simon went into the truck more willingly, but I could hear them both sobbing as soon as they were inside.

Gilda shoved me towards the truck. “GO!” she said, almost angry now. “I’ll get out later!”

I looked over my shoulder at her, the guilt almost unbearable. But Gilda didn’t look disappointed or disapproving at all. She looked just as hard and as determined as every time I had passed her in the stocks. She was a fighter. She would survive.

The driver shut the door of the truck, and then my kids were huddled against me, crying into my dress in the dark.

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.