Jonas and Charity didn't speak for the first few miles. They passed some trees and a few gentle hills; Jonas braked when a raccoon ran across the road.
"I saw one of those when I came through the first time," Jonas said, breaking the silence. "I didn't know what it was."
Charity turned and looked over at him, waiting. He had never before spoken about the hardships he had endured in his journey to their doorstep.
"They sent planes after us the first week. Whenever I could hear one coming, I'd drag the bike and us under cover, and I'd make Gabriel cold by sharing memories with him, so that the heat-seeking devices couldn't see us. Eventually they stopped looking. I've always wondered why. Was it that the damage already done? Or had they stopped seeing it as damage?"
"I hope it was the latter," Charity said.
"So do I," Jonas said quietly.
000
The drive would take them a couple of days. Jonas had traveled quite far to get away from the Community—more than a month, in fact. In his memory the days all blurred together, especially toward the end, when he and Gabe were running out of food. All he could remember now was the hellish ache of hunger in his stomach and the terrible feeling that Gabriel would die and he couldn't save him. And he preferred not to think about that.
They stopped after a few hours to stretch their legs. Just to be on the safe side, Jonas checked their stores. He had brought a decent amount of food and some cans of gas to keep them going. After stretching prodigiously, Charity came around the back of the vehicle and stood beside him.
"What do you think they'll be like?" Charity asked, not looking at him. She stared hard at one of the gas cans.
Jonas didn't have to ask who "they" were. "They may be hostile," he said after a long pause. "It's a definite possibility."
Charity bit her lip. "Do you think they'll…" she couldn't seem to figure out how to say it.
"Execute us?" Jonas said it for her. She looked up at him. "Maybe. We can only pray they won't."
000
They drove all day, stopping only to stretch their legs or refill the gas tank. In the evening, the sun set before them in a flood of crimson. Jonas squinted hard into the light. "We'll have to stop soon and get some rest." There was no answer from beside him. "Charity?"
Charity suddenly slumped forward, held upright by her seatbelt. Jonas swore and braked. He put the car in park.
"Chare?" He tipped her head back. She was unconscious and frightfully pale. Jonas unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned her seat back, then put a pillow under her head and covered her up with one of the blankets from the back. It was all he could do for her.
In a few minutes that felt like hours, she came to. She blinked weakly at him in the crimson light. "What happened?" she asked, her voice rough.
"You passed out," Jonas said, putting his hand over hers. "We're going to stop here for the night." He leaned his own seat back and pulled out another blanket and pillow. "We should be thankful that your symptoms aren't any worse than the occasional fainting spell. Rather mild for a terminal disease, isn't it?" He smiled at her, but she didn't smile back. She picked at her blanket. "Charity?"
"It's not all," she said, clearing her throat. "The doctor said I would probably begin to decline rapidly sometime in the next few days. The fainting spells will be longer and more frequent, I'll be unable to keep food down, and I'm going to get pretty weak." She smiled at him, the smile of a martyr, or an angel. "You're probably going to have to carry me into the Community," she said.
000
Jonas and Charity woke with the sunrise. Jonas sat up and stretched out his sore shoulders.
"Is it morning already?" Charity asked groggily, pulling the blanket closer up around her chin.
"Yeah," Jonas said, climbing out of the car. "Do you want some breakfast?"
"Mm. Not really." Charity closed her eyes again.
"Come on, you should eat something," Jonas cajoled, pulling some food out of the back.
"Oh, alright." Charity capitulated, but Jonas saw that she only nibbled on the Nutri-grain bar he handed her.
They got underway again. They chatted for awhile, and when the conversation petered out into a comfortable silence, Charity reached over and turned on the radio.
All they heard was static. Charity flipped through a few channels: nothing.
"We're out of range of the towers," Jonas said.
Charity turned off the radio. She sat in thought for a second, the reached around her seat and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. She turned it on, then off again. "No service," she said quietly, putting it away. They both suddenly had the feeling that it was them, only the two of them, in the entire world.
Charity leaned over and kissed Jonas on the cheek.
000
After about two hours of driving, Charity put her seat back again.
"Are you alright?" Jonas asked.
"Yes; I'm just tired," Charity said, settling herself with a pillow.
Jonas glanced over at her. Dark circles under her eyes stood out even more starkly against her pale skin.
Charity curled up on the seat and closed her eyes. Jonas watched her for a moment, and a tender smile crept over his face. Very low, he began to sing.
"Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind…"
Charity fell asleep with a smile on her face.
Jonas was beginning to worry. If something happened to cause Charity's health to deteriorate even more rapidly before he reached the Community, there would be nothing he could do for her. He couldn't even call anyone for help on the cell phone. He suddenly realized something he had never thought of before: how very lucky he had been that both he and Gabriel were healthy and were immunized against so many diseases. Had they not been, one or both of them could have easily succumbed to illness on their journey to Elsewhere… And if he had died then, he wouldn't have been able to help Charity now.
Jonas could only raise his eyes to heaven in a silent prayer of thanks for giving him the chance to save the girl now asleep on the seat beside him, the girl who walked around the house barefoot and looked up the meanings of names and made jokes about Borneo.
000
Jonas had a nightmare that night. In his dream, he and Charity were met at the bridge the Community by young men with guns, who ordered them out of the car and took them to see a judge. Jonas gulped and held tight to Charity's hand as they were taken to the courtroom. The room was just as he had remembered—nothing had changed. And then the door behind the bench opened… and his mother stepped out.
"We will now hear the case of 18-19," she said tonelessly, "Jonas."
"Mother." Jonas tried to call out to her, but he couldn't make a sound.
"18-19 is charged with betraying his Community," a young woman said from behind Jonas and Charity. Jonas turned and stared at her as she approached the bench. The woman—girl—looked to be about fifteen, her brown hair cut short in the Community's style. And she looked terribly familiar. "Furthermore, he stole food, a blanket and a bicycle. He even stole away a newchild and took it to Elsewhere. But most heinous of all, this abandonment of his Community, expressly forbidden in all laws to all citizens and particularly to the Receiver of Memory, caused the memories stored up over so many years to be released on this Community." She turned to the crowd seated watching them (had there been a crowd there before?) and declared, "You have all felt the effects of this communal receiving of memory." The crowd murmured in affirmative. She turned to Jonas. "I do not know what it was you hoped to achieve—teach us to love perhaps?—but I am certain it failed. For all we feel now is hatred. Hatred, brother."
Brother. He knew now who she was. Lily. Lily, with stone-hard revenge in her eyes.
Lily turned to the bench. "The Community asks our judge for sentencing. We ask for death."
The crowd began to chant, slowly. "Death. Death. Death." The words grew louder and louder until they were shouting them with all their might—"DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!"
They ceased all at once, and Jonas's mother looked down at him. Her eyes were as icy as her daughters. "Death it is, then," she said lowly.
Jonas turned in panic to Charity, but Charity crumbled slowly to sand before his eyes. Two people dragged him over to a chair and strapped him down—the young man's eyes had once laughed as he threw an apple to Jonas, and the young woman's hair was red as fire—or blood. "You won't go to the releasing room, Jonas," Asher said calmly. Fiona added, "All of the Community wants to watch."
Absolutely unable to speak, Jonas looked out over the crowd, and he saw everyone he had ever known there—Pierre and Inger, and the secretary to the Giver, and hundreds more, many of whom he could call by name. Two faces were missing, though: the Giver and his father.
The Giver, he knew, was dead. And he knew where he father was, too, and instant before he saw him. Saw him approaching with the needle in his hand.
Jonas awoke with a strangled cry of anguish. He sat up, panting in terror, his face awash in a cold sweat. But Charity didn't stir. She lay asleep beside him, so deeply exhausted that even Jonas's scream couldn't rouse her. Her skin in the moonlight looked white as paper.
In that moment, Jonas knew it in his heart—knew the thing he had not truly taken in until that instant. Charity was dying. She could not now put her arms around him and soothe him from his night-terrors, and there was no small, warm hand to wrap around his own. And if he couldn't save her now, there never would be again.
AN: Don't think the quality of that one was quite up to par. Sorry about that, guys.
Once again, I am in the realm of dorkdom. I researched this chapter. I needed to know how far Jonas went from the Community to get to Elsewhere, and how long it would take him to drive back. So first, I needed to know how long he traveled.
The book says he left about two weeks before the December ceremony, and presumably he got to Elsewhere on Christmas. Unfortunately, the book never says when in December the ceremony takes place. So I went to the source: I emailed the author.
Lois Lowry has a website—the address is on my bio page. She has her email address at the website, so after reading a couple of things she had already said on the site to see if my answer was there, I emailed her and asked her when the December ceremony was. Here is her very nice and very prompt reply:
"I don't know the answer to your question about how long Jonas was traveling. I wish i had paid more attention that that in the book, perhaps even making it several months, but I think it would have made the last section too long."
So she wanted the traveling time to be long. If we put the December ceremony on the first of December, that would mean that Jonas traveled for 39 days. So now I needed to know how far he could travel in that time. So, on to another page: http:www.bicycletraveller.de/indexe.htm . I emailed the author, and he replied that:
"an untrained person, say doing only the occasional ride, can normally do about 50km without any problems. People riding a bike more regularly will average 80km to 100km. Cyclists doing bigger tours can go 130+km easily - weather and other factors permitting."
I'm no good with metric, so we're gonna put this in English. That's 31 miles, 50 to 62 miles, and 81+ miles. Jonas rode his bike a lot in the community, so we can say he rode about 55 miles a day for the first two weeks (770 miles). Then for two weeks he dropped to 45 miles (630 miles). As he begins to weaken, he drops to 20 miles a day for a week (140 miles) and then finally the last four days he can only do 5 miles a day (20 miles). That's a grand total of 1,560 miles! WOW! Go Jonas! Halfway across the country, that boy rode! I mean, if Charity lived in south-central PA (which is where I'm from), then the Community, due east, is like, north-central CO!
You know the really funny thing about all this? This is not the first time I've done research for a fanfiction. I am a very lazy person. Like, with schoolwork, I won't do any more work than I absolutely have to. But for this fanfic, I also went through and figured out when Jonas and Gabe's birthdays were—his little mind calculation? That took me several minutes and my friend's calculator to do during a boring health class. And I also had to figure out Edwardian servants' wages for my Little Princess fic. Nobody ever tells you that you have to do math and research for fanfictions:)
Link007: I agree, it seemed like they crossed dimensions. But if you've read the sequels, it seems that the Community was on the same plane (if you will) with Elsewhere, and it was just that the quality of the world was different somehow. Not exactly sure. But I tried to capture some of that with the feeling they got as they crossed to the other side of the hill.
CPO3: You're right, the symptoms are too light. I tried to make them a little worse in this chapter.
Arachnomadness: Well, the Giver actually does have two sequels, called "Gathering Blue" and "Messenger", but I really didn't like them. :) And I didn't read them until after I began writing this fic. They're very interesting; I just don't think they're nearly as good as The Giver.
kairisora16 and I would login but I don't feel like it right now: (Nice name, btw :) Unfortunately, if I tried to get it published, I would get my butt sued off. :) Also, I would like everyone to know that not only do I not own the rights to The Giver, I don't own the rights to Nutri-grain bars either!
A huge, gigantic, warm-fuzzy thank you to everyone who reviewed! And also big thanks to sdonnelly, whose review which I received tonight made me go, "ohmigosh, I haven't updated since November, and I've already got most of the next chapter written anyway! I better get crackin'!" Even one review can go a long way. grins
Okay, now that the note is longer than the actual chapter, I think I should stop… Please review! I will love you all forever! makes the sad puppy-dog face, lower lip trembles