“You have somewhere to go, somewhere to seek.”
I should just tell her. I should tell everyone. Something is standing in my way, a question. It’s that one word, “seek.” What if I don’t want to seek? What if I’m done with seeking? Even if we made it to the university, then what? Would we stay there forever or would there be another destination after that, and then another, and another? We’ve found a good thing here. It’s not perfect, it’s not glamorous, but it feels manageable, sustainable. Phil, Janette and Matt have already slipped into the old pattern of life; they ignore us and we ignore them. Maybe that symptom alone is enough to convince me that we’ve discovered a semblance of normalcy—why risk it? Even if it’s only ten blocks away, why uproot again just to live in a crowded gymnasium with a new set of strangers? But if I don’t tell them it feels like lying, like just another betrayal.
“Allison?”
“Hm? Yes?”
“Are you okay? You’ve been staring at that Glade PlugIn for five minutes now.”
Fuck.
“Oh, oh yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, just had a thought, that’s all.”
“Is it your mom? Want to share?”
Sure, I think, looking at Holly’s wide-open face, why not? It’s not that she’s stupid, she’s just very, very trusting. I can’t imagine she’ll prod for my true motivations.
“Holly,” I begin, clearing my throat, “do you like it here? I mean, if you had the choice, to stay here or go somewhere else, what would you do?”
She shifts from sitting cross-legged to sort of resting with both her legs crooked to the side. The miniature snow globe in her hands began to travel up and down, tossed from palm to palm as she sticks out her tongue a little and considers the question. At least she doesn’t have an immediate answer. Maybe my hesitations aren’t so strange after all.
“I guess it depends,” she says at last, shrugging.
“On what?”
“On where it is.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know; just curious, I guess. I mean, this place isn’t so bad, right? We’ve sort of carved out a bit of a niche, don’t you think?” She looks away as I ask the question, molding her palms around the curved dome of the snow globe, pressing it together until it looks ready to shatter in her hands. “Holly?”
“It is good here. I … I like it.”
With that, she turns back to the boxes, conversation terminated. I watch her as she gets up on her knees to reach across for a big, heavy, unopened box. She grabs it by the flaps but it’s too heavy and the box tumbles out of her arms, landing askew. A cascade of tinkling Christmas ornaments lands across our feet, red and green and gold, smelling like dust and pine. One of the green ball ornaments has broken, cracked open on its end like an egg.
I reach to start cleaning it up and without warning, Holly is in tears. She covers her face with both hands and sobs, hard, her whole body shaking with the effort to stop, to recompose. I gently touch her knee, wondering if my question was too much, went too far.
“Hey, it’s okay. Only one broke, we’ll just clean it up, no worries.”
“It’s not … i-it’s not that!” she says, forcing out the shuddering words between sobs.
“Jesus, hey, don’t worry. What’s going on?”
I brush the broken glass to the side and move closer to her, hoping a human presence and a shoulder to cry on is what she’s looking for. Holly stays still, hiding her face for a moment before her fingers slowly wipe down her cheeks.
“It’s Ted,” she says, stumbling over his name. My first thought is that he’s broken up with her and my second is that I’ll have to break his face. “He’s … he’s proposed. He asked me to marry him.”
“That’s great!” I shout, maybe a little too enthusiastic. Holly stares back at me, mystified.
“It is?”
“I mean … yeah—isn’t it? I thought you two were … ya know, in it for the long haul.”
“It’s not that. I love him, I really do, but I just don’t like it.… It feels like he’s only doing it because of this, you know, because of everything that’s happened,” she says. The tears have stopped, coming to a slow rest on the curve of her cheekbone. She sniffles, wiping her nose with the back of her pale hand. “So I asked him: would you be asking me this if we weren’t stuck here together? And he said no!”
I knew Ted was no Casanova, but that’s pretty inexcusable.
“Well, I’m sure he means that … that the circumstances being the way they are, well, things are uncertain. I’m sure he would have proposed eventually, so what’s the difference if he does it now?”
“I don’t know. See? I just don’t know! I should be happy, part of me is. I thought he would never get up the courage. He was so shy when we met and I know his parents would never ever approve of us, but that’s just it! It means he doesn’t think we’ll ever see his parents again. I think he’s given up.”
“No,” I tell her firmly, squeezing her knee. I mean it. “That’s not true. He wouldn’t have asked you to marry him if he’d given up hope. He has hope for the two of you, for a life together. That’s not an insult, Holly. I just wish you knew how lucky you are.”
She rests her warm hand over mine and nods, a smile tugging at her lips even as the tears finish sliding off her chin. Carefully, she picks up a jagged piece of the broken ornament and turns it, letting it catch the light, crackle to life and sparkle.
“You won’t tell him, will you? That I was mad?” she asks, dropping the piece of glass. I can’t stop looking at it.
“No, of course not,” I say, laughing. “It’s our secret.”
* * *
I had a visitor just before getting into bed tonight. Zack came to chat. I hadn’t seen much of him or Ted today; while Holly and I worked on sorting Ms. Weathers’ belongings, Zack and Ted volunteered to sweep the other apartments more thoroughly to locate useful items and to check and double-check hiding places. The cold has seeped in through the windows; Zack shuffled in draped in a chunky afghan.
“Busy?” he asks, nodding toward the laptop perched on my knees. Dapper rolls over a few feet, anticipating that he would be asked to move.
“Not really,” I reply, shutting the monitor. “What’s up?”
“Is everything okay with Ted? He seemed weird today.”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know.… Jumpy … Irritable,” he says, sitting down at the foot of the bed. “I know he’s not my biggest fan, but it was strange.”
“I’m sure he likes you just fine,” I say. “It’s just stress. I think he and Holly are having issues. Best just to leave it alone.”
“Ah,” he says, “I see.… Trouble in paradise.”
“So you would call this paradise?”
He looks over at me, squinting like I’m miles away. I try desperately to keep my face neutral, to stop my cheeks from turning a bright, burning red. Getting a sneaky question past him will be hard, much harder than with Holly.
“What are you up to?” he asks, scooting closer.
Well, here goes.
“I heard someone on the radio last night,” I tell him. His eyes double in size. “It was a man at the university. They’ve set up some kind of relief effort there. He also read me to sleep.”
“Really?” Zack replied, arching an eyebrow with a smirk.
“Not like that. It was … nice, but odd, ya know? To hear someone out there, someone with some kind of authority. He said they had food and shelter.”
“He a cop?”
“I don’t think so, he didn’t say anything like that,” I reply. He looks away, down at his fingernails. “So?”
“So what?”
“So do you think we should go?”
“It’s not so bad here.”
“That’s what I was thinking too. The last thing I want is to be milling around with a hundred sweaty college kids, or my own goddamn professors,” I say, sha
king my head. “But we might run out of food here, especially if my mom is coming and bringing people, or the cold.… I just think it’s worth discussing.”
“Look,” he says, taking my hand. “Food can be found. What we have here … It’s like a home, a place of our own. If we go to the university who knows what we’ll find. It might sound good now, but it will be harder to leave once we’re there.”
“I know,” I say, “but I’m not good at keeping secrets. I think I should tell the others.”
“Do it,” he says, nodding vigorously, his curls bouncing. “But I guarantee you they’ll say the same thing.”
“Thanks for listening.”
“Mind if stay? I could use a bedtime story.”
We turn on the radio and blow out the candle. The voice is there, the stranger. We lie perfectly still in the dark, both of us on our backs, listening to Dapper breathing and to the low, rhythmic voice coming to us over the radio. I can’t help but wonder at the miracle of such things, of technologies I’ve never cared about or considered before. It’s as if an entirely new person is there with us, a man I’ve never met but that I know will become familiar with time. He’s there, reading, his voice separating into a million pinpoints of light, carrying a story, words, warmth. We lay quiet and still and I feel my breath going out of my lungs, lifting out and over to the radio, traveling through the speaker, across the invisible airwaves to visit the stranger with the mesmerizing voice.
The voice reads from The Awakening and I can’t help but think of my mom. I wish she was here to listen, to put me at ease. It would be much easier to just relax and enjoy the radio if I knew she was still alive, if I knew she would make it here to read it to me again the way she used to. She’s out there, I know she is. I just hope my urgent thoughts are enough to see her safely through.
COMMENTS
Isaac says:
October 3, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Any word from your mom yet?
Allison says:
October 3, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Nothing yet. I’m trying not to panic but it shouldn’t take her long. On a normal day you could get here from her house in forty-five minutes. I guess that distance doesn’t mean much anymore.
Brooklyn Girl says:
October 3, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Hey, if we’re still here hanging on then she could definitely make it. Don’t give up hope, Allison.
October 4, 2009—Sense and Sensibility
“Anything?”
“Nothing. Not a peep. There are some Floaters milling around outside but no sign of her.”
Ted puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I don’t know what to do. If I cry it’s like I’ve accepted she’s not coming. I won’t cry, I won’t. I need to focus, focus and lead.
And so the meeting goes about how I expected.
No one in particular is jumping at the idea of leaving the apartments quite yet. Phil brings up the possibility of finding lost family members among those assembled in the university gymnasium. Janette finds his idea promising and exciting. Matt points out that a single mother carrying a child and traveling ten miles through dangerous country was an anomaly, not something to be expected. This, of course, is his way of saying that it was highly unlikely that Phil’s chubby, well-meaning wife (or their two kids) had made it the more than ten miles from their tan rambler to the university. Phil throws a bit of a tantrum, but something tells me he felt Matt was right.
Ted, who has spent most of the meeting glowering at me from the corner of the living room with his glasses still skewed slightly to the right, corners me after the others have left to start on dinner. We stand alone in the living room, the low, glass surface of the coffee table between us. I can see he’s gunning for a fight but that he’s hesitating to start in with too much heat.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You can just say it. Go ahead. I know what you’re thinking.”
Ted refuses to speak, his lips pursed so tightly they look like a starfish all folded up and suffocating. I can see the thoughts flickering in his eyes, the decisions, the careful weighing of the options. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and tosses his hair around like an impatient stallion.
“I don’t want to fight,” he says.
“Yes you do, and that’s okay. Just start now before I get too hungry.”
“Fine,” he snorts. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had … I know you’re fucked up worrying over your mom, but I thought there was an understanding, you know? We hash things out and then take it to the group. What happened to that?”
I kinda knew this was coming, but knowing doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.
“It’s not a decision I can make, or we can make, get it? It’s a group decision, everyone is involved.”
“Everyone?” he says. He’s lowered his voice to his serious register. When he starts to get angry his accent becomes thicker and his shoulders hunch over as if he’s readying for a fistfight. I don’t think it will come to blows, but he still looks like a warthog kicking at the dirt, coiled up, tensed, a ball of fire seething right in front of the gold-framed Thomas Kinkade print.
“Right. Everyone. Everyone meaning you and Zack, right?”
I didn’t know this would happen, but I thought it might. I cross my arms, puffing out my chest to mimic his ridiculous, dominant posturing. I keep silently insisting there’s no drama here. I keep telling myself this is about a power dynamic, not about Ted being a jealous, whiny little prick.
“Does Zack know?” he asks, much more to the point.
“Yeah, I guess so, yeah. But, come on, in my defense he wheedled it out of me.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“You know that saying, how does it go—I hurt you because I love you? Well, that saying doesn’t apply here.”
“Is that one of your kinky sex games?”
“Look, asshole,” I mutter, taking a big step toward him, “I’ll slap you again if I have to. Don’t make it seem so appealing.”
I can feel it surging, that clash of the titans—hot, angry, boiling temper that’s just dying to rip right out of my throat and through the palm of my hand. I still don’t know where this is coming from. Best guess? Ted’s goddamn fucking attitude and the fact that my mom, the most beautiful woman in the entire world, is missing and maybe, just maybe, dead.
“Fuck it,” I say, deflating. “This is a waste of time.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think we should leave? I mean, when my mom gets here, do you think we should go?”
It takes Ted a moment to answer. In the meantime, we both take a seat on the big, calico couch. It’s covered in handmade afghans that take up so much space that the couch itself is barely visible beneath all the crafts. Everything in this place smells like cinnamon. Cinnamon tinged with sweat and shit, the smell we seem to carry with us everywhere. We can’t get rid of it—no matter how careful we are about cleaning the bathroom we always seem to reek just a little.
Ted rests his right ankle on his knee and shoves his hands deep in his pockets. I’m tempted to interrupt the silence with a bit of a heart-to-heart about Holly but I keep my mouth shut. I think I like Holly’s new allegiance, the way she grins at me like we’re twins separated at birth. I can’t read her mind but I can take a pretty accurate guess.
“My gut says yes,” Ted replies at last. “But that’s a big change. Who knows if it will be that much better. Still, to see people, new people, hell, lots of people…”
“I know. That’s how I feel too.”
“It could be a madhouse,” Ted says, smiling crookedly. His foot bounces rhythmically in the air. “And super-unsanitary with all those people in one spot.”
“I think we should stay,” I tell him. The tension melts away, leaving behind the same old easy friendship that existed before. It’s as if the radio, Zack, our disagreements never even existed.
“Really?”
“Really. What’s the point? Se
arching, searching, never happy with anything … When does it end? It exhausts me just thinking about it. Buddha taught that desire never learns, it never wakes up to its own foolishness, it drives us on endlessly—and for what?”
“Hmm, well, Confucius say: ‘White girls who sit on tack get point.’ ”
“Right, never quote Buddha to a Chinaman, I forgot.”
“Cracker.”
“Infidel.”
“Honky.”
“Oriental.”
“Forsooth! That stings!”
“If you think we should go then I’ll think about; if not then I think the case is closed,” I say, brushing the jokes aside for the moment. Ted looks at me. He really needs a haircut.
“I just can’t help but think about Phil and his kids, and Janette … and, you know—please don’t hit me—maybe even your mom. If she doesn’t make it here then there’s a chance they made it to the university.”
“I’m trying to get over that. I don’t want to cling to hope for too long. She said three days and that should be long enough but … We have to give her longer,” I tell him, forcing a smile. “After all: woman who fart in church sits in her own pew.”
“That doesn’t even make sense. What is wrong with you?”
I reach across and punch him in the shoulder. It’s better than a slap; it makes him fall over, groaning theatrically and clutching his arm. Outside, through the curtains, through the glass, I can hear the undead making their slow, determined march down the street. I know what direction they’re going. West. West toward the campus. I wonder if they can sense the bodies there, the feast to come … Or maybe they’re mustering outside our door, coming for us instead.
Or maybe they’ve found my mom and her fate is already sealed.
We stay. For now we stay in here, safe, uncertain, huddled for warmth.