Last Survivors 01 - Life as We Knew It

  I left Mom alone in the pantry for a while (I'm losing all sense of time), but then I figured I'd better make sure she hadn't fallen. So I went into the pantry and found her sitting on the floor weeping. I put my arm around her shoulder and let her cry. After a while she calmed down and then she embraced me.

  I helped her up and she leaned on me as we went back to the sunroom.

  I have never loved Mom as much as I love her now. I almost feel like some of Mrs. Nesbitt's love for Mom has seeped into me.

  November 10

  Peter came over this afternoon. Each time I see him, he looks five years older.

  He didn't talk much to us. He just lifted Mom off her mattress, blankets and all, and carried her into the living room.

  They stayed there a long time. Matt and Jon came in while they were there, and we all whispered, so Mom wouldn't be disturbed by the sound of our voices.

  When they came back into the sunroom, Peter put Mom down so gently on her mattress, I almost wept. There was so much love and kindness in that gesture. Peter told us to take care of Mom and make sure she doesn't try to do too much. We promised we would.

  I wonder if Dad was ever that gentle with Mom. I wonder if he's that gentle now with Lisa.

  November 11

  Veterans Day.

  A national holiday.

  Matt stayed home from the post office.

  I think this is the funniest thing ever.

  November 15

  I went to my bedroom to look for clean(er) socks, and while I was up there, I decided to weigh myself.

  I had on a fair number of layers of clothes. Even though we have the woodstove going day and night, the sides of the sunroom don't get too warm. And of course leaving the sunroom to go to the pantry or the kitchen or upstairs is like hiking to the North Pole. You don't just stroll there in a bikini.

  I had on my underwear and my long Johns (sometimes I remember how upset I was when Mom bought them last spring, and now I thank her over and over, at least in my mind) and jeans and sweatpants and two shirts and a sweatshirt and a winter coat and two pairs of socks and shoes. I didn't bother with a scarf and I kept my gloves in my pocket because I knew I wasn't going to be upstairs too long.

  For the great weighing-in, I took off my shoes and my coat. According to the scale, my clothes and I weigh 96 pounds.

  I don't think that's too bad. Nobody starves to death at 96 pounds.

  I weighed 118 last spring. My real concern is how much muscle I've lost. I was in good shape from all the swimming and now I don't do anything except carry firewood and shiver.

  I'd like to go back to the pond and do some more skating, but I feel guilty leaving Mom alone. When I left her alone to visit Mrs. Nesbitt, I was doing something for someone else. But skating would just be for me, and I can't justify that.

  Matt and Jon are both thin, but they look like they're pure muscle. Mom looks skinny and sickly. She's been eating less than the rest of us for a while now, but she also started out weighing more so I don't think she's at starvation level, either.

  We have food but we're so careful with it. Who knows when we'll get any more. Even Peter doesn't bring us any when he visits.

  Thanksgiving is next week. I wonder if we'll have anything to be thankful for.

  November 18

  Matt came flying home from the post office today. There was a letter from Dad.

  The only problem was the letter was sent before the other one. I guess he wrote a letter between the two we'd already gotten.

  This one was from Ohio. It didn't say much, just that he and Lisa were doing well and so far they had enough gas and food and camping out was fun. They met lots of other families who were also going south or west and he'd even run into someone he'd known in college. Lisa threw in a PS to say she could feel the baby move. She was sure it was a boy but Dad was equally sure it was a girl.

  It was so strange getting that letter. I couldn't understand why Matt was so happy. It wasn't like there was any new news in it, since we know Dad and Lisa made it farther west than that. But Matt said it means mail is still traveling and is totally unpredictable, so a newer letter from Dad could arrive at any time.

  Sometimes I feel like I miss Dad and Sammi and Dan more than I miss Megan and Mrs. Nesbitt. They all deserted me but I can't blame Megan or Mrs. Nesbitt for not writing. I know I can't blame Dad or Sammi or Dan, either. Or I shouldn't blame them, which is more accurate.

  I have no privacy. But I feel so alone.

  November 20

  It was minus 10 when I went out with the bedpan. I'm pretty sure that was early afternoon.

  Matt keeps chopping wood. There's already too much for the dining room, so he's started a pile in the living room.

  I wonder if we'll have any trees left by the time winter ends. If it ends.

  We still have water but we ration it.

  November 24

  Thanksgiving.

  Even Mom didn't pretend we had anything to be thankful for.

  November 25

  Matt came home today from the post office with two special treats.

  One was Peter.

  The other was a chicken.

  It wasn't all that much of a chicken, maybe a little bigger than a Cornish hen. But it was dead and plucked and ready for cooking.

  I guess Matt knew he'd be getting it, and had arranged for Peter to join us in our Day After Thanksgiving Feast.

  There was a moment when I thought about where the chicken had come from and what Matt must have given up for us to have it. But then I decided the hell with it. It was chicken, a real honest-to-goodness-not-from-a-can chicken. And I'd be a fool to look a gift chicken in the mouth.

  No matter what Matt might have given up for the chicken, it would have been worth it for the look in Mom's eyes when she saw it. She looked happier than she has in weeks.

  Since the only way we can cook is on top of the woodstove, we were kind of limited. But we put the chicken in a pot with a can of chicken broth and salt and pepper and rosemary and tarragon. Just the smell of it was heaven. We made rice and string beans, too.

  It was wonderful beyond description. I'd forgotten what actual chicken tastes like. I think we each could have eaten the entire chicken, but we shared it very civilly. I had a leg and two bites of thigh.

  Peter and Jon broke the wishbone. Jon won, but it didn't matter since we all have the same wish.

  November 26

  I guess the chicken really revitalized Mom, because today she decided we were all wasting our lives and that had to stop. Of course it's true, but it's still pretty funny that Mom felt the need to make a big deal out of it.

  "Have any of you done a bit of schoolwork all fall?" she asked. "You too, Matt. Have you?"

  Well, of course not. We tried to look shamefaced. Bad us for not doing algebra when the world is coming to an end.

  "I don't care what you study," Mom said. "But you have to study something. Pick one subject and work on that. I want to see open schoolbooks. I want to see some learning going on here."

  "I absolutely refuse to study French," I said. "I'll never go to France. I'll never meet anyone from France. For all we know, there isn't a France anymore."

  "So don't study French," Mom said. "Study history. We may not have a future, but you can't deny we have a past."

  That was the first time I ever heard Mom say that about the future. It shocked any possible fight out of me.

  So I picked history as my subject. Jon picked algebra and Matt said he'd help him with it. Matt admitted he'd been wanting to read some philosophy. And Mom said if I wasn't going to use my French textbook, she would.

  I don't know how long this burst of studying is going to last, but I understand Mom's point. The other night I dreamed that I found myself in school for a final and not only hadn't I been to class and didn't know anything, but the school was just the way it had been and everybody there was normal looking and I was dressed in layers of clothes and hadn't washed in days and ever
yone stared at me like I was a drop-in from hell.

  At least now if it's a history test, I'll have a fighting chance of knowing some of the answers.

  November 30

  There's nothing like schoolwork to make a person want to play hooky.

  I told Mom I wanted to go for a walk and she said, "Well, why don't you? You've been spending entirely too much time indoors."

  I love her but I could throttle her.

  So I layered up and walked over to Mrs. Nesbitt's house. I don't know what I was looking for or what I was expecting to find. But the house had been ransacked since the day she'd died. That was to be expected. We'd taken everything we could use, but there was stuff like furniture that we didn't need and other people had taken for themselves.

  It felt funny walking around the empty house. It reminded me of Megan's house when I'd gone there, like the house itself was dead.

  After I'd walked around awhile, I realized what I wanted to do was explore the attic. Maybe that hadn't been gone through, or at least not as thoroughly

  And sure enough, even though all the boxes had been opened and contents pulled out, there was plenty of stuff left in there. And that's when I knew I was there looking for a Christmas present for Matt. Jon had the baseball cards. Mom had the box of chocolates. But I wanted Matt to have something, too.

  Most of what was lying around on the floor was old linens, tablecloths, and stuff like that. There were piles of old clothes, too, nothing anyone could have found usable.

  When I'd gone through the attic the first time, it had been crowded with boxes, but everything was neatly packed away. Now it was chaos. Not that it mattered. I looked through piles of things, through boxes that had been gone through but nothing taken out. And finally I found something I could give Matt.

  It was a dozen or so different colored pencils from an old color-by-number picture set. The pictures had all been carefully colored in, but their backs were blank, so I decided to take them, too.

  Back in high school, Matt had done some drawing. I wasn't sure he'd even remember it, but I did, because he did a sketch of me in a much better layback position than I'd ever really managed. Mom had loved it and wanted to hang it up, but it embarrassed me because I knew it wasn't really me and I threw a tantrum until she gave up on the idea. I guess she kept the picture, but I don't know where she hid it.

  At some point Matt's going to stop chopping firewood and when he does he can take up art again, to go along with his philosophy studies.

  I went through the other stuff in the attic, but the pencils were definitely the high point. So I thanked Mrs. Nesbitt and went home. Just to be sneaky, I went in through the front door and took the color-by-number set up to my bedroom before returning to the sunroom.

  We may not have a chicken for Christmas dinner, but at least there'll be presents.

  December 1

  For the third straight day the temperature was above zero this afternoon, so I took Mom's skates and went to the pond.

  There was no one there. (I'm really starting to think that whole Brandon thing was a hallucination.) In a funny way, it was better that I was alone, since I never am at home. Mom can definitely hobble around now, so I don't have to hover around her all the time, but it's way too cold in the house to spend much time anyplace but the sunroom.

  I skated around the pond, nothing fancy and incredibly slow. I had to be careful, since there were chunks of ice missing. I guess people have been hacking away at it for water, the way we will once Mrs. Nesbitt's water runs out.

  The air is so bad I don't know how Matt and Jonny manage. I'd skate for a few minutes and then start coughing. I probably didn't skate for more than 15 minutes total, but I was exhausted by the time I finished, and it took most of my strength to get back home.

  Matt, Mom, and I are down to one meal a day, but at least we're eating 7 days a week. And maybe the temperature really is warming up, and that'll make things better.

  Chapter Seventeen

  December 2

  Fridays Matt goes to the post office first thing in the morning. Lately he's been coming home in the early afternoon. Even though the days are all gray, there's still a difference between daytime and night and it gets dark very early now.

  Mom, Jon, and I were in the sunroom and it must have been before noon because Jon hadn't gotten anything to eat. We had two oil lamps going because, even in daytime with the fire in the woodstove, we still need two lamps to have enough light to read by.

  Jon was the first one to notice. "Does it seem darker to you?" he asked.

  He was right. It was darker. First we looked at the oil lamps to see if one of them had gone out. Then we looked at the woodstove.

  Mom tilted her head up. "It's snowing," she said. "The skylights are covered with snow."

  With the windows covered by plywood, we can't see what's going on outside. But since the only change in the weather for months has been the temperature, there hasn't been much need to see what's happening.

  The kitchen window is covered with plywood, too, and we can't get to the windows in the dining room, so we all went to the living room to see what was happening.

  It must have been snowing for an hour or more. It was coming down at a furious pace.

  As soon as we realized it was snowing, we also realized the wind was blowing. "It's a blizzard," Jon said.

  "We don't know that," Mom said. "The snow could stop in a minute."

  I couldn't wait. I grabbed my coat and ran outside. I would have done the same for rain or sunlight. It was something different and I had to experience it.

  Jon and Mom followed me. "The snow looks weird," Jon said.

  "It's not quite white," Mom said.

  That was it. It wasn't dark gray, like the piles of plowed snow in March. But it wasn't pure white, either. Like everything else these days, it was dingy.

  "I wish Matt were home," Mom said, and for a moment I thought she meant that she wished she could share the moment with him, the excitement of snow. But then I realized she was worried about him getting home. The post office is about 4 miles from here, which isn't that far if you're biking, but could take a long time to walk, especially in blizzard conditions. "You want me to go get him?" Jon asked. "No," Mom said. "He's probably on his way home now. And it's not like he'll get lost. I'd just feel better if he were home."

  "One good thing," I said. "If there's any kind of accumulation we'll have a water supply."

  Mom nodded. "Jonny, get the barrels and the garbage cans, and put them outside," she said. "We can collect snow in them."

  Jon and I took everything that could hold snow and put them by the side of the house. By the time we had the last recycling bin out there, the garbage can already had an inch of snow in it.

  Jon was right. It was a blizzard.

  We went back in but none of us could concentrate on our books. We kept our coats on and sat in the living room, watching the snow fall and waiting for Matt's return.

  At some point Jon made himself some lunch. While he was in the sunroom I asked Mom if I should go get Matt.

  "No!" she said sharply. "I can't risk losing two of you."

  I felt like she'd punched me. Matt couldn't possibly be lost. We couldn't survive without him.

  Mom didn't say anything after that and I knew to keep my mouth shut. Finally she went back to the sunroom and when she did, I went outside and walked toward the road just to see what conditions were like. The wind was so fierce it came close to knocking me over. The snow was falling almost sideways and I couldn't see more than a few feet ahead.

  I barely made it to the road, but when I got there I couldn't see anything anyway. Matt could have been 20 feet down the road and I wouldn't have known. Mom was right. I couldn't possibly have made it to town. 1 could only hope Matt could make the long walk and that he'd known enough to leave once the snow had begun falling.

  I went back in and made up some nonsense about going outside to check on the snow collection system. If Mom suspect
ed differently she didn't say anything.

  We went back and forth between the sunroom and the living room. Mom went out just past the front door and stood there for a few minutes until I made her come in.

  I could see how excited Jon was, the way a kid is when it snows. It was killing him to suppress his excitement. It was killing Mom to suppress her fear. And it was killing me to see both of them trying to hide their feelings.

  As the day progressed the sky grew darker and the wind stronger.

  "I really think I should go find Matt," Jon said. "I could take one of the oil lamps."

  "Maybe he should, Mom," I said. At this point Jon is stronger than me and a lot stronger than Mom. He might even be stronger than Matt, just because he's been eating more. If Matt needed help, Jon was the only one of us who could give it to him.

  "No," Mom said. "For all we know Matt is staying in town with a friend to wait the storm out."

  But I knew Matt wouldn't do that. He'd come home. Or at least he'd try to. He'd be as worried about us as we were about him.

  "Mom, I really think Jon should go out," I said. "Just a little way down the road but with a lamp. It's getting so dark Matt could go right past our drive and not realize it."

  I could see how much Mom hated the idea. I decided to try a different approach.

  "How about if I go out first?" I said. "And then in a few minutes Jon could take over for me and then I could take over for him. We'd rotate, and that way neither one of us could get into any trouble."

  "Yeah, Mom," Jon said. "I'll go first. Send Miranda out in a few minutes."

  "All right, all right," Mom said. "Fifteen minutes and then I'll send Miranda out."

  Jon looked really excited and in a funny way I didn't blame him. Mom made sure he was thoroughly bundled up: coat and gloves and scarves and boots. She told him not to go too far and to hold the lamp as high as he could to give Matt a beacon.

  I waited alongside Mom. We didn't say anything. I didn't dare and Mom was way too wound up to make small talk. Finally she gestured to me to get ready.