I intertwined my fingers with his. “Thank you,” I said, and glanced at Tessa.
She nodded before I even asked. “I’ll look after Meredith until you’re back. I don’t mind at all. She’s kind of like my cousin too, now.”
“Thank you,” I said again. A lightness filled me that could have been excitement or terror or both.
I was really going to do this. I was taking the vaccine off the island, into whatever waited on the other side of the strait.
Gav found a car the next morning—an SUV someone had donated for the food runs, solid with wide snow tires. Rather than risk emptying the last working pump at the island’s gas station, we took a rubber tube and siphoned out what was left in the tanks of the town’s many abandoned cars. After a few failed attempts and a mouthful of gas for me that left me sputtering when I didn’t move fast enough after getting the suction going, we managed to stock up an extra ten gallons in jugs that we stashed in the back.
“I’ll see if we can find some heavy sleeping bags for the nights,” Gav said as we closed the hatch. “And we’ll want to have more than enough food, in case we run into trouble. How far are we going?”
“I’m thinking Ottawa,” I said. “Since it’s the capital—if the government still has scientists working on the virus anywhere, it’d be there, right?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Or we could try Halifax first, since it’s closer.”
He shrugged. “What you said about Ottawa makes sense. If there’s no one who can help in the capital, there probably isn’t anywhere.”
He said it so casually I stopped and looked at him. “You don’t think we’re going to find anyone?”
“We don’t really know, do we?” he said. “Look at how quickly the government abandoned us here.”
At my frown, he stepped toward me, resting his hands on my arms. “I get that you need to do this, Kae,” he said. “And I want to go with you. I don’t think anything else matters.”
“I was always planning on leaving the island some day,” he added when I didn’t speak. “Me and Warren, we were going to travel the country, see what we’d been missing.” A roughness had come into his voice mentioning the best friend he’d watched die, but then he tugged the collar of my coat playfully. “If I have to go with a pretty girl instead, I guess I can deal.”
The warmth in his gaze made me flush. He leaned in to kiss me, and I pulled him even closer. In that moment, nothing mattered more than the tingling of my skin and the heat where his body touched mine.
Before dinner, Leo knocked on Meredith’s bedroom door while I was refilling the ferrets’ food dish.
“Hey,” he said from the doorway.
“Hey, yourself,” I replied, trying to keep my concern out of my voice.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said. “I wasn’t judging you, or what you want to do. I just—when I even think about what things were like over there sometimes…”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, it’s not, really.” He dragged in a breath. “I wanted to see if I can help. With whatever you’re planning.”
I hesitated. As if sensing that I was evaluating his stability, he stood straighter. Though his body had always been lean, he looked too thin in his sweatshirt and jeans now. But his jaw was firm and his eyes clear.
“You’re the only person I can talk to who’s been off the island since the epidemic started,” I said. “If I ask Mark too many questions, he’ll probably mention it to Nell. I could use some advice figuring out the best route to take.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can do that.”
So the next day I scrounged up a map book and sat down with Leo in the living room. He traced his finger from the grayed-out area of the United States across the spread that showed all of Canada.
“I came this way,” he said, “through Maine and into New Brunswick. If you’re going to Ottawa, I think you’ll want to head up into Quebec and then down by the St. Lawrence River.”
“How bad were the roads?”
“There wasn’t too much snow yet. But there’s definitely no one plowing anymore, and there won’t be lights. You’ll probably have to get around abandoned vehicles. I think some people just drove until they ran out of gas.”
I bit my lip, studying the map. My grandparents on Dad’s side had lived in Ottawa—we’d done the drive in a day and a half before. But that was on properly cared-for roads with working gas stations along the way.
“You must have gone through a few towns,” I said. “What were they like? Did you see many people?”
Leo opened his mouth, and his eyes went briefly glassy. He lowered his head.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” I said quickly. “If it’s too hard thinking about it.”
He exhaled, and then he looked back at me with a small, tight smile. “You know, I haven’t thanked you,” he said. “You’ve been trying so hard to make sure I’m okay—I know that. So, thank you.”
He squeezed the top of my hand, where it was resting on the couch between us. Then the stairs creaked, and his arm jerked away. I felt my face warm as Tessa walked into the room, even though we hadn’t been doing anything friends shouldn’t, even though I hadn’t thought of Leo as more than a friend in months. He’d reacted because the sound had startled him, that was all.
As Tessa bent to kiss Leo and then turned to the seedling tray she’d started setting up before breakfast, I thought of my old journal. All the feelings I’d poured into it—about Leo, about every horrible thing happening around me. I didn’t know how I’d have stayed sane during the last four months without it. Maybe Leo needed more than time and space. Maybe he needed to get the memories haunting him out of his head.
“If you do want to talk about what you saw over there, I’ll listen,” I said. “It’s not that I don’t want to hear it. It’s totally up to you—whatever you’re okay with.”
Leo ran a hand through his dark hair, which had been short and spiky since he’d taken Uncle Emmett’s electric razor to it the day after he made it back to the island. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
“It’s not the roads that are really bad, Kae,” he said. “It’s…it’s people. You can’t trust them, even if they act like they want to help. You shouldn’t talk to anyone if you can avoid it. Just keep driving.”
“I know to be cautious,” I said. “We’ve dealt with enough, with the gang and their craziness, here on the island.”
He shook his head. “Everyone here is still mostly looking out for each other. Once you get to the mainland, it’s not going to be like that.” He paused. “You remember how you always told me, when we were kids, that the most important rule with wild animals is keeping your distance, making sure they don’t feel you’re threatening their home or their food? You have to treat everyone you see like that. They won’t care that you’re trying to save them from the virus. They’ll just see a car with gas and food in the trunk that could keep them alive a little longer. And they won’t care what they have to do to you to get it.”
Tessa set down her watering can with a clunk loud enough that we both turned our heads toward her. “Do you really have to talk like that?” she said to Leo. “Kaelyn already knows it’ll be dangerous.”
“I think she needs to know just how bad it is,” Leo said cautiously.
“She’ll be careful,” Tessa said. “She always is. How is going on and on about it going to help?”
A shadow passed over Leo’s face. “Maybe,” he said quietly, “I believe in telling people the truth. So they can decide how to deal with it for themselves.”
Tessa stiffened. Without another word, she left her plants and headed back upstairs. I watched her go, baffled. Leo dropped his face into his hands.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he said, his voice muffled by his palms. “I know why it bothers her. She still doesn’t know what happened to her parents.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” I
said.
“We’ve argued a couple times,” he said. “About—she was writing e-mails to me, while I was at school, you know? Before the epidemic was big enough news that people were talking about it in New York. And she pretended everything was fine. Never mentioned people getting sick, or the quarantine, or any of it.… The last time I talked to my mom, I had no idea it might be the last time. We had a fight about whether she’d cook turkey or just a chicken for Thanksgiving. So that’s my last memory of her.”
I waited for the right words to come. When they didn’t, I leaned forward and squeezed his hand the way he had mine.
“Tessa didn’t know how bad it was going to get. No one did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But you’d have told me. If everything had been normal with us, you’d have told me right away.”
It felt like betraying Tessa somehow to admit it, but I wasn’t going to lie. “I would have,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He smiled at me for a second, less forced than before. “It’s the past now,” he said, reaching for the map book. “We’ve got the future to worry about. Let’s get your route figured out already.”
When I went upstairs a half hour later, Tessa was in the master bedroom.
“Hey,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
She turned, brushing her overgrown bangs away from her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said. “I should probably finish up with those seeds.”
“You know,” I said, “I’ll look for your parents on the mainland. Ask around. Maybe I’ll be able to find them.”
I didn’t realize how much I wanted her to smile and say she was sure they’d make it back someday, until her face fell. “You don’t need to, Kaelyn,” she said. “I know they’re dead.”
“You don’t,” I protested. “They were smart—they knew about the virus early on—they’d have protected themselves. You can’t assume they didn’t make it. My brother Drew is still out there somewhere, and yeah, I know the chances aren’t great, but I haven’t given up on him.”
“That’s different,” Tessa said, so calmly I felt suddenly cold. “Your brother could be anywhere. My parents were right there on the other side of the strait the last time I talked to them. They wouldn’t have left, they’d have been there on the ferry if they were still alive. Which means they’re not.”
“Tessa…” I started.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve known since Leo got back. I knew it might be true for weeks before that. Nothing’s changed, not really. So it’s better not to dwell on it.”
That was Tessa. Practical, unemotional. Maybe she’d talked through the grief with Leo, gotten out all the pain she must have felt when neither of her parents stepped off the ferry that day.
Or maybe she was just pushing it down so deep she could almost forget it was there.
“If there’s anything you want—or need—me to look into while I’m gone…” I said.
“I know.” She touched my elbow as she walked past me into the hall; that was as close as Tessa got to hugging. “Thank you.”
I drove out to the research center in the SUV, getting used to how it handled, the wipers swishing back and forth over the windshield with the gusts of snow.
Inside, I went straight to the second floor and rummaged through the offices for books I thought might be useful. Unless we kept the samples in viable condition, there was no point in leaving at all.
One of the manuals had a chapter on vaccine transportation. After I read through it, I searched through the lab room until I found an industrial-grade cold-storage box in the cupboard beside the fridge. I grabbed a smaller plastic box too, to prevent the vials from touching the cold packs and freezing. Beside the cold box, I stacked the three notebooks of Dad’s that were dated from after the virus appeared, and added a box of petri dishes, a container of syringes, and a pack of microscope slides I found in one of the cabinets. Who knew what supplies they’d still have on the mainland?
I set it all in front of the fridge, where I’d be able to grab it quickly as soon as the weather cleared up enough that we could safely take the ferry across the strait. Leo thought he’d be able to get it going, after watching Mark start it up before. Until then, the vaccine would be safer here than anywhere else in town, with the specially calibrated fridge and modern generator behind the unbreakable windows and the door that had already stood up to the gang’s prying.
In the middle of the counter, where they would be easy to find, I placed the papers onto which I’d copied all of Dad’s notes about creating the vaccine. I’d give the keys to Tessa when I left. If we failed, I didn’t want Dad’s work to be completely lost.
There were so many things he hadn’t told me. He should have been prepared for the worst, for the possibility that he might not always be here.
He probably wouldn’t have thought I could handle this. He would have said to wait, like Nell had. And he might have been right. The roads could be so bad Gav and I would get stuck. We could run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. We could get held up, like Leo said, because all people would see was a couple of teenagers with resources worth stealing.
But bigger than those doubts was the feeling that had been swelling inside me since I’d watched Nell turn away. That if I didn’t do something now and we lost the vaccine, I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it.
The last things I packed in the SUV were two bags of sidewalk salt, which I thought to check the garage for after Meredith complained about the slippery front step.
The bags weighed forty pounds apiece. Despite the chill in the air, I was sweating under my coat by the time I’d carried them to the clear area by the door. But I’d also found a jug of winter windshield-wiper fluid, so I figured the effort had been worth it. I’d paused to stretch my arms when Leo stepped through the doorway.
“Hey,” he said. “Meredith said you were out here. Looking for salt?”
“Yep,” I said, nudging one of the bags with my foot.
“Ah!” he said. “That kind of salt.”
The silence that followed felt awkward. I looked at him, and he looked back at me, his expression so serious my heart skipped a beat. Before I could ask why, he dropped his gaze.
“You want help bringing those to the SUV? They’re for the trip, I guess?”
“Thanks,” I said. “Grab one and we’re good.”
I hefted the first bag onto my shoulder and trudged along the snowy driveway. Flakes whirled around us.
“You’re ready to go?” Leo asked as we shoved the bags into the back of the SUV.
“Completely,” I said. He followed me as I headed back for the wiper fluid. “All we need now is a break in the weather.”
We ducked into the garage.
“Kaelyn,” Leo said. When I turned, he opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times, as if he’d forgotten what he’d wanted to say. Then he smiled crookedly. “You wouldn’t believe how much I missed you when you left for Toronto, all those years back.”
“Please,” I said. “I bet it wasn’t half as much as I missed you. You still had a gazillion other friends here, at least.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t the same. You were the only one I knew really wanted me around.”
“What are you talking about? Everyone liked you.”
“Sure, they liked me,” he said, and hesitated. “But they never stopped seeing this.” He pointed to his face, and I knew he meant the shape of his eyes, the olive tone of his skin. “They never forgot I was adopted, different, not a real islander. I knew they couldn’t help it, so I acted like I didn’t notice. But with you I didn’t have to act. You didn’t judge me by where I was born.”
He’d always seemed so happy. I’d never known he’d felt that way about the rest of the kids the whole time we were growing up. But he was probably right. I’d felt the same sort of judgment aimed at me. It’d been easy for me not to care that Leo was different, because I had parents who were of contrasting colors and a mainlander dad on
top of that. I was different too.
“Leo,” I said, but he kept going.
“I was so relieved when I got off the ferry, and you were there and you were you. When you moved to Toronto, you seemed to be getting so…critical, and closed off, and I started thinking you’d changed, or that I hadn’t really known you as well as I thought. Especially when you came back and it was like you were avoiding me. I can’t believe I left for New York without trying to talk to you. And then the virus started wreaking havoc on everything.…” He swallowed. “But you’re still the same person I remember. Even more that person. The way you’ve thrown yourself into helping the town—you’re amazing, Kae. You know that, right?”
My cheeks warmed. “Lots of people are helping,” I said. “It’s Gav who really got everyone organized.”
“You’re the one who’s decided to go to the mainland with the vaccine,” he said. “You saw someone had to, and you’re doing it, despite all the risks.”
“I’m going to be fine.”
“You can’t be sure of that.” He stepped closer. “Look, I know nothing’s going to change; I know you have Gav and I have Tessa and that’s—that’s all right. But you’re leaving, and I might not ever see you again, for real this time. I need you to know what that means to me, and how sorry I am that I didn’t try harder to make things right with us before, and how much I really, really want you to get back safe.”
Then he raised his hands to the sides of my face and kissed me.
It was a gentle kiss, but so steady and sure my lips started to part against his instinctively. I caught myself, stiffening. My brain stalled. Leo wasn’t supposed to be kissing me. What was he doing? What was I doing?
I raised my arms to push him away, and suddenly the kiss was over. Leo shifted back, his hands falling to his sides. A tremor passed through his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again. Please be careful out there, Kae.”