“Keep to yourselves and contribute if we ask you to, and we shouldn’t need to make any decisions,” she said, and drove off.
I mentioned the incident to Kaelyn and Nell, and we posted an extra guard by the front door for the next few days, but no one else came by while we were finishing settling in. Then, just as a group of us were setting off to explore the commercial strip to the east, a motorcycle growled down the street and stopped in front of the building.
“I heard I can find Kaelyn Weber here,” the driver said as he took off his helmet.
“Drew!” Kaelyn cried, and launched herself at her brother. He hugged her, laughing, and the other islanders gathered closer with a flurry of questions.
“I would have come sooner,” Drew said. “But things have been a little... complicated.”
“Is everything okay, with us being here?” I asked. “The Wardens in charge don’t have a problem with us?”
“Well, ah, it turns out I’m kind of the one in charge,” he said, scratching the back of his head.
Kaelyn’s eyebrows rose. “How did that happen?”
“It’s a long story,” he said, in a tone that made me guess it wasn’t a completely pleasant one. “I’ll tell you later. I can’t stick around too long right now. I just wanted to give you an official welcome. What are you all doing here?”
“We wanted everyone to get the vaccine as soon as possible,” Kaelyn said. “Has any made it up here yet?”
He nodded. “We’ve gone through a couple batches already—should have another coming in a week or two. I’ve been encouraging Michael to negotiate another deal with the CDC, so they can send one of their people with our portion and some of their own, with the understanding we’ll let them take care of the kids and the elderly and people like that for free. Still working on the trust issue with them, understandably. But I’ll make sure everyone here who needs it gets the shot without payment. Just be careful until then. We’re still seeing newly infected people; the friendly flu’s not beaten yet.”
It would have been hard to forget how precarious life still was. When we finally did set off for the commercial strip, we came across a man’s corpse sprawled in the middle of the road. From the contorted angle of his body, he might have been hit by a car, but there was no way of knowing if he’d been infected too.
“Should we just leave him?” one of the guys said, covering his mouth with his hand, when we’d stopped several feet away.
“It’ll be more of a health hazard the longer we leave it, if we’re going to keep coming this way,” Nell said.
So it was up to Kaelyn, Howard, a woman named Liz who’d also survived the virus, and me to move it. I kept my eyes averted, breathing through the cloth I’d tied over my mouth as we wrapped the body in several layers of garbage bags, but I couldn’t completely avoid the sight of gnawed flesh or the putrid stink. Long after we’d carted the corpse to the nearest graveyard, which seemed like the most reasonable place to leave it, and I’d scrubbed myself with antiseptic soap and scalding water, the memory would flicker up with a sourness in the back of my mouth, making my stomach churn.
There’d be more—in and around the hospitals especially, but we’d stumbled on other bodies in random places when we’d been in the city in the winter. As it got warmer, something would have to be done about them, or the smell... I got queasy just thinking about it. Maybe Drew could get the Wardens organized and truck the corpses out to the mass graves that had been created before the infrastructure here had fallen apart. Leaving them would be as unpleasant and unsanitary for them as it’d be for us.
There was, at least, no sign of the friendly flu within our group. Not long after Drew’s visit, Cody came down to dinner with the other kids into the dining room we’d set up in the basement.
“He must be glad to be out,” I said to Kaelyn. Nell had made one of the condos into a quarantine area, and Cody had been isolated there, to make sure he hadn’t picked up his mom’s infection, for the last two weeks. I’d tried to visit him a few times, figuring he had to be lonely, but Dorrie had shooed me off, saying he wasn’t in a good mood for company. I knew that when Meredith had been allowed in to try to play with him, he’d refused to talk to her, and he’d hit Howard the first day here. I couldn’t blame him for acting out a little. He’d obviously been through a lot, and now he was stuck among strangers.
“Maybe he’ll open up now that he doesn’t have to worry that he’s sick,” Kaelyn said.
We studied him for a moment. Cody didn’t look as though he was opening up. He was sitting between the two nine-year-olds, Owen and Mya, who were sniping at each other past him as if he were a statue and not a fellow kid, while he jabbed at his plate. Dorrie walked by and leaned over to say something to him, and he shook his head with a jerk.
“Has he talked to anyone so far?” I asked. He could speak—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, he’d wailed at his mom—and I’d assumed his silence with me afterward had been out of shock.
“I don’t think so,” Kaelyn said. “I guess he needs a little more time. Dorrie takes good care of them.”
“She does,” I agreed, but I kept watching Cody. As Dorrie walked away, he bowed his head over his plate, shoulders hunched as if to shield himself—or to warn people away from him. The posture gave me an ache of recognition. Not long ago, I’d felt like that: lost and adrift, focusing all my energy on holding my pain and regrets inside. The pain and regrets about the people I’d lost, but also the people I’d purposely left behind. The roommate whose wallet I’d grabbed to get bus fare to the border, the sick woman whose car I’d stolen after she offered me a ride. The people whose stuff I’d taken off with when I’d run from the border camp. Remembering that raw, desperate time still made me twist up inside.
Cody hadn’t really had a choice, with his mom—there wasn’t any way he could have done better by her. But it was his mom he’d left to die. I could only imagine how much the guilt might be eating him up.
I’d needed to let those feelings out, to admit to Kaelyn the horrors I’d seen and done to make it back to the island, before I’d been able to start recovering. Maybe Cody needed that too, before he’d really feel he belonged here. I’d brought him with us, but I hadn’t brought him all the way in. And there might not be anyone else here who could come close to understanding where he was coming from. I’d stood there with him listening to her rattle the door and call out his name.
The next day, I stopped by the penthouse suites where all the kids except Meredith were rooming. Dorrie spent the nights with the girls in one and Mason with the boys in the other, and they’d turned both of the open concept living spaces into playrooms which the whole group alternated between. Today they were gathered on the girls’ side. Meredith had come with me, and she bounded straight to the dress-up box to paw through the clothes there.
Her energy seemed out of sync with the rest of the room. Only the two toddlers, who were stacking blocks and then smashing their towers, looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Paulette, the eleven year old who was the oldest of the group, was curled up in a chair with a magazine, but her gaze kept drifting away from it. Owen and Mya perched at the marble kitchen island with pencil crayons and paper, their drawings aimless doodles, their expressions bored. A couple of the younger kids were putting together a puzzle at the rate of about one piece a minute, and another was pushing a toy dump truck around himself in the same steady circle, over and over. Cody lay on the sofa, scowling at the ceiling. The only sounds in the room other than Meredith’s rustling through the box were the rattling of the toddlers’ blocks and a muted yelp as Mya poked Owen in the side.
I’d noticed the kids seemed a little lethargic before, but I hadn’t spent much time around the whole group since we’d moved in here. “Are they normally this quiet?” I said to Dorrie.
She gave me a little smile. “This is pretty typical. I was hoping the move would do them good, help them start to move on, but I have to wonder if leaving the island didn?
??t just make them more aware of what they’ve lost. We do our best to distract them, but...” She shrugged. “You can’t hurry healing.”
“I can try to help with the distraction part,” I offered. I’d meant to reach out to just Cody, but a group activity could work just as well. Singling him out might have been too much pressure to start with anyway, and the rest of the kids did look as though they could use something.
I wandered farther into the room, searching for inspiration. I’d had a knack for this as a kid, coming up with some unexpected idea and getting everyone around me caught up in it—playing ringmaster. It had been fun, exhilarating, and deep down I think I’d been aware that if I was leading I couldn’t get left out.
Cody didn’t look in the mood for anything too wild. I picked up a Snakes and Ladders game and carried it to the kid-sized table and chairs in the middle of the living room. As I opened the box, Cody glanced over and turned away again.
“Hey,” I said. “I need someone to play with.”
He rolled onto his side to face me, his scowl relaxing a sliver, but he didn’t get up. Owen peered at us from his stool.
“Snakes and Ladders is boring,” he declared.
“Well, it’s a good thing we’re going to play Lakes and Snadders, then,” I said.
He frowned, and Mya ambled over. “How do you play Lakes and Snadders?”
“I’ll show you if you can get two more people playing,” I said.
She marched to the sofa. “Come on, Cody,” she said. He grimaced at her and she put her hands on her hips. With a sigh that sounded far too old for him, he got up and plopped into one of the four chairs. The boy who’d been pushing the dump truck came over, wide-eyed, and took another. Meredith appeared by my shoulder as Mya sat down in the last.
“Can I play too?” she asked.
“There’s just four pieces,” Mya informed her before I could answer. Meredith’s eyebrows drew together, but she stayed standing beside me. Owen drifted over too, and even Paulette perked up behind her magazine.
“We can always do another game after,” I said, and tapped the board. “The rules of Lakes and Snadders are, every time you take a turn, you get to make up a new rule, and we all have to remember all of them. The rule can be anything you want, as long as people can do it at the table.”
“Like, you go up the snakes instead of down?” the little boy asked.
“We can get crazier than that,” I said, and then my mind went blank. It shouldn’t be that hard to think of something they’d find amusing. “You could say... anyone who lands on a blue square has to sing a song, or something like that.”
The boy grinned, and Mya leaned forward intently.
“Cody can’t play then,” Owen said. “He won’t say what his rules are.”
Cody aimed his scowl at Owen, and Owen smirked. Then Meredith said, “I can help Cody—I’ll give him ideas and he can pick which one. He doesn’t have to talk for that.”
“Good thinking,” I said gratefully. Cody eyed her as she knelt beside him, but he didn’t make any gesture of protest.
“I’ll go first,” Mya announced, grabbing the dice. “My first rule is, if your name starts with M, you get to roll twice.”
When it was Cody’s turn, Meredith whispered in his ear. He shook his head at her first two suggestions, and nodded for the third: “If you land on a red square you get to go again,” she said for him. I used my singing idea since I hadn’t come up with a better one. The little boy decided we would all go down ladders instead of up. And so it went. Mya looked triumphant when she came up with the rule that you could move someone else backward the same number of spaces you moved forward, and then less happy when the very next turn Cody sent her back, to the top of a ladder she then had to go down. I tried to mitigate the growing tension by saying the same person couldn’t be sent backward twice in a row, but they still ended up in a duel between the two of them, focusing on who could make things worse for the other.
The younger boy started to get confused. The fifth time around, Cody had shaken his head to six or seven of Meredith’s ideas when Owen, who was still watching, rolled his eyes and said, “This is so dumb.”
Cody looked at him, and then reached out and shoved the board. It slid to the edge of the table, the pieces skidding off onto the floor. He stood up and raised his hands in a victory pose. Owen snorted disdainfully, but when Mya started laughing, he laughed too. And that was the only time Cody smiled.
There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to salvage the game. As Meredith helped me gather the pieces, Mya dragged Cody over to the pencil crayons. Dorrie stepped in when they started scribbling right on the countertop, and they and Owen went off to huddle in the corner by the gas fireplace. Cody still hadn’t said a word. His gaze flicked back and forth between his companions as they alternately plotted and sparred, with that same defensive curl to his shoulders.
I didn’t think they were going to be the most comforting company, but getting him comfortable with me was obviously going to require a different approach.
“He’s always with them now,” I complained to Kaelyn a few days later as we meandered along the boardwalk at the edge of the beach just south of the condo building. “If I try to take him aside, or to talk to all of them, he acts like I’m not there, and Mya or Owen will tell me, ‘We’re busy.’” I imitated their offended tone.
“At least he’s made friends?” Kaelyn offered. We glanced over to where the kids were playing in the sand on this rare trip outside the safety of the condo building. A bunch of us had combed the beach for bodies or other hazards before Dorrie had agreed to Meredith’s suggestion that they all trek over here.
The kids did look a little more animated than before, in the sunlight, but Owen and Mya tended to take their animation in less-than-constructive directions. Mason was just chiding Owen for kicking down one of the little kids’ lopsided sandcastles while Owen glowered at him. Mya and Cody stood together watching, Mya snickering and Cody wearing his usual dark expression.
“I guess,” I said. “But he doesn’t look any happier hanging out with them. The way they talk to everyone, they might be making him feel worse.”
I guessed for all I knew Cody might have been a bully himself in his life before. But I hadn’t seen him do much besides tag along with the other two and watch their exploits looking sullen, as though he didn’t exactly enjoy being there but he was afraid there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Afraid he didn’t deserve kindness?
Meredith ran up to us with Paulette and the little girl who’d lost her sandcastle in tow. “Can we go swimming?” she asked, waving toward the lake, which stretched away from the curve of the beach as far as I could see. Lake Ontario looked as vast as the ocean from here, but, at the same time, disorientingly different—the waves only big enough to sputter, not crash, as they rolled in, no salt in the vaguely fishy breeze drifting off them.
It was hot for May, the sun intense overhead, but Kaelyn hesitated. “My parents told us not to go in the water,” she said. “It’s not that clean near the city—the runoff from the sewage system... But, you know, that hasn’t been operating for a while. It should be better now. Even before, some people still swam here.”
Dorrie must have overheard, because she joined us, saying, “I don’t think we should risk it, even so. Sorry, kids. It’ll be hard to keep you all together in the water too. We’re better up here.”
“Awww,” Meredith groaned, but when none of us budged she plopped down on the edge of the boardwalk near the others. She and Paulette started sketching figures with a stick in the sand, Meredith chattering about the intricacies of the outfit she was designing while Paulette mostly just nodded.
Kaelyn and I ambled on, staying on the boardwalk as it veered toward a peninsula dotted with trees.
“It’s not just Cody,” I said, still turning over the problem. “All the kids, you can tell they’re struggling—even Owen and Mya, that’s probably part of the reason they act like the way the
y do—but how do you help a five year old cope with the idea that he’s never going to see his parents again?”
“How did you move past the things you’d been through?” Kaelyn said.
I considered. “By talking about them, but that’s where I’m getting stuck with Cody. And... I guess by actually moving, when I let myself start dancing again. It was a way to channel the feelings into something else, something better.”
“Maybe that would help them too. Not real dancing, but acting out their grief. Giving them something to literally throw themselves into.”
“Yeah,” I said. I could try it. I couldn’t see making any less progress than I’d made so far, which was basically none. In fact, I might have been moving backwards.
As that thought crossed my mind, Kaelyn glanced toward the lake, suddenly pensive, and I remembered a time I had literally moved backwards. A moment I’d relieved dozens of times in the last two months: when we’d been standing in that snowy driveway, checking out the abandoned pick-up truck, and the infected guy had come running at us.
I’d stepped back, like everyone else. Everyone except Gav, who’d rushed forward to protect the cold box and the vaccine inside it.
It should have been me. I should have gotten in there, stopped the guy—after all, I’d been protected and Gav hadn’t. But I hadn’t known that for sure, the vaccine had been untested, and my body had reacted on instinct, away from the threat.
If I’d been more brave—more dedicated, more selfless—maybe Gav would still be alive.
That regret niggled deeper than any other, because it wasn’t just regret. Because I knew there was a part of me that would have hesitated to wish it different.
The boardwalk ended, and we wandered onto a path that wound around and through the peninsula’s sparse forest. With the breeze rustling the trees and the buildings hidden from view, it felt as though we’d left the city far behind. We paused by a rocky bit of shore. Kaelyn took my hand. And I found myself saying, “How do you think things would be, if Gav hadn’t...”