by Lucy Snow
I didn’t have time to waste here, not if I wanted to get back to Meridian before snow came down in buckets. After another moment watching the peaceful lake through the slowly falling snow, I walked along its edge until I came around the corner and the shed came into view.
I half-hoped someone had broken in and stolen it, but the lock was stiff but otherwise working, and inside the shed my car sat, pristine and ready to go.
I opened the garage door and shoved my bag into the trunk before settling in for the long drive back to civilization.
Before the lake disappeared around the curving unpaved road, I pulled over to the side and took a brief look back at my home for the last 7 weeks.
I knew it - I could feel it. This time was different. I wouldn’t be back.
CHAPTER 03 - AVERY
The bus ride was slow, and it barely felt like we were making progress. Occasionally I’d pull out my phone to check the map and see how much further we had to go, but even when I got service up in the winding hills, I couldn’t really get a sense that we were actually getting anywhere.
The snow was coming down harder now, and I could hear distant thunder — it was too grey out to see any arcs of lightning. The inside of the bus had heated up almost immediately, and several times the driver had asked if I was warm enough. We’d made one stop along the way, for snacks, and I’d taken the opportunity to get my bag back from the luggage compartment. I didn’t really need anything from it, I just liked having it close to me. The driver seemed to understand.
I spent most of the early part of the trip with my forehead pressed against the window, looking out at the murkiness and glad that I was safe and warm in the bus. I tried pulling out my phone to read, but the rocking back and forth and the changing speeds made my head hurt after a few minutes, so back to the window it was.
It was amazing to me how the landscape changed when you gave it a fresh coat of white paint. What had been distinct colors all merged into various shades of grey, indistinct shapes that all kinda meshed together.
It was beautiful in a different way, even if it was a little tough to enjoy as a storm bore down on us. It was something I wished I could share with someone, but the driver was off in his own world.
Someone closer to my own age, I meant. I looked around the bus for the hundredth time, and still there was no one else in any of the other seats — as if by looking one more time I could conjure up someone to talk to, someone to look out the window with.
“Everything’s gonna be OK,” I heard the driver’s voice from the front of the bus. I looked forward and saw his smiling face in the mirror. “Looks like the storm’s gonna get worse, but we’re gonna push on. You all good?”
“Yup,” I smiled back, giving a thumbs up. “All good back here. Holding it together.”
“Great. Warm enough still?”
“Still warm enough.”
“Good to hear. We’re getting to the hills soon. It’s a bit of a windy trip even on a regular day, but this time it’ll be a little rougher. If you, uh, need a bag to, uh…” He trailed off and then held up a small brown paper bag. “I got them right up here if you need one. No shame in it, I’ve used them before myself.”
“Thanks,” I said, weakly, and waved back, settling back against the rough cushion of my seat.
There was a sense of dread that felt like it was pooling all around me, and only some of it was coming from the storm raging outside. I knew that every mile we drove got us closer to Meridian, which I was looking forward to, but I also knew that it got me closer to my family.
Any strength and resolve I’d had about confronting them while I was still at school had started to evaporate as we got closer and closer to home, and I could already tell that by the time I got there I’d be wavering. Hopefully not enough for them to be able to influence whether I came back to school for my last semester, but I couldn’t be sure.
Of course they had the right intentions for their daughter, but it was the way they expressed those intentions that drove me up the wall. Sure, they wanted me to be, above all else, safe, and happy ran a distant second to that. On a parental level I could totally understand that, especially after what had happened to Naomi.
But this settling down and getting married thing…I mean, really? I was just about to turn 23, who got married at 23 in 2017? Almost Unheard of!
I’d needed my space, needed to get out of there. Seeing my parents, knowing their history together, it was all just too much. I understood that back in their day, it made sense for high school sweethearts to get married right after graduating and begin their lives together, but that just didn’t happen now, at least not nearly as often as it used to.
We’d moved on from that. Sometimes people never got married! I laughed, remembering the looks of shock and horror on my parents’ faces when I’d said that to them. The thought of not getting married! Gasp!
“What about children, Avery? What about settling down and having children?” My mother fumed. “You can’t have children without getting married!”
“First off, who says I even want to have children? I’m 19!” Their jaws had already hit the floor by the time I closed my mouth.
My mother gasped, trying to form the words, but no sound came out. “I had your sister when I was 22, young lady.”
“And that made sense for you at the time. Things have changed, Mom. People don’t settle down that quickly anymore. Some do, of course, but it’s not expected like it was before.”
She sat back and processed this, and I could tell she decided to file that conversation away for another day and turn to another angle. “But why do you want to go to college?”
I looked at her like she’d sprouted another head. “Because that’s what you do after high school, Mom! You get a job or join the military or travel, but mainly people go to college! That’s how they get ready for a career!”
“I just don’t really see the purpose in all that. I mean, once you get married you won’t need to…”
I laughed. “It all comes around to that, doesn’t it? ‘Once I get married.’ It’s the same thing over and over around here.” I leaned in. “Look, Mom, Naomi’s gone. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. I know you want to keep me safe, but keeping me here and not letting me experience things for myself isn’t the way to do it, OK?”
Right around then was when my mother threw up her hands and got up from the table. My father tried to ‘talk some sense’ into me, but clearly, it hadn’t worked. I left the house for New Hampshire State University a couple weeks later, and our relationship was never the same.
They resented me for not letting them ‘take care’ of me, and I resented them for trying to pigeonhole me into their outdated sense of how girls should live their lives. We weren’t about to see eye to eye on it any time soon.
Which made this trip all the more baffling to me now that I had had some time to think about it a little more, turn it over in my head. In the moment, back in Professor Stevens’ office, this had seemed like a good idea, but now the harsh light of the storm had changed that.
I needed to sit them down and explain to them that I was not Naomi, and that I was going to live my life the way I wanted to. I was so close to finishing school, and after that a whole realm of doors would open up for me. These days getting a bachelor’s degree was pretty much the minimum required to start a professional career, and I was even thinking about grad school.
Of course I’d like it if there was a guy in my life, but that wasn’t the goal. I was the goal — finding what I want, building a life for myself. And while I had dated around in school, none of it had stuck.
I was OK with that — it would have been a little scary to fall deeply and madly in love at such a young age — like I would never be sure if what I was feeling was real or just a complex mix of hormones and freedom getting together for the first time.
I just couldn’t imagine how something like love could work between people my age. It’s like…weren’t we just a
little too young and immature for all that? Feelings changed, life changed, people came in and out of our lives so fast…how was anyone supposed to build a connection with someone if whatever you had could just disappear, when someone didn’t come home one night?
There was no way I could be sure of any of that right now. Luckily, I didn’t have to make decisions like that any time soon — people waited till their 30s to get married these days!
I couldn’t even imagine what being in my 30s would look like.
To be fair, considering all I could see around me was the dimly light interior of a bus and the storm billowing outside around me, my powers of imagination weren’t exactly getting much help right now.
Even so, I had plenty of time, and I wasn’t in any kind of rush. I had to make that clear to my parents, but at the same time, try and rebuild some kind of connection to them beyond a hollow and obligatory phone call or email every now or then. As much as we didn’t get long, I missed them deeply. It felt hollow, not having a link to my own family, or what was left of it.
The bus wrenched around a corner just then, shaking me out of my thoughts and forcing me to sit up in my seat instead of banging my head on the window. The driver waved from the front. “Sorry about that, took that turn a little too fast. I’ll be more careful. Don’t know the old lady’s strength!” He chuckled.
I nodded and pulled my jacket tighter around me.
Suddenly it felt even colder than the outside in here.
CHAPTER 04 - EAMES
“You just gonna stand there?”
I couldn’t move, I could only stare at the chaos in front of me.
“A mute, eh? Useless.”
A hand waved in front of my eyes and I blinked, hard, my head shaking.
“Hello? Anyone in there?” Now the hand disappeared and a dark face replaced it, full of exasperated anger and hard lines worn by clear fatigue. “If you’re not going to help, then get the fuck out of my way.”
And then he shoved me and at the last second I flailed my hands out behind me and caught myself. “Sorry,” I stammered, getting back up and dusting myself off, still trying to process what was going on. The heat, the humidity, the scared people, the smell of burning, the suffering…
“Oh, he can talk, can he?” The man reached down and picked up a heavy case labeled ‘RATIONS.’ “Can he also pick things up and move them?”
“Uh, yeah,” I got out before dropping my backpack and rushing to help, picking up another case. It was heavy, heavy enough that my shoulders were already hurting. The other guy made it look so easy, but I knew I couldn’t go very far with this weight loading me down.
I couldn’t even remember being around such humidity. The sweat was already pooling around my lower back and I already felt like I needed a shower, and I’d just taken one on the boat an hour ago. I only vaguely knew where I was - I’d just gotten to the relief ship a couple days earlier, and this was the first time we’d actually stopped somewhere.
“Good man, now come with me.” The man led the way off the dock and toward the village.
Or what was left of a village; the only indication that there’d been a village here were piles of wood that suggested that maybe once they’d been parts of buildings. And the rubble, and the crying children. And all the other things that came with this kind of devastation.
What the fuck had I gotten myself into? I could dimly hear my father’s voice in my head, asking me if this is what I had been looking for.
We deposited our cases near a tent that was clearly being used as a makeshift hospital, before turning around and going back for more. It took hours to get them all moved, and as soon as we came back with new cases, the ones we’d left before were gone.
The only other thing the man said to me during the entire day was “lift with your legs or back won’t make it through the day, let alone the week.” I took his advice and things got a lot easier.
It was dark by the time we were done, the stacks of cases from the dock all gone. Something inside me knew that in the morning there would be more to move, whether it was cases of rations or something else. Someone made a fire and we sat around it, each of us tearing open one of the ration bags and digging in.
I was bone tired, and could barely keep myself upright as I tried to eat the completely unsatisfying food. At the same time, I knew I needed to get the fuel inside me if I was going to keep from passing out.
The other man looked at me from across the fire while we ate.
“So,” he said, staring at me. “Why did you volunteer to help in disaster relief?”
I drove through the twists and turns of the hills of northern New Hampshire a little faster than I should have, given the weather.
I didn’t know why I was going so fast, because I most definitely was not looking forward to the inevitable conversation with my father that arriving would bring.
My father had built a strong business, carrying it on his back for many years. He was the kind of man who understood the value of a hard day’s work, and reveled in it. Most of the early years running his business hadn’t involved all that much day to day management — or, rather, it had, but my father had gotten down into the trenches and worked the line along with his workers just as much as they had.
Only during the evenings had he retreated to his office to make sure the company was still running and still growing. He hadn’t been around much, but I hoped he knew how much I appreciated how much work he’d put into it. We hadn’t wanted for anything we needed growing up.
At the same time, though, the world had changed — technology and productivity had changed the game, so that people could start businesses that leapfrogged over my father’s in a short time and soon dwarfed it in size, and my father had stubbornly refused to update his company to make pace with the times.
Sure, he still had huge customers, and loyal workers, but time wasn’t on his side — the writing was on the wall.
It had taken all I was to get out of there and keep from following his footsteps in the family business. Even as a teenager walking through the assembly lines of one of his factories while he toiled away in his office, I’d known that this wasn’t for me.
The computers I’d used in school only whetted my appetite for more, and as soon as I could I bought my own and started building things. My father had dismissed all my creations as toys, expressions of creativity, but he’d never thought anything would come of it - I’d graduate from high school, maybe go to college, then start in the factory and work my way up as far as I could go — no special treatment just cause I was the old man’s son. That whole cliche of the mailroom to the board room must have been my father’s fondest dream for me.
That had never held any appeal to me. Why fight that kind of a losing battle against time and other people, when you could be on the forefront of the next wave of progress?
Of course my father and I had these conversations — we’d gone around endlessly about it. In fact, aside from cheering on the New England Patriots, we really had nothing in common, least of all our ideas about business and where the world was headed.
He’d been furious when I’d left home right after high school. He’d ranted and raved and told me in no uncertain terms that I was letting down the family by my treachery, letting down the business he’d worked so hard to build, sacrificed so much to maintain.
I didn’t want to hear any of it, and I would never have admitted to him that I understood his frustration even if I was the direct cause of it, but at the same time, it wasn’t me who was changing the face of business in America. It wasn’t me that made the internet a thing. I just wanted to be a part of it, rather than manage a building full of people making widgets for car companies.
We had never seen eye to eye on it, and I didn’t think we ever would. So what was I doing barreling toward Meridian and an inevitable clash with my father, another front in our long standing war between tradition and moving forward?
