The Disaster Days

by Rebecca Behrens

  I didn’t mean what I texted, Neha, I’m so sorry

  “Hannah?” Zoe’s voice, followed by a tentative knock on the not-quite-closed bathroom door. I choked back another sob, wiping at my eyes and my runny nose. Clutching the radio, I stood up, slowly because I could feel the impending head rush. The doctor who prescribed the inhaler had told me that it wasn’t just running that could trigger asthma symptoms. Having a cold, certain types of weather, and strong emotions could too. In terms of strong emotions, I’ve never felt this scared and overwhelmed. She’d explained it in a gentle, caring way, which almost made me feel worse. I remember thinking, How can I possibly be so fragile that my lungs can’t even handle feelings? It’s funny how you think you know yourself and your body, and then all of a sudden it betrays you. I used to feel like a strong person. After the asthma, I wasn’t sure anymore. I didn’t trust my own lungs.

  It wasn’t the time to worry about whether a chronic illness changed who I was. If I needed more air, I needed to calm down. I forced myself to take a few slow, deep Ms. Whalen–approved breaths. You can’t show Zoe and Oscar how bad it really is. I was so grateful that I’d listened to the radio alone. I flicked off the dial.

  “Hannah?” Her second knock was firm.

  “Just a sec,” I finally said, my voice wavering. I hoped she wouldn’t notice I’d been crying. I peered down at one of the biggest shards of mirror on the floor to check my reflection. Nope. The tearstains were obvious.

  I took another good breath. The tightness relaxed a smidge. I walked to the door and tugged it the rest of the way open. “I wanted you guys to stay in the blanket fort,” I said.

  Zoe darted past me into the bathroom. “I know, but I really had to go!”

  Oh. I guess I should’ve had us all take a bathroom break first thing. “My apologies to your bladder.” I sniffled again, then called down the hallway, “Oscar, if you have shoes on, you can come to the bathroom!” Seconds later, I heard him thudding down the hall. “Slowly and carefully!”

  Zoe had barely emerged from the door before he burst past her into the bathroom. One look at Zoe’s face, and I knew she had been crying too. Her eyes were puffy, and her nose was red and raw. “Are you doing okay?” It was kind of a stupid question. None of us were anything near okay.

  Zoe tried to nod, then shook her head. “Why isn’t my mom home yet?”

  Beth Kajawa’s words echoed in my head. “Tens of thousands of people injured.” I made a silent plea that Andrea wasn’t one of them, even though the sinking feeling in my stomach told me she absolutely could be. Same with my mom. Same with Neha, and even Marley. “Um, your mom texted and said not to worry, but it’s taking a long time to get back because of…damage on the bridge.” Zoe’s eyes widened. “Minor damage,” I added. “Something they can definitely repair.” Lying still felt wrong, but like a necessary kind of wrong.

  “Did you tell her about my cut?” Zoe asked.

  I bit at my lip. What would make me feel better? Knowing my mom had promised I would be fine. Knowing that she was actually proud of how I was handling things. I nodded slowly. “She said it’ll be just fine, and she’s super proud of how tough you’re being.” I heard the toilet flush from inside the bathroom. “You too, Oscar.”

  I hadn’t checked on her injury yet that morning. “Let me see your cut,” I said, motioning her over. I gently took her forearm in my hand. The skin around the bandage looked perfectly normal. “Does it hurt badly?”

  She shrugged. “It stings. And the Band-Aid itches.”

  “My mom always says itching is a sign of healing.” I hoped that was true. “I’m taking a peek under the bandage, okay?” She nodded. As carefully as I could, I pulled the adhesive edge from her skin, Zoe wincing as it tugged on her downy hair. With a corner up, I could see the cut. I gritted my teeth, willing myself to not feel faint or barfy from looking at it. The wound had crusted on the edges, and it didn’t look like it had scabbed yet at all. But there wasn’t any bright red, fresh blood. “The bleeding has stopped—that’s great! Can you move your hand and arm normally?” Zoe flexed her hand into a fist, then opened it. She circled her wrist for me.

  “I also think you’re going to be fine.” I hoped I hadn’t just jinxed it.

  8

  It turns out marshmallows don’t do a great job of keeping you full. I’d thought that my stomach ached only from anxiety, but while Zoe and I were grabbing the coats from the closet mess and Oscar used the bathroom, it made a plaintive growl. Loud enough that I startled, clutching at the coat’s arm like it might protect me.

  “My tummy’s been talking to me too,” Zoe said, patting her midsection.

  I relaxed my grip on the coat sleeve. “Yeah, as soon as Oscar’s done in there, we need to scavenge for breakfast.”

  I hadn’t meant scavenge literally, but that’s what we ended up doing. At least 50 percent of the food from the Matlocks’ cupboards was now pooled on the sticky, slimy, powdery kitchen floor and therefore inedible. Everything in the fridge was inaccessible, because it had landed door-side down when it fell. Now it was a giant tomb of perishable food. I once read that the ancient Egyptians buried people along with jars full of delicacies. Tutankhamun’s tomb had eight baskets of fruit inside it. I thought longingly of the yogurts and veggie pasta and cheese and berries I’d seen inside that fridge. The pitcher of water and dregs of a gallon of milk too. At least I knew that no ice cream had been lost, because we’d eaten it all.

  But then again, with the electricity out, all the food inside the fridge was bound to spoil whether we could access it or not. Probably faster than we could possibly have eaten it, even though the house had become as chilly as the freezer section at Safeway.

  The cupboard doors were all open and some cabinets had even pulled away from the wall. The one closest to where the fridge had formerly stood was hanging by a couple of screws. I didn’t want to poke around in it, because I feared it would fall on me if I touched something wrong. Luckily the big pantry cabinet had held up okay, aside from everything inside of it having been shaken up. I gathered a dented can of mandarin oranges, a half-empty plastic jar of peanut butter (the full, glass all-natural one had rolled out, shattered, and splattered on the floor), and a slightly crushed bag of potato chips. I thought about scooping the spilled bran cereal into bowls, but then I got worried that the bits of plaster dust covering the countertops could have settled on the cereal, and I didn’t think we should eat that kind of “frosted” flakes. A box of unopened almond milk had landed on the floor unharmed, so I picked that up too, along with a hardy box of mac and cheese. I grabbed a slightly wet shopping bag from the floor, loaded it with all the salvageable food, and handed it to Zoe and Oscar, who I’d made wait at the edge of the kitchen, away from the broken glass. “Take this stuff back to the blanket fort—we’ll have a picnic on the couch.”

  I crouched to scan the floor for anything else salvageable. While standing up, I bumped my shoulder on a drawer stuck partially open. Whatever was inside rolled and bounced off the sides of the drawer like pool balls. Grumbling, I tugged the drawer open the rest of the way. Oh, sweet. An egg carton full of chocolate crème eggs, left over from Easter. Perfect for breakfast. In spite of everything, I smiled. If only the bunny had gifted candy bacon in their baskets. I scooped up the loose eggs and put them back in the carton.

  I made my way to the couch, holding it behind my back. “Do you guys want eggs?”

  Oscar frowned. “Don’t you have to cook them?”

  “Not this kind!” With a grin, I whipped out the carton and tossed him a foil-wrapped egg. He caught it and squealed with delight.

  “I’m going to eat eggs for breakfast!” He unwrapped it and bit the chocolate open to see the fake yolk inside, giggling. “I love this kind.”

  Zoe smiled. “I’ll have an egg too.” I tossed her one, then unwrapped another for myself.

  Oscar and I
ate greedily, taking turns sipping straight from the almond milk carton—not the best idea in terms of sharing germs, but none of us felt sick, and none of the dishes that had survived the earthquake were clean. Oscar ate about half the carton of chocolate eggs by himself, which I realized too late was going to set him up nicely for a major sugar rush and, later on, a crash.

  Zoe picked at her oranges, staring at the picnic spread in front of us. Then she lowered her hand to her lap, frowning. “Can we listen to the radio again? Maybe it will tell us when my mom might be back…if there’s an update on the bridge repairs.”

  I wondered if she’d overheard any of the broadcast when she’d come to find me in the bathroom. If so, she would’ve heard the fear in Beth Kajawa’s voice. For Zoe’s sake, I hoped she hadn’t. I didn’t want her to feel the panic and dread that simmered inside me, no matter which distraction I struggled to focus on. It was excruciating to know how bad things were out there—and inside this house—yet have no clue if our families were okay.

  I swallowed, forcing the glob of peanut butter I’d eaten—scooping it out of the jar with a sturdy potato chip, because the only other option was my dirty fingers—to slide down my throat. “How about later on, after we’ve finished eating? I need to crank the radio more first, anyway.”

  “Did you listen to it this morning? You took it with you when you went to the bathroom.” Zoe was eyeing me in a way that suggested she knew the answer to her question already, and this was a test.

  I swallowed harder. The glob of peanut butter did not want to move down my throat. I stalled with a sip of the room-temperature almond milk. “There wasn’t really any new information.” Other than that lots of people are hurt. Some have died. Nobody seems to know what to do. A tsunami destroyed the coast. My dad was there.

  “Is there anything we can feed Jupiter?” Oscar piped up. He motioned to the emergency box. “He’s squeaking like he’s hungry.” I beamed at him, grateful for ending the other conversation.

  Zoe scooted over to peek in the box and give Jupiter a loving pet. “He needs water too,” she said.

  I stood up, rubbing potato chip grease on my already filthy leggings. Most of our problems, I couldn’t fix. This one, I could. “I can get his water bottle out of the old cage. Fingers crossed it wasn’t crushed.” I shuddered, thinking of how narrowly I’d managed to rescue Jupiter from the glass shards that had rained down on his home during the shaking.

  I made my way through the obstacle course of the living room toward the shattered window. The large wire cage now rested up against the wall, flipped over on its side. Shavings and glass and pellets blanketed the floor around it. Even though I’d halfway cleaned the cage, it reeked. The bottle had leaked out some water, but it was still clipped to the side. I worked the bottle free, careful not to cut myself on the glass bits lying next to it. The wire edges of the cage were mangled and poked menacingly in multiple directions. Jupiter would definitely be staying in the emergency box until Andrea could buy a new cage.

  Which made me wonder: When would people even be able to go shopping again? Cute shops clustered along the main street of downtown Pelling, their shelves lined with scented candles and quirky letterpress cards and locally made granola and, of course, fancy coffees roasted right here in Seattle. I pictured those shelves toppled and collapsed, all the wares wrecked on the floor. The glass storefronts shattered onto the sidewalk, cracked and uneven. And that was a best-case scenario, if the buildings themselves were still standing. I had no idea what condition the rest of the island was in. Maybe we’d experienced the worst of it, here in our mini neighborhood. Maybe something about being on a peninsula, on the other side of the inlet, had made us more vulnerable to the quake, but based on the broadcasts I’d heard, I doubted it. If anything, we’d been lucky.

  “I got the water bottle,” I called. As I started to walk toward the kitchen for water, my nose wrinkled. At first, I thought the smell must be from the stew of debris on the floor. Last night, when I dumped the shavings from Jupiter’s cage, I’d noticed that the trash can was filled to the brim with coffee grounds and old melon. Now, that plus the majority of the contents of the kitchen were all mixed together, baking in the soft rays of morning sun coming in through the skylight.

  But the smell wasn’t like the guinea pig shavings or melon or coffee. It was kind of like eggs—not the Easter candy kind. Real ones. I recognized that scent from my kitchen. When you light a burner, especially if it takes a moment or two to spark, you can smell it. It’s gas. Or rather, a chemical they put in the gas so people know when it’s swirling into the air around them. The gas itself is odorless. My mom taught me that. “A flatulent scent can save lives.”

  I stepped onto the tiles of the kitchen floor, sniffing. The scent was barely noticeable when you were in the living room. In the kitchen, it was faint but definitely present. I moved closer to the oven. Unlike the fridge, it hadn’t lurched from its spot during the shaking. But it did stick out farther into the room than it had before. It should have hugged the back wall, and now there was almost a foot of space between them. I peeked over to see if anything was visibly wrong with the tangle of cords and tubing connecting the stove to the pipes within the wall. I inspected the burners, making sure that one hadn’t accidentally been turned on. All were definitely off.

  Was there a soft hissing noise, too, like when you’re letting the air out of an inflatable pool floatie?

  Did that mean the stove had a gas leak?

  This is really, extra, super not good. I sniffed again, as deeply as I could, at least, with my chest never having gone back to its normal level of tightness since the earthquake happened. What if the gas had been leaking the whole night? What if it was slowly poisoning us? Sometimes there were news stories about people falling ill in their homes because they had filled with carbon monoxide. I didn’t think that came from stoves, but I wasn’t sure. I glanced at the kitchen window, which, surprisingly, was still intact. Even though it was going to make the house even chillier, I flipped the latch and pushed it wide open. Maybe once I aired out the kitchen, the smell would go away. Maybe it was a temporary thing.

  I leaned my upper body through the window, taking in the fresh scents of evergreens from the yard. The clouds were breaking up, revealing a bright blue sky. Frankly, it looked safer out there than inside.

  “Guys, put on those coats,” I called to the living room. We were going to venture outside.

  * * *

  It felt a lot safer outside too. The backyard looked mostly like it always did—the veggie garden, fish pond, firepit, and swing set had stayed in their usual spots. There weren’t any big gaping chasms in the ground, as far as I could tell. The bramble bushes seemed to have been unharmed by the earthquake. One or two trees had fallen, but the rest surrounding the property were standing tall. Big branches and sticks with leaves littered the yard, but not more than you would see after a particularly windy day. Although the news had said that fires, flooding, and landslides were happening all over the place, which made it seem like Seattle had turned into a dystopian novel’s setting, none of that was happening in the Matlocks’ backyard. The grass smelled sweet. The birds chirped. It even felt a couple of degrees warmer than it had inside the living room. For the first time since 6:17 p.m. Pacific Standard Time the day before, I felt my shoulders and chest relax a bit. I could breathe more easily.

  We stood next to the small screened porch that connected the Matlocks’ living room to the backyard, unsure of what to do. Play? It seemed wrong to run around merrily, but it was a rare sunshiny spring day. The weather, perhaps, was trying to make up for what we’d been through the night before. It seemed no less wrong for Zoe and Oscar to sit on the damp ground and worry with me.

  “What’s that?” Oscar pointed to a section of open grass at the side of the backyard. I did a double take. Mounds of sandy dirt that looked like gigantic anthills had cropped up, and they were spitting
out sprays of wet mud like geysers.

  “I have no idea,” I said. We watched the silt spew out and plop onto the grass next to the volcano-like mound. They didn’t seem particularly dangerous—just weird. I guess the backyard wasn’t as untouched as I’d thought. “Stay away from that area.”

  “Can I go on the monkey bars?” Oscar asked. He was hopping on one foot in a small circle, clapping his hands over his head whenever he switched feet. It made me dizzy just to watch him. The sugar high from his “eggs” was really kicking in. Eventually, we’d have to go back in the house, and I wanted him to burn off that energy before we had to hunker down for the night.

  I’m already expecting we’ll be alone in the house overnight. For me to be in charge. Again. I shivered, hugging Andrea’s coat tighter around me. I was wearing it over my windbreaker, which was over my long sleeve and vest. Four layers, both inside the house and out. Still I couldn’t escape the damp chill. My house had a generator. If it was running, we would be a lot warmer over there.

  “You guys can do whatever you want out here,” I said. “In the backyard, I mean. This is maybe not the best time to go traipsing into the forest.” Zoe was still clutching the emergency box with Jupiter inside. “I can watch Jupiter, if you want.”

  Oscar took off galloping across the backyard, toward the swing set, dodging sticks on his way. Zoe handed me Jupiter’s box and then followed him at a shuffling pace. I think she felt as conflicted as I did about enjoying the nice weather, pretending like a crisis didn’t surround us. All I had to do was look down at Jupiter in the box, clearly marked Emergency, to be reminded.

  I stared at the swing set, which Oscar had already reached. It reminded me so much of the one in Neha’s yard. I wondered if she’d even made it home before the earthquake hit. If she hadn’t—where was she? Still stranded on a soccer field, maybe. At least there, no furniture could’ve fallen on or near her. Although if she was in a place where the landslides were happening…