Will Rise from Ashes

by Jean M. Grant

  What if I hadn’t awoken? He’d slithered away without me knowing. There were countless what-ifs these days.

  He prodded the mud with a stick, crouching like kids do, his prominent spine poking through his thin, wet pajama top. His backside hovered close to the ground, and his legs were tucked beneath him.

  “Will!” I said too sternly. “Why—”

  “Because we stopped here last night, Mom. Don’t you remember?”

  I loosened my hand. Fingernail marks peppered my palm. I set the lantern down and squatted the best that my approaching-forty-year-old body could beside him. I blew a forceful breath. Now was not the time for my palpitations to return. Mental note: take my pill when I returned to our camp. “I asked why you came to the pond…now? You know the rules with camping. It’s…” I paused and looked at my watch…the one Harrison had given me on our first anniversary. “It’s only five in the morning.” Not like that was early for him.

  He turned to the mud after a brief glance at me. “I followed these frogs.”

  I shook my head with a muffled curse. I was hopelessly failing with my efforts to stop swearing around the boys.

  “Mom, why did you scream?”

  “What? I didn’t scream.”

  “Yes, you did. You scared the frogs. Did you have a nightmare?” Will asked with his usual earnest, no-nonsense tone.

  “I—” Numbness returned to my fingertips. I had been screaming. The nightmare flashed across my memory. The scream burned. Panic raced through my veins as chunks of volcanic rock tore down the hillside, heading straight for my Finn. I tried to call to him, but fear halted me. My legs wouldn’t move. Then, he was gone, swallowed by the rush of mud and rocks.

  I stifled a sob.

  “It’s okay, Mom. Good thoughts, remember?” Will stuck a spindly pine twig in the mud.

  I nodded. “Yes, good thoughts.”

  A sudden movement across the pond caught my eye, and I shifted the lantern behind Will. There it was again. Campers on the shore farthest from us. Were they traveling west, too? Muted voices. I grabbed Will by the shoulder. I wondered if they’d heard me scream as well.

  “Ouch!”

  “Shh! Come back to camp. Let’s pack and go.”

  “But the frogs!” he whined.

  “They’re happy there. Let’s go.”

  “You’re right. No ash has come this far yet.”

  Yet.

  I rubbed my throat, the scream still burning and the fears of where my brother and youngest son could be, still paralyzing.

  ****

  “Mom, how long will it take?” Will asked, not looking from his clipboard drawing, which I knew to be another map. All he drew these days were geographical maps. Correction: not even these days. He’d been drawing them since kindergarten. How many hundred had he drawn since then? Accurate enough to plug into any map software program.

  “I’m not sure, honey.” I drove the car in a sleepy daze, my body longing for caffeine. Coffee had not been on the essentials list, and Will hated too many stops. Triple mocha latte, Harrison used to say as our inside joke. I’d grab my java fix at the next gas station stop. Two nights of disjointed sleep and too much worry plagued my overworked mind.

  I tightened my grip on the wheel, my chest tightening. I’d forgotten to take my pill this morning. I reached into my handbag and dug out the bottle. Half looking at the road, I twisted the cap off, grabbed a small white pill, and popped it in my mouth with a chug of water. I knew on this trip, of all trips, I would need to stay on top of them if I didn’t want my anxiety to halt me in the days ahead.

  “I can do this,” I whispered for the umpteenth time since we’d departed.

  Will pondered aloud. “Grandma drives from Virginia to California every year to see Aunt Sarah and Uncle Brandon and that takes her five days, right? So, it should take us maybe four days to get to Colorado?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, mid-yawn, distracted by a few stopped cars ahead. At least they were pulled off to the side. Gray-black smoke curled from the crushed hood of one vehicle.

  “Well, that’s if Colorado is still there,” Will said matter-of-factly.

  Dammit. Tears blurred my vision. Not now, not again. His wheels always churned. “It’s there, honey. The news said southern Colorado is not in the impact ring.” Oh my God, was I really talking about this?

  The accident’s smoke triggered yet another memory flash of the newscasts. The eruption column of the volcano billowed miles into the sky, suffocating all light, like the shroud of a nuclear blast. I had spent all night by the TV and phone, idle, helpless. Brandon had never called. Denver Airport was unreachable, sustaining irrevocable damage from earthquakes.

  “Can you feel earthquakes while in a plane? The earthquakes were reported all the way south into Arizona!” Will said.

  The people by the cars waved their hands at me to stop as I accelerated around them, without a look behind.

  “Mom, why are those people waving?”

  “I can’t stop to help them, Will.”

  “I know, Mom. We need to get to Finn and Uncle Brandon.”

  I pursed my lips. “Yes, honey, we do.”

  ****

  “Please, Mom, can we stop?”

  I sighed. The dashboard clock read five p.m. “Yes, we’ll stop,” I said in response to Will’s third plea as I glanced back at his face. His furrowed brow immediately softened.

  At least we had reached New York. I suppressed a moan. Gone were the days of naps and snoozes in the lulling motion of a moving vehicle. There would be no all-night driving on this journey. Will couldn’t sleep without a bed; well, minimally he needed a sleeping bag.

  A short while later, I relented and pitched the tent at a campground, having learned my lesson with his early morning rising to see the muddy pond and frogs. We were both quiet through dinner. At bedtime, Will asked, “Mom, do you have my sleepy spray?”

  Shit. I’d intended to reorder his homeopathic melatonin spray after our Yellowstone vacation.

  “No, honey. I have glow sticks and your special blanket.” I lifted the blue and red seven-pound weighted blanket and spread it across his torso and legs.

  Worry flickered in his eyes. “Okay, Mom. I’ll try those.” He cracked a glow stick and held it like a wand.

  “Thanks, honey.” I kissed him and snuggled beside him until he fell asleep.

  Tomorrow I had to make better time, push the speed limits. We had gotten around the congestion of southern Maine and Boston without a hitch and were now halfway across upstate New York. If I’d had my way, we’d be in Ohio by now, but Will…

  Dammit, AJ, why didn’t you leave earlier?

  I scratched my head. My fretting would not help us. I had to stay strong for him. I had been forced to do a lot of things in the past year for the sake of my children.

  A few minutes later, while Will snored and probably dreamt about volcanoes, I sat up, grabbed my pen, and opened my journal, its virgin pages stiff and aromatic. I snapped on my headlamp, glanced sideways at my snoozing son once more, and began to write in the late evening darkness of the tent.

  I wasn’t sure how to start the journal. I rewrote the first few lines before I found something I approved. Nobody was going to read it anyway. This was for me. Writing was way cheaper than therapy. Not sure it helped as much as my anti-anxiety med did though. And it wasn’t like an agent had picked up any of my previous work. My mind was a whirling mess of thoughts. Why was I writing now of all times? If anything, I could hold on to my sanity during our journey. I scribbled about the eruption as much as I wanted to avoid it. Yet writing about it didn’t make me feel better right now.

  I paused, fighting the tears when I thought about my missing son and brother. Seriously. A journal? Writing had gotten me through much of my life…escapism at its best. I couldn’t stop now. This time it happened to be nonfiction. This was for me, and me alone. Audrey Jane Sinclair, aspiring writer, former scientist, and part-time working mom. Oh, wait, no-long
er-working mom.

  I snorted. If only Harrison could see me now. Seriously.

  The Finn-ism made me think of him. He always said, “Seriously, Mom…” Never apart from my sons for longer than the occasional weekend at Patsy’s, my heart ached more than it usually did. My Finn. Where was he?

  I directed the headlamp to the side and turned to Will. My fingers itched to snuggle with him more, the heat of his nearness already having dissipated. What was I thinking? I closed the journal for a moment. All those cheesy Hollywood movies could not compare to what had happened.

  It had really happened.

  No, not an asteroid hitting the planet, although Finn would have loved that, but rather, the earth had opened, an unbridled wrath of ash, mud, lava, and havoc raining on a third of the country. So many dead. So much destruction. Our country forever altered. The goddamn supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park had erupted, and here I was, writing in a journal somewhere in the sticks, New York.

  I ran my fingers over the gold-embossed and lily-speckled cover. My friend Siobhan had given it to me for my thirty-seventh birthday. The notebook had spent far too many months sitting beside me on the passenger seat in my car and had slowly worked its way to the back of my SUV, eventually becoming buried beneath a soccer ball, karate bag, books, jumper cables, and artwork crafted by the boys.

  I must have asked myself the same painful questions a hundred times in the past two days. Why had I left them there? Why hadn’t we stayed with Brandon and Finn at the airport so the four of us could leave Salt Lake City together?

  Why?

  One word: meltdown. Well, two words: autism meltdown.

  I’d left my seven-year-old son at the airport with my brother Brandon.

  The memory begged to be replayed as I overanalyzed it for moments of failure. I clicked off the headlamp and closed my eyes.

  ****

  Two days earlier

  “Will, come out. Will, honey, please.” I reached to touch him as he hugged his legs against his body while wedged behind a row of airport seats at our gate.

  He snarled and sobbed. “Tell me when the flight’s ready!”

  “Please wait over here with me, okay?” I tried again. He wormed as far back as the corner would allow.

  Finn spun the carry-on suitcase around with a whoop behind me. The suitcase smacked into a woman nearby, and she released a surprised curse. I stood, heat stealing my voice. “Finn! Control your wiggles!”

  “See!” Will’s cheeks flushed, and crinkles appeared under the dark smudges beneath his eyes. Those were not his happy dimples. Red splotches formed on his forehead. I recited the abbreviated version of a tranquility prayer in my head.

  “Mommy, there’s nowhere to sit,” Finn countered. He kept spinning the suitcase around. Sure, those fancy 360-degree spinning wheels were great for navigating an airport, but now, I wanted to rip the wheels off. I grabbed the handle to prevent an injury to another innocent bystander.

  Brandon returned from the bathroom and squeezed my shoulder. “I’ve got it. Finn, let’s get hot chocolate.”

  Finn dropped the suitcase on my foot. “Okay!”

  I sucked in a steadying breath.

  Brandon righted the wayward suitcase. “We’ll check at the counter again, okay?”

  My okay held far less exuberance than Finn’s.

  I shot a look to a reproachful old woman who was mumbling about “bad parents and bad kids” as I reached for Will in the corner. My fingers made contact.

  I wanted to holler, “He’s autistic! Let him be!” I bit my tongue. I hated labels. There was no perfect label to describe my Will, who hung on the Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning fringe of the autism spectrum. Even Asperger’s was an obsolete term with both negative associations and preconceived notions. He was “too normal” to be autistic, but “too quirky” to be normal.

  Instead of voicing my rebuttal, I turned, tucked the suitcase beside our other carry-on bags, and squeezed beside Will on the carpeted area around the seat. I ignored the paper wrappers beside me, the glares of bystanders, and the grumblings of disgruntled passengers who were not pleased about our two-hour delay.

  “Come, honey.” I coaxed him from his hiding place, my fingers gentle on his arm.

  He thumped his forehead against a seat a few times before I could stop him.

  “Will, we can’t hit our head. Come here,” I said, placing a hand on his forehead.

  Even at age nine, he didn’t think twice about sitting in my lap. I stroked his hair and wiped tear-stained cheeks as he leaned against my chest. “It’s noisy here. You’re tired. We had a great trip though, right?”

  He sniffled and replaced head thumping with hand tapping—against his thighs, against the seat.

  “Tell me about your favorite thing.” I rubbed his cheek, and he closed his eyes.

  “I want to go home.”

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “I know,” I said, brushing aside errant brown hairs from his forehead. “I liked Jenny Lake. You and Finn enjoyed stacking those rocks into cairns.”

  “Yeah.” He peered into the throng of briskly moving bodies, the moaning conversations, the shuffling of impatient feet. His gaze was glassy, and his mind was certainly processing it all. Well, overprocessing it all. He touched the tears on his cheeks and licked his fingers; then repeated it. I let it go. A kid could do a worse thing than lick their tears and stim a little. Stimming helped him cope and relax.

  “How many parks did we see? We went to Seattle, Olympic National Park, Mount St. Helens, Crater Lake, Craters of the Moon, the Tetons…Yellowstone…”

  “Seattle isn’t a national park.”

  “Ah, you’re right. Remember how I used to do this when you were a baby?” I cupped his cheek.

  “Uh-huh.”

  His hands fluttered.

  Tap. Tap.

  I held him quietly. He allowed it. Always my love bug, he wouldn’t refuse physical comfort.

  A few minutes later, my brother returned with a smiling Finn. “Got you tickets!” Finn said, a hot chocolate mustache tracing his upper lip and his blue eyes glimmering with excitement.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  Brandon angled his dark brown gaze to me, pleased with himself. “You and Will. You two are on the flight to Portland that leaves in thirty minutes. They’re boarding now.”

  “How did you manage that? What about you two? I can’t leave Finn.”

  “We’ll stick to the already scheduled flight to Denver in two hours and then from there we catch a connecting flight to Dulles, then on to Portland. We’ll be a few hours behind you. It will be our own adventure, right, Finn?”

  “Yup!”

  “I can’t leave you. What about your flight to California? You can’t come all the way back to Maine with us.”

  “Yes, you can, and you will, and I will, too. I switched my ticket,” he said with a subtle head nod to my weary son, who lay crumpled in my lap now, his head burrowed into my thighs. At least his crying had ceased, and the looks of judging passengers had moved on to more interesting things.

  “I haven’t been around enough for you, AJ, since…” He pulled off his ballcap and ran a hand through his receding hair line. “It’ll be okay. Sarah’s off work for a few weeks. She’s cool with me staying with you guys for a week or two. I’d love to see Maine again. I just called her. If that’s okay with you?” Brandon plopped the hat on his head.

  And so I’d left my seven-year-old son at the airport in Salt Lake City with my brother.

  ****

  Present day

  Rage boiled within me. Damn you, Harrison. “Why did you have to leave us?” I said into my hands. The headlamp illuminated the worn lines on my palms in the darkness of the tent.

  “Mom?”

  I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and snuffed my tears. “Go back to sleep, Will.”

  “Mom…”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Mom…,” he moaned. He sat upright and whim
pered. He pushed the sleeping bag away and squirmed.

  “Go to sleep, Will,” I said as gently as I could, though my voice trembled. I removed the high-powered headlamp from my forehead and laid it in my lap, the beam pointing away from his face.

  He released short bursts of cries, frantically looking around. He scrunched his face and tried to stand in our short two-person tent, panting.

  “Down, honey.” I laid a gentle hand on his forearm.

  He fluttered one hand, while the other was tightly gripped on a glow stick.

  I took his hands in mine while saying, “Sleep, Will. Think good thoughts.” It’s what I always told him when he had night terrors. “Think about jumping in puddles or playing in your sandbox or your cool Lego constructions or—” I stopped short from saying volcanoes. Good thoughts. I snorted. What good was left now?

  “Try to block it, honey. Happy thoughts. Think about…” Stillness hung over me. All that came to me was a toad’s ribbit in the nearby woods. “Here’s Douglas.” I nestled his favorite plush dog into his hands.

  I murmured soothing words, rubbing his cheek. His eyes were dark in the low light, wide, distant, and staring off beyond the closed tent flap. He was in another place. Will never remembered the terrors come morning. Although he appeared awake, he was locked in a sleepy world with his spinning thoughts. I often wondered what was going on in his brain during the terrors. They had begun when he was three, and now at age nine, he continued to have them, but they were rare and occurred in clusters, usually triggered by stress or lack of sleep. In uncommon cases, the terrors could be seizures, a condition I knew sometimes went hand in hand with autism, but in Will’s case, the symptom profile was not there so we’d never investigated it further.

  His eyelids danced as he fought and eventually succumbed to sleep, my hand never leaving his cheek. It had become our new normal. Will joined me most nights in bed—that is, when I decided to sleep there instead of on the sofa. He was comforted when beside me and would fall asleep instantly. Then, I would carry him back to his room. I hated to admit that I was equally comforted with a warm body beside me instead of an empty spot once occupied by my husband.