Will Rise from Ashes

by Jean M. Grant

  “I still like it,” he murmured, nuzzling into my embrace. “Your face is red and purple, Mom.” He stroked my cheek in the same manner I stroked his, but I winced with his touch.

  “It will heal.” As will your hurt, I wanted to say. “We always heal. Sometimes it takes longer.”

  A stubborn smile cracked through his grimace. “Mars is a dead planet,” he repeated.

  “But you’re not.”

  “Mars has volcanoes.”

  “It does. So does Earth.”

  He glowered at me, but with the meltdown momentarily diffused, he rose and went on his way toward the car.

  “Will, your Lego bricks…”

  “Okay, okay. I know, Mom.”

  He picked up his toys and tucked them in a bag, and then drifted toward the car. Reid, thankfully, ignored the situation to let me handle it and had loaded the rest of our supplies in the car.

  We drove away without another look. Goodbye, Missouri. I hoped to never see you again.

  ****

  “Mind if I put on the radio?” Reid asked as he drove.

  “Go ahead.” Not that I wanted to hear more news of the devastation, but the silence was maddening.

  Reid flipped through a few channels that were broadcasting news. We shared a look of resignation. He scanned through a few more channels. Most were static. No music. Nothing but news.

  “So much for that,” he said, clicking the radio off.

  “I have my MP3 player, but the adapter here is broken,” I said, pointing to my center console. I passed a glance at a road sign. “Do you think the best way is Route 70 toward Kansas City?”

  He scrunched his brow. “Seems like all the cities have had detours.”

  “Yeah, we may need to improvise.” I closed the atlas and tucked it away. Best laid plans were that—and on this road trip, those plans got changed a lot.

  I opened my journal to distract myself from doomsday talk. I scribbled along the edges, writing HBA. I crossed it out and drew a few flowers instead. I remembered reading that people doodled when their brains were thinking, that it was part of the creative process. So far, my journal included Will’s maps, numerous entries about my life and family, and pages of information about the eruption. Now I added flower and cube doodles to the mix.

  Even though writing and reading in a car usually gave me a wicked case of vertigo and nausea, the pull to write made a stronger case. I skimmed my previous entries. Writing about Finn the evening before had been hard but cathartic. After a few doodles, I turned to a new page and began today’s entry. I wrote the date. My God, I should have been preparing the kids for their first day of school, not journeying across the country.

  I processed that bleak thought for a moment, and then continued writing.

  The car bumped a pothole, and my fancy pen skittered a swirly blob that almost looked deliberate.

  “Sorry,” Reid said.

  “Is the tire okay?”

  “Yeah, was just a pothole. It’s a full-sized spare. It’s okay, but we can check it at the next stop if you want,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

  I turned a look over my shoulder at Will. He was contently gazing outside.

  “What are you writing?” Reid took his attention off the road briefly to glance at my journal.

  I closed it, no longer really feeling the urge to write…not like my writing today was anything short of scattered. “I suppose it’s a journal.” I flipped down the visor. I poked the bruise. Purple and red had been an understatement. I didn’t care what Reid thought as I pulled out my compact and dabbed concealer on it. I swiped through my hair that needed a clarifying wash and a cut as it now grew past my shoulder.

  “About your life?”

  “Well, it began as a telling of the current events, but it’s evolved into a story about my family. So, yeah.”

  “Am I in it?” Will asked, always attentive.

  “You betcha,” I responded.

  “Do you write other things, too?”

  “I had a part-time job working at a local New England magazine, but I recently resigned. Life got lifey. I’ve wanted to focus on novels. Haven’t had much success in that arena yet. I’ve also dabbled with short stories.”

  “Fiction is fun. I love a thought-provoking story, as you know. What kind of stories?”

  I shrugged. “Historical fiction, with romantic or fantastical elements, and I have a few ideas for high-concept mainstream stuff. Not the same as the philosophical greats, but yeah. I love to immerse myself in fictional worlds, but lately I’ve been drawn to writing about families like us. Perhaps something non-fiction to help other parents.”

  “Write what you know—isn’t that the motto?” Reid said astutely.

  “It sure is.”

  “I’d love to read your work.”

  I surprised myself by saying, “Sure. Maybe. This one is for me though. What about you? Do you write?”

  He cast me a lopsided grin. “Nah. I just read and philosophize. Leave the writing to those with a knack for it.”

  Will asked, “What does philosophize mean?”

  “You like big words?” Reid asked.

  “I like to know what they mean.”

  Reid scratched his bare chin. “Well, it means to talk about logic, ethics, and values as they relate to human beings. And also to understand the beliefs of groups.”

  “Like understanding what people care about and why they do things?” Will asked.

  “Pretty much, buddy.”

  “Are you from Puerto Rico?” Will blurted.

  “Will!” I apologized for Will’s bluntness with a pleading look.

  Reid squeezed my arm. “It’s okay.” He looked in the rearview mirror at Will’s reflection.

  Will looked back.

  “Close, buddy. My mother was from Mexico, but my dad was born here. What gave it away?”

  “You look like a kid in my class, Javier. His parents moved here from Puerto Rico. He speaks Spanish. Do you know Spanish?”

  “Sí!”

  “That means yes. I know a few words. Javier taught me at recess. Wanna know what volcano is in Spanish? Javier told me.”

  “Sí.”

  “El vulcán!” Will said. “There are a lot of volcanoes in Mexico—a whole range traverses through Mexico to Central and South America. The ring of fire!” He smiled to himself and returned to daydreaming.

  “What do you do, Reid?” I realized I’d never asked. “Now that you’ve retired from the army, I mean. You’d mentioned traveling east for business.”

  “I’ve done the odd job here and there. Five years in the army, following the footsteps of my father I suppose. Since then, I’ve been doing this and that. Worked at a mechanic’s shop for a short time, but I don’t find cars interesting. I can fix tires though, right?”

  “That you can.”

  “I took a few college classes after my tours, while helping my sister in her class like I mentioned. I like to see how things work and fix problems. I wasn’t sure what direction to take—education, law, philosophy, or engineering. Lily really got me interested in special kids. My mom encouraged me to be a surgeon. That’s a mom for you.” He shrugged. “My uncle, the senator, well, he opened my mind to government policy. Lots of choices. Ultimately, I never finished school.”

  He didn’t mask the distance in his voice. “Anyway, I’ve also tinkered at a clock shop—yes, yes, they exist!” he said in response to my surprised look, his demeanor quickly changing.

  “Clocks!” Will said, always listening. “We have one on our living room mantel with Roman numerals. I learned how to read it when I was four, right, Mom?”

  “That’s right,” I said, fondly remembering how he’d kept his kindergarten teacher on track with the schedule.

  “Clocks are neat, aren’t they? All those gears and such,” Reid said delightfully.

  “Not another one,” I said in jest.

  Reid laughed. “I’m a tinkerer! What can I
say?”

  “Finn loves gears and stuff, too. Daddy…well, he did, too,” Will said.

  I heard Will dig through his backpack. He thrust his hand between us, Harrison’s old metal compass on his palm.

  “It doesn’t work well anymore. Maybe you can help me fix it?”

  I pressed my lips together. Reid raised an inquisitive eyebrow and I responded, “That’s a great idea, Will.”

  “Finn loves this. He used to sneak it into his backpack and bring it to school and play with it on the bus.”

  Now that I didn’t know. In fact, I’d not seen it since my last hike with Harrison. Like many of his belongings, it had been tucked away in bins in our basement. Or so I had thought.

  “I take it there’s not much business in clock shops?” I asked.

  “Nope. Now I work in a bike shop. Marshall, the owner, sells cycles for the diehards who love to mountain bike the trails of the Rockies, and he also runs a tour business, taking people in bike groups on the southeast slopes, or to Pikes Peak. I’ve done my share of work with the tour groups in the Southern Front Range area. Marshall isn’t able to travel as much as he needs to. He sent me to upstate New York to follow up on some online leads. He collects old cars and classic cycles and needed parts and what not. That’s why I was where you found me.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I said. That certainly explained riding a bike cross-country and with a heavy pack.

  “What about all these books you read?” I said, upbeat, and with a thumb pointing toward his backpack that was buried somewhere. “Did Lily get you into other authors besides Lewis and Shakespeare?”

  “A few. It definitely keeps my brain busy.”

  “It certainly must. Ever consider re-enrolling in college now?”

  He scratched his head. “I’m too old.”

  “Never too old.”

  “Never too old to give up on your writing dream either,” he said.

  I nodded. “Touché, Mr.—what’s your army rank?”

  “Corporal.”

  “Well, then, Corporal Gregory, well played, sir,” I quipped.

  He laughed. I laughed. He stuck out his hand to shake mine. “I will go back to school for education and philosophy if you continue writing what you love. Deal?”

  “Deal. Finn always does that,” I said.

  “Does what?”

  “Makes deals.”

  “My kind of kid, like I said.” Reid flashed a smile.

  “I’m hungry.” Will’s voice broke into our discussion. “It’s lunchtime.”

  The clock on the console read 12:15 p.m. “We’ll stop soon.”

  He moaned but was thankfully distracted. “Look, Mom! They’re like a thousand suns!”

  I hadn’t paid much heed to our surroundings in Kansas. I’d been happily distracted by the conversation with Reid, while we drove long stretches of highway flanked by ripening cornfields. The vast open fields rustled in a strong breeze, and I rolled down my window for air.

  Then I noticed the milky grayish smog obscuring the sun. I coughed in reflex and rolled it up. Will coughed once, too.

  The wide cerulean sky that I’d remembered from a childhood road trip was lacking. My scalp prickled, and the hairs lifted on the back of my neck. The foreboding real-life villain hovered above. This was no fictional villain from my novels. Ash-filled clouds threatened to unleash upon us. I swallowed, parched, despite having had a gulp of water.

  “What do you mean, Will?” I asked belatedly. “I see just one sun, honey.” And even that was hazy and dismal.

  He pointed ahead of us. I squinted. Then I saw them…an expansive field of golden yellow sunflowers, tall, robust, and swaying.

  “Wow, they’re stunning.” I’d never been one to dote upon sunflowers, even with my love for gardening, always considering them to be out of place…tall and awkward in clusters of three or four along someone’s garden fence. However, when I saw them in the hundreds—thousands—wow.

  “I’ve never seen so many flowers, Mom. Except for when we went to see the lupine.”

  “Lupine?” Reid perked up.

  “Yeah, they’re one of my favorites. We used to go to this place nearby where there were fields of them, wild. Used to go every Father’s Day weekend, because they peak in June,” I said. I blinked back sudden tears. “In some places, they’re considered invasive weeds, but I just could not manage them to grow in my gardens. So to the wild I went each summer to enjoy them.”

  Reid was soft-spoken. “Ah, I see.”

  “Mom, I think we need to turn south.”

  I bounced a curled knuckle against my mouth. “I want to go through Wichita, honey.” It’s where I’d asked Dr. Martin to send my prescription. God, that was days ago…

  Reid crinkled his brows and looked up through the windshield. “It does look awfully gray over that way, west. And given the disorder in the other cities in the Midwest, I am wary traveling through Wichita.”

  I pulled open the atlas. “We can’t be certain it’s lousy there, too. The news had shown the plume more north than this.”

  “El Niño, Mom.”

  “Huh?” I flipped the pages. There were only a few roads in southern Kansas that looped down and then through Dodge City. I followed with my finger. The best route dipped into Oklahoma.

  “How far are we from Wichita?” I glanced for road signs.

  “Not sure. Not close yet, though,” Reid said.

  “I was watching the news and was reading in my books. Volcanic eruptions in the Pacific have triggered El Niño years,” Will said.

  I tapped my temple, a dull headache returning. “But El Niño is in the winter, honey. It’s not even September yet.”

  “Yes, they usually start in the winter, but an eruption of this size could greatly shift the weather patterns. The winds could be all mixed up. We already know the blast sent a plume east and northeast, but it’s going to be pushed south because the news said the trade winds in the Pacific died as a result of the eruption. And the earthquakes. Plus that tsunami.”

  I scratched my head as he continued. Was my head actually spinning? Sarah had also mentioned road closures in northern California…but that was west of the eruption, not south. “Okay, slow down a bit, Will. The newscasters said the ash cloud is traveling north and east, not south,” I countered.

  “I know, Mom. But look at those clouds! I think it’s shifting because of the jet stream, too. El Niño can affect a lot of things. The eruption and earthquakes triggered the tsunamis. The tsunamis disrupted the Pacific Ocean’s balance, and there is a lot of rain in southern California now already…El Niño is coming.”

  “How do you know all this?” Seriously, were we driving into a goddamn disaster movie? “Shouldn’t the ash have settled by now?”

  “There was a lot on the TV. Plus, my books, like I told you. And that ash rain we drove though? Probably moved faster and east because of the El Niño shift. Ash can remain in the atmosphere for a while, get picked up by the winds and stuff, Mom.”

  Reid said, “We’d drive right into it if we stay on a northern route.”

  “Yeah,” Will said.

  A brick wall hit me.

  I couldn’t get to my medication.

  “Yeah, but I don’t understand…,” I said, grasping. “I’m not driving south into Oklahoma! We may never get to Colorado.”

  “Maybe just go a little more south, Mom. Then we loop back up?”

  “Okay,” I mumbled, staring at the atlas spread open on my lap.

  We drove for a few hours, looping south of Wichita and dipping into Oklahoma. My blood pressure rose as I considered other places to try to get my prescription filled.

  “Look, pizza! Can we stop, please?” Will asked as we passed a cluster of billboard signs.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sounds good to me.” Reid massaged his neck with a slight groan.

  “Yum, pizza!” Will said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Salty and Sweet

&
nbsp; The smells. Spices and tomato sauce. Baking crust. My, oh, my, Will loved pizza. The colors! He’d never seen a restaurant like this before.

  “Hey, what’s this?” he asked, making his way to the brightly colored gizmo in the corner of the shop.

  “Oh, that’s a jukebox,” Reid said.

  “A what box? It’s not a square or a cube. It’s round on the top. See.” In fact, the top part was like a rainbow, made of three colors—well, it wasn’t a rainbow then—bowing stripes, that’s what they were. It was fascinating.

  Mom moved toward the counter. “Cheese, please!” he said, his interest fixed on the jukebox.

  Reid knelt beside him. “It plays records.”

  “You can’t play records.”

  Reid laughed. “Not that kind of record. A record is also an early type of a CD, but bigger. It plays music.”

  “Oh, like Mom’s CD player in the car? Not like a radio, which transmits via radio waves.”

  “Exactly. This one doesn’t have records anymore. Just digital recordings…probably on a computer, much like an MP3 player. The old jukeboxes used to play records. The records would be lined up inside the box, and a special mechanical arm would grab the record and move it, then play the music.”

  Will ran a finger along the polished wood. It was carved. This jukebox was colorful, too. Neon pink and blue and orange, with shiny silver along the edges. He skimmed the rectangular buttons. Each had words on them. “Are these songs?”

  “Yeah. Want to pick? A quarter gets you three songs.”

  “I don’t know any songs.”

  “What type of music do you like?”

  Will shrugged. He counted the rectangular buttons. There were thirty-six. The carvings weaved along the edges and ended with circles. That reminded him of Finn’s favorite things—black holes and whirlpools!

  “Will, answer him, please,” Mom said from the counter.