by Nancy Kress
He walks away, his back toward her, and Jenny covers her face with her hands. It is her fault, will always be her fault. Not that Eric’s wife and daughter are dead, of course, but that Eric was with Jenny, in bed with Jenny in another city, pumping away on top of Jenny, when it happened. He will never forgive either of them for that.
They met a year ago, at the American Library Association annual conference, in Kansas City. Jenny’s attraction to him was instantaneous, and so was her glance at the wedding ring on Eric’s left hand. But he was so handsome and so charming, and she was so thrilled by the almost unprecedented masculine attention. They drifted together at the luncheon held between “Reference Tools for the On-Line Generation” and “Collaborative Approaches to Information Literacy.” They had a drink in the bar after the obligatory inedible banquet, laughing at the dullness of the speakers. One drink became many. They spent the last night of the conference in Jenny’s room, and the next day she’d flown back to Rochester, suspended somewhere between euphoria and dread. Two days later she’d e-mailed him. Eric had replied, and things had gone on from there.
Sometimes, if she hadn’t had an e-mail or phone call from him in several days, Jenny let herself imagine that he’d told his wife about the affair. He’d told her, and then he’d moved out of their Evanston home, and he was just waiting to hear from his lawyer before he told Jenny the great news. She let herself imagine all this in exquisite detail—the scene with Deirdre, Eric’s complicated emotions, the phone call to Jenny and how understanding she would be—even while she knew it was not going to happen. Very few married men actually left their wives for their mistresses. Eric adored his six-year-old daughter. He had never even said that he loved Jenny.
But she loved him, and she knew it was turning her desperate, which in turn was driving him away. She waited, helpless and all but hopeless, by the phone. She turned up the volume on her computer (“You’ve got mail!”) so that anywhere in the apartment she would know the instant his e-mail came through. She wrote long, eloquent letters giving him tender ultimatums, and never sent the letters because she knew he would not choose her. It took all her strength to never ask him the Fatal Questions: Do we have a future? Are you tired of me? Is there somebody else? Somebody besides Deirdre, she meant. She tried not to think about Deirdre, and the effort further exhausted her. Finally she Googled Deirdre and got over a thousand hits; Deirdre was a successful real estate agent in Evanston. She was slim, tanned, smiling, dressed more stylishly than Jenny had ever managed. She grew roses and played golf. Jenny mailed one of the eloquent ultimatums.
“I think we’d better end this, Jenny,” Eric said gently on the phone. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t what I’d thought it was. I don’t want you to get any more hurt than it seems you already are.”
Seems? More hurt? Not “what he thought it was”? What was that? She found a steeliness she didn’t know she possessed. “I want to discuss this in person, Eric. I think you owe me that!” And he agreed, from guilt or compassion or fair play or who-knew-what. He flew to Rochester on a Friday morning, a return flight scheduled for that evening, six hours in which to end what had become the center of her life. She lured him—there really was no other word—into a farewell fuck, thinking desperately, stupidly, Maybe if it’s really good, better than Deirdre… But Friday afternoon Bombay and Karachi disappeared, and a few hours later Chicago took Deirdre (maybe) and little Mary along with three million other people, and now Rochester is gone and Eric can barely look at Jenny.
She gets into the minivan, but even with the passenger door open, the September sun starts to heat up the car. For something to do, she straightens the blankets on top of the mattress that fills the back of the van; she and Eric, not touching, slept here last night. She checks their boxes of food, bottles of water, two flashlights and small hoard of extra batteries. Jenny, no camper, didn’t own the tent, Coleman lanterns, or propane stoves she sees blossoming over the field like mushrooms. Communities are forming. Ricky and two other little boys have started a soccer game in the middle of the semicircle of cars. Somebody’s dog, barking wildly, chases the boys. In front of the green SUV, three women gossip over coffee bubbling on a campfire. One of them is Ricky’s slatternly mother, and the other two look enough like her to be her sisters or cousins. Out of desperation—she will go mad if she just sits here—Jenny fights off her innate shyness and walks over.
The oldest of the women, overweight and sweet-faced in a Redwings T-shirt, says, “Hi, honey. Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please.” The small kindness almost brings tears. “Thank you so much. I’m Jenny.”
“Carleen, and this here’s Sue and Cheri.” Carleen hands Jenny coffee in a thick white mug. “I figure we’re all in this together, so we better stick together, right?”
“Right,” Jenny says unconvincingly. Cheri, Ricky’s mother, is studying Jenny as if planning to dissect her. The coffee is hot and wonderful.
Sue is as talkative as Carleen. “Your husband at the big powwow?”
How to answer that? Cheri’s gaze sharpens. Jenny finally says, “They investigated the…the wall this morning and found no breaks. Now they’re trying to tunnel underneath.”
“That’s what my Ted said,” Sue says. “But he told me he thinks an assault on the ETs’ building is gonna have to happen sooner or later.”
Jenny nods. ET conjures up for her the cuddly and benevolent creature from the old movie, not the beautiful alien megaterrorist who offered her breakfast and who may or may not even be bodily present. And assault is an alarming word all by itself. These look like gun people, which Jenny and Eric emphatically are not.
Carleen says, “If the assholes really do have food in there and—Ricky! Be careful!”
The soccer ball has nearly gone into the campfire. Cheri grabs for her son, who wriggles away with the agility of long practice. She bellows, “Ricky!” The child darts behind Carleen and grabs her ample waist.
“There now, he didn’t mean nothing, Cheri—don’t get your blood in a boil. Ricky, you be good now, you hear?”
Ricky nods and darts off. Desultory chatter reveals that Carleen is Cheri’s and Sue’s mother, the grandmother of Ricky and the now-sleeping infant, Daniella. Carleen does not, to Jenny’s eyes, look anywhere near old enough to be a grandmother. Sue is the mother of the other two little boys, nonidentical twins. Neither Carleen nor Cheri mentions husbands, either present or vaporized in Rochester. Carleen is casually maternal to anyone who enters her radar, including Jenny. Cheri asks fake-nonchalant questions about Eric, which Jenny avoids answering. After a half hour of this, the coffee is gone, the fire is out, and Jenny is emotionally exhausted.
She excuses herself, crawls onto the mattress in the hot van, and falls fitfully asleep. When she wakes, sweaty and unrefreshed, Eric still hasn’t returned. She stumbles out of the car into a midafternoon chaos of cooking, unleashed pets, gossiping, worrying, grieving. Radios yammer, although it’s clear that groups have pooled electronic resources to save batteries. Women cry. Children either race frantically around or sit in frightened huddles against parents’ knees. There are no aliens visible.
Carleen comes over, evidently a response to Jenny’s dazed look. “You need the latrine, honey? Over there.” She points. “And your husband said to tell you to go ahead and eat without him; he’s gonna work on the tunnel and he’ll get something later. You got to make sure he eats, Jenny. Some of these men are mad enough to just burn themselves out.”
Jenny nods. She finds the latrine, efficiently and deeply dug behind the field’s only line of scrub bushes, divided by a blanket on poles into separate pits for males and females. Many of these people, she realizes, are far better at basic survival than she. Not that that’s hard. On the way back to the van, she notices a prayer service of some sort under a tarp strung between two cars, a card game around a collapsible table, and a woman reading a book to a toddler on her lap. All the adults wear the resolute, pinched look of people going through fu
neral rites and determined to do them correctly despite whatever they might be feeling. This should, Jenny thinks, be an inspiring model for her own behavior, but instead it makes her feel even more inadequate.
How long will Eric stay away from her?
The rest of the day, it turns out. Jenny calls her brother Bob on the cell and then sits in the van, waiting. The early September dusk falls, and a few cars, chosen by lottery, train their headlights on the low, pale buildings across the meadow. This hardly seems necessary, since the buildings glow with their own subtle light. People put on sweaters and jackets, and the smell of canned stew fills the air. Three aliens begin to circulate among the cars.
“Good evening. Dinner is ready now.”
People turn their backs or glare menacingly. Sue spits, a glob of sputum that slides off the alien’s protective shell. This one is a man, tall and brown-skinned, handsome as an African-American movie star. Sue’s husband, Ted, snarls, “Get your ass out of here!”
“Are you sure? The chicken Marengo is excellent.”
Cheri appears with a shotgun. The alien smiles at her. Carleen says sharply, “Don’t you fire that thing with all these people around—what the hell’s wrong with you? Jenny, honey, you want some coffee?”
Cheri returns the shotgun to the green SUV. Ricky sits beside Carleen’s fire, eating Chef Boyardee ravioli from a plastic bowl, his baby sister asleep in an infant seat on the grass beside him. Cheri has changed from the pink pants and tee dotted with baby spit to tight jeans and a spangled red sweater cut very low. She has spectacular breasts. Jenny accepts the coffee but no ravioli; she’s still not hungry, and anyway she doesn’t want to deplete their food supply.
“Honey, you got to eat,” Carleen says. “Even a bitty thing like you gotta eat.”
“I had something in the van,” Jenny lies.
Cheri says, “Not into sharing?”
Jenny faces her. “Would you like some organic yogurt? I have some in the cooler.”
Carleen laughs and says, “That’s telling her!” Cheri smiles, too, but it’s a nasty secret smile, as though Jenny has revealed dirty underwear. Cheri says, “No, thanks.” Ricky demands more ravioli and Cheri gives it to him, then turns to her mother.
“Will you watch the kids a bit? I’m going to go find Ralph.”
Carleen snaps, “You’d do better to stay away from that no-good.”
Cheri doesn’t answer, just strolls off into the darkness. Carleen says to Jenny, as if Jenny were her own age and not Cheri’s, “Kids. Soon as they get tits you can’t tell them nothing.”
Jenny, whose own tits are negligible, has no idea what to say to this.
“That Ralph’ll just break her heart, same as the daddies of these two.” She picks up Daniella, who’s starting to fuss in her infant seat.
The information that Cheri, too, is having her heart broken by someone should make Jenny feel more kinship with her. It doesn’t. She crawls onto the mattress in the van, trying to read Dickens by flashlight while she waits for Eric to come back for dinner. She’s fixed him a sandwich from the best of everything thrown hastily into her cooler. Two bottles of beer are as chilled as the melting ice will get them. Jenny knows it’s a pathetic offering, but as the hours pass and he doesn’t appear to witness her pathos, anger sets in. What right has he to treat her this way? None of this is her fault. Somewhere deep in her bruised and frightened mind she knows that Eric is staying away because he’s afraid of what he’ll say if he comes back to her, but she doesn’t want to look at this. Looking at it would finish her off.
He doesn’t come back all night.
In the very early morning, anger replaced by frenzied anxiety, Jenny looks for him. Eric is asleep near the half-dug tunnel, rolled up in somebody’s extra sleeping bag. He lies on his back, his dark hair flopping to one side, and in sleep all the anger and guilt and fear have smoothed out. Through the grime on his face snake tear trails. Jenny’s heart melts and she crouches beside him. “Eric…”
He wakes, stares at her, and tightens his mouth to a thin, straight line. That’s all she sees; all she can bear. She gets up and walks away, making herself put one sneaker in front of the next, moving blindly through the damp weeds. It’s over. He will never forgive her, never forgive himself, possibly never even approach the van again. The frenzy of tunnel digging, which will do no good, will eventually be replaced by frenzies of another sort, any other sort, anything to blot out everything he’s lost. And she will not be able to change his mind. Eric is not strong enough to fight off his own passions, including the passion for self-destruction. If he were, he wouldn’t have become involved with her—or with his other women—in the first place.
All this comes to Jenny in an instant, like a blow. It’s all she can do to remain upright, walking. Her cell rings. It will be her brother, but even knowing how cruel she’s being, she can’t bring herself to answer. As the field comes alive around her, she sits alone in her van, wishing she had died in Rochester.
Another two days and most of the food and water have run out. Except for a few dour loners, mostly armed, people have been remarkably generous with their supplies. There have been no fights, no looting, no theft. Jenny, who hasn’t been able to eat, gave most of her food to Carleen, who made it last as long as possible among her small matriarchal band, which now apparently includes Jenny. Jenny doesn’t care, not about anything.
Outside help, it’s learned through numerous phone calls, was stopped by a second invisible wall about a mile from the camp. Not even a helicopter was able to rise high enough to surmount the barrier. Relatives, cops, and the Red Cross remain parked just outside in case something, unspecified, lets them drive closer. Most cell phones, including Jenny’s, have exhausted their batteries, although a few people have the equipment to recharge phones from car cigarette lighters. Jenny doesn’t find out if hers can be recharged. Bob knows that Jenny’s still alive, and there is nothing else to report. The car radios now pick up only two small-town stations, but these report that cities have stopped disappearing. A schedule has been organized and a track cleared to drive cars around the field, so that the batteries will not run down and both radio and heat will still be available. It’s a nice balance between using up gas and preserving batteries. Jenny does not participate.
Three times a day aliens circulate around the field, offering breakfast, lunch, dinner. No one accepts. The aliens are cursed, spat on, attacked, and once—although this is looked on with disfavor—publicly prayed over.
Tunnels of varying depths now ring the field beside the invisible wall. None of them go deeper than the barrier, but digging them has given many people something physical to drain off rage and grief.
Every once in a while Jenny glimpses Eric in the distance, working on yet another futile tunnel, or huddled in desperate conference with other men, or with Cheri. Each of these sightings turns her inside out like a sock, all her vulnerable organs battered by the smallest sound, breeze, photon of light.
“My Cheri never was no good around men,” Carleen says, handing Jenny yet another cup of boiled coffee, not meeting her eyes. It’s the first time Carleen has mentioned the situation. Jenny doesn’t reply. Carleen’s kindness is like air, ubiquitous and necessary and equally available to everyone, but even air hurts Jenny now.
“Honey,” Carleen adds, “you gotta eat.”
“Later,” Jenny says, the syllable scraping her throat like gritty vomit.
Carleen goes away, but half an hour later Ricky appears beside the van, holding a book. He is incredibly dirty, smells bad, and clearly does not want to be there. “You spozed to read me this.”
It’s Treasure Island in the original, a book whose flowery language and slow pace Ricky will neither understand nor enjoy. Where on Earth did Carleen get it? She must have asked every last person in the camp, must have remembered that Jenny is—was—a librarian, must have cudgeled her slow wits to think of something that might make Jenny feel better. Jenny starts to cry. An old song title f
ills her head: “Roses from the Wrong Man.” Carleen is not a man, and this filthy child with his reluctant offering is about as far from roses as it’s possible to get, but Jenny is in too much pain to appreciate the incongruity. She only knows that if it had been Eric who’d arranged this perverse kindness on her behalf, she could have borne anything. But it is not Eric.
Ricky looks at her tears with the same alarm as would any grown man. “Hey! You…you gonna read me that book?”
“No. You’d hate it. Go play.”
Released, Ricky gives a whoop and races away, running backward, maybe to fulfill some small-boy notion of paying attention to the adult he’s been told to pay attention to. No one else is in the center of the field; the cars are doing their daily promenade to charge up batteries. The red Taurus is not going very fast and the driver slams on her brakes, but not soon enough. Ricky is hit.
He starts shrieking to wake the dead. Carleen and Cheri both scream and dart from beside their SUV, Cheri with Daniella clamped to one naked breast. Sue’s husband, Ted, leaps from his car and reaches Ricky just as Jenny does. Ted says, “Ricky! Buddy!”
The child is wailing and writhing on the flattened weeds. His left arm hangs at a strange angle. Ted gently holds down Ricky’s shoulders. “Lie still, buddy, till we see what’s broken.” Cheri thrusts Daniella at Carleen, yells something anguished, and throws herself practically on top of Ricky. Ted shoves her off. “For Chrissake, let me see how bad he’s hurt! Don’t crush him, Cheri!”
“Ted’s an EMT,” Sue says at Jenny’s elbow. “What happened?”
Jenny shakes her head. She can’t speak. Cheri says shakily, “He was just racing around like always and—fuck it, why does everything always happen to me!”
Jenny just stares at her. The statement is so selfish, so inadequate, so stupid, that no response is possible. A thought forms in Jenny’s mind: If this is what Eric prefers to me, the hell with him. The next second she’s ashamed of this thought; it’s as self-absorbed as Cheri’s. She turns her attention to Ricky.
