by John Varley
“I wish we could help you,” Dave said. “You understand, we can’t take people in. Do you have a place—”
“It’s the same everywhere,” Vega said. “People are protecting themselves. In the hills here, they can block off streets. Nobody has any food they can spare. That’s why we had to leave home. We ran out of food. We’re hoping to find someplace where they’re taking care of refugees. Do you know anything about that?”
“No more than you do. There is a rumor of a soup kitchen in the Valley, maybe somewhere around Panorama City, but I can’t vouch for that.”
“It’s a long way to walk.”
“That it is. Where…where do you stay at night?”
Vega gave a wry grin.
“That’s the least of our problems. Most of these groups don’t care if you stop off in a park. They’re getting crowded, though. Good thing it’s not winter.”
Dave couldn’t think of another thing to say.
“Well, thanks for the water.” Vega held out his hand, and Dave shook it. He and his family started back down the hill.
“Well, screw this,” Marie said, from behind the barrier. “Mr. Vega! Wait a minute, don’t go yet. I’ll be back in a minute.” She took off, jogging away from them, toward her home.
It was more like five minutes, but she was back soon. She was carrying a plastic grocery bag as she slipped through the narrow barricade entrance.
“It’s not much,” she said, as she handed the bag to Vega. “There’s a can of pineapple, a can of corn, and a jar of spaghetti sauce. Also a box of spaghetti. Do you have anything you can cook this—”
Mrs. Vega moved to stand beside her husband and reached out to take Marie’s hand in both of hers.
“I am Anna. God bless you, ma’am. My children will eat tonight.”
“It’s not much, I wish I—”
“It is a feast to us. Bless you.”
Mr. Vega was looking at the ground again.
“I’ve never begged for anything in my life, I—”
Anna cuffed him with the back of her hand.
“Be quiet, Richard. If we have to crawl on our knees until they bleed, then we will do so. But this wonderful lady has spared your pride and filled our stomachs. Can’t you find anything to say?”
Chastened, Vega looked Marie in the eyes and nodded.
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“Bless you,” Marie said. “It was little enough. I think you will find food and shelter soon. I know you will.”
Dave watched as they walked down the street. One of the shopping carts had a squeaky wheel. It was almost the only sound on this quiet, deceptively peaceful day. He watched them out of sight, then followed Marie back to his post.
There was silence among the three for a while. Then Herman spoke.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I wonder—”
“Don’t say it, Herman. I’ve got a loaded gun.” She sighed. “I know what you want to say. I was in India twenty years ago, I saw what happens when you give a street kid a few rupees. Next thing you know, you’re surrounded.”
“If those people talk about where they got the food…”
“He’s got more sense than that. But you know what? I don’t care what the committee says. I’m single, I’ve got nobody I’m responsible for, and it’s my food to do with what I want to.”
Neither Dave nor Herman was inclined to argue with her.
“And you know what else? I’m through with this shit. I can’t take it anymore. You better get someone else to take my place, because I’m out of here.”
She turned and walked back up the street to her house, with her back straight and her rifle resting on her shoulder.
A few hours later, with only a little light left in the western sky, she drove up to the barricade in a white Lexus. The backseat was full, the contents covered with blankets and clothing heaped almost to the ceiling. Dave figured her trunk was full, too. There was a man he didn’t know sitting in the passenger seat. He was glad to see that. He didn’t think venturing out alone after dark was a good idea for a woman.
Dave and Herman had been joined by Lucas Petrelli, who neither of them knew all that well. The three of them removed the blocks from under the wheels of a Cadillac and pushed it out of the way. Marie drove until the hood of her car was through.
“Where will you go?” Dave asked them.
“Toward San Diego. I have friends there. But there’s not enough gas in this overpriced heap to get me there. So if you drive south on the I-5 and see two people pushing a shopping cart, it’ll probably be us.”
With that, she waved good-bye and pulled all the way through. Before she reached Sunset she turned off her headlights.
Far in the distance he heard several gunshots.
“They should have waited until daylight,” Herman said.
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Sometimes it’s best to just do it before you chicken out. Sometimes you just have to go.”
Dave wondered if he’d ever see them again.
That night he lay sleepless in bed with Karen in the guesthouse.
He had brooded about the scene at the barricade for a little over a day. He felt he had a lot to talk over with his wife.
“I can always tell when you’re not sleeping,” she said. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Late. Maybe even early.” He no longer looked at his watch as often as he used to. The only appointments he had to keep these days were his stints at the barricades. They went to bed not long after the sun set, and got up when it rose. Another lifestyle change, another reversion to the practices of an earlier era.
“I’m getting the feeling you want to talk about something.”
“I guess I do. But to tell you the truth, I’m still not exactly sure what it is.”
“Are you unhappy with me about something?”
“No, nothing like that.” He sought out her hand and squeezed it there in the dark.
“You want me to light a candle?”
“That might be a good idea.”
A lighter flared and Karen lit the candle. Their shadows moved as she set the candle on the nightstand. It was so much warmer, homier than electric light, Dave reflected. Not all things about losing electricity were bad.
He turned to her.
“I guess the simplest way of saying it is that I’ve begun to think that what we’re doing is wrong.”
Karen was silent for a while.
“Do you mean wrong morally, or wrong, as in not the smart thing to do?”
“Maybe a little of both. I want to do the smart thing, the right thing for our family, even though it’s not always possible to determine what that is.”
“You wanted us to get out,” Karen reminded him. “I stood in your way.”
“This is not about that. Not about anything you did, or didn’t do. Karen, I’m concerned that we don’t lose our humanity, trying to survive.”
“Dave, what happened?”
So he told her about the encounter with the Vega family, how Herman had felt about it, and what Marie had done. He felt his own reaction had been sort of in the middle of those two, and it didn’t satisfy him either way. What was the solution? Either toughen up, like Herman, turn away hungry children, or become a pushover for any needy people who came along?
“I can’t imagine how awful that must have been,” Karen said.
“Then let me ask you something. Would you have done what Marie did?”
There was a long pause.
“I honestly don’t know, my dear. You know I was always a sucker for any needy cause that came along.”
“I wouldn’t call it being a sucker. You did a lot of good.”
“Maybe. Lately I’ve come to feel I was always playing at it. The way I kept jumping from one thing to another. But I can say that my concern was always genuine. When I saw poor kids, abused kids…I wanted more than anything to help them. As for hungry kids? When I see pictures from th
ose countries in Africa, children who are literally starving to death because of some government or warlord’s ambition…I can hardly bear to look, because I want to go out and kill somebody.”
“So what do you think? Would you have given them some of our food?”
“That gets to the heart of it, doesn’t it? ‘Our’ food. We have it because you got an early warning, and you laid it in for us, you were a good provider, and we don’t know how long it will have to last. Maybe a long, long, time. I’ve thought about that a lot. That’s why we’re on such short rations. I think I could stretch it for a year, with the four of us. We’d lose a lot of weight, but we’d be alive.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I was deliberately avoiding it. What you’re asking is, would I take food out of my daughter’s mouth to feed the children of a stranger.”
“Food which Addison may never need, if help arrives.”
“I don’t know where that help would come from, but okay. Say we keep it all to ourselves, and three, four months from now food shipments start arriving. How many children would starve in the meantime? We might have saved some of them.”
Dave didn’t answer, and for a while they were both silent again. Then Karen spoke.
“When I was a little girl my parents got into a discussion about fallout shelters.”
“You know, I read that some of those are still around. I wonder how many people kept replenishing their supplies over all those years?”
“I don’t remember what brought it up,” she said, ignoring his question. “But they remembered my grandparents talking about it. My father’s dad even drew up some plans and started digging a hole during the Cold War. He never finished it, but he made lists of what he would need. Right at the top was guns.”
“I remember,” Dave said. “The big question was, say you’ve made a shelter just big enough for your family. The alarm goes off, the bombs are on their way. You seal up your shelter…and the neighbors come knocking. Do you let them in?”
“The simple answer is no,” Karen whispered. “They should have built their own shelter, and letting them in isn’t an option. There’s not enough room, there’s not enough food. It’s an easy answer when it’s theoretical. I can’t imagine the agony of listening to them, to your friends, shouting out in desperation. Pleading to just take the children, for instance. But that’s not even the worst of it. The other scenario is, would you actually shoot your neighbors, kill them, to keep them out of your shelter.”
“Answers to questions like that are never ‘simple,’ though, are they?”
“No. So what do you suggest we do?”
There was another long silence. Dave wasn’t sure himself what he was proposing. He had some ideas, and a general goal, but he was still feeling it out as he went along.
“Okay, here’s where I am, so far. We won’t…we can’t just set up a Marshall Family Soup Kitchen, feeding hungry families who drop by down on Sunset. Our pantry would be bare in a week.”
“More like a day.”
“Right. Is the only alternative to…to just seal up the bunker? Guard our gate twenty-four/seven, and stretch our food as long as it will go? Because before long it’s not going to be just strangers who are getting hungry. It’s going to be some of our neighbors.”
“I had already thought of that. It’s dangerous to have plenty when people around you have nothing.”
“Have you thought of what to do about it?”
“I don’t like the hunkering down and shooting it out scenario. But I don’t like any of the others much better. Dave, are you talking about leaving again?”
“I guess that’s pretty much it. We don’t know much about what it’s like in the rest of the country, but I think we can be pretty sure that things are at their absolute worst here in Los Angeles. On top of all the problems with lack of power and transportation, half the city is burned down, and the other half is collapsed. I’m not sure a city can ever recover from all those things. I think Los Angeles may be doomed.”
“Then we’d better get out, don’t you think?”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No. The biggest part of me wants to do just what I said I don’t like. Just stay here where I feel safe.”
“The question is, is it safe, and for how long.”
“I know. I’m just telling you what my gut is saying to me. But what I keep coming back to is, if I had listened to you from the beginning, or even quite a bit later than the beginning, we could be in Oregon by now. Oregon, where there’s rain, and they grow food, and where we have family that will take us in. No, Dave, I’m terrified of going on the road now, with things the way they are, I’m terrified of exposing Addison to the dangers out there. But I don’t trust my judgement. I was so wrong before. What I decided not long ago is pretty simple. I’m ready to do whatever you think is best. I want you to be the head of this family. Not because I want to be an obedient wife, but because I’ve been a bad mother.”
“I don’t agree with that,” Dave said. “You’ve always been a good mother to Addison. She loves you. I love you.”
“You can say what you want, but the fact remains that because I wouldn’t listen to you, and because, frankly, I’d been angry with you for well over a year for various reasons, I made the worst decision of my life. And it has affected Addison’s chances. Not something like her chances of getting on the soccer team, or getting good grades, or getting into a good college, but her very chances of survival. Her life is at stake here.
“The only way I can ever forgive myself for that is to do everything in my power to get her to a safe place. Nothing else matters to me. And right now, I just don’t trust myself to make the right choices. You were right before. I hope you’re right now. Because I’m going to do whatever you think we should do, and I’m going to do it with all my heart.”
Though her voice had been level and calm throughout, Dave was not at all surprised that her face was wet when he put his arms around her and kissed her. They stayed that way for a long time, and eventually fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Dave slept more soundly than he had in weeks.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“That’s just not fair!”
Sometimes Addison seemed like a young woman of twentysomething, mature beyond her years. But like most teenage girls, she could also revert to being a spoiled eight-year-old when she wasn’t getting her way. Not often—she was basically a good and obedient daughter. But they had all been under too much stress, and Dave wasn’t surprised at this rebellion.
“It’s my scooter, and I want to go along with you guys. I’ll ride on the back. Daddy, you have to let me go.”
“Addie, that’s not the way it works anymore. It has to be share and share alike, and we all own things together. And we all have to do what we do best, and not complain about it. And, bottom line, we’re your parents, and we’re responsible for you, and you will just have to do what we tell you to do, even when you don’t like it.”
“Well, she didn’t do much to get us through this, did she? Where was she when you were buying all our food and trying to get us safe and up to Oregon? Shopping, that’s where. While I was helping out.”
It was the first time Addison had lashed out at her mother. Maybe it was long overdue, maybe she needed to express some of the frustration she had felt and had kept silent about as the rift developed between her parents. She seemed to have concluded that the best way to keep them together was to be a good daughter. Dave had been thankful for that—it made his life a lot easier—but now wished he had talked to her more about it, and maybe even that Addison had opened up more about the resentment she was feeling, mostly toward her mother, but to some degree toward both of them. Dave knew the feeling. His own parents had gone through a bitter divorce when he was a bit younger than Addison was now, and he remembered his anger at them.
Karen was keeping silent. He didn’t know if it was from her feelings of guilt or because of
her resolution to let Dave make the hard decisions and do the hard things. Speaking harshly to Addison definitely came under the heading of hard things.
Still, he couldn’t let that remark pass.
“Addison, you can’t speak that way about your mother.”
The girl thrust out her lower lip.
“Well, she didn’t help out, and I did. And besides, she doesn’t even know how to ride a scooter.”
Still Karen kept silent.
“You’d be surprised what all your mother knows how to do. But I’ll tell you something now, Addison. Things have changed. You trusted me when I told you what was going to happen, didn’t you?”
She looked away from him, took a deep breath, and gave him a grudging nod.
“Well, from now on you’re just going to have to trust me on a lot of other things. And something else you’re going to have to do is obey me. Without any lip.”
She looked up at him again, a little astonished.
“That doesn’t mean you have no say around here. We can discuss things, when we have the time for it, and you can put in your opinions. And then I will make up my mind, and you will do as you’re told. Do you understand?”
He thought she was going to cry. But she didn’t. After a long pause, she looked him in the eye again.
“Yes, I understand.” And she turned and walked stiffly back into the house.
The argument had happened early in the morning. Dave and Karen were wearing helmets and leather jackets. Karen’s jacket was from a shop on Rodeo Drive and built more for style than for protection. He was wishing they had leather pants, too, but jeans would have to do.
They had been standing beside the two scooters, facing off with Addison. Jenna was standing to one side, wondering if she should get out of earshot. She was happy to have something useful to do, someone to be responsible for.
The idea of being babysat had not gone down well. Addison wanted to go. For one thing, it was going to be an adventure, a chance to see what was happening beyond their small world. But much more important was the fear that something might happen to her parents.
