H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  “Zak’s mom said not to touch the car door,” I said (to pick up some Brownie points).

  “Good,” he said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Maybe he’d just let me use the laptop; it was sitting right there, right in front of me, and—

  “Ruby! Please! You need to concentrate.”

  I peeled my eyes off the laptop and focused on the list. The next item was the freakiest:

  DON’T TOUCH ANYONE WHO’S SICK. OR DEAD.

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  He grunted.

  DON’T TOUCH OR DRINK ANY TAP WATER.

  He rattled on for a while then, about how although no one had actually said the tap water was bad already, it probably was or would be very soon because people had probably panicked like he’d panicked and emptied their water tanks, which would just speed up sucking the bad water into the pipes unless you could shut the water off, which he couldn’t because he’d have to go outside to do that, so even though the water he’d filled up every last container in the house with was probably OK, you couldn’t be sure, could you?

  “No, Simon,” I said, and before he could go on about it anymore, I read the next part out loud.

  DON’T USE THE TOILET. NO BATHS. NO SHOWERS.

  DON’T EAT ANYTHING THAT’S BEEN OUTSIDE. NO FRESH FRUIT, VEGETABLES, FISH, MEAT.

  The meat part annoyed me; technically, apart from eating fish, I was a vegetarian. It was just that it was a little hard to keep it up sometimes, and there’d been lapses—that Simon knew about and never let me forget.

  “Yup. Got it!” I said brightly.

  “And, Ru, this is the most important thing.”

  At the top of the list, he wrote one word, in capitals, underlined. Then he wrote over it again and again. One word:

  THINK

  “Do you understand?” he asked.

  It was too much; I just wanted to get this mini-lecture/test thing over with, but I knew “OK!” wouldn’t cut it.

  “Like filling the kettle?” I said.

  “Like filling the kettle,” said Simon.

  Phew. Comprehension test passed. But no—

  “Do you understand, Ruby? You have to think. You have to stop and think, whatever it is, whatever you feel, you have to stop and think.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “What do you get?”

  “That I’ve got to think,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About… I dunno, about the water and stuff.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He turned and held my face in his hands; it scrunched the Caspar-kissing sore patch a little and made it hurt, but I was too freaked out to even say “ow.”

  “Ruby,” he said. “You have to think.”

  It was the worst eyeballing he’d ever given me.

  “You have to think about yourself,” he said. “You have to put yourself first.”

  Huh?! My whole life, I’d been told I was selfish. Simon, he’d just say, “Will you please stop being so selfish?!” while my mom would say something like, “Oh, Ruby,” and I just knew she meant the same thing. And now?

  “You have to think about yourself first, Ruby. About your survival.”

  Yup, he’d gone from weirding and freaking me out to full-blown scaring me out. He wouldn’t let up.

  “Before you do anything, what are you going to do?” he asked.

  My chin hurt.

  “Think,” I said.

  “About what?” he demanded.

  “About me,” I said. Said? Any second now, I could feel I was going to be forced to shout a little, just to make him lay off.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Think.”

  “About?”

  “ME. Leave me alone, Simon—I’ve got it, all right? I have to think!”

  “About?”

  “Survival!”

  “Whose?”

  “MINE!” I shouted. I hated him then, more than I had ever done. “MINE! ME!”

  He let go of my face.

  The house was still quiet. I’d shouted and the house was still quiet.

  “Mom?! ” I shrieked.

  Shrieked—that’s a word for a kind of scream, isn’t it? Not some great howl of a scream, when you know, but the kind of scream you make when—

  “Think!” Simon shouted, trying to grab my arm.

  I was too quick for him. I stormed up the stairs; I flung open the door to their room.

  Oh…oh…oh…I saw my mom.

  She was just lying there, curled around Henry, like she might be asleep. The bedsheets were all rumpled up. I didn’t fling myself at her, in case she was just sleeping. Yes, I still thought that was what it could be.

  “Mom?” I said.

  The way she was lying, on her side, she had one arm stretched out across the pillow. Her hand was all bloody. The blood had soaked into the pillow. Her other hand, not bloody, lay on Henry’s tummy. He was lying on his back, completely still. Only the tiniest little red sore on his cheek.

  “MOM?! ”

  Simon’s hands snatched around my middle and pulled me back. He pinned me to him.

  My scream died in the air; it died and joined all the other screams. They live like ghosts, like echoes in the minds of the living.

  My scream burst out and died, and my lungs refused—refused—to suck in air. I wanted to stop, to die with that scream.

  “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” Simon kept saying. He was crying. He would not let me go.

  Then it comes. Your lungs suck in air; your body decides for you. You will live.

  You’re one breath away from her, then two, then three, then four, then five.

  Mom, I am still breathing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I don’t know how we got back downstairs. I was sobbing, that I remember. Wailing, so I could hardly breathe. But I did breathe.

  What I kept trying to say, over and over, was that I knew why. I knew what had happened. Hadn’t I seen the tablets fall? My mom must have reached out into the rain to throw the box to Mrs. Fitch. Poor, stupid, Mrs. Fitch.

  Why hadn’t I realized? Why hadn’t I shouted? Why hadn’t I thought?

  And then what? Had she known right away? No…or else she wouldn’t have touched Henry. Oh, she would have stroked his little face. Not even enough to wake him. Just the softest touch on his cheek. She did it to me still—even if we’d fought, I’d pretend to be asleep just so she’d do it…the softest touch and a little kiss.

  For the rest of that day, it rained. Simon and me, we set up camp in the living room, made Dan nests there. I guess neither of us wanted to be alone.

  I’ll tell you the parts I remember, but, really, how it all went, what we said and did, it’s kind of muddled.

  What I do remember, more than anything, was stuff about sound, the torture of it. To begin with, he turned the TV off. Fine, because who would want to see that? Even though it had been on mute anyway, those pictures… I dunno. They kind of made noise…because of how horrible they were, I suppose. But when the TV was off, all we had was the rain. I couldn’t listen to that, but whatever we tried to stop it with—music, a DVD—none of it was right. Cheerful stuff, sad stuff, silly stuff—whatever we tried seemed so wrong, so angry-making. And unless you had the volume up, deafeningly up, you could still hear it: the rain.

  So we watched boring stuff. Simon had tons of it. It’s almost enough to make me laugh—but not quite—that I sat through a boxed set of bird-watching DVDs and this history series he’d bought and been trying to force me to watch for weeks because he thought it would help with my studying.

  Ha. I thought history was boring, and now here I am writing my own.

  Simon would be pleased, I think.

 
We talked—not much, but also a lot, if you know what I mean. We talked in little bursts, about Mom, about Henry, about what had happened. And then we’d have to stop for a while, because it hurt too much.

  The whole time, everything we said and did, I kept thinking about my mom and Henry upstairs. I couldn’t stop seeing them in my head.

  I got angry with him. I wanted to know why he hadn’t called me, why he hadn’t let me say good-bye. He told me he hadn’t known. He’d heard Henry. He’d thought it was the teething. He was about to go up there with one of Henry’s teething rings from the fridge, but then it had stopped. After that, he’d heard nothing, thought it best to let them sleep. He’d stayed up the rest of the night, watching the news, trying to get back on to the Internet, trying to phone people. When it got to 7 a.m. and Henry still hadn’t piped up, he went upstairs to check on them. It was too late.

  But why had he left me to sleep and then sat me at the kitchen table with his stupid list when—

  “I was trying to think about what your mother would have wanted,” he said.

  How she had kept quiet, I don’t know. I just can’t even imagine. Most people I’ve ever heard with the sickness scream and groan and…

  “Why didn’t she call you?” I said.

  I said it in the middle of a thing about wetland birds. Marsh warblers.

  “She would have been worried about giving it to us,” said Simon, staring at the screen. Then he looked at me. “She would have been worried… If I got sick, there’d be no one to look after you,” he said.

  • • •

  He did shout at me a few times. Just “RUBY!” Mainly for going to turn the tap on. Once for nearly knocking a jug of water over. When that happened again, he put on rubber gloves and carefully shifted all the jugs and bowls and pots and pans of water into the corner of the kitchen and fenced them off with chairs and the trash can. I don’t know why he didn’t just chuck it all down the sink; too splashy, I guess. Or because that would somehow feel like setting it free. So there it sat: our little poisoned sea. I hated the sight of it.

  I wanted to call my dad.

  “Everything’s down, Ru.” That was all Simon said. He passed me the phones anyway: the landline, his cell, my mom’s cell.

  I tried my dad; I tried Leonie. I didn’t know anyone else’s number by heart; that wouldn’t have mattered because my mom and Simon had pretty much all our relatives and most of my friends’ parents’ numbers on their phones, but there wasn’t even a dial tone. No sound at all on both their cell phones, and just a single endless beep on the landline.

  “What about email?” I said. “We can email people.”

  He gave me the laptop too. He hadn’t shut the Internet off. The Internet was down. I kept trying the laptop, the phones. I don’t know how long I tried—a long time—while the TV guy rattled on about the Tudors and Stuarts. They weren’t even on our syllabus. Nor was the Civil War, which is what the TV guy was going on about when Simon took the computer and the phones from me. I didn’t put up a fight. I was crying.

  “They might be trying to get through to us too,” he said.

  He laid his cell, my mom’s cell, and the regular phone on the windowsill, in front of all the family photos. The laptop he put on the coffee table.

  “We’ll try every hour,” he said.

  We did. We took turns. We ended up not even telling each other that nothing had changed.

  Sometime during the afternoon, there was a really loud bang—like an explosion, I guess—in the town. We both jumped up and ran to the kitchen window. You could see nearly the whole town from our kitchen: the castle, the church, the housing development that spread up the hill east of the river where Leonie lived.

  There were flames and smoke coming up from the High Street. A fire in the rain.

  Simon opened cans of fruit, poured out the juice, and gave one to me.

  “Where do you think that is?” he asked me. “The George?”

  You could see, working it out from the rooftops, that it must have been.

  “Such a shame,” muttered Simon.

  Dartbridge is jam-packed with old buildings, medieval stuff—even the dentist’s has got gnarly old beams on the ceiling. (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at them.) Probably if it had been any other old building in town, I might have thought a stupid building didn’t matter, not now, but it wasn’t any other building. I wanted to tell him that The George was where the second most amazing moment of my life had happened prior to the all-time number-one kissing amazing moment that had happened at Zak’s party. I wanted to tell him that was where Caspar had looked up at me, when he was playing his guitar, and that I had felt myself fall in love on the spot.

  We stared out at it. There were no sirens.

  I said it then: “Simon, I’m really scared.”

  He led me back into the living room. I sat in my nest; he sat on the sofa.

  “Should I make us something to eat?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  This is a thing to know, a thing I have learned, about what fear and grief and horror do. They mash you up from the inside out. They twist you, and they break stuff inside you. They tear stuff out. They get whole brains, whole hearts, in their hands, and they crush and crush.

  “Can I come and sit with you?” I asked.

  “Yes. Of course,” he said.

  And for the first time ever, I snuggled up to Simon on the sofa.

  I thought how pleased (and shocked) my mom would be, and I cried.

  I felt so small. Littler—younger—than even before I knew Simon. I felt as tiny as Henry. Tinier. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to bawl. For my mom.

  When it was dark, Simon did make some food.

  “I’m going to make a stew,” he said.

  He made stews when we went camping. “Comfort food” was what he called it. They were horrible—and, as I once pointed out, if we went on the kind of vacations everyone else got to go on, you wouldn’t need comforting. Even my mom had laughed.

  “Do you want me to help?” I asked.

  You can imagine how often I would have voluntarily helped Simon make one of his hideous stews, but I sat and peeled vegetables. I didn’t want to be away from him.

  Normally, even on a campsite, he’d drain and wash the kidney beans or whatever, but now he slopped the whole can into the pot.

  “Won’t that taste disgusting?” I said.

  “No choice, Ru,” he said. “I’ll spice it up with something.”

  He had his back to me as he opened the cupboard where the herbs and spices were. He rummaged, opening unlabeled jars and sniffing, and his head turned a little. I saw tears on his cheek; one slid down, and I saw him lick it from his lips.

  “I could kill for a cup of tea,” he said, turning back to the stovetop to dump random stuff into the pot and stir it. He wiped his face on his sleeve.

  I saw the list he had left on the table:

  THINK

  I went to the freezer. I got the ice cubes and popped them into the kettle. It didn’t look like enough, so I chipped off ice from inside the freezer, crammed that—my hands numbed dead with cold—into the kettle.

  I plugged the kettle in and flicked it on.

  “Earl Grey, peppermint, or black?” I asked. Like my mom would ask.

  It took three boils to make it. All that ice and just enough for one cup. Simon chose Earl Grey. We both knew why; that’s what my mom liked.

  The stew was horrible. Simon stopped me from pouring salt all over it and onto the baked potato that went with.

  “It’s dehydrating,” he said. “And it’s bad for you, anyway.”

  I gave him a look.

  “It’s what your mother would say.”

  I couldn’t really eat it. I mean, you wouldn’t really want to, but I sort of knew I must be hungry, even
if I didn’t feel it.

  “She’d also say, eat up,” said Simon.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  From the looks of his plate, he couldn’t either.

  “Simon, are we going to die?”

  He didn’t answer for a while, then he laid his knife and fork down. He said, “I don’t know.”

  That was how we came to turn the TV back on, to find out. He said if it upset me, I should just say so, immediately, and he’d turn it off. I knew what he was expecting—the same thing I was expecting: hospital shots of people dying, the TV people going on and on about it. In a way, what there was instead was worse. I just didn’t realize it at first.

  The scary pictures had gone, so had Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men. Everyone had gone. Instead, there were just words on the screen and someone reading them. For a second, I thought it was some kind of documentary thing, the sort of thing that bores me stupid, until Simon flipped through the rest of the channels. They either came up blank fuzz or showed the same thing: EMERGENCY PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCAST. But it was different from the first one. Were we having ANOTHER emergency?

  (No, we weren’t. It was just what they should have told us in the first place, but I’ll get to that.)

  You know what Simon said? “If only we had satellite…”

  Know what I nearly said? “Like I asked!”

  I had. I’d asked about a million times if we could at least just get a package with the music channels, said it would help me learn guitar. It might have.

  He got the radio then, plugged it in and crept across the dial—yes, that’s right: about the only thing we had in common with Zak’s family was we weren’t even allowed a digital radio. It was crazy making, the sound of the radio, with the TV going as well. Then he hit a crackly station playing that “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” song and turned it off.

  “I’ll try later,” he said, looking all anxiously at me.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I get it. It’s really bad, isn’t it?”

  But I didn’t really get it. I think I thought… I dunno, that Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men had all gone home—because you would, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be with your family to check that they were OK and stuff, or help them or just be sad like we were if they weren’t OK and you couldn’t help them.