Oliver’s sprawling mass beside me in bed is like a living, breathing security blanket. The dog snores like a foghorn, but the noise too is comforting. And Oliver never leaves my side. When I go out to the sand to use the bathroom, Oliver squats next to me. Even ourpoops are in synch.
We make it home by early afternoon. I leave the truck in the driveway. It’s too hot to set up the generator right now, so I leave it and the tools in the truck. I carry the fruit and the canning materials into the house.
The heat saps me. Warm bottled water keeps me hydrated but I desperately miss cold drinks. A frigid can of Coke, sweat beads dripping off its shiny red aluminum. The burst of cold and bubbles and caramelized sugar. That’s what refreshing tastes like. Maybe I’ll get the fridge working. I know exactly where to find cases of Coke.
We spend the rest of the day in the ocean. Oliver is a huge fan of driftwood. Sometimes I throw it for him, but most of the time the waves do the work. My skin has passed the sunburned phase and is now as dark as coffee and cream. My hair has lightened, too. Streaks of reddish gold highlight my deep, drab blonde.
As the sun falls, I pull my clothes back on and we sit on the beach. In the surf beyond the lagoon, three dolphins dance in the waves.
I eat fresh peaches for dinner and give Oliver a can of the ridiculously expensive canned dog food I took from Petco. I still don’t understand why pet food had turned into a gourmet product. I’ve seen Oliver eat deer turds with the same gusto.
Today was a good day. I conquered a fear, have a driveway full of supplies and was even able to romp in the surf with my best friend. I’m tired but not sleepy, so we stay on the beach to stare at the stars. Oliver’s wiped out, and lies half in and half out of my lap. I stretch my legs out, wiggling my bare toes in the cooling sand. The sound of the waves is a lullaby.
My mind is empty. Most of the time, my thoughts are a jumbled street fight between worry for the future and guilt about the past. Tonight, though, things are clear. The triumph of the waves, the gentle harmony of Oliver’s breathing, the stars twinkling overhead, it’s all combined to make me feel something I never expected. I’m satisfied. So much of my energy has been spent in worthless worry. Tonight I feel like the world is turningwith me, not in some out of control orbit.
Of all the things that have disappeared, I miss music the most. I never went in for the trendy stuff, the kind of pop drivel I call “Grace noise”. Surprisingly, it was Mom who had the most eclectic musical taste. Straight and narrow Mom listened to everything from the Dead Kennedys to Harry Chapin to David Bowie to Billie Holiday. I stumbled across a photo album once with pictures of Mom as a teenager. She had Day-Glo pink hair and a green army jacket emblazoned with dozens of buttons and patches from a whole bunch of weird and obscure 90s bands. Mom played music all the time. Before everything we owned was thrown onto the front yard of our house in Flint, half of the basement wall was stacked with crates of Mom’s records. Mom didn’t play an instrument, at least she never told me if she did. But she loved to sing. Mom didn’t have a perfect voice, but her heart was sure in it.
“Maybe we’ll go to Best Buy once we get the generator hooked up. Pick up a CD player and fill that truck with as many CDs as it’ll hold. Maybe charge up my phone, too. I’ve got some goodies in there.”
Oliver chirps at the disruption to his sleep. Rub his ears again and watch him drop back under. It’s amazing how quickly he falls asleep. One minute he’s barking and jumping, and the next he’s completely asleep. Boy, do I envy him that.
A light breeze picks up, blowing cool, salty air against my skin. There’s something a bit like magic in a sea breeze. There’s no telling how far the wind has traveled. As it strokes my cheek, I imagine that it’s also brushed across the backs of whales, danced across exotic and uncharted pirate islands, whispered through stands of palm trees and across an immense and open empty ocean. Most of the oceans were still unexplored. Read that someplace. The thought makes me happy. There should be places humans didn’t know about. Mysteries are the real masterpieces.
I ride the wave between sleep and wakefulness. The lull of the actual waves makes me feel dreamy and light. Maybe I can fly. In fact, I’m certain I can. Maybe I’ll try in the morning.
At first the lights are part of my gentle twilight daydream. They have the same twinkling softness as the stars, but something about them seems not quite right. Are they even lights? Maybe a reflection of the moon, not yet risen above the ocean’s horizon? No, the moon’s behind me, a thin crescent. The lights are on the water like they were before, far out at sea. They flicker like a distant candle. I’m awake now, pulled headlong out of my daze.
“A boat?” Oliver pokes his head up.
“If it’s a boat, it’d have to be pretty big. That’s a long way out there. I mean, maybe it is. The water plays tricks on me.”
Oliver is awake now, staring at me expectantly.
“If it’s not a boat, what is it? An oil platform? No, I’d seen it during the day. Is it just a trick of the light? The stars reflecting on waves?”
I remember the binoculars I picked up at the sporting goods store. Scramble to my feet and run through the sand back to my house. Oliver chases me, thinking it’s a game. I almost trip over him.
Pick up my flashlight and dug through the piles of stuff that has accumulated in the house.
“Doesn’t anybody ever clean up in here?” Find my camping gear on the floor of the study and root through my tent and sleeping bag. Feel the familiar textured outline of the binoculars and pull them out of the chaos of camping gear.
“Out of the way, dude.” Stumble back through the dark living room. Oliver bounces along beside me. We run through the sand, back to the place we fell asleep. Put the binoculars to my eyes and scan the horizon. Distant waves crest and fall. I force myself to move the binoculars slowly across the horizon line. There’s nothing there but dark ocean.
“I saw it, right? I wasn’t dreaming. That’s why I got the binoculars. I really did see it.”
Oliver just wags his tail, oblivious to anything but me.
Power Up
“Mom would be ecstatic.” I slept fitfully last night, jumping from one dream to another, all of them involving us being chased. Sometimes it was pirates, other times it was shadowy military guys, all of them storming the beach on small boats sent out from the lights on the water. I woke up at sunrise and spent an hour feverishly cleaning up the beach house. I didn’t realized how messy it’s become. That was always Mom’s chief complaint about my bedroom. To my credit, I didn’t always notice clutter. Not my own, anyway. There was always something more important to think about.
Cleaning up has given me an unexpected sense of accomplishment. And it’s helping relegate the lights on the water to the back of my mind. Even if ithadbeen a boat, what good is that to me? I’m just some scrawny fourteen-year-old girl. If thereare other people, military or something else, all I’ll be is the same thing I was before General Tsao. Just some kid.
“Well, I’m notjustanything anymore. Unless I’mjust a badass.”
I laugh at that one. Yeah, Hannah the badass. Able to drive a Land Rover and load a generator into the back all by herself.
“And able to walk from Detroit to South Carolina.” I pick up one of Oliver’s squeaky toys and toss it across the living room. Oliver bounds after it, pouncing on top of it like a cat.
“All right, my boy, let’s get this generator working.” I open the front door. Oliver carries his squeaky toy, some kind of cartoon penguin, with him.
I’ve seen them twice now. I’ve scanned the horizon for hours from the top of the church tower. There’s nothing permanently out there, no oil rig or distant island or even a shipwreck. Nothing that would reflect light. There were lights on the water and then they were gone. I’m not crazy. I’ve seen them twice.
I angle the generator box out of the truck the same way I put it in, using the bumper as leverage. Stand the box on its end and push it onto the driveway. I
’ll need to run the extension cords into the house. The generator will need to stay outside. The thing burns gasoline, and carbon monoxide poisoning is a consistent and persistent warning in all the books I’ve read. Makes sense. Gas fumes are stinky, and obviously pollute the air. Breathing it in wouldn’t be a good thing.
“The first thing you need to remember is to respect electricity,” Dad said. As goofy as he could be, it was easy to forget how smart he actually was. He was an engineer, had gone to college for that, but either guilt or obligation had kept him in our family’s business. Dad installed heaters and air conditioners. And he was really good at it.
“You don’t have to be afraid of electricity,” Dad said. “Most people are. It’s powerful stuff. But if you know what you’re doing, electricity is under your control.”
I huddled behind Dad’s shoulder. It was summer break. I was bored and wanted to hang out with him. We were at a job site in what was left of Flint’s ritzy neighborhood, a big house Dad called a “McMansion”.
“Electricity just wants to complete a circuit,” Dad said.
“Like a circle?” I asked.
“Yeah, like a circle,” Dad replied. “And it’ll use whatever it can to get there, including your body.”
“Is that how people get electrocuted?”
Dad nodded. “If you put yourself in the path of an electrical current, the current uses your body to get where it wants to go. You’ve heard of people getting struck by lightning?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Lightning is electricity generated by over-excited electrons in the air,” Dad said. “They build up a charge and that charge needs to be released, kind of like a sneeze. But this sneeze blows out electricity instead of boogers.”
“Gross.”
“The electricity needs to go somewhere,” Dad said. “And so it goes down into the ground.”
“Completing the circuit.”
“Exactly,” Dad smiled. “But when people or trees or street signs get in the way, the electricity usesthose things to complete the circuit.”
“So why doesn’t the ground catch fire or something?” I asked.
“The earth absorbs the electricity,” Dad said. “It grounds it. That’s where the term ‘grounding’ comes from.”
“Like when you ground Grace?” I asked.
“Different kind of grounded,” Dad laughed. “Remember that electricity always wants to go somewhere. If you have an electrical socket in the wall and you plug in your lamp, the lamp completes the circuit, right? It turns on.”
“Sure.”
“So why doesn’t the electricity just shoot out of the electrical socket when the light’s not plugged in?”
I was stumped. “No idea.”
“Because we ground the electrical outlet,” Dad said. “We use a separate wire, usually copper, called the grounding wire, in order to make sure the electricity has a place to go when we don’t need it.”
Dad unscrewed the faceplate from an electrical socket in the utility room in which they were working. He pointed out the green screw head and the copper grounding wire. The concept seemed simple enough. And it was sort of brilliant. I was mesmerized. Dad took me over to a gray metal container hanging on the opposite wall.
“This is the breaker box,” Dad said. “The electricity from the power lines outside comes into the house through a wire on the roof, and it’s fed into this box.”
He opened the metal faceplate. A collection of evenly spaced black switches was lined up in two vertical rows. A corresponding chart on the inside of the metal faceplate had handwritten words like “KITCHEN” and “DRYER”.
“The main electrical wire comes in from the power line and is split off into smaller, individual lines that run through the whole house,” Dad explained. “When a house is built, wiring is put inside the walls before the drywall goes up.”
“What are the switches for?” I asked.
“Each of these switches are the breakers,” Dad said. “Which means that when they are turned off, they ‘break’ the electrical circuit to a particular area.”
“So you can turn off the power in the kitchen but I can still turn on the lights in the living room?”
Dad smiled. “I think you might be taking over my job soon, brainiac.”
The concept was the same for the generator. Instead of getting power from the electrical lines along the street, the electricity would be generated by the motor powered by gasoline. Generators had been used in case of power failures (read all about that), and in places like hospitals that needed to have backup power available. I remember that big hurricane on the news, Superstorm Sandy. It was years ago but I remember that some hospital had its generators located in the basement, and they flooded.
I set the generator box down flat as gently as I can. It’s heavy. Lands with a thump on the ground. Notice the words “KEEP UPRIGHT – DO NOT TILT”. Oops.
I cut open the cardboard box with an X-acto knife, slicing each side of the box open to avoid having to lift the generator out of it. The generator itself looks like some sort of prop from a sci-fi TV show. It has a rounded black metal frame on the outside. Inside, a red gas tank sits on top of a powerful and angry-looking motor. On one side of the generator are a set of five sockets, the same kind Dad showed in the McMansion in Flint. The name “PREDATOR” is emblazoned in blood-red letters on top of the machine. That only adds to its cool factor.
A plastic instruction card rests on top of the gas tank. Pick it up and look it over. Easy peasy. Unscrew the gas tank and then grab one of the plastic funnels from Home Depot, sticking the thin end into the receptacle. The red plastic can of gas is something I found in one of the neighborhoods around Home Depot, in someone’s shed beside their lawnmower. None of the gas pumps at the gas stations work anymore. I read up on how to siphon gas. The whole process just sounds gross, putting a tube into a gas tank and sucking on it until a negative vacuum draws the gas out. Gasoline smells bad enough. I’m in no hurry to taste it. It’d probably kill me, anyway. So I went on the hunt for lawnmower gas in gas canisters. Every garage in my neighborhood in Flint had a few gallons. And North Charleston seems no different.
Get down on my hands and knees to add the oil. The oil cap is underneath the motor, almost flush with the ground. I angle the ridiculous-looking funnel with an enormous spout under the generator and add the oil. I cap everything off, adjust the choke as I see on the plastic instruction card, and then find the pull cord. It’s the same type of cord I saw Dad and everyone else in Flint use to start their lawnmowers. Pull the cord. Nothing.
I stare at the contraption for a moment. Mentally ran through the minimal checklist.
“Did I miss something?”
I put my foot on the side of the generator to brace it. Hold the start cord’s small black handle with both hands and tug as hard as I can.
The machine roars to life. I fall backwards onto the driveway. The generator is loud and fills the silent air with an offensive growl. A flock of birds scream out of the surrounding trees. Oliver runs behind the truck.
I get on my feet and switch the choke to its “RUN” position. I’m already beginning to adjust to its obnoxious noise. Unpack the extension cords and unroll them. Plug a long yellow cord into one of the sockets on the side of the generator.
“It’s okay, Oliver.” I bent down, beckoning the dog over to me. Hesitantly, Oliver comes out from his hiding place. I rub his head.
“Not really the bravest little duden, are you?” Oliver head-butts my hand but keeps a wary eye on the generator.
“You’ll get used to it. C’mon, let’s go rediscover what a cold drink tastes like.”
I lead Oliver back into the house, carrying the long yellow extension cord with me. The fridge is heavy, and I’m only able to angle it away from the wall a few inches. After a wiggling struggle from atop the adjacent countertop, I manage to snare the refrigerator plug out of the wall socket. I look down at Oliver’s expectant, nervous face.
> “Moment of truth, buckaroo.” I plug the fridge into the extension cord. A low whirring sound comes from the refrigerator. I open the door. The small light bulb turns on.
I scream in triumph. Oliver barks, unsure of whether this was a good or bad thing. I bend down and shower him with kisses.
“It works! It really works!”
Later, under the clear, diamond-dripped sky, I sit on the beach with an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola and looked back at the house. Even though only two lamps are plugged in, the entire mood of the place has changed. I’m not some unwanted squatter anymore. Lights, cold drinks — it’s all starting to look like home.
Music
“I promised you a dance party.” We’re in Best Buy. Oliver sits beside me, wagging his tail. I pick up a Beastie Boys CD and drop it in the cart.
“This is one of Mom’s favorites.” A flash of memory, Mom in the living room in Flint, wearing her paint-stained sweatpants and her tank top, dancing barefoot as she dusts the tables. Singing at the top of her lungs about fighting for her right to party. Mom didn’t do that often, let herself go. She was our voice of reason. But put on her music and she became a wild thing. I don’t know what I loved more about that scene, Mom singing or dancing or the fact that it embarrassed Grace so fundamentally.
Oliver and I drive home. I have the binoculars beside me. I intended to go back to the tower, stare out at the ocean and try to find the lights. But now that I’m out here, I don’t care. I should, shouldn’t I? Care, I mean. If there’s a ship out there with people on it, if there are other survivors, I should want to find them. Hmm. Lots of shoulds in there. As if somehow I’mobligatedto do so. I’m not. I can live like this. Iwant to live like this.
I don’t even think about you that often anymore. Oliver occupies that place in my life now. Oliver’s real. You’re not. You’re part of the same mythology as the lights on the water. I don’t even know where you came from. Why I created you. Out of loneliness, maybe. Or fear. Maybe youare real. You’re somewhere out there by yourself. Maybe imagining me. Or perhaps you’re part of whatever those lights represent. A safe zone? A new start? None of it has anything to do with me. I have a life. I have my routine. And that’s how I live my life now. I’m okay without you. I think I was the whole time.
The First Year Page 15