The roar of the generator is a welcome homecoming, as if the house is screaming out, “hey, glad you’re back.” The generator and the waves each roar in their own ways. They surround the house and my life contained in it like two warm and protective lions.
Oliver bounds out of the Land Rover, unaffected now by the constant noise of the generator. I follow him into the house and set my packages on the kitchen counter. I dump out the bags and fish through the CDs for the phone charger. Until now both items seemed extravagant. Extraneous. Worthless. Even after I left three-quarters of what I’d taken out of Detroit by the side of the road in Ohio, I still kept the phone.
I cut open the package and unfurl the cord. The power strip I’ve set up on the counter has a red power indicator that flickers. Sometimes at night its glow on the ceiling reminds me of a distant lighthouse. A beacon reminding me what life used to be like.
I walk into the study, where I’m keeping all my supplies. Camping gear, extra water, cans of food. The phone is in my backpack. I haven’t picked up my phone in a while. I haven’t had to. Feeling the waterproof fabric of the backpack under my fingertips gives me flashes of tangible memory. Endless hours of the straps biting into my shoulder blades. The empty silence of the road. How did I do that?Why did I do that? I’m glad I did, but I can’t imagine it. I mean, I remember it, I remember every single step. I just can’t believe I did it. The backpack smells overwhelmingly like me. My sweat has become embedded in its fabric. We were for a long time two parts of the same living thing. The blisters on my feet and hands are gone now. Even the deep red welts across my shoulders caused by the straps have faded. I’m a child of the ocean now instead of a girl who wanders. The salt and the surf and the heat have baptized me. All of these items I hold onto, the backpack, the tent, my sleeping bag, they’re relics of a forgotten civilization. They’re the bridge between my two worlds. I’m not that girl anymore. Maybe I never was. Who knows? I remember all of it but as time and distance spreads, the memory of experiencing it grows dimmer and dimmer. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t need those experiences anymore. I don’t need to be that person anymore.
Found it. I set the backpack down and walk back to the kitchen. I’ll need to top off the generator soon. Three times a day seems to get me through. At some point I’ll have to figure out another option. Running the generator constantly will blow its motor out at some point. I guess I can just keep picking up generators. That’s easier than figuring out how to turn the power back on.
The cell phones were our family’s sole extravagance. Mom insisted. It was the only way I understood how worried Detroit made her. Nobody but Gabe was allowed to text, although Grace broke that rule regularly. The majority of Mom and Grace’s screaming matches revolved around texting. The library had free WiFi. That’s how I had access to the world. I watched General Tsao almost from the start. At first it was stories about the flu. Lots of people were sick. It was a particularly bad strain. And then the head of the CDC in Atlanta started doing interviews. And then it was a guy in a military uniform. And then nobody did interviews. Grainy cell phone videos began popping up of giant garbage trucks dumping bodies into huge burning pits. I stopped being allowed to go out after that. The last time I saw the internet was after the first wave came through. The president was praying. And crying.
Plug in the charger and in a few moments the familiar dead battery icon gleams to life. I set the phone on the counter and unwrap the first CD.Prince’s Greatest Hits. A double disk. Mom cried when Prince died. I mean, outright bawled in the kitchen. I pop the disk into the player and the calliope beat ofDelirious blasts into the room.
Life without music. Its explosion back into my world slaps me across the face. There’s no sound I’ve heard that mimics it. The ocean’s melody only pretends to sing. This, it’s rich and crazy and makes no sense but it makes so much sense. I can’t help but move. I’m physically incapable of standing still. I can’t dance but who cares? I’ve just got to move and oh my God it feels so good, right down to the tips of my toes.
It’s over too fast and I want to jump over to the player and go back but then it’sWhen Doves Cry, the insane guitar riff that opens it up and I can’t go back, only forward. Oliver barks and jumps. He has no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea what I’m doing. Life without music. Electric word, life. Never, ever again.
I’m small enough to be fully consumed in Mom’s arms. Old enough to remember it. She’s swaying me in her arms toLittle Red Corvette. It’s long before I learn what the song is really about. I can hear her voice in my ears. It’s like the echo from an amplifier. I smell her skin, feel her arms around my body. She’s dancing. I’m along for the ride. Music belongs to Mom. It always will. I will only ever borrow it.
Now I’m on the floor bawling. Oliver’s licking my face. I don’t know how to tell him what this means. Maybe because I don’t know myself. I feel so good, the vibration in the air makes my heart feel so light but I feel such overwhelming grief. I miss her so much. I had no idea until right now. This was our language. She taught me to speak it fluently. I need her now.
I left her behind. My mommy’s dead and I left her behind me and I’ll never see her again as long as I live. What have I done? What have I done?
Love
“Leave me alone, troll,” Grace said. I was used to her insults. We all were. Mom and Dad didn’t even snap at her for it anymore, unless they were in particularly sour moods.
I stood in the doorway of her bedroom in Detroit. She was painting her toenails. Bright blue. She had long toes, like Dad and Gabe. I inherited Mom’s stubby ones.
“Get out!” Grace hissed. “I mean it. You’re going to get dweeb all over the floor.”
“Can I ask you a question?” I said bashfully. Grace paused with the nail polish brush hovering over the second toe of her left foot. She sighed, exasperated.
“Fine. What?”
I stepped through the door and navigated a dozen steps into her room. The floor was perpetually drenched in balled-up socks and underwear and pairs of secondhand jeans that she’d climbed out of before taking up her native position on her bed. Every couple of weeks Mom swept through Grace’s room like a tornado and grabbed it all to wash. The rest of us had been taught to wear things three or four times. Grace learned the same lesson but chose to ignore it. She called it “unsanitary and barbaric”, although I’m not sure how dirty underwear on the floor was any more civilized. We all lived secondhand. Mom taught us all how to mend holes in clothes. Gabe was the best at doing it. Grace used to bribe him with small trinkets from her room, beads and broken earrings and the like, in order to get him to sew buttons or fix tears. After they died, in the months I was alone in the house, I’d open the shoebox in which Gabe kept his bribes. Grace and Gabe didn’t have much of a relationship. To be fair, none of us had much of a relationship with her. Gabe’s box of useless crap reminded me that there used to be other people in the world. Grace and Gabe engaged in transactions that were completely separate from me.
“What, troll?” Grace said, returning to the task of painting of her toes. “You have one minute before I throw you out.”
“There’s… a boy,” I said. Grace looked up, a sneer forming on her thin lips.
“Oh, my,” she laughed. “I was beginning to wonder if you were ever gonna’ look up from your books.”
“He’s in my English class,” I said. “His name’s Ethan.”
“Another brainiac, huh?” Grace asked. “You’re thinking about repopulating the world with little super-geniuses, then?”
“Gross.”
“Of course you’d think that,” Grace said. “You wouldn’t know what to do, anyway. Nobody’d be able to tell which one of you was the boy.”
“You’re a bitch,” I said, whispering “bitch”.
“Okay, okay,” Grace said. “There’s a boy named Ethan. You like him?”
“He’s nice,” I replied warily. “We were partnered up yesterday. He said
I have pretty hair.”
“So he’s blind, huh?” Grace laughed. “Some kind of special needs kid?”
“I knew this was a mistake.”
“Fine, whatever,” Grace said, turning her attention fully back to her toes. “You like this boy, then. What do you want to know?”
“What do I do about it?” I asked. Grace stuck the tip of her tongue out of her mouth while she focused on her baby toe. She closed the bottle of polish and set it on her cluttered nightstand.
“Some boys like to be boss,” Grace said. “And some boys really don’t like it. Either way, you still are the boss.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that sometimes you have to ask them out, and sometimes you have to be asked out by them,” Grace explained. “But no matter which one it is, you’re still in charge. You can make them do things for you. Buy you things. Take you places. Sometimes you can tell them what to do. Other times you have to trick them into thinking it’s their idea.”
“That sounds horrible,” I said. Grace laughed.
“It’s the opposite of horrible,” she said. “Boys are dumb. Give them a little smile, kiss them every once in awhile and they’ll do anything for you.”
That ended up being the last real conversation I had with Grace. Things went bad quickly after that. Grace never got the chance to repaint her toes. As I pulled the dirty bed sheets around her body before taking her down the stairs and outside to bury her, the last part of her I covered up were her bare toes. The bright blue polish had mostly flaked away.
I toss one of the salty tennis balls into the surf. Oliver bounds across the beach to fetch it, his paws kicking up bursts of sand as he runs. He grabs the ball, runs back to me. This is a pretty simple relationship. Throw, retrieve, throw, retrieve. Because of that simplicity, Oliver loves me and Oliver trusts me. The repetition of throwing the ball into the water never gets old for him. Watching the joy on his face never gets old for me. This relationship, this one simple part of what we do together, it’s deeper than what Grace told me about boys. Maybe what she said was true. God knows she had more experience with it than I did. Or ever will. But I hope it wasn’t true. It can’t possibly be. I’ve read too many things, too many stories about love and about relationships for Grace’s sad and mercenary assessment to be accurate. Maybe it was true for her. That’s certainly who she appeared to be. I guess we all reacted differently to having nothing. Gracetook, exchanged the one thing of value she thought she had, her looks, and used that to trade for stuff that decorated her life. She exchangedherself for physical things. Boys had a use to her. That’s how Grace saw it. I think that’s how she saw all of us.
The thing is, I don’t know. Grace could’ve been right. That might’ve been the way all relationships were constructed. What’s the difference between Grace making out with a guy in exchange for new nail polish and me throwing this ball over and over for Oliver? We’re both getting something we want, Grace and I. We both perform an action in order to have some need filled. Grace’s need was tangible. Mine is less so, but they’re still both needs. I could say the difference is that Oliver gets something out of this, too, but then didn’t Grace’s boyfriends, as well? Is love really just a transaction?
I will never know, will I? Not unless I want to start dating the corpses. I’ll never fall in love.
His name was Ethan O’Connell, the boy I talked about with Grace. I never got to tell Grace his full name. And she didn’t ask. I dream about Ethan sometimes. Most of the time he just shows up, off to the side of whatever I’m dreaming about, smiling at me. That was largely the extent of our relationship in life. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I liked his smile. It reminded me of my own smile, the one I practiced in the bathroom mirror. Kind of shy, not really sure of himself.
That doesn’t matter, though, does it? Ethan O’Connell is as dead as everyone else. Every boy I would ever have dated, every boy I’d have ever fallen in love with, they’re all dead. I don’t know what falling in love feels like. All I know is what I read in my books. That’s all I’ll ever know.
Most of the time I think you’re a girl, someone a lot like me. But what if you’re not? What if you’re a boy, how would that change our relationship? Or maybe youare a girl but girls are supposed to be who I’m supposed to fall in love with? I’ll still never know, will I?
I used to walk through the hallways at school and all I’d see was a sea of faces. I don’t know what else I expected to see. Maybe like in a book, a beam of light would shine down and extract from the crowd the person I was supposed to love. That never happened. All I saw were strangers. There were more strangers in the world than familiar faces. Seven billion people. I knew maybe a hundred. I never saw more than twenty thousand my entire life. Like a set of concentric circles growing out farther and farther from where I stood, until the larger circles of people I’d never ever meet dwarfed my own circles into near oblivion. Maybe they’re not all dead. But they’re dead to me.
I need to hear some more music. Maybe something upbeat and mindless. Justin Timberlake. Katy Perry. Something to get me dancing. Get me out of my head.
I throw the ball one more time. Oliver dutifully runs after it. I stand up, dust the sand off my shorts and Ollie trots after me back inside.
OCTOBER
The Dark Places
Morning is still the best time for walking. By my unsteady estimates, it’s October. There’s even a chill in the air. It reminds me distantly of autumn back home.
I throw a washed-up stick down the beach. Oliver bounds ahead, sending up a cloud of beach sand. I hold my flip-flips in my hand. Not sure why I brought them with me. Habit, probably. Sometimes I like peering into the big houses set back and almost hidden from the beach. Mostly, though, I just walk. My calves are becoming muscular. My whole body has started to look decidedly athletic. How’s that for irony? The scrawny book nerd is getting buff. My skin is a creamy shade of brown. My hair has become lighter and lighter. My whole body is changing, inside and out. I’m even considering getting a bra. Not that I’d ever wear it. Bras are for the benefit of other people, anyway. Designed for the sole purpose of your boobs not making other people uncomfortable.
“Oh my God, I’m a hippie.” Oliver dutifully brings the stick back to me. I toss it away.
There’s a routine now. Wake up with the sunrise, eat some homemade canned fruit, a big drink of ice water, top off the gas in the generator and then head out to the beach. Later, Oliver and I take a nap. Read, eat, maybe drive into town and then go for a swim. Eat again, watch a movie and go to bed. I snagged a second generator to power the TV and DVD player, and we’re working our way through the truckload of movies we pilfered from Best Buy.
Walking down the beach is my favorite part of the day. The rumble of the waves clears my mind. Oliver never tires, no matter how many miles we walk. The beach goes on forever. The tide sometimes comes in high and forms new temporary lagoons that cut us off, but there’s always another direction to walk.
I bend down to pick up a conch shell that’s become embedded in the wet sand. I rinse it off in the frothy surf and examine it. I’ve got a dozen just like it that I’ve already collected. I’m running out of places to display them. My house is starting to look like one of those beachside stores, with shells and alligator skulls and shark tooth necklaces for sale.
My house. Yeah, that’s probably true. Finders keepers, right? The Charles family hasn’t risen from the dead to take it back. Although that’s a fairly recurrent dream. Usually after I’ve stupidly watched one of the horror movies.
I tell myself that the long walks on the beach have nothing to do with the lights on the water. I’m still not sure I actually saw them, anyway. And they haven’t come back. A rational person wouldn’t keep looking for them. A rational person would say the binoculars I’m carrying around my neck are to look for birds and dolphins.
Mostly, there’s a lot of time to think. I’ve never been a stranger to the dark and
dusty corners of my own mind. But more and more the dark corners keep curving back around to the lights on the water. What if thereare other people? Survivors, like me. They’d have to be immune, or maybe were given some secret government vaccine. If their boat is some kind of survival ship, they probably want to come back to shore. Maybe they already have. That would explain why I haven’t seen the lights again.
Or maybe they were never there. That would explain it, too. But that explanation isn’t any fun. Is some sort of survival ship any better? I have a routine now. Oliver and me. And we’re doing fine. Better than fine. And that’s the dark corner I most dread to discover.
I’m happy, in a way and with a consistency I’ve never been before. And that happiness leaves me with a giant double scoop of guilt. It isn’t as if my family had been monsters. I love them, deeply and profoundly. I miss them, too. Not every day anymore, and not in the same way I did in the months since leaving Detroit. But it isn’t like I’ve forgotten about them. I look at the photos on my phone almost every day. But their smiles on my screen aren’t real. It’s just another way of remembering. Remembering is a kind of make-believe. It relies on something artificial. Just like their images through the lens of the camera on my phone are just a collection of pixels, so too are my memories of them. Just synaptic collections. It’s at once more complex and then so much more simple. I’ve ceased being obligated to do things in which I don’t see any value. Survival is a lesson of necessity. Clean your room, do your homework, eat your carrots, these are all directives with no ownership. I did them because I was told to do them. And therefore I had no ownership over the acts themselves. Every action I took in my life before had been prescribed, part of a greater plan of which I had no broad understanding. The things I do now, from finding the beach house to setting up the generators, I’ve done them because I understand their implications. I miss my family, but I’ve stopped needing them. And it hasn’t taken very long to get here. Independence is where my guilt lives.
The First Year Page 16
