by Em Garner
“Sure.” He follows me through the arched doorway into the kitchen.
The table’s still overturned in here.
“My mom,” I say over my shoulder as I lead him to the pantry, “was a huge fan of plastic bins. All the cereal, all the rice, stuff like that. Pasta. Some of it might still be okay.”
Lots of stuff isn’t—mice or squirrels have chewed through plastic bags and boxes, and stuff is spilled all over. But lots of the packages are still okay. Cans of soup and vegetables, even tuna and salmon. Bins with sealed lids of bulk rice and cereal. I don’t want to think about why it’s only slightly stale. There are even a few tall glass jars with sealed lids, filled with different kinds of beans, red, black, speckled, in layers. The tag on the front gives instructions for bean soup. I think Opal made these for my mom in school as a Christmas or Mother’s Day present. I can’t remember my mom ever making bean soup, but my stomach rumbles at the thought of it.
“I’m hungry, too,” Dillon admits. “But I can just head home—”
“No.” I say it too fast and feel stupid. “I mean, no, you don’t have to go. I can make some macaroni and cheese. Opal loves that stuff, and look, the boxes haven’t even been touched.”
“And that stuff could last through a nuclear war, not just a Contamination,” Dillon says.
He says it so matter-of-factly, but it strikes me funny, and I laugh. Loud. The sound fills up the narrow pantry. After a second, he joins me. We laugh together, loud and long and goofy, until tears stream down my cheeks and I have to swipe them away. I never laughed with Tony that way, not ever.
“What are you guys doing?” Opal sounds disgusted.
I try to answer her, but the laughter won’t stop. Dillon’s watching me with bright eyes. He has a great laugh to go along with the great smile I already noticed. He runs a hand through his hair to push it out of his eyes. He has great eyes, too.
Blue. Bright, gleaming blue. And he’s looking right through me. And just like that, I’m on my way to serious Crushtown.
Opal looks back and forth from him to me, then frowns. “Hey, Velvet, c’mon. I’m still hungry. C’mon!”
“Right.” I wipe at my face and then reach for a plastic-sealed roll of paper towels. “Sorry, Opal. How’s mac and cheese sound?”
She gives me a narrow-eyed look. “What kind?”
I want to laugh again at her expression. I’m very aware of how close the walls are, how close Dillon’s standing. “Have you heard that saying about how beggars can’t be choosers?”
Opal crosses her arms and looks annoyed. “No.”
“It’s that beggars can’t be choosers,” I tell her. “Know what that means?”
“Does it mean you want me to close the door so you can kiss or something?” she says, exasperated.
“No!” I cry too loud. From behind me, Dillon laughs again. I can’t look at him. “It means you’ll have to eat whatever kind I make, because that’s all the kind there is!”
“Oh. Well, can you make it fast? I’m hungry!”
“Yeah. I’ll make it. Go watch Mama.”
Opal nods. I risk a glance at Dillon. He doesn’t seem embarrassed or annoyed at what Opal said. He’s busy turning the cans to read the labels. When he feels me looking at him, he looks up.
He smiles.
What Opal said doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
TWENTY
OF COURSE, I DON’T KISS DILLON. I DON’T really know him. No matter what Tony’s mom thought about me, I’m not like that. I can’t pretend the thought doesn’t get my heart pitter-pattering in a good way, which is a nice change from the stomach tumbling. From the way I keep catching him looking at me, I’m thinking maybe Dillon wouldn’t mind so much, either.
He doesn’t try, though. Not even when it gets dark and I walk him out to his truck. We’re full of macaroni and cheese and hot tea. Not the best meal I’ve ever had, but the company and atmosphere made up for it.
“So,” Dillon says, then stops.
I laugh a little bit. Dillon makes it easy to laugh. “So, what?”
“So… Velvet.”
I’ve heard lots of people say my name. Some of them make it sound sort of like a joke. Some stumble on it, make it sound exotic or strange. But Dillon just says my name like it’s the most natural word in the world to slide off his tongue.
“Yes?”
“This was nice. Really nice, tonight.” I smile and laugh again, unable to help it. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.” Dillon smiles, too.
I look back at the house. We have some candles lit, and the fireplace light casts a warm orange glow, faint, from the front windows. The good smell of wood smoke tickles my nostrils. Even so, there’s really no pretending everything inside is normal. Or anything out here, for that matter.
“Do you think they’ll have cleared the traffic away?” I ask him.
“I think so. If not, I’ll find another way home.”
“Where do you live?” This conversation sounds so normal, so BC. Before Contamination.
“We used to live in Mount Gretna, on the lakeside. But we moved closer to my mom’s work when… you know.”
I know. “We were living in assisted housing behind the strip mall.”
“This is better,” Dillon says.
“This is better,” I agree.
We’re grinning like idiots, and I don’t care. It feels good to be normal, even if it’s just pretend. It’s too cold out here to linger, though, and no matter how much I’d like for Dillon to stay and hang out longer, I know it’s time for him to go.
“I should go,” he says at the same time I think it.
“Yeah. Thanks for the ride. And everything, Dillon. Thanks.” I bounce a little on my toes, too cold to care if I look silly.
Something tells me Dillon doesn’t think I look silly. He opens the door to the truck and gets inside. I’m backing up the sidewalk toward the front door, hoping I don’t trip and fall and land on my butt in front of him, but not wanting to turn my back, either. I want to watch him drive away.
He leans out of the truck, looking over the door.
“Velvet!”
“Yeah?”
“Can I come over again sometime?”
I want to dance right there, and it has nothing to do with being cold. Because I’m not, just then. I’m warm again because of Dillon. “Yeah, sure.”
He nods. “Great, I’ll… oh, crap.”
No phone. Instead of feeling bad about this, I just laugh again. “Dillon, I got fired from my job and pulled my kid sister out of school. I’m pretty sure if you stop by, I’ll be around. Besides, maybe you can give me a ride to the store or something, if I need it.”
“I’ll do that.” He nods again, then ducks into the truck. It starts with a rumble and roar.
I’m hugging my arms around my belly to keep warm, and I back up, all the way to the front porch. I don’t fall. I stand watching as the lights of his truck illuminate the trees, then the driveway, and finally, at last, disappear down the street.
Inside the house, Opal’s already curled up in a nest of blankets, her eyes sleepy as she watches the firelight. It’s not late, but something about the sun going down has made all three of us tired. My mom’s tucked up on the couch, blankets to her chin, eyes already closed.
I want a shower so much, it’s like a physical ache, one more to add to all the others. I ignore it, though. I haven’t ventured too much upstairs to check the bathrooms. Even if the shower works, the water will be cold. I’m not in the mood for that. Instead, I curl myself up in my own nest of blankets and quilts. I have my own pillow, from my own bed. I’d forgotten how much I loved my pillow. How comforting it is to feel it under my head. How that one small thing makes all the rest of this really feel like home.
* * *
I wake in the night to the sound of humming. I bolt upright, heart pounding, eyes blinking and straining against the dark. The fire’s burned down to a glowing red, but it’s not
hard to see the silhouette in the rocking chair by the window. Some of the slats in the back and seat are broken, but it still rocks.
It’s my mom. She’s rocking slowly and humming. I recognize the tune as a mashup of all the lullabies and show tunes she’d ever sung to us. I think I hear a snippet or two of Madonna and some Lady Gaga in there, too. Every so often, she stops and sighs and the chair stops rocking. Then another sigh and she starts again.
This should be creepy but I find it even more comforting than my old pillow. This is almost like my old mom. Watching over us in the night, making sure nothing hurts us. It makes knowing that the dark is pressing against the house all around us outside so much easier to bear. It makes all of this easier, and I fall asleep to the sound of her voice.
* * *
I wake up to it again. It’s farther away. She’s not in the chair, though there’s a blanket there to prove to me I had seen her in it and hadn’t just dreamed it. I sit up, my blankets tangled around me. Opal’s still buried inside hers.
My mom’s in the kitchen. I can see her from my place on the family room floor as she moves from cupboard to cupboard, then back to the sink. I hear the water run. I get up to see what she’s doing, but I have to stop in the doorway to just stare.
She’s cleaning.
She’s taken all the dishes out of one cupboard and put them on the center island, which is also clean, despite the huge nicks and scratches in the marble from where the pot rack fell down on top of it. She has a cloth in her hand and she runs it under the sink, wrings it out, then wipes the inside of each cupboard shelf as high as she can reach. This means the top shelves have been left alone, but that’s okay. I’m sure I don’t want her teetering up on top of a chair or even a step stool.
“Mom?”
She doesn’t turn. She’s humming again. The songs seem to be more coherent this time. Rather than a mashup, she’s humming some of them all the way through, with only a few stops and starts or mix-ups. She’s moving slowly, shuffling, and there’s no way to confuse this new mother with the old one, who’d always have two or three tasks juggling at once, and usually the music blasting from her iPod speakers at top volume while she did them. She’s not dancing now, she’s barely moving, and even so, all I can do is stand and watch her, without daring to interrupt in case whatever she’s found gets lost again.
“What’s Mama doing?” Opal wipes at her eyes.
“She’s cleaning the kitchen.”
“Oh.” Opal shrugs. “Mama, can you make me some breakfast?”
“Opal.” I follow her into the kitchen. “You know she can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Opal gives me a familiar, stubborn look, hands on her hips. She’s wearing the clothes she wore all day yesterday and to bed. I need to figure out a way to do laundry.
“Because…” I gesture at our mom, who’s now carefully wiping each plate before putting it back into the cupboard. “She just can’t.”
“You know what, Velvet? Instead of telling me all the time what Mama can’t do, maybe you should just watch what she does. She can do a lot, you know. She’s Mama.” Opal’s utterly convinced of this, and I’m not going to try to discourage her.
Besides, maybe she’s right.
During the months of the worst part of the Contamination, news reports quoted doctors and government officials and military leaders on all different aspects of what was going on. Hardly anyone agreed on anything, and even reports from official agencies could change from day to day as they fought against this sudden upsurge in random violence and tried to separate the Contaminated from the people who took the chance to become criminals.
A few months after the Contamination began, their tests started to show some results, and they started warning that it had been some sort of food-borne contaminant, not a zombie virus. The scientists and doctors put out test results, the military and government made a bunch of rules and laws, and the rest of us tried hard to get back to normality, if there is such a thing.
But nobody knows the long-term effects of the prions that caused the Contamination. There’ve been rumors that they can be spread through contact with the Contaminated, not just by consuming the protein water. That they can linger in the brain for months or years and suddenly cause a Contamination in someone who doesn’t remember ever drinking a ThinPro. And there are other faint whisperings about how the brain manages to rewire itself, work around the Contaminated areas and gain back its original functions, but that the neutralizing techniques employed by the scientists and government make it so nobody could ever get better.
Jean said it. She’d never seen a Connie acting like my mom. Reacting, showing emotion that wasn’t fury or savagery. I’ll bet she’s never had a Connie in her kennel who hummed lullabies or cleaned a kitchen, either.
My mom is different. I know she is. I watch her as she moves to the next cupboard and starts removing the glasses, one by one. I think I should help her, that she’s like a child and might drop one. Cut herself again. But I only watch.
It’s too hard to tell, really, if she’s acting on instinct or some kind of repressed memories, or if she’s really someplace inside her head, trying to get out. Her face doesn’t look animated. She moves sort of like a robot. “I’m hungry,” Opal says.
“You’re always hungry.” I am, too. Mac and cheese really wasn’t a big enough dinner. I move toward the pantry. “If we can figure out how to set up the griddle pan on the fire, I can try to make pancakes. But we don’t have any syrup.”
“Hooray! Pancakes!” Opal jumps up and down.
“And after that, we need to clean up the rest of the house. See what’s working and what needs to be fixed. And then… you have to do your homework.”
“Whaaaaat?” Opal’s eyes go wide. She stops halfway to the pantry. “Noooooooo!”
“Yes. You have to. It’s the deal I made with your principal. If you don’t do the work, you know what might happen.” I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at the look on her face.
“How come you get to quit school and I don’t?” Opal stomps her foot. “It’s not fair!”
I shrug. “I don’t make the rules, kid. Believe me, I should be looking at colleges and stuff, getting ready to get out of this crappy town. But guess what. I’m not.”
Opal glares at me. “It’s still not fair.”
“No,” I tell her with a shake of my head. “It’s not. But it’s the way it is. So don’t give me a hard time about it.”
Opal stomps her feet again, both of them one after another. Hard. “Raawwwrrrrrr!”
“Yeah, the dinosaur thing? Not working.” She does it again, louder. Stomping and growling. “Not fair! Not fair! Not fair!”
“Life’s not fair!” I shout at her.
My mom’s stopped her humming. I look up to see her watching us with her head tilted. She’s not just looking at us, she’s seeing us. For real. Her brow furrows. She puts a glass down on the island with a clink.
“Mom?”
She raises her hand, pointer finger in the air. Frowning, she wiggles it back and forth. Scolding us without words.
Then she goes back to cleaning.
Opal settles for cereal covered with milk we get from a can. I eat a couple of granola bars I find in the snack drawer and hope neither of us get the barfies from it. My mom cleans all the cupboards, and then, as we watch, goes into the pantry. She doesn’t come out.
“Mom, you okay?” I peek in on her.
She’s staring at the wire shelves that go all the way to the ceiling. Dillon and I didn’t throw away any of the spilled food we found yesterday. My mom reaches for the broom and dustpan hanging on the back of the door.
She gives me a look and holds up the broom. I think she’s giving it to me, but before I can take it, she uses it to point out the door, into the kitchen. She says nothing, but I’m staring hard at her face.
“You want me to… clean out there?”
It’s not quite a nod, but I’ll take it as one
. My mom turns back to her task in the pantry, and I face mine. Opal’s still eating her cereal, but I tweak the end of her ponytail.
“Betcha I can clean more rooms than you can.”
“Nuh-uh,” she says at once. She has a milk mustache.
“Betcha I can.”
“What’re you gonna bet?” Opal says practically and licks her spoon. I’m not sure how she can stand the sweet cereal marshmallows along with the extra-sweet milk, but she’s gobbled it all up and even served herself a second bowl.
“What do you want to bet?”
“If I clean more than you, I don’t have to do my homework.” She looks pleased with herself at that.
“Haha. No. You have to do your homework, I told you.”
Opal grins, eyes squinting. “You’ll do it for me!”
I roll my eyes. “That won’t do you any good.”
“Don’t care.”
“Fine,” I say. “And what are you going to bet?”
This stumps her. “I don’t know. I don’t have anything.”
So much for my idea of motivation. But then Opal snaps her fingers. The gesture’s so adult, so funny in her miniature fingers.
“I know. I’ll make you a cake. A chocolate cake.”
I look at the stove. “Yeah, how are you gonna do that?”
Opal just gives me a mysterious smile. She’s only ten, and way too smart. I could always eat chocolate cake.
I hold out my hand. “You’re on.”
We start upstairs. We stand together in the hallway, both of us stopped in the doorways to our bedrooms, staring. I don’t know what Opal’s thinking, but what’s running through my head is the fact that when they came and took us away for our “safety,” we left almost everything behind. We didn’t even make the beds. My laundry hamper still has the clothes in it I was wearing the day before the army showed up at our door. The clothes are probably ruined, or at the very least desperately in need of a good washing. Yet my quick run-through of the house shows me that most everything’s still there.
“You ready?” Opal sounds triumphant, like she’s already won.
