“Wait until your own child starts sassing you and then see what you think,” Suzanne—unflappable Suzanne, always willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt—said mildly.
“But I mean, it’s like Ruthie’s afraid half the time. Twyla talks, like, four times as much as she does.”
“Some kids are just quieter than others, Jazzy,” Suzanne said patiently. “And Cass and she have been through a lot. Even kids need time to process things.”
“But look at Dirk and Dane. I mean, they lost their dad, like, one day he was there and the next day he was facedown in the front yard, shot by the neighbor, for heaven’s sake. That’s traumatic, right? Right?”
There was a pause, a small silence in which the coil of anxiety inside Cass pulled taut. The silence meant that Suzanne—sweet Suzanne, humming-without-knowing-she-was-doing-it Suzanne—had doubts.
“I don’t mean she’s a bad mother,” Jasmine said. “Only, you know, she’s so protective. Overprotective. She never lets that child out of her sight. She even drags her along to go see that poor man in the hospital. I mean, tell me that’s not traumatizing, right? I heard his eyes were gouged out.”
“Oh, Christ, Jazzy, that’s not true,” Suzanne protested. “Go see him yourself, if you want. I was over there getting some cream for Twyla’s rash, I saw him, he’s not that bad.”
Cass backed up the stairs at that point, her face burning.
Was she overprotective?
Yes, probably; but how could she help it, after everything they had experienced and seen?
And yes, Ruthie was quiet…but a few months ago she didn’t talk at all. Cass had been happy that she was simply talking again. But these few words from Jasmine threw a pall over her progress.
The doubts magnified and escalated all that day. It wasn’t the first time her parenting had been called into question; it was far from the worst time. So why did it hurt so much now? As Cass sat with Smoke late that afternoon, holding his hand, smoothing the hair out of his face, adjusting his covers, her mind reviewed every interaction she’d had with the others. The way they instinctively knew how to fill the gaps in the conversation that always left her tongue-tied…had they been thinking she was awkward all along? The way Ingrid always brought a new book for Ruthie from the library—was it because she didn’t think Cass would do it on her own? The games Dane invited Ruthie to play—had Ingrid put him up to it, out of pity for her awkward daughter and her inadequate mothering?
By dinnertime, she had a stomachache and her face felt tight. As she carried their tray of food and walked with Ruthie across the lawn, headed for the table she usually shared with the other women, she saw Dor sitting alone at another. His meal was finished, his cutlery laid across his plate and half a cup of water in his hand. He was watching Sammi, who was talking to a group of teens over at the volleyball net.
In a split-second decision she went and sat with Dor instead.
Sliding her tray on the table across from him, she gave him the best smile she could muster.
“Okay if I sit here?” she said.
Dor looked surprised. “Hell yeah. I thought you were avoiding me.” Then, as if sensing he’d made a mistake, his face softened. “If you hadn’t come to me, I would have hunted you down, Cass.”
“I don’t belong here.” The words, stark and frightened, were out of her mouth before she could stop herself. Worse yet, her eyes stung with unshed tears. Cass covered her mouth and looked down at the table. Someone had covered it with a flowered cloth—someone, no doubt, who had no trouble making and keeping friends, someone who was comfortable in the social milieu here in New Eden.
Dor smiled ruefully and held up his hands for Cass to see the cuts and scrapes that covered his forearms. He’d spent the day helping to remove barbed-wire fencing from a section of the lower island; they’d been using it to cultivate kaysev, but as Cass had already seen for herself on a walk with Ruthie, they had barely cleared the land since New Eden had been settled.
Pulling the barbed wire, like hauling trash or tilling the earth, was a job for the brawny, but not one that was prized. Such jobs were never given to council members. Despite New Eden’s insistence on a cooperative society, it was clear that some job assignments were more coveted than others and distributed according to the council’s whims. And Dor had started at the bottom. He didn’t have the same reputation in New Eden as he had in the Box.
“Ahhh…hell.” Dor’s hands sought hers and drew them together, holding them tightly. “Come on, girl, don’t go soft on me now.”
Blinking, Cass took a chance and peeked at him. His dark, scarred face was shadowed with concern. His brows were lowered. He’d cut his silver-tinged black hair since coming to this settlement, and it now cleared the collar of his work shirt, though the front still fell in his eyes. The thin wire loops in his ears and the tattoos that wound up both arms—things that had never looked out of place in the Box—seemed a little too edgy here, a little provocative. Maybe that was why he sat alone, a fact Cass hadn’t bothered to consider until just this minute.
Neither one of them fit in here.
“Sammi’s making friends,” Cass said lamely, after Dor finally relaxed his grip on her hands.
“Ruthie too.”
Just like that, they acknowledged what neither had said aloud: New Eden was a good place for children. And that had to be enough.
“I just…I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that the others all knew each other already. I mean, Ingrid and Suzanne and Jasmine and all. They’re nice to me, but sometimes…”
“Don’t let them get to you,” Dor said. “They’re jealous. I mean, look at you.”
Cass looked up in surprise, found Dor’s eyes intent on her. They were the near-ebony that always signaled intensity, the shade of Dor’s strong emotion, and he stared without blinking into her eyes, and then let his gaze travel down to her mouth, and it was almost a physical sensation, as though he were touching her instead of just watching her, and Cass felt the stirring that she thought had not followed her to this place, the hunger for touch that had been driven from her by the terror of almost losing Smoke.
And thinking of Dor touching her lips led to memories of him kissing her. They’d made love twice on the journey that took them from the Box to Colima. No. That wasn’t right—they’d fucked twice. They’d seized on each other out of desperation, terror, need, hopelessness, anger, slammed their bodies into each other as death threatened and the world yawed crazily on its axis. They’d kept each other going, no more and no less, and wasn’t that over when it was over? Wasn’t that the nature of the deal they’d never discussed out loud—to get each other through, and then leave it, then never speak of it again?
“You’re beautiful, Cass,” Dor said, and only then did Cass realize that he’d only loosened his grip on her hands, not released them, and he laced his fingers through hers and caressed her palms with his thumbs. The sensation went straight to her core, searing, ignited from a spark to a roaring flame with no slow build. “Every woman, every man, that’s the first thing they think when they see you.”
His words were a buzz in her ear, confirmation of things she didn’t want to hear. These were things she didn’t want to know. They were a crushing rejection of the fragile hope she’d nurtured, that she could be just another mom in just another town, raising a nice girl and having nice friends.
Dor must have seen her expression slip, because his hands went still, he stopped touching her, pulled away. “What did I say?” he asked urgently, not unkindly.
Nothing, only don’t stop touching me. Nothing, only—please—make me forget again.
“Tonight—” Cass swallowed, nearly lost her nerve. “Tonight, after Ruthie goes down…”
“What? What do you need?”
“Take me somewhere,” Cass said mi
serably. “Alone.”
And he did.
Chapter 18
THERE EXISTED ON the survivors’ islands one pickup and one panel van, a motorcycle, a small ATV with a trailer for hauling fuel, Nathan’s little hybrid and a dented Accord, all of which were maintained by Sharon and Elsa, two women who’d met at WyoTech and worked at a Toyota dealership in Sonora until riots and crashes decimated most of the vehicles on the road. A hasty midnight session of the New Eden council divided the vehicles’ cargo and passenger space among the eligible citizens, following a very specific set of improvised guidelines. Communal supplies would receive top priority: medicine, water, prepared food. Mothers and children would ride at least some of the time, as would the elderly, the sick, the disabled.
Seventy of them and four passenger vehicles. Everyone knew that meant they would be able to take very little. Cass looked around the room, knowing that the few sentimental things she clung to would only weigh them down. Elsewhere in the house, she could hear Ingrid and Suzanne and Jasmine, throwing what they could into backpacks.
“Ruthie, Babygirl, we’re going exploring,” she said, as she sorted through their clothes, choosing lightweight things that could be layered. Some of Ruthie’s clothes were getting tight; she had hit a growth spurt and had outgrown most of her pants. Her turtlenecks no longer pulled easily over her head. Even her nightgown’s sleeves didn’t cover her wrists.
Her little girl sat cross-legged on the mattress and pouted. “I don’t want to go.”
“Oh, honey, it’ll be an adventure.” Cass didn’t have the heart to put any energy into the lie. She’d be found out soon enough; horrors awaited around every corner.
“Is Twyla going?”
“Yes, of course. We can walk together.”
Except that Suzanne had told her not to speak to her until she’d cooled down. Don’t call me, I’ll call you, she’d said over a week ago, a faint attempt at humor on a day when humor had no place. By now Ingrid would have told her the latest, and Suzanne was bound to be angrier still.
Cass packed the large-framed pack that she used to haul a day’s worth of water and her tools every day. It was good she’d become accustomed to carrying forty pounds on her back. She could not count on much help on the road and she already needed to ask a very big favor that would exhaust any goodwill she had left.
Into the pack went her meager supplies of soap, aspirin, lanolin and dried rabbit jerky. Then hers and Ruthie’s clothes, with extra coats and scarves wrapped around her bottle of wine. It was about half-full, a fact she did not allow herself to dwell on. The box decorated with the circus bear she left on the shelf, along with the bowl of earrings.
Into Ruthie’s Tinkerbell backpack, a gift from Twyla on her birthday, Cass packed a soft baby blanket that she liked to sleep with, a few stuffed animals and the veterinarian play set. She added a stack of books and then, reconsidering, took out all but two.
“Okay, sugar?” she asked Ruthie, helping her try it on for weight.
“Okay,” Ruthie answered through a yawn.
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry, it’s bedtime, isn’t it? And we’ll go to bed soon.”
A lie. Cass would not sleep this night. The entire settlement was leaving at dawn, and she had to make sure that Smoke was with them. How, she did not yet know, and her anxiety over that fact curdled in her stomach.
She descended the stairs with Ruthie, using the flashlight she kept for emergencies. Its beam was still strong, but she had no spare batteries, and she was aware of every second that ticked by.
The house was empty. The women had left without her, just as she feared. She swept the flashlight’s beam over the kitchen table, the counter, the living room—everything as it had been before, about to become part of a ghost town.
She stepped out on the porch and stopped for a moment, caught up short by the scene in front of her. Flashlight beams and candles bobbed along the paths as people hurried about. Someone had built a bonfire in the yard and piled on firewood with abandon. They couldn’t take it with them, so Cass supposed it made sense to burn it. The air was filled with people calling to each other, and along the shore she could make out a growing pile of bags and boxes.
The island’s vehicles were parked in a neat row in front of the bridge, and men were milling around close by. From this distance Cass could not tell who was in the crowd, but she suspected it was the council members and their trusted friends. People connected to them would decide what went and what stayed. Already the mound of belongings at the shore was more than would fit into cargo.
“Cass.”
The deep voice in the darkness startled her. She spun around and pointed her flashlight straight at the speaker, who’d been standing under the overhang next to the house.
It was Red. He winced in the sudden light and held his hands up to his face; they were empty. “Hey, easy there.”
“I was just. Ah, going,” Cass said, backing away from him. In the flickering light she saw how he braced himself against the wall, his muscles stiff from waiting.
“No, wait. Wait, Cassie.”
Cass looked up sharply. No one called her that, not for a very long time. She didn’t like it—it brought back memories of times and places that she couldn’t reclaim even if she wanted to.
“What do you want?”
“To help. Just to help.”
“Help me?” The absurdity of the request made Cass laugh. “And how are you going to do that? You got a key to some underground bunker no one knows about? A ten-year supply of Rice-A-Roni?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” In the light of Cass’s flashlight, which she directed at the ground, Red’s face looked ghostly, his beard obscuring all his features except those soft eyes nested in sun-weathered wrinkles. He lifted a hand and then cut the gesture short. His shoulder drooped. “I wish I—we—could offer more. But, well, I just thought Zihna and I, we could watch the little one. So you—I mean, Smoke’s gonna need you to advocate for him. They’re over there right now…and it looks bad. No way they’re taking all the patients along, and Dana and a couple of the others want to leave them all.”
“What are you talking about?” Cass’s voice went shrill with fear. “Leave who?”
Only, before Red even answered, she knew what he was going to say, and was surprised she hadn’t already thought of it.
Four cars. All that gear. The water. Decisions were going to have to be made, and a full-grown man was a lot of cargo. She knew they wouldn’t necessarily help her, but to leave Smoke, who’d been a hero to so many when the Rebuilders threatened all… But of course: Dor, Smoke, herself—none of them were recognized for what they had been prior to their arrival, for better or worse.
“Oh my God…” she breathed, and the enormity of the truth finally sank all the way in. “Oh no.”
What had she been thinking, that she could save them all? It would be a miracle if she could even make it through the journey with Ruthie. An injured man—barely walking, barely returned from the edge he’d walked with Death. She felt the porch floor tilt underneath her.
Strong hands steadied her as she struggled to hold on to Ruthie. “Let me,” Red said, and he eased Ruthie out of her arms with surprising tenderness, and hitched her up over one shoulder. Her little head lolled in the crook of his neck, her eyelashes fluttering and her sweet mouth in a sleepy pout.
Red put a hand at her elbow to steady her. “Are you okay? Do you need to sit down?”
Cass took a deep breath. “No, I’m all right. I need—I just need—oh God.” She needed to get to Smoke—but she needed to stay here with Ruthie. She needed to get their things down to the pile and hope there was a chance they might be loaded. Otherwise, it was only a matter of time before the packs became too heavy and they had to start leaving things behind, leaving them
at the edge of the road like people did in the impossible early days of the Siege, back when families tried to take everything with them. You’d come across abandoned pillowcases stuffed with silver, paintings, photographs; suitcases bulging with clothes; bicycles and chain saws and radios and clocks and dolls and things that defied logic; vases and puzzles and garden hoses.
Would their things end up like that? And then—a half mile down the road, a mile, two—would they themselves lie down, too?
“Cassie.” Red spoke urgently. “You can’t give up now, girl. Me and Zihna, we talked it over. We have the trailer. We think we can rig it so Smoke can ride. I’ve got Steve helping me out right now. He owes me one. We’ll have to take turns with Ruthie, but I don’t expect that’ll be a problem, not with so many of us. We’ve got the girls—well, Sage, anyway. Can’t be putting too much strain on Kyra, not with her goin’ on her sixth month. And Sammi…well, she’ll come around. You’ll see. She just needs to cool off a little, is all.”
Cass’s mind swam with what he was proposing. All those people—all the favors he was willing to trade on her behalf. She wanted to know why. What she asked instead was, “What trailer?”
“It’s a little old flatbed three-wheeler. It was the one Zihna and me came in here with. Came from her place, to be fair, but I expect she won’t mind sharing with her old man,” he said, smiling.
What other choice did she have? Smoke wouldn’t make it four steps down the road, despite his amazing journey across the island. Still, maybe there was another way; maybe she could convince them to give him passage in one of the vehicles. She had to find out who was in charge and could make decisions.
“I don’t know what you’ve been planning,” Red began, “but there are some things you should know. Milt and Jack already took Charles down to the end of the island, about forty-five minutes ago. Charles didn’t make the trip back with them.”
Charles—Cass’s heart lurched at the memory of the frail, scabbed man who was in the late stages of AIDS, which he had controlled Before but which ravaged his body now that the steady stream of medicine was gone.
Horizon Page 12
