Ashes, Ashes aa-1

by Jo Treggiari

  Lucy flipped the pages with difficulty. They’d swollen from the damp and stuck together, and the red cover was warped. Past the graduating seniors’ portraits, where everyone was posed like they were selling wristwatches; carefully avoiding the formal photo of Maggie, who was smiling so widely, happy and secure in the knowledge that she had her pick of Ivy League schools; past Rob and the rest of the ninth graders who looked like little kids and always would be. She got to her class picture. Ran her eyes over the list of names: Julie, Scott, Chad, Angie—people who’d barely noticed she was alive even though they’d known one another since kindergarten. In the class roster she’d been marked absent, but she’d been there. It was like a bad joke that even her teachers seemed unaware of her existence. She stood at the end of the row toward the back, shoulders hunched and hair pulled forward across her pale face, which appeared to float like the moon above the unrelenting black of her combat boots, jeans, T-shirt, and zippered hoodie.

  Chad was standing next to her, but he’d squeezed over so that there were at least a couple of feet between them. God, she had hated him! He’d always acted as if she were diseased or something.

  Lucy chewed her thumbnail, remembering how strange life had been that spring. The flyers with the lists of symptoms had appeared, plastered all over school, and it seemed as if everyone visited the nurse’s office complaining of headaches and muscle cramping and fever. A few girls had fainted in class. Lucy had felt perfectly fine. She turned the pages of the yearbook slowly, flicking past photos of football teams and teachers and school staff. She paused at the picture of the nurse, Mrs. Reynolds, looking so neat and trim and motherly in her white outfit.

  But she hadn’t been so calm the last time Lucy had seen her, when she was called into the health office for yet another blood test. Mrs. Reynolds had seemed distracted. Even her smooth blond hair, normally pinned in a neat bun, was messily tucked behind her ears, and she’d had dark circles under her eyes. There’d been none of the usual chatter, the casual questions about Lucy’s health or how the school year was going. She’d been nervous, preoccupied. And she’d flubbed the test somehow. Instead of blood squirting into the needle, it had dribbled all over Lucy’s arm and the black-and-white tiled linoleum floor, and quite a lot of it had spattered onto the woman’s white brogues. And although Lucy knew from sex ed class the previous year that the nurse could field the most embarrassing questions lobbed at her by Chad and his idiot posse, she had mumbled when Lucy asked her how many kids were sick and if it was contagious.

  “What is it?” Lucy had said. “Strep? Or is it mono?” For some reason there was a coolness factor associated with mono. It meant you’d been kissing someone. Julie Reininger’s rep had been cemented by having mono and being out of school for a whole month last winter.

  “Maybe that bird flu they were talking about on the news?” Lucy had continued, and she’d been almost mesmerized by the weird spasm that quivered across Mrs. Reynolds’s fingers and the way her eyes skittered away. And then she’d bitten her lip, as the nurse jabbed the needle into her arm again. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Reynolds had left the room, clasping the full tube of blood and closing the door firmly behind her. Lucy had heard the sound of the lock clicking shut. She had waited, until her sweaty thighs had stuck to the paper covering the gurney and she realized that she had to go to the bathroom. Finally, after looking at the closed door and the frosted glass window, she got up and walked around the small room, sliding drawers open and checking out the plastic-wrapped syringes, the tongue depressors flavored with cinnamon, the model of the female reproductive system all shiny purple and pink plastic—she’d wondered if the colors were anatomically accurate—and blowing balloons with a couple of powdery surgical gloves. She tried not to think about how full her bladder was. One of the bottom drawers held a thick stack of folders. Lucy was about to close it when she noticed Chad Grey’s name and casually flipped the cover open. Chad had been absent for the last few days, and Lucy couldn’t say she missed him. He always had some lame comment to make when she walked past his locker in the hallway, and he liked coming up with stupid words to rhyme with her name. Being called “Goosey” or “Moosey” might not have been exactly insulting, but it was almost impossible to walk to your desk with any kind of poise when a crew of boys was hissing it under their breaths. Maybe he had an STD or something….

  A wallet-sized student photo was clipped to the top of the page. A black bar was slashed across his eyes in marker, and the letter D was carefully marked next to his name. Lucy would have liked to believe that it stood for dumb but even then she was afraid it meant something much more terminal. She read: “Student complains of abdominal pain, fever, headache, backache, nausea. No lesions. Subconjunctival bleeding, subcutaneous bleeding. Hemorrhagic variant suspected. Sent to Dr. Lessing/R. Island for confirmation.”

  And there was a folder for Hilly Taylor and one for Samantha Barnes and that massive jerk AJ Picard, and, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen any of them around for a while. She had trained herself to ignore them for so long, but now it seemed crazy that she could go from class to class and sit there doodling in the margins of her notebooks without noticing the empty desks. And each photo had been altered in the same way, black bars slashed across their eyes, the letter D written in thick, black lines, and the same listing of symptoms.

  Suddenly she had to pee so badly, she squeezed her legs together like a toddler. She kept rifling through the papers and there, almost at the bottom of the pile, was one marked “Lucy Holloway.” It was thicker than the rest. Seeing it made the latest needle hole in her arm twinge. They’d turned her into a pincushion these last few weeks. And there’d been no explanation. Just more tests following the first physical exam, when Mrs. Reynolds had run her fingers over the smooth skin of Lucy’s upper arms, looking for the puckered scar of a vaccination that wasn’t there.

  “My parents didn’t believe in them,” Lucy had whispered when the nurse had finally thought to ask her and she’d begun to feel afraid that there was something really wrong with her. It was one of the only ways her straight parents deviated from the norm. She remembered when Maggie had told her, in a hushed voice, about their older brother, who’d died when he was barely two years old from an allergic reaction to a shot. “That’s when Mom and Dad moved out of New York to Sparta, here in New Jersey,” Maggie had said breathlessly, her eyes round with delicious horror. “Because it’s less crowded and people are healthier, so it doesn’t matter.” Then she’d added, “Alex’s face swelled up like a pumpkin, and his hands looked like shiny pink balloons, and then his tongue turned black.” And even though there was no way Maggie could have known all that, the image had given Lucy nightmares for years.

  Now she opened the folder slowly, half-afraid she’d see the black bar and the D, but then thinking that if she did then that would indicate it meant something other than deceased. And that would be good, right? Her startled face looked back at her from the photo. It was a copy of the picture on the student ID she was supposed to wear clipped to her backpack but never did. Her thick, curly bangs obscured her left eye completely, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line that almost made her lips disappear, but there was no black bar, no letter D.

  She’d picked up her folder and stumbled backward to the gurney, spilling pages covered in weird symbols, rows of numbers and decimal points, percentages and charts. Too much information for someone who had suffered many scraped knees and cuts and broken bones but had never contracted anything worse than a head cold. One thing you could say about Lucy Holloway was that she had near perfect attendance. She wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the science stuff, and her bladder had finally demanded that she do something about it. She peed in a blue plastic cup and then dropped it in the biohazard receptacle, trying not to tip it over. The can was filled with used syringes and marked with a yellow and black skull.

  And then Mrs. Reynolds had come back; the clicking of the lock opening gave Lucy just enough time t
o stuff her folder back into the drawer and vault onto the examining table. The nurse had jotted down a few notes and then made the calls that brought a legion of white-coats in, their faces blank behind their masks, and the battery of testing had begun again, until finally her father had shown up. He’d seemed twelve feet tall standing in the doorway, swinging his briefcase like an axe, his face purple with rage. She had never seen him with his cuffs undone, his tie unknotted, his carefully combed hair bristling. Something stony in his face had stopped her from asking any questions when he’d dragged her out of the room. Afterward, there’d been no time. Lucy never went back to school. Missed final exams, never picked up her report card, and soon there had been no reason to think about school. She’d received her yearbook in the mail a month or so later, sent directly from the printer with a computer-generated mailing label affixed.

  A few pages further and there Lucy was again, a shot of her hunched over her journal, her hair a tangled curtain drawn across her face, scribbling away furiously. All around her were people caught in the midst of laughing and talking, their hands a blur of motion, moving around her as if she weren’t there. And she kind of hadn’t been. In her mind she’d been traveling and thinking about the day she could escape, and she had written it all down in her journal. Even to herself, though, she had to admit she looked like a strange, dull girl. Lucy closed the book, thinking not for the first time that she should burn it or throw it away, and ended up stowing it safely in a fold of the orange tarp against the wall. She sat back down next to the fire and clasped her arms around her shins, resting her chin on one bony kneecap. Her body thrummed with exhaustion.

  If Aidan had gone to her school, she wondered if he’d have talked to her or if he’d have gravitated toward the in crowd. She could picture him: confident, easy, and relaxed. She could see Julie and Hilly hanging on his muscular arms, imagine him in a letterman jacket or a numbered basketball jersey. What was his deal, anyway? He reminded her of the boys at school. He had that swagger, that confidence, which she could only suppose came from having things always go your way. And from looking like he did, like something out of a preppy sportswear catalog. But he was different, too, in a way she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Two things bothered Lucy: One was that Aidan seemed to know quite a lot about her and where she lived. She wondered if he was spying on her after all. She’d felt as if she was being watched for a long time now. And if so, that begged the question why? And the other, far more important, was, what if he was right about the dogs? She could think of no reason why someone would be tracking her, but it made her feel unsafe for the first time since she’d found the hollow and the willow grove. She’d built her camp. It was as warm and dry as she could manage. It was comforting in a weird way, maybe because it was completely hers and proof that she could survive on her own, away from other people.

  At first the thought of being alone had been terrifying. It was what had driven her to leave her family house and venture back into the city, searching for someone to tell her what to do next. She’d wandered blindly, attempting to mesh her memories of various streets with the rubble-strewn desolation around her, and eventually followed a cluster of scared-looking teenagers who seemed to be heading somewhere.

  The shelters that had been organized after the first and second waves of the plague had passed were depressing and crowded with survivors looking for answers or authority figures that weren’t there. There were maybe five of them set up in gutted churches and schools and sports arenas around what remained of the city, and they all looked the same: long rows of camp beds, flickering tube lights, and huddled bodies under thin blankets. People bundled under the covers like they were children afraid of the dark. She couldn’t help but be reminded of the last time she’d seen her parents in the hospital, lying on gurneys side by side in the hallway with sheets pulled up over their faces.

  It had been impossible to sleep. Every three hours there was the grinding roar of old generator-powered fans starting up and pushing around the warm air and the thick smell of unwashed clothing, unwashed skin, and instant noodles. And always, from one bed or another, a constant keening, like a wounded animal had crawled inside to die, and strangled sobs sometimes exploding into rage. The woman in the bed next to her, her gray face sagging with exhaustion, had never stopped crying and moaning, “The Sweepers took my boy away, the Sweepers took my boy away,” until it started to sound like the lyrics to a sad song. Lucy had slept in her clothes with her boots on and her backpack clasped to her chest, too scared even to visit the bathrooms at night, when grimy, wild-eyed people gathered for secret reasons of their own.

  One day, as she was coming back from a solitary walk around a swampy, mosquito-infested neighborhood that used to have the best used record stores, she’d seen a squad of people in white hazard suits come out of the shelter with the sad woman and a few others—mostly children—bundle them into a white van with darkened windows, and speed away. The men’s faces were covered with blue surgical masks and their hands were gloved. The lady had left her purse behind, pushed halfway under her pillow, as if she was planning on coming back in a few minutes; as if she hadn’t meant to leave. By the next morning it was gone, and the pillow, too. Pillows were in short supply. After that, Lucy had gotten out of there as soon as she could. She’d been better away from people and among the trees, where she felt like she could breathe.

  A sudden flurry of raindrops forced their way through the roof and dripped onto her head and neck. She blinked. She’d set bundles of sage burning in the corners and the purple smoke was thick on the ground, the spicy fug strong enough to mask the briny scent of cooked turtle. Her clothes were still damp, but beginning to stiffen. She had been sitting for an hour at least, staring at nothing. She peeled off her wet things, scrubbed her skin with a scratchy towel, and put on dry clothes. The thick woolly socks on her feet felt like heaven, even though her big toes poked through. She wrapped herself in her mother’s shawl, and then slipped on her leather jacket, pulling the collar up around her ears. She pushed her waterlogged boots close to the fire. Then she peered into the depths of the cooking pot. It looked like a thick soup, greenish-brown, and it smelled salty and wild. Chunks and strings of indefinable matter floated on the top. Lucy’s stomach turned an unhappy somersault, but from nausea or hunger, she wasn’t sure. It had been at least sixteen hours since she’d choked down a heap of lukewarm acorn mush, and she dipped a bowl in now, being careful not to stir up the murk too much. It was stronger tasting than she expected. As salty as boiled seaweed, and although she was careful to sip with a pursed mouth, straining it through her teeth, there was plenty of sand and little bits of turtle shell floating around with the gluey wild onions and the chewy dried mushrooms. It was slightly less repulsive than the salamander stew she’d made before finding out it was better to skin them first, and she reminded herself that the survival book had praised turtle meat as being high-protein and low-fat. However, she would not be recommending it to anyone.

  She forced the food down, and then sat determinedly not thinking about what she had just eaten for a few minutes until she could be sure that it was going to stay down. Instead she found her thoughts returning to Aidan. Lucy decided that she was pretty sure she disliked him intensely, his attitude, his annoying self-assured way. The fire wheezed and snapped and sent out tiny wavering flames that occasionally puffed gouts of smoke as if they concealed a small dragon. The flicker of rain falling beyond the walls reminded her of snow on a television screen. Lucy fell asleep, sitting up, her jacket pulled tight around her, the smell of worn leather comforting.

  In her dream there were dogs swimming in the lake, their pelts dark and streaming water like seals, and they were herding the small boat she was in, pushing it toward shore. There was something hidden in the pitch-black that terrified her. Was Aidan somewhere? She could hear him, but the sound of his voice echoed all around her, and she couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and it was too dark to see him. Suddenly s
he was certain that the dogs were pushing her away from the safety of land, into the open waters.

  She came awake in a rush, not sure what had roused her. Her eyes felt as if they were filled with grit. The camp was flooded with a soft gray light. It was too quiet, and after a moment Lucy realized that the storm had blown itself out and that it was the encompassing stillness that had wakened her. She could hear the trickle of water sheeting down the walls of her shelter, but other than that there was a deep silence, muffled, as if she still had her head under her arm, or she were still asleep. It was eerie. She got up, forced on her boots without tying them, and moved the screen aside. She was definitely awake. Her boots were clammy, the leather stiff. It was not quite dawn. Droplets of moisture glistened on the grass stems. The rain must have just stopped. The trees about her shook as though a giant had flicked their tops carelessly as he walked past, and Lucy realized that the roof of her shelter was swaying as if blown by a strong breeze. But there was not a breath of wind now. It was still and so, so hushed, it seemed the entire world was frozen between moments.

  Lucy stumbled out toward the shore. Wet reeds slapped against her hands. Her jeans were already soaked to the knee. The air was warm. All the myriad sounds of animals waking up were missing. No frogs. No birdsong. No rustle of mouse or vole in the long grass. The sun was rising now, just cresting the purple edge of the horizon behind her. She felt the heat on the back of her neck and shrugged out of her leather jacket and the shawl, carrying both under one arm. She checked to make sure her knife was sheathed at her waist. Everything seemed crystal clear, the curious quality of light so sharp it hurt her eyes. Her booted feet squelched and slid in the sand, the loose laces clumpy with mud. A sound like the flip-flop of a car’s windshield wipers in a rainstorm reached her ears, but magnified a hundredfold. Ahead of her, the surface of the sea appeared to be seething, like molten silver at a boiling point. She stopped and slit her eyes, shading them against the brilliance of the light. She’d seen the ocean just before a sudden storm, with a blazing sun overhead, when the waves seemed picked out in metal wires and the sky was almost black, but this was different. This was like a spilling of gleaming coins.