Autumn in the City of Lights

by Kirby Howell

  When we turned onto the tree-lined lane where our house was, the horses’ hooves went almost silent on the dirt and weeds concealing the concrete evidence of an era of human history gone forever. I looked up at the street sign as we passed by. When we moved in, Ben had repainted it to say “Hoover Hollow” because the street housed most of the Hoover Settlement people who came with us back to California.

  The ancient, knobby trees arced over the street, creating darkness within the pitch black of night. I wasn’t frightened. Wildflowers and tall grasses bearded the disappearing curbs and sidewalks, and the wind sighed through the trees, their great gnarled branches creaking quietly.

  The house we chose was a large Tudor with peaked roofs and dark shutters. A behemoth sycamore towered over the front lawn, keeping the house in perpetual shade. Rissi once said it looked like it was out of a fairy tale, and I agreed with her. It had three bedrooms upstairs, where Rissi, Ben, and I slept; an enormous master suite on the ground level for Connie and Daniel; and a finished basement apartment, which Shad took over. There was a massive fireplace in the living room, and the long table in the kitchen sat at least twelve people. There were a couple acres behind the house with a stable and a guesthouse, where Grey lived.

  Daniel was waiting for us when we turned onto the grassed-over bricks of the driveway. He followed us to the stable and helped remove the saddles, brush down the horses and get them ready for the night. Snicket’s stall was in the back, and as I fed her a carrot, I thought I heard Connie and Daniel quietly arguing in Coach’s stall.

  “We were fine,” she murmured. “Everything is okay.”

  I peeked over the boards between the stalls. Daniel faced me, but his eyes were on Connie. His face was pinched with worry, but he looked a little angry, too. After yesterday, he was probably worried because she, and the rest of us, had been out after dark. He knew I didn’t carry a gun, and Connie flat out refused to carry one. I felt sheepish thinking how, even after yesterday, I still took our safety for granted.

  I gave Snicket the rest of the carrot, tugged on her butterscotch-colored forelock and whispered goodnight to her, then secured her stall door. I helped Rissi finish with her pony, whom she’d named Nugget. When we were done, I sent her on to the house while I stopped at Connie’s stall, where she was methodically combing Coach’s black mane.

  “Was Daniel mad we rode back alone after dark?”

  She looked confused for a moment, then composed herself and began combing again. “He’s just upset about Ben. We all are.”

  I nodded. She paused to hug me tightly. “I’m so so thankful you’re okay,” she whispered fiercely into my ear. Her tone frightened me a little, but since moving back home, Connie had become quieter, and yet louder at the same time. She was withdrawn, but had forceful and even emotional outbursts when it came to our safety and well-being. She worried Rissi would fall off her horse, she set Shad and Ben up with any nice girl she met, she fussed at Daniel about eating his vegetables, and gave Grey dark looks when she found us alone together.

  “Are you okay, Connie?” I asked suddenly. “We’re all going to get through this, you know.”

  She stared at the wide-tooth comb in her hands for a moment, then looked up at me. She opened her mouth, paused, then sighed. “Of course I’m okay.” She smiled, and I felt better as we went into the house together.

  Half an hour later, I was sprawled across my unmade bed in clean pajamas, paging through my parents’ photo albums. The leadership of New Burbank still considered it too dangerous for us to ride down to the Westside, at least until the peace talks were settled, so Grey had projected us to The Water Tower to let me collect some personal items. It was a comfort to have these photo albums, one of my mother’s necklaces, and my father’s reading glasses. I kept everything in a box hidden in the back of the closet, so no one would know we’d gone back.

  There was a quiet knock at the door. I tossed my quilt across the albums and called, “Come in!”

  It was Grey. Even after all we’d been through, and the somewhat quiet months we’d spent together here in New Burbank with little to no drama between us, his presence still made me pause sometimes. Seeing him enter a room and smile at me, knowing he found relief near me as well, always amazed me.

  Without a word, he closed the door behind him and crawled onto the bed beside me. He crammed a pillow under his head and, as was our custom, pulled me against his side. He must have gone to the guesthouse first to change and shower after the hospital, because he smelled like warmth, lemons, and home.

  “How’s your head?” he murmured after a few minutes.

  With everything that had happened with Ben, I’d completely forgotten about my concussion. So I had to consider it for a second. My head still hurt, but my heart ached more. “It’s better,” I lied. “How’s Ben?”

  “The same,” he said. “He hasn’t woken up yet. But that’s not a bad thing. We’re going to take this day-by-day for a while. I’ll take good care of him, Fòmhair. I promise.”

  He shuffled his arm out from underneath me and turned to inspect the bump on my head. I turned my head slightly, bringing our faces together, and briefly touched my lips to his. When I pulled away, his sparkling blue eyes focused on me.

  “What was that?” he asked, quietly smiling.

  “That was a thank you,” I answered. “For... miscellaneous things.”

  “Miscellaneous things?” he repeated. “Can you be more specific?”

  “For staying here with all of us when you could have left,” I said, brushing a lock of his hair behind his ear. “For staying up for 48 hours straight to take care of Ben. For loving me. For everything.”

  He leaned toward me, and our lips connected again. The throbbing in my head was replaced by a falling sensation in my stomach, and I slid my arms around his neck. For a moment, my sorrow over Ben slipped into the background of my mind.

  Grey started on my neck and slowly worked his way around to my throat, then up to my jaw and the corner of my mouth. I pulled him closer, kissing him hard. I could feel the warmth of his palms through the thin material of my pajamas. I shivered as his thumb grazed the bare skin of my stomach above the drawstring waistband.

  Then I heard Daniel calling to Connie, and the haze that usually fell over us when we were alone together receded as if I’d heard my own father’s voice. Daniel often waited up for Grey to leave at night, or for me to come back in from being out at the guesthouse. He would sit in an armchair in a corner of the spacious main hallway, the sports section of an old newspaper open in front of him, waiting and watching. Those were the only times I ever saw him sit in that chair. He’d always pretend to be engrossed in an article, but then he’d shuffle off to bed, yawning, as soon as I closed the door behind Grey.

  Even though I knew my parents were dead, it continued to shock me every time something made me remember. Would my dad have reacted the same way to a boy being in my bedroom? It made me sad that he’d never had the opportunity to show me that protective side of himself.

  “Hey,” Grey said quietly as he leaned forward and took my suddenly chilled hand in his own. “Where’d you go? Are you worried about Ben?”

  I shook my head and forced a small smile through my lips. “Well, yes, but I was actually thinking about my dad. I wish you could have met him. And my mom, too. And Sarah.” And so many other people who’d been in my life not long ago.

  “I wish I could have met them, too, though I feel like I have because of how much you’ve told me about them.” He pulled something out of his sweater pocket. “And because of this.” He placed the object in my hand.

  It was my father’s iPod, still warm from being in his sweater. When we went back to The Water Tower after arriving from Hoover, I found my father’s iPod in his office, tucked away in a drawer. It was the trend now to exchange MP3 players with friends, to listen to their music and then trade them back when you were done. Daniel, Connie, and Shad had already had their turns with mine, but I wasn’t
ready to let my father’s go, even for exchange, except to Grey.

  He leaned across me and grabbed the earbuds on my bedside table, then pulled himself up into a sitting position and began to pick apart the tangled wire with his long, square-tipped fingers. I sat up too and leaned my head on his shoulder, watching him. He offered me one of the earbuds, and then plugged us in.

  “There’s a song I want you to hear. I’m sure you’ve probably heard it, but it’s one I keep coming back to, and I want to know the memory associated with it.” He scrolled through the menu until he found the song and, tilting the screen away from me when I tried to see what it was, pressed play.

  A dim applause filled my ears, and with the opening strains of the orchestra, I immediately recognized the voice. A voice as strong as one of Notre Dame’s bells on a clear day in Paris.

  “Edith Piaf,” I said, smiling.

  Warmth filled my stomach as I let the tinkling piano and weeping violins carry me to the small cottage on the rocky, Ireland coast. Rain pattered against the windows, and Mamó cursed at my grandpa in Gaelic for not tending the sitting room fire. My mother was telling Mamó to lay off, and my dad was flipping the Edith Piaf record playing in the corner. Coddle stew and soda bread cooked in the kitchen, the smell filling the entire cottage. And I was on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and drying out after my wet afternoon down on the cold beach searching for fairies. I was eleven.

  I sighed and leaned further into Grey’s chest. I told him about that afternoon, and his arm went around me, pulling me closer against him.

  “Mamó told me there were fairies on the beach that day. She said they only became visible to us one day a year to collect raindrops so they could bathe. She said if I managed to find and catch one, the fairy would give me her raindrops to drink and grant me one wish.”

  “Did you find any?”

  “I think I made up a story about finding a fairy, and I wanted it to be true so badly that I started believing I actually did.”

  Grey chuckled. “And what did you wish for?”

  I thought back to that day on the beach. “You know, I don’t think I got that far. I was concentrating so much on making up the story I didn’t even think about what I’d wish for.”

  We smiled for the first time since the accident at the Hillside Bowl, and I disappeared into the memory again as Edith Piaf’s voice swelled. I could smell the salty freshness of the nearby beach, the acrid scent of cooking coddle, and my grandma’s laundry soap in the blanket around me. I could still feel the power in her small, bony hand as she patted the top of my head when she passed, heading back into the kitchen. Clusters of framed photos hung on the walls, like barnacles on a dock, and they seemed to lean in on us, holding in the warmth from the stone fireplace against the torrent of wind outside.

  “Fòmhair, we should probably join the others.”

  Grey’s whisper brought me back to the present. The song was ending. I sat up, pulling the earbud from my ear and hearing the escalating noise from the kitchen downstairs.

  Daniel bellowed my name from the bottom of the stairs. I stood up and pulled Grey to his feet.

  “Interesting what living with a teenage girl will do to a middle-aged man.” I lowered my voice as we approached the stairs. “He’s been kind of overly protective lately.”

  Daniel came into view as we descended the stairs. “It’s dinnertime,” he said, eyeing Grey.

  Dinner at our house was usually a time of uncontrolled craziness. Everyone helped cook. This usually meant emptying the contents of the refrigerator and pantry and making a mess until we decided what to make. We took turns cleaning up in twos every night, except for Connie, who was exempt from dinner cleanup duty, simply because she ended up doing most of the cooking and organizing. It was usually the event of the day, but with both Ben and Shad absent, it was a quieter experience.

  We decided on vegetable stew, fresh baked bread, and fried eggs. The vegetables were from the garden I’d begun in the backyard, and Grey and Daniel began chopping them up, while Connie started mashing tomatoes to start the stew base. Rissi helped me mix up some no-rise bread as usual, but before we could leave our customary handprints on top of the neat, little loaves before putting them into the oven to bake, she went to the dining room table and sat by herself.

  Just as we were sitting down to eat, I heard the front door swing open. It caught all of us by surprise. I peeked into the living room, half-hoping for the miracle of Ben strolling in as if nothing had happened. But it wasn’t Ben.

  “Shad?!” I said, surprised. My skin prickled in goosebumps as a cold wave of terror hit me. Could Ben have died? Is that why he was here now when he said he’d stay the night? Shad saw the expression on my face and was quick to hold up his hands.

  Before he could speak, Grey stepped up behind me. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s changed. He’s fine... or the same as when you all left. Jen said she was too tired to sleep and wanted to stay the evening with him. Did I miss dinner?”

  I smiled and pointed toward the table, where Daniel had paused in setting out plates. “You’re just in time.”

  We sat down and began eating in silence. The meal was as appetizing as ever, but our hearts weren’t in it. Connie shook her head, looking at her watch.

  “We’ve been eating dinner later and later these days. This would not have flown at my house two years ago.”

  “At least we’re eating dinner,” Shad said, shoveling three fried eggs into his soup. “And at least only one of us is incapacitated in the hospital right now.”

  Connie burst into tears, and we all paused, staring at her. Daniel let the soup ladle fall back into the pot and pulled her under his arm. She leaned into him, wiping her face to regain composure. Daniel murmured something to her, and she shook her head.

  “I’m fine, really.” She picked up her spoon then set it back down again. “I’m just tired and not very hungry. I’m going to go to bed."

  She stood and kissed the top of Daniel’s head, then bent to kiss each of us in turn. Concerned, Grey began to speak, but she patted his shoulder. “I just need some sleep; that’s all.” She turned and started toward the master bedroom on the other end of the house, and called over her shoulder, “Rissi, don’t forget to brush your teeth tonight!”

  Everyone looked at Rissi, and she flushed hot pink and began tearing her bread into small pieces. “MA-rissa...” she muttered under her breath.

  “I didn’t mean to upset Connie,” Shad said. “I guess that sounded pretty callous.” He paused and thought for a moment before continuing. “I’m just angry at the whole situation.”

  Daniel shook his head, helping himself to Connie’s bowl of stew. “We’re all angry. It wasn’t your fault, Shad.”

  I looked up at Grey, suddenly not feeling hungry myself. He’d been exchanging a look with Daniel, but noticed me looking up at him and quickly asked, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I miss The Water Tower, where the three of us used to live,” I said, looking at Rissi and remembering what it’d been like with just her, Ben, and me there. “When can we go back?”

  Daniel dunked his bread into his soup and said, “I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to, Autumn.”

  “What? Why?” This was news to me.

  “Now that we’re moving forward, or at least, were moving forward, with peace talks with The Front, it might leave that whole area off limits to us. But we don’t need the Westside. It’s safer here.”

  “This peace treaty is so asinine,” Shad said, glowering. “We came back to take the city and get rid of The Front, and now we’re treating them like welcomed neighbors. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s clean up an area that The Front hasn’t been able to completely ruin yet, and then invite them to come and piss all over it.’”

  Rissi’s eyes widened.

  “Shad,” I warned.

  He let his spoon fall into his bowl, splashing egg and soup onto the table. “It’s not my night to clean up,
is it?”

  “No, tonight is Rissi and me,” I said, sighing.

  “Good. I’m going to bed.” His footsteps were slow and dejected going down the stairs to the basement.

  “Well, I guess dinner’s over,” Daniel said. He got to his feet, picked up a hunk of bread, and wrapped it in a napkin. “You’re a fine baker, Autumn. I’ll see if Connie wants any of this before she goes to sleep.” Then he disappeared to join her.

  Grey kissed my forehead, and I whispered for him to meet me in my room later. He squeezed me tight, then waved to Rissi and left through the back door, crossing the dark lawn to the guesthouse.

  Rissi and I moved quietly around the kitchen, gathering up dishes, dumping vegetable remains in my compost heap in the backyard, and scrubbing the dishes and pots until the large kitchen was orderly again. By that time, it was after eleven, and the events from the last two days seemed like they’d happened a week ago.

  I sighed and stretched my sore back, then draped the damp towel over the edge of the kitchen sink to dry overnight. Rissi had been unnaturally quiet during the process, and I eyed her now. She eyed me back.

  “You worried about Ben?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  She shook her head, then sighed.

  “You sure? I don’t mind talking if you need to, Rissi.”

  “MA-rissa,” she said quietly.

  “MA-rissa,” I parroted.

  “I don’t want to talk about my brother,” she whispered. “But...” she stopped, thinking.

  “Out with it,” I prodded.

  “I know...” she said immediately.