by Tom Howard
“Where’d you get those glasses anyway,” I say. I go through the backpack again to make sure everything’s still there. Just habit. Most things we keep at the Snack Shack or the house on Poplar, but some things I like to have with us all the time. Flashlight and batteries, a couple books, emergency meds, and so on. A drawing Hildy did for our mom on Mother’s Day that she wanted to keep for some reason. Some pictures of the three of us, pre-Cory.
“Pier Three,” she says. “Milk jugs. ’Member?”
“Kinda.” Thinking that we’re running low on antibiotics. And clonazepam, but I already knew that.
Hildy says, “So yeah, I went back and set ’em up and explained the rules to myself. Then I was like, ‘Alright, Hildy, now take your time and whatnot. You can do it. Just concentrate.’ And I’m like—”
“You don’t gotta tell me the whole story,” I say. A heavy godforsaken silence follows. I try to wait it out but I can’t. I say, “Jesus, okay, you can tell me.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” I say.
“Well, so then I was like, ‘Dang, I got it, you don’t gotta lecture me, we’re the same age, right?’ And so I went around and picked up the first ball and threw it, but I missed pretty bad. Like I don’t even know where that ball is anymore. But I said not to worry, I said, ‘You’re a natural, kid! You sure you’re only eleven? You sure you’re not a professional ballplayer?’ Friendly at first, but then kind of suspicious. I said, ‘You trying to pull a fast one on me, kid?’ And I’m like, ‘No, sir, I’m eleven.’ I said you’d vouch for me because you were there when I was born, even though you were only two and maybe didn’t remember me being born, because that’d be so weird? But then I was like, ‘Dang, I was just kidding, Hildy, I know you’re eleven. You go on.’ Which was mighty nice, so I said, ‘I appreciate that, sir.’ Being extra polite and whatnot, thinking maybe it would get me an extra ball?”
The dogs are gone now, slipped into the dark beyond the pier. When I look back to the south I can’t even tell which lights are missing anymore. I’m thinking maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe the lights aren’t going out just yet after all. Other than Pier One, which went dark right after we got here in May.
“I’m glad you finally knocked them down anyway,” I tell her. “Just stop saying whatnot.”
“Sorry, yeah. ’Cept I didn’t exactly knock them down, but the thing is that I felt bad for myself, standing there all sad and crazy looking. And I said, I mean the other one of me said, I could maybe borrow one of the prizes? Just one of the small ones?” She turns the glasses over in her lap. “Guess I can take ’em back. You think I ought to?”
I remind her we should only take what we really need.
Hildy blinks down at the glasses. “Yeah, I know,” she says. “Just seemed like I needed ’em.”
“Forget it,” I say. “Let’s go. We need to shut things down.”
“I wish we could just keep everything on all the time,” she says.
I tell her she always says that. Then I get to my feet. “Come on,” I say.
“All right. I’ve got to poop now anyways.”
As we leave I sneak a look back toward Pier One. The wind is picking up and the Ferris wheel’s moving on its own, which makes me unhappy. Makes me think of ghosts. Or like one weird ghost, maybe, who rides a broken Ferris wheel over and over and never says anything, never even looks at you. I think maybe that would be the worst kind of ghost. Just because he’d look so sad and lonely and terrifying at the same time. Also I hate Ferris wheels.
* * *
It’s hot but Hildy still wants to sleep on the roof back at Poplar. She says she feels weird sleeping inside some stranger’s house. It’s one of the only houses we found that didn’t have any dead people in it. But I know what she means.
The roof’s got a telescope. We take turns looking for people. Signs of Life, Hildy says. She always gets distracted and ends up pointing the scope at the moon. “Just in case,” she says. So mostly it’s my job to look for Signs of Life. I’ve got a whole system. It takes an hour or so to cover everything, about ten miles up and down the beach, and inland too. Hildy’s asleep most nights before I’m even halfway done. But I feel better doing it, like I’m taking care of things.
She crawls into her sleeping bag and lines her animal collection around her feet. A couple she brought from home, but most of the animals are from the boardwalk here. An owl, a teddy bear missing an eyeball, a dolphin wearing a little bowler hat, a sad monkey and a happy monkey, an alligator named Russ—he seemed to just have a name right from the beginning, like she recognized him from way back or something—and a half dozen lemurs with yellow eyes.
“Rose and Thorn,” she says.
I tell her I’m not in the mood and point the scope toward the south.
“It’s tradition,” she says. “You got to. Otherwise it’s bad luck.”
I tell her she can’t just start doing something and say it’s all of a sudden a tradition.
“That’s what a tradition is,” she says. “I’ll start. Unless you want to. I guess you could start. But you want me to start?”
“Go ahead, fine.” Keeping my eye on the hardware store a couple miles down the beach. The windows are busted and I can tell the shelves are empty, but the streetlight outside is still working, so I get a nice clear view. Somebody spray-painted something on the brick wall next to the broken windows, these big jagged letters all running together so it looks like some long crazy word that starts with an O. But I can’t figure it out. I guess I could ride over there sometime, but I never do. Maybe I like the mystery of it.
“Thorn,” she says. “No, Rose. No! Thorn. The second hot dog I ate. The first one was pretty bad, and I was like, ‘Hildy, maybe the second one is actually pretty good. Maybe the second hot dog convinced the first hot dog to taste all weird and gray and slimy to throw you off, Hildy. And if you don’t eat it, you’ll never even know you got tricked. You’ll never know there’s this batshit hot dog conspiracy—’”
“Hildy!” I taught her that word a couple days ago. Now I’m thinking it was a mistake.
“Sorry, so anyways I ate it. Only it wasn’t good. It wasn’t worse, but it seemed worse because I guess I raised my expectations about it? Plus I was thinking about the conspiracy and that was getting me worked up maybe.”
The streetlight across from the hardware store is moving around in the wind, throwing weird shadows over the store, making it look like someone’s moving around in there. But no one’s ever moving around. Not there, not anywhere, not ever.
“Dang,” Hildy says. “I should’ve said Reggie’s ear worms.”
“What’s your Rose?” I say.
“You didn’t say your Thorn.”
I give her the eye.
“You can’t always have the same Thorn,” she says. “Although I guess it’s a pretty good Thorn, considering. So, yeah. My Rose was macaroni dinner.”
“Was just plain old macaroni,” I say, rolling my eyes a little. I know she can’t see me.
She yawns. “Not so much the dinner,” she says. “Just afterward. We were sitting there at the Snack Shack and the clouds were rolling in and you said you always liked storms over the water.”
“And?”
“That’s it.” She rolls over in her sleeping bag so her voice is muffled and quiet. “I just liked you saying that, Woody.”
A couple minutes later she’s asleep.
* * *
In the morning I sweep up the boardwalk a bit. There’s more sand every day, and trash that blows in from the streets around the piers. I can’t get rid of it all but I don’t like to see it pile up.
Afterward I go down to the beach. Sometimes when it’s early and the sun’s still hanging low over the water, it’s like everything is the same as always. It’s quiet and still except for the sea wind, and it’s like this is just how the world’s supposed to be. Usually it doesn’t last long. I’ll end up seeing something, and I’ll remember thing
s aren’t the same as always. But not today.
Past Pier One and the Ferris wheel, I find a Coke bottle washed up on the beach. I wipe the sand and the seaweed off and pry out Hildy’s cork. With my little finger I reach inside and slip the note free.
Hi there. It’s July or August or something here. I guess by the time you get this it’ll be the future, which is so weird right? Like maybe I’m an old lady in a crazy sweater by the time you get this. Except by then I hope we already get to meet in person, due to me learning to sail like I told you. Except so far I’m still a beginner and Woody says any ship I sail would be a death-rat. I don’t know what a death-rat is. Also I don’t know why I’m wearing a crazy sweater when I’m old. I hope things are good on your island. Say hi to whatever your people’s names are and enjoy them sunsets. We had macaroni for dinner and it was delicious, and Reggie’s got ear worms. Woody hasn’t had any fits either. Bye, Hildy.
After I slide the letter back into the bottle and cork it, I walk to the edge of the water and throw it out to sea as hard as I can.
* * *
Hildy spends a couple hours collecting sea glass on the beach while the gulls scream overhead. Farther down the beach are some vultures too. I watch from the pier and read a book.
The wind feels good. When it comes in off the ocean you can’t smell anything else. I look back down and try to find my place on the page, but suddenly the words are all gone.
It always takes me by surprise. I don’t know why. Just a funny feeling at first, like I know what’s coming, not just the fit but all the little details that come with it. The way the wind feels on the back of my head as I start to sweat. The knotty grain of the boardwalk planks under my hands. The exact color of the sky, some deep blue that’s never been in the sky before and probably never will again. And the feeling: like the world’s not just going to end, but it’s already over. Like it was over a long time ago.
Lots of people coming toward me. Shuffling on dumb legs with blank, dead faces. They’re not coming for me. It’s not like that. They just walk right past and disappear when they reach the end of the pier, like they’re all just marching to hell or something. Or to heaven, I guess, except they don’t look like they’re on their way to heaven. Sometimes they look at me as they go past, which doesn’t make me feel too good.
I wave at my mom when I see her but she doesn’t notice. So I lie back down on the planks and look up at the sky. All that blue. And indigo, maybe. I don’t even know what indigo is, but maybe this is indigo. People rumble past like a thunderstorm on their way to the sea or to hell or wherever.
Sometime later, Hildy leans over me and her tangled hair falls in my face.
“You doing okay now?”
“You don’t gotta yell,” I tell her. I sit up and look around. The people and the thunder are gone, but my head’s still pounding. “How was it,” I say.
Hildy says, “You were going, like,” and she lets her tongue hang out and she makes like a zombie noise and her eyes roll back in her head. “So kind of batshit, but just regular batshit I guess?”
“You’re still yelling,” I say.
“Sorry. You take your clonazepam?” She digs around in the backpack.
“Wasn’t that bad,” I say. I haven’t told her I started rationing the pills. Not supposed to ration the clonazepam, but I don’t know when we’ll find any more. Most of the pharmacies were emptied out a long time ago. At least we can still find amoxicillin sometimes in people’s medicine cabinets.
“You see ’em this time?” she asks, and I nod.
“You see Mom?” she asks.
“I saw her.”
“What about him?”
“They’re not real, Hildy. They’re just hallucinations.”
“Yeah, but did you see him?”
I shake my head.
“Good,” she says. She wraps her arms around herself and the wind blows her hair in a thousand directions. She looks like a wild animal.
After dinner I let her ride the Himalaya for an hour. The Himalaya just goes around and around forever but it whips you from side to side, too, and then there’s a switch to make it run backwards. Hildy never gets tired of it, and she usually ends up so hoarse from screaming that she can barely talk the next morning.
Tonight she doesn’t scream so much. She’s coughing a little when the ride is done.
I ask her how long she’s been coughing like that.
“You know I don’t keep track of time,” she says.
I give her the old eyebrow.
“I’m fine,” she says. She asks me if I’ve still got a headache.
I shake my head. “Doing okay.”
“I’m glad,” she says.
“You want to ride again?”
“Maybe not,” she says. “I guess I’m a little tired. Maybe we can turn in a little early, Woody.”
“Okay,” I say.
* * *
Hildy stopped talking when she was nine. Nobody knew why. They took her to a psychologist and then a neurologist, too, but nobody could get her to talk or figure out what was wrong.
“At least it’s more peaceful,” is what Cory said, over dinner. That made me angry, maybe because I was thinking the same thing and I felt bad, I don’t know. Maybe because my mom didn’t say anything back to him. She should’ve said something back to him.
Eventually Hildy talked again, but she wasn’t the same. She stayed in the shadows and moved soundlessly around the house, like a ghost. Sometimes she’d sing real quiet-like, but it was all nonsense words. Once I caught her just standing in the backyard in the same spot for an hour. Later I asked her what she was doing out there, and she said she thought she was dead. She said she thought maybe that’s what it was like to be dead, that maybe you just watch the night fall and the leaves blow all around and the world moves on without you.
That’s around the time I started watching Cory a lot, and praying for terrible things.
I was glad when he got sick. And I wasn’t too upset when he died, even though I felt responsible. Then everybody else died too. Even though I tried to take it back. I guess that’s what happens when you pray for something terrible like that. Now and then I think I should apologize, when I see all those ghosts shuffling past on their way out to the sea. But I never do.
I think about telling Hildy someday. I know I can’t. But I guess I think about it.
* * *
No moon or stars tonight. Clouds moving in, but I’m hoping the rain will hold off till the morning.
“Read that last one again,” says Hildy.
So I read it again.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Hildy shivers beside me. “What’s it mean,” she whispers.
“You always ask me that,” I say. “How come you like it so much?”
“I just like the words,” she says. “And that part about the yellow fog that curls around the house and falls asleep. It’s batshit weird.”
“Supposed to be a love song,” I say.
“Well, it’s got them mermaids at the end,” she says.
“You want me to keep reading or you just want to talk about it forever?”
She buries her head against my shoulder and says she wants me to read.
“Hold the flashlight steady, then. And stop picking your butt.” “Sorry,” she says.
* * *
The rains come in the morning. We spend the day at the Snack Shack, which has an overhang so we can still be outside without getting wet. Hildy reads her sailing book and writes letters to whoever she writes letters to, and asks me how to spell things.
My head’s starting to hurt. I go through the atlas trying to figure out where we’ll head once the weather gets cold. Summer’s coming to an end. I don’t even know the date anymore, and Hildy stopped keeping track months ago. But I can tell the days aren’t as long.
At one point I look up and Hildy’s at the edge of the overhan
g, trying to get Reggie to come inside. She’s down on her knees, coughing, half in and half out of the rain. The dog’s just standing there in the middle of the boardwalk with his tongue hanging out, soaked to the bone.
“He don’t look right,” she says.
“Doesn’t,” I say.
The Carolinas, maybe. I don’t know anything about the Carolinas. But Emerald Isle sounds nice. Sounds like a place Hildy would like, even if it doesn’t have a boardwalk. Maybe it won’t have any ghosts either. I measure it out: four hundred miles. At least a month to get there on our bikes, which means we’ve only got a couple more weeks here. Maybe not even that long. I think about Hildy’s cough. Wonder if she’ll even be able to make the trip. That makes my headache worse. I take out a sheet of paper and start writing a list of what we’ll need to pack.
Macaroni
Toothpaste
Toilet paper
Water
Soups
We need to start eating vegetables. I think maybe Carolina has lots of gardens and orchards, and maybe they weren’t all burned down like the ones up this way.
Basket (for apples/oranges) (from own orchard)
I rub my forehead and chew on the pen cap, thinking.
Screwdriver and hammers and assorted nails etc.
Medical supplies
Clonazepam
Amoxi
I start hunting around the Snack Shack. “Hey,” I say to Hildy. “You seen the backpack?”
She blinks at me a couple times and then her eyes grow huge. She says, “Oh, damn. Damn, Woody, I think I messed up.”
“What do you mean?”
She says she took it with her in the morning when she went exploring on her bike, so she’d have something to hold treasures. Only maybe she left it somewhere.
My head feels like it’s throbbing now, and I ask her where she went.
“Don’t get mad at me,” she says.
“Jesus, I’m not mad,” I say. “Just tell me.”
“You’re yelling, though.” She sees my look and says, “Okay, so I don’t exactly remember. I was following Reggie so I wasn’t paying absolute attention, and also you know I don’t have any kind of sense of direction and whatnot. But I’m pretty sure I set it down on Fern.”
