Mom tried to look disapproving, but I could see her eyes light up as we brought in our loot. After a while she got into the whole Christmasy feel.
“My brand of shampoo,” she said. “Oh, and look at this. I haven’t had a crossword puzzle to do in months!”
Of course we oohed and aahed over the rods and reels and flies and nets and wading boots and salt containers. Matt had also found an unopened bag of cat food for Horton and a cordless power saw that still had some power to it.
Neither one of them had thought to take the toilet paper or soap or any of the useful stuff I’d located. But I can always go back to the houses they went through.
As far as I was concerned, though, Jon found the absolute best thing. He was positively giddy when he handed a box to me. “I tried two of them,” he said. “They both worked, so I bet they all do.”
It wasn’t a big box, but I was so excited about what I’d find, my hands shook as I opened it. In the box were twenty-four flashlight pens, all neatly inscribed “Walter’s Realty Your Home Is Our Business.”
I flicked one on and sure enough it worked.
“Now you can write in your journal without using a flashlight,” Jon said.
I could have kissed him. In fact, I’m writing this entry after everyone else has gone to sleep, thanks to Walter’s Realty. If I ever buy a house, I’ll give them my business.
May 7
Mom wouldn’t let us go through any more houses. “You’ve found enough,” she said. “Stealing isn’t a game.”
“We’re not stealing,” Matt said.
“Taking things without permission,” Mom said. “It’s as good as stealing.”
But I didn’t notice her hesitating to do one of the crossword puzzles.
May 8
Matt and Jon went to town to pick up our food, and I was too jumpy to stay in the house.
“I’m going to Mrs. Nesbitt’s,” I said, and I was pleased Mom didn’t make a fuss about stealing.
The first thing I located was a manual can opener, for Matt and Jon. None of us had thought to pick one up on Saturday. I never thought of Mrs. Nesbitt as one to travel, but sure enough, she had a cosmetic bag hidden away, with a tissue packet, a little bar of soap, and three packets of hand sanitizer. She’d left a quarter roll of toilet paper as well.
But the most interesting thing I found was a small electric heater. By the time she’d died, electricity was a thing of the past, so no one had bothered taking it.
But now, at least sometimes, we have electricity. I lugged the heater back to the house, along with whatever else I could find.
“We can use it in the kitchen,” I told Mom. “Or turn it on anyplace whenever we have power.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mom said. “We could put it in the sunroom and cut down on the firewood.”
Of course when you want electricity is exactly when you don’t get it. We haven’t had any since those fabulous four hours a few days ago.
Mom and I then had a lengthy discussion about the causes of World War One so she could feel like we got something done. It seems like a pretty dumb war to me, but most wars seem pretty dumb to me, given how things worked out.
She had just finished telling me how the Russian royal family had all been murdered but some people thought Anastasia had survived, when Matt and Jon returned. They brought the same four bags, but there was more food in each. I knew I should feel bad about that, but I couldn’t make myself.
If Mom noticed the extra two cans in each bag, she didn’t say so. Instead she asked how the roads were.
“A lot better than last week,” Matt said. “Almost no ice.”
“We biked the whole way,” Jon said. “I bet we won’t have any problems getting to the river.”
“All right,” Mom said. “You can leave tomorrow morning after breakfast. But no traveling after dark, and I’ll expect you home by Friday.”
“Saturday,” Matt said. “That way we’ll have three days if the fishing is good. We’ll leave first thing Saturday morning.”
“Saturday, then,” Mom said. “Before then if there aren’t any fish. Or if either one of you doesn’t feel well. No heroics. And no traveling separately. If one of you leaves, you both leave. Is that clearly understood?”
“Clearly,” Matt said, but he was grinning, and Jon could hardly keep still, he was so excited.
I don’t blame them. If I got to go away for five whole days, I’d be landing triple axels on the living room floor.
Chapter 3
May 9
Mom made Matt and Jon eat an extra can of spinach for breakfast, and then we helped them load the bikes.
Matt remembered a folding grocery cart in Mrs. Nesbitt’s cellar, so he ran over there and brought it back. He rigged it to the back of his bike to hold the fishing equipment and the sleeping bags. They both wore their backpacks, which Mom had filled with food and bottles of rainwater.
“We’ll bring back trash bags full of shad,” Matt promised us. “Everything’s going to be better once we get back with food.”
“Wear your face masks,” Mom said. “And boil your drinking water. Matt, you have to be really careful.”
“We will be, I promise,” he said. He and Jon kissed Mom good-bye, and then Matt bent over and gave me a good-bye kiss, too.
I didn’t like that. It felt too final.
We walked out with them and watched as they began their ride down Howell Bridge Road. The air is so bad you can’t see too far ahead of you, but I bet they tore off their face masks a half mile down the road.
I was reading Romeo and Juliet (Mom figures it must be in the curriculum somewhere) and Mom was working on one of her illicit crossword puzzles when the electricity came on. We jumped into action. We put all our pots and pans in the dishwasher, threw in detergent and buckets of rainwater, and hoped for the best.
“I had a thought,” Mom said, which always means More Work for Miranda. “If we could find another electric heater, we could put one in the kitchen and one in the dining room.”
“The firewood’s in the dining room,” I said. “Besides, why would we want to eat in there?”
“We wouldn’t,” Mom said. “But if we stored the firewood in the pantry and had heaters for the kitchen and dining room, then Matt and Jon could share one room and you and I the other. Both rooms have windows that face the sunroom, from when it was the back porch, so they get a little bit of heat from the woodstove. Between that and the heaters and our sleeping bags, we would be warm enough.”
“We’d need someone to check on the woodstove during the night,” I said. “Maybe we should keep one mattress in the sunroom, and we could take turns sleeping in here.” I pictured that, sleeping alone in the kitchen. Even sleeping alone in the sunroom, waking up every few hours to put in another log, sounded like heaven.
Mom and I emptied out the pantry (which didn’t take very long, even with the extra food we got yesterday) and carried in all the remaining firewood. The dishwasher kept churning, and naturally we did some laundry at the same time.
Mom washed the kitchen floor while I swept every piece of bark and leftover twig from the dining room. The electricity held out long enough for us to vacuum.
“Should we move the mattresses in?” I asked once the dining room met with Mom’s approval.
“Not yet,” she said. “All this is dependent on having electricity fairly regularly, especially at night. That may never happen.”
Great. I exhausted myself lugging firewood for a fantasy.
Mom burst out laughing when she saw me scowl. “Things will get better,” she said. “I promise.”
I wanted to ask how. Did she mean we’d get electricity regularly, or the sun would start shining again and we could have a vegetable garden, or Matt and Jon would come back with enough fish to last us a lifetime, or we’d move someplace with food and running water and junior proms? Senior proms, I guess, since I’d be a senior by the time there was a prom. Assuming I ever finish reading Romeo
and Juliet.
But I didn’t ask. Instead I put the second load of laundry into the dryer, throwing in one fabric softener sheet. Horton, who’d run upstairs at the sound of the vacuum cleaner, came back down and sat on my lap while I pretended to read Shakespeare by lamplight, all the while thinking about food and water, blue skies and proms.
May 10
I don’t know if Horton doesn’t like the food Matt found for him, or if he’s holding out for the shad Matt and Jon say they’ll be bringing back, or if he just misses Jon. But he hardly ate a thing.
Mom says when he’s hungry he’ll eat.
We’d almost run out of cat food before Matt brought home that bag, and I’d been worrying about what would happen when we did. In the olden days people fed their cats table scraps or the cats found some mice to nosh on.
But Horton would have no interest in leftover canned peas, assuming we had any left over, which we don’t. And with the cold and the drought and the snow and the ice and the complete lack of sunlight, the mice have all died out.
I was six when Dad brought Horton home. Horton seemed to think Jonny was a kitten, too, because the two of them played together all the time. Horton became more Jonny’s cat than anyone else’s, but we all love him, and I hate the thought of life without him. He’s eleven now, and he doesn’t do much more than sleep and eat and sit on our laps, but he’s still the blue and green and yellow in our lives.
I hope he develops a taste for his new cat food. I hope we can find some more for him or there’s enough shad to go around.
May 11
I told Mom I was going to bike up and down Howell Bridge Road, stopping at the houses to look for space heaters. If I found any, I’d figure out some way of dragging them home.
“You can’t go by yourself,” Mom said. “It’s too dangerous.”
Sometimes I’m so stupid I amaze even myself. “I went all through Shirley Court by myself,” I said.
“When did you do that?” Mom asked.
Then I won the Olympic Gold Medal in stupid. “On Saturday,” I said. “That’s where I found all my stuff.”
“I thought you all went looking together,” Mom said.
“We started out together,” I said. “But we split up right away.”
“You mean you lied to me?” Mom asked.
I knew that “you” was directed right at me. Matt didn’t lie. Jon didn’t lie. Only Miranda lied.
“We didn’t lie,” I said. “Besides, it was Matt’s idea.”
“I don’t care whose idea it was!” Mom yelled. “It was unsafe and you knew it, and that’s why you lied to me.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “Matt and Jon can go anywhere they want. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again, and you’re mad at me for going to Shirley Court by myself?”
It’s been months since Mom and I had had a real battle, and we were overdue. She screamed, “Insensitive! Uncaring!” and I screamed, “Overbearing! Playing favorites!”
Right after I shouted, “I never want to see you again!” I ran out, got my bike, and began pedaling as fast as I could. I didn’t care where I ended up or even that I’d been too angry to put on my coat and it was too cold to be outside without one. I wanted to escape, the way Matt and Jon had.
I started by going down Howell Bridge Road, but I knew I didn’t want to end up in town. So after a couple of miles, I turned on to Bainbridge Avenue, and then I turned again and again and again. I avoided streets I knew, because every one had a memory and I didn’t dare face my memories.
I must have biked for an hour before I acknowledged I had no idea where I was and very little sense of how to get home.
I thought, Of all the stupid things I’ve ever done, this is the stupidest, because I could die here and no one will ever know what became of me.
That was when I totally lost it. It’s been hard to cry in the sunroom, because we’re together all the time, and tears are better if you shed them alone. But I’ve never been as alone as I was that moment, sweating and shivering and hungry and lost. First one tear trickled down and then another, and then I sobbed six months’ worth of sorrow and anger and fear.
I could have cried forever, except I didn’t have any tissues on me, and the only thing I had to blow my nose into was my sweatshirt. Which made me sweating and shivering and hungry and lost and really disgusting. Then I started laughing, so for a while I was laughing and crying, and then I just laughed, and then I just shook. After a few minutes of that I thought I’d be okay, but before I knew it I was sobbing again.
I told myself Mom wasn’t shedding any tears over me, but I knew she was. It was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy looks in the crystal ball and sees Auntie Em crying out for her. I knew Mom was crying. She was crying because she’s worried sick about Matt and Jon and now she was worried about me. Only that made me cry even harder, because I was worried about Matt and Jon, too, and I was probably a lot more worried about me than Mom was. She thought I was breaking into houses on Howell Bridge Road like a sane, disobedient daughter. I knew I was crazy and lost and cold and scared.
I knew I couldn’t stay there forever, so once I’d stopped shaking from the hysteria and resumed shaking from the cold, I got back on my bike and let my legs direct me. I favored right turns, but for the longest time I was in countryside, with nothing but unoccupied farms around.
Then, because right turns weren’t doing much for me, I made a left. I biked maybe a half a mile down the road, and in the distance I could see a mound of some sort.
At least it was something to look at. I biked toward it. When I got close enough that the dust in the air didn’t block my view, I could see it was a mound of bodies.
I got off my bike in time to throw up. Part of me said to get back on and ride in the opposite direction, but I couldn’t help looking.
The pile was about six bodies high, and it was pyramid shaped, more bodies on the bottom than the top. It wasn’t neatly formed, though, and there was more snow on some places than others, so it looked kind of lumpy. The cold had preserved things, and I could see hands and feet toward the bottom of the pile and heads sticking out higher up.
People have been dying around here since the summer, but before things got too bad, the bodies were buried. There were cremations, too, although maybe they were funeral pyres. You don’t ask about things like that. Not unless you absolutely have to.
But when the sun disappeared and the weather turned cold, more and more people died. Starvation, sickness, suicide. More bodies than people knew what to do with.
I thought, What if Mrs. Nesbitt is in the pile? I’ve known so many people who have died, but she was the only one I thought of then. Mrs. Nesbitt could be in a mound of snow-covered bodies in a field somewhere near town, and if Mom ever found that out, it would kill her. She was more than just a neighbor. She was family.
I told myself not to look but of course I did. It was hard to make out faces, between the snow and the distance, since the top of the pile was taller than me. And I didn’t see Mrs. Nesbitt, who most likely was cremated, since she’d died fairly early on. But I did see Mrs. Sanchez, my high school principal, and Michelle Webster, who I’d known since fifth grade, and the Beasley boys, two old guys without many teeth who used to sit in front of the hardware store, good weather or bad, and chatter in secret code to each other. They were descended from Jedediah Howell, the same as Mom. The same as me.
I thought I should say a prayer over these people, show them respect for the lives they led, the people they were. I don’t know a lot of prayers, and the only phrase that came right to me was “deliver us from evil,” which didn’t seem appropriate. So I said, “I’m sorry,” out loud, and then I said, “I’m sorry,” again.
It could have been us. It should have been us. We have no more right to be alive on May 11th than any of them. Why should I be alive and Michelle Webster dead? She did better in school than me. She had more friends. Yet, there I was standing by her dead bo
dy.
Deliver us from evil. Deliver us to evil is more like it.
I got on my bike, pedaled as fast as I could, and discovered I was on the back road to the high school. From there I made my way back to town, back to Howell Bridge Road, back to my home, back to the sunroom.
Mom opened the door for me. I thought she’d be loving and comforting when I got in, but she wasn’t.
“You came back,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I had nowhere else to go,” I said, walking toward the fire, desperately needing its warmth to heal me.
“The boys,” she said. “Will they be coming back?”
“How can they?” I asked. “They’re dead. Everybody’s dead.”
Mom turned white, and for a moment I thought she was going to collapse. “Matt and Jon are dead?” she screamed.
“No!” I cried. “Not Matt and Jon!” I pictured them on the mound, all of us on the mound, and I made a sound I can’t even describe. It came from deep within me, the place where I hide all my rage and grief, a sound no one should ever have to hear.
“Miranda,” Mom said, and she grabbed me and was shaking me. “Miranda, how did you find out? Did someone tell you?”
“I saw them!” I cried. “Oh, Mom, it was horrible. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Where?” she said. “Can you take me to them? Now. We have to go now.”
“All right,” I said. “But you don’t have to go there, Mom. I didn’t see Mrs. Nesbitt. I’m sure she wasn’t there.”
“Mrs. Nesbitt?” Mom said. “Why would she be at the river?”
“I didn’t go to the river,” I said. “Is that where Matt and Jon…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
Mom took a deep breath. “Matt and Jon,” she said. “Are they coming back?”
“How can they come back?” I asked. “You just said they…” I still couldn’t say it.
“I didn’t,” she said. “I thought you did.”
“Did what?” I asked. “Said what? I came in here, and you said Matt and Jon weren’t coming back.”
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