This World We Live In ls-3

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

  Even with nobody to hear me for miles, I didn’t burst into song, but I did whistle as I biked. I liked the splashy way the bike rode through puddles on the road. And I had this great realization: I don’t have to be happy all the time. With everything that’s happened, no one should expect to be happy. But moments of happiness can sneak up on you, like pairs of unworn blue jeans, and you need to cherish them because they’re so rare and so unpredictable.

  I even understood why Matt married Syl ten minutes after meeting her. Finding her was rare and unpredictable.

  Of course it hadn’t hurt that she had long hair at the time.

  I was whistling “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” a song I learned in third grade and haven’t heard since, when I rode my bike straight into a pothole and went flying off.

  I landed face down in a puddle, and for an instant I was in a state of total panic. I remembered Mom in the cellar, and I swear I thought I was going to drown.

  What shocked me to my senses was how much I hurt. When you’re in that kind of pain, you almost wish you were going to drown in a half inch of water.

  I rolled out of the puddle and moved my fingers, my hands, my arms, my legs, until I was satisfied I hadn’t broken any bones. The palms of my hands were scraped and it felt like my knees were, too. My chin and jaw hurt horribly, but I wasn’t spitting any teeth out. I was going to be a total-body black-and-blue mark, but no one dies of bruises.

  I crawled back to the bike. It was lying on its side, but the two trash bags were unbroken, and both tires looked okay.

  That was when I realized how lucky I’d been the day I got lost. What if I’d had a flat tire? I’d been miles away from home, with no idea where I was, and I would have had to walk back.

  Sometimes I think all I’ve done for the past month is cry, but that didn’t stop me. I sat by my bike, telling myself over and over again how lucky I was, and I sobbed.

  I didn’t have to use my sweatshirt to blow my nose this time, though. I’d found a tissue packet at one of the houses, so when I was up to it, I dug through a trash bag and located it.

  That’s progress.

  I was just finishing the tissue packet when Syl rode over. We were south of our meeting spot, but she must have looked around for me, and since I was on Howell Bridge Road when I fell, I couldn’t have been too hard to locate.

  “You’re a mess,” she said, helping me up.

  “I rode into a pothole,” I said.

  Syl nodded and straightened up my bike. “Which will be easier?” she asked. “Riding or walking?”

  Either way, it was going to be a mile uphill. “How about letting me die here?” I asked.

  “Laura would never forgive me,” Syl said. “Do you need a few more minutes?”

  What I needed was a completely different life. “I’ll try walking,” I said. “I’m feeling too wobbly for the bike.”

  “All right,” Syl said. She grabbed the handlebars of her bike with her right hand and the handlebars of mine with her left, and began pulling them behind her, while I hobbled by her side.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said after a few of the most agonizing yards I’ve ever walked. “You couldn’t make it this far if anything was broken.”

  Just because I knew it was true didn’t make me any happier to hear it.

  “I remember once, months ago,” Syl said. “Right after the air got bad. The band I was with—”

  “You were with a band?” I asked.

  “Not that kind of band,” Syl said. “When you’re on the road, you find bands of people to travel with. By foot, by bike, even by truck.”

  “There are trucks?” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a truck.

  “Of course there are,” Syl said. “How do you think food gets to Howell? And they’re always bringing supplies to the safe towns. They’re not supposed to give people lifts, but sometimes they do.”

  “Were you with a band of people when you met Matt?” I asked.

  “Just one other person,” Syl said. “We’d split off because he wanted to try fishing in the Delaware. Anyway, this happened last summer. We were in South Carolina, I think. There were a half dozen of us, and we saw a man lying on the side of the road. You could tell right away his leg was broken, and he was screaming in pain.”

  “Did you do anything?” I asked.

  “There was nothing we could do,” Syl said. “Even if we’d set his leg, we couldn’t carry him with us. If you can’t keep up with a band, you get left behind. People died all the time, but mostly when they were dying, they were quiet or moaning. This guy must have broken his leg right before we saw him. He was going to lie there on the side of the road for days before he died. He knew it. We all knew it. Eventually he’d pass out, but until then he was going to scream because he was in agony and because he knew he was going to die.”

  “And you left him there?” I asked.

  “One of the guys I was with said we should put him down,” Syl said. “Maybe someone else did. We didn’t stick around to find out.”

  “Did you ever tell Matt that story?” I asked.

  “No,” Syl said. “I haven’t thought about it in months. It was the way your bike was overturned that made me think of it. One of the guys I was with took the bike and rode off. If you had a bike, you didn’t stay with people who were walking.”

  “Would I have gotten left behind?” I asked. “I mean, after a fall like I took just now. If I couldn’t keep up with everyone else?”

  “Oh yeah,” Syl said. “Sure. But you would have found another group in a day or so. There were always groups of people to grab on to.”

  I hated the story of the guy with the broken leg, but I kind of liked the image of all these groups wandering around together. When you’ve shared a room with the same three people for months, fresh faces sound appealing.

  We walked in silence for a while, and I fantasized about a group of good-looking guys and me. It’s a good thing I have a permanently gray complexion or else Syl might have noticed how hard I was blushing.

  Mom wasn’t too happy when she saw how I looked, but she found some peroxide and cleaned my palms and knees. Suddenly, I was six years old again and had fallen off my bike.

  She was glad for the books, though, and Syl appreciated the blue jeans. Jon didn’t say anything about the air freshener, so maybe ocean breeze isn’t his favorite.

  May 28

  The worst night I can remember in ages.

  I’ve been having nightmares for a couple of weeks now, ever since I got lost. Horrible dreams about the mound of bodies. A lot of times I see us in the mound, or I think I’m with Mom and then I look around and there’s the mound and I have to climb on top of it to find her.

  Twice I had dreams that I was in Mrs. Nesbitt’s house after she died, and I’m looking around for things and wherever I turn, there she is. Both times I woke up thinking Mrs. Nesbitt was still alive, and I had to remind myself that she was dead and I had gone through her house, with her body lying on her bed, and that I had believed at the time it was okay to do that.

  One dream I had was so much like a horror movie, it was almost funny. Mrs. Nesbitt and I were playing tennis (which is a funny thought right there), and I looked up at the stands and everyone watching the match was dead. Nobody I knew, though. They all looked like ghouls.

  I don’t know if I’ve been in a bad mood because of the nightmares or if I’m having the nightmares because I’m in a bad mood. Probably both. I know I haven’t been sleeping well, and that hasn’t helped.

  But last night I had nightmare after nightmare. I don’t know if I ever woke up. It felt like one dream led directly to another. In one I was going through someone’s house and I opened a closet door and piles of corpses fell out. Then I was in the same house and I opened a different door and the dead people were all people I knew. Then I saw Mom sitting in a rocking chair, and she said, “Don’t look at me like I’m dead,” only she was dead.

 
But then I had the worst dream—maybe the worst dream I’ve had in my life. I was walking to school and everything was normal, the way it had been. The sun was shining, and I remember how happy I felt seeing the sun again. I wasn’t sure if everything was back to normal or if none of the bad things had ever happened. It didn’t matter. The sun was shining, and I was walking to school. The closer I got to town, the more people I saw. Everybody was happy, so I realized the sun had returned. We were all celebrating because we could see the sun again.

  Then I heard someone screaming, and I looked down at a man, his leg twisted horribly. I knew right away it was the man with the broken leg Syl had told me about. It was like I wasn’t asleep anymore because I thought, Oh, that’s the guy Syl mentioned. Then I thought the man was Dad, which was when the dream turned into a nightmare. But I realized it wasn’t anyone I knew, and I remember thinking, Okay, this isn’t going to be another nightmare after all.

  I felt like I was awake and this was all truly happening.

  Everyone who was walking stopped, and some of the people came back. There must have been ten or fifteen of us standing around the guy, who kept screaming. Someone said, “Shut up already,” and kicked the man in his leg.

  Then other people started kicking him, and—this is the worst part—I started kicking him, too. I thought, If I don’t join in, they’ll kick me. But part of me enjoyed it, because I was okay and this guy, who somehow represented everything that had been awful for the past year, was lying there helpless.

  The more we kicked, the louder he screamed, and the more excited I got.

  In my sleep I thought, This dream is going to turn and I’m going to be the person lying on the ground, but that never happened. I guess I woke up before it could. I know I was shaking when I woke up. My body hurts all over from the fall, but I swear my leg hurt even more, like it ached from kicking.

  A month ago I was dreaming about Baby Rachel. Dreams I thought were scary.

  For the first time ever I hoped there was no Baby Rachel. I don’t know what happened to Dad and Lisa, if the baby was ever born. It must be so hard now to have a baby. Lisa could have miscarried or had a stillborn baby. Horrible though that is, it might be for the better.

  I tiptoed out of the sunroom and through the kitchen to the bathroom. It smells of fish and bedpans and ocean breeze air freshener. I curled up on the cold tile floor, and I rocked back and forth, glad it made my body ache even more, like I deserved the punishment for what I’d been thinking.

  I hate my dreams. I hate Matt for bringing Syl into our lives, and I hate Syl for giving me her nightmares.

  I hate this world we live in.

  June

  Chapter 8

  June 1

  The doorbell rang.

  Mom and I sat there, frozen by the sound. Syl was upstairs napping. Matt and Jon were chopping firewood.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Mom gestured for me to stay absolutely still.

  “Laura? Laura? Are you in there? It’s me, Lisa!”

  “Oh my God,” Mom said. “Lisa?” She raced to the back door and opened it. “Lisa? Is that really you?”

  Lisa was crying. “Please,” she said. “Please let me in.”

  “Of course,” Mom said, and gathered Dad’s wife in her arms. “Oh, Lisa. I’m sorry. I’m in a state of shock.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Is he here? Is he all right?”

  “Yes, yes, he’s out front with the baby,” Lisa said. “Everyone’s outside. Hal thought it would be safer if I came first, that it wouldn’t frighten you as much if you heard a woman’s voice.”

  At least I think that’s what she said, because before she was halfway through, I had run through the house, passing Syl on the stairway, and flung the front door open. There he was: my father, still alive, home where I could hold him and never let him go.

  “Miranda, Miranda,” he said. “I knew this day would come. I never lost hope.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” I said, and the tears streaming down my face were tears of joy for a change. “I don’t believe it. I can’t. It’s too good to be true.”

  Dad laughed. “It’s true all right,” he said. He turned to one of the other people he was with, a girl, I noticed, and took a baby from her arms. “Meet Gabriel,” he said, handing the baby to me.

  I was so stunned the baby’s name wasn’t Rachel, I almost didn’t reach out. Gabrielle’s a pretty name, I told myself. It was my fantasy she’d be named Rachel, no one else’s.

  Dad was beaming. “This is Miranda, your sister and your godmother,” he said to the baby. “Miranda, this is your baby brother Gabriel.”

  I looked down at the baby I was cradling. “It’s a boy?” I said.

  “He was born right after midnight on Christmas Day,” Dad said.

  For months now I’ve dreamed of my little sister, Baby Rachel. A few days ago I was in such despair, I’d hoped she’d never been born. And now I was holding that very baby, only it was a boy and it was screaming.

  “He cries a lot,” the girl said. “You get used to it.”

  Lisa and Mom had come to the front door. “Come in, everyone,” Mom said. “Syl’s gone to get the boys. Please, come in. You can warm up in the sunroom while I make a pot of tea.”

  Lisa took the baby, Gabriel, from my arms, and for the first time I really looked at the people Dad was with. They were unloading their backpacks and taking their coats off, so they didn’t seem to notice that I was staring at them.

  There were five altogether, if you count Dad and Lisa. Six if you include the baby. Besides Dad, there were two guys: one maybe in his thirties, the other one more my age or Matt’s. The girl who’d been holding the baby looked young, close to Jon’s age. Everyone’s so thin nowadays, and gray and sad, you can’t really tell ages anymore. Except the older guy wasn’t thin. He wasn’t exactly robust, but he certainly wasn’t thin.

  We followed Mom into the sunroom. “It’s so warm in here,” the younger guy said.

  We had the woodstove going, of course, and one of the electric heaters was on. Mom has it in her head we’ll use less firewood that way.

  “Please,” Mom said. “Make yourselves comfortable. Lisa, is there anything I can do for the baby?”

  “He’s hungry,” she said, and she began to nurse him. The other people—their band, I guessed—acted like this was the most normal thing in the world.

  I didn’t have to figure out where to look, since Syl, Matt, and Jon burst in. Jon held on to Dad even longer than I had, and then Matt got his turn to hug Dad.

  “This is Syl,” Matt told them. “My wife.”

  “Your wife?” Dad said, giving Matt an extra congratulatory hug. “When did that happen?”

  “Three weeks ago,” Matt said.

  “May I kiss the bride?” Dad asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he gave Syl a hug, which she resisted for a second, but then responded to with a hug and a peck on Dad’s cheek.

  “Can you believe it?” Dad asked. “My son got married.”

  “Congratulations,” the older of the two men said, and gave Matt his hand to shake. “That’s wonderful news. Hal talks so much about you, but he never once guessed he had a daughter-in-law.”

  “Are you from around here, Syl?” Dad asked. “Did Matt go to school with you?”

  “No,” Syl said. “We met nearby.”

  “That’s great,” Dad said. “Lisa, darling, can you believe it? Matt’s married.”

  “And you had your baby,” Matt said.

  “A boy,” I said. “Gabriel.”

  “I have a baby brother?” Jon said. “Wow.”

  Dad laughed. “It’s all wow,” he said. “Oh, I’m sorry. There are introductions to make. It’s just—well, I know you understand. Laura, everyone, this is Charlie Rutherford, and Alex and Julie Morales. And in case you haven’t figured it out, this is Laura, the mother of my beautiful children Matt, Miranda, and Jon. And now Syl, my unexpected daughter-in-law.”

&n
bsp; There we were, eleven of us, crowded into the sunroom. If Alex Morales had thought it was warm before, our body heat and the lingering smell of fish now made it almost unbearable.

  “It takes a while for the kettle to boil,” Mom said. “Please, everybody, sit down. Miranda, get the mugs, and the tea bags.”

  I went into the kitchen. The girl, Julie, followed me. “Let me help,” she said. I gave her a couple of mugs to carry in.

  Mom’s been using her tea bags over and over again, but she’s down to her last half dozen. Now five of them would be used.

  Did Dad expect us to feed all these people? Sure, he and Lisa were entitled to whatever we could give them, but the others were strangers to us. And on a Thursday. If we fed them the way we usually ate, we’d be out of food by Saturday.

  I thought I saw Alex give a quick look at Julie. “Just hot water for Julie and me, please,” he said, handing one of the mugs to Dad.

  “It’s just boiled rainwater,” Mom said.

  “But it’s in a cup,” Julie said. “And in a warm room.”

  Charlie laughed. He had a big man’s laugh, and it changed the atmosphere immediately. “See how little it takes to make us happy?” he said. “This is very kind of you, Mrs. Evans.”

  “Laura, please,” Mom said. “I only wish I could offer you more. Miranda, get the bottle of lemon extract. That will give the water a bit of flavor.”

  I ran back into the kitchen, found the extract, and returned it to the sunroom. I bumped into Alex as I did, and I blushed while I apologized.

  “My fault,” he said. “I was in your way.”

  I glanced at him, trying to act like I wasn’t looking. He reminded me a little of Syl, like he’d always been thin, like his body was used to it. His eyes were a very dark brown. I used to like more athletic boys, but I could see that he’d be good-looking under ordinary circumstances.

  But these aren’t ordinary circumstances, and even though I couldn’t get over the idea that a guy had fallen into my sunroom, I was a lot more excited about Dad coming home.

  “How’s Grandma?” I asked. “Did you get to her?”