Lost Everything

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Then two women and a man appeared where the frontage road dropped into the water. Held guns, but without wariness. Motioned for them to come closer. The captain turned around, asked for volunteers.

  “Go,” Reverend Bauxite said to Sunny Jim. “I know we’re all stuck on this boat together, but I think you should make yourself as scarce as you can, when you can.” Thinking of the woman who had asked too many questions.

  The con artist had stayed belowdecks. Did not want to see the house that used to be his, the woman who was once his wife. But he found Sunny Jim before he left, put a note in his hands with a name on it. “Please ask how she is,” he said. “If anyone has seen her.”

  The landing party crossed the front between the river and the earth, a hundred yards of a slurry of roads and houses, the fractured ends of plumbing and infrastructure. Spurs of territory had been claimed by either side, a leg of rock repelling the water, a flat of ground turning to swamp. The border of the shore would be renegotiated in time, the land become a hillside again, but the town would not live long enough to see it. The people who lived there knew that. They had been there for generations, seen the iron and coal and giant hospitals come and go. At first they tried to believe that they would only lose a few blocks, a few houses, until the night that half the place drowned at once, the houses, cars, and everyone inside them. So they gave up, packed what they could carry, and moved to higher ground. Came back only to salvage, to scavenge, the needs of the living too pressing for nostalgia.

  On the ridge of Route 11, the destruction ended and there was only neglect: the car dealership, buildings built for light industry that they no longer had any use for. The empty highway turned curvy, crawling over rises in the land. Then they turned onto State Hospital Drive, the bent green sign, the pavement curling as if it had been banked too tight. They passed fields washed out by monsoons, small ponds collecting in the depressions in the earth. A guardhouse, a line of barbed wire, a sign that used to be white with red letters, now peeling and faded. A new sign posted in the center: WELCOME TO NEW DANVILLE. They crossed into the hospital compound, topped the next hill, and saw how the people of Danville were putting their lives back together. Rows of small calico shacks, pieced together from old houses. A wide scattering of vegetable gardens. Animals lowing in communal pens. People walking about the gardens on dirt paths strewn with rocks and paper, beaten into streets by footsteps. Bartering at a long table piled with clothes, parts of farm tools, the soles of shoes. Small fires, for cooking, for warmth. A woman with a banjo, tapping her foot in the mud. The grunt of a pig being slaughtered. Behind them, the high towers of the old state hospital, its wings spread wide like a giant bat, its stones black with soot. The unshattered windows were warped, the shattered ones covered in plastic. Lines of laundry hung from sill to sill, reds, blues, browns, greens, shocks of yellow and gold. The flags of their new country.

  “Seventeen hundred souls left,” said the mayor. “That’s why we moved up here, put ourselves in one spot. Took some doing, the way the state left the place. Still parts of the building we can’t use. But enough left to keep us all out of the rain.”

  “Does it ever bother you? Being here?” the captain said.

  “You mean because of the history? I don’t believe in ghosts, Captain. It’s just an old building, fields, and trees. That’s all.” She was taking them down a long hallway through the east wing. Paint cracking off the walls, chips falling as they walked. “You find some sad things now and again. You know, the straps. But they didn’t build this place out of hate. They were just trying to help. It was just that the building—the building, and the patients, I suppose—got away from them.”

  Like the castle in Binghamton, Sunny Jim thought. He had run away from Lisle to go there, go and get his sister, after what she did to her father. Ridden his bicycle until both tires blew from the rocks on the roadside, then ditched it and walked the rest of the way. Made it all the way down there and stood outside the wire fence guarding the ruined castle, the newer brick facility nearby, sickly in the street lamps’ yellow light. He could not bring himself to go in, just stood out there and felt the hills moving in on him. Tried to understand what his sister had been talking about. How the shadow could get into you, at the bottom of the valley, in the places where the trees died young. After a while one of the nurses took him by the arm, made him call someone in Lisle who still had a phone. His cousin came to get him and he suffered through the ride back to his house. They could not find his bicycle on the road.

  He did not go in his house for four days. Lay in the yard at night, looking at the black stand of trees across the road. Wished with all he had that he would be taken as his sister had been. But it never happened. He woke in the morning covered in dew, his father yelling that he better come inside, a plea blooming into threat.

  “It’s getting away from us, too,” the mayor said. “But we do the best we can with it.”

  At the tip of the hospital’s wing, building scraps lay in spiky piles. Dark beams, water-stained and studded with nails. Sheets of plywood, some sides still square, the others ragged and splintered. Flapping walls of vinyl siding. A paneled blue door half-split down the middle. A cracked glass doorknob loose and shining on the screw. A sign that once hung from a porch. A painting of a boy in a raincoat in a little red boat, fishing line in the water. Everything of their town they could pull from the Susquehanna before the current carried it off.

  “Help yourself,” the mayor said.

  “What do you want for it?” the captain said.

  “Nothing,” the mayor said. “We have more here than we can use.” She did not finish the thought aloud: in the time we have left.

  The crew clambered over the piles, picked up boards, a sheet of wrinkled metal, hefted it all in their hands. Waved at each other. They were throwing the pieces in the hallway to sort through them when the captain put up a hand.

  “Wait,” she said, and picked through the pile herself. The crew looked at each other. As if on cue, rolled their eyes.

  “There’s no time to be sentimental,” one of them said.

  “There’s no time not to be,” the captain said. She took the best pieces from her crew’s hands, put them in a small stack. Found a plank with the name of the town stamped into it, a date centuries old. The surface of the wood warped and smoothed. If only she were more clever, she thought, she might find ancient fingerprints, signs of birth and murder. The story of the dead town in the grain.

  “You sure there’s nothing we can give you for this?” she said.

  The mayor winced, then opened her arms. Why are we still talking like this? Still pretending? “Take it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

  They were out of the building when Sunny Jim remembered the note in his pocket. He took it out, unfolded it, gave it to the mayor.

  “Do you know what happened to this person?” he said.

  The mayor read it, did not look up.

  “How do you know her?”

  “I don’t. I’m asking for someone else.”

  “I see.”

  “…”

  “She died,” the mayor said. “Tuberculosis. Eight months ago. Which in some ways was a blessing. If she’d seen what the river did to her house, it would have broken her heart.”

  As it broke mine, the mayor thought. To see what had happened to her town after all she had done. She had been mayor for two years, elected to her husband’s seat after he was conscripted, killed by a mine in Virginia. For the first year, she was in thrall to anger. First that the news had taken so long to reach her, that there was no way to mourn him right. He was cremated along with six other casualties, all the ashes scattered in the Occoquan River days before she knew he was gone. He would have wanted the Susquehanna, she thought, not something in the boiling south, the name of which she was unsure even how to say. Had they told her sooner, she could have come, just to see him off. Tied a fresh line from her to him so they could find each other later. But they did not giv
e her this, and he was gone, into the hurricane-whipped Atlantic. In her dreams, he was drowning out there, over and over, tossed by sixty-foot waves of white brine under a black sky split by frantic lightning, and her too far away to save him. Then she was angry at the war, treated it like a dog that had maimed a child. Chased off recruiters with a pistol, shot one of them in the calf just to make a point. You are not welcome here. Then she turned to the last of her town, so many more women than men, and there was no one left to be angry at but herself. For wasting so much time. For fighting. For letting hours slip by her unremembered. For not memorizing more of his face. And at last her anger burned out, left her blackened and brittle for a month. If she went outside, the wind could have disassembled her, the gentlest touch turned her to smoke.

  But her husband had not married her because she was weak. She pulled herself out of the ashes, made the town her husband and child. Did not flinch when the Susquehanna came for it. They say she saved eight lives herself, running down the hill in the night as the water was taking pieces away. Broke windows and yelled at the sleeping people. Dragged one of them up to higher ground herself, because the poor woman’s legs would not work after she watched the river eat her house. Then the mayor gathered them all on the curb where Route 11 curved up the valley out of town, told them what she had in mind for them. Felt a thrill of pride that first day at the state hospital, though the paint on the walls had shredded like tissue paper and there were long puddles in the hallways. Between the highway and the river was her kingdom. They would work its land, mend its cracking walls, fix the roof before the heavy rains came, and the war would never hold dominion over any of them again.

  “Melody Juniper was a good woman,” the mayor said.

  “I’m sure she was,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Do you mind me asking you a personal question?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you still alive?” the mayor said.

  “I was protecting my boy.” Then saw what she was asking. “My wife did the fighting. I stopped a long time ago.”

  “Is your wife with you?”

  “Yes. Should be back any day now.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “My husband, too,” the mayor said. “Where’s your boy now?”

  “With my sister. I’m going to get him. It’s why we’re going north, even though…”

  “Yes,” the mayor said. “Even though.”

  Sunny Jim turned a small scrap of wood over in his hands. Looked at the floor, then back up. A woman in a nightgown was coming down the hall, dragging a girl in a wooden wagon behind her. The girl had her hands over her face, her tangled hair spilling over her fingers.

  “Maybe you should get going,” the mayor said. Keeping her voice as even as she could, hoping Sunny Jim could tell it was hard.

  The woman smiled at the mayor. “So nice to see you. Who is this?”

  “Someone passing through.”

  “Going north or south?”

  “North,” Sunny Jim said. He had not understood how the mayor was trying to protect him. Now it was too late.

  “North?” the woman said. Turned to Sunny Jim. “Why?”

  “To get my boy,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Say no more. I understand. This is my daughter here in this wagon. I think.” Streaks of worry cutting the smile away. “How far north is he?”

  “Just fifteen miles or so north of Binghamton.”

  “You don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Then you’ve seen it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  She stared at the ceiling, put her hand over her mouth. “Everyone wants to know, don’t they? What’s happening up there.”

  “Please tell me,” he said. “Please.”

  She looked at him again. “What can I say? There are no words. It’s as if the land is giving up to the sky. As if it’s falling asleep and its dreams are coming for us. Do you understand?”

  He was backing away. “I just want to get my son.”

  “But you won’t make it in time, and your son will see it all. The sky peeled open, showing its true self. He’ll look up into it and laugh, just before the lightning takes him.”

  “That’s enough,” the mayor said.

  “And the house he was in? The wind will blow it all away. It will blow until there is nothing left. Nothing.”

  “I said enough,” the mayor said.

  “But he has to face it all soon, face it all and be done with it.” She turned to Sunny Jim. “How else are you going to be good for him?”

  “I don’t know!” Sunny Jim said. The girl opened her hands, lifted up her head. He could not read her face, could not tell if she had one. She was disappearing into the air, the light from the windows moving over and through her. It was all loosening, coming apart, the people around him and the windows and the walls, dissolving into a thrashing darkness that rushed toward and over him. He could not find his hands, his arms, his legs. A last thought, flung to the edge of the drowning world: Aaron, I’m so sorry I failed you.

  Then he was in the hall, stretched on the floor. The mayor standing over him, putting out her hand. “I think you need some rest,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you believe her?” he said.

  “I think everything is always ending and beginning again,” she said. “It’s just that we all know about it this time.”

  “You have to believe that, don’t you? To do everything you’ve done.”

  “It’s not a question of whether I have to. I do.”

  They pointed the hole in the Carthage away from the current, and five of the crew spidered over it with hammers and nails, a crowbar, a bucket of glue, and a brush. The light was bleeding out of everything by the time they were done. The remains of Danville a ragged shadow, the river turning thick and oily. As if it had watched for any mistakes the crew had made, was remembering where the flaws were, the fatal weaknesses. Soon, the river thought, it would feel the inside of that vessel. There would be an explosion, and the fire would let the water in. Let it pour in and flow down the stairs, spread along the theater floor, then force all the air out, fill in all that space, until the tables were floating on the burning ceiling, legs dangling. It would creep through the flaming hallways, force its way under doors, take anyone it found. Then the river would take the ship in its liquid hands and break it against the rocks, the tips of islands. The water swelled with the anticipation of it, and Faisal Jenkins felt it, turned the boat’s bow into the stream a little. We are still here, the pilot thought. But the river had not told him anything yet.

  The con artist found Sunny Jim as soon as he was back on the boat. “So?” he said.

  “So,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Did you find her?”

  Sunny Jim took a good long look. Saw the hope and dread on the man’s face. He did not know why, could not have guessed that the con artist’s past with Melody Juniper was so complicated. But he understood that the man was looking for forgiveness. Knew, too, that the truth was too much, that the con artist was not ready to bear it, not yet, maybe not ever. They were all grieving so much for the days they would never get. Why grieve, too, for the ones they had already lost? So Sunny Jim decided to lie. Give him news that would let the man put down what he was carrying and be lighter. Even if it meant stripping away his pride. There was no time left for that anyway.

  “She found someone else,” Sunny Jim said. “Found someone else and then took off. For Kentucky. They say she was pregnant when she left.”

  It was a good lie. The con artist’s lips narrowed, his eyes grew glassy. Then he was pumping Sunny Jim’s hand, thanking him over and over. Sunny Jim did not know what to say. He could see Aline shaking her head. Feel her, still, reaching for him from the water.

  The House

  WHEN MERRY WAS TWELVE and Sunny Jim was ten, Matt Robinson, Henry’s second cousin, skidded off the highway during a torrential rainstorm.
His car sliced along the guardrail for thirty yards, then eased over it belly-up and took the short muddy slope down to the river. From there, it rolled three times, coming to rest on its roof in the river. The car began to fill with water, and Matt Robinson, concussed, suspended upside down with a compound fracture in his arm and a broken collarbone, could not escape it. They found him with his head submerged, his feet by the pedals, his sneakers still dry. Matt Robinson was difficult, stuck with an argument as though his feet were nailed to it. But he was also the valve in the boiler, kept Henry out of a bad fight more than once. Put his hand on his younger cousin’s shoulder, said hey, look. It’s just not worth it. Henry, who was twelve years old like Merry, bawled at Matt’s funeral as if he were six again. Spent a month afterward wondering how he was going to stay alive.

  Sunny Jim saw ever less of his sister, but he heard the stories. Your sister is crazy, the Wallace brothers told him in front of the Lisle Inn, Henry Robinson and Joe Thule nodding.

  “Shut up,” Sunny Jim said.

  “Crazy, crazy,” the brothers said again, and Sunny Jim tackled them, pinned one Wallace to the ground and hit him in the face five times before the other Wallace and Joe Thule pulled him off. Henry Robinson then hit Sunny Jim in the stomach four times, wanted blood, but Joe Thule stopped him. Turned to Sunny Jim with what Sunny Jim recognized even then as pity. “She is, you know,” he said.

  She was hunting more by then, much more. Stepped into the woods with a knife and a rifle, six rounds of ammunition. An orange wool hat, a thick jacket, a blanket rolled up and tied on her back. She vanished for four days at a time, when it was just cold enough to make their great-grandmother remember stories of winter. My parents told me there used to be so much snow that it was hard to believe it fell from the sky, she said. Easier to imagine it coming up out of the ground. But Sunny Jim could not picture it. Had only read about snow in books. On the fifth day, Merry always came back, a small grin on her face, with half as much ammunition. Her knife a little duller. Once, a single neat, oblong stain of blood on her pant leg, above her knee.