“It doesn’t matter.” Caitlyn nudged Rowan’s plate back to him and placed his spoon in his hand. “If you don’t like it, you can just request a change. They’re not dictators here.”
“What if there’s a job that they hadn’t considered before? Am I allowed to suggest anything? Would I still be allowed to do it?”
“Like what?”
“We met this man at Hearst Castle. He told me that I could be a writer of some sort over there, and I could write about the world and stuff. About new things—about how this new world is like. Maybe people in the future, or even people now, can learn from the stuff I write.”
Caitlyn’s eyes tightened with her wide grin. “That sounds like something we should have here. I think you should ask them about it. Even if they don’t give you exactly what you want, maybe you’ll find something similar that you’ll enjoy and it’ll be really valuable for this community. Like, maybe you’ll be assigned to track and write down important logs and journals of developments going on here.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“I think it is,” said Lorena. “You’ll be doing something useful.”
“But is it really going to be helping this community out more than if I just take a job where I can just start rebuilding stuff? Or, like, farming or something?”
“Seriously, Rowan?” Caitlyn waved her fork in disapproval. “Just ask them. You’re not a builder or a farmer—and you know you’re not.”
“But I could be.”
“But you don’t want to be.”
Rowan shoved the rest of his food to the corner of his plate. He didn’t even bother touching his bread. “What do you do here?”
“I help out people who aren’t entirely mobile or able to work,” she said. “There’s another hotel specifically for their housing a couple miles away from here, and I go there five times a week. Sometimes, if they already have everything they need, I go on a couple of supply runs in the city.”
Lorena perked up. “Can I do that with you?”
“Of course! It seems like something that’ll fit right in your alley.”
“Maybe Rowan can write about the stuff we do for those people. Wouldn’t that be a good kind of thing for people to look at? They can see how good this place can be and how we can all come together to help each other.”
“Yes, he can definitely do that—but only if he decides that this really is right for him.”
“You think that people will read the stuff I write for this place?”
“You know, even if they don’t, sometimes the best stories are only for one person. Even if that one person is you. Nobody here has to read it or like it. Maybe someone might stumble across it one day and really be affected by it, but you never know. I think it’s just something you should try no matter what.”
“Then I think I will.”
Caitlyn took his hand and smiled. “Good—because if you said no, I was going to force you to do it anyway.”
20
Rowan’s request to write for the community was accepted, but it wasn’t entirely what he expected it to be. He couldn’t just write about anything and everything. As Caitlyn had predicted, he was required to write down important events regarding the development of this community, almost as if he was a historian. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t just write about other things in his free time. He took this as a win, and it lightened his mood for the rest of his day with Caitlyn and Lorena. He even managed to cry of laughter at a joke that Caitlyn had told him just before they parted for the night at the new hotel room he was staying in.
A writer—he liked that. Things felt right for a while, but as he got ready for bed, his stomach began to twist and contort again. Something still felt wrong and terrible inside of him. He looked at his abdomen in the mirror, but even as it churned, he saw nothing on the outside. As he liked to do, he ignored the pain and slithered into bed, where he tossed and turned for hours upon hours until his body couldn’t take it anymore.
In the morning, Rowan awoke to Caitlyn playfully tugging on his dark, messy hair. He groaned and swatted her hand away, wiping the crust out of his eyes before sitting up to see her cheerful expression.
“How’d you get in here?” he asked.
“Asked for a key. You haven’t come out for hours and you didn’t answer the door, so I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“What? I didn’t hear anything.”
“I know you didn’t. It’s nearly three o’clock and you were still sleeping.”
“Holy shit, did I miss anything?”
“Not really. But you’ve got to be living in the same time zone as me and not be sleeping in all the time.” Caitlyn took Rowan’s hand and dragged him out of bed.
“Where are we going?”
“To get you lunch, obviously. Lorena has been waiting and I bet she’s starving like hell.”
Caitlyn stopped by her room to grab her backpack first. She let Rowan know that she needed to work today, and though he was moderately upset that they weren’t going to get dinner together that evening, she assured him that they would meet again at night to hang out or talk about their day. She was looking forward to hearing about how he would go about spending his first day in this community without her.
They marched out of the hotel and started making their way over to the high school at the end of the street again. There were less people wandering around at this time compared to yesterday, as most people were out working. This made everything seem more broken again to Rowan. No longer did this place look like a picturesque image of a recovering, lively society—it was merely just another place with desperate people in it.
As they passed by the building that Rowan and Lorena were contained in yesterday, Caitlyn spied her brother and a few others leaving the front door with a group of five men. She excitedly waved to him, and in her blind bliss, she hadn’t noticed Rowan pull out his crowbar.
“Rowan,” said Duncan, yanking one of the men aside. “What are you doing?”
“What are they doing here?” Rowan tried to rush forward, but Caitlyn had managed to grab his arm. “Those are the plague doctors, Caitlyn. Those are the people who tried to kill me and Lorena.”
“They’re sick,” she said. “Duncan is taking them to our treatment center.”
“They shouldn’t be here!”
Wayne, who was held tightly in the grasp of one of the doctors beside Duncan, hissed at the boy who reached out at him. “We should’ve caught you, boy.”
Caitlyn struggled to keep Rowan steady. “You’ve got to stop,” she groaned.
Rowan thought about all of the families whose lives were ruined by these men. What would have happened if the plague doctors had found his family? They wouldn’t have spared his parents. They didn’t care about any lives, and this made him not care about theirs. He pictured their ruthlessness and their disregard for life and imagined what they would do to Caitlyn and Allie. What if they were released from the treatment center and they started killing again? He couldn’t trust them being here. He couldn’t forgive them for what they did.
“I’m going to kill you,” growled Rowan. “I’m going to kill all five of you.”
He tried to rip Caitlyn’s hand off of his arm, but he couldn’t get a good grip on her fingers. “Let go already!”
“No,” she said. “You aren’t going to do this, Rowan. I won’t let you.”
He continued to pry at her hand, finally managing to break free from her. Without hesitation, he rushed toward Wayne first, but one of the escorts raised a rifle at him, stopping him in his tracks.
“Why?” Rowan was screaming now—his voice echoing against the broken glass windows of the buildings around them. The air in his throat shook violently, banishing the quiet breeze that rustled his shirt. “Don’t you all know what these guys have done?”
“Just drop the crowbar, Rowan,” said Duncan. “That’s all you gotta do.”
Rowan gritted his teeth. “Do you want me to tell
you what they did? Do you want me to tell you everything I’ve seen? All the innocent people they killed—and for what? Nothing. And you’re expecting me to drop my weapon? To forget about the people they killed?”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” Duncan ordered the man next to him to lower his gun. “I’m not asking you to forget about any of the terrible things they’ve done. I’m asking you to drop that thing and let us handle this. Not you. Us. We can help these people. I can’t let you dish out justice as you see fit. We can’t have that kind of thing in this community—we have to establish structures to get others help, otherwise there’ll only be chaos in this world.”
Caitlyn approached Rowan from behind, but he swung his body around and glared at her. She held her arms out, stopping just inches away from the reach of his crowbar.
“Rowan, you’ve got to calm down for once. This isn’t the path you want to follow. Killing isn’t the path you want to follow. All it takes to lose yourself is a few bad choices. Don’t do this—you’re better than this.”
She walked toward him. “Look at me, Rowan.”
The boy, still boiling with rage, looked his best friend in the eyes. He saw his anger reflected in the compassionate warmth of her irises, and he forced himself to take a deep breath.
Caitlyn grabbed Rowan’s arm again. “Don’t let your temper unhinge you. I know you’ve been through a lot, but you can’t let everything break you down like this. You just can’t.”
“You don’t understand,” said Rowan, only slightly resisting against her grasp. “You don’t understand what I feel—you don’t understand the weight that pulls me down when I see these people in front of me. You don’t understand the fire blazing in my head as I think about what they’ve done to me and to others. You don’t understand the pain that creeps through my entire body as I imagine what they would do to you and Allie and Lorena. My urge to stop them—to hurt them for everything they’ve done, it’s natural, and it’s a part of me. It’s always been a part of me. I can’t let terrible people hurt me or the people I love. I just can’t.”
Caitlyn managed to grab the crowbar from his hand and tossed it aside. “Rowan, there are people in this world who don’t care about making the right decisions. People that go astray. People that hurt others because they can’t control themselves. People that lead a life of mindless, lawless, undisciplined violence. It’s up to people like us—people like you and me to make up for people like that.”
She watched Rowan’s eyes, which wandered over to the crowbar. She hugged him from behind and felt no battle. “Rowan… if you’re not going to do the right thing, then who will? We have to be better than that. We have to. This world… this fucked up world that killed our families and many other families—it all started because people weren’t able to stop themselves. Countries bombed each other… and for what? Because they were angry? I know it’s not that simple… but Rowan, I’m telling you—killing these men because you’re angry will only make things worse. It’ll only make this world worse.”
“You’re a better person than this,” she continued. “This isn’t the Rowan I know.”
Rowan dropped to his knees and clenched his chest. He didn’t know what to feel anymore, except for that same, deep pit in his stomach that now climbed up to his lungs and heart. He looked over at Wayne, and as he gazed into the helpless man’s eyes, he realized how lost, how cold, and how angry he looked—which is what he, too, must’ve looked like to everyone else.
“I need to talk to you tonight,” said Duncan. “Can I count on you meeting me in this building later? I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”
Rowan forced himself to nod. He watched Duncan and the rest of the escorts bring the plague doctors over to the treatment center, and though he still wanted to rush forward and take down Wayne and Anthony with a single swing of his crowbar, he instead let himself be consumed by the comfort of Caitlyn’s embrace.
“Are you okay now?” she asked.
“I can’t let go of my rage quite yet,” said Rowan. “But I’ll be trying from now on. I’ll really be trying.”
Caitlyn held his hand. “We’re all going to help you with that, okay? Just—I don’t want to see you like that anymore.”
“I don’t either.”
They remained where they were on the ground. People passed by and offered words of concern, but Rowan paid no attention to them. Only one person could really help him right now—and everything she did in these crucial moments in his life always reshaped him as a person. He needed to be better. He just needed to be better.
Caitlyn sat Rowan down on the front steps of the health check-in building, which was what the boy now called it. Duncan watched them from the inside, but he moved further into the lobby in order to give them their space to talk to each other.
“You’re cool with this?” asked Caitlyn.
“Kind of. I just hope it helps.”
She rested her hand on Rowan’s back. “It will. You just have to be open to it.”
Rowan looked over at Lorena, who was lying down on a small patch of grass at the park nearby. “Why do I always do things wrong? Have I always messed things up?”
“No, you haven’t. Just know that you can’t realistically expect to make the right decisions each and every day. Making decisions isn’t easy—no matter what it is. We just have to deal with the decisions we make and judge whether or not we made a mistake, and then we learn from those mistakes.”
Caitlyn pulled out a granola bar from her pocket and split it in half. “You know, Rowan, we’re becoming adults now. We’ve got to be more responsible than ever—not just for us, or for the people we love, but for our entire community.”
“We’re asked to be adults before we’re even ready,” said Rowan, splitting the granola bar further into quarters. “I don’t feel like I’ll ever be as responsible as society expects me to be.”
“Is anyone ever ready for adulthood?” Caitlyn giggled. “I like to think that even our great-grandparents were still a mess, even on the day they died. I mean, think about it. Just look at how some adults act. You’ve got childish politicians always trying to one-up each other until shit goes terribly wrong because they were too busy treating diplomacy like a playground fight instead of being mature about things. It’s like nobody ever understands the consequences of their actions.”
“I’m guilty of that. I guess that means I’m already a pretty shitty adult, aren’t I?”
Caitlyn shook her head. “I mean, we’re only labeled as adults by our age, not by our maturity and experience. These things take time, you know? It’s like trying to ride a bike, but instead of falling and scraping your knee, you fall and fuck everything up around you until you’re depressed as hell and wish everything could be fixed by rubbing alcohol and a bandage.”
“How long do you think we’ll be separated?”
“I don’t know. We might not even get separated at all, depending on what the doctors see and say. I imagine it won’t be for forever, though.”
“But what if it’s for a really long time?”
“It won’t matter.” Caitlyn put her granola bar away. “No matter where I am and no matter where you are, I won’t be far. I’m always in your mind and in your heart.”
Rowan didn’t argue with her. If he was going to be away from her for a long time, he didn’t want the last thing between them to be an argument. Instead, he hugged her, as it was the one thing that he knew would make him feel better at a moment like this. The moon soon arrived, and its gentle gleam found no vacancy in their unyielding grasp.
“Duncan is still waiting,” said Caitlyn, finally letting go of the boy. “Are you ready?”
Rowan stood up and dusted off his pants. “In a bit. I’m gonna go check on Lorena and see how she’s doing.”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting for you inside.”
He watched Caitlyn shut the door before he headed over to Lorena. He lied down on the grass beside her and said nothing, letting the beautiful silence
take them over like it had many times before. Lorena turned to him and gave him a momentary smile, which floated away to the clouds above.
The boy was the first to speak. “You see anything interesting up there the past few minutes?”
“Not really. I’ve never really been able to tell what clouds are shaped like, and that’s all there is up there. How about you? What do you see?”
Rowan squinted at the sky for a moment before responding. “You know, I was gonna try and say something really deep—but I think I’m tired of thinking about all this deep stuff all the time. I guess I just want to relax now.”
“So relax. That’s what I’m doing.”
Rowan reached into his pocket and pulled out the crude sketch of white lilacs that Lorena had drawn just days earlier. He stared at it for a moment before looking back up at the clouds.
“Maybe I do see something up there after all,” he said.
“What do you see?”
“White lilacs. All bunched together.”
Lorena smiled. “You know, I see that too, now that you say that.”
“It’s nice, you know? They’re not in season yet—but here they are.”
“We should plant a garden and grow all of our favorite flowers.”
“I like that idea,” said Rowan, reaching his hand up to the sky. “It’ll make this place look a lot less depressing.”
“That’s what I want to do. I want to make this place more beautiful than ever.”
“I’ll help you. We’re going to make this place better than anything we’ve ever seen.”
Lorena closed her eyes. “Better than anything we’ve ever seen.”
The two of them spent some time watching the sky gradually cast away the clouds with a wave of slow, creeping darkness. It was odd—Rowan and Lorena had grown so accustomed to dusk that they actually felt comfortable here, completely exposed to the open streets around them. The world didn’t seem so scary anymore.
Seasons After Fall Page 21
