by David Kazzie
She glanced around the crowd; everyone was here. The faces were familiar, the same faces she’d been seeing month after month, year after year. Her gaze settled on Erin and Charlotte, the two people she’d probably been closest to in the community. They stood side by side, together, whispering. As Rachel watched them, she couldn’t remember when she’d last spent any real time with either of them. They’d been through a lot together, especially her and Erin, and here they were, not necessarily strangers, but not the family they had once been. She caught a glance from Charlotte, who gave her the pressed-lip head nod. Rachel returned the nod, and Charlotte dipped back into her conversation with Erin. If anything, she had grown closer to Charlotte over the years; Charlotte had never become pregnant, had never wanted to have kids, and remained one of the few women to not look at Rachel with envy or judgment or contempt.
Another thing winding down.
“We’ve suffered a terrible loss,” Harry said. He went on, and Rachel drifted into another daydream as he eulogized Paul, the one who’d been cut down trying to escape the warehouse. A little story about Paul. He’d been a regional manager for Best Buy before the epidemic and he had loved the Boston Bruins. He liked the Pats, Sox, and Celtics well enough, but the Bruins had been his first love. He’d been divorced when the plague hit. Had a son in the Army, assigned to a quarantine zone in San Antonio when everything had gone to hell. She tried to listen, she should listen, but these sad, beautiful stories of those they had lost simply did not hold her attention.
Soon it was her turn.
She squeezed Will’s hand and made her way to the front. Her head hurt and she could feel a twitch forming over her left eye. In her pocket, some notes she had sketched out, things she could say to celebrate the life of the man who had done so much for her, for all of them.
There was no podium, no dais, no slideshow of Adam’s life whirring behind her. Just Rachel standing there, looking out over those long, drawn faces, faces she might be saying goodbye to very soon. Things were ending here, she knew it the way you knew a relationship was over, even when it was still running on autopilot. She took in a deep breath of the chilly air and let it out, the cloud of breath transfixing her. The cold air brisk and refreshing on her cheeks.
“My father was a great man,” she said, reading from her note, her weight shifting from one foot to the other.
She had never given a eulogy before.
Was it supposed to be happy? Sad?
Was it for her? Was it for them?
Was it for him?
“Many years ago, he did a great thing,” she said. “For me. For some of you.”
It all came back to her in a rush, her time as a prisoner at a place called the Citadel. She’d been strapped to that hospital bed as those men had begun the procedure, looking up and seeing her father, positive she was hallucinating because how could he have found her out there, in the dark, in the cold, in the great nothing of the world after the outbreak. But there he’d been, against all odds, somehow, he had found her and saved so many.
Her hand absently stroked the inside of her wrist, home to the tattoo they had given her at the Citadel. A phoenix rising from the ashes. One by one, she made eye contact with the women who had been held captive at the Citadel with her, women who had identical tattoos, and each of whom nodded. The ones who would have died if not for Adam’s ridiculous rescue attempt. It had been something out of a movie. A regular old Rambo.
Her hands slipped behind her back, and she laced her fingers together, crumpling the note. Her feet were crossed now. She couldn’t get comfortable. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. A podium would have been nice. Something to hold on to. To give her purchase, here in the roiling waters of this terrible day.
She glanced at the note again. A few sentences she had jotted down last night as sleep had eluded her. Looking at them now, in the light of day, they looked naked, exposed, the emperor with no clothes. Letters making up words which made up sentences. Squiggly lines. Sharp lines. Jagged slashes. They looked dead on the page. Broken pieces of glass.
Lifeless.
What was wrong with her?
She tucked the note back into her pocket and ran her fingers through thick, perpetually messy brown hair. Bile crept into her throat. She looked at the women Adam had saved, at the others to whom he had meant so much. Her heart swelled, but not from joy, not from pride. It felt like someone was pushing down on her chest, the way it felt when someone had wronged you, when someone had gotten the better end of the deal, when someone had gotten away with it, whatever it was. When there wasn’t a goddamn thing you could do about it.
Like now.
The way they all looked at her with their sad faces, their tears running down their cheeks. They had that luxury, to see Adam as this post-apocalyptic savior, a martyr, might as well start calling him St. Adam, they could do that now here in the First Church of Omaha, Nebraska, in the People’s Free Republic of Whatever the Hell This Was. They did not have to know what she had known about him her whole life before the plague.
Anger.
“He was a smart man, my father,” she said. “He knew how to fix things, how to fix people. And I get why you all looked up to him. I do.”
She paused, conscious of what she was doing, giving herself one last chance to pull the emergency brake, bring this whole goddamn thing to a screeching halt before she passed the point of no return. But she couldn’t.
“I didn’t know my father well before Medusa,” she said. “I grew up in California, and he stayed back in Virginia. I kept thinking he would move out to be near me, but he never did. I never understood that. He was a doctor. People in California needed doctors. Wouldn’t he want to be near his only daughter?”
The words came easily now, spraying out of her like water from a hydrant.
“Let me tell you guys a story,” she said. People shifted from one foot to another, exchanged nervous glances with one another. She watched the scene shift from mournful to awkward, but she didn’t care. They needed to hear this about their superhero.
“He planned to fly out to San Diego for my high school graduation,” she said, thinking about all the good he had done in this new world but continuing with her story anyway. “This was about a year before the outbreak. The day before he’s supposed to fly out, he calls me and says that one of his patients needs him, she’s had a difficult pregnancy, he’s really sorry but he won’t be able to make it.”
Warm tears streamed down her icy cheeks, and she wiped them away with the backs of her wrists. The yard was silent now; no one spoke, no one moved a muscle. She turned toward the graves, where she could see her father’s body lined up with the others. Her wise, brave, selfish, shitty father. It came at her all at once, her emotions waging a terrible battle inside her for control about how she really felt.
There was more to the story, she was sure of it, but she simply stood there in front of the other survivors, rubbing her hands together, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, not sure what she was supposed to do next. She had a point to make, an important point here at her father’s funeral, but it was gone.
She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran, leaving Will, leaving Eddie, leaving all of them behind. She sobbed, her mournful howls filling the morning quiet. The tears continued to fall, her body shaking, she ran for the trailer, wanting nothing more than to hide away from Will, from Eddie, from everyone, from the world she was in.
#
Charlotte Spencer came to see her the next morning.
They sat at the kitchen table, drinking strong, bitter coffee. Rachel’s hands trembled from the caffeine, her stomach sour and tight. On the table was an old photograph of her father, back from his college days. She had found it in his old things as she wandered the trailer like a troubled spirit and had spent much of the night staring at it, entranced by it. The photo was old and yellowed, snapped at a semi-formal event more than three decades ago. Adam, dressed in khakis and a blazer, stood next t
o a pretty girl in a strapless red dress, a string of pearls encircling her slender neck. Their smiles were broad and deep, loosened perhaps by the cheap beer in the bottle each was holding, two young people with their whole lives in front of them. Rachel could just make out the time on the girl’s digital watch, tilted just so toward the camera. Seven twenty-six in the evening. On the back of the photo, in faint blue ink, the numerals 4/2, the date of the event, she supposed, were etched into the upper right corner. She felt bad for them, she hated knowing the dark future that lay ahead for them both.
Rachel had never told her father about how disappointed she’d been that he’d missed her graduation. He couldn’t find another doctor to cover that patient? Doctors did it all the time. They traded patients like baseball cards. Why was this one any different? Oh sure, he’d been apologetic, he’d watched a livestream of the ceremony from her mom’s iPhone, but the damage had been done. Ever since the day she was born, she had been the runner-up in the priorities of Adam’s life, second to all the women who came to see him.
She had never told anyone about it until the funeral. So many times, it had been right there on the tip of her tongue. If she could have told Adam this one thing, tell him how badly it had hurt her, maybe they could repair this rupture between them, the rupture that had been there all along. But she never did. And now it was too late.
The trailer was quiet. Will was in his room, the door shut tight. Rachel lit a cigarette, old and stale.
“I wanted to check on you,” Charlotte said.
“I’m fine,” Rachel replied, blowing a stream of blue smoke into the air.
“We need to talk,” Charlotte said.
“He was my father,” she said, her eyes down in her coffee. “Not theirs.”
“I know,” Charlotte said. “And it’s easy for people to forget that. To them, he’s a folk hero. To me, too, if I’m being honest.”
Rachel snorted in disgust.
Charlotte held up her hands in surrender.
“It’s not fair, I know that,” she said. “I know no one is perfect. It was nice to have someone to believe in, someone who never let you down.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Rachel snapped.
They sat quietly. Will coughed, and Charlotte’s eyes cut toward the bedroom. She took a sip of the coffee and set her mug back on the table.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Charlotte said. “Must’ve been hard.”
“No one’s life was perfect.”
“Cheers to that.”
Charlotte took a sip of her coffee. She started to set the mug back down but paused. She lifted the mug back to her lips and took another sip.
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
As Charlotte gathered her thoughts, Rachel scraped at a piece of long-dried food encrusted on the tabletop. A cylinder of ash fell from the forgotten cigarette still clamped between her two fingers and landed in a perfect little pile. She traced her finger in the ash, leaving a dark smudge on the tip of her finger.
“You know I love Will, right?”
“I guess,” she said, but not really knowing. Truth be told, she didn’t know how Charlotte felt about Will at all. Everyone had their own unique relationship with Will, but she wasn’t sure if any of them were normal. A bitter reminder of the past. A possible savior. A target of envy. No one knew how to act around him. It was a lot for an eleven-year-old to carry. She didn’t want to open another front in this discussion, so she sat quietly. Let Charlotte say her piece and move on. She traced a circle in the ash deposit on the table with a finger.
“It’s just that…”
She paused.
“It’s just what?” Rachel said.
“Now that your father’s gone, I worry people will forget how special Will is.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, a spike of discomfort making her shiver.
“Your dad loved Will,” Charlotte said. “Talked about him all the time.”
Yet another twist of the knife from dear old Dad.
“I know.”
Charlotte cast her eyes downward; perhaps her words were floating in the coffee mug.
“I get it,” Rachel said, her argument with Eddie playing back in her mind. “Will freaks people out.”
Charlotte smiled thinly.
“No, sweetie, I don’t think you do.”
“Enlighten me.”
Charlotte glanced at the ceiling and took a deep breath.
“I mean, that’s a part of it,” she said. “But it goes deeper than that. They’re afraid of him. Of you. They’re jealous. They’re angry. They want to know why.”
“I knew that,” Rachel said, although she was still a bit surprised by the depth and breadth of her hostility toward her friend. She looked back across the years, understanding now her sense of connection to the group weakening as Will had grown up. Her shoulders sagged. Alone again. As it had always been.
“Don’t you think I’ve wondered about it?” she asked. “Don’t you think I’ve lain awake at night, wondering what was so goddamn different about me? About my family? You think it didn’t crush me to see all those babies die?”
“I know,” Charlotte said. “But people are scared. And now that the warehouse is gone, it’s getting worse. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people have said.”
“Like what?”
“Crazy stuff,” Charlotte said. “But your father always shut it down. He made them believe we’d had a little bad luck, that eventually, things would turn around.”
Rachel laughed bitterly.
“It’s been thirteen years,” she said. “I think that ship has sailed.”
“Whether it has or not, your father kept the ship steady, kept it afloat.”
“And now he’s gone.”
“Right,” Charlotte said. “And without your father here to cover you, I wanted to make sure you knew the score. When people get desperate, they do crazy things. Be very careful. And what happened at the funeral yesterday, it made people angry.”
Still, she felt no regret. In fact, she felt better than she had in months. Maybe years. Maybe ever. Clear. Cleaned out.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Rachel said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “How are things with Eddie?”
She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand.
They sat in silence for a long while, the coffee cooling in their cups, the seconds ticking by, time winding toward the inevitability of it all. She looked at Charlotte, her face hardened by the passage of time but still quite lovely. She’d been on her own all this time; her sexual orientation was well known in the community, but as fate would have it, there were no other gay people living in Evergreen. Or none that had come out.
“What about you?” Rachel asked.
“What about me?”
“Do I freak you out?”
Charlotte smiled.
“No more than anything else,” she said.
Rachel tried to laugh at the joke, but she couldn’t.
“I never wanted kids,” Charlotte said. “Even when I was a little girl, I knew in my core that it wasn’t for me. So I look at this a bit more objectively than the others. I think Will is a gift. I think you’re a wonderful mother. I agree with your dad. He explained it to me once. Will can’t be the only one. It doesn’t make any sense. It would be one thing if none of the babies had survived. That, at least, would be explainable. But Will survived.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Sometimes I think he would say those things, but he didn’t actually believe them. He wasn’t the same when he got back from that trip back east. I think he got out there, in the big open, and saw what he was most afraid of.”
Charlotte was shaking her head forcefully.
“No!” Charlotte snapped, slapping her hand on the table. “I refuse to believe that this is it. This isn’t the end. It can’t be.”
“But what if it is?�
� Rachel said.
Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, but Rachel held up a hand to cut her off.
“Hear me out,” she said. “He never would. But please hear me out. What if this is it? What do we do? Live out our days, knowing this is really the end?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think about him growing up in this, and it rips me to pieces,” Rachel said. “Sometimes I’ll lie awake all night thinking about what his life will be like. Who’s the next youngest person here?”
Charlotte scrunched up her face and gazed at the ceiling.
“I think Emily, maybe? She’s twenty or so.”
“And that’s assuming he lives that long.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m trying to be realistic,” Rachel said. She pushed the coffee mug to the center of the table.
“We’ll figure something out.”
Charlotte took Rachel’s hand between her own.
“We’ll do the best we can,” Charlotte said. “We fight like hell to make it. We enjoy this life as best as we can. Did you know I’ve started praying?”
“Oh?”
“Every night. I know you’re a science geek,” Charlotte said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “And I never had much use for organized religion. But in the past few years, I’ve started to see God everywhere. It makes me feel a little better. I don’t know if there’s a heaven. If there’s a hell, I’m pretty sure we’ve lived through it.”
“You think all this was God’s judgment?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t a judgment any more than my shaking an Etch-a-Sketch is a judgment on all those little bits of aluminum powder. Maybe we don’t even understand what judgment means.”
Charlotte laughed out loud.
“I sound like a lunatic.”
Rachel did not reply.
“Besides, we have far more immediate concerns,” Charlotte said. “How are you on food?”
Rachel glanced toward Will’s bedroom.
“Few days,” she said, suddenly feeling like they’d been dropped back on the shore of their current mess. “Maybe a week.”
