by Ike Hamill
Through the walls of the tent, they could hear Romie’s quiet complaints about the conditions she was enduring. They could also hear Lisa’s mumbled rebuttals. On the other side, Brad was already lightly snoring. By the middle of the night, if he stayed on his back he would sound like an air compressor. The noise would be completely welcome—it was just like home.
Robby and his kids formed a square in the tent. They each had a wall to themselves. The lantern hung from the center and Ashley reached up to snuff it.
“Wait,” Janelle said. “The rest of the story. You only got to the part where you found out Mom’s name was Martina.”
“You guys told the story without me?” Ashley asked.
“We all thought you were dead,” Jim said.
Janelle reached over and smacked her brother’s leg.
“You really want to hear it now?” Robby asked. He never could understand why his kids liked the end of the story so much. To him, he would rather leave it where they had left off. The beginning of the relationship had been filled with nothing but potential. It had been utter magic at the time, and his memory had grown nothing but fonder over the years. If he could, he would have scrubbed the end from this brain so he could live in that beginning.
“Yes!” Janelle said. Jim shushed her.
“Okay,” Robby said. “Okay. Where did we leave off?”
“You thought her name was May,” Jim said.
“I did. Eventually, she accepted the name as her own. She embraced my mistake. It almost felt like I had accidentally discovered her true name, or maybe that’s just the way I like to think about it.”
Robby let himself slip back into the memory.
While they drove north, Robby spoke about his life before the end of the world. It was all the details that he had barely shared with anyone. They just hadn’t seemed that important before. He told her about his parents and living on the island. He told her about his best friend, Jim, and how they had played down by the edge of the water.
“That transition, where the ocean met the land, was constantly changing. We could find little creatures that were taking advantage of the shifting environment. We could see how movement fuels life. It helped me understand,” he said, glancing over at her.
“I never liked the ocean,” May said. “We used to go down to my aunt and uncle’s place down in North Carolina. The salt water stings my eyes.”
“You get used to it,” Robby said.
“And it’s too cold.”
“You get used to that too.”
“Why bother? Lakes are better.”
Robby shrugged. “It’s all we had.”
“What about now?”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
May extended her arm past him and pointed through his window.
“Right there. There’s a lake right there.”
“Oh,” Robby said. “We’re going to go help Brad set up the last of the relay stations. I don’t want to just leave him.”
“We left early,” she said.
It was true. He had told Brad that he would try to get up there in the afternoon, thinking that he would probably end up sleeping late. But he hadn’t slept late. Something had woken him up early and he had found Lisa and May already down in the kitchen, making breakfast. They had left Gladstone with plenty of time to spare.
Before he could talk himself out of it, Robby pulled off the road. May got out as soon as he slowed down enough. She sprinted across the tall grass and Robby followed. They were both panting and laughing by the time they reached the shore of the lake. May splashed in, still wearing her pants.
“Oh my god, it’s way colder than it looks,” she said, and then she dove in.
Robby slogged through the mud at the shore, wondering why anyone would think it was superior to the ocean, and then danced from foot to foot as he tried to get used to the temperature. May was already swimming away. He gathered his nerve and dove in after her. The water wasn’t nearly as cold as he had thought. It was just the difference between the hot sun and the cool lake that had surprised him.
May angled toward the shore, heading for a dock.
Robby followed, swimming as fast as he could against the drag from his shirt and shorts.
He stopped when she began to climb the ladder. Somehow, during the short swim, she had shed her pants and she climbed the ladder with only her clinging shirt and underwear. Robby was so stunned by the sight of her that he forgot to tread water. His mouth and nose dunked under and he came back up coughing and spitting.
May had her head tilted to the side. She was squeezing water from her hair and laughing at him.
“You okay? Should I come save you?”
Robby shook his head and started swimming again. He tried to show off his perfect form as he swam toward the dock, but when he looked up again she had wandered off. Robby climbed up, dripping gallons of water from his pockets and the folds of cloth. The sun warmed him immediately. Streaming through the car window, the sun had felt oppressive. Now, it felt nice.
May was smashing a rock against the door of a camp. Robby glanced back toward the car. She banged through the door and pushed into the little camp, leaving it open behind her. Robby followed.
May had found a stack of towels. She handed one to Robby and took one for herself. It smelled of toasted dust and felt wonderful when he pressed it to his face.
“My grandparents had a camp like this,” she said, looking around. She opened a cabinet and rummaged through it. “They were on Squam Lake. You heard of it?”
“I think so.”
“My dad always said that their camp was too close to the road. Guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“No,” Robby said. The building was only one room. Bunk beds were in the back corner. A counter and little sink were on the wall that faced the lake. There were four chairs around a square table that reminded Robby of the table that had been in the kitchen back in the house where he had grown up.
“There wasn’t that much traffic though,” she said. “At night, if a car passed, people would always look out through the window to watch the headlights pass by. That’s when my grandfather would cheat at cribbage. He would move his peg when you weren’t looking.”
Robby smiled.
She moved to a chest of drawers and opened them one at a time. She found a pair of pants in one and held them against herself to check the fit. They were way too long, but the waist and hips looked right.
“Bad news,” she said.
“Oh?”
“We’re going to have to walk back to the car—I like these pants.”
“Oh,” Robby said. “That’s okay.”
She smiled at him and tossed the pants over the back of a chair. He couldn’t stop looking at how her shirt stuck to her body. Robby finally turned around completely and went to the sink, pulling open the drawers and opening the cabinet doors. There were cans in one. He took out a can of pineapple.
“Hungry?”
“After that breakfast? No way,” she said.
Robby turned and dug through the drawer until he found a can opener. He wasn’t particularly hungry either, but it gave his hands something to do.
“You ought to find some dry clothes too. There are men’s clothes in these top drawers.”
Robby blushed. It wasn’t the thought of changing—he was blushing because she had basically referred to him as a man. Robby was so accustomed to thinking of himself as a kid amongst adults that the thought was weird.
When he turned back, the open can of pineapple in his hand, she was standing directly behind him.
May reached up and plucked something from his hair.
“A weed,” she said, tossing it to the side.
His scalp tingled where she had touched him.
“That’s the other nice part about lakes—you don’t have all that salt on your skin and in your hair after. No need to take a shower.”
“Yeah,” Robby whispered.
“Are you okay?” she
asked, tilting her head. “You don’t look so good.”
“Light headed,” he said.
“Must be from the water,” she said.
“Yeah,” Robby said. It wasn’t from the water. It was from the blood that was suddenly pulsing in his ears. It was from his short breath. He had never felt so present in a moment. There was nothing but him and her in the hot camp. May turned to look out over the water and her skin was so perfect. The shape of her nose and her chin were at just the right angles.
Robby heard the patter of thick liquid hitting the floor and realized that the can of pineapple in his hand was tilted. He straightened it and cleared his throat.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
The rest of the way north, Robby felt giddy. A switch had flipped inside of him and he couldn’t look at May the same way. He noticed a change in her voice as well. She spoke quickly and revealed a lot more details about her past.
“I hated school. I was such a terrible student. In middle school, I thought everything was going to be easy forever, you know? I would do my homework at the last minute—sometimes right before class—but I always managed to ace all my classes. Then, when I got to high school, it was like everyone else was speaking a foreign language. I almost felt like they had all gone to summer school and left me behind. I was worried about such different things from the rest of them.”
“Like what?” Robby asked.
She laughed. “Everything. This is going to sound stupid, but I was really into clothes when I was in grade school. I’m talking, like in kindergarten and first grade, when nobody else cared at all. Then, when the other kids started to worry about what they were wearing, I absolutely didn’t give a single shit. I got really into woodworking. Funny enough, it started because I needed to redo my closet so I would have more space for my clothes. By the time I finished the closet, I was wearing jeans and sweatshirts all the time because the shop in the basement was so cold and drafty.”
“And that’s what you were focused on instead of school?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “I had just started to get into riding mowers when everything ended.”
“Riding mowers?”
“It’s a long story,” she said with a sigh. She looked through her window at the passing landscape. Robby was sticking to the left lane, only swerving to the right when there was an abandoned car on the left. He wasn’t going too fast. He still had bad memories about that stretch of road. Once, alone and frightened, he had tried to come to that part of New Hampshire and he had almost died.
“Were you good in school?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Robby said.
“I bet,” she said. “You look like the type who was good at everything.”
Robby blushed.
“No,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine, I mean. It was a compliment.”
“Sometimes I talk without thinking about it first. It was okay with Hasp. He barely listened to anything I said.”
She grew quiet again after that. Robby wanted to say something—tell her it was okay—but he didn’t want to intrude on her memory.
“I’ve been mourning him a long time,” she said. “I mean, he just died but he has been dying for so long.”
Robby nodded.
The big green bridge was just ahead.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Huh?”
Robby realized that he had slowed down substantially. Instead of the road ahead, he had been focused on his memories of the place. It was a dangerous way to travel. Lost in the past, he could miss the details around him.
“You faded again.”
“I’m sorry,” Robby said. “I’ve had bad times through here. I wrecked a car on the bridge going south one time. There was a kid.”
She nodded. “Want me to drive?”
He almost said no. Just before the word left his mouth, he realized that there was a deeper implication to the question. When he was having a hard time coping, he could lean on her. That’s what she was really asking—would he lean on her? She had already leaned on him several times. They had dug a grave together. He had brought her food. He had taken her to a new group of people.
“Yes,” he said, letting the car drift to a stop. “Would you?”
“Of course,” she said.
When they got out of the car to switch places, they met in front of the hood. Facing each other, Robby felt the blood pounding in his ears again. Her smile lit a fire in his chest.
When he slid left to move around her, she put a hand on his arm and stopped him.
“For the first time in a long time, I’m glad I survived all this,” she said.
“Huh?” was all he could manage to say.
She smiled and let him pass.
They spent the day working with Brad. That night, the three of them camped out on the floor of a post office in Maine. After Brad fell asleep, his snoring providing a gentle rhythm. Robby looked up through the window at the stars. He was awake when May got up and unzipped herself from her sleeping bag. She paused in the doorway and whispered to him.
“You coming?”
“Yeah,” he said, hastily pushing off his own sleeping bag so he could follow.
A warm breeze was blowing in with the clouds. It rattled the leaves overhead. Robby looked up at the moon and saw that a ring was just beginning to form around it.
“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Can’t you feel it?”
Robby looked over and saw her pushing herself up to sit on the railing. The post office had a deck around it. They were almost even with the tops of the trees to the east. Robby remembered a time when he had seen ghosts. It would have been easy to convince himself that she wasn’t really there. Instead of wasting his energy on that, he went over and sat next to her on the railing.
“Ours was better,” she said.
“Your…”
“Our post office,” she said. “Hasp and I gravitated there because the sight lines were so good. It seemed like everyone had been snatched up into the sky, so we wanted a place where nothing could descend on us from above. Did you ever see one of them?”
“One of….”
“The fliers?”
“Oh. I think so. When my Dad and I went to a neighbor’s house, I saw something against the sky. It was a black shape against the clouds.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what they looked like when I could actually catch a glimpse. They were like a hole in the sky. It was almost like you could see through to where they would take you.”
Even though the air was warm, Robby shivered.
“I liked hearing those voices,” she said. After they had hooked up the equipment, Brad had put a call through to Donnelly. They had talked with Mike and Donald, who were working in the town hall when the call had come through. Donald was updating the farm maps that the settlement had started to keep. The idea was to track plantings and yields over time so that they could improve their farming efficiency. Donald had droned on for fifteen minutes before Brad managed to break in again.
“Donald is a good guy. He and Richard are really good with the horses, too.”
“I used to be into horses,” she said. “I stopped liking them so much when one broke my foot.”
She laughed at the memory.
“He stepped right on it. I know that monster knew what he was doing. I couldn’t get my foot out and I slapped him on the shoulder. When I tried to push him to the side, I saw him looking at me. There was calm curiosity in his eye. That horse was a serial killer, I just know it.”
“These horses aren’t like that,” Robby said.
She laughed at him.
Somewhere in the distance, coyotes began to yip and howl. It wasn’t frightening—it sounded like they were having some grand party.
“Don’t you love this time of year?” she asked.
“I suppose,” he said.
“Why? What’s your favorite?”
Robby swung his legs as he thought about it.
“On the island, I always liked the winter the best,” he said. “When the winds would come, everyone would stay inside as much as they could. When they had to do things outside, people would rush around and try to get it all done during the daylight. Then, at night, we would gather in this house or that one. It was very social. It was like people believed that they were going to be warmer and safer if they congregated.”
“That sounds nice,” she said. “It wasn’t at all like that where I was from. Except for going to school or church, we didn’t socialize all that much.”
“On my street, there were some families that rotated dinner parties in January. Tuesday and Thursday nights, people would get together. It was rare when someone would be missing,” Robby said. “What did your parents do for work?”
“Dad was a plumber and a handyman. When I was a little kid, he did more plumbing. More recently, he was building a lot of decks and doing bathroom remodeling. Mom worked at the school. Technically, she was the vice principal, but she ended up doing all kinds of stuff that was outside of her job description. She was even the crossing guard for a while. My parents had just gotten separated when they disappeared.”
“Oh.”
“Dad had turned the garage into an apartment for my grandmother. She was dead, so he took it over. He was going to move farther away as soon as he saved up enough money.”
“My grandma, too,” Robby said. “Dead, I mean.”
She laughed at him.
“What?”
“They’re all dead now, right?” she asked.
“Oh. Yeah. I mean that she died the year before everyone disappeared. She was great.”
“Mine too.”
They were silent for a minute. The coyotes began to yip again, sounding farther away this time. Robby wondered if they could smell the human intruders on the air. It was amazing to him how quickly the animals had cropped up from nowhere. From what he could tell, their population had been reduced to almost nothing, just like people. Now, people were just beginning to get a foothold in the world but the animals seemed to be everywhere. There were deer, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes, and bears, and they were everywhere. He wondered if they were simply better at adapting, or maybe just faster to reproduce.