All We Have Is Now

by Lisa Schroeder

  for Sara Larson and Candace Robinson,

  thanks for all of the support over the years,

  and

  for Mrs. Smith, my favorite high school teacher,

  who asked the question, if you only had 24 hours …

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The stuff movies are made of

  September 9, 5:05 p.m.

  5:29 p.m.

  7:10 p.m.

  Darkness falls

  7:35 p.m.

  7:42 p.m.

  8:47 p.m.

  Sisters

  8:50 p.m.

  9:45 p.m.

  9:50 p.m.

  Missing the moon

  10:45 p.m.

  11:53 p.m.

  12:30 a.m.

  A sad song

  12:30 a.m.

  12:40 a.m.

  12:50 a.m.

  La vie en rose

  2:54 a.m.

  3:05 a.m.

  3:09 a.m.

  Sing it like you mean it

  3:09 a.m.

  3:22 a.m.

  3:45 a.m.

  Mothers and daughters

  3:45 a.m.

  3:56 a.m.

  4:17 a.m.

  Pleasant surprises

  4:21 a.m.

  4:21 a.m.

  4:30 a.m.

  4:36 a.m.

  Almost

  4:42 a.m.

  5:07 a.m.

  6:12 a.m.

  Their song

  9:30 a.m.—approximately 12 hours left

  9:30 a.m.

  9:40 a.m.

  A missed opportunity

  10:02 a.m.

  10:05 a.m.

  10:23 a.m.

  A kaleidoscope kind of day

  10:35 a.m.

  10:37 a.m.

  11:19 a.m.

  To be enchanted

  12:01 p.m.

  12:15 p.m.

  2:02 p.m.

  Making it count

  2:15 p.m.

  2:33 p.m.

  2:54 p.m.

  3:10 p.m.

  Changed

  3:14 p.m.

  3:52 p.m.

  4:00 p.m.

  4:15 p.m.

  Cookies from a fountain

  4:16 p.m.

  4:47 p.m.

  4:55 p.m.

  5:31 p.m.

  Missing

  6:22 p.m.

  6:24 p.m.

  6:40 p.m.

  A way of life

  7:15 p.m.

  7:16 p.m.

  7:37 p.m.

  She runs

  7:57 p.m.

  8:22 p.m.

  Almost one year later

  About the Author

  Also by Lisa Schroeder

  Copyright

  NO ONE saw it coming.

  Because this particular

  cosmic death star

  came from the direction

  of the sun,

  we were blind.

  And then, by some miracle,

  an astronomer spotted it.

  A killer asteroid,

  coming right for us

  and due to hit Idaho

  in a matter of weeks.

  The devastation would

  affect the United States

  as well as parts of Canada

  and Mexico.

  Space, the final frontier.

  The place most people

  don’t think about much because,

  after all, it’s out there and we are here,

  and for millions of years

  the earth has occupied its own little part

  of the universe with very few

  dramatic incidents.

  Until now.

  For a couple of weeks,

  it was pure pandemonium.

  Impossible to describe.

  Innocent people killed

  because of the chaos

  in airports and

  on the roads

  as many tried

  to make their escape.

  Get the hell out of Dodge.

  For soon, the land of the free

  and the home of the brave

  would be the land

  that was struck with an explosion

  a hundred times greater than the biggest

  nuclear bomb ever detonated.

  Fasten your seat belts.

  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

  Like the Titanic, some got away.

  Some were safe.

  Some would live.

  Others would not.

  “I DON’T think I can stand the waiting any longer,” Emerson tells Vince. “I mean, what’s the point? It’s basically over.”

  She sits across from him, on an empty bed, as he throws a small bouncy ball at the wall.

  Bounce. Catch.

  Bounce. Catch.

  Bounce. Catch.

  The guy couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it. When they panhandled, he had this crazy thing he did with his feet, shuffling back and forth and side to side as he held the sign they’d made that said, WE’RE HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. ANY LITTLE BIT HELPS. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS. Vince just likes to be moving, somehow, someway.

  They’ve been in this youth shelter for two weeks. It’s nice. For the most part, Emerson loves it. She’s had a bed with a pillow and a shower every morning. The hardest part has been figuring out what to do with all the extra time. A silly problem that is only temporary, she realizes.

  Before, they slept in parks, in alleyways, in backyard sheds. They scrounged for food in restaurant dumpsters, or begged for money on the street. Every day, it was about survival. It was a dirty, ugly life, but they became pros at living that way.

  When the news hit and things got crazy, Vince found this place, and fortunately, there was room. A lot of the kids had left, hoping to return to their families or catch rides to the northeastern states. Hard to know if it would be far enough, but most people didn’t want to sit around and do nothing.

  Emerson jumps up and catches the ball. She sits down next to Vince. Her best friend. Her confidant. Her brother on the streets.

  He reaches over and takes the ball from her hand. He has big hands. Big feet, too. The kind you see on professional basketball players. She’s often wondered if he ever had any desire to play. But she’s never asked. If he’d said yes, all it would have done is made them both feel bad. She tries to avoid that happening as much as possible.

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” Vince says. “Maybe it’s best if we go out on our terms. Decide how and when, you know?”

  Emerson looks for fear or sadness in his eyes, but there is none. Not that she can see anyway. If it’s true, if he isn’t afraid, he’s in a much different place than she is. Although, it’s not just this day that she feels afraid, it’s every day, really. Afraid of getting discovered and sent home, but also afraid of living on the streets forever. Afraid of getting hurt again the way her family hurt her, but also afraid she’ll never love anyone ever again. The fear is always there, buzzing around in her head like an annoying fly that keeps bumping up against the window, trying to find a way out. Mostly, she tries her best to ignore it.

  “The question is,” Vince continues, “whether you want quiet or dramatic.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Quiet? Like, what, we find ourselves some Nerf guns?”

  He sits up and gives her knee a little shove. “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  His eyes stay locked onto hers, but she looks away. Not because she’s embarrassed or self-conscious. God, not with Vince. He’s seen her at her worst, more times than she’d like to admit. They’ve gone days without washing themselves. Weeks, a few times. What a sight she
must have been. Stringy, greasy hair. Zits on her face. Dirt caked underneath her fingernails. She studies her hands now, small but strong, and most of all, clean, thankfully. It’s a relief to look in the mirror now and not be ashamed of the image she sees, with full, shiny hair and her blue eyes bright and well rested.

  No, it’s just that sometimes, Vince looks at her like he wants to spill the contents of his heart at her feet. He’s like the old jukebox at her dad’s place that sits there quietly until someone puts a quarter into it. So she looks away because she doesn’t want him to think she has a quarter to give when she doesn’t. She’s broke. In more ways than one.

  As she avoids his gaze, Vince seems to wrestle with the best way to answer her question. Finally, he says, “I just want it to be … easy.”

  Emerson nods. He’s nailed it. Because sitting around, waiting, for the next twenty-eight hours does not sound easy. “I was thinking the bridge,” she says softly. “You and me. On the count of three.”

  He tilts his head slightly. Studies her as he considers this idea. “Like little kids, jumping in the pool.”

  Right. Except there’s no water under Suicide Bridge. Only cold, hard pavement. City officials erected a barrier a few years back, to try to prevent people from jumping, but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. People who are determined just climb around the barrier.

  Emerson tries to imagine grabbing Vince’s hand, and jumping with him. Happy-go-lucky Vince, in his Charlie Brown shirt. She’d found it last week underneath a bed. Someone left it behind. It’s yellow, with a big black squiggle at the belly. It makes Emerson smile when she remembers how thrilled he was when she gave it to him.

  “The yellow looks good against your dark skin,” she told him.

  “Charlie Brown should have been a black kid,” he said. “That Peanuts gang needs a little diversity.”

  “There’s a black kid,” Emerson argued. “But he didn’t get much airtime. I can’t even remember his name.”

  “See? So typical. Put him in the background, out of the way, because that’s where someone like him, like me, belongs, right?”

  Though Emerson isn’t black, she’d related to his comment, because she often felt like a background character in her own life. Hell, in her own home. Well, what used to be her home, anyway.

  It hadn’t been so bad when she was younger. When her dad still lived with them, and they were a normal family. In fact, she and her dad both adored Charlie Brown. And Lucy and Schroeder, too. Every year, they’d watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special together.

  She quickly pushes the thoughts away. The last thing she needs right now is to take a sentimental trip down memory lane. It won’t help anything. In fact, she’s pretty sure it will only make things worse.

  “Okay,” Vince says, interrupting the silence. “Whatever you want is fine with me.”

  “When?” Emerson asks, nervously picking at a loose thread on her jean shorts. “When should we do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looks up and stares at him. Tries not to think about what it’s going to be like. Whether there will be any pain before the peace.

  “Soon, I think,” she says, tucking her straight brown hair behind her ears. “Soon would be better. For me, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  She takes a deep breath. “Okay. So do we just … go? Leave our stuff here?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like we have much anyway, right? Anything you want to do first?”

  She looks out the window. Late summer in Portland is the best. If they hurry, they can make it before it gets dark.

  Death at sunset sounds nice.

  “No,” she says. “If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s nothing here for me.” She pauses. “Except you, of course.”

  EMERSON IS surprised by how empty the streets are. Of course there are other homeless people, wandering around, like always. But very few cars. It’s so different from how it was ten days ago, when people took to the streets protesting the government’s lack of response. For a few nights, things got pretty violent, and Emerson and Vince hid out in the shelter, waiting for it to pass.

  The quiet and stillness is strange, but also a nice change. As she thinks about it, it makes sense, really. The shops, banks, and restaurants seem to be closed now. There’s no reason to do business, after all. The people who couldn’t leave are probably at home, spending their last hours with loved ones.

  It’s like a holiday. Like Thanksgiving, but without football or Black Friday ads. Maybe some people are even cooking turkeys and pumpkin pies.

  God, pumpkin pie. It’s been a long time since Emerson’s had pumpkin pie with real whipped cream. She left home the spring she’d turned sixteen. It seems like yesterday and, at the same time, like a hundred lifetimes ago.

  But it all ends now.

  She won’t live to see her eighteenth birthday. For her seventeenth birthday, Vince stole a couple of doughnuts from the supermarket. Took them out of the case, put them in a plastic bag, and stuffed them inside his coat.

  “Happy birthday,” he said as he handed the bag to her. “Sorry it’s not a cake.”

  “Go back there and stick a cake in your pants,” Emerson demanded.

  “You want to eat a cake that’s been in my pants?”

  “Never mind. I’ll take the doughnuts.” She smiled up at him. Literally, up at him, since he towers above her five-foot-three frame.

  They have a ways to walk to reach the Vista Bridge. But it’s a nice evening. Not too hot, and there’s a soft breeze. Emerson lifts her face and looks at the baby-blue sky, dotted with clouds.

  “I wonder how close the asteroid has to be before we can see it,” Emerson says.

  “I read an article in the final edition of the newspaper that said it’s really dark, with not a lot of light bouncing off it, so we shouldn’t expect to see it. Not until it’s super close, anyway.”

  “As in, ‘Watch out, here it comes’?”

  “Pretty much.”

  They walk past the old historic church, one of the most beautiful buildings in Portland with its teal doors, stained glass windows, and the elegant tall steeple. Just as Emerson wonders if people are inside, praying, she hears an organ, the sound drifting out of an open window.

  The music is kind of sad. Haunting. It gives her chills. She thinks about what it must be like to have faith right now—to believe in something more. Something bigger and better after this. It must be comforting, to be absolutely certain there is nothing to fear. She’s tried, a couple of times. To believe. To pray. But when nothing gets better, it’s hard to keep it up.

  “Do you wish now we’d tried to leave?” Emerson asks.

  “Nah. The shelter’s been nice, right? Better than the Ritz.”

  When they’d heard the news, they’d stayed up all night, talking about what they wanted to do. The truth was, they were tired. Tired of working so hard just to get up every day and live the same filthy, miserable life over and over again. Tired of running from the ghosts of their pasts, the pimps on the streets, and the security officers in the stores they occasionally stole from.

  Tired.

  Emerson recalls the day they arrived at the shelter. “God, the first hot shower I took in that place might have been the best thing in my entire life.”

  “No doubt. You know, maybe heaven will be one long, hot shower. With lots of soap. And hot girls. And—”

  “Stop,” Emerson says with a laugh. “You need to keep those heavenly fantasies to yourself, all right?”

  “Em, you could be one of them.” He pauses, like he’s trying to decide if he should say it. Or if he should shut up and wait for that quarter Emerson never seems to have. This time, he continues. Maybe he decides life is too short to keep waiting. “The only one, actually. Just say the word.”

  She can feel his eyes on her. “No way. I shower alone or not at all. I’m selfish when it comes to hot water.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing to hear.�
��

  She’s learned it’s easiest to joke about it with him. In truth, there’ve been a few times it could have been more. But Emerson wouldn’t let it happen. She’d needed Vince to be her friend. More than anything, that’s what she’d needed. And she’d told him that, in no uncertain terms. Nothing could happen between them. Ever. Her life was messy enough; she didn’t need him making it even messier.

  “Maybe in heaven, you’ll finally stop running from me,” he says softly.

  She scoffs. “Believe me, if we make it to heaven, running is the last thing I’ll be doing. I want a comfy chair and all of the ice cream I can eat.”

  “Good. We can share.”

  “Maybe. But only if you have your own spoon.”

  AS THEY wind their way up into the Portland Heights area, on a footpath they discovered one day while exploring the neighborhood, Emerson says, “I wonder how long of a drop it is from the bridge to the street below.”

  “Over a hundred feet,” Vince says. “Easily.”

  They reach the top of the path and turn onto a narrow residential street. The houses here are older, yet elegant. They walk along quietly, and Emerson thinks about the families inside the homes. Have any of them considered what Vince and Emerson have planned? After all, Suicide Bridge is right in their backyard. Although, why would they do that when they have their lovely houses filled with their favorite things, and their favorite people, too? It’s different for them. Vince and Emerson have none of that.

  “Check this out,” Vince says as they reach a yard that is filled with a forest of bamboo that towers above the roofs in the neighborhood. “Man, that is cool. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Even up here,” Emerson says as they continue walking, “in this amazing neighborhood, we’re reminded that Portland is weird.”

  “Which is why we fit in so well.”

  “Hey, weirdo, speak for yourself.”

  At the end of the street, they turn onto Vista Avenue. They’ve made it. Emerson can’t help but think how ugly, how completely out of place the black barricade fencing looks next to the pretty old stone railing of the bridge. It’s definitely a lot more work now to jump.

  “Let’s go to the middle of the street and look out, over the city,” Vince says. “It’s an awesome view, and with the sun setting soon …”

  His voice trails off when they suddenly realize they aren’t the only ones at the bridge. A tall, good-looking man is on the other side of the barricade holding on to the fence and inching his way along the shorter stone railing, when he sees them. Emerson grabs on to Vince’s arm.