by Matayo, Amy
He means it. He used to ignore calls, sending them straight to voice mail for hours, sometimes days. But then he spent five days with no one knowing his whereabouts and got reformed. Nowadays, he reasons that every call could be a distress call. Whatever happened on that island, I’m glad that bad habit is gone.
“I know you will. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to test wedding cakes.”
I laugh. “Gave in, did you?”
“I didn’t have a choice. Dillon said her mother threatened to come with us tomorrow if we don’t decide on one tonight. Tonight, it is.” He wobbles his head back and forth and gives a couple of shoulder rolls like he’s preparing for a boxing match. Dillon’s mother has been planning her daughter’s wedding since the day she was born. Overbearing is too mild a word to describe her. There’s one good thing about Dillon choosing my brother over me.
One.
“Snagging a hot wife wouldn’t hurt.”
I bristle at the memory and focus on the television, distraction condensed to forty-two inches. Today, I’ll take it. “Have fun, and I’ll see you when I get back.”
“Take your time. With Teddy gone until the middle of the month, I get the apartment all to myself.”
“Go away.”
And he does, laughing quietly as he closes the door behind him. In the silence, I flip through more photos of the devastation online. Chaos is everywhere; nothing is left untouched by the wrath of nature.
I will take my time. There won’t be a choice.
Solo travel is not high up on my list of things I like to do. But lately, I’ve needed a change. There’s a restlessness swirling under the surface, one I haven’t told anyone about, not even my brother. A desire to move. A need to start over. A yearning to reinvent myself somewhere else…someplace where I’m not known as Liam’s brother or Teddy’s roommate or second-best on an ever-growing list of women. In another town or state where no one knows me and pre-conceived notions won’t follow me around like a midnight shadow I can’t shake. I’m tired. Weary of being the quintessential guy friend in a zone I can’t break out of…annoyed that everyone else has the one thing I want. I’m not jealous, necessarily. But it seems life is passing me by while I sit back and watch.
Sitting has become increasingly difficult to do.
Take now. The kid in the seat in front of me won’t stop crying and banging his head against the seat. I have my seat-back tray down—why not? We’re not going anywhere anyway, and it keeps jamming into my knees with every whack. Combined with the unbearable heat and the wailing that is clearly never going to stop, I’m two seconds away from throwing my own temper tantrum. Grown adults keep sending impatient glares in the kid’s direction; an angry mob would undoubtedly tackle me and throw me on the runway if I pulled the same stunt.
I open my phone and answer a couple texts, then scroll through headlines on Twitter, Facebook, and CNN. Growing quickly bored, I open Instagram, then swiftly abandon it for LinkedIn, wondering for the thousandth time why I bother with social media at all. It’s nothing but a mindless escape from the real world, an unnecessary distraction meant to pull us all off course of what matters. Still, it seems entirely necessary right now. The ability to think is something I need to escape from, before I do something irrational that I may or may not regret.
I glance up at the kid again. Swear to God he meets my eyes through the tiny slat between the seats, smiles, then throws his head back to wail again. It’s an act; what a swindler. I have half a mind to tell his mother, but then she hands him a lollipop, and the plane begins to move. Like the heister he is, he plucks the sucker in his mouth.
He’ll be in prison someday, and she’ll be wondering where she went wrong.
I spend the next hour in blissful silence and even manage a nap. When I wake up, we’ve begun our descent. Curious, I crack the window shade and peer below. I’ve never been to Springfield, but even from the air I can see this place is a shell of what it used to be. It’s mid-September, but every inch of landscape is layered in gray and brown, not a speck of green anywhere unless you count the occasional metal rooftop. Springfield is a wasteland. It’s reminiscent of Joplin years ago when that town was flattened, but worse.
My brother told me to take my time, and no wiser words have ever been spoken. All the time in the world might not bring this place back to life.
CHAPTER 5
Riley Mae
Over a hundred people are dead.
James is one of them.
Even more are missing.
Paul is on the list.
James didn’t finish that Santa cupcake before the storm blasted through and carried him away; a silly thing to think of, but it skips through my mind like a record with a scratch down the middle. They found his body up the street and over one block, as though the funnel picked him up, swirled him around a few times, and dropped him in a heap when it was weary of carrying the weight of a human body. He died on impact. Most of his bones were broken.
I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours moving in a fog of shock and grief, not to mention the literal fog of smoke and ash from the collapse of buildings and entire lives around me. There’s no coming back from this; not anytime soon, maybe not ever. How do you replace things so carelessly ripped from your arms and treated like nothing more than dispensable objects that had outlived their use? Livelihoods. Homes. Automobiles.
Loved ones.
You can’t. That’s how.
The weather played with us all a bit, sighed from boredom, and moved on—leaving our whole town to deal with the aftermath. We’re a ghost town now, filled with grieving bodies, crumbled buildings, and broken spirits.
The bakery was hit hard, but compared to everything around us, the damage is minimal. My dream of franchising is now a distant, laughable memory. The picture window is gone, the wood floors are wet and warped nearly everywhere, and more than half our furniture is broken beyond repair. The front door hangs by a single hinge, the faux-brick wallpaper I special-ordered and took three days to hang is ripped and peeling. Food, utensils, and plates are smashed against the wall and floors, though most of our food was spared. Not that it matters. What good will it do when there’s no one to serve? Other than Paul and James, everyone who was at the shop is accounted for. In that regard, I suppose we were fortunate. I suppose I should be thankful to have a bakery at all. My building still stands. The one next door no longer exists.
As for the rest of the town, the news is grim and is only getting worse.
A four-year-old girl and both her parents are among the dead. Several children are missing, along with one entire family. Ninety-five homes in the Springfield area were flattened as though they never existed at all. More than two hundred homes are uninhabitable, and that doesn’t include apartment buildings ripped from foundations, or mobile homes carried off and still not recovered. One floats in the middle of Lake Springfield. Looting has grown out of hand, grocery stores have experienced mass robberies, and abandoned cars still line most roadways, making driving on some streets next to impossible.
It’s been twenty-four hours.
As for my grandmother and me, the ambulance came in twenty minutes, a little later than promised, though we were lucky it came at all. By then, my grandmother had lost a significant amount of blood and was drifting in and out of consciousness, but she’s stable now. She survived.
Her home did not.
What was once a small but tidy two-story home with white clapboard siding and a wraparound porch has been reduced to an old refrigerator standing in the middle of splintered and broken two by fours. Everything is gone, including tangible mementos. I perused the place for a few minutes earlier this morning, then left because I couldn’t see through the tears. I didn’t find anything, not even a single, salvageable photo. I’ll go back in a few days when my head and emotions agree with each other.
She’s still asleep, so I haven’t needed to break the news to her about the house. Even after she wakes up
, I won’t tell her until she’s strong enough to handle it. I could barely handle it myself, and I’m not the one recovering from surgery.
My grandmother is in a hospital on the other side of town and will be for several more days. The glass in her side was larger than it first appeared, a six-inch spear that pierced a kidney and nicked a major artery, but the surgery went well. She’s expected to make a full recovery, even though the healing process will be slow.
I watch her in silence for a long moment, both grateful she survived and relieved she’s not yet awake and curious.
Yesterday I was terrified. My grandmother raised me. She’s my person and I’m hers. Without her, I would have no one. Friends, acquaintances, co-workers, sure; I like people around me on the surface. But going deeper is too risky. I’ve been hurt enough for one lifetime, and I’m not interested in more. It’s the reason I haven’t dated in years.
My grandmother is the only person in my life who knows me completely—the ins and outs, all the things I hide because to expose them would be to expose me. When you’ve already lost nearly everything that matters, the risk of losing more is too great. So, you shrink back and build walls to keep yourself safe. And then you dye your hair pink to give off the appearance of confidence and a devil-may-care attitude. The world thinks I’m slightly rebellious and flamboyant; my grandmother knows it’s all smoke and mirrors designed to keep the illusion going and the people away.
Thank God she survived.
I stand up and kiss her on the forehead, whispering a promise to come back in a couple of hours, then walk out of the room. The hospital is busting with both the injured and the anxious relatives waiting for news of loved ones, and I have to dodge them all to leave.
I can’t escape fast enough.
My heart is covered in sludge. My feet are blocks of concrete. Heaviness coats the air with a thick layer of dread and despair, and it’s hard to keep moving under the weight of it. Four people are just sitting on the sidewalk by the front door, eyes unfocused and limbs unmoving. They’ve been there since I arrived this morning and show no signs of leaving. Three men sit in two-day-old rumpled suits, one woman as well. They all look like they left work and couldn’t find a destination to head toward, so they just sat down to wait. No home. No car. I assume, no family. My tears broke free a while ago and haven’t stopped falling since.
I tie my hair back with an elastic and check the clock over the bar. It’s nearly dinnertime, and I’ve made almost no progress. Water still drips from the ceiling, although now it’s collecting in a bucket in the middle of the room instead of all over the floor. Broken glass is everywhere, but I’ve decided to keep my shoes on and deal with it tomorrow. Dried icing smears the floor and walls in sugary stickiness, but I can’t bring myself to touch it. I’m bone-weary and exhausted. All I want is a bath and a bed.
Except I no longer have either.
I’m setting chairs upright when the bell rings above the door. The sound startles me, bright and cheery amidst so much gloom; like a party horn at a prayer vigil. I haven’t heard the chime since the storm hit, and I consider dismantling it and throwing it in the street with all the other debris. The thought dissipates when I look down into the face of a little girl of maybe four or five. Whatever I expected, this wasn’t it. The sight of her sends me careening backward anyway; two decades breached in an instant; like a DeLorean connecting with the electric current of an average light pole.
I’m crying.
There’s blood.
I’m hungry.
My hand is broken.
I’m terrified.
There’s no one to help.
My mother isn’t moving. My father is no longer behind the wheel. Rain pelts me in the face. A spark ignites under the hood and almost catches me on fire. Water floods my new suede shoes. A snake slithers through the ditch. I try to reach for it, but it disappears like everyone else.
Sirens.
A man in a white coat. He gives me a shot.
A woman in a business suit. She sticks me in a cold, gray bedroom.
Days pass. Weeks.
I’m only seven so, maybe it’s only a night.
An old lady takes my hand.
A stranger at first. A grandmother I’ve only met once.
An airplane.
A grandfather who never smiles.
More crying. Me hiding under a bed.
A door slams. My grandmother screams. “Walter, you’re a coward! Selfish! We’re better off without you anyway!”
Alone is safer, less complicated. People can’t break you that way.
Unwelcome memories come at me so rapidly I don’t have time to duck. I can’t lay bricks fast enough to get the walls up, and my heart clinches from the unexpected breeze. I stare at the girl, a sense of déjà vu ramming into me like a boulder to the gut. I’m tired of replaying the same painful scene, yet here I am all over again.
Little girls shouldn’t walk around alone after storms. They shouldn’t walk around alone after anything at all.
“Daddy, where did you go? Mommy, wake up. Can’t somebody take care of me?”
“I’m forty-eight years old. I didn’t ask to raise a kid all over again.”
“You’re a coward!”
It’s an awful narrative. I already know how the story ends.
Little girls who walk around alone after disasters end up walking alone in life, as well.
“Can I help you, sweetie?” I scan the area behind her, but no one appears. Sweat collects above my lip, and I wipe it off with the back of my hand at the same time a faint alarm drums inside my neck. Unclaimed children are one of life’s greatest injustices. They’re also currently all over the news.
When she doesn’t respond, I walk a little closer, crunching glass under my sneakers as I go. Her feet are bare, but I don’t want to startle her by yelling. She doesn’t move, and silence is the only thing that greets me, made more heartbreaking when a dirty thumb goes into the little girl’s mouth and she twists back and forth at the waist. Her blue knit dress is torn at the hem, and she smells faintly of urine and cat food. If anyone is taking care of her, they’re doing a terrible job.
I bend down to eye level and swallow the lump threatening to form in my throat. History repeats itself all around me, but I push the past away. This isn’t the time for emotion. Tears don’t turn bad situations into good ones.
“Where’s your mom?” I ask, looking over my shoulder. A shrug is the only response other than a faint sucking noise. “Your dad?” This question comes with a blank stare. Either dad is out of the picture or she is simply finished responding. The thing about history is this: some things can stay buried, but other things resurface when forced upward and out. I remember. I remember, and I don’t want to.
“Are you by yourself?”
Still nothing. Short of calling the police—which makes my heart sink into my shoes—I’m running out of options here. “Do you want anything to eat? Something to drink?” She nods, and it isn’t until that moment that I notice the blood. Her foot has a jagged one-inch cut from her big toe downward, the blood is already dried, and mud is buried under her toenails. I force myself to look at her eyes and speak again, careful to keep any concern out of my expression. “I’ll tell you what, how about I help you over to that barstool.” I hold my arms out to pick her up, she lets me, and I carry her across the room. I hastily upright a toppled bar stool with my foot and push it to the counter.” You sit here while I grab some food from the back. I could bring you a cupcake. I made them a couple of days ago.” Please don’t be stale. “How does that sound?”
Her thumb pops out of her mouth. “Chocolate?” The L sounds like a W in that adorable little-kid-speak, and the thumb goes back in. Chocolate is the magic ingredient that bonds us all.
“Of course. And I’ll decorate it just for you.”
A ghost of a smile appears, and I feel like I’ve won something. A long-forgotten wish. An answered prayer. A piece of my history back. A host of t
hings with no name but with a very tangible emotion: joy. Namely, mine.
“You stay right here and I’ll be back, okay?”
The little girl nods, and I rush through the doors to the kitchen. Physically, I’m walking lightly so as not to scare her. Inside I’m a marathon runner in a race for first place, pulse skipping, heart pounding, neck craning, hoping for a hair-splitting win. I can’t move fast enough. I’m afraid to lose. I’m worried she’ll bolt, though she isn’t mine to save.
Or maybe, for now, she is. No one took care of me. Maybe this is a small chance to rewrite history.
I race to my desk to retrieve two butterfly bandages and a tube of antibiotic ointment, stuffing them into my back pocket. Running into the kitchen, I fling open the refrigerator door, glad to see a platter of leftover un-iced cupcakes from two days ago, along with a bowl of white frosting, an open carton of orange juice, one of a dozen mini-bottles of chocolate milk, and in the freezer…ice cream that I keep around for my personal use after the breakfast crowd clears. I set to work on the decoration, adding a few drops of food coloring, and quickly drawing a pink crown and lining it with edible gold jewels that I hope will lift her spirits. It isn’t perfect, but she isn’t old enough to criticize my work.
I set the cupcake on a plate, then pile everything else in my arms; once upon a time I was a waitress at a breakfast chain, so I’m used to this sort of thing. Balancing the carton of juice under my chin, I reach for the ice cream and tuck it under an arm, then head for the door. I haven’t been gone more than three minutes, tops, but the fear she’ll be gone is real. So, real that I’m starting to sweat. Perspiring with a frozen tub of chocolate Blue Bell under your arm is difficult, but I manage. Defying the odds is what I do.
I push my way through the door, exiting backward.
A deep voice stops me in my tracks, the sound reverberating off the walls and sending those previous alarm bells up a few decibels. The voice doesn’t belong here. Unless…