by Isla Morley
“Do you want to see it?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Adam steers Dobbs to a chair. “You need a ticket.” He races to the kitchen table to the stack of tickets he made from old cereal boxes. He slips Dobbs one, then stands ceremoniously with his hand out to collect it. With big solemn eyes, a broad mouth quick to smile, and stick-straight-up blond hair, he’s a good-looking little guy, nothing at all like his father. Except for the splatter of freckles on his nose, he’s nothing of me, either.
“Maybe we should do this another time, Adam.” I can read Dobbs better than a script. Dobbs doesn’t like me teaching Adam American history. He says America is a Fallen Empire. He says what matters is the future.
“Mommy, please.” He runs behind the partition, then gives me the signal to begin. I look at him, and he gives me puppy eyes.
I pick up the script, clear my throat, and begin reading, but he stops me.
“Use your narrator voice.”
In a deep voice, I take us back to the time when seven hundred acres of Shawnee land is sold to three German settlers by Chief Paschal Fish. Adam comes out from behind his partition so the one-member audience can get a load of his homemade feather headdress. “If you name the town after my daughter, Eudora,” Adam recites, “no misfortune will come to you.” His somber expression splits into a grin, so proud to have delivered the line perfectly.
In Adam’s mind, Chief Paschal Fish is right up there with God. I’ve told him that Eudora, smack-dab in the middle of Tornado Alley where great swaths of land are ripped through to the bone and entire towns tossed into the air, has been spared calamity, and in his mind, this is the chief’s doing. One of the things you cannot teach someone with extremely limited experience is coincidence. Especially not when you’re always going on about Destiny.
I narrate the part where Quantrill and his murderous ruffians raid the city of Lawrence, trying not to pay any mind to Dobbs’s chuffing. Saddled on his broom, Adam gallops around the concrete pillar as the avenging party. He chases the marauding guerrillas into the Sni Hills, in reality a place of high bluffs and deep ravines, but down here the place behind the shower curtain with paper trees pinned to it. We are about to come to the part in the Battle of Black Jack, where John Brown defeats Henry Pate in retaliation for burning down Lawrence, when Dobbs stands up. It sounds like applause, but it looks like a man smacking two old gloves together to rid them of dirt.
“But we’re not done yet.”
He rubs Adam’s head. “That’s enough for today, Sport.”
Adam is about to make another protest, but Dobbs cuts him off. “If you spent half as much time reading what I give you as you do making up these silly plays, you’d know a lot more about the world.” Adam’s smile slips. No matter how amiable Dobbs is with Adam, he has a knack for making Adam feel like he just doesn’t measure up. Reading is one of those ways. Even though I’ve explained a hundred times that not all children are quick to pick up on letters, Dobbs is worried that Adam is slow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Give the child a pile of junk, and he’ll build you the most wonderful machine. At the moment, Adam is constructing himself a companion with an alarm-clock head, limbs made from coils, and hands with spoon fingers. Tell me that’s not genius. Adam can also recite any story I’ve ever read to him almost word for word.
To get into Dobbs’s good graces again, Adam asks Dobbs to help him take apart the vacuum cleaner. While they are busy, Adam prods for information about Dobbs’s venture Above. Dobbs is quick to tell him about bad guys and vicious animals and terrible storms. He knows full well too much disaster nonsense will give Adam bad dreams, but it doesn’t stop him. If I tell Dobbs I don’t like his filling Adam’s head with stories—those kinds of stories, at any rate—he’ll only say, what makes me think my stories are better than his. Instead of putting a stop to it, I go about opening cans, making as much of a protest as I can with a spoon and a tin plate.
What Adam believes about the outside world, the land we call Above, is something right out of a science-fiction novel. The death of masses of people is how the story starts, followed by the prolonged and agonizing death of the planet as a result of radiation. Severe climate change and barbarism sum up Dobbs’s contribution. So Adam will not feel like the last kid on earth, my contribution to the oral history has been to include survivors his own age hidden in caves and sewers throughout the land, and to reiterate that the Disaster will soon have run its course. On one point Dobbs and I are in perfect agreement—that the ending be happy. Adam, in other words, will one day run free.
“Want to take this downstairs and work on it in my office?” Dobbs asks Adam.
“Yes!” Adam’s out the door in a flash. He loves being invited into the Inner Sanctum. He’s fascinated most by the animals in the specimen jars, even though what Dobbs will want to show him are the reams of preparedness tracts. Dobbs acts more like a recruiter than a father.
* * *
When I draw the covers over Adam, he is so tired he can barely keep his eyes open. Nevertheless, he wants a story. I offer to read, but he shakes his head.
“How about The Hobbit?”
“That’s way too long, Adam.”
“Just tell the part about the treasure.”
It’s such a relief that after Dobbs’s gloom and doom Adam wants magic. “The Arkenstone is known as the Heart of the Mountain,” I begin. I tell him about its luminescence, how it has a thousand crystal surfaces sharp enough to slice off a finger. It has its own light, and everywhere it shines, things are made new and beautiful. “And it’s way down deep in the mountain where nobody can see to it.”
“Like me,” he says.
“Yes, like you.”
Doomsday is no match for such purity, such radiance.
“WHEN CAN I go Above?”
Adam is almost seven. This is not the first time he’s asked the question; it’s the first time he’s asked it with the calendar in his hand. He hands me a pen.
“It’s not something we can schedule, Adam. Mister will tell us when it’s safe.” I pretend to keep reading.
“Can’t he just open the door and let me see a little of it?”
I set the book aside. “You know what? I think you are old enough now to become a Boy Scout.” I describe what I remember from Theo’s Cub Scout days.
Adam interrupts. “You’ve told me that before. It’s where you learn how to tie knots and fix a broken leg with a stick.”
“Yes, that’s right, and a lot more than that. Do you know why?”
“So they can get badges.”
I laugh. “They do earn badges, but they learn this stuff so they can take care of themselves in the outdoors, by themselves if they have to. Be prepared, is the motto of a Boy Scout.”
He sees where this is going. “If I can take care of myself, will Mister let me go outside?”
“There are a lot of badges you’ll have to earn.”
“Can I start now?” He starts bouncing on the balls of his feet.
I get up from my chair and walk to the kitchen. “Well, shall we start with teaching you how to cook?”
“I already know how to cook. I can make toast.”
“I was thinking about something more substantial. When you live Above, you’ll need food to give you plenty of energy, for building a camp, say.”
Sometimes I wish I never went along with the end-of-the-world story so I could describe what it is really like outside at this time of year. Spring is when the trees are leafing out and the fields are turning purple with larkspur. It’s that time of year when the mercury barely rises and children go rushing outside in short sleeves. You can hear their mothers calling about how they are going to catch their deaths, mothers who have forgotten how breaking the hard ground of winter is done in the hearts of children first. I can’t tell Adam about spring without telling him about children, so I tell him instead about rivers.
There are rivers that run faster than ocean waves and some that run granddaddy-slow. “Some of them
are so wide, you can’t swim across them, especially after the rains, but my favorite are the ones that have stepping-stones across them. Spending a day at the river is like being lost in time.”
“I don’t want to be lost.”
Sometimes, this is how it goes when I describe the outside world. It starts off sounding magical and ends up sounding scary.
I lift his chin. “You’ll never be lost. When we go Above, I’ll be right by your side. Now, how about we get back to cooking?”
I get out a box of kitchen gadgets I seldom use—the egg poacher, though we haven’t had an egg in months and even then, it was something a pigeon might have laid; a cheese grater; a nesting set of measuring cups. I tell him he can take anything from the shelves he wishes, and I part the blue gingham curtain to show him the pots and bowls. “Doesn’t matter what you fix. Get creative, use your imagination.”
My son takes it all in with a seriousness that crushes my heart.
“When you have cooked three meals for us, you will earn your first badge.”
He doesn’t say anything, and for a horrible moment I think this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever come up with. As if fake Boy Scout badges are going to make him stop asking to be let outside.
But he asks, “Do we still have any of those chocolate sprinkles?”
I almost choke on my relief. “Well, now, you’re the chef. You dig through that stuff and see what you find.”
I retreat to the living room and rummage around for fabric scraps to start making badges, while Adam unpacks everything in the kitchen. By the time I have finished making the first badge, an embroidered circle of T-shirt material with a pot drawn on it, Adam’s project seems to have stalled. “You done?”
“It doesn’t look right.” His face is streaked with flour and his fingers are gummed together with some sort of paste.
Beside the mixing bowl are jars and cans and packets and every conceivable mixing utensil. In the bowl is thick sticky dough the color of red dirt. It is lumpy with raisins and the last of the peanuts and other unidentifiable fragments.
“I’m not going to earn my badge, am I?” He is on the brink of tears.
“Oh, I wouldn’t give up that easily if I were you.” I scoop some of the mixture on my finger and pop it into my mouth. Way too much Cup-a-Soup, but not entirely inedible. “How about we add some sugar to it and see if these don’t turn out to be cowboy cookies.”
Anything with the word cowboy commands Adam’s attention.
Encouraged, he dumps spoonfuls of sugar into the bowl. I find a cookie cutter, and he tips out the batch onto the table, flattens it, and presses out star shapes. After we’ve browned them on the skillet, we sit down. Neither of us speaks. The mealtime has the feel of a high-stakes card game. Adam studies my face. I chew poker-faced. Too much praise too soon and he’ll know right away I’m bluffing.
He takes a bite, makes his own assessment—several quick blinks, a frown, and a hasty swallow.
When I take another bite, he shows his surprise. “You like it, Mommy?”
If it kills me, I’ll eat every last one of these cookies. “Like it? I think you’re going to put me out of a job soon.”
He grins, then comes around to give me a hug. “Maybe I can earn all my badges before my birthday.”
And just like that, I know scouting isn’t going to be any help to me at all.
* * *
“They won’t hurt him one bit.” Dobbs is suggesting a blue pill because something has set Adam off on one of his marathon crying jags. “It’ll just put him to sleep, is all.” This from the man who used to rant about drug companies.
“It’s from being cooped up in this room,” I whisper fiercely. Ever since the incident with the so-called Intruders, Dobbs limits our access to just the upper level when he leaves on his missions. Only when he’s around to supervise can Adam have the run of the place. I push the bottle of pills back across the table. “No.”
“They’re not poison, for pity’s sake. Here.” Nothing makes Dobbs happier than when he can prove me wrong, especially when it comes to Adam.
He slugs down a pill. “Watch. In a few minutes I’m going to have a really decent nap. You two want to have a party, be my guest. Raise the roof, if you want.”
Sure enough, Dobbs is snoring before I finish doing the dishes.
Adam stops crying and goes over to look at Dobbs. He doesn’t get to see such a spectacle because Dobbs does his sleeping in his study with the door locked. Adam decides to conduct a test. He lets off a piercing shriek three inches from the man’s ear.
I find this amusing until I wake up from a deep sleep. I grab Adam’s arm and tell him to hush, to let Dobbs be. I run out of the room and up the short staircase, past the first blast door to the second one. The keypad.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
I remember the first three numbers of the code. Five, one, zero. One more. One, I try. Nothing.
“You mustn’t do that, Mommy!”
“Go get your sweater, and grab Teddy.” I pound five, one, zero, and then two. Nothing.
Adam yanks on my arm to make me stop. “No, Mommy! Don’t!”
“Adam! This is important. Let go of me.” Five, one, zero . . . three.
“You’re going to set off the bomb!”
“Be quiet.” And then I turned to him. I’ve never seen him so afraid. “What?”
Adam starts to rock back and forth on his heels. He shakes his head wildly.
I take him by the shoulders to explain. “Adam, there is no bomb down here.”
He glares at me. “Uh-huh. The Atlas bomb. It’s for Russia, but you tried to open the door, and now it’s going to go off in here!” He twists out of my reach and runs along the passage and back down the stairs.
Five, one, zero, four. I hear the sliding sound. The door is unlocked! I push it open and run through the corridors and up the steep, narrow stairs.
One door! One!
I start punching combinations. My heart is pounding. It could be hours before that pill wears off! I stop and think. Five-one-zero-four . . . Five one zero four. A date but referring to what? I have no idea. The second combination has to be a date, too. What? His birth date. I try those numbers. Nothing. Adam’s birth date . . . nothing. Mine doesn’t work, either. I keep trying different combinations: the date I was abducted, the date baby Freedom was born. Then I realize these numbers are important to me, not to Dobbs. What dates would he care about? The End of the World! Let’s see . . . how many have there been? Dobbs has spoken of several. There was the one called Collapse of the European Union, and there was one called Wall Street Meltdown. I don’t remember when exactly these were—sometime in the early years. The one he called Diablo was a few months after Adam was born—something about a nuclear power plant in California. That was six years ago, early May, as I recall.
I start punching numbers. And then I hear an almighty scream. I race down to see.
Adam is under the kitchen table, beside Dobbs’s legs. He has his arms folded over his head. He is rocking so vigorously, plates and cups clatter and smash to the floor. Rockets may as well have blasted off for the way he is hollering. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”
“Adam, we’re going outside, like you wanted.”
I try to crawl under the table, too, try to pull him out so he will quit shrieking, but he shrinks from my touch as though he’s been scorched. I know not to touch him when he’s like this, but we are so close to getting out. I try telling him that, and he screams back that he doesn’t want to go out. I’ve killed him, he cries.
And then, wham! He kicks. Blood spurts from my nose. I stumble backward, and something else crashes to the floor. Adam has grabbed hold of Dobbs’s knees. He’s waiting to be blown to smithereens like it’s 1950.
I press a wet towel against my nose and sit across from him, saying, “Sweetie, we’re safe. You’re okay. It’s okay.”
He keeps yelling and rocking until, eve
ntually, Dobbs wakes up. The bucking thing inside Adam is stronger than both of us put together. Dobbs hands me the bottle of pills. Between Dobbs and me is a truce the shape of Adam. I take out a pill. Somehow, we manage to pry Adam’s jaw apart and force the pill into his mouth. The tremors begin to lessen, and the flares in his eyes die out.
As I lay him down on his pallet and stroke his forehead, Dobbs says, “You feel that?” He cocks his head.
“What?”
He looks toward the door, then back at me, eyebrow cocked.
“A draft.”
He goes to investigate and comes back with a very odd expression. “Both doors were open.”
ADAM WAKES UP yellow.
I scream through the gap in the floor for Dobbs. I tell him to bring the book with him. The book has seen us through Adam’s rickets, his broken arm from when he fell down the stairs, a tooth extraction, and several urinary infections. It has to have the answer for this.
Adam answers all of Dobbs’s questions. Yes, his tummy hurts; yes, his head hurts; yes, he feels sleepy. Yes, to everything.
I hold his hand. His palm is yellow, too.
“It could be a dozen different things,” Dobbs explains. “Liver problems, gallbladder. I don’t know, Blythe. I just don’t know.” I’m not used to seeing Dobbs at a loss. It scares me almost as much as his cold-blooded control.
I put a cool compress on Adam’s head. “Give him one of your pills.”
Dobbs brings back a little foil package. “These are the last of the antibiotics.” He breaks one in half.
Adam refuses it. The days of bribing him with bottle caps are over. Dobbs promises him three Krugerrands. Sick as he is, Adam only swallows the pill after Dobbs fetches the coins and puts them in his hand.