by Isla Morley
Apart from rickets and being a little small for an eight-year-old, Adam is a healthy kid. He’s never been sick like this before.
Dobbs and I sit and watch him, waiting for the color to fade.
* * *
“I think his color is better. Don’t you?”
Dobbs says, “I don’t know.” I hate the sound of this. After another long silence, he goes downstairs and comes back with one of the pistols. He packs it in the duffel bag. He tells me he’ll be back as quick as he can.
“You’re not going to leave with him being like this.”
“I’m going to get him medicine.”
Dobbs has taken two children out of here already, children I will never see again. I can’t believe my own ears when I say, “Take him with you.”
It doesn’t help to plead or to cry or even to accuse him of being the cause for Adam’s sickness. Dobbs tells me to get a grip, panicking isn’t helping the situation.
“He’s my son. You must take him!”
Dobbs gets in my face and lowers his voice. “He is my son, too.”
I almost feel sorry for Dobbs until he adds, “You still don’t get it, do you? He’s our future. If anything happens to him, what would all this have been for?”
The Plan—it always comes first.
* * *
Dobbs is taking too long to return. Something must have gone wrong. To keep from torturing myself with all the what-ifs, I keep busy. It’s silly trying to fashion a product out of worry, but I crochet anyway. As soon as I come to the end of a pattern, I pull the whole lot loose and start on something else. I read The Hobbit to Adam, even when he’s asleep. Knowing full well he’ll refuse to eat, I nevertheless cook him a meal from scratch. Hand-cut noodles from a lumpy mix of stale flour and chemically treated water. Tuna mixed with the last of the crackers. The result is something a dog would turn its nose up at. I scrape it into the trash can. Housework, then. I mop and polish and dust, even though dust doesn’t make it this far down. I organize the already orderly cupboards. I clean where stains and spots should be. And still, Adam is sick. Still, Dobbs is not back.
* * *
I am up before the door opens all the way. Dobbs looks haggard. Heavy bags hang beneath his eyes, making them look even smaller. He hasn’t shaved for several years, but now his beard is dirty and he reeks of sweat. He hands me the medicine, says to get two pills down Adam, even if it means more Krugerrands. He brings the hourglass and tells me we have to turn it four times before we can give him another dose. “It’s likely hepatitis, the kind you get from eating contaminated food. We have to be careful not to catch it, if it is.”
“And if it isn’t?”
We sit and watch Adam, and then we watch the sand, and then we watch Adam again. Dobbs never answers the question, and I am too scared to ask it again.
* * *
“Did you bring me a treat?”
Dobbs and I both snap awake. Adam is sitting up on his pallet, his skin translucent and his cheeks slightly flushed. No yellow.
I rush to him. I hold him and cry.
Dobbs kneels beside us and pats him on the shoulder.
“Why’s everyone being so nice to me? Is it my birthday or something?”
Dobbs and I exchange glances. What a brilliant idea!
“Yes, it is!”
“How old am I?”
“How old do you want to be?”
He thinks for a minute. “Fifteen.”
I hate how he always chooses to be older. He ages so quickly as it is, but this is a favorite game and rules are rules. “Fifteen, right. You go into the supply closet and make a list of all the things you’re old enough to do when you’re fifteen, and we’ll get ready.”
Dobbs heads downstairs. I follow him to get the box of decorations.
Soon, the living room is decked in streamers and paper banners. Dobbs has wrapped a great big present in old newspaper comics, and I’ve dug up a bottle of maraschino cherries and a liter of Coke. I have a couple of presents for him, too. A knitted cap and Grandpa’s old watch.
When Adam steps out of the closet, we throw confetti on him and cheer, and he acts like he’s never been so surprised in all his life. We put on pointy hats. Dobbs starts whistling, and for the first time, the sound does not turn my insides around. Adam sings “Happy Birthday” to himself and pulls us into a conga line. We do a loop around the concrete pillar until he sees his presents.
Dobbs’s gift is an encyclopedia that looks brand-new even though it was published in 1958. Adam thanks him politely, which means he wishes he’d received anything other than a book.
He tries on the cap that I made him and admires himself in the mirror. “Thanks, Mom.” And then he unwraps the last present. Grandpa’s watch. He looks at me hesitantly.
“You have to take good care of it. That was your great-grandfather’s.”
“I know.” He rubs the inscription. He doesn’t know how to tell time, which is just as well, because one of the hands is missing. “Are you sure I can have it?”
“It’s yours.”
Dobbs is suddenly not having a good time. He withdraws from the circle. Adam doesn’t notice.
“Is it real gold?”
“Yup.”
He clutches it to his chest and then he bounds into my lap to give me a hug. “I love being fifteen!”
MOTHERS AND TIME are not allies when it comes to the raising of children. We pull in opposite directions. I talk a good game about the virtues of Adam growing into a young man, but I’d just as soon he stayed my little boy. Time, on the other hand, has Adam by the scruff of his neck and is racing him full speed ahead. Adam is fifteen for real now, a number that makes about as much sense to me as binary code. For him, it’s all about forthcoming attractions. No regard for the present, let alone the past.
Because the time for coming headlong at him has passed, I have to monitor the changes in him with the sideways glance—another growth spurt, a broadening around his shoulders, hair growing in thicker above his lip. There’s less roundness to his face, more pointiness. Grandma would call it the stubborn set of the chin of all Everley men, but to me he looks more like a pixie than a man. So pale is his face that you can see the webbing of blue veins around his cheeks, and his eyes appear even larger and darker. Not that those eyes offer any clues about the changes going on inside him. His turning away from me is, I suppose, what most marks the change from boy to man.
About the only thing Adam will discuss with me is the future. Then, he is full of ideas. All the things he wants to do when he gets out. It scares me half to death the way he talks. If Dobbs catches wind of it, he’ll say I’m contaminating Adam. Plotting, he’ll call it. And it will set us back another few years. Sometime back, when Dobbs was spending every waking moment indoctrinating Adam about the End of the World and his destiny to spawn a new tribe, I had the notion to use Adam to get to Dobbs. Because Dobbs seemed so eager to give Adam whatever he wanted, I suggested to Adam that he ask to go on a field trip, to insist putting into practice some of those skills Dobbs was so intent on teaching him. It backfired. Dobbs dug in his heels. Adam quickly became sulky when he didn’t get his way, and Dobbs interpreted this as my turning the child against him. I’ve had to play it the other way ever since Dobbs turned the tables and issued the decree that we’ll leave this hole only when Adam is “ready.” I think “ready” means when Adam puts away all talk of leaving. Dobbs increasingly makes mention of moving—resettling, as he puts it—but insists it all hinges on Adam. Who he says is becoming a loose cannon, just like his mother used to be. Never has their relationship been that of a father and son—at best, it has been something of a mentorship program—but of late, the tension between them has ratcheted up. So no harm will come to Adam, so Dobbs might actually keep his word and take us out of here, I find myself on more than one occasion doing Dobbs’s dirty work for him. Talking Adam off his high horse, for example.
The cough comes on suddenly, and as always, it is worse dur
ing Lights Off. I hope Adam, now rooming in what used to be the battery room next to the silo entrance, will sleep through it. The cough is Death’s promise to me. Ours was a courtship I protested at first, and then one I longed for like a spinster bride. Ever since Adam was born, though, I am the one who stalls, who bargains: wait for him to get a little older. I don’t know how much longer I can put it off.
It hasn’t helped to broach the subject of dying with Dobbs. He’ll have none it.
“You’re still young,” he has said. “My God, you’re thirty-four.”
In earth years, maybe so. But down here, a person can age ten years in a matter of minutes.
I try to remember what it was like to be a girl, to be Adam’s age, but my memories of the past are not as substantial as they used to be. They are now more like mobiles, casting intricate patterns of light and shadow on the walls of my mind. Suspended from gossamer threads will be a bright scene, a scene from Way Before. If I am patient enough to wait for it to stop spinning, I might see the four of us kids around the breakfast table, say. Gerhard’s hair catches the dirty beam of light; Suzie pretends to eat; Theo, propped high on his chair by two telephone books, uses his finger to stir cereal formations in his milk. And there, a teenage girl with her head in a book. Try as I might, there is no telling what she is like. Dreamy, perhaps. Eager to get the awkwardness of adolescence over with and become an adult.
You’d think I’d have shared everything about my childhood with Adam by now, but to look back is to walk around an abandoned house. It pains me to search the lonely rooms for some overlooked toy, some snippet of conversation, and to realize even the old ghosts have given up haunting it. It must be in Mama’s memory that the girl with the braids now resides, and in Adam’s imagination, since he insists she is like him, prone to keeping secrets and wishing the grown-ups would meddle less.
Coughing makes my heart start racing. This time it also sets off a tingling that starts in my fingers and works its way up my arm. “This is it, Blythe. Go wake up your son,” the voice says. I don’t move. Am I to tiptoe down the stairs to Adam’s bedside and wake him up for this? So he can worry, too? So I can say good-bye? What are a mother’s last words supposed to be when all along they’ve been designed to keep him from realizing he’s trapped in his own grave?
Like the wake of a boat comes the glow. I hope it’s Dobbs getting ready for another mission. Dobbs leaves for days sometimes. Sometimes I worry he might go off wandering into the woods and never come back. When the foamy green light reaches my bed, I see it is Adam. Worry lines his face like freshly plowed furrows. I make a show of beating my chest as if all it needs is a good scolding.
“Silly old chest.”
Adam blinks hard against welling concern. “Want some water?”
I shake my head, even though he is already pouring me a cup.
“Dusty down here.”
After a few sips, the cough runs muddy like the Wakarusa River. I draw my handkerchief away. Fortunately, there is no blood this time.
We go through the ritual. Adam waits for me to finish drinking, finish playing Pollyanna, finish fussing with the bed covers.
“That did the trick. Thank you, son.”
He takes my cup and peers into the bottom of it.
“You can go back to bed, it’s passed now. I’m sorry I woke you.”
Adam sits on the ground beside me, draws his knees up to his chin, and circles his arms around his shins. He’s way too big to get in the cot with me, but I lift the covers anyway. “Want to climb in?”
He shakes his head. “What if you die?”
I have to remind myself that this is not the carefree boy of yesteryear. This is someone leaving his boyhood. Even in here, one world has to make way for another. And yielding, too, must be his mother, whose fairy tales are not wanted anymore.
“I’m not going to die, silly. It’s a cough, is all.”
“But what if you do?”
His lips harden, and his eyes are frozen into treacherous ponds.
“You saying I’m an old lady, is that it?” In some ways, the thirties are a relief, even if I am now terrified of dying. It is a special kind of hell to be twenty-three and clinging to the hope that the youth from which you were robbed is still waiting for you. So Adam will not wake up each day to a skinny old woman, and so Death might be fooled into thinking that I am owed at least some of my prime, I have taken to wearing braids again and have managed to gain enough weight to fill out those old dresses.
I try not to sigh for fear it may dislodge another coughing spell. “Mister will take care of you.”
Adam shakes his head. “I won’t live with him down here, you know.”
This resentment of Dobbs is not a new thing. It’s just now a moving thing, something that keeps gathering speed. I look at this kid, his legs bowed and his back growing more crooked every day, and see him pitting himself against his father in a war he won’t win. If Dobbs lets us out, it will be on his terms, not Adam’s.
“Hush now.”
“When’s it going to be safe for us to go outside?”
“Why all the questions tonight?”
“He spends most of his time out there. Why won’t he let me go out, even on one mission?”
“I think I will take more of that water, if you don’t mind.”
The task is not enough to redirect Adam. “It could be safe to go Above right now, and we wouldn’t know it.”
“Adam, please. You’re getting worked up for nothing. Go back to bed.”
“There could be people out there who could help you, make you well. It could be like before.” Before the Disaster, he means. “Anything’s better than just waiting,” he insists. “Waiting, waiting, waiting. It’s all we ever do!”
“My boy.”
“I’m not a boy! Stop treating me like one!”
I get up and go to the kitchen to make us something hot to drink.
“What if people have started living outside again? What if there are doctors again, or hospitals?”
I debate whether to tell him what I vowed I wouldn’t until I knew for certain. Waiting for Dobbs to keep his promise and move us out of here is like going for a ride on a giant Ferris wheel. There’s Main Street, ribbed with pickups. Cecil’s Grill has been tarted up with neon beer signs and a wagon-wheel fence. The houses are pegged in place by blooming crabapple trees. We go a little higher, and the old fertilizer plant looks more like a carnival attraction than a rust heap. Down Indian Road is where I pick out the spot where we might live, and the next thing, we are up where the air is too thin to talk. The Ferris wheel gets stuck, and all I can do is look at the scene from an impossible distance.
“Mister is looking for a place for us Above. We’re going to be moving out of here soon.”
On his face is exactly what I have come to expect: suspicion. “When?”
If only we could go back to the time when I started all my stories with “long, long ago.” He doesn’t want “once upon a time” anymore. He wants stories that begin with “when.” When will the doors open? When can we go free? When can we get a dog?
“Soon,” I say. “Let’s just leave it at that for now.”
* * *
We hear the blast door open. Adam doesn’t even look at Dobbs when he pokes his head into the room. He always does this, like he expects to see it empty. We hear him tromp downstairs. He goes to the weapons room and locks away his pistol. His study is directly beneath my cot. I hear him take off his keys. He puts them and the code to the magnetic locks in the safe. Ever since I got the doors open, he uses long combinations of numbers that he changes frequently enough never to be able to memorize them.
“It’s like a morgue around here,” he says when he comes back upstairs. Dobbs hands Adam a hardbound copy of Ivanhoe and tells him there’s more where that came from if he plays his cards right.
The years have not been kind to the man. Long, wispy strands of hair do a poor job of disguising the bald spots. His face ha
s a sagging look to it, not aided by the collection of skin around his chin. With his scraggly beard and untrimmed mustache, it is hard to believe that this is the same man who was once so particular about grooming and hygiene. There is a puttylike growth that now covers most of his left ear; it’s a wonder he can still hear out of it. He’s shrunken, a good foot shorter than he used to be, and he is a far cry from the warrior he once fancied himself as being. What we have to listen to most days is a rundown of ailments—constipation, bloating, arthritic knee, jaw pain, dry mouth. It’s no use hoping he’ll drop dead, because Dobbs Hordin has the heart of an ox.
“Seems to me some people have been a little testy lately, so I’m thinking what we need is an outing.”
Adam and I exchange glances. Is “Soon” now?
Dobbs dumps the duffel bag on the table. He pulls out a dress, something a little girl might wear to a costume party. Clearly, the answer is no. “You’re going to want to dress up for a night at the movies.” He hands Adam an old movie reel.
Adam snorts.
“What? I thought everyone liked movie night.”
Dobbs got his hands on an old movie projector and a box of reel-to-reel black-and-white films some time ago, which means once in a while we “go out.” In other words, we go down to the lower level, where three chairs are set up in front of a sheet hung from a support beam. Popcorn is passed around, and scenes of battleships and bombers light up the screen. This beats game night, when Dobbs brings out a pack of cards and shuffles in such a way that his hand always ends up with all the jokers.
I get up to boil water. I set out three mugs, three small plates for sandwiches. We don’t have the variety or quantity of groceries we used to have, and this latest foray outside amounts to only a dozen cans, none of them labeled.
Dobbs sits and picks at one of the many black scabs on his arm. All his shirts are stained from when they rupture and bleed. The twitch in his cheek fires repeatedly. He’s been up to something. It’s written all over him.