by Isla Morley
He flicks his head at Adam, who is drawing plans for some new machine in his notebook.
“What you working on, Sport?”
He gets no reply.
“Oh, I see, we’re playing the Silent Game.” As soon as he finishes his sandwich, he leans over and takes my bowl of slop. “You aren’t going to eat that? Guess it’s easy to turn up your nose at food when you don’t have to earn it.”
Adam monitors my reaction. When I do nothing, he tucks his notepad under his arm and stalks off.
“I’m going to have to start coming down harder on that boy.” He says this, but the truth is that disciplining is left to me. Dobbs prefers to play good cop.
Dobbs launches into one of his lectures, blaming me for Adam’s attitude. He says Adam is impressionable and I shouldn’t fill his head with notions. On and on it goes. I tune out and watch his hands. Flaccid palms, tapering fingers. He still keeps his nails too long, but unlike before, there’s often dirt underneath them. His hands have age spots now. These same hands used to crawl over my body, claiming even the unforgiving parts. And these same hands have crawled over someone else’s body. I can smell it on him; the smell of another woman. He’s itching for a fight because he thinks it’ll distract me from that fact.
“You went to see her again.”
A flicker of surprise.
“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.” He gives me the wounded look. How can I accuse him of being unfaithful, a man who takes his vows to heart? Once in a while, he’ll tell me he loves me. It’s not love. It’s what he feels for The Manifesto, for the seed catalogs and the silo. Ownership is what it is.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be Dobbs’s girlfriend. If he weren’t so miserly, I’d say he was paying for it, especially since he never helps himself to me anymore. “You don’t have to pretend for my sake. I don’t care. Heck, why don’t you invite her around for movie night?”
He lifts his hand for me to stop. “It’s not like that—”
Oh my, after all these years, is this a confession? It’s my turn to cut him off. “I told Adam you were finding us a place.”
“I thought we agreed to hold off on that.”
“What else am I supposed to say? He keeps asking me how long we’re going to be down here, and I’ve run out of stories.”
“Why don’t you just tell him the truth?”
You’d think the man would have grown weary with the end-of-civilization plotline by now. Instead, it evolves. We’re long past the Apocalypse. Now, I’m supposed to tell Adam there are thugs running about, bandits who snatch up women and children and use them for their own purposes.
“He’s not going to put up with this arrangement much longer.”
Dobbs arranges his facial muscles just so, draws in a deep breath. A picture of long-suffering.
It only makes me more insistent. “You can’t keep telling him—”
“You were the one to mention going on a mission, not me.” This is how it is with us now—completing each other’s sentences, reading each other’s minds, remembering a shared history as though it were a rerun of a favorite TV show. Lord help me for the times we behave like this, an old married couple.
“I’m trying to give him something to look forward to! If you cared for him at all . . .”
Dobbs sighs. “I’m working on it. Give me a few more weeks.”
I raise my eyes to the ceiling.
“I promise, Blythe. I give you my word.”
AS SOON AS Dobbs goes to his study, Adam comes back upstairs.
“You want your dinner now?” He doesn’t answer but heads straight for the bookshelf.
“Where are my notebooks?”
“He confiscated them.”
“Why?”
“Can’t you show him a little respect?”
“Why should I respect him? You don’t.”
He’s right. I haven’t done a good job of hiding my feelings. Rather, I bake my loathing into Dobbs’s favorite meals, spoiling them with too much salt. I stitch it in the shirts he gives me to mend, sewing cuffs closed.
“Am I going to get them back?”
I am still deciding how to answer this when he says, “Can’t you just say yes or no? Why does there always have to be a story?”
Why does there always have to be a story?
Stories keep the fire burning inside us, stories keep us from dashing our heads against the wall. Without stories we’d be lost, dead, forgotten. I am a story, I should tell him. There used to be a girl who lived in a town where nothing bad ever happened. You are a story. Play your cards right, and you might live in a town one day, too. How about that for a story?
“Please just try and be nicer to him, that’s all I’m asking.”
Adam grabs a load of books from next to Dobbs’s recliner and leaves the room in a huff.
* * *
After enough time has passed for Adam to cool off, I go down with a sandwich and a cup of hot cocoa. His private barracks is next to the generator room. He doesn’t seem to mind the cramped space, the fuel smell from next door, or the engine noise when the generators kick on.
He’s hunched over his desk. I put the plate next to him, keep my hand from landing on his head and smoothing the static out of his white-blond hair, and notice he’s scribbling in one of Dobbs’s prized books.
I seize The Coming Race from him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Frantically, I leaf through the others. Scribbled over the text of The Survivor’s Primer are silly riddles. In The Alpha Strategy, Adam has drawn cartoons.
“Adam! How could you!”
He grins. “What else am I supposed to use?”
“You aren’t going to be able to hide this from him, you know. He’s going to find out.”
“So let him.”
“Adam, this behavior of yours—it has to stop.” Every time I get a clear picture of that weathered farmhouse on the edge of town, where Adam is outside breaking sticks across his knee like a regular kid, there is this. Whatever the name for this is.
“He’s the one who took my stuff. Why don’t you yell at him? Why do you always take his side?”
“I don’t always take his side.”
“Yes, you do. It’s always got to be his way, keeping him happy, like he’s God or something.”
“You’re not being fair.”
He shakes his head. “Is it fair that he gets to come and go as he pleases and we have to stay here all the time?”
“We will stay here forever if you do not get your act together!”
Because there is no taking the words back, I spin around and march out of the room, Dobbs’s books packed tightly in my arms.
* * *
Nobody says a word when Dobbs comes upstairs. He’s bathed and changed his shirt, and his hands are pink from all the scrubbing, as though to get rid of any trace of her. “Movie’s ready.”
All he has to do is take one look at Adam’s face to know something’s amiss. He catches me looking at the bookshelf. He walks over to it. The second book he pulls out, and the game is up.
I go to him, explaining we’re living with an adolescent now, that we have to adjust.
He storms downstairs. Adam and I chase after him. Dobbs loads every single one of Adam’s notebooks into a cardboard box, and uses the dolly to wheel them along the utility tunnel. Adam yells at him to stop. I stand in front of the silo door, but Dobbs pushes me aside. He unlocks the padlock and opens the door. The place reeks. He rolls the cargo onto the platform and up to the railing. As Adam screams his protest, he empties the load over into the darkness.
“You let me know if you want anything else disposed of,” Dobbs tells Adam on his way out.
Adam might be small for his age and very pale, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a straight bone in his body, but he is not one to cower at a challenge. This is going to end badly.
* * *
I wake to find my son sitting at the table eating cereal.
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“Good morning,” I call to him.
“ ’Morning.”
I put on my robe and amble to the table. He is smiling that sunrise smile I used to take for granted. He is not going to retaliate, and Dobbs is not going to hold a grudge, and we are going to live in that farmhouse after all. And then I see why Adam’s smile is so buttery. He’s covered himself in small print. On his arms, on his neck, all over his hands are words and diagrams and maps. It’s not ink poisoning I’m worried about; it is the poisoning that comes from thinking you can win.
“My boy?”
* * *
I read him while he sleeps. With the pocket flashlight, I look at what Adam has refused to scrub clean. It is like being in Tutankhamen’s tomb, reading the history of the ancient Egyptians. I discover my son has learned to swear. FUCKING SHIT, is wrapped around his heel. More alarming are all the pictures of weapons—daggers and cannonballs careening across his arm, a missile, a gun. If someone else were to read this, they’d get entirely the wrong idea about my son. Adam is still the sensitive, soft-natured boy he always was. He is just fed up with being kept down here. And with the ones who keep him down here. The caricature of me is unflattering, if not downright unkind. The one of Dobbs is vulgar. From what I can tell, the rest is a story of a young hero on a quest to slay a dragon and return a magical stone to its rightful heir.
Adam wakes up, startled. I didn’t realize I had touched him.
There is a wall of darkness between us when I quickly switch off the flashlight.
He leans toward me, following my breath. With his face all but superimposed on mine, he says, “What are you doing, Mom?”
I find his cheek, stroke it. I have learned to distinguish color in the darkness. Gauging from the heat at my fingertips, I’d say he’s steamed.
He bats my hand away.
“I’m sure he’ll get your notebooks back for you.” I lay my hand on his thigh, give it a little pat. It is as stiff as an ironing board. “You can’t let him get to you, though. It’ll only make things worse.”
Again, no response.
“You’re going through a lot of changes at the moment—physically, emotionally—”
“Mom, please!”
“You’re fifteen, Adam. You’re becoming a man. It’s natural that the two of you are going to have these . . .” I can’t bring myself to say, “tiffs.”
“Can you just drop it?”
“I don’t know how to talk to you anymore without you getting upset. We used to be able to talk about anything. And now you are keeping things from me, and I don’t like it.”
He sits up now. “Turn on the flashlight. Let’s talk.”
Instead of being joined by the dark, we are now separated by a measly column of light. I barely recognize the person on the other side of it. His blond hair stands up like brush bristles, and his eyes are still the same midnight blue, but it’s in the way he holds himself that’s new, like an arrow readied on a bow. I can’t look at him without thinking, Hurt; someone’s going to get hurt.
“We have to get out of this place,” he says.
I shush him. The generators are off, which will make it easier for Dobbs to eavesdrop. “We can talk about this when he’s on a mission,” I whisper.
Adam tags behind me, following the thin beam all the way back to my cot. “You always do this! You say you want us to talk, but you mean you want to talk. You never want to listen to what I’ve got to say.”
“You’re right, honey. You should talk and I should listen. Just not right now. He’s going Above tomorrow; we can talk then.”
He shakes my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here or we’re going to rot!”
All you have to do is take a look at my teeth to know he’s telling the truth straight-up. “Don’t say things like that. Nobody’s rotting.”
He can’t keep his voice from rising. “He’ll listen to you. If you tell him to take us Above, he will. You just have to insist.”
Sometimes I think putting up with Dobbs and playing by his rules is being strong, but sometimes, like now, I wonder if I didn’t misplace my backbone somewhere. “Is it getting cold in here or is it just me?” I pick up my blanket and hand it to him.
Adam throws it on the floor. “If he won’t take us up even for a short time, like at night or something—”
“Keep your voice down!”
“—then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“We’ll know he’s lying to us.”
All the care we’ve taken—I’ve taken—in remodeling the universe, every apostrophe and comma and parenthesis, and still he is on to us. How can it be, when I did such a painstaking job of re-creation? Sure, God spoke the world into being—a grand speech that went on for six days. Big deal. What the Almighty authored, I had to edit. It has taken fifteen years to boil it all down to something that has allowed my son go about his days in these fixed dimensions and not make mad dashes for the outside. I’ve even broken down man’s greatest achievements into itty-bitty piles. Cities, I’ve told Adam, weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I’ve chopped off the tops of skyscrapers, made them no higher than the cottonwoods growing along the flood plains. I’ve shortened freeways, lowered bridges, given parking lots back to the cows. It wasn’t a big, wide world to begin with, I’ve told him; don’t believe everything you read in books. Despite all this paraphrasing of the world, my boy is still spoiling for a fight to experience it.
“There are others who have had it a lot worse.” When Dobbs takes us out of here, I will happily take the blame for the lies, but until then, I have to keep my end of the bargain, or Dobbs might keep us here forever.
He scoffs. “Here we go again.”
“Adam, I want what’s best for you, don’t you know that?”
“I don’t want to live like this for the rest of my life!”
The particles that make up darkness are much denser than those that make up light because they amplify sound. Either that, or my boy is shouting at me.
“Lower your voice.”
“You know what? I am not going to die down here. I’d rather go Above and get rounded up by the vigilantes. I’d rather have my head shot off or get skin cancer or whatever the big threat is exactly, than—”
“That is quite enough!”
“—than live like you!”
We are both taken aback by a new sound. Like a sheet being torn through the middle, the crack of thunder.
A slap.
It is the first time I have ever hit my child.
After an initial gasp, he utters not another sound.
My God, I’ve killed my son. “Adam?” I reach for him, but he draws himself out of my reach.
On my palm is Adam’s cameo, a stinging silhouette. I now understand the punishment of chopping off a hand for the crime of stealing. It should also apply to mothers who strike their children. What have I just stolen from Adam?
I say, “Go to your room. Right now.” But he is already gone.
I’M TIRED, OLD. Thirty-four. I am my parents’ age now, but I have my grandmother’s hands. It is her graying hair I have to braid each day. My body is craggy, and there are places where the skin falls into deep pleats, like I’m a folded fan waiting to be spread out. Perhaps that’s what death will be like—an unfurling of what never came to pass. Perhaps I will find myself to be a magnificent landscape, like the mural Adam has painted in his room, one across which colorful, wild animals migrate. Among bison and monarch butterflies and humpback whales will be a parade of trees, with hills swelling up behind them. A pied-piper breeze will egg on jolly hollyhocks, lift stray leaves and music notes into spinning pirouettes.
“Get that light out of my face!” I hear Dobbs shout from below.
I leap out of bed, run downstairs. Dobbs is standing in front of his study door. Adam is interrogating him with a flashlight. “Adam! What’s going on?”
“Who was here before me?”
The flashlight makes Dobbs look very
pale. Either that, or he is. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Listen to your mother, and go back to bed.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time. Who was here before me?”
This doesn’t have the ring of a question but the tone of accusation. Adam is so upset, he’s trembling. Before tempers flare any further, I say, very calmly, “Military personnel. The ones who worked here long ago, before we came. The Cold War, remember—we read about that.”
“Children don’t man missiles, Mother.”
“You mean, someone your age? No, honey, children weren’t in the armed forces, you’re right about that.” And don’t shove me away with that word—Mother.
“Then, who’s Charlie?”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know what nonsense your mother’s been filling your head with this time, but I’m not about to put up with this.”
Adam tries following Dobbs into his room, but he slams the door and triggers the latch. We hear him unlock the safe and gather his keys. A minute later, he barges out. He unlocks the fuse box and flips the switch. The generators groan in response, and a second later the fluorescents snap on. The light makes Adam look sick and Dobbs as guilty as sin. Lord knows what it is doing for me.
Dobbs glares at me with pure loathing. I know what this means: he’s going on a mission and it might be days, a week perhaps, before he’ll be back.
Adam intersects him at the stairs up to the entrapment vestibule. “I am coming with you.”
“I haven’t got time for your games!”
“This is not a game. I’m coming with you.”
Dobbs glowers at me.
“Adam . . .” I respond weakly. I can’t think straight, much less speak. How does Adam know the name Charlie?
Dobbs slings the duffel bag over his shoulder, giving me the I-told-you-this-would-happen face.