by Alison Stine
His daddy said nothing more than, Sorry, son. But his mama couldn’t stop apologizing, couldn’t stop asking him what had happened, how could this have happened? I didn’t know, after a while, if she meant his cast, the accident—or something more. How could we have left our homes? How could we have thought we could do better?
How could it still be cold?
This was what we told ourselves: nobody could have known. Nobody could have predicted. What an unusual time. What a ridiculous time. This was one for the record books. When we wrote new books, we would say: summer was hot sand and burning pavement, growing food outside in the air, warm earth breaking in our hands like bread. We got sunburns that flushed and freckled us; we built machines to cool us. They sent chemicals into the air.
How could we write that, explain that, to a baby like Starla? What would she remember? Jamey had said she was a summer birth.
Jamey and Starla had disappeared into the crowd of women as soon as they had arrived at the town, fussed and fawned over. I expected to find Starla, the next time I saw her, in new clothes, her hair washed and festooned with ribbons, her belly full of cookies. If they had cookies here. I expected Jamey would be more crabby than usual; the women would have pestered her about being saved, about bringing up her baby the right way.
“You should be with your folks,” I said to Grayson. “Spend some time with them. Why did you come looking for me?”
“Well, I have to say goodbye to you.”
There was a medical doctor with The Church. Grayson had friends at The Church. His folks were here. Of course he would stay.
He should stay. I told myself the reasons. I told myself not to be surprised, not to show outwardly the cold river of sorrow spreading through me.
“Are you sure you want to stay?” I said. “It’s just...”
The men patrolled the perimeter, only the men. The women had served dinner that night: canned green beans and rolls and hamburger casserole, and the women had cleaned up after alone. They had refused Grayson’s offer of help.
“They left you,” I said.
“Your family left you.”
“I didn’t want to go with them then.”
“Well, I didn’t want to go with my family, either, at the time. But times have changed. It seems like we should be with family now. Doesn’t it? Whatever that means.”
I felt an ache. It wasn’t like the awful thought of leaving Jamey and Starla behind in the compound; it wasn’t even like watching Dance disappear off on his own. Grayson wouldn’t be alone here. But I still didn’t want to let him go. It didn’t seem right. It seemed like, once we had found each other, we should stick together.
“Are you going to be safe?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
“It seems a little cult-ish.”
“It is. But you can’t blame people for wanting to believe in something, especially now. And the assistant pastor’s a woman,” he offered hopefully.
And the pastor was a man.
Power was power, I thought.
“Do you believe this stuff?” I asked.
“Not really. So what? So I have to go to church sometimes.”
“A lot. Sunday and Wednesday night. Probably more. A lot.”
“I’ll do it. It’s temporary. Nothing is forever now. It’s not a big deal. I want to get this thing off me as soon as I can.” He kicked his leg and we both looked at the boot. If he did get it off, it would feel light for him. It would feel like flying. “I want to survive,” he said.
I hugged Grayson. Above the layers of flannel and thermal and fleece, his coat was stuffed with balls of newspaper. We had learned to do this miles ago, insulating ourselves like old house walls. When I hugged him, it crunched.
Beneath all of this was a person I had grown to trust, to even love a little. I tried to imagine the road without his dumb jokes and hesitant driving. I didn’t want to think yet if Starla would miss him. If she would ask where he was, the limping, bearded man who would sometimes carry her around on his shoulders, though it must have hurt his foot. He saved the softest lumps of meat for her. What could her life be like if she got to grow up with someone like him? I had stopped trying, years ago, to imagine a life where my daddy hadn’t left when I was little, or Mama hadn’t met Lobo—or Lobo was different. Just different. That was all I had dreamed.
There had been other men before him but I didn’t remember much. They were flannel and beards and beer, indistinguishable from each other. I was still not sure, after all these years, why Lobo had stuck. He yelled at the sky, at the eggs burning in the skillet, at a series of dogs who ran away. He didn’t plan on being a daddy, but he loved my mama and part of the way he showed that love was by putting up with me—Mama had told me that once. We always had food, though it was often deer meat, and potatoes and tomatoes he grew. We had warmth, though it was woodstove heat. There was money for school supplies and clothes and gas. Lobo provided. Was that why she had gotten stuck? Because he kept us from dying? I wanted something more.
We didn’t talk about keeping in touch, Grayson and I, because how could we possibly do that? How could we manage that now? Our phones were rocks. The internet was dead. The Church might not stay in this company town if invaders came, or tragedy came, or something better came along.
“Get that radio station working,” was all I could say.
He held my shoulder. “Get to California.”
* * *
Before turning in for the night, I double-checked everything in the tiny house: that the windows were locked, the stove off, that no one from The Church had stolen anything. I looked in the cupboards, counted our dwindling packages of deer meat. I should have felt grateful that I still had the keys to my house and truck, that I had been allowed to park close to where we were staying. I was telling myself that when I noticed them.
The beans by the windowsill. The seeds in the jars I had watered faithfully, for a long time, for nothing.
They were sprouting.
I ran to tell Lisbeth, the first one I thought to tell. She was tucking extra blankets on the bed in the house where we were both staying. Extra blankets for me. And her smile, when she heard my news, when she turned to me, was bright with the kind of open-faced joy I hadn’t seen on her—on anyone—in forever. She looked like spring.
“That’s great!” she said. “God provides.”
“But it was me,” I said. “It was me. I grew them.”
I don’t know what I expected. That news of the seeds sprouting would make her change her mind, would make her want to come with me. That it was a sign—and she had started to believe in signs.
But not this sign, not the seeds bursting from their brown casings like butterflies, spreading green wings.
She turned back to the blankets.
I didn’t tell Grayson about the seeds.
It was supposed to be nice to sleep in a real bed in the company town, under a real roof—Lisbeth and I had a nonleaky one. To sleep on a bunk, the mattress stuffed with hay and leaves. Guards patrolled the wild outside. The ceiling in the house stretched high enough I wouldn’t hit my head if I stood, unlike in my loft. And Lisbeth lay on the mattress beside me, her back pressed against my side, like we were on one of our old sleepovers.
But when she woke in the middle of the night to find me still awake, staring at the moon through the cracked window, she didn’t ask me if I had had a nightmare, what my dreams were, if I liked Grayson or not, if we had kissed. She only said, her breath sparking in the moonlight, “I’ll pray for you.”
I turned to see her hair fanning over her shoulder, pale as a mermaid’s. Her hand reached back to hold mine. Cold hands, warm hearts.
Her hand was bonier than I remembered, sliding into my palm. She fell asleep again instantly, shivering in her nightgown under the quilts and extra blankets, her tennis shoes that wouldn’
t protect her. How fast, how far, could we run?
I had lost my friend a long time ago. Frost fractured the moon through the window into a million more shards.
We left after breakfast, Jamey, Starla, and I. It felt good to hear the truck start again. The sound meant freedom, survival. The truck heat, stale and sharp, had a dry smell like hay. How long would trucks have heat? I wondered. How could we slap this together with duct tape and wire?
We fueled up at the company town. They were sending us off with food we hadn’t asked for and extra canisters of gas. I wanted to refuse it, but we hadn’t found any place to buy or borrow since we had been robbed by the people in white, and the faces of the women pressing canned goods into my hands were so hopeful, so sure of what they were doing: giving survival away. I had never felt that sure about anything.
Some of the women cried when they said goodbye to Starla, passing her into the arms of Jamey, who rolled her eyes. That made me feel a little better.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Jamey said.
She buckled Starla into the back. She tucked heavy blankets around her, which Starla immediately kicked off. Jamey got into the front seat, pulled the visor down and put sunglasses on, even though there was no sun. The sunglasses were heart-shaped, cracked on one lens. Everything that wasn’t already broken was starting to break.
I hoped that Grayson and Lisbeth would protect each other from whatever The Church would demand of them. I hoped that I would see Grayson again; maybe he would be walking. Maybe Lisbeth would think of my hand in the dark.
They both had come out with the rest of The Church to say goodbye, lined up outside the miners’ little houses as if for inspection. It might have been easy to lose Lisbeth among the other women. They all wore long denim skirts, thick woolen leggings or slouchy sweatpants tucked into boots underneath. They all kept their hair in braids down their backs. But Lisbeth was different. There was a spark in her. It radiated off her, a kind of humming light. When she was onstage, singing, I knew that everyone saw it: a golden glow, buzzing around her. But now—waiting to get into the truck, Jamey checking her hair in the passenger mirror—I felt I was the only one who could see it still.
Grayson stood with his folks. People like us left home both earlier and later than people in cities, I knew that. The pull of the holler was real, a kind of invisible mist or vine swirling around our ankles, tying them fiercely to the red ground.
But it was also practicable to stay. Where would we go? How would we live? What jobs were there? How could we afford to get them and start over in a town with no kin to float us gas money or food, or offer us a couch for sleeping, even reluctantly?
“I don’t feel useful,” Grayson had said to me last night. “You grow things. I’m a waiter.”
“You’re great with kids,” I said.
“I’m just a waiter.” Grayson looked around the company town. The lights in the houses were all going out. I didn’t know if there was a curfew, and someone would come around and yell at us, the generators wheezing off, or if people just wanted to save their candles and kerosene. Grayson’s boot thudded on the van hood. “If I stay here, I can at least help my folks.”
“Don’t sacrifice your life to help your family.”
I was aware, as I said it, of the postcard from California in my truck. Of the reason we had left the farm. Of the farm itself. Not my idea, not my dream, just a dream I had inherited.
“What life?” Grayson said. “Back home, maybe I could’ve worked my way up to manager eventually, if the restaurant had stayed open. I could’ve squatted in a trailer on somebody’s land, or in a house with a bunch of other folks until we got kicked out for being late on the rent or noise or some other crap. It’s not like I could ever own my own house. It’s not like I could have a great job.”
With the lights off, the town was turning silver, crested over with snow. It was too cold to sit outside, but still we sat, watching the shadows around the houses. There was a sliver of moon, as thin as a razor. It slid in and out of the clouds.
“Maybe this weather is a great big equalizer,” Grayson said. “Everybody has to start fresh.”
I thought of Mica in the forest. “Some people are starting out with more.”
Grayson slid off the hood. The newspaper in his coat made his arms rustle. “Damn, Wil. If anyone knows how to do more with less, it’s us.”
* * *
As we readied to leave, I knew Grayson was there, but if I didn’t look closely, he blended into the congregation, bundled in his warm things. It was like when The Church had left, when I couldn’t find Lisbeth in the vans. I was losing her again. I was losing two people.
I got into the truck.
Was this what a wedding was like—everybody standing there, watching, waiting for you to do the thing you already knew in your heart was wrong? When my mama married my daddy, leaving was already in him, like searching was in her. There was something in the blood, some kind of pull. I couldn’t change my mind now and stay, or insist Grayson and Lisbeth come with us. It was too late. People were lined up on either side of the truck, getting impatient and cold. Jamey was making faces in the mirror. Starla needed to nap.
I made my body move, close the door. I had done this before, willed my body into action: in the truck with the boys from the bar, in my loft. Mindlessly, rotely, I belted myself in. I put the truck into gear. I drove. Just drove.
Straight ahead, slowly. I didn’t look back.
“Let’s get out of town,” Jamey said. “Get on a highway already.”
The engine was comforting, its rattling purr. I heard the rustle of Jamey settling into her seat, a sigh from Starla in the back. Then we were out of sight of the little houses. The trees were a tangle that hid the access road to the town. The Church didn’t need camouflage to hide their camp. Maybe it would all be fine. I tried not to imagine everything burning.
I saw a blur in the rearview and felt my heart jag. Grayson or Lisbeth, come to call us back?
No.
It was a little girl. She was dressed as a rabbit in a fuzzy, full-body suit. A Halloween costume. Either The Church had run out of warm winter things, or she had persuaded her minders to let her wear it. It had long ears that wouldn’t stay up, a hole for her face.
I kept driving, but slowly, in case she darted forward. She followed behind us until our tires hit the main road, then she stopped. Some invisible line halted her, some mental fence. Someone had yelled at her or hurt her for going farther. She believed them; she was afraid of them. She looked like a magical creature, guarding the town.
I didn’t want to speed up until I saw her turn around, until I saw her at least start for home. The truck idled.
“What?” Jamey said. “Did you forget something? Why aren’t we going?”
The little girl just stood there. She didn’t turn around. She just watched us. I looked back at Starla, but she was asleep.
* * *
We got used to things. After our first night alone as a trio, the days developed a rhythm, as they had back on the farm. We drove, stopping often because Starla needed to run around and stretch her legs, and because the sight of too many cars now made me nervous. A few cars were okay, but a caravan with tires roped to bike racks, gas cans strapped to roofs, scorch marks or spray paint—meant people organizing, traveling together: groups with an agenda. And a leader. Groups meant trouble. A leader meant power. People together could not be trusted. Our house would draw attention, attract too many questions.
Parts of the roads we traveled had crumbled. Some were closed, gated or chained. Sometimes people had driven around or through, anyway, splintering the gates onto the ground. At nearly every gas station, we stopped. Most of them had closed signs, but we tried, anyway. We filled the fuel cans when we could. We collected kindling. We collected tins of little sausages and noodles in red sauce and we ate them cold as we drove, p
assing the cans back and forth across the front seat, like other girls might pass a joint, and I dissuaded Jamey from giving too many packages of candy or cakes to Starla.
Everything was stale.
In the afternoons, we found a place to stop for the night, somewhere sheltered, capable of hiding the house. We used the painted boughs from the Occupied Forest. We had our jobs that we had decided on. Jamey fed Starla and started the fire. I cooked, aware that I was not as good as Grayson, and was painfully reminded of him every time I stabbed at a hunk of frozen deer meat with a spoon, or tried to do something with a potato.
“This is some of the last meat,” I said to Jamey as I handed her a plate of it, warmed with nubby brown potatoes, which we were also running low on.
“Good,” Jamey said. “I’m sick of deer meat.”
“You and Starla need protein.”
She looked up from her plate. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That mama thing. Saving the meat for us? Giving us the biggest piece?”
“You’re younger than me.”
“So? That doesn’t mean you have to die for us. I didn’t ask you to.” She fed Starla a potato off her fork.
The trees shone silver with frost, like they had been shellacked, like the snow globes Mama and I made one winter for presents: saving food jars, gluing trees from model train sets onto the lids, and screwing them on upside down. Glitter snowed on the miniature world, and it was pretty, safe, to look at the fake cold, contained behind glass. I had given one to Lisbeth, and she had saved it on her windowsill for years. She was thoughtful like that, careful. I wondered if she had packed it. I hadn’t seen it in her room in the company town.