The Last One

by Alexandra Oliva

  In the hall, Brennan moves into my line of sight. He’s eyeing the wedding collage. I wonder if he can recognize me in the photos, with my hair curled and my face all made up, wearing a clean strapless ivory gown dotted with Swarovski crystals. I flip the book to masculine B. Brennan. It’s Irish in origin, like I thought, but the meaning is unexpected. Sorrow, reads the book. Sadness. Tear.

  Laughter cracks from my chest, painful.

  Brennan looks over.

  I close the book and scan the living room, wishing for a Clue. All I see is our life, abandoned. I take the book to the built-in shelves lining the back wall, and slide it into a gap between Cooking for Two and 1984. When we moved in, we unpacked our books first, haphazardly, promising to institute a system once we were settled. The last box was empty within the month, but by then we’d grown accustomed to having to Where’s Waldo anything we wanted to read. We pretended it was a game we’d chosen to play.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I say, and Brennan steps aside.

  The third step from the top is going to creak, I think.

  The third step from the top creaks.

  The second-floor hallway is long and narrow, with two doors on either side. To the right, a bathroom followed by our bedroom. To the left, a guest room and our home gym, which was slated to become the nursery. We planned to move the gym equipment to the basement when it was time. The treadmill and the yoga mats, the mismatched dumbbells we never lifted. The basement is a damp cave, but we’d fix it up. That’s what we said.

  The bathroom door is open; I glance inside. Our Antarctic-scene shower curtain is scrunched to one side of the tub, but I know which cartoon penguin is which. Fran is posed mid-waddle. Horatio and Elvis are resting on their iceberg in the folds.

  Across from the bathroom, the guest room door is closed. The door to the home gym, our nursery-never-to-be, is also closed.

  But our bedroom door is open. I’ve been able to see this since I reached the top of the stairs, and now that I’m only about four feet from the frame, I can see a slice of the room beyond. Our double-wide dresser, the opening of the walk-in closet. I can’t see our bed or the master bath. Those are to the right of the doorway, hidden by the wall.

  My head feels fuzzy and tight.

  You shouldn’t be here.

  There is nowhere else for me to go.

  I feel Brennan behind me, close. I brace my left hand against the wall, splaying my blood-dabbled fingers atop ugly yellow floral-print wallpaper—another thing we meant to change but never will. Let me be wrong, I wish. Let him be in there, waiting, holding a bouquet of mixed flowers. He always gets mixed, because he knows that lilies are my favorite, but he forgets which ones are lilies and hates to ask. There’s always a lily in a mixed bouquet, at least the good ones, so it works. I think of how sweet that mixed bouquet will smell. Unless he did ask the florist and got only lilies. Lilies with orange pollen bunched along their stamens, looking beautiful but smelling awful and waiting to stain my fingertips.

  Maybe that’s what I’ve been able to smell since cresting the stairway. Lily pollen. Maybe the whole room is filled with lilies, and their rotten pollen stench is filling the air, drifting out to the hall to meet me.

  “Lilies,” I say aloud. “It’s lilies.”

  But this isn’t what lily pollen smells like.

  “Mae?” says Brennan.

  “I can’t,” I say. I can’t go back, I can’t go forward. I can’t stand here forever.

  “I’ll go in,” he says.

  I put out my swollen hand to stop him, but he hasn’t moved.

  It takes all my strength to lift my foot.

  I recognize our maroon-and-gold comforter. The bedding is rumpled, mounded on the far side. My side. A patch of fuzzy darkness near the head.

  Pressure builds behind my eyes. This is my punishment. For the cliff, for the cabin. For leaving.

  I can’t look. I can’t see you like this.

  A baby. Our baby. A little boy with light blue eyes. I left him, crying. I had to have known. His fingers so chubby and grasping, and I left him there and here you are, gone, and I don’t even know for how long because I was off playing another game.

  We met playing a game, Wits and Wagers, and in the final round you bet it all on my answer: 1866. I was one year over; you lost it all and so did I. Three years later, your best man framed the story of our mutual loss as the story of our mutual gain in a toast that had us laughing tears. Afterward we wondered: How many other weddings have referenced assassination?

  My eyes flicker toward the window. Sunlight blinds me. It should be raining.

  I feel myself hit the floor without experiencing the fall, without feeling my knees give.

  You’re gone. Right there, but gone.

  Brennan walks past me, toward the bed. I can’t watch him; I can’t not watch him. If I blink my skin will rupture. I stare at the nearest leg of the bed frame. Mahogany, bought from a stranger online; we haggled fifty dollars off the price because of a scratch that later buffed right out. Brennan reaches for the covers, doing what I cannot do because I’ve done it before, I’ve seen what lies beneath, and I kneel here willing my heart to stop beating, begging it to—Please. A pair of brown slippers, size eleven, at the foot of the bed. A birthday present, from me to you. The practical gift, not the fun, we promised to give at least one of each, always. They’re askew, and I can see you there, kicking them off before crawling under the covers. My side.

  Maroon and gold rise at the edge of my vision. I hate the boy for it. He shouldn’t see you like this. No one should see you like this. You shouldn’t exist like this. My hands are limp upon my lap, one gruesomely swollen and bruised, the other with shredded skin. I can’t feel either. All I can feel is the endless, overwhelming ba-bump of my heart, grotesque in its insistence to keep on beating. The comforter, not falling—being placed. You, covered now. My ears are ringing. The boy’s looking at me. My forehead strikes the floor, the peeling veneer of what we thought was hardwood.

  This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I meant.

  Pressure, Brennan’s hands upon my shoulders. The floor retreats; I have no resistance left in me. He’s talking—crashing waves, my ears still ringing—and I think: All I’m left with is you. Hatred like flame and fear like fuel. This isn’t how this was supposed to end, how we were supposed to end. The boy’s face in mine, imploring, beseeching, needing, trying. One phrase penetrates. “It’s all right.” Over and over: It’s all right. An automated response; he doesn’t know what he’s saying. It’s not all right, it’s all wrong. I was wrong. Wrong to leave, wrong to fear, wrong to lie, wrong to think that you couldn’t make even raising a child possible. I’m sorry, I was wrong, I will forever be wrong—but I came back.

  It can mean nothing now, but I did.

  I came back.

  22.

  Footage from the first full day of the Solo Challenge is sent to the studio, but the editor never sees it, never spins it. Never adjusts tint of the trees or the saturation of Zoo’s eyes. The contestants will search and hike and scratch at mosquito bites in real time, forever. That night the third episode of In the Dark airs, the first and only weekly finale. It’s widely watched, but few will remember it. Footage from the second day of Solo is never even sent in. A drone lands, never to rise again.

  The third day, Exorcist wakes to find his cameraman collapsed outside his shelter with red mucus leaking from his nose. He uses the cameraman’s radio to call for help. The voice on the other side is panicked, but assures him help is coming. Exorcist holds the cameraman’s sweaty, bloody head on his lap for hours, telling him stories and dribbling water into his mouth. Help does not come, and the cameraman’s heart beats its final rhythm. Exorcist tries to carry the body out of the woods, but after a slow half mile falls to the ground, exhausted. He mutters a final blessing, crosses the man’s stiffening arms over his chest, and leaves him under a black birch. He soon mistakes a combination of deep thirst and pathogen-cause
d nausea for hunger, and decides to hunt. Stumbling through the woods, delirium falls over him like mist. A branch sways with the weight of a squirrel; he chucks his sharpened dowsing rod. The rod flies swiftly, hits the trunk of a different tree, and bounces into a bed of leaves. Exorcist searches for the dowsing rod until nightfall. In the dark he begins to sweat, and then his stomach heaves. He can’t stop coughing. He feels too warm. He wipes at his runny nose and his sleeve comes back red. He weeps, seeing the bloody eye of his ex-wife. His inner monster is nothing compared to this possession—so quick, so painful, so total. In a moment of semi-lucidity, he wonders why it never occurred to him to try to exorcise the cameraman’s sickness. And then the demon grasps his organs with its many claws and rends his innards.

  Help does find four of the contestants. Air Force, Biology, Engineer, and Banker are brought back to the production camp by their still-well cameramen. And when Tracker’s cameraman doesn’t show the third morning of Solo, Tracker follows his trail from the previous night and finds him curled in his sleeping bag, feverish. Tracker helps the cameraman back to base camp. These five contestants are evacuated and sent with the remaining production crew into quarantine, where they are caged singularly in plastic cubicles. Here, surrounded by the sounds of crying, dying strangers, they are again recorded.

  The quickly mutating and still unidentified pathogen strikes Tracker first, with no preamble. He sweats and weeps and dreams, but he does not bleed and he does not die. A combination of genetics and years of pushing his immune system to the limit spare him. He will live to old age, telling his story to few and never publicly, wondering always if he should have tried harder to find her.

  All Banker catches is a cold. He spends his days in quarantine alternating between fear and boredom. When he’s later moved to a Californian refugee camp, he will tell his story to anyone who will listen.

  By his second day in quarantine, blood leaks from Air Force’s eyes and nose to stain his perfect warrior face. He always thought that if he died young it would be in a singular, glorious crash. His last breath is the scream of a falcon missing its prey. Biology slips away with relative quiet, unconscious through the pain, dreaming of her partner. Engineer is conscious until the end. A lifelong optimist, the instant before he dies he will think, I’m going to get better.

  Rancher is among those left behind in the scramble to evacuate. He finds the production camp, but not for days, not until it is empty of everyone except for the Expert, who insisted on staying behind to search for the others. When Rancher finds him, he is recognizable mostly by his flannel shirt. Flies feast on his leaked and drying blood. Rancher continues to search for the others, and after a week is felled not by the fast-spreading affliction all around him—which he has the genes to survive—but by microbes in ill-chosen standing water. When he dies, he will be delirious, dehydrated, covered in his own filth. But he will be smiling, watching his three children play in the distance. His sons and daughter will never know the details of their father’s death. They will grow up wishing they knew more, that he had never gone east. If he’d just stayed home, they’ll say.

  Waitress does not have the genes to survive. The third morning of the Solo Challenge she wakes feverish, her throat a silent scream. She cannot sit up. Her cameraman stands above her, listening to the panicked callback on the radio, “Bring them in. Bring them all in!” He sees the trickle of red coming from her left nostril. He drops his camera and runs. Waitress sees him go. Her fever tells her it’s a mistake. She clutches the whistle given to her at the start of the bear-tracking Challenge and brings it to her lips, but she doesn’t have enough breath left to make a sound. The cameraman will lie and say he could not find her. He will die too quickly and in too much pain to feel remorse.

  Zoo wakes that third morning feeling only a little stiff. She waits for her cameraman, but he doesn’t show. Unknown to her, he is lying among the fallen leaves of late summer about one hundred yards away, crying senselessly and uselessly into his radio. Within minutes, the cameraman too will die. Within hours, turkey vultures will find him. Within days, his remains will be scattered by coyotes.

  If Zoo were to search for the cameraman now, she might find him. But she doesn’t search, she waits. She rests and ineffectually washes her clothing in a stream she crossed yesterday before making camp and receiving her most recent Clue. As she scrubs the sweat out of her socks, her body prepares for a fight her mind doesn’t know is coming. Her second morning truly alone, she concludes that she’s supposed to keep moving, to follow the Clue: You’re on track; it’s what you seek. Look for the sign past the next creek. While vultures swirl and land out of sight, Zoo dismantles her shelter, clips a water bottle to her side, and shoulders her pack.

  “Well,” she says, speaking to the tiny camera posted above where her shelter used to stand, “I guess I better find that creek.” She dusts off the seat of her pants and starts walking, walking east because that is the direction they last sent her and the Clue says she’s on track. East, past a dry creek bed where an evacuated intern will never place a box. East, toward a brook that runs through a culvert, above which sits a road where driveways sprout like the many tendrils of a single root.

  At the base of one of these driveways a new mother now stands, exhausted and slightly queasy—but happy, dismissing her discomfort as a nebulous postpartum affliction. The mother’s newborn baby boy gurgles from a carrier at her chest as she ties a trio of blue balloons to her mailbox, preparing for a party she will never host in a small brown house with red trim; a house decorated with a touch of blue. A classy amount, the new mother thinks.

  Just enough.

  23.

  Everything has changed; nothing has changed. Brennan and I walk. To where, I don’t know. I can’t eat, but Brennan hands me a water bottle a few times a day and I drink. Beyond that, I walk through daylight and wait out the night, thinking of you.

  I see you sleeping now, your peppered hair, your forehead smoothed of worry. Lids pale and veined, shielding inquisitive eyes, your cocoa eyes. Cold and empty, you lie alone in the bed where all those nights you tried to sleep and there I was, my nose an inch from your nose, just staring, waiting for you to smile or open your eyes. Occasionally I’d augment the stare with a prod, because I could never get over how much you loved me and this seemed an easy way to prove it. Sometimes—often—you complained, but even then you smiled. You felt lucky too.

  I could have at least buried you. I could have burned you and carried the ash on my hip. I could have spread you across the garden.

  I could have burned the house. I should have.

  I didn’t even take a picture. I didn’t even take my ring. I barely remember leaving, and the only thing I have of us is me.

  I couldn’t even look. I couldn’t look at you not being human. I couldn’t see what you’d become.

  I’m sorry.

  “Mae?”

  A stranger. All that’s left.

  “You were married?” asks Brennan.

  Once or twice a day he does this, tries to talk about my home, as if his being there made it a shared experience. As if he knows anything. I shake my head, a thunderous effort. I can’t talk about you, I won’t.

  We’re sitting beside a fire it took him nearly all evening to build. He’s heating soup or beans, something in a can. It’s been two days since he led me out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the back door. How I moved I still don’t know.

  Brennan glances my way then back to the dirt. “My brother liked zebras growing up,” he says. He’s been telling a lot of stories about his brother. This I allow—white noise. “I was a baby, so I don’t remember, but Mom always talked about it at birthdays and stuff. Everyone else is playing with cowboys and aliens and robots, and Aiden’s drawing stripes on a toy horse he found in the park.”

  He pauses to stir whatever’s in the can. The smell is atrocious. Every smell is atrocious. Sap and pine and smoke and death: interchangeable.

  “That was he
r favorite story,” he continues. “I hated it. It made us sound poor, like she couldn’t afford to buy him a toy. We weren’t poor. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor. Mom was a paralegal. Aiden was going to go to law school. Mom told him the lawyers always looked tired, so maybe he should become a doctor instead. I thought that was funny.”

  He starts peeling the bark off his stir stick. “I didn’t get sick so maybe he didn’t get sick,” he says. “But Mom did, so…then, it’s like, there’s those two guys. So much else that could have happened even if he didn’t get sick, you know? But what if he’s still out there?”

  A memory, triggered: I got sick. After the cabin, I got sick. I thought it was from the water, but it wasn’t the water. It was this, whatever this is.

  I didn’t quit because they didn’t come; in my delirium, I knew my state couldn’t be as dire as it felt because they were leaving me alone. If I were in danger they would help, I told myself. Turns out no one came because they were all dead, or dying, like I was dying, except that I didn’t die and they all did.

  You did.

  I cup my face in my hands, block out the world, a world that keeps insisting on its own existence.

  When my grandmother died, my father spoke of Heaven for the first time in my memory. A coping mechanism. I saw how this sudden expression of belief helped him disperse his grief. Me, I had the pendant: an oblong opal that shimmered in my palm and reminded me of her wisdom. I don’t remember why I thought my grandmother wise, what she ever said to me. I don’t remember her at all, now, though I remember the love I felt for her.

  “I hate it,” says Brennan. “I hate not knowing if Aiden’s alive or not.”