“I believe the cattle prod will suffice,” Dev would say, winning a wide-eyed, slack-jawed “Mo-om . . .” every time.
And so OK became just plain Kay. She also became a world-class asker of why, first about the ever-growing number of rules that only she had to obey, but then about the rules that everyone and everything had to follow as well.
“Because of gravity,” Dev would answer.
“Because you’ve got blood underneath your skin, and when you scrape it, blood comes out.
“Because you don’t want germs in your cut.
“Because it stings when the germs die.
“Not yet. Not for a long time. I hope.
“No, not her either.
“Because she’s a big girl and she has a big gun.
“Because Uncle Dev knows the importance of the home-field advantage, that’s why.”
It was after this and similar barrages that Dev decided to teach Kay how to read as soon as possible. It wasn’t because he wanted her to leave him alone; it was because (with the exception of going beyond the wall) he was prepared to give her the world that (as long as they weren’t going beyond the wall) could be found in books. He started with alphabet blocks and some of the baby books Lucy picked up while shopping. He pointed to concrete things—his eye, her eye, a tree—and then arranged the blocks to spell out the name of the thing, sounding each letter out as he handed it to her and having her sound it out as she handed it back. He’d then flip through the baby books and have her pick out instances of the word she’d just learned.
It was slow going at first. But Dev was dedicated like only an obsessive can be, and Kay was motivated too. Her uncle had already promised her that the answers to all her questions were in the books her mother had collected on a shelf under a sign Dev made that read: “Kay’s Library.”
By the time she was four, she was making her own words out of blocks and quizzing Dev on them. Soon, the words started getting longer and less and less likely to have come from any of the books set aside for Kay’s Library. “Where’d you learn that?” Dev asked, after being surprised by the words focal point.
Kay handed over a book on astronomy he hadn’t noticed was missing from Dev’s Library. “Those are pretty grown-up words,” he said.
Which was all he needed to say, of course, to send her ripping like a buzz saw through whatever reading material she could find. And the more she read, the more she began wondering about the circumstances of her existence with her mom and Uncle Dev in this world she routinely walked to the edge of, beyond which, her mother assured her, there were monsters, though that didn’t stop her mom from going.
Dev’s response to Kay’s interest in things astronomical was a strategic mistake. He simply took her out one clear evening, wheeled out his telescope, and showed her some of the things that had fascinated him when he was a child. “Do you see those circle things on the moon with lines spreading out from them?” he asked.
Kay nodded.
“Those are from meteorites like the one we saw making a line in the sky earlier. They’re like rocks, but in outer space, and when the earth gets in their way, they burn up in the air. The moon doesn’t have any air, and so the rocks just hit it, leaving those marks.”
Kay kept nodding as Dev explained, and he thought he’d done it: preemptively cured her of wondering what was beyond the wall, once she’d outgrown the tiny world she’d inherited. There was, after all, a lot of sky they could work through, certainly enough to distract her until he, himself, was dead.
This illusion was short-lived, however, coming to an end with four little words: “Can we go there?”
“Where?” Dev asked, though he already knew and regretted bringing it up.
“The moon,” Kay said.
And that was the perversity of astronomy to a citizen of a world only a handful of blocks from end to end: it implied much bigger worlds that, alas, you couldn’t get to, no matter how hard you tried. Instead of satisfying her curiosity, he’d focused it into a desire to be elsewhere.
“I did say there’s no air up there,” Dev said, trying to salvage it.
“I can hold my breath,” Kay said before proceeding to demonstrate.
“Stop that,” Dev said, taking hold of her shoulders. “Breathe,” he said.
Kay shook her head, cheeks bulging.
“Lucy!” he finally called as the little girl flapped her arms, either trying to fly or to just not pass out.
“Miss Olivia Katherine,” Lucy said, deflating the girl’s cheeks by pressing them from either side, forcing her to take a great, gasping breath, “what on earth are you doing?”
“Getting ready for the moon,” her daughter said as Lucy looked at Dev and just shook her head.
The more she read, the more curious she got about all the stuff that was in the books that wasn’t anywhere she’d looked within the handful of blocks that made up the known universe. “Where is everything?” she wanted to know.
“What everything?” Dev bluffed.
And though the object of her curiosity varied every time, it was usually something conspicuous enough to make hiding it difficult if her circumscribed world really was all there was. Things like: the Eiffel Tower. The Statue of Liberty. New Jersey. All the people . . .
“What people?” Dev asked back.
Kay opened an encyclopedia and started pointing out names.
Dev tried bluffing again, this time by suggesting they were the ones the skulls belonged to in the wall at the edge of the world.
Yeah, right. Kay had counted the skulls, and she counted proper names in the encyclopedia. Not even close.
“Well, um.” Dev hesitated. “Why don’t you ask your mom?”
Lucy tried suggesting that everything in the books was made up—a hard sell. Once again, Kay did the math and found it hard to believe that there were more made-up things in books than there were real things in the world. One obvious question: Why would anybody make it all up in the first place?
“To entertain us,” Lucy said. “So we won’t get bored.”
“What does bored mean?” Kay asked. Interestingly, the subject of boredom was not often addressed in books—perhaps because it was boring. And other than Lucy and Dev, books were Kay’s primary source of information.
“Um, you know. ‘There’s nothing to do,’” Lucy said, using her whiny-kid voice. “‘I’m bored.’”
Kay didn’t get it and said so, so her mother tried again. “Say you’re counting your toes. And you count them. They’re all counted. Bored is why you counted them and how you feel after you have.”
“Oh,” Kay said.
Whether she recognized it as the nuclear option for getting her way with Uncle Dev or not, that’s how Kay used it, the very next time Lucy left to go shopping. “I’m bored,” the little girl announced, flopping down on the couch like her strings had been cut.
Dev suggested they read something. Kay had read everything in Devonshire and even though more was available at the library he’d raided prior to her being born, both Lucy and Dev were reluctant to feed a curiosity that was rapidly outpacing their ability to make up answers.
And so Dev suggested they play a game.
“A board game?” she asked, setting him up.
“A video game,” he replied, not falling for it. So they tried Mortal Kombat, but the things that made it exciting in the world before were all wholly outside her experience. She had never physically fought anybody and had never seen anybody else do it. It really didn’t make a lot of sense. Killing, yes, she was familiar with that; Uncle Dev killed stuff for dinner. But the winner never ate the loser in Mortal Kombat, and so, again, what was the point?
“I’m bored,” Kay announced as her avatar had its spine ripped out.
“Um,” Dev said, turning off the game, wondering what to try next.
By the time Lucy returned, they had a vacuum cleaner in pieces and spread across the living room floor. She took one look and said one word: “No.”
<
br /> “She was bored,” Dev explained.
“Nope,” Lucy said. “No way. Living like this is bad enough. You’re not turning my daughter into a weirdo . . .”
“What’s a weirdo?” Kay asked, another subject not broached in the books she’d read.
Lucy looked at Dev. Dev looked at Lucy.
“Who wants ice cream?” Lucy tried.
“What’s ice cream?” her daughter asked on top of Dev’s, “Where’d you get ice cream?”
“That’s just what my mom used to say when . . . ,” Lucy began.
“You had a mom?” Kay said, eyes wide.
“Shite,” Lucy said, as Dev just looked away.
51
He was being counted on. He’d been on the planet for how long now? Sixteen years before, going on six years after, and in all those years, he’d never been counted on—not by anyone but himself, that is, and before, not even then. Before, he’d been something to be taken care of, tolerated, taken for granted and, eventually, taken for a fool. After, he’d done what he did to survive. There’d been Diablo and his lesser—and it had felt like he’d been counted on back then, but not really. Once he’d removed the man-made barriers between the animals and their self-reliance, they took care of themselves, including helping themselves to his chickens. But now, with this little human in his life, talking and full of needs, Dev Brinkman, previous waste of protein, was being counted on to make decisions in someone’s best interest other than his own.
Sure, the human also had her mother. But there were decisions to be made—decisions that tangled the three of them together, that couldn’t be made without affecting every thread in that knot. And one of those decisions threatened to upend one of the most fundamental tenets of his survival thus far: Dev’s comfort zone, a.k.a. the home-field advantage.
It hadn’t even been a question before. If you had the home-field advantage, you kept it. Wandering about for no good reason was how survivors became ex-survivors. The loophole—and Lucy showed every sign of exploiting it—was that no-good-reason clause. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of staying or leaving, but what would make a good enough reason to go.
And here’s where Dev was being counted on. Kay—they needed to leave Devonshire because of Kay. That’s what Lucy said. They needed to find others—“for Kay.” They needed to find friends—“for Kay.”
“I never had any friends,” Dev tried. “Not real ones, at least.”
“And how’d that work out for you?”
Dev wanted to say, “Just fine,” but he’d become enough of a “real human” by then to know that Lucy and he had totally different opinions about how he’d turned out. “I just don’t want her to be weird,” she continued.
“You were weird,” he pointed out. She’d said so herself.
“Yeah,” she admitted wistfully. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Dev had been accused of being weird so often he started wearing it like a badge of honor. Lucy had, too, until everybody died. She’d told him that after that, the only thing she ever wanted to be was normal. Dev had been useful back then; he had the power to make anyone seem normal in comparison. Now all he could do was make her daughter as weird as he.
“Listen,” she said. “Being weird has to be a choice. If it’s your default setting because you don’t know what the options are, it doesn’t count.” Pause. “What I’m saying is, she can decide to be antisocial, but she’s got to have the option of being social first.”
“So your argument is she should talk to strangers.”
Lucy blinked. “Um,” she said, “kind of?”
“What happens when she gets kidnapped?”
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Lucy said. “I just want to find out if there are any strangers out there to worry about.”
“Cheetahs,” Dev said. “Bears. Deer with Lyme disease . . .”
“I meant people strangers,” she said. “Prefriends. For Kay’s sake.”
And so it went, round and round, Lucy advocating expansionism, Dev solidly in the isolationist camp until that day when Kay added her two cents with the weapon of mass distraction her mother had taught her:
“I’m bored.”
It didn’t help that she put her whole little body into those two nuclear words, shoulders slumping, knees buckling underneath her as she tipped backward to plop onto the couch, the soft cushions of which threatened to envelop her, close over, swallow, then burp. Her head hit the back cushion, bent, chin resting on clavicle. Her head looked like a chubby-faced sun, setting below the horizon of the rest of her.
“Bored . . . ,” she repeated.
If it was an accusation—and it stung like one—it was aimed at Dev, and she, this little human named Kay, was counting on him to do something about it.
Until that point, he’d been convinced they had everything they needed in Devonshire to survive. He looked around now, confronted by the sameness he’d collected around himself and rigidly enforced. The books had been read, the DVDs watched. The board games—despite the sound-alike name—had been fun. Until they played them a hundred times and lost some vital pieces.
He’d tried teaching her chess, but the game wound up suffering from missing-piece syndrome—a case of it that he suspected was really hidden-piece syndrome. He’d allowed the charade partly because he’d realized it was just that—thanks to how poorly the kid lied.
Her lying had been one of many important moments on his journey of discovery to the higher human emotions. Sometimes a bad example is better than a good one. Thinking about his bad liar, Dev wondered if she’d ever get better at it with only her mother and him to practice on. How important was lying in the development of a nonweird human being? Judging from how poor he himself was at it, likely very.
So Lucy was probably right, but for the wrong reasons. Kay did need other people around, not to be friends with, but to lie to. To get practice lying to people with varying degrees of BS-detection abilities. Maybe then she could build up her own. And then, if she decided she needed friends, she could make sure they were the real kind.
“So how are you going to find these strangers?” Dev asked. “Or should I say, prefriends?”
Lucy shrugged. “Like how I found Marcus,” she said. “Like how we found you. Drive around.”
“Drive around? That’s your plan?”
“You got a better one?”
He hesitated. But he was being counted on. “If it were me,” he said, “knowing what we know about who survived and who didn’t . . .”
“What we think we know,” Lucy corrected.
“I’d look for suicide-prevention call centers,” he said, finally sharing an idea that had occurred to him some time ago. “See what calls came in on the day of, especially just before. I’m sure everything got recorded with all the metadata, including addresses. They’d have to keep that stuff just in case.”
Lucy’s eyes widened, and she nodded. “That makes sense,” she said, considering it. “Almost every robo you called back then would tell you they were recording ‘to ensure sound quality’ or some such BS. What they really should have said was ‘We’re recording this to cover our ass . . .’”
“Language,” Dev said, ever mindful of young ears in need of protecting, “but yes. Exactly.”
But then Lucy’s excitement deflated. “Except, Google’s dead. How are we supposed to . . .”
And then, evidence that this conversation had been more premeditated on Dev’s part than he’d let on. “Here,” he said, handing her a slightly yellower copy of the yellow pages from before. “It’s under S.”
Okay, it was a long shot, but it was for Olivia Kay. Sure, some of the callers could have gone through with it. Sure, some of the survivors could have stopped surviving along the way. And those who were still surviving may have set out like Lucy and Marcus rather than staying put like Dev. But it was something, and if enough somethings started pointing to the same somewhere . . .
“You kno
w,” Dev said, having second thoughts and naming them, “on second thought, this seems like a total long shot.”
“It’s better than the no shot we’ve got staying here,” Lucy said while Kay helped her mark suitcases in chalk—“Mom,” “Kay.” A gratuitous gesture, or maybe just a sign of their hope that one day there’d be enough others to warrant the labeling of things.
“Better’s a relative term,” Dev said, thinking about how he’d thus far evaded death, despite the many times he’d believed it imminent. Leo’s making a fool of him hadn’t killed him. Driving on the freeway at nearly freeway speeds hadn’t killed him. The cow stampede hadn’t killed him. The cheetah, deer crash, and Lyme disease scare had all left him shaken, but not dead. Diablo’s death came close but still fell short. He’d even failed at willing himself to death when the eggs ran out. Perhaps he wasn’t the best judge of what would kill him after all . . .
Dev remembered a conversation he’d had with his mother—a monologue, really—when she’d learned that the reason he’d stopped talking for a day and a half was because he’d overheard someone he considered his inferior refer to him as “slow.” When she’d stepped into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed, he’d fully expected her to try to make him feel better by explaining what an idiot the other child had been and telling him to ignore such talk—the usual. But it wasn’t the usual rah-rah you’re-perfect-just-the-way-you-are speech. After a heavy sigh, she’d begun:
“I know it’s not politically correct to say it, sweetie,” she’d said. “But think of it this way: you’ve got a developmental disorder, not a static condition. Slow doesn’t mean stopped. It doesn’t mean stuck. You’re fast—you’re very fast—when it comes to intellectual intelligence.” Here she’d touched him on the head even though she knew he hated being touched. “But you’re a scooch slow when it comes to emotional intelligence.” Moving her hand to his chest—the presumed home of this latter kind of thinking. “But you’ll catch up, one of these days.”
A lot of days had passed since then, and the people he’d needed to catch up to had largely disappeared, not that he’d cared for them much anyway. But “largely” wasn’t all. And the ones excluded—the ones he found himself caring for—were preparing to leave, luggage now waiting by the door. And Dev could let them. Or he could try to catch up.
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