That’s why I fear the lights on the water. Everything I’ve seen and done and overcome to get here, what would happen to it all? Some group of survivors coming ashore from some self-imposed nautical quarantine, carrying with them the corpse of the old way of doing things. Adults outranked kids, and I’m still most definitely a kid. Achievements or not, I’d be relegated to the bottom of the list. Someone else would be stronger. Better. More important.
That’s it, wasn’t it? For all the grotesque horror I’ve seen, survival has made me the leader. I’m the hero of my own story now. And I’ve earned that honor.
I sit down in the sand. Slip the backpack off my shoulders and set it down beside me. Tuck my flip-flops inside the pack and stretch my legs out in front of me. Oliver bounces over to me. I rub his ears and nuzzle his face with mine.
“I could stay here forever. But why do I have the feeling something’s coming?”
Oliver cocks his head. I hug him tighter.
“Maybe it’s just me. Thinking too much. Always expecting something bad to happen. It’s exhausting, being worried all the time. I wish my brain wasn’t always trying to spoil things.”
Oliver rolls onto his back. I rub his stomach.
“I guess it’s not a bad thing at all, is it? If I’m worrying about things thatcould happen, that must mean I’m pretty content with the way things are now, right?”
Oliver snorts. I roll onto my side and lay my head on the dog’s stomach.
“Be grateful you’re not a human being. It’s harder than it looks.”
Creation
I don’t know why everyone was so surprised that I can draw. Maybe it’s because my analytical mind is so dominant. Logic, reason, problem solving, those were the keywords I most often saw on my report cards. The big surprise always came from art class.
Drawing uses a similar muscle group to reading. And in the same way I can disappear into a book, so too can I immerse myself in a drawing. I love pastels. They have a softness about them that helps make my artwork dreamlike. Most of the time, I used to draw my interpretations of characters from books. Wizards, fairies, knights, monsters. I read to escape. It’s an internal, deeply personal voyage. Drawing is more active. It’s a release, steam blowing out of a relief valve, letting out some of the dust from my dark corners.
I discovered the art supply store by accident. A wrong turn down a side street brought me into a neighborhood of small art galleries and gift shops. The art supply store was at the end of the block. I parked the truck in the middle of the road and Oliver and I walked slowly past the art galleries. The art on display was mostly water-themed. Paintings, photographs, collages, pictures of beaches and boats, probably there so the tourists could take home a piece of their vacations and put them on their walls.
I grabbed stacks of thick, heavy paper and boxes of the most expensive pastels I could find. There were lots expensive brands from which to choose. I wandered the aisles of the art supply store for most of an hour. Oliver lost interest and passed out in the doorway. I love the smell of an art store. It smells like creativity. I don’t paint or anything like that, but walking through aisle after aisle of canvases and brushes made me want to try. Creativity is like that, as if all the inanimate colors on all the dusty shelves are simply waiting to become what they were destined to be. A little like me. A collection of static ingredients that when combined create something entirely new. In the end, I filled the back seat of the Land Rover with a myiad of paper, pastels, paints, brushes and canvases.
It’s become an essential addition to the day. Lying on the living room floor, usually after our morning beach walk, when the light is most flattering, and I set my hands free. At first it was all abstract. “Free form”, as Miss Bishop, my art teacher called it. Miss Bishop was a soft-spoken, pretty young woman who wore paint-spattered jeans and yellow Converse running shoes. Most of the kids treated her class like a free period. I sat in a quiet corner of the cavernous art room and submerged into whatever project I was working on that day. I was always the last to leave the class because I never heard the bell ring. Miss Bishop would put a gentle hand on my shoulder to pull me out of my fugue.
Fugue is an awesome word. It describes a total loss of awareness, often associated with certain types of illnesses. Mental illness, usually. My intensity borders on the manic. But a quiet sort of mania, contained beneath the surface and making me completely unaware of what’s around me. Kind of like a creative power nap. Only when Oliver nudges me or barks will I pop back out of my cocoon.
Over time, my pastel drawings have become more literal. Recognizable shapes and forms have begun to emerge. When I stare at them later, taped to the walls throughout the house, they’re the visual chronology of my survival. My family, their graves, the empty streets, each individual piece a part of the larger narrative. The smudges of pastels on paper are the memories I need to remember. It’s a painful job. Not the creating part. When I’m under water, I feel nothing. But seeing them later, and through seeing them grabbing hold of what I’m starting to forget. It surprises me.
Sometimes I sit on the floor and cry. The tears hurt as they rise like magma from my deepest places. This grief is always unexpected. I’ve cried for them before. Isn’t that enough? It isn’t.
“I can’t hold onto it anymore.” Oliver whimpers and nuzzles me.
“They left me. They left me behind and I hate them for that. I know I can’t be mad at them but I can’t help it. They left me behind. Why didn’t I die with them?”
I weep on the floor for a long time. All my plans, all my bravado, it’s just an act. Because I’ve been abandoned. All of it, the house and the generators and the canned fruit, it’s all a smokescreen. Busywork, put in place to distract me from that one central fact. They all left me behind.
It’s hard to fight off the rising tide of guilt. I’m angry at them, all of them. It isn’t what I’m supposed to feel, but it’s what I feel.
A soaking rain starts during the night and persists through the next day. Oliver and I sit on the sofa, watching the drops smear and disappear on the windows.
“What am I supposed to do with all this anger? I’ve kept it inside me for so long, and that allowed me to do what I needed to do. But now… it’s just sort of lying here, with nowhere to go.”
Oliver whimpers and I hug him tightly. He’s getting bigger every single day.
“People always said ‘let your feelings out’. “But I don’t know what to do with them now. Being angry isn’t going to change anything. They didn’t die on purpose. Anger’s a stupid feeling. But it’s real. That’s the worst part. I hate them all for leaving me. And I don’t want that to be the memory I have of them.”
The rain continues to pour and my anger still sits beside me on the couch. It’s a third living creature in the room, an unwelcome and uninvited intruder. Sometimes anger’s valuable. Yelling at Gabe for pulling my hair, I got the connection. But this, it’s all new. And it’s too big for me. I love my family. I miss them. So how can I be angry at them for dying? I’ve done okay, haven’t I? I made the trip to South Carolina,survived the trip and here I am now, living in a Barbie dream house on the beach with movies and food and books and Oliver. So what’s the problem? My family got sick, just like everyone else in the world. They didn’t leave me. They died. And there’s a difference. A big difference. I wipe my eyes. I’m still angry, but now I’m angry at myself. Nobody is to blame for all of this, least of all my parents and Grace and Gabe. I lived. They died. It sounds cold, but facts are cold. Anger like this, it’s futile and meaningless. It’s a waste of time. All it’ll do is bring me right back to where I started.
I doze off on the couch with the sound of the rain lulling me. When I wake up, Oliver and I are alone on the couch. The rain has stopped. My anger, for now, has found another place to sleep.
Fishing
Early morning and just before sunset. I stand quietly, as still as a flagpole. They swim up to me. I don’t need all of them. It’s onl
y me and Oliver.
I stand in the sinking sand just beyond the surf. Each wave that rolls in brings new fish. I let them nibble at my toes. And I wait.
At first I tried a net. Too cumbersome. The fish were gone before the net broke the surface of the water. During a walk past the marina, I decided to check out some more of the boats. I found the harpoon hanging on the outside wall of one of the big ones. I’ve never fished in my life, and fishing rods just seem convoluted. The harpoon, that’s straightforward. And dangerous. I like that.
Fishing is a compromise. No matter how I try to make it right in my head, I can’t kill a deer. And I’m not really sure what the difference is between killing a deer and a fish. Fish are foreign. They breathe water. They have gills. Deer have ears and legs and crazy-sweet brown eyes. It’s hypocritical. But it’s a hypocritical logic I can embrace.
The ocean is still warm. Not bathwater warm, like it had been in August, but it isn’t a shock when the waves splash against my legs. There’s a hint, though, of what’s yet to come. There’s the whisper of a freeze.
Oliver sits on the shore, keeping one drowsy eye on me. At first he’d thought it was a game, me standing still and him leaping through the waves. I hated to admonish him, but a quick “NO” had done the trick.
The water engulfs me below the knees. Staring down, it looks like my calves and buried feet are mirror reflections. Small fish move in first. They dart through the water like fireflies. I wait. There’s no rush. There can’t be. The larger fish are more wary than their smaller prey. They only condescend to swim into the shallow water because that’s where their food is kept. It seems like a kind of cruel joke perpetrated by the schools of itty-bitty fish, as if in some way proving their dominance over the big boys. If you want us, come and get us. Pay no attention to the girl with the harpoon.
It’s a foreign world through the strange looking glass of the ocean surface. Kind of like I imagine an alien world on a far-off planet to be. I have a soft spot for alien invasion movies. Dad had made me watch the TV seriesVwhenever the SyFy Channel replayed it. That andIndependence Day. I love the movies and ridicule them at the same time. The universe is huge. Even the Milky Way is practically infinite. And the Keppler telescope, the one in space that had started to find all those distant planets, it just made the whole thing seem more vast. The problem with alien invasion movies is that aliens were invading. I think invading is a decidedly human trait. In nature there’s violence and death, but it all has a purpose.Human invasions, they’re about greed or power. The alien world into which I’ve sunk my bare feet has no interest whatsoever in invading my world. I wonder if the Keppler telescope is still finding planets. The satellites that pass across the star-filled sky, what are they beaming back? And the International Space Station.
Yeah, the ISS. It’s up there. I’ve seen it sometimes, an impossibly bright light moving purposefully across the sky. There were still astronauts up there. Or there had been. What happened to them? Did Mission Control just stop responding to them? Did they plummet back to Earth on one of those Russian Soyuz capsules? And if they did, where did they go?
Sometimes it all seems too big. I saw the aftermath of General Tsao in snapshots, almost like tweets. A hundred and forty characters at a time, through which I had to extrapolate and interpret the bigger picture. What if I’m wrong? What if just over the horizon human life is still going on same as before? Here I am, barefoot and mostly naked in the surf, waiting for the catch of the day and living like I’ve washed up on some desert island. Maybe moving on is what I need to do. Pack up the Land Rover and drive toward Washington, DC, New York City, somewhere big and populated and
SWOOSH
I stab the black sea bass cleanly through its head. My reflexes are sharper when I let my mind wander. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. Stop overthinking.
I pull the bass out of the surf, still impaled on the end of my harpoon. The fish thrashes. It’s reflex only. I made a clear shot through its brain.
There, catch myself about to overthink again. I killed the fish. A moment ago, it had been swimming through the shallows getting ready for its own dinner. Now it’sour dinner. There’s enough meat on the fish for both of us. We need to eat. Canned food needs to be supplemented. There’s no value in overthinking.
I pull the fish off the harpoon and rinse the bloody tip in the salt water. The bass is heavy. I slog through the surf back to the shore.
“Dinner time.” Oliver runs over to me.
I skin and debone the bass with practiced ease. It gets easier the more often I do it. I light a fire in the fire pit I set up on the beach and cook my half of the fish. Oliver prefers to eat his meat raw.
Stay or go. The decision keeps reemerging like a pimple. And like a pimple, I keeping working at it until it erupts and clears up. Happiness comes at a cost. That cost is obligation. Even if there is some sort of safe zone somewhere, what would I find out there that’s any better that what I already have? Everything I ever knew is already gone. If I leave the beach house, I’ll be doing so because I’m supposed to do it. I’m supposed to be a part of society. I’m obligated to do so. But I’m happy without it. Right or wrong, that’s the truth. So it doesn’t matter whether New York City is still not sleeping. Not to me, anyway.
And yet, despite the satisfying pop of the pimple head, I can feel it already starting to grow back. Maybe it’ll always be part of my routine. Is that such a bad thing? It’s important to remember why you do what you do. Too often, the habit ofdoingoverwhelms the validity ofwhy you’re doing it.
I eat my half of the fish and stare out at the darkening ocean. The sun is nearly gone and the stars have triumphantly returned. Maybe there’s still a signal being transmitted to the satellites. Somewhere, maybe someone is receiving it. I’m not. That’s my choice. Like the fish that swim in the ocean’s shallows, I’m content not knowing what lives on the other side of the looking glass.
Changing
Pain, but a weird one. Maybe it’s the fish, or maybe the canned peas I had for lunch had gone bad. But that isn’t really it. It’s a deeper pain than indigestion, like an ache with a bite to it. Try farting. I let a couple good ones rip but the pain doesn’t let up. My head is swimming in worst-case scenarios. Appendicitis. Gall bladder. Stomach cancer. Haven’t given a whole lot of thought to what would happen if something goes wrong. Charleston, South Carolina is fresh out of emergency room doctors.
Drink some Pepto. Still no relief. The pain makes me double over. Oliver whines. I curl up on the sofa downstairs and cry myself to sleep. I dream that my appendix bursts. In the dream, I’m lying on the kitchen floor as I go into septic shock. And then I continue to lie there, day after day, watching my body rot.
Oliver licks me. I wake up. The pale blue of predawn paints the living room in horror movie colors.
“Still alive, huh? I guess that’s not gonna’ be what kills…”
Something isn’t right. The air has a strong coppery smell, and I feel like I’ve wet the bed. Look down at my lap. The blue light turns the stain on my shorts dark black.
It’s blood, that much is obvious. Not a lot but where blood is concerned, a little goes a long way. Sit up, careful not to move whatever part of me is mortally wounded. Put a hand on my stomach, my legs. No cuts, no scrapes. That means that it’s probably internal, and if that’s the case then that means I’ll—
“What do you mean, she hasn’t started yet?” Grace chided. She stood outside the bathroom door.
“Grace, out!” Mom barked.
“Seriously, I waseleven,” Grace said. “What an infant.”
Mom slammed the door in Grace’s face. I must have looked terrified because Mom took both my hands in hers.
“Don’t listen to your sister,” Mom said. “She thought she’d been stabbed the first time she got her period. Don’t tell her I said that.”
“I know about periods, Mom,” I said. I pulled my hands away uncomfortably. “Sex, too, so let’s not have
that conversation.”
Mom sighed. “Look, my mom wasn’t really up front with me about things. Y’know,sexual things.”
“I just said let’s not have —“
“So whether you like it or not, that’s not how I’m going to be with you.”
“Duly noted, Mother.”
“You’re my last little girl, Hannah,” Mom said. “Please let me have my moments.”
“My period is your moment?”
“Kinda’ weird?”
I considered this. “I mean, I get it,” I said. “Not my period being your moment. But with Gabe, yeah, it’ll be different.”
“Grace didn’t let me be the kind of mom I wanted to be,” Mom said. “I didn’t love her any less for it, but you know what she’s like. She’s concerned about what everyone else thinks.”
“And I’m not.”
“No, but it’s different with you,” Mom said. “In a lot of ways, I don’t worry about you the same way I worry about Grace. You’ve got a brain in your head that lets me know you’ll make the right decisions. Y’know, when the time comes.”
“And Grace?”
“Grace is my problem, not yours.”
The sun breaks over the ocean. I strip out of my bloody shorts and clean myself off in the surf. The thought strikes me that I’ll attract sharks. That sounds like something Grace would say.
I put on three pairs of underwear and a fresh pair of shorts, and Oliver and I drive into town. Find a drug store. The aisles have been stripped clean of things like bottled water, cold and flu medicine and, surprisingly, beer and wine, but the “feminine care” products are largely untouched. “Feminine care” is a strange way of putting it. The words make me feel like I’m feeding a stray animal. The shock of seeing the blood has passed. I’m in get-it-done mode.
The First Year Page 17