Coming of Age at the End of Days

by Alice LaPlante

  “We do know the script,” he says.

  “We do know our roles,” Anna says.

  “No, you’re forgetting yours. You’re forgetting that you’re still a minor. My daughter. Under my control.”

  “Even He doesn’t pretend to control us. Even He believes in free will,” Anna says.

  “You’re not in His car. You’re not living in His house. You’re not eating His food, or wearing clothes He bought you,” Anna’s father says. “Those are mine. All mine. That’s mine,” and he tugs at the sleeve of her black sweatshirt. “Those are mine,” he says, pointing at her sneakers. “And your blonde hair? Mine. Brown eyes? Mine. I picked them from a database.”

  “No, that was Mom. Mom’s choice,” Anna reminds him. She knows she is treading on dangerous ground. But worse things are coming. Wonderfully terrible things are coming.

  “As for what’s up here”—and with that he tapped Anna’s head, hard, with his index finger—“I’d be ashamed to lay claim to that. You should be ashamed.”

  “Turn around,” says Anna.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Pull over. Stop. Then make a U-turn. Now. Take me home.”

  They’re passing Soledad. Anna’s father doesn’t say anything, but puts on the brakes, Anna looks at the speedometer. He’s dropped down to almost a standstill by his standards: just 35. She thinks he’s considering her request, there’s a place to turn around up ahead about two hundred yards. On the right, a cattle ranch, with large enclosures full of black cows. The car bounces as it slowly winds to a stop. Its shocks need replacing, but Anna’s father always delays repairs. He puts on his blinker.

  “No,” he suddenly says, and his voice is lowering again, he is practically whispering, “Goddamn it, Annie, we’re going to take this trip and we are going to talk during it and I am going to pound some sense into your head.” He steps on the accelerator.

  Anna opens the car door and jumps. She hits the gravel with such force her right kneecap cracks. After a wrenching half somersault her left shoulder slams the ground. Her face hits hard. Rocks grind into her flesh as she rolls. For a moment she’s lost to the world. When she comes to, she’s on her back gazing at telephone wires and a cloud shaped like a foot. She hears shouting. Her father. Faint but getting louder. “Anna! Little Man!” Despite her pain she recognizes the panic and shame in his voice. Her jaw aches and she is feeling around her mouth with her tongue to see if she cracked any teeth. Then she smiles. Her father, fanatic devotee of sudden shocks, has been vanquished.

  24

  IT’S 4 AM TWO NIGHTS after she jumped from her father’s car, and Anna is out of pain meds. She sits on her bed and stares out the window. Anna’s bedroom faces the street, and she can just see the Fulsons’ house. The rec room windows stream light onto the grass, catching the early dew on the blades and causing them to sparkle, a sea of tiny spiky lanterns. Then, so gradually that she almost doesn’t notice it, the front door of the house swings open and a form emerges, walking carefully, as if treading on glass. It’s not until Anna sees the shoes being held in the right hand that she understands why the woman—for it is definitely a woman—is feeling each step with her foot before trusting it with her full weight. To see better, Anna kneels on her bed, grimacing from the pain. A dark figure, taller, appears behind the woman. Jim Fulson. The woman turns, is enveloped in a swift embrace. Despite her best efforts, Anna feels bitter. When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. She knows this, but it brings no comfort.

  25

  SCHOOL BEGINS AGAIN IN SEPTEMBER, and a long grim autumn descends. Unusually cold for Northern California. A baleful dark chill. Mist that blankets the streets every morning and refuses to clear until long after noon. The number of auto accidents shoot up, the number of fatalities quadruples from previous years. ­Babies are born early at local hospitals, at reduced weight. Retail sales plummet, more restaurants and boutique clothing stores close, more nail salons open. There is a swift but fleeting epidemic of cupcake shops. Bus schedules are cut due to budget shortfalls, hot lunches are cut, janitors are cut, teachers are cut.

  Anna is annoyed at the sudden crowd in the high school library during lunch period as other students used to eating outside in the bright and warm Indian summers seek shelter from the fog and cold. They intrude upon Anna’s precious time with Lars, upon their plotting and planning. Still, they see all these things as harbingers. The world is getting worse by the day, so much is clear, so much is good.

  They step up what they call their outreach at school. They are taking a route that is against Anna’s better judgment. Not because she doesn’t agree with Lars’s goals. Just the means. “This won’t work,” she tells him. “If anything, it’ll gross kids out, push them away,” Lars pays no attention. He has been busy on the Internet, searching for the most graphic images he can find of death, dismemberment, atrocities. At his insistence, Anna prints them out on her father’s color printer. Today they are taping the most lurid photographs on the walls of the empty cafeteria before the first lunch bell rings. A bloody fetus, the head and eyes discernible. A beheaded corpse. A hand-printed sign: What awaits you at the End of Days.

  The signs will get taken down almost immediately, as soon as the bell rings and the students begin lining up to get their sodas and an adult monitor enters the room. Anna and Lars will be sent to the principal’s office for yet another lecture, and yet more phone calls to their parents. “What can we do?” Anna’s mother and father have asked her, again and again. To which she just shrugs. Lars’s parents never get the messages left on their voicemail, Lars simply erases them. Not that they’d check, anyway. Anna and Lars have been warned that unless these demonstrations stop, they will be suspended.

  They are so busy hanging their grisly trophies that they don’t notice Ms. Thadeous entering the cafeteria.

  “Are you really so determined to get thrown out?” asks Ms. Thadeous. Once again, she is no longer the mediocre chemistry teacher. She is sparkling. Anna sees that she hasn’t come into the cafeteria to accost them, but for reasons of her own. Ms. Thadeous goes directly to the large windows. She looks out. She is smiling. She raises her hand in a salute. There, among the cars, stands a solitary figure. A man. Bundled against the autumn chill, but still recognizable. Jim Fulson. Standing outside the school like a lovesick Romeo. Anna realizes he can’t see into the cafeteria because of the glare of the windows. He believes he is unobserved. So he stands and worships unashamedly. This is his church, and Ms. Thadeous his high priestess. May God have mercy on them.

  “Take these off,” she orders, and walks over to the wall and begins pulling down the photos herself. “Don’t be fools. If you’re expelled, how will that advance your cause? Will you start going door to door in Sunnyvale, handing out pamphlets? Good luck with that.”

  Lars opens his mouth then shuts it again. Anna realizes that neither of them has thought this through sufficiently. Ms. Thadeous sees this and laughs. It is not a friendly laugh. “Finish this,” she says, and Anna dutifully goes to remove the rest of the photos and posters.

  “If you must preach this drivel, at least do so in a productive manner,” Ms. Thadeous says.

  Anna looks at Lars. She has been gradually losing confidence in him, and this incident does nothing to raise him in her eyes.

  “So what do we do now?” she asks after Ms. Thadeous exits the room.

  “We think,” Lars says, but nothing in his voice gives Anna faith that he has answers.

  26

  DUSK. THE BUS HAS JUST pulled into the high school parking lot after a long field trip to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Lars is still asleep, his dark head against Anna’s shoulder. Everyone around them is stretching, then, after being given permission, they turn on their phones, begin to call and text their parents for rides home, a flurry of small dings erupting from nearly every seat.
Anna powers up her phone to call her mother. She sees that she has missed twelve calls, caller ID blocked on all of them, no messages left. She dials her mother’s cell, but gets voicemail. Same on her father’s. She tries the house number, although no one ever answers that, and no one ever checks the voicemail box, a sore point for her mother who wants to disconnect it, but Anna’s father, ever conservative, feels safer with a landline in case of emergencies. In the closet he even keeps an old-fashioned rotary phone that doesn’t require electricity for when they lose power—as they invariably will when the Big One comes, he says.

  No one picks up. Anna sighs and dials her mother’s cell phone again. Still no answer.

  Anna nudges Lars.

  “You’ll have to call your parents,” Anna says.

  He shakes his head. They both know that even if he can reach them, there will be a long delay before they come. They’ll be in the middle of a prayer session, or reading, and his call will float out of their minds as soon as he hangs up. Still, he takes Anna’s cell phone and dials. As they expect: no answer, and no way to leave a message. They start walking home. Two miles. An easy thirty-minute walk. Anna passes the school on her runs every day. But the temperature has dropped with the sun and neither of them is dressed for evening.

  They turn left on Columbe and head south toward El Camino, that sea of car dealerships, strip malls, and fast food eateries named after the orchards they replaced. The Cherry Farm Center. Smith’s Ranch Shops, Orange Farm Shopping Mall. Anna is filled with a sense of exhilaration triggered somehow by the steamed-up windows of the pho shops, the scent of jasmine and lavender wafting from the foot-massage parlors, the brake lights of the cars lined across all four lanes of traffic, the crisp wind against her face. Even the teenaged boys boisterously shoving each other as they exit the video arcade at the corner of Matilda and El Camino seem touched with grace. Anna finds herself filled with an aching love for everything around her—the last gasp of a doomed civilization. They pass a storefront megachurch, with a fluorescent sign out front. Turn off your phone and say hello to Jesus! A car stops too suddenly at the corner and another car bumps into its bumper, but even that event is a blessed one, for the two well-dressed people who emerge from the cars—one man, one woman—greet each other cordially, inspect the respective front and back of their vehicles, shake hands, and drive off. A sort of delight bubbles inside of Anna. Lars looks at her curiously. He can sense something. She can’t keep the smile off her face. God has bestowed a gift on her, this magic evening. She used to try to be analytical, figure out what she had done, choices she had made, to get this feeling, anything that seemed to hint at cause and effect. But now she knows, this is unearned benevolence. Yet she is so grateful that she has to restrain herself from making promises to retroactively earn it: She will make her bed and straighten her room, she will be nicer to her parents. That would only cheapen His gift. He has bestowed this joy on her precisely because she doesn’t deserve it. She takes Lars’s arm, and laughs out loud. He is startled. She has not exactly been a lighthearted companion in the months they have known each other.

  Anna’s phone rings, She checks. Blocked. She ignores it.

  Many of the stores already have their Christmas decorations up, although Halloween has barely passed. Anna will not be cele­brating the holiday this year. Christmas will be a time of fasting and renunciation. Still, she is as excited by the lights as she was when she was a small child. Her father would buckle her into the car and drive around the South Bay, seeking the most garishly decorated houses, the ones blasting out the most colorful lighting. Inevitably, the most splendid Christmas decorations would be in the most implausible neighborhoods, run-down cottages in South San Jose with tiny postage-stamp yards but every twig, every corner of the house adorned and blazing with lights.

  Anna and Lars reach the edge of their subdivision. Here also, jolly Santas and cardboard reindeer and trees dripping strings of lights are beginning to appear. Some religious icons, but not many. Perhaps this is a good sign, the dropping of the pretense that this is anything but a pagan season.

  They walk slowly, Anna savoring her lingering euphoria.

  They turn the corner to the Street of Children’s Names and stop. Violent flashes of red and blue lights. Dozens of people in the street, forming a semicircle around four police cars parked in front of Anna’s house. She recognizes the foul Hendersons, and the Greens, and the older Fulsons, although she doesn’t see Jim Fulson. Walkie-talkies are spitting out undecipherable crackling sounds. Half a dozen police are lounging around the squad cars, two leaning against Anna’s mother’s Ford in the driveway. No sign of her father’s Toyota. The house is lit up as if for a party.

  Anna starts running, leaving Lars behind, for once not caring what he does. By the time she arrives at the circle of people and begins to push her way through, she is out of breath.

  “What’s going on?” Anna calls, addressing no one in particular. Her chest hurts. Faces are turning toward her, full of both pity and excitement.

  A policewoman hurries over. “Anna?” she asks. “Anna Franklin?”

  Anna nods.

  The woman picks up a device and speaks into it. “We got her.” Then she puts her arm around Anna’s shoulders and begins to gently walk her past the other uniformed officers into the house.

  Anna brought this on, whatever it is. She knows that. She does.

  PART III

  Goodbyes

  27

  FACT: ANNA’S FATHER WAS DRIVING too fast. But was the light already red? Witnesses disagree. That the truck barreled full speed down Page Mill Road and roared into the intersection at El Camino at more than 50 miles an hour is another fact. Did the truck driver have the green light? Or was he anticipating it? Whatever the truth, the driver of the truck died instantly, as did Anna’s mother and father.

  Anna’s Aunt Ginny and Uncle Bob fly in from Columbus, but because the will is simple and clear—Anna’s father was a lawyer, after all—they have little to do. It is impossible to display the ribbons of flesh and splintered bone. Cremation is the only option, and so Anna’s aunt and uncle are able to take action without dithering.

  None of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Bob’s other decisions are wise ones. As Anna’s parents lacked connection to any church, her relatives opt to hold a memorial at the house, catered by a delicatessen known locally as The Rat Trap. Her aunt can’t even order provisions.

  “We’ll have ham,” she says into the phone. “No, turkey. Four pounds. No, six pounds.” She posts the wrong time for the gathering in the Sunnyvale Times, and when guests start showing up two hours earlier than expected she panics and simply points to the living room. She then escapes to the kitchen without introducing herself or offering food or drink. Anna’s mother had been equally shy but possessed far more social bravado. She may have quaked inside, but Anna’s mother would have pulled the situation off with aplomb. A magnificent deceiver.

  Anna watches from the top of the stairs. The initial awkwardness of a hostessless gathering doesn’t last long. Three neighborhood husbands disappear and twenty minutes later burst in through the front door carrying provisions: potato chips and pretzels, carrot sticks and sliced apples, and half a dozen extra-large pepperoni pizzas. Four cases of microbrewery beer appear on the dining room table. Those are quickly depleted and replaced by a keg of Coors, bottles of vodka and whiskey and tequila.

  Anna is not crying. Anna is not sad. Anna is carefully tracking the number of hours since her parents left the earth. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Forty. She frets over the passing of each minute, believing that time matters, that the longer they are gone the less chance she has of getting them back. Insane thinking. Anna is insane. Acting as if her parents are trapped under water. As if there is only so much time to rescue them. Four to six minutes before brain damage. Ten minutes before they lose consciousness. Fifteen before they die. That first night she comforted herself with the thought
that it had only been five hours, just six hours, there was still hope. As the night stretched on the idea came to her that if she just said the right thing, acted the right way, believed enough, He would permit them to return to her. Her responsibility is to have faith. Grieving is out of the question. She is too busy willing them back to life.

  By 4 pm a surprisingly large, surprisingly affable crowd is milling through Anna’s house. After finishing the food, everyone is apparently settling in for an afternoon and evening of hard drinking. No one appears to be thinking of leaving. Not out of a sense of guilt or neighborly duty, but because they are actually enjoying themselves. One of her father’s Parkfield earthquake buddies is flirting with a baroque flutist friend of her mother’s. The chair of the music department at the college where her mother was the on-call piano technician is laughing with her father’s administrative assistant, a malnourished-­looking young man Anna’s father infected with earthquake mania.

  Even the older neighbors are mingling, talking directly to each other. A strange sight. So pervasive is the joie de vivre that the old guard is actually speaking to the younger set.

  Anna is under siege. Hands reach out to reverently touch her shoulders, arms, back, as she wanders through the rooms, as if her nearness to tragedy bestowed sacred powers. That her garments were holy relics. But she refuses all direct and indirect offers of solace. To every apology (I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry) she is silent. No one can make her speak a word. She watches the clock.

  She has re-shaved her head. Eschewing color, she’s wearing a pair of her mother’s white capris and one of her father’s white cotton work shirts. She has neither shoes nor socks on. She keeps her arms folded across her chest. She tries not to listen to the blasphemous chatter. Your parents are in a better place. They are not. They were good parents, they loved you. Yes, too good, and too much. But sinners, just the same.