Zaley was in the doorway. “Nothing there.”
“Are you going to call home when phones come back on?” Austin asked. “If phones come back? Do you ever think about that?”
“Yeah,” Zaley said. “I’ve gone back and forth on it. I don’t think I will.”
“Why?”
She rested against the frame, sadness weighing her down. “Everything is so short, Austin. It can stop in a heartbeat. I don’t want to waste any more of my time on them. I could die tomorrow for all we know. I want to spend my life with people I love instead, however long I’m here. My parents are a waste of my time.” Her voice was harsh, and when she spoke again, it was far more mellow and meek. “That sounds pretty horrible. But it’s still the truth.”
“Are you mad at them? Is that why?”
“Not mad so much as just . . . baffled. Disappointed. I don’t want to think about having them in my life, being drained by them all the time. Being around their sickness makes me sick. And my father will hate me for having Sombra C. So I don’t see what I’d get out of calling except more bafflement and disappointment. I want to let them go, as much as anyone can let their parents go. I want to surround myself with people who are trying. Even if they’re not succeeding all the time, they try. My parents . . . they don’t try at all. That’s how sick they are. I feel sorry for them.” She paused. “Would you call your mother? Just to say you’re alive?”
Mamma would hang up the second she heard his voice. He remembered ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN on the card he sent her long ago, how much it hurt to see her handwriting and the ink of her favorite blue pen. She had washed her hands of him. “Yeah.”
That answer surprised Zaley. “What would you say to her?”
He looked at his reflection and saw bits of his mother’s features within his own. “Mamma, I’m alive and I’m safe. I hope you’re alive and safe, too. I’m going to call now and then just so you know I’m okay.” Swallowing hard and hearing dead air, he said, “Maybe one day she won’t hang up so fast. She’ll talk a little more each time. She’ll stop being scared of me, the parts she doesn’t understand. There’s nothing to be scared of. I’m just me. I’ll keep calling on her birthday, on holidays, until she changes her number or gives me a chance.”
He and Zaley had the same situation but were going different ways with it, and neither was right nor wrong. She was reaching for her future so she wouldn’t get hurt, and he was going to keep reaching for his past and accepting that he would get hurt. Not all the time, he wasn’t going to call Mamma daily or stay on the phone and let her berate him, but some of it. They had a connection, whether she wanted to recognize it or not. If all he could ever have was a five-minute call once or twice a year, then that was what he had. Hi, Mamma. Hi, Austin. He hadn’t sprouted fully formed onto this earth. He had come from her. And Mars had come from his heart if not his blood, and losing him hurt too much to be borne. Mamma had to feel that somewhere too, locked deep inside herself where she didn’t want to look. That part of her would be relieved to hear his voice, even if it wasn’t big enough to make its way out her mouth.
They went out to the living room so Mrs. Li could use the bathroom to wash the dirt off her arms. On the floor by the sofa was a dog’s water bowl, which they had set down if Bleu Cheese came to the harbor with Corbin. Mr. Li put the bowl in a cupboard sadly. There wasn’t a kitchen, just a kitchenette. People ate in the cafeteria. Clicking shut the cabinet door, Mr. Li said, “Our poor dog. We didn’t think she had a chance, but . . .”
“You hoped,” Austin said. You couldn’t help but hope for anyone you loved, person or animal. He would always hope for some magic to bring back Mars, to have that cute little face looking up to his.
“We hoped,” Mr. Li said. “We hoped for all of you. Every time there were new admissions, we’d wait for quarantine to end and dash over to see who it was. Even when the guards told us the physical descriptions of people and they didn’t match any of you, we went to look anyway. Just in case.”
As Corbin inspected the tiny bedroom meant for him, Austin said, “Are they going to give us a place to sleep?”
“You’re welcome to stay with us, you and Zaley both, or you can go to the dorms,” Mr. Li said.
Austin wanted to stay with them rather than be overwhelmed in the company of strangers. He sat on the sofa and asked, “Does Elania’s family live nearby?”
“Oh, no, they’re clear across the harbor. The module parks are divided into four quadrants. We’re in the southwest and they’re in the northeast, so we only see their family now and again. There are two cafeterias and they eat at the one closer to their home. They’ve been sitting Shivah for Elania. We took over a tray of food two days ago and sat with them.”
“I have some of Elania’s things to give to them.”
“We’ll give you the directions when you want to go over there. I think they’d really like to see you, and hear about her. Those boys will always have to be so careful to never get infected, or that could happen to them, too.”
“What are they being told?” Zaley asked. That was important. The details were ugly, and the boys might be getting a watered-down version.
“That she was sick, too sick to live,” Mr. Li said. “They’re being honest about everything, the confinement point, the . . . the suicide . . . that there was nothing else to be done. She did the right thing, the only thing she could. The boys are having a hard time with it, but they deserve the truth to wondering.”
There were cots in the closet to be set up at night for Zaley and Austin in the living room. Schedules were posted in the kitchenette and showed when either of the Lis had kitchen or grounds duty. Everyone in the harbor worked. The three of them would be added to it, although Zaley would have fewer hours until she turned eighteen.
Neighbors came over to meet Corbin, who they had heard so much about since the spring. Hands reached out to Austin and Zaley to include them. Young and old, California natives and stranded here from other states and countries, there were people on their own and married couples, groups of friends and three generations of one enormous family who joked that every tenth person in the harbor was a Johnston. A Chinese girl dashed through the garden and pressed her hands to her lips to see Corbin. It was Jingwei, who lived in the dorms for single women. “He kept me alive,” she said to everyone after the two hugged. “His pill he shared. He kept me alive.”
Two more people turned in to the path through the garden, two very familiar faces from Cloudy Valley, and Austin bellowed at the sight of DeAngelo Rosenberg and Quinn Dutch. People parted and he flew outside, convinced they would vanish like Micah in his dream.
They didn’t vanish, and yelled back at him. This wasn’t a harbor full of strangers. Quinn looked just the same as she had when they were in school, and she had come to the harbor with her family. DeAngelo was here alone. He was using a walker. The extra weight he carried through their school years had dropped off him. Like a frail old man, he climbed up to the module with Quinn watching over him. A whisper passed by Austin’s ear that Shepherds had beaten DeAngelo with baseball bats and left him for dead. Cops and a coroner came to move his body, saw that he was alive, and helped him get to the harbor. He had had several surgeries and needed more. It was a miracle he could walk and talk.
They had gone through their rings of hell as Austin passed through his. The living room was filled with voices and bodies, Quinn and Zaley wedged onto one cushion of the sofa to reminisce about choir and hands going out to guide DeAngelo to another cushion when he needed to sit down. Austin took the walker from him, collapsed it as instructed, and leaned it against the wall out of the way.
Later he would ask if anything was known about Janie, about others, but for now, he rejoiced. Today was about seeing who was here, not who wasn’t. Some of them had come through. He wanted to explore the whole harbor, see every face and shake every hand, but all he could think about doing right now was sitting on the sofa with his friends, and feel like he had gotten
home at long last.
Epilogue
Zaley
On the first of September, Zaley woke up to sunlight streaming through her window.
The only time she ever closed the curtain all the way was when she changed her clothes. It was a light blue sheet affixed to each side of the frame by tacks. The scarf she’d tied around it in the middle was out of the rummage bin. A gaudy red with green sprays of peacock feathers, someone had come to the harbor wearing it to cover a stamp. The rummage bin was full of things like that. No one wanted to keep them after a stamp was removed. But Zaley found the colors cheerful, and gave it a new purpose.
Five people in one small module had been overload. She’d moved to the dorms fast, and Austin followed two days later. The perk to having her own dorm room was that she and Corbin had a place of total privacy. Lying in his bed together with his parents chatting and going up and down the hallway wasn’t exactly conducive to romance.
It was the tiniest room imaginable. The bed took up three-quarters of it, and the last quarter was the pathway between the window and the door. The closet was a pocket, and the shelf above the bar creaked in warning whenever she set something upon it. The sheets and blanket were the regulation sort that everyone had, white and tan. But they were hers. Every inch of this room was hers, and she loved it dearly. The view out the window was nothing special, the shag of a tree and a walkway with the men’s dorms beyond it, but that was hers, too. She kept a pair of potted plants on the windowsill and suspected she was overwatering them. If they died, she’d get others. It wasn’t like the harbor lacked in plants.
She wasn’t on duty until the afternoon, when she and the women in her cluster had to show up at Warehouse 2 to do whatever had to be done in there. Sweeping, unpacking boxes, transferring goods, work lasted from one to five. But the morning was hers as much as the room, which she tidied up fast before going out the door. She needed this free morning. There was something important she had to do.
When she walked through the door to the giant dining hall, she saw Corbin and Austin over at the bulletin board. Dozens of groups operated in the harbor, one meant for older Sombra Cs, one for younger Sombra Cs and a third for kids, some for things as frivolous as television shows and jogging groups, others existing for deeper matters like recovering alcoholics and grief support. Parenting groups, suicide help, games, notices of permanent work positions, there was something for everyone stuck to the board.
Kissing Corbin, she turned to the bulletins and said, “What are we looking at?”
“Austin wants to know if we’ll go with him tonight,” Corbin said. One bulletin had a rainbow flag across the top.
“It’s a mixer for fabulous Sombra Cs, and their fabulous straight friends,” Austin said. “I’m not sure I’m ready to walk in there and be fabulous all on my own.”
“I said we’d be his chaperones,” Corbin said. “There’s going to be brownies.”
It was huge that Austin was willing to go, and Zaley was keen on those brownies. Treats like that weren’t common in the harbor. “Of course we’ll go with you.”
They were dressed a little differently for the day, having picked the most sober of their rummage bin clothes. Corbin and Austin had tucked in their shirts, and Zaley had spent more time in fixing her hair. After breakfast, they were hiking over to the Douglases’ module. In Austin’s hand was the Pewter letter, which he had put in a frame. It was a crude one, banged together out of pieces of wood left over from the harbor’s construction, and there was no glass in the front. Plastic wrap covered the whole thing for protection.
Zaley took it from him. The letter had come all this way, from the porch to the harbor, and it was battered from the journey. Thickly creased at its folds, the four corners were curled. But every word on it could still be read through the wrap.
As they got in line for breakfast, she ran her fingers down the wood of the frame and read the words of acceptance. Austin said, “I made a smaller frame for the picture of Micah and Mars. That’s in my room, if you want to stop by and see it.”
“Let me deal with this one today,” Zaley said, stinging to remember those gleeful, stolen hours in the Cool Spoon last summer with Micah and Elania. All of them sitting in a booth and bitching about how tired they were of nothing but Sombra C on the news . . . they didn’t know how truly tired of Sombra C they were going to become. A year and change after that day, Zaley was the only one left alive of the three at the table.
She was going to live well for herself, and for them. When a tow-headed toddler boy had stumbled outside the dorms yesterday, an older sibling shouting impatiently down the path to hurry up, it was Micah who came to mind as Zaley bent to ask the kid if he was okay. She’d only felt gentle with a small, struggling human, who wanted to be big and go fast and talk coherently and just wasn’t there yet.
They gathered up their breakfasts from the serving counter and searched for a table. On her plate was a big scoop of scrambled eggs, two microwave sausages, and fruit. Food was strictly rationed. There wasn’t the room to graze herds of meat animals within the walls, so few were kept except for chickens. What came from the gardens all over the harbor was essential to flesh out their diet.
Everyone ate together, infected and non-infected alike. The cleaning of plates and utensils followed a rigid process in the kitchen. The rate of new infections in the harbor was very low, and didn’t come from the dining hall. Unprotected sex was the biggest offender there. The women’s Health Advisor kept a basket of condoms outside her door, free to anyone, and Austin had opened up his dorm door the first time to a handful of condoms spread out on his bed. He’d thought it was a prank until the men’s Health Advisor showed up to give him even more in person, along with a lecture about how Sombra C was spread.
Announcements began over the intercom as they sat down. The harbors scattered across the United States were in communication with each other, and anyone with news passed it on to everyone else. Today the news was little (although anything was large to Zaley), of pirates haunting the waters to waylay ships bringing goods to the nation’s ports, the White House being rebuilt and President Pitch about to move in, and Shepherds winning an airport only to have their first plane shot out of the sky. A Prime cabinet member was rumored to have been inside. The military was currently battling to seize that airport back.
“They’re going to win sometimes,” Corbin said about the Shepherds and Prime. But then they would lose. And Zaley was in a protected place to wait out their death throes. How well the country reformed afterwards . . . she wouldn’t ever feel safe out there if people knew she had Sombra C. A woman in her cluster had Sombra C stickers all over her dorm door, which was fine inside the harbor, but Zaley couldn’t picture doing that outside. Only friends she trusted implicitly could know about her illness, and even then . . . She didn’t want to live in a state of paranoia, but there would always be people who thought like Shepherds, seeing a supernatural monster in place of Zaley Mattazollo. The only zombies there had ever been were the Shepherds themselves, mindlessly destroying everything and everyone they encountered until the whole world collapsed into insanity.
Maybe one day she’d have a Sombra C sticker on her front door out there. Or maybe not. Fear aside, it just wasn’t anybody’s business save hers.
The news of the world was small, and the happenings of the table were even smaller. Quinn was eating fast to make it to her shift in one of the community gardens, which was harvesting its crops. DeAngelo and Austin were planning to fill out an application for a module, which had a two-person minimum. Some of them were empty around the harbor, and safety bars could be installed to help DeAngelo get along. Living in the dorms could be noisy, and having to wait for the toilet or the shower sucked.
Corbin nudged her leg under the table at the application chat. She didn’t qualify for a module until she turned eighteen, but once she did, the two of them could fill out the form for their own. They’d plant a garden in the space allotted for a yard,
and hopefully Zaley would do better with that than she was with the plants turning yellow on her windowsill.
She wasn’t impatient for the module, although he was. She had her own space to stretch out in for now, and that was enough.
After the meal ended and everyone returned their trays to the counter, she, Corbin, and Austin separated from their friends and waved to the Lis. They started across the harbor, Austin fiddling with the frame in silent criticism of his work. She tucked her arms through his and Corbin’s and said, “It’s lovely, Austin.”
“It’s crap,” Austin said.
“It’s not crap! It will keep the letter from getting destroyed, and that’s what you want.”
They passed the chapel. Candles and batteries for fake ones couldn’t be spared, so there was a memorial area full of paper cranes and flowers. Beyond it was the hospital. It had a wing for people who stopped responding to Zyllevir or never did, and those who had the infection held in abeyance but had degraded too far mentally to be in the general populace. As to the former, there had only been one person out of the thousands here. Zyllevir just quit on him. He received an overdose of drugs before he went completely feral, went to sleep and never woke up. The harbor was better stocked in drugs than it was in ammunition.
Eight people lived permanently in the hospital with infections in the forties and fifties. Sometimes Zaley saw them in the evening, being taken on a walk through the modules under the watchful eye of minders. One’s pronounced lurching gait had been frightening, pushing her into memories of previous encounters with ferals, but his mind was in better condition than his muscles and he said hello to her as they passed.
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