Kate guides Goldie out of the corral with practiced ease and without looking back. Clearly Stu and I are meant to follow their lead, but Stu isn’t having it. He doesn’t even shuffle a hoof in their direction.
“All right, Stu.” I lean down toward the horse’s ear, which he flips at me with an indignant flutter. “You and I need to have a little chat. It’s not like I like this any more than you do. But here we are, and there they go, and it seems to me we can just stand here all day being annoyed with each other, or we can agree to disagree, too.”
Stu snorts. But I take it as a good sign that he hasn’t bucked me yet. At least he is listening.
“Let’s make a deal, you and I. You don’t bite my arm off, I’ll play the happy passenger, and after today you’ll never have to see me again.”
Stu shuffles forward a couple of steps but then stops again. His head levers back toward me, and he eyes me with that big, black hole of his. I lift my hands up in the universal sign of surrender. He’s in charge, and he knows it.
“It’s your show, Stu. You can stand here glaring at me, or we can spend the day following the ladies.”
His large head turns away from me and toward where Kate and Goldie are sauntering off into the day. Stu whinnies lightly. I think he has a bit of a crush, which leaves me with one last card to play.
“Wouldn’t you rather spend the day staring at the view than sitting here all alone?”
Stu kicks at the dirt and snorts his assent, and takes off after Kate and Goldie.
Figures. Stu’s an ass-man.
We catch up quickly, much more quickly than I am comfortable with. For the first half mile, I have a death grip on the reins, bouncing up and down in the saddle with such force my tailbone is scratching the top of my head, which I think amuses Stu to no end. Eventually, we settle into a rhythm, and I ease back enough to notice we have left the farm.
Stu keeps us a few horse-lengths behind Kate and Goldie for a while, enjoying his own view while I take in the world around us. Barren fields lead one into the next, surrounded by rolling hills as green as emeralds. These are the ruins the plague has wrought. With no one left to tend them, the crops waste away, sagging in the fields, picked apart by birds and animals. Yet all around them life flourishes, the trees and grass man so arrogantly tamed now growing free. It is as if the earth has chosen to let the remains of man die while she nourishes the natural world, reclaiming the ground we spent lifetimes taking as our own. The world is hers now, and she is using it as she sees fit. We are no longer her master, but instead, her lowly tenant.
Eventually, Stu sidles us up next to Goldie, and the four of us stroll on in companionable silence. It is peaceful, this silence, only broken by the muted sounds of the horses’ cantering and the wind riffling through the trees. I imagine this must be what it sounded like to the earliest settlers, back before the trains and cars and cell phones. This kind of quiet is a foreign thing, even though it has been accompanying me for months. It is amazing how quiet the world has gotten since the fall of man. I wonder if the animals are relieved to finally have an end to all that racket.
At some point I notice I am growing tired, so I can only imagine how the horses feel. The noonday sun signals we have been at it for hours, and I am about to suggest a break when Kate reads my mind.
“See that group of trees up ahead?” she asks, pointing off toward a small cluster just below the horizon. After hours of silence, her voice is like a song. “It’s not as much a group as it is the edge of a small forest. Might be a good place to take a break.”
It is nearly another half hour before we reach what turns out to be much more than a small forest. The trees offer needed relief from the cloudless sky, and the temperature drops noticeably as we weave in and out of their shade. We arrive at a small stream, and Kate dismounts as if she hasn’t become unbearably stiff from the long ride. I, on the other hand, find I have even less grace getting off my horse than I had getting on and would have landed flat on my ass but for Kate, who catches me with surprisingly strong arms. I grin shakily up at her, a bit unnerved by our sudden proximity, but she just steadies me before retreating to tie up the horses.
Stu, for his part, pays me little notice before nuzzling up next to Goldie. I guess he has his priorities, although I swear that horse is laughing at what a smooth operator I am. While I stretch and try to regain the feeling in the lower half of my body, Kate unpacks some sandwiches and water and a small blanket. We might be picnickers in some lovely park.
“Thanks,” I mumble as I sit down beside Kate, a bit ashamed that I have nothing to offer in return. I feel like the prom date who forgot the corsage. Not that this is a date. From what I remember of my last one, there should be wine and flowers and candlelight. I let my friends fix me up a few months after I found my girlfriend cheating on me. Bad idea. I knocked over the candle trying to pour more wine to numb myself against my date’s incessant nattering. Interesting how effectively catching a tablecloth on fire can end a bad date.
“No problem,” she says, offering me a sandwich before digging in to her own. I eat greedily, surprised at how hungry the trip has made me. Goldie and Stu chew on the grass at their feet, occasionally nudging each other with their noses. It seems very much like flirting to me.
Kate finishes her sandwich and leans back on one elbow, watching me finish my lunch. It makes me nervous, and I feel compelled to say something, anything, even though I seem to have lost the art of making light conversation. Not that I have ever been good at that.
“So, you come here often?” I ask, nearly laughing at the ridiculously cheesy line as it leaves my mouth. Kate does laugh, putting me at ease.
“I’ve been here a few times.”
“It’s beautiful.”
She looks around, as if taking it in for the first time.
“Yes, it really is.”
I struggle for something else to say but come up empty. I am entirely distracted by a ray of sunlight that has pierced the canopy and is playing with the highlights in Kate’s hair. It is pathetic, but I am completely smitten.
“What do you miss most?”
And the fly ball into left field award goes to…
“Um…huh?”
She laughs again. If I could do nothing else for the rest of my life, making her laugh would be enough.
“From before? What do you miss most about the world?”
It is a serious question, and yet it feels as light as the breeze rustling the grass around us. I choose to follow the wind’s lead.
“Starbucks.”
“Starbucks?” she chuckles. “Of all the things in the world…Starbucks?”
“If you’d ever had an iced mocha you wouldn’t be asking me that.”
“I was more of a green tea Frappuccino girl myself.”
Of course she is. I smile.
“Seriously, though. Iced mochas, Wi-Fi, those exclusive CDs? And they really were on every corner in DC. What’s not to miss?”
“I see your point.”
“What about you?” I lean back, settling in against the base of a large tree, my arms propped on my knees like I don’t have a care in the world.
“Hmm, many things.” She shifts on the blanket, propping her head in her hand, her other hand idly plucking at imaginary pieces of lint. “I think I miss music on the radio. How you’d be driving along in the car, switching stations, until you’d stumble on a song you hadn’t heard in forever. Then you’d be singing along to words you could barely remember but somehow still knew. I miss that.”
I remember the last time I had that feeling. A whisper of a nondescript memory washes over me, and although I can’t remember the song or the road or when it was, I remember the feel of it. “I miss that, too.”
“What else?” Kate prompts.
“Movies.”
“We still have those. Well, we have Buck’s three John Wayne DVDs, anyway.”
“Yeah, but I’m talking about real movies. In theaters. With surround soun
d and popcorn.”
“With butter.”
“Of course with butter.”
“I miss baseball,” Kate says wistfully.
“Oh, me too. Favorite team?”
“Well, my dad was a Cardinals fan.”
I think the scowl on my face tells her all she needs to know. The hissing sound I make seals the deal.
“Oh boy. Cubs?”
I nod. “You know what this means?”
“Of course. Thankfully, I said my dad was a Cards fan. I never much cared for them.”
“That was close. I really didn’t want to have to bludgeon you to death.”
“Well, no, that would have been bad,” she says gravely even as she smiles broadly. “I liked the Padres.”
“Respectable choice.”
“I’m so glad you approve. Your turn.”
“Airplanes.”
“But not airplane food.”
“God, no.”
“Bumper cars.”
“Bumper stickers.”
“Barnes & Noble.”
“Comic books.”
“Captain America?”
She couldn’t delight me more if she was wearing an “I Heart Geeks” T-shirt.
“Captain America. And the Flash.”
“Wally West?”
The girl knows her comic books. Now I am impressed as well as delighted.
“Okay. But Barry was always my Flash.”
“I can respect that,” she says.
“I miss ice cream cones.”
“Ben & Jerry’s.”
“Nah. Too much…stuff. Give me a scoop of mint chocolate chip melting on a cone any day.”
“Because it’s better when it’s melting?”
“Of course,” I say. I get lost in a memory, of better times that don’t seem so far away despite their distance. Kate remains silent, as if she senses the memory rattling around in my head.
“I have this memory,” I begin distantly, like I am telling a fairytale instead of a story from my life. “I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I was with my dad one Saturday, which was unusual because my dad wasn’t home much. He was a trucker, and he was on the road more than he was home, especially on weekends.”
A wistful smile tugs at my mouth as I flash through a dozen other memories of my father. Watching him shave, getting to blow the horn of his truck, the sweetness of finally beating him at Sorry because he refused to ever let me win, watching him watch a Bears game on the rare Sunday he was home...
“Anyway, he had taken me out for the afternoon on his motorcycle, first to the park, then for ice cream. Mint chocolate chip on a cone. We decided to bring some ice cream back for my mom, so we got on his motorcycle and headed home. I still had the cone in my hand, and it was a pretty hot day…”
“Oh no…” Kate says, laughing already at the inevitability of it all.
“Oh yes. Not the smartest move, granted. So there I was, holding my cone, watching this stream of green flying past me and directly onto the windshield of the car behind us.” We are both laughing now, and I can barely get the words out. “Nice old couple in that car. Reminded me of my grandparents. I could see them smiling at me from behind their windshield wipers.”
Kate sits up, wiping away tears of laughter. My stomach clenches from laughing, and I rub the knot away. I can’t believe I just told her that. Yet instead of wanting to take it back, I only want to tell her more. I want to tell her everything.
We lapse into silence again, enjoying the day. I glance over at Kate and find her watching me. She has grown thoughtful. I can tell by the way her head is cocked to the side she is gearing up to start a conversation I won’t necessarily be happy about. She isn’t hard to read that way.
“Your dad, is he…?”
And there it is. The $64,000 question, which adjusted for inflation is more expensive than I can ever hope to afford.
I have two choices, sitting on this blanket in this not-so-small forest with this person I barely know and yet feel I know deeply. I can fall back on my usual cynicism and use sarcasm to deflect the question, or I can actually act like a human being who has something left to offer the world.
To run or not to run. That is the question.
“I don’t know,” I say, the words catching in my throat.
Putting voice to these thoughts is like bathing in acid. It burns everywhere, tearing at my flesh and my heart. I am speaking words I have not used in more than five months, and they taste like copper pennies on my tongue.
“I haven’t spoken to my parents since...” I have to work to remember when that last conversation happened. It’s hard to place even though the call is etched in my mind, the words half shouted between bursts of static, desperately begging me to leave the city. “It was a few weeks before the bomb. They were still okay then. Neither one was sick. The line was so garbled with static I couldn’t hear a lot of what my dad said. I don’t know whether my brother or sister or their families were sick. I kept feeling like there was more he wasn’t telling me, like maybe…He sounded okay, like he was healthy, but maybe he wasn’t. Or maybe someone else was sick. Dad never liked to give me bad news over the phone, so who knows?”
I make light of it, trying to keep the countless what ifs at bay. I have spent countless hours imagining who had caught the disease.
Kate is sitting up now, her arms wrapped around her knees, listening. Her eyes hold a world of grief, for me, but also for herself. She has lost people, too. Everyone has.
“I just remember how desperate he was for me to leave the city. He kept begging me to come home. For weeks I had stayed, watched everyone I knew get sick. The people I worked with, my neighbors, my friends. I moved in with my best friend and her husband. They had managed to not get sick for so long, we thought they were immune. We were wrong.”
I refuse to cry. I deny the tears even as they well up. If I start crying now, I know I will never stop. I shake my head, forcing it all back down.
“I knew that woman for fifteen years. We met in college. I always thought we were sort of the odd couple. She was all athletic and confident and straight, and I was this introvert nerd just starting to figure out I was gay. But somehow it worked. When we both ended up in DC years after college, it seemed like the craziest, most wonderful coincidence in the world. And then the plague came, and I held my best friend while she died.”
I blow all the air out of my lungs, releasing that particular ghost. I did what I could for her. I stayed, and I held her, and I buried her and her husband out in the backyard, beneath the fire pit where we spent countless fall evenings talking and making s’mores and laughing like those were the things that truly mattered in life.
“After that, there was nothing left to stay for. The call with my dad just confirmed what I already knew—that it was time to go home. The last thing my dad said was to make me promise to come home. Then the line went dead. I tried calling them back, but I couldn’t get a call through. So the next morning, I got in my car and started for Asheville. I went as far as I could with the little gas I had left. I’m still trying to get there. I have to get there.”
I stop talking. That is only the beginning of the story, but it is too much to continue on with right now.
“You have to know.”
It is said simply but with perfect understanding. I give a terse nod, still trying to fight back the emotion threatening to overwhelm me. I can’t tell her what I fear I already know, for if I speak the words aloud, it will make them real. And if they are real, then I truly will have nothing left. As long as I am going home, I have something. The mission sustains me. The lie is my life.
There is more to say, and she knows it, but for now what I have said is enough, for both of us.
“We should probably start heading back,” she says reluctantly. Already the day’s light has started to angle through the trees, and it won’t be long before the shadows begin stretching toward nightfall.
We make quick work of our picn
ic, content in the peace that comes from two people who have just shared what we have. Kate brings the horses over, and they both seem more subdued than before. I chalk it up to boredom on their parts, but as I take Stu’s reins, I notice him eyeing me with an understanding that had been missing from our earlier encounter. I know I am being ridiculous, thinking somehow the horse understood our conversation, yet it makes me less anxious about the ride back.
I am in the midst of ungracefully mounting my horse when Goldie screams. I turn, only to find the horse rearing up on her two hind legs and Kate plunging toward the earth.
I barely hear myself shout Kate’s name as I jump to the ground and run to her. She is clutching her head in agony. “Stupid snake,” she mutters as I drop down to her side.
“What happened?” I am panicking. I pry her hand away from her head. A purple lump is already forming beneath the blood running out of a deep gash.
“Goldie got spooked, and I hit my head on a rock,” she says, wincing as I probe the cut. I strip off my overshirt and dab away the blood.
“Sorry. I have to put pressure on this,” I say, pressing the shirt against the wound.
“It’s okay,” she says weakly, grinding her teeth. “Goldie’s not easily spooked, but it was a pretty big snake.”
I glance around nervously. That’s all we need, for the snake to come investigating while we are on the ground, defenseless.
“It’s gone. I think Goldie scared it just as much as it scared Goldie.”
I remove the shirt and take another look at the cut. It isn’t as deep as I feared. The blood is already slowing. Still, it is going to leave a nasty bruise, and I’m not convinced Kate doesn’t have a concussion. I return the shirt to her head, wanting to make sure I stop the bleeding.
“I told you next time I wouldn’t have to ask.”
“What?” I ask absently.
“Next time I wanted your shirt off.”
It takes me a minute to focus on anything besides the gash on her head and the panic I feel. I look down to find Kate grinning up at me, and I relax.
“Are you flirting with me?”
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