It was the one and only time he’d seen Ginny frightened beyond rational thought. She wanted to get up and move, to walk in some direction, any direction. But he knew they needed to stay put if they had any chance of finding their way back onto the trail at first light. It got darker and they slept in fits and starts, Ginny’s head in his lap, her cheek pressed against his puffy coat. He slept with both his and her hands tucked inside his jacket, terrified that hers would become frostbitten, that she would lose a finger and her career as a surgeon would be over before it got started.
It was incredibly stupid to set out like that with no supplies, no in-case-of-emergency plan, and he has never again gone into the woods so ill-prepared. He’s also never forgotten what it felt like, crouching together under the massive tree in the dark, its roots hard against their backs. Not just because of how scared they were. But because it’s one of the few times in his life he felt Ginny truly needed him.
A man’s voice interrupts his thoughts. “Are you interested in making your home more secure?” He appears beside Mark, bringing the sweet smell of pipe smoke with him. He wears jeans and a green Carhartt sweatshirt; a full brown beard covers his chin and cheeks. He holds out his hands for the ladder, dexterously folds it up, and sets it back on the shelf.
Mark returns his hands to his pockets.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” the man says. “The important thing is you’re here.”
“Right…” Mark sneaks a glance at the guy’s beard—he couldn’t grow a beard like that if he stopped shaving for a year.
“I’m Lee.” The man holds out his hand for Mark to shake. “Why don’t you start by telling me your concerns.” He crosses his arms over his broad chest. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Mark hesitates. The Other Mark’s wild-eyed face looms in his mind. He lowers his voice. “Have you ever had the feeling something bad is about to happen, but you’re not sure what?”
“All the time.” Lee says this like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“What did you do about it?”
“I got my butt in gear. I got prepared.” Lee looks him in the eye. “Do you want to get prepared?”
“I want to keep my family safe.”
Lee nods like this is the right answer, and this makes Mark feel good, like he made the right decision coming here.
Lee waves him toward the back of the store. “Follow me.”
They walk through a thick hanging wall of sleeping bags that partitions the middle of the store. Behind a large sign that says SURVIVAL GEAR, shelves contain packets of freeze-dried food, first-aid kits, fluorescent orange whistles, heavy-duty flashlights, compasses, and old-fashioned-looking emergency radios with metal dials. Also complicated water purifiers, sturdy folding shovels, silvery Mylar blankets, and ropes and cords of every color and length. Even rubber gas masks, radiation detectors, and jars of potassium iodide.
Lee holds up a yellow plastic suitcase. “We have some kits. They come in three sizes, for a family of two, four, or six. They have all your basics: food, water, light, shelter, survival tools, first aid, and toiletries for up to three days.”
Mark picks up one of the suitcases and frowns at the label printed in at least eight different languages.
“But that’s just the bare minimum.” Lee surveys Mark. “And you’re not the bare minimum kind of guy.”
“I already have basic disaster supplies.” He sets the suitcase down. “Everyone should.”
“You want something more.”
Mark thinks. “I want someplace I can take my family. Someplace secure.”
“A safe room or a shelter.”
“A shelter.” Just the word makes Mark feel better, makes the image of the Other Mark recede from his mind. He has a feeling of sturdy walls protecting him and Ginny and Noah. The sense of their warm bodies close to his own.
“They aren’t cheap. But peace of mind is worth the cash.”
“How do you go about building something like that?” Now that the possibility has entered his mind, he’s impatient for details.
“Two ways of doing it. Hire someone to build it—” Lee pulls a three-ring binder from a rack of catalogues nearby and opens to the first page. “But we’re talking upwards of fifty thousand dollars for a professionally installed fallout shelter. Or build it yourself. A couple of companies, like Hard Top Structures”—he flips to the end of the binder—“have do-it-yourself models.” He folds down the top corner of the page and hands the binder to Mark.
Mark’s eyes land on random phrases:
Marine-grade access hatch.
48-inch diameter emergency escape tunnel.
Subterranean long-term food storage shelter.
War gas filtration system.
“I’ll let you take a look at the options.” Lee rubs his hand through his beard one more time before ambling toward the Fishing section.
“Thanks,” Mark calls after him without raising his eyes from a brochure for Arizona Shelter Systems with the slogan BECAUSE SURVIVAL IS OUR HIGHEST PRIORITY. But on the back page he reads the small print: it will take thirty days just to schedule an estimate, and there’s no mention of the cost. He flips to the bookmarked page for Hard Top Structures. The top sheet has a logo in the shape of a fortress, followed by a series of questions in bold black font:
Are YOU concerned about natural disasters, such as
Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Tsunamis?
Earthquakes, Forest fires, Floods, Landslides?
Or Invasions: Foreign, National, or Alien?
Or Nuclear War: Blasts and Fallout?
Or Terrorist Attacks, including Biological or Chemical?
On the next page a red inset presents “THE BUNKER ROOM. The Only Do-It-Yourself, Underground Blast-Resistant Bomb/Fallout System that Includes an Engineering Pressure Rating. By Hard Top Structures, The Only Name You Can Trust in Underground Shelter Design/Build.” Then there’s a big picture of what’s included in the shelter kit, shown packed on a pallet, ready to be loaded onto a flatbed truck.
For the Series 100, measuring twelve by twenty feet inside, the cost is $9,500. But he isn’t worried about the money. He’s only concerned with how fast they can get the kit to him. He finds photocopies of the shelter’s schematics, complete with materials list and project time line, tucked into the back of the binder. He strides to the counter, credit card in hand.
NINE
SAMARA INCHES HER small car through the heavy white fog. She counts streets—the haze has obscured even the street signs—and slowly makes the turn for the Kells house. Inside, the house is unchanged since her last visit, empty and still. There’s no reason for her to be here again so soon. But she can’t be home right now. Yesterday she saw her mother hammering a FOR SALE sign into the front yard. Her mother who died a month ago. She can’t figure it out, what she saw. What it was, what it means.
She reaches behind the living room drapes and feels for the cord. She pulls and they give way with a squeak. She sneezes. The streaked and cloudy windows make the backyard look like it’s under water.
She locates a roll of paper towels and a bottle of orange-scented cleaner in the kitchen. She intends to give the living room windows a quick wipe down, for the sake of the pictures she needs to take for the MLS listing, but a strong odor of mildew comes from the enamel kitchen sink. She sprays it with the orange liquid and the huuf of the nozzle between her thumb and forefinger is so satisfying she quickly moves on to the speckled Formica countertops. The smell of chlorine and orange peel fills her nose.
There’s no one she can talk to about what she saw. She imagines trying to tell her father about it, asking him if he’s seen her too. Her mother, out in the front yard. She pictures the expression on his face.
She picks up the spray bottle and starts again. After a while the counters gain an indi
fferent sheen, but the sink looks exactly the same. She starts opening cabinets until she finds a bent fork, forgotten in a wax-papered drawer, and scrapes clean the rings of black around the faucet and its ancient sprayer. Her eyes migrate to the vinyl floor, to the dark, sticky outline where the fridge used to be.
She searches the house and finds a mop and bucket in the laundry room. She lugs them upstairs and closes the blinds in the kitchen. She turns up the thermostat, unbuttons her shirt, shivers, and steps out of her skirt. Wearing only a cotton camisole and underwear, she fills the bucket with hot water and some of the orange soap. She submerges the mop in the orange-tinted water and drags it across the floor. Over and over, until her muscles burn.
An hour later she has mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors and Windexed the aluminum-framed windows. She has shaken dust from all the blue curtains—miles and miles of blue curtains, all made from the same nubby material that holds an astonishing amount of dust. She has wiped down the wooden mantel and the bathroom sinks and the tops of the pastel-colored toilets.
She has sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. She has peeled and peeled and peeled her feet from the sticky vinyl floors. Her hands are red from the hot water, her underarms and the backs of her knees sweaty. But she keeps going from one thing to the next because it feels so good to do it. Better than being at home among all her mother’s things, her clothes and her books and her dishes and her plants. Much better than being anywhere near the spot where she appeared, like magic, in the front yard.
She’s up on a step stool in the dining room, attempting to wipe the dust from a chandelier with four white globes, when the doorbell rings. She jumps. She’s forgotten she’s only wearing her underclothes, and she never locked the front door.
She hears Shawn’s deep voice. “Hello?”
It must be noon already; she asked him to come by to give her an estimate on refinishing the hardwood floors. “I’m here,” she calls. “Lock that door, would you? I didn’t mean to leave it open.”
He walks toward her, grinning. His head is only a few inches shorter than the hallway ceiling. “Are you planning on showing the house in your underwear?” He takes off his hat, embroidered in red thread with the words HARRIS CONSTRUCTION.
She twists her hair away from her damp neck and lets it fall back down. “I started cleaning and I couldn’t stop.” She climbs down from the step stool.
She shows him where she pulled up the carpet, and the hardwood hidden underneath, and he takes measurements. His manner is relaxed, confident. She envies him, the assured way he goes through the world. She sees very little of the teenage boy she used to know. He’s become something entirely different in the intervening years. He’s grown up, while it feels like she’s hardly changed at all. What difference is there between her and the girl that stood elbow to elbow with him at the Ping-Pong table in his basement? That girl had a mother and she doesn’t. That’s all.
“Can I show you something else?” She leads him through the house and into one of the bathrooms. The overhead fan whirs to life when she turns on the light. She points out some cracked tiles. “Can these be replaced?”
He frowns. “Whoever buys this place is probably going to rip all this out.” He waves his hat across the room. “It’s a shame. This house is pretty great as is.”
“It is, right?” She reaches for one of the sparkly melamine pulls on the vanity.
“It takes time and money to find replacements for vintage tile like that.” He runs his fingers over one of the cracked tiles. He shrugs. “You never know, you could find some buyers who appreciate pastel tile and tiny pink toilets.” He laughs and the sound echoes in the small room.
Shawn pokes his head into rooms as they walk back to the kitchen. “It would be a fun project,” he says. “Getting it to look like it did in 1959.”
“Yeah…”
“You thinking of buying it?”
“Of course not.”
“Why not?”
She hears her mother’s voice in her head, and she uses her mother’s words. “Moving back home was only temporary.” Onward and upward, Sammy, to better things. “This job was only temporary.”
“Oh yeah? What would you rather be doing?”
Her mind scrolls through the list of suggestions her mom has made over the years about her future: graduate degrees, certificate programs, internships abroad. But she answers him honestly. “I don’t really know.” She’ll never hear another one of her mother’s schemes for how she should live her life. This should feel like a relief, but it doesn’t. It feels awful, and unfair.
“Oh, hell. I’m sorry.” He puts his arms around her. “What else can I help with?” he asks in her ear.
She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “There’s one thing.” She shows him the closet in the master bedroom, how its door rattles loosely off its track. He bows his head to step inside the closet, picks up the door easily, and snaps it into place. He pushes the door open and closed.
Then he grabs her and pulls her inside. “Don’t be sad,” he says. His breath is hot against her cheek.
“I’ve been cleaning—I’m all sweaty.”
“You smell like oranges.”
He presses her body against the closet wall and kisses her, his hands on her hips. She hesitates, briefly, and then reaches her arms around his neck, pushes his hat from his head, and kisses him back.
Their breath grows loud and quick inside the small space. His fingers pull at the waistband of her underwear. She tugs his belt open, unzips his jeans. She kisses him harder, feels his teeth behind his lips. He picks her up, his hands under her bottom, and she wraps her legs around him. She gasps as he pushes himself inside her. There’s the briefest second of pain and then they are moving against each other. She grips him tight with her thighs. Their bodies thump against the closet wall, and she stifles a laugh. And then everything feels like it’s speeding up, and she loses track of where her body ends and his begins, and she doesn’t care. She cries out, and a moment later he does too.
Her mind is blank when she retrieves her clothes from the kitchen. She picks up her shirt, pulls it on, and starts buttoning it. Her phone buzzes, and when she answers an unfamiliar, accented voice asks for Ashmina Mehta. “This is Samara Mehta, her daughter. How can I help?”
Shawn emerges from the bedroom, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sheepish. Samara holds up her hand. “One second,” she mouths.
“Has your mother retired already?” the voice on the phone asks. “That’s wonderful.”
She turns away from Shawn, toward the front of the house. “What’s this regarding?” Through the glass front door she watches the hazy shapes of a bike and child trailer move through the fog.
“I’m calling about the house in Sarapiquí.”
“The what?”
Papers rustle in the background. “The one-bed, one-bath house—well, more of a cottage really—I sold your mom in Sarapiquí, Costa Rica.”
“A house in Costa Rica.” Samara laughs. “My mom didn’t own a house in Costa Rica.”
“Is your mother available?”
“There must be some mistake.”
“Maybe you better put her on the phone.”
“She had cancer. She died.”
“Oh I’m so sorry.” There’s a long pause. Then, her voice slightly embarrassed, the woman tells Samara the lot adjacent to the home has come up for sale. “That’s why I called,” she says. “There are lovely forest views—”
Samara cuts her off, tells her she’ll have to call her back. She hangs up the phone, her eyes still fixed on the fuzzy view of the road from the front door.
“Everything okay?” Shawn stands behind her.
“My mom bought a house in Costa Rica.” The peaceful, blank feeling she had a few minutes ago has disappeared. “Why would she have done that?”
“
An investment?”
She shakes her head. “If it was an investment I would have known about it.”
“Maybe she was going to retire there?”
“No way.” The image of her mother hammering a FOR SALE sign into the front lawn springs up in her mind. “She didn’t have any plans to retire.”
“People can surprise you. When my dad told me he was getting remarried I just laughed. Took him three times to convince me he wasn’t joking.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
He shrugs. “Seems pretty similar to me.”
“Well, it isn’t.” She walks to the sliding door and closes it hard. “I have to go. I have an appointment downtown.”
He’s quiet for a minute. “Right. I guess I’ll see you later.”
He tucks in his shirt and gathers his tools. She ought to say something to him, something nice. But she keeps thinking of her mom, out there in the yard. Her long brown braid swinging down her back.
“I’ll call you,” she says.
He puts his hat back on and nods.
She hears the rumble of his truck driving off into the fog as she switches off the lights and draws the curtains. With all the lamps off, the house feels old and dark. Her mother bought property in a foreign country. A place Samara’s never been. A place her mother, as far as she knows, had never been. She retrieves the keys from the top of the stove. It’s a puzzle, about the house in Costa Rica, and she waits for her mother’s voice to offer up an explanation. But for once Ashmina’s voice is silent. She can’t think of a single thing her mom would say.
TEN
MARK CALLS TO his son from a thicket of blackberry bushes at the top of the yard, where the edge of his property meets the state forest. He holds a can of yellow spray paint in one hand and a tape measure in the other. “Up here.” Fog floats between the trees; the air is thick with the smell of pine needles and decomposing leaves.
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