He folds his arms over his chest. “She’s safer here than anywhere else.”
“Mark, the hospital is built to withstand natural disasters. They have generators, and they have—”
“What about the road to the hospital? What’s going to happen to her, and to you, if Broken Mountain blows while you’re driving there?”
“I know you think something’s about to happen, but it hasn’t yet, and—”
Her words are cut off by a terrific, vibrating sound from deep within the earth, FOMMMMMMB. She lunges for Noah, and Mark does too, and they wrap their arms around him. She feels the vibration move through their three bodies. She tastes metal and the floor lurches violently; objects on the shelves clatter to the ground. She squeezes her eyes shut, and when she opens them—
There is no ceiling. No walls, no bunker, no people. Just her and Mark and Noah, holding each other in the middle of their empty backyard. Rain flecks their faces. The drum of a woodpecker sounds out from the trees.
Another intense vibration jolts their feet and they’re knocked to the ground—
Now they crouch in a pile of gray ash. The forest is a wasteland of charred twigs, their house a shadowy heap of wet wood and bent shingles. The sky is chalky purple, the air thick with dust. There is a horrible smell that Ginny knows…the smell of car wrecks, the smell of house fires. She squints into the gloom. Ash-covered shapes slump near the back door—the shapes of people. Two adults. One child.
Her stomach heaves. The earth shudders, again, and Mark and Noah slip from her grasp—
She waves her hands through empty air and catches sharp brambles. They’re gone. Dense wilderness surrounds her. There’s no house. No cul-de-sac. Only darkness and a cacophony of forest sounds. The earth is still. The whir of insects and the croaks of frogs swell in her ears. Panic rises in her throat. She crawls in one direction. Then another, reaching for Noah, for Mark. She screams.
And then the ground buckles, and Mark and Noah are back in her arms. She coughs and coughs and clutches them tight. They are back inside the bunker, inside its thick walls and yellow light. Livi kneels next to Cass’s dog. Samara and Manish and Edith bend protectively over Cass’s cot.
“What just happened?” Ginny’s fingers shake as she wipes dust from Noah’s eyes. “What was that?”
Mark hurries to the white metal box in the corner. “I don’t know.” He pushes buttons on a generator. It groans, starts up, and then the white box does too.
“We weren’t here for a second.” Ginny coughs. “We went somewhere else.”
Everyone looks at each other.
Finally Manish speaks. “Is there a radio in here?”
Mark takes a small emergency radio from a shelf, turns it on, and they all listen to its crackle. Then a robotic voice fills the room: “There has been a volcanic event on Broken Mountain. Residents of Clearing, Evergreen, and Spring Camp, Oregon, should shelter in place inside an interior room. Turn off HVAC systems. Stay away from glass. If possible, seal windows, doors, and vents. Do not go outside. Repeat, do not go outside. Stay tuned to this station for more information.” Then the broadcast repeats.
“My mom,” Livi says. She’s crying.
“She’s at work,” Mark says. “That’s thirty miles away. She’s fine.”
Livi keeps crying.
“Livi, I promise you. She’s safe.”
“You were right,” Samara says to Mark. “You were actually right.”
Her words have a strange effect on Ginny. She looks at her husband, really looks at him, and he is a mystery. “Why did you build this shelter?” She raises her voice and dust catches in her throat. “How did you know?”
Cass groans loudly from her cot. Her face is squeezed and red. Ginny moves closer and Cass grabs her hand, gripping it hard.
“Try to breathe through it,” Edith says. Manish releases the dog, and Bear whines and licks Cass’s cheek. She moans through another contraction, and then another. They are coming one on top of the other.
“We need to see if she’s dilated,” Edith tells Ginny.
“Now?” Cass breathes.
“Babies come when they want to come,” Edith says. “I think this one wants to come now.”
Ginny pulls the sheet from one of the cots and lays it across Cass’s body. Edith helps Cass tug down her pajama pants. The radio’s still on, and the robotic voice reminds them, “Do not go outside—”
“We need a way to wash our hands.” Ginny holds up her dust-covered fingers, and Mark finds water and soap and a small plastic tub. He tells Noah, “Let’s get out of their way,” and points him and Livi to the far cot. “Your mom knows what to do.”
Edith reaches under the sheet and frowns. “She’s at…I don’t know, a six or a seven? It’s been a long time since my L&D rotation.”
“Me too,” Ginny says.
Samara stands close to Cass. “Is this really happening, right now?”
A sort of growl escapes from Cass’s lips.
“Those two were only thirty seconds apart,” Samara says.
“Check her again,” Ginny says. “This is going quick.”
“At least an eight, maybe a nine.”
Ginny springs up and moves quickly around the room. She shouts at Mark for things she needs: towels, scissors, rubbing alcohol, more water.
Samara kneels down next to Cass and offers her hand. Edith stands beside her, and Manish pulls the dog away. Ginny positions herself at the foot of the bed. She tries to listen for the baby’s heartbeat again, but there’s too much noise.
Cass grunts and pants through the next contraction, and Edith helps her get into a squat. Cass’s face gets redder and redder as the contraction reaches its climax. She grips the sides of the cot and looks around the room, her eyes wild. Then she tucks her head into her chest and screams.
Ginny looks at her son, who has gotten down on the floor and put his arms around the dog. She reaches between Cass’s legs. “We’re nearly there.”
Edith leans over and speaks to Cass, “We’re about to have a baby, okay?”
Cass shakes her head.
“Yes. We are.”
Cass’s eyes are going wide again. Another contraction is coming.
“Do you want to push?” Ginny asks, and Cass grunts and grits her teeth. Her lips go white, her eyes squeeze shut.
Then she lets out the breath she was holding.
“That was good,” Ginny says. “When the next contraction comes, do it again, just like that.”
Cass pushes again, and again. Samara’s still got her hand. “You’re doing great,” she says after each contraction.
After another push, Ginny reaches between Cass’s legs and feels soft skull and wet hair. “Here’s the head—” She cradles the baby’s warm head with one hand and wipes its mouth with the other.
With one more grunting push, Ginny eases the shoulders out. Then, in a slippery rush, a blood-and-mucus-streaked baby falls into her arms. It blinks in the light, astonished, angry. Its tiny mouth gapes noiselessly.
Then its piercing cry fills the room. How could she have forgotten that sound? Noah shrieked just like that when the OB tugged him from her abdomen and held him above the dividing curtain, his tiny legs flailing.
Samara beams at Cass and says, “You did it. You did it,” again and again. Ginny lays the baby on a towel so she can listen to its lungs, and it squirms, blinks its eyes, and kicks its tiny frog-like legs. Edith cuts the cord and ties it; she cleans the blood and mucus from the baby’s face. Cass breathes hard and weeps and reaches for her child.
Ginny hands her the baby—a boy—and Cass lies back on the cot, her face shiny and amazed. She looks into her son’s dark eyes and whispers a name, “Liam.” She lays the baby against her chest, and her expression softens as she presses her nose to his wet patch of hair and inhales
.
THIRTY-FOUR
ON A WET Sunday afternoon in April, six months after the eruption of Broken Mountain, Mark leads a team of graduate students up the narrow path to Pond P—the only pond to survive the disaster because it had an early freeze a few days before. He feels the cool air in his lungs and the strength of his body as he walks; he hasn’t lost the muscles he gained while building the shelter.
The eruption killed seventeen people, destroyed thirty-six homes, collapsed two bridges, and obliterated eleven roads, but because of the direction of the wind that night, and the geological formation of the mountain’s top, the town of Clearing was largely spared. Only five residents died that night, three when the roof of their house collapsed under the weight of falling ash, and two in car crashes. But inside Mark’s shelter everyone survived, and was spared exposure to the ash-filled air.
The eruption made international news and attracted scientists from all over the world to study Broken Mountain. But the stories that filled the local paper were less about the eruption itself than the strange events that led up to it. People reported seeing bizarre things in the days prior: a woman said she chased a dog through her house, on three consecutive mornings, but each time she cornered the animal, he disappeared into thin air. A man described waking up to see his wife, who had died three years prior, stepping out of the shower, her long wet hair streaming down her back. He tried to ask her what she was doing there. Was she a ghost? But she didn’t respond. She walked into their closet, and when he got up the courage to follow her, she was gone.
Mark read these articles with keen interest: parents told stories of children insisting on the reality of imaginary friends; children told stories of parents being in two places at once. Most of the people who saw the visions hadn’t told anyone, at least not at first. Just like Mark hadn’t told anyone about the Other Mark. They worried they were losing their minds. They convinced themselves the hallucinations were a side effect of medication or an extreme symptom of stress. But after the eruption, when the visions suddenly stopped, they wondered if the two things were connected. A few people lobbied the mayor to organize a task force consisting of scientists from the university, members of local government, and interested citizens to look into the strange occurrences.
Mark wanted to volunteer for the task force, but after the eruption his research projects were flooded with grant money. He is busier than he’s ever been. He’s taken on more graduate students, and widened his study of the northwestern spotted frog to include ponds near dormant volcanoes in Washington and California. He’s also started a project at the coastline, collecting data on shorebirds and the ways their flight patterns change during seismic activity along the Cascadia fault line.
Best of all, the university is in talks with a major donor to fund a new institute for the study of animal behavior. He’s going to get to build DAMN, a true worldwide system for the prediction of natural disasters through the observation of animal behavior. Everything he’s ever worked for as a scientist is coming to fruition, all at once.
But sometimes he can’t help questioning all this success. His marriage and his mountain, both destroyed before he could get anyone to listen to him, before he could get anyone to believe in DAMN, and in him. It makes him angry. But it’s no good thinking like that. He just has to keep going forward and know that his work is important. He’s going to save lives. He’s going to save more than just his family this time.
The air turns cooler as they climb, and he quickens his pace. The pond is just ahead, a sliver of reflected light between the trees. To his west, the forest is still green, but to the north the landscape changes. It’s like someone drew a line down the mountainside: on one side the world is in color, full of plants and animals and fungi, and on the other, it’s in black-and-white, full of nothing but the gray stalks of scorched trees. Up there, where the green turns to gray, the air still tastes like bitter cinders. It still stings the inside of his nose. It appears to be a wasteland, but Mark knows better. Even among the gray dust, things are growing; they’re coming back. You just have to know where to look. At first it was the pocket gophers, which survived the eruption underground, and then the fungi the gophers dug up. Then the grass and weed seeds borne by the wind. Now, with the spring rains soaking the sooty earth, tiny pine saplings peek from the ashes.
His ponds will never be what they were. They’re something different now. But they’ll still be a source of fascination for Mark, and for lots of other scientists too. They are the proof that DAMN works.
They reach the pond and his graduate student, Katie, hands out clipboards, nets, and new digital readers for the frog collars. She shows the students who are new to the team how to trap the frogs, read their collars, and set them free. Mark pulls on his hip waders, steps into the pond, and plunges a net into the murky water. He catches a frog, scoops it from a tangle of watercress, and lifts it gently from the net. He holds it cupped between his two hands while Katie scans its collar—it’s one of the frogs that ran away, and then, after the ash settled, came back. Once Katie’s turned to help another student, he lifts up the frog so he can look into its flat black eyes. He feels its cool, slick skin and clipping heartbeat, its hinged back legs straining against his palms, and he can’t help but whisper, “Thank you.”
* * *
—
A warm spring rain mists Samara’s face as she calls from her back porch to the roof, where Shawn lays the last of the shingles over a section damaged during the eruption. “Aren’t you getting wet?”
“Yeah, but I’ve only got one more,” he calls back.
She’s owned the house—what used to be Mr. Kells’s house—for three months, but she’s been waiting to move in until the repairs are done. She’s brought some things to unpack today, boxes full of design books from college, and a few cookbooks from her parents’ house, the dog-eared ones annotated in her mother’s large script: The New York Times Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Also a bag of fabric and paint swatches, and a smaller box with wrapped glassware.
She brings everything into the house, unpacks the books into the built-in bookcase in the living room, and lays the fabric and paint swatches out onto the recently refinished hardwood floors. She steps back and eyes them: strips of paper with progressively lighter shades of snowy blue; squares of black-and-white-striped cotton, pale blue silk, and nubbly charcoal linen. She holds up the silk to the sliding glass doors. Outside the lawn is bright green, and the pine trees sway in the breeze. The sun comes out for a brief second and then disappears again behind the clouds. She hears her mother’s voice inside her head: Where’s the color, Sammy?
This is a color, she answers. She thinks of the riot of color and pattern and texture in her parents’ house. She misses it, and she doesn’t miss it.
You want to spend your life surrounded by gray?
It’s blue.
Makes me want to go to sleep.
Well, I like it.
Samara sets the swatch down and turns to the box of glassware. A bottle of champagne has been sitting in the fridge since she closed on the house, because it didn’t seem right to toast the purchase of a house with a hole in its roof. But maybe today she and Shawn should open it. She wipes out water tumblers and wineglasses, and sets them inside a newly scrubbed kitchen cabinet. At the bottom of the box is her mother’s orange Fiesta ware pitcher.
Shawn comes through the door, shaking rain from his jacket. “What are you doing?” He unlaces his boots and sets them in the entryway.
“I’m finding a spot for this.” She lifts up the pitcher.
He walks toward her and puts his arms around her waist, pushes his face into her hair. “You’re so warm and dry.”
She laughs—his nose is cold and his hair dripping. “Are you done for the day?”
“I am. What do you want to do tonight?”
“Paint.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve already bought it. It’s in the garage.”
His face is tired, but he smiles. “All right. I’ll bring it in.”
“But first we can order some food,” she calls after him. “And drink that bottle of champagne.”
Once he’s gone she sets the Fiesta ware pitcher on the limestone mantel.
Now that looks good, her mother’s voice says. Brightens up the place.
It does look good, Samara says, like it belongs.
* * *
—
Twigs snap under their boots as Ginny, Noah, Peter, and Livi walk toward a campsite near Sparrow Lake. The forest smells fresh and new, like pine shoots and vine maple buds, and it’s noisy with new life—the rasping of insects and the cheeping of baby birds. They’re far enough from Broken Mountain to escape the remnants of volcanic ash that covered the town of Clearing like gray snow six months ago, and that still linger in the dirt and under rocks and inside tree trunk furrows. Ginny pauses to catch her breath, watches the kids climbing ahead of her. Noah walks close to Livi, who has a bright pink backpack tightly strapped to her back. Peter drags a duffel bag behind him and stops to point things out—mushrooms, snake holes, the dart of a rabbit in the brush. Livi grabs Noah’s hand and he stiffens, sneaks a glance back at Ginny. She forces herself to smile and wave. The campsite is just up ahead. The sun appears through the trees for a second, and then flickers from view.
She stepped down as chief of surgery a few months ago—she hated the paperwork anyway—so that she can focus on the operating room, on fixing people’s insides. That’s what she’s best at. This has left small spaces of time she’s filled with Noah’s soccer games, played at fields over an hour away since the eruption, parent nights focused on helping kids through traumatic events, and rainy Sundays spent at the bowling alley, with Peter and Livi tagging along.
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