“What about the onions?” I asked, as he shone his flashlight all through the living room. Stephen kicked idly at the carpet, bringing up a cloud of dust.
“In a minute,” he said, and motioned with his flashlight, glancing out an uncurtained window as if he thought someone were watching. “Over here.”
We surprised a little nest of mice, darting away from our feet swift as big sleek silverfish, and then we were in what must’ve been the dining room, a dollhouse-tiny chandelier and one of those god-awful vista murals painted on the wall and a big wooden table with one wonky leg. Piled up on the tabletop, sliding from their moorings thanks to the short leg, were dozens of CDs. Stephen stood back, still aiming the flashlight at the table, a museum curator showing off some new exhibit.
“I collected them,” he said, “from some of the other houses. And this one. I wouldn’t know what’s good, you pick.”
His voice was impatient, almost brusque, like I’d nagged him into foraging for me, but it hardly mattered. Music. I started sifting through them, wiping the grimy plastic covers clean with my fingers, my own private garage sale: Dirty Little Whirlwind—that one CD of theirs that everyone had—and Kelp’s first album, and Bellepheron’s first album, and a Nina Simone best-of my mom had had. I loved how deep and furious she sounded, like a righteous tide coming in sweeping every dirty thing off shore. I was glad she’d died before all of this happened. Sins of Our Fathers’ third CD, crap for the dustbin. Some hip-hop I vaguely knew, a string quartet—I liked violins—I made myself stop, we needed room for the onions. Stephen watched, unsmiling, his hands curled around the tabletop; his fingers were long and thin, knobbly and bulging around the knuckles like they were swollen up from overwork. And probably were. I opened the CD cases, one by one, just to make sure they weren’t empty.
“Al won’t let me play half of these,” I reminded him. “You were right, if it’s not Ornette Coleman or whoever, he doesn’t want to know—are you allowed to hoard these?”
He shrugged. I loaded up the bag, let him sling it over his shoulder, and we went back outside to nose around deserted neighborhood gardens, seeking out promising bits and pieces of edible green like any actual four-legged rabbit. I remembered my Safety and Crisis Management classes from high school, Ms. MacAllister’s fat rump in clingy pink polyester making us giggle every time she turned around and her thickened, clammy fingers like moist potato slices pointing to the old 1930s USDA poster: IF THE TOWN GATES CLOSE, CAN YOU STILL FEED YOUR FAMILY? START A “HAZARD GARDEN” TODAY. I never paid attention, during the gardening parts. I hated crouching down in the sun, sweating, grabbing stray handfuls of poison ivy weeding, driving soil so far under my nails that it hurt trying to dig it out.
Everybody living here had been good, while they were alive; they nearly all had dedicated hazard patches to root through. I found a clump of what looked like dandelion greens, tugged it up. The night air was perfect, that cool half-wet freshness that smelled and felt like being enveloped in a single new soft spring leaf.
“Phoebe came by the kitchens,” Stephen said. His fingers hovered over a clump of mushrooms, tiny little deep orange tabletops at the base of an oak. Of course Billy or Mags wouldn’t lose a beat if he slipped them a toadstool. “Jabbering, like—”
“She keeps acting like she knows stuff about me,” I said. Dandelion greens were bitter as hell anyway, why was I scrounging for them? Rather have the instant rice. “Like a couple days ago at dinner, you saw it.”
Stephen sat down next to me. In the moonlight the bruising on the side of his face looked like a great smudge of dirt, charcoal ash smeared on his skin; it was almost reassuring, a mark of mutual humanity. Our defanged voices, our fragile skin, our frail little bodies that won’t just up and heal. A whole race of turtles who’ve forever lost their shells.
“I shut her up,” he said. “She started talking, and talking, like she does, like there’s a damned windup key all in her back, and I shut her the hell up. It was my pleasure.”
Something fierce crossed his face, heat flaring suddenly from the dead ashen debris of a fire pit, and he laughed, dry and rasping, like a cigarette cough. The sound of it made me hope he never found anything funny again.
“She can’t help it,” I said. Phoebe running hunched over and tripping over her own feet, half-crying, still cradling the arm Lisa had hurt. “I hate her too but she can’t help it, she’s crazy—”
“Oh, you’re right about that,” he said, and laughed again. Just sucking in that smoke. “Everything she does is crazy, says, thinks—”
“What did you do?” Sharp, verging on angry, because I wouldn’t be made to feel sorry for her, but his eyes, his laugh, I didn’t like them right now at all. “One of the exes almost broke her arm tonight, I hope you didn’t decide to finish the—”
“I scared her,” he said. So calm. He tugged the orange mushrooms out by the roots. “I just told you that. Scared her enough to shut up and go away. I didn’t need to hurt her.” He turned, looked me square in the face. “I’m good like that. When I want to be.”
I looked him right back. Eyes so dark you couldn’t see to the bottom of them, thick smears of paint that never quite dried. We had gray eyes, my mother and I, like Mags did. I’d always wanted eyes like his, that deep opaque brown that’s nearly black; light eyes illuminated too much inside you, glass instead of paint. Left you too exposed.
“Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.
“No.” No more smiling. “There isn’t much scares you, really. I don’t think. So why would I try?”
He held up a mushroom, waxen and caked in dirt, already bruising like his face from the light touch of his fingertips; he bit off half the cap, chewing methodically, swallowing. I waited. Nothing happened. Maybe it wouldn’t until tomorrow. I’d seen wild mushrooms in the woods near Dave’s house a lot of times, foraging in the fall when our food was already running thin, but I never dared touch them.
“The thing is,” Stephen said, “Phoebe thinks you remind her of someone.” He ran his free hand through his hair, standing it up on thick bristly ends and then letting it collapse. “I guess someone from her precious lab. She thinks you’re holding back something big, something you’ll use to get things you want. Things she wants, like getting back to Prairie Beach. To whatever she thinks is still going on there.” He snorted, took another bite of mushroom. “She’s welcome to it, what went on there was—anyway. That’s what she thinks.” Another bite and he made a face at the mushroom’s aftertaste, licked at his lips like a cat. “I mean, you never were there, right? Even just sneaking in, like kids used to try to do sometimes?”
Too casual, that question, and he knew I knew it. I waited until he looked up again, then deliberately bit a mushroom in half. A little rubbery, a bit earthy, a faint bland sourness like soil slowly transmuting to wax. I waited. Nothing happened.
“I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about,” I said, and licked dirt from my fingertips like sugar. There was something oddly comforting about the tangerine color of the cap. “My dad was a steelworker. My mom—nobody I know worked for the labs. I’ve never been halfway near the beaches in my life. So I guess she really is just crazy, and I get to be her crazy fixation. Lucky me.”
Weirdly that was almost a letdown, a slumping feeling inside, like I’d been on the verge of some horrible but truly interesting revelation about . . . something or other, and it all came to naught. It was the boredom of this place, the boredom of every place now, the utter tedium of putting one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, every day, hour, minute . . . for what? My cell phone was stone dead now, nobody ever called me back. Farther from my mother than I’d ever been. Lisa had Naomi now, I didn’t hate either of them for it but it was still true. Me, I was treading water. Sliding backward, like a moving glacier. I finished off the mushroom.
“Phoebe thinks she knows Lisa too,” I told him. “And so does Mags.” Jessie’s Lisa. Whoever this Jessie was, Lisa’s lost
sister. I didn’t think much of them both together, to be honest, if they’d had each other’s company and then just decided one day to throw it away. I wouldn’t have behaved like that. I knew what I had before I ever lost it.
“Maybe she does,” Stephen said, pulling himself to his feet, offering me a hand up. He didn’t seem particularly interested now. “Bully for them. Time for an onion hunt.”
I was expecting more stumbles through knee-high weeds but the patch of ex-garden was right there, big patches of dirt still untouched by grass and with the telltale long, slender spring onion shoots poking from the depths; some thinner ones too, that might be garlic. I dug carefully around the edges of a bulb. “Anyway,” I said, “Phoebe was jabbering at me and then Lisa and Mags showed up, thank God, never thought I’d say thank God for Mags, and then Mags got really weird—”
“She hurt you?” Stephen glanced up from where he knelt, an onion bulb in each hand.
“God, no—she was going on and on about her old gang, I mean, her gang back when she was really dead. And then she was talking about her childhood or something, I guess, when she was human and alive. Alive for the first time. It’s just . . . weird, isn’t it? I mean, I always thought they were just sort of bags of flesh, walking around. Bags of rotten flesh with nothing inside.”
That seething, swollen thing that looked at my mother like he knew her. Like he was trying to tell her something. I pushed him from my mind, even though it’d been him who took away everything I had, before any of this ever started. “But they think and feel like we do—I mean, they’ve got whole histories inside them, everything that happened before they died. They remember everything. Everything a human remembers, about their own past. Isn’t that weird? They’re actual people. I’m sorry, I guess that sounds stupid but I’ll never get over it—”
“So that’s your yardstick,” Stephen said. He was just kneeling there now, the trowel idle. “How good someone’s memory is.”
His voice was distant, and far too brittle. I stopped digging and slid one fingernail under another, sawing at the grounddown dirt. “My yardstick of what?”
“Whether they get to be human or not.” Staring back at me now, detached and cold. “Whether you, yourself, deign to think of them as a person.”
What the hell had I said? “I didn’t—”
“So the more you remember, the more human you are. And if you can’t remember it, you can’t think, for any reason? That’s that for that. Good to know. Takes care of anyone with Alzheimer’s, or who got hit on the head, or just has trouble stringing their thoughts together for any—”
“That isn’t what I said.” I threw the onion bag onto the grass. “That’s not what I said at all, and you know it.”
“I do, huh?” His eyes were sparking. “Yeah. I do. I’m not fucking deaf, and you just said—”
“I said I was surprised that Mags, you know, the zombie as was, I’m surprised whenever she sounds halfway human! And I am! All right? I’m surprised when any of them sound halfway human! It’s not like they think of themselves as human and I’m taking that away, now is it? They hate us! Work until you die, that’s us, then they feed off what’s left! Just like before! I’m not fucking talking about humans with Alzheimer’s!”
I turned away to stare into the depths of the garden. Weeds everywhere, predictably, clumps of shiny reddish leaves and patches of soft spring-green furze and a tiny vine with purple flowers I could see winding slowly, mercilessly around far bigger plants. Alzheimer’s. What if you were human before, with Alzheimer’s, and then you got plague sick and recovered and were stuck like that, forever? Who would take care of you, knowing you’d never die and let them catch a break? From the corner of my eye I saw Stephen, back on his feet, fingers curled vine-tight around the trowel and glowering at the peonies like he wanted to tear them in fistfuls out of the ground.
“Everything that’s happened,” he said, “and that’s what surprises you.”
I kept my eyes on the garden: a bush with huge, top-heavy creamy-lacey blooms already a mess of petals on the ground. Bright orange poppies, a vibrant deep orange with the petals blushing all over like skin. I used to think they only came in red.
You were right, I thought. You don’t scare me. Though I guess you got me to shut up anyway, just like Phoebe. Enjoy it.
“They surprise me too, Amy,” he said, something tangled in his voice like a snarl of hair too painful to comb out. “All the time, they do. But that doesn’t get me anywhere.”
I turned back to him, slowly. He’d stolen those CDs for me, and that fork. He could get in trouble. He was probably remembering someone old he’d seen die and he got upset.
“Are you and Natalie related?” I asked.
He blinked in surprise. “If we are,” he said, “it’s news to me. She came here without any family, just like me. Why did you think that?”
“I don’t know, I just did. Making up more stupid things to be surprised about.” I dug under my nails again, ignoring the rawskin feeling making me wince. “Why does everyone here act like she’s contagious?” And you too. Diseased. Though we don’t talk about that, we pretend not to see it even as it happens right in front of us. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed anywhere.
“Amy—”
“Why are we even doing this?” I flung a hand at him, bent over the dirt again and scrabbling hard, a dog set on digging but all grimness instead of animal bliss. “I hate dandelion greens. Everyone hates them. It’s like when everyone was sick and eating the grass like goats.”
Stephen looked up at me, our faces inches apart. This close his bruised side had a yellowing tinge, greenish-yellow like those potato skins. The jaundiced ugliness of healing.
“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell we ended up here at all.”
Fate. Ms. Czapla, my eighth-grade English teacher, she loved that I liked Greek myths, she said it was especially hard for an American to wrap their head around the Greek idea of Fate since our big myth was that anyone could do anything. Hubris is in our national DNA, she said, we think every good thing we have we did all by ourselves, and then told the story of Niobe. There was no Fate or destiny or grand plan, she said; life had no point at all, in the end, but to perpetuate itself. She got in trouble sometimes, talking like that to us kids. I don’t know what happened to her when the sickness came.
“Maybe we only find that out when we die,” I said.
He looked down at our hands, grime-caked and digging side by side. About to tell me just how full of it I really was.
“Have we met before?” he asked.
I frowned in surprise. “I’m serious,” he said. “There’s all sorts of holes all through my memory, things just keep dropping out and reappearing and I don’t know why. Maybe Natalie really is my sister. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But, you say things that’d be crazy out of Phoebe’s mouth but right off I know what you mean, so—it just seems like we’ve talked before. Enough that we both know what to talk about and what to keep—”
He shut up quick, and got back to digging.
“I can’t remember stuff either,” I said. “There’s spaces where there shouldn’t be, like my mind’s this big mouth, biting down on reality, and there’s gaps all in the teeth.” I reached over and yanked out a clump of weeds, greens, something I couldn’t identify. “And things I do remember, it’s like they’re—pulsing, inside, but my head keeps shoving them away. Forgetting while I remember.”
He didn’t answer. Angry still, a taut vein of it pulsing through him with a soft, persistent beat like blood. So what? Jabber-jaw crazy or smoke-sucking angry, those were the only two choices left, and maybe he was only now coming out of a long stretch of crazy. That notebook of his, writing everything down because otherwise it might all vanish. My atlas, that I lost in the tornado.
“Only four of us lived,” I said. I sat back cross-legged on the grass. “Me and Kristin, and Dave, and Ms. Acosta. She kept saying to ca
ll her Alicia but I can’t think of her by her first name. She worked for my school. Her and Dave. I hid, we hid, in the school basement, when our town fell apart. A couple days later we found Kristin, in this little white stucco house near the school. She was holding her daughter who was dead from the disease. Suffocated. Her whole face, the little girl’s, it was so swollen and blue-black that her eyes just disappeared inside it. Swallowed up. Dave’s house had a wood-burning stove, and he knew how to hunt, so that’s where we went. That was us, the whole town.”
I hadn’t talked for months on end, not truly, not since I fled my uncle’s house, and now it poured from me like the rain in last week’s storm. “I should’ve maybe written things down, or something, but I couldn’t think straight enough, it’s like pieces of my brain got shoved around like blocks inside my head and—see, this is why I didn’t bother writing it down, I’m shit at describing things. It’s easier with songs, songs don’t have to make sense, they just have to sound right—”
“You write music?” he said. He was sitting next to me now, arms wrapped around his knees, the garden’s remains forgotten. His head, a shoulder would angle forward when he was really listening to you, I’d noticed that before.
“I used to. Stupid shit. I thought I was going to have my own band and live in Europe, and—it doesn’t matter what I thought. There’s no point.” My fingers curled around a shin, the denim rough and worn enough I could feel the fraying cords of the cloth like tiny wires losing their insulation. “Everybody thought they were going places, didn’t they? But we got shown up, shown up good. Me and Dave, and—and Kristin.”
Mourning doves. Those birds I kept hearing, when Lisa and Mags were with me, all over the place: oooh-ahhh-wooo, woooo, wooooo. And again, when I woke. I liked the sound of mourning doves, I always had before too; you would hear them calling from the grayness as the afternoon faded and you felt like something was saying it like it was, like their song was the perfect low, subdued sound to encapsulate the disappearance of the light. Onomatopoeia.
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