Todd

by Nicolai, Adam J

  Can't sleep. Might have concussion. Have to watch fire.

  When he wakes, it's almost dark.

  84

  "Dad." Todd is shaking him. "Daddy."

  The fire has guttered out, the ghost of its heat fading as quickly as the sunlight. Todd is a shadow in the gloom. Alan sits up.

  "Todd?" Alan grabs him. "Todd? Oh gods, I thought you—" He pulls him into a tight hug, kisses the top of his head. "Are you okay? Can you feel your feet?"

  "Yeah. I can feel my feet, yeah."

  Alan peers at him, but can't make out the boy's face in the dim light. He remembers Todd's face turning pale, his lips blue. "How about your cheeks? Your face?"

  "My cheeks kinda hurt."

  "They kinda hurt? Can you feel them?"

  "Yeah. But Dad. Where are we?"

  "I don't know. Iowa, somewhere. Some restaurant."

  "I don't remember coming here."

  "Yeah, I dragged you in. You passed out in the snow." Alan climbs gingerly to his feet, wincing. Every part of his body hurts, but he needs to restart the fire while he can still see.

  Once it's going, he sees Todd's cheeks are mottled red and purple. Frostbite. His heart catches because he doesn't know what to do about that, but then he remembers the boy is alive. Some frostbite may be a fair price to pay.

  Todd is quiet as they rummage through the kitchen for food. The canned goods tend to come in giant, industrial-sized containers, and most of them are condiments. Eventually they settle on heating up some baked beans over the fire.

  As the last of the daylight dies, the snow has slowed but not stopped.

  "Where is our stuff?" Todd asks when they finish dinner. When Alan tells him, Todd says, "We should go get it."

  "Not in the blizzard. We need to wait it out."

  "But when it stops?"

  "We'll see." Alan actually agrees; he does want the basic supplies they packed, especially the first aid kit and the siphon pump. There aren't enough supplies in the restaurant to last them for the whole winter. They need to keep moving, and they'll need their things to do it.

  But this is a problem for tomorrow. Wrapped in a white tablecloth like a Greek toga, Alan drapes their clothes over several chair backs and arranges them around the fire to dry. His feet sigh as he sits back down.

  Slowly, the fact that they actually survived the storm sinks in. For what must be the first time in several hours, his heart rate slows. They're both alive. They're both safe—for now, at least. This is not how he expected to spend their first snow day, but it beats the alternative.

  "It smells bad." Todd crinkles his nose at the fire.

  "Yeah. The chair wood is probably treated—it's not really meant to be burned like this." Probably spewing a million carcinogens straight into our lungs, he thinks, but unless they're going to develop and die of cancer in the next eight hours, this too is a problem for tomorrow. "It's all right, though. We're using it as firewood, not incense."

  "What's that?"

  "Incense? Just something you burn to make things smell good."

  The smoke is still flowing up to the windows, so he's not worried about suffocation. This is what passes for reassurance now, and it's enough. He snuggles with his son, each drawing warmth from the other, and they talk in the dark until sleep comes.

  85

  As if part of his mind has appointed itself the task, he wakes every hour or so to check on the fire. He broke down several chairs before bedtime, which makes tossing in a new chair leg so easy that at times he barely remembers doing it.

  During one of these intervals, as the snow patters ceaselessly against the window panes, he notices the Blurs. The fire light is not as complete as the lantern light was; it leaves too many dark patches behind the tables and around the dining room's distant corners. In these black places he's been seeing the shift and eddy of Blurs all night, but that's not what catches his eye now.

  Again, two of the forms are not moving. He returns their eyeless stare while their brethren flash through and around them. Their mute appeal could be a symptom of anything. A sinister intent. Simple curiosity.

  Empathy?

  He is seized by a sudden longing, as futile as it is desperate.

  "Brenda?" he whispers, and the two shapes dissolve.

  86

  In the morning, he dresses and steps outside to find the world has vanished.

  A handful of white mounds mark the vehicles in the parking lot. In the distance, the 35 overpass is a blank arch over the road. Everything else is endless, perfect white. The street, the ditch, the fields: these distinctions mean nearly nothing.

  The snow has stopped, for now, but the sky is still iron-grey, and he can't see the sun. He can't rule out another storm.

  His damaged cheeks are burning in the cold, and he can't stay out long. Inside, as he stamps the snow from his shoes just inside the door, Todd screams for him.

  "Todd?" His fight-or-flight instinct activates instantly; the grizzly bear that saved his son from certain death rears up, roaring.

  Todd pops up from behind the reception desk, eyes alight. "They have activity books!"

  "They...?" Alan struggles not to scream. Don't do that! "What?"

  "Look!" Todd hobbles away, and Alan chases him.

  "Todd, you need to get off that foot. I told you—"

  "Look!" The boy points at a forgotten corner of the restaurant foyer, where a display shelf is filled with rows of dust-covered coloring books, road atlases, and car games. It's the kind of obsolete stuff no one would need if they had a working smartphone. As a kid, Alan always felt weirdly discomfited by these sorts of things; even now, he feels vaguely embarrassed on Todd's behalf. But Todd has never felt that way. Naked excitement shines in his eyes.

  "This one has mazes and riddles. I was looking under that"—he points at the host's desk—"because you know how sometimes at the restaurant they have crayons? I was looking for crayons." He grabs the book and starts flipping through it.

  Something about Todd's excitement pricks him, and Alan suddenly reels under the loss of their suitcases. The supplies were feeble, but at least they were theirs. Without that they've truly lost everything—their home, their family, their stuff.

  And Todd is so excited. What the fuck is he so excited about?

  A monstrous grief rears in Alan's chest. He turns away so Todd won't see it, limping toward the kitchen as Todd talks at his retreating back: "I'm tall when I'm young and short when I'm old. What am I?"

  Alan shakes his head. "I'll be right back."

  "A candle!" The pages shuffle, followed by a breathless report: "There's lots of these."

  Is this it, now? Is this all Alan has to give his son—shitty activity books that no one wanted and pathetic overtures at trick-or-treating and freezing his fucking face off? Where are they going?

  Where are they going?

  He reaches the kitchen and slides to the floor, gasping, panicking, the weight of this responsibility—this despair—crushing him. He sobs and moans. He wishes he believed in a god—he is nearly ready to pretend he does, just to have someone to beg. A refrain winds up in his head, a low, desperate denial that whips itself into a frenzied shriek:

  This can't be all.

  This can't be all.

  This can't be all!

  Part of him is terrified that Todd will hear and come to find him, but part of him hopes he does, because as fucking pathetic as it is he could use a goddamn hug right now and Todd is literally the only other being in the universe that can give him one. But none of it matters. Todd doesn't hear, or he hears and doesn't come. No one comes, because there is no one.

  There is only him.

  87

  His grief pours out of him. His outrage and his incredible, powerful loneliness leak out in babbling moans and tears and snot. In the end, he is left a shivering wreck on the floor of an empty kitchen in Bumfuck, Iowa.

  Except that's not the end. Eventually, he still has to climb back to his feet, where he fi
nds that nothing has changed.

  He wipes his face, wincing at the burn in his frostbitten cheeks, and returns to the dining room. Todd has harvested a stack of the shitty road-trip books and is working through them with the diligence of a 13th-century scribe.

  As if his father never left the room, he says, "The more you have of it the less you see. What is it?" He's grinning with the suspense of it all, but the contrast of his adorable front teeth with the mottled damage to his cheeks makes Alan wince and turn away.

  "I'm going out for a little bit," Alan says, as if this were a reasonable thing to say.

  "Oh!" Todd starts to get up, and Alan stops him.

  "You," he says, "stay here. I'm serious. You need to stay off that foot and let it heal."

  "It's feeling better."

  "Bullshit. I saw you hobbling around earlier." He snaps off another chair leg, adds it to the fire, and starts digging through the customers' clothes for car keys. He saw a huge Ford pickup in the parking lot earlier and is hoping to drive it out of here.

  Todd has no answer. He sits back, apprehension heavy in his face. "You're gonna leave me here?"

  "I'm not gonna leave you here. Jesus, Todd, you make it sound like I'm never coming back."

  "It doesn't hurt that bad! I can walk."

  "No!" Alan snaps. "Sit down! God dammit, you need to rest your fucking foot! Do you want it to heal crooked? You want it to slide out sideways every time you try to fucking walk?"

  Todd snaps his mouth closed. Panic and old pain burn in his eyes.

  "Look. I need to see what the area looks like. I need to see if there's a grocery store, or a gas station, or—" He finds the Ford keys, slides them into his pocket. "And you can't walk. Okay? I am a shitty parent if I let you hobble out of here. Stay here, stay warm." He points at the stack of books. "You have plenty to do. If I'm not back before the fire gets low, just break off a chair leg and toss it in there."

  Alan puts on his hat and gloves. Todd mumbles, "All right."

  "You'll be fine," Alan says, and walks out.

  88

  The Ford starts right away. By some cosmic miracle, it has a full tank of gas. It rolls over the snow in the parking lot easily, but the back's not weighted down at all, so Alan keeps the speed low. The memory of his vehicle going into a fishtail haunts him as he pulls onto the street.

  He was wrong earlier. The snow on the road has not formed a perfect plain. There is a slight dimpling down the middle of the oncoming lane, a path that runs all the way back to the 35 overpass. He thinks of an old Christian poem as he follows it: Where there's one set of footprints, I carried you.

  He takes a deep breath. The vise in his chest loosens just a little.

  The suitcase is nearly a mile up the road. He jumps out and hauls it into the cabin. Everything is there—the first aid kit, the siphon pump—but taken together it is more than that. It's a hand on the rudder, a tiny piece of control. He draws another shuddering breath, slowly coming back to himself.

  It is ironic, he thinks, that even when we're the only two people left on the planet, I need space from my kid to avoid throttling him.

  He hadn't planned on going any farther, but it felt so good to recover the suitcase that now he wants to push on. Staying gentle on the accelerator, he rolls up the exit ramp and follows the highway back to the crash site.

  The eyepiece for the telescope is broken, but everything else has survived, including—especially?—his pills. He pops one immediately, right there in the snow. Then he rounds everything up and stuffs it into the truck's passenger seat, even going so far as to dig through the debris in the front seat for Todd's 3DS, and the sack of extra batteries.

  Look at that, he tells himself on the drive back. Practically no harm, no foul. Despite the snow, despite the accident, they have a vehicle and almost all of their things.

  The very notion that this would lift his spirits is asinine. They are still trapped in the exact winter scenario he was so keen to avoid, homeless and alone. He's caught a break, that's all. But the psyche is weird that way. Every little bit helps.

  He rolls into the Jericho Diner parking lot feeling like a goddamned sultan, parks just outside the door, and goes in. For once, he finds Todd where he left him. The look of crushing relief on the boy's tear-stained face washes Alan in guilt. His son has obviously been crying, but a shitty, vindictive part of Alan feels like ignoring this fact simply makes them even.

  "Darkness," Alan says.

  Todd blinks, wipes his nose on his sleeve. "What?"

  "'The more you have of it, the less you see.'" He crosses to the boy and hugs him, kisses his head. "Right?"

  Todd sniffles. He is stiff at first, but he caves fast and hugs his dad back. "Yeah."

  "Tell me another one."

  89

  They have real bedding tonight, from home. They don't need all the tablecloths. Alan throws the extras into a pile, and the two of them sleep like kings.

  He wakes to the roar of the dining room burning.

  The pile of tablecloths, only feet away from him, has become a fountain of flame. Two tables are engulfed, and the fire is slithering toward Alan and his son like a viper.

  Alan jerks Todd backward, screaming. "Get up! Fire! Get up!"

  The boy starts awake and scrambles to his feet as Alan shoves him toward the kitchen. "Get out! Get out the back!"

  Todd starts to obey, limping for the kitchen door, then stops and turns back when he sees Alan's not following. "What are you doing?" he screams. "Come on!"

  Alan's eyes dart across the fire. He left the siphon in the truck, but everything else was in the suitcase—which he brought in with him, and is now burning. He has an instant of wild bravado in which he fantasizes about grabbing the extinguisher in the kitchen and putting out the fire. But it's already spread too far; as he watches, it leaps into the window curtains, devouring them from the bottom up.

  There is a wild scream in his head, a disbelieving shriek. GOD DAMMIT! He is frozen in place, wondering once again if it simply makes more sense to just die.

  "The activity books!" The ragged cry is Todd's, a gruesome echo of the one in Alan's head. "No! The books!" And he actually tries for them—tries to limp past his father and into the fire, willing to die for them. When Alan hauls him backward he fights, kicking and flailing, regressed to a toddler throwing a tantrum.

  "No, Todd!" The boy's thrashing skull clips Alan's temple, and the room explodes with stars. "Todd! God damn it!" He drags him through the kitchen, where his son smashes a row of glasses and sends a frying pan thundering to the floor.

  "No!" the boy screams. "No! No!"

  "Todd! You will fucking die in there!"

  "Nooo!"

  Out through the emergency exit, into the cold and the Blurs. Already the windows are livid with flames, burning like the world's last lighthouse. He drags his boy through the snow, around the building to the truck, and stuffs him in the passenger seat.

  The keys—ah Christ, oh thank the gods—are in the ignition where he left them. The engine roars to life; the headlights leap over the snow. He pulls away from the Jericho Diner at ten miles per hour, as Todd bangs on the windows and sobs.

  90

  He can't stop. Can't idle to watch the diner burn, or try to sleep through the night. They have one tank of gas. They have to find shelter before it runs out.

  But he can't go on, either. He could barely make out the edge of the road in broad daylight. In the dark, he's certain to wander into the ditch.

  So he creeps forward, flogged on both sides by indecision. Ahead of him yawns a dark, infinite road into the Iowa heartland. Somewhere along it, there will be a house—but if it's not heated, does it even count? Does he follow the road, hoping to hit a place with a proper wood-burning stove? Or turn on to 35, and continue south at 15 miles an hour?

  "I wanted my books," Todd mutters. The sobbing and screaming has finally stopped; now his voice drips with petulance. "You should've let me get them. Mom would've let m
e."

  Alan scoffs despite himself. "Let you run into a fire? No." Somewhere in the darkness ahead the freeway entrance is drawing slowly closer, and he doesn't know what he'll do when he reaches it. "You would have died, Todd."

  The boy's face is plastered to his window, as far from his father as he can get it. Alan almost doesn't hear him murmur, "So?"

  That single syllable hurts more than the day-old frostbite on Alan's face. It hurts like finding Brenda's empty clothes, like watching his dreams fall to ash. "Don't say that." The desperation in his voice surprises him. "Please."

  "Why?"

  Alan wants to launch into a list of reasons to live, to turn his son's thoughts around, but he doesn't have them. Even now, even here, he is failing as a father one final time. Reasons to live? Sorry, son, I'm fresh out. "Because that's not you." He reaches over and squeezes Todd's shoulder. The boy flinches, but doesn't pull away. "I know you. That's not you."

  Ahead, the freeway entrance finally crawls into the Ford's high beams. The moment of truth approaches.

  "Besides. We can get more activity books. The world is your oyster, man. It's all yours. We'll find new ones."

  "Yeah, and they'll burn too."

  It's fatalism worthy of a Goth kid twice Todd's age, and it punches Alan in the stomach. He knew it would come one day, but he isn't ready for it, and it's his fault more than Todd's. Depression runs in their blood; how could the kid possibly resist its pull, spending month after dragging month with his impossible downer of a father?

  But Todd's hands have found a pair of paperclips in the coin tray, and started to play. They haven't gotten the message that nothing matters anymore; they are too busy transforming these objects into straight lines, then geometric shapes, then letters. When one of the paperclips snaps, his hands discard it and grab a new one from the tray. "Is this my suitcase?" Todd asks, noticing the luggage on the floor for the first time.