Later, when I’d asked my mom about it, she’d told me he hadn’t looked right because the undertaker had put in his dentures. I knew my grandpa had a set of false teeth because he loved to startle us by leaving them in unexpected places. In the bread box. In the glove compartment of the family car. In the medicine cabinet. But they were never in his mouth, not even during meals. He was like this great, wide-mouthed catfish gumming at everything on his plate.
My heart felt heavy when I realized we wouldn’t even be able to give my mom a proper funeral and bury her in the family plot in the town cemetery. No doubt the gas had been siphoned off in every excavator in town and the ground was too frozen to chip at it with only manpower and shovels.
“He’s been in there a while,” my grandmother murmured after a few minutes. She looked worried, but we hadn’t heard any yelling or fighting so I assumed the bandits had truly left.
I patted her arm. “I’ll check on him,” I said, trying to be brave. I hopped up from my seat and stopped just in front of the front entrance. “Dad? Is it safe to come in?” I called through the open door. I anxiously toyed with the oversized hunter’s knife in its holster at my side. It was the only true weapon I had. Convincing my dad to let me carry even just a knife had been hard enough. He repeatedly warned me that it could be used against me. I repeatedly pointed out that I was dead either way.
His response wasn’t immediate. “I can’t find her.”
“What?” I rushed into the house and found my father in the kitchen. He stood in the entranceway looking lost.
“She was there,” he said numbly, pointing at the floor in front of the kitchen sink.
“Where did she go?” I turned my head this way and that, but found no sight of my mother, no evidence she’d ever been there. I turned to my dad. “Did she go someplace else?”
His jaw flexed erratically. “They must have moved her.”
“Why would they do that?” I demanded.
My father’s features darkened. “That all depends on how hungry they were.”
When I understood his meaning, I gasped and staggered back a few steps. “No. No. That-that couldn’t have happened. No one would ever do that. What if she wasn’t dead?” I suggested naively. “What if she just walked away?”
He licked his lips, chapped from the dry, cold temperatures. “They shot her in the head, Sam. You don’t walk away from that.”
My grandmother had overheard our conversation and she came to investigate. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, surveying the damage. “I’ll try to find something for us to eat.”
+++++
Dinner that evening was sparse and silent. My grandmother had managed to scrape together enough oatmeal from the bottom of one of the wooden barrels to make a meager meal. The quiet meal was punctuated with the sound of eating utensils scraping against the bottom of bowls. As the three of us sat around the dining room table, my eyes rested on the empty chair that had been my mother’s. The oatmeal felt heavy in my gut and kept threatening to reappear.
The ground floor had been completely ransacked. The bandits had gotten into the house by breaking through the front picture window that overlooked our cul-de-sac. On top of that, every shelf had had its contents knocked to the ground. Every drawer had been removed from its cubby and its contents were spilled out as well. Furniture was tipped over and broken. I felt completely violated. It wasn’t enough that they’d killed my mother; they apparently had had to destroy my home as well.
We had spent the majority of the day cleaning up the broken debris crowding the living room, dining room, and my father’s study. My dad had used one of the torn down walls from the dismantled pole barn to patch up the gaping hole left behind when the bandits had broken in through the picture window. I don’t know if he thought if we could just pick up the broken glass and clear out the broken furniture that we’d find my mother's body. But we never found her. She, along with the majority of our stockpiled food, was gone.
“We can’t stay here,” my father announced, breaking the uneasy silence that had begun to feel oppressive. “This place is firewood now.”
“It would be foolish to leave, Brandon,” my grandmother protested. “Where would we even go?”
“We’ll find something. It’s not safe here anymore. Now that the house has been compromised, the bandits will just keep coming back.”
“Then we stay and fight!” I exclaimed. My body shook so violently, I nearly tipped over my bowl of oatmeal.
“These are dangerous, moral-free people, Sam,” my dad noted gravely. “We’re leaving,” he said with a firm nod. “We’ll pack up whatever’s left of the supplies, see what’s salvageable, and we’ll leave when the sun’s up.”
“Well, I’m not leaving,” my grandmother said, crossing her arms over her chest in a sign of defiance. “I’m too old to be traipsing around the country.”
“We’ll figure something out, Mom,” my father insisted. “It’s better than waiting here to die. Please.”
“Fine,” she sighed. Her sunken eyes closed. I wondered what she was thinking. In a life dotted with economic depressions and a World War, I wondered where this ranked.
I was happy she was going to stay with us. I couldn’t handle losing her, too. Not now, not so soon after my mother…
“Can I stay in my room tonight?” I asked.
“No. I want you all where I can see you,” my father said sternly.
My grandmother laid a withered hand on his forearm. Her hands reminded me of bread dough. They were strong, capable hands, even for a woman her age, but they were also warm, soft, and seemed to always have a sheen as if she’d just been kneading lightly oiled bread dough. “Let her have the night, Brandon. If anyone comes, we’ll escape through the second floor stairs like last time.”
He frowned, clearly unhappy with my cautionless plea, but finally he relented. “Fine. But don’t stay up all night. We have a long day ahead of us.”
+++++
Like the first floor, my bedroom had been turned upside down. Things had been ripped from my closet and the drawers of my dressing bureau had been upset. My boots crunched as I walked through broken glass. I picked up a picture frame that had been knocked from its place on the top of my dresser. The glass was shattered and the photograph that had been inside was missing.
Who knows what they’d been looking for in my room. It’s not like I stashed canned goods under my bed. I thought about refolding the clothes that had been thoughtlessly tossed on the floor, but it was a useless action. They were just clothes. It was just a room. It wasn’t mine anymore. It had stopped being mine the moment the news anchors on the television had told us about the asteroid.
I opened my bedroom closet and stared for a long time at its contents. I had a few items of clothing in my emergency pack already, most of them specialized camping and hiking gear designed for keeping warm and dry in subzero temperatures. I frowned at the button-up shirts and the few skirts and dresses that hung there. None of them seemed essential enough to take up space in my backpack. I closed the closet door without taking anything out.
I swept my eyes across the room. Knick-knacks, stacks of books, makeup, jewelry. They all seemed so unnecessary now when at the time I’d bought them or asked for them as a present, they’d seemed so essential. The laptop computer I’d saved my summer earnings to buy was now less helpful than a paperweight. I went to my desk and opened up all the drawers. Old essays I’d saved for God knows why; stacks of bank statements for my savings account that would remain untouched and obsolete. Highlighters, staples, push pins. Nothing, nothing, nothing of value anymore.
I sat down heavily in the center of the room and caught my lower lip between my teeth to keep from crying. I hadn’t let myself cry yet. I wasn’t going to start now.
Peeking out at me from beneath the dust ruffle of my bed I saw the corner of a photo album. I breathed out a rough breath through my nose and pulled the old album out from under the bed until it was in the cente
r of the room with me. I remembered my mom had told me how important it was to have physical photographs even with digital cameras and external hard drives. “You never know,” she’d once told me.
I sat in the middle of my floor and flipped through the photo album in silence. I didn’t know what I was looking for; I think I was just looking for something to distract me.
I turned to a photo of my childhood best friend, Andrea, and I paused. We had been next-door neighbors, and she had also been my first and only love. I didn’t have to say the words, but she had known that I adored her.
I traced my fingers along her photographed silhouette. Her dark eyes were squinted, mouth laughing at something, head tilted up towards the sunlight, as the picture had been taken. Her arm was thrown around my neck and we were both in bikini tops and short shorts. I looked like I usually did in photographs – uncomfortable, trying to look at ease, trying to fit in, but just glad to have been included.
I remembered the day the photograph had been taken. It had been a particularly stifling summer between our sophomore and junior year of high school. North Dakota hardly experienced weather one might categorize as “summer,” but that school break had been the exception. My parents had made me get a summer job the moment I turned old enough to legally do so. Most summers I worked at a Mom-and-Pop greasy spoon diner, working my way up over the years from bus-girl to dishwasher to hostess to waitress. When I wasn’t working, I spent every free moment with Andrea and a group of our friends at a small lake that was shallow enough that it usually got warm for swimming by the end of July.
Most of the girls never braved the water and sunned themselves instead on broad, flat boulders that dotted the shoreline while the boys, clad only in long swim shorts, dared each other to jump from the highest point into the frigid lake below. I had always wanted to join them, preferring their company to the often dull, vapid, useless gossip of the sunbathing girls who I called my friends, but I already felt like too much of an outsider to eschew my female classmates entirely just because I worried they’d catch me staring at their bare midriffs for a second too long.
On the day that this photograph had been taken, we’d been baking in the sun for a few hours. The morning sky had been blue and clear, but as the day progressed, dark clouds had rolled in to choke out the sun. We’d tried to eke out as much sunshine as we could that day, fully knowing it was just a matter of time before the rain started. A single crack of thunder had signaled the end of our sunbathing and the skies had opened up, producing raindrops so heavy and large I’m surprised they didn’t dent our nearby parked cars.
We’d had just enough notice to scramble and hastily collect our things. Laughing, shrieking, without a care in the world, Andrea and I had run to my car to hide out from the sudden downpour. I remembered the solid thud of car doors closing behind us as I had slid into the driver’s seat and she in the passenger’s. Everyone else in our party had retreated to their own cars, leaving us alone. I had looked across the partition at my best friend and it had struck me that I had never seen her look so beautiful before.
Weeks of sunbathing had deepened her already tan Native American skin. She’d pulled back her thick, lustrous hair into a haphazard bun so messy and so carefree that a stylist would never have been able to mimic its perfection. My eyes had dipped lower to her bikini top, a white swatch of material that cut across tan skin and a defined clavicle, that accentuated the narrow hollow between her small, twin breasts. She was breathing heavier than usual because of our sprint from the lake to my car, and her mouth was slightly open.
Without thinking I’d leaned across the seats and had kissed her soundly on that parted mouth. I thought I’d felt her press back against me, but I wasn’t sure. For months afterwards I sat alone on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember if I’d felt her kiss me back.
Her dark eyes had stared at me with such intensity when she’d pulled back. All the while her tongue kept dancing out of her mouth to run the length of her lower lip as if she was still feeling and tasting me there. In my daydreams, this was the part where she reciprocated my bravery and kissed me back. But instead of that mouth moving against mine, it formed the words I dreaded to hear.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she’d told me somberly.
Much of my junior year I’d spent petrified that she’d go back on her promise and everyone in my high school, and then eventually the entire town, would know my secret. But true to her word, Andrea had kept quiet. I didn’t know if it was a tribute to our friendship or if she was afraid of implicating herself in some same-sex schoolgirl scandal.
From that moment on we weren’t anywhere as close as we’d been before The Kiss. The sleepovers stopped, but she was still brightly friendly to me whenever I saw her in the hallways at school. I didn’t see much of her though as we didn’t share any classes that year or the next, hers all college-prep and Advanced Placement while I skated by, content to slip under the radar lest anyone notice my presence.
The evening before Apophis was scheduled to strike, the moments just before we thought it was going to all end, I’d been sitting in this very same place on my bedroom floor, reading and listening to music. My parents were spending the night together and I didn’t want to selfishly spoil what could be their final moments, but I also hadn’t wanted to overhear it.
Sometime around 8 o’clock that night there’d been a knock on my bedroom door. It was Andrea. The moment I had opened the door, her lips were pressed against mine and her fingers were searching for the bottom hem of my t-shirt. I didn’t bother stopping her to ask why. I knew why – the world was ending.
The next morning when we’d woken up to discover that the world hadn’t ended, she’d left as abruptly as she’d arrived. I didn’t try to stop her and I didn’t try talking to her afterwards, and in a few weeks time she and her family had left for Florida. I still loved her though. She couldn’t help who she was anymore than I could.
I took out two photographs from their protective liner and slipped them into a zippered pocket of my backpack. One was a picture of my mother, standing and smiling in front of her prized flower garden. The other was of Andrea. I felt foolish to pack both pictures, especially the one of my former best friend, but I didn’t want to forget what they looked like or how loved they’d both made me feel in their own ways.
I thought about my father’s survival philosophy – you can carry everything you need on your back. Be frugal. Be prudent. Be practical. I wondered if I’d find any mementos in his backpack, but I knew that I needed these in my pack to survive. Because even now with my memories not far removed from life before Apophis, it was hard to believe that the world I now saw around me had ever resembled the bright, warm, vibrant place permanently preserved in those pictures.
+++++
CHAPTER THREE
The next morning I shouldered my backpack and came downstairs. Although back in the familiarity of my childhood bedroom and not huddled inside my dad’s deer shanty, I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I wondered if I’d ever be able to sleep soundly again.
Downstairs, my grandma, who usually woke up earlier than the rest of the house, was drinking coffee at the kitchen table and reading a newspaper that was practically two years old. She read that paper every morning as if she expected the news to have changed since the day before. I would be surprised if she hadn’t memorized the entire paper by now.
“Morning,” I greeted.
She looked up from her reading and smiled. Her aged face softened with a warm glow. “Morning, Sam. There’s coffee in the kettle on the woodstove,” she said, nodding in the direction of the potbellied stove. “I also made some cinnamon buns if you’re interested.”
“I wondered what smelled so good.”
Her smile drooped at its edges. “I’m sorry it’s not more. I wanted to make us one last big breakfast before we left, but those bandits really cleaned us out,” she said, shaking her head. “There was just enough sugar and flour in the dry cellar for
the buns.”
I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. Those bandits had stolen so much more than the food in our pantry.
My grandma went back to her reading and I grabbed a plate and a coffee mug from one of the cabinets. I poured myself a steaming cup of black coffee from the copper kettle that sat atop the woodstove. I wrapped my hands around the mug and breathed in the rich aroma. Normally I preferred my coffee with tons of cream and sugar, but I’d acquired a taste for black coffee because of the need to ration. We had run out of dairy products over a year ago and now used a non-dairy powdered creamer for anything that called for milk or butter.
My grandma had baked the cinnamon buns in a cast iron dutch oven using wood coals from the fire. It was a neat trick she’d taught my mother and me, shoveling out the red-hot coals onto the stone hearth to cook or bake on. For things like bread or large pieces of meat that needed heat from the top and the bottom, we used a dutch oven with an inverted lid. The top had a beveled lip high enough so coals could go on top. When whatever had been baking was finished, you used a long fire poker with a hook at one end and fished around in the now grey ash for a solid ring that would let you lift the lid from the oven without spilling the ashes into the food inside.
It was a lot harder to do than it looked. It was solid cast iron, so it was heavy and awkward, and if the weight of the coals on top of the lid wasn’t evenly distributed or you tried to move too quickly, you could very easily tip the lid and all the coals would get into your food. I’d spoiled a few loaves of bread that way, but you learned quickly from your mistakes or else you got accustomed to the taste of wood ash in your food.
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