Wave

by Mara, Wil

  “Thanks.”

  He nodded and left.

  The option of simply sitting there, waiting, while the precious seconds ticked away and that giant wall of water moved ever closer to Patrick and Michael never entered Karen’s mind. Perhaps the young corporal really did care about the fix she was in—she still couldn’t tell for sure—but the bottom line was that, at the moment, he wasn’t doing anything about it, and neither was she. That was unacceptable. Doing anything was immeasurably better than doing nothing.

  For the time being she followed his orders and pulled to the shoulder, perhaps thirty feet from where the Causeway began its ascent. She could see across the bay, could just make out the rough shape of the famous “clam shack”—once a serviceable shelter for clammers and fishermen, now little more than a dilapidated novelty slowly being consumed by the unyielding force of the elements.

  She knew Moreland expected her to turn the engine off, but she didn’t. Instead she sat and carefully watched him and his superior, Sergeant Whoever. Moreland was still scanning like a human security camera. The sergeant was too distracted to engage in such activity, trying futilely to keep the cars moving while, invariably, someone stopped to asked one idiotic question or another. The elementary concept of keep moving was apparently too difficult for most people to grasp.

  Moreland glanced in her direction every thirty seconds or so. She was sure this hadn’t been part of his routine—he simply wanted to keep an eye on her. Once she realized this, she grew irritated by the lack of trust. Of course, an inner voice said, he has good reason not to trust you, doesn’t he?

  At that moment a large military transport pulled up and Moreland approached it. Karen thought this might be her chance to ease away, but the young soldier remained vigilant. He talked to the driver from the passenger side rather than going around and letting her out of his sight. Nevertheless, each time he turned his head away she removed her foot from the brake and allowed the car to inch forward.

  Moreland hopped down from the running board and started toward her. The truck rumbled away, the transmission groaning as it began the laborious climb. The corporal’s face appeared to have reddened, the jaw set tighter than before. He fixed her with a cold, pissed-off stare that sent fear shooting through every vein. He noticed, she thought. He’s seen the car moving, knows exactly what I’m trying to do, and is going to tell me to turn around and leave.

  As he reached back toward his service pistol, a 9mm that could blow a hole through a concrete wall, Karen felt all the blood drain from her face.

  “555-4347, right?” he asked, producing the cell phone again. The pissed-off look apparently had nothing to do with her.

  She couldn’t help but smile. “Oh, yes. Thanks.”

  He entered the number, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “Still no answer.”

  Now it was Karen’s turn to be pissed off. She was not one to anger easily, and in the all the years she’d known Nancy she was sure she had felt only the brightest emotions toward her. But now…Why the hell can’t she have an answering machine like everyone else?

  A little guilt came with this, but not much. Their home was a damn museum, two thousand square feet of the 1970s trapped in a vacuum. No answering machine, no computer, no cable TV, no cordless phone. It even smelled like the ’70s. Nancy and Bud’s refusal to join the rest of the world in the 21st century had caused a few minor problems before, but nothing serious. It was always something cute, something to be joked about. Karen and Mike even liked it in some ways—along with increased technology came increased negative influences. They didn’t want the boys to have free access to cable TV or the Internet. Now Karen wondered if those sacrifices had been worth it.

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll keep trying on mine.”

  “Right.”

  He returned to his post, and she returned to her inching forward. Now she was sure—absolutely certain—he knew what she was up to. In another few moments she would reach the point where the shoulder ran out. She would have to make a decision then. Maybe the riskiest one of her life.

  She tried Nancy’s number again. A recorded voice told her for the hundredth time that all lines were busy. She wanted to smash the damn phone on the dashboard, slam it so hard that it shattered into a thousand pieces. She felt the knot in her stomach tighten, felt the overwhelming helplessness. And the rage—the rage at being forced to sit here and do nothing while her two children were somewhere on the other side of that bridge, perhaps scared out of their wits and wondering where their mommy was. The only thing she knew for certain was that she wasn’t going to sit here for long. One way or the other, she was going to do something.

  Soon.

  Nancy kept the TV off as a matter of principle. Like Karen, Mike, her husband Bud, and about a zillion other people, she firmly believed television was bad for children. It had been bad enough in the ’60s and ’70s, but at least back then there were some good programs. Now it was almost all trash; mass-market brain candy. And not just incidental garbage, either—she and Bud had long ago decided there were certain media outlets that were purposely producing stuff that was bad for children. The drastic increase in sex and violence, for example, hadn’t been some kind of cosmic accident—a group of people had decided to make that happen.

  So when the boys were over, the TV stayed off. She knew Karen and Mike appreciated that; it was one of the things Nancy loved about them. They were trying to bring their boys up right, and it gave her hope; hope that the values of the ’50s and ’60s had not been completely obliterated. Besides, even if the world of television hadn’t gone to the dogs, there was so much else to do. So many things that were more productive and educational.

  A typical day for them began with breakfast at the small round table in the kitchen, which was covered with a vinyl tablecloth and always kept immaculately clean. Nancy prepared and served the meal while Bud and the boys handled the cleanup.

  Then Nancy would take the boys into a spare room on the first floor that was once occupied by their daughter, Vicky, but had since been converted into a makeshift classroom with two small desks. Bud had attached a markerboard to one wall—one modernization Nancy had embraced rather than shunned. In all her years of teaching she always hated using chalk and was grateful that a better option had finally come along. Since neither Patrick nor Michael had seen the inside of a formal classroom yet, this playful facsimile thrilled them. Nancy had seen too many children begin their school years poisoned by parents who passed down their own bad memories. If nothing else, she was determined to fertilize a positive attitude and start them on the right foot. It wasn’t so much the academic angle; that would come in its own time. She wanted to make sure they were comfortable in the classroom environment. And she had a selfish motive, too—she still loved the opportunity to dabble in the practice she held a great passion for.

  After an hour or so of basic education, the boys were allowed to color or play in the basement while Nancy made lunch. Often Bud would be down there in his workroom, building or fixing something. Patrick and Michael would sit and watch him, awestruck by his vast collection of tools, nuts, nails, and bolts. He’d let them help if they could help, and these were the only times the brothers came close to fighting—one would get to turn a screwdriver or hammer a nail, and the other would become swollen with jealousy.

  After lunch everyone went for a walk. Nancy and Bud needed the exercise at their age—especially Bud, who had a cholesterol problem and arthritis in his knees. They usually walked the few blocks to the corner of Joan Road and Bay Terrace, where there was a small playground. The boys would monkey about while their minders admired the view of Little Egg Harbor Bay and enjoyed the breezes rolling off the water. Then they’d go back to the house, and the boys would nap for an hour or so. Sometimes, if he’d been busy enough during the first half of the day, Bud would nap, too, affording Nancy some quiet reading time. Throughout the years she’d accumulated hundreds of paperbacks for what she called her “retirement
collection.” Now, at long last, she was getting the chance to knock them off one at a time. Most were classics, which she loved. Right now she was working her way through Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper.

  Karen usually arrived between four-thirty and five, but sometimes she got caught at the office and Mike would pick up the boys instead. So far there had never been a need for Nancy and Bud to feed them dinner. In her heart Nancy knew Karen would die if it ever came to that, but she also silently wished it would happen just once. With her own children grown and gone, she missed the liveliness, and even the occasional craziness, of the family dinner table.

  On this particular day, there had in fact been someone in the house each time the phone rang. Bud was in the basement, repairing a broken coffee table that he’d found on the side of the road. It wasn’t that they didn’t already have a coffee table, or that they were so poor they were forced to resort to picking through other people’s trash. But there was a spare room down there that he planned to convert into a sitting area, a place where he could relax and do a little quiet reading of his own. He wasn’t much for novels, but he did have a growing pile of handyman magazines that he wanted to absorb, some of which hadn’t even been opened yet.

  There was no phone in the basement, which meant he had to climb the stairs to answer the one in the living room. This was something of a challenge due to his achy knees, so, more often than not, he simply wouldn’t bother.

  That’s what happened the first time Karen called. Bud figured it was probably a solicitor. Those sonsofbitches were terrorists in their own right, shattering the fragile privacy of a person’s home. In spite of the FTC’s efforts to keep them under control through the National Do-Not-Call List, certain groups—mostly charities and political candidates—still hammered away. Once they learned you had a little spare cash in your pocket, they were unable to control themselves.

  So he heard Karen’s first call—the one she’d made from the Tarrance-Smith office—and ignored it. When it kept ringing, he called up the steps, the bare bulb burning above him, to see if Nancy was there. When he received no answer, he put a foot on the first step, and the knee flared as if in admonishment for his foolishness. He groaned a little, let out a deep, why-do-I-have-to-be-getting-so-old kind of sigh, and stepped back. The knee immediately felt better, and he made a mental note to—maybe—buy a cheapo phone and put it down here somewhere. He knew where the main line was, and splicing it would be no problem. Yeah, if he was going to spend more time down here, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

  As the ringing continued he had grown so frustrated that he turned on the transistor radio over his workbench to drown out the sound. It’d been purchased at the PX in Fort Monmouth in 1977 and still worked like a charm. He rarely touched the tuning dial—it was usually set on whatever station broadcast the Phillies games. He twisted the knob until he found a muzak station. Music never really interested him one way or the other, but anything was better than the continual distraction of the damn phone.

  The problem with the coffee table he’d found was that all four legs were wobbly due to severe wood rot where they were connected to the table surface. This was an easy fix—he simply removed the old, rusted screws, moved each leg to healthier wood, drilled fresh holes, and inserted shiny new screws. The end result was even more satisfying than he’d hoped—when he set the table on the floor and gave it a shake, it didn’t even budge. And since the repair work had been done on the underside, it wouldn’t be visible. Good as new.

  With a groan and some more protest from both knees, he stood the table up on end and walked it into his future reading room. He placed it in front of a horrendously ugly plaid couch he’d bought at a yard sale down the street. The neighbor not only gave it to him for a bargain—ten bucks—he even carried it into the basement for him. (Bud was under the impression he was just happy to be rid of it, and from the look of it he understood why.)

  There were three boxes of magazines in a dusty corner. Bud dragged one across the cement floor and set it next to the couch. Then, exhausted, he sat down, put his feet up, and took out the first issue. It featured a special NASCAR section and an article on how to build an eleven-foot rowboat.

  Back in the workroom, the Muzak station, which broadcast from a tiny office in Philadelphia, interrupted its service to transmit an emergency message.

  Bud Erickson didn’t hear it.

  Nancy and the boys were in the backyard, working in the small level patch of yard she’d cultivated for her garden. It had been a noisy morning. In her many years living on LBI she’d gotten used to the intermittent blare of sirens, but she thought they were worse than usual today. At one point she thought she heard the phone ring, but decided not to bother with it. She was having too much fun with Patrick and Michael.

  Bud was inside. He could answer it.

  { EIGHT }

  01:18:00 REMAINING

  When they were married, BethAnn and Kenny had two vehicles—her Toyota Celica and his Dodge Dakota.

  The latter was Kenny’s pride and joy. He was a truck man right down to the dust on his boots and the grease under his fingernails. His father had been a truck man, too, and his father before him. The Dakota was the first brand-spankin’-new vehicle anyone in his family had ever owned. He and BethAnn had lied in several places on the loan application and cut back on beer and pot for months to make the down payment, but it’d been well worth it. The obvious jealousy of their friends more than made up for the sacrifice.

  Kenny took the truck when he left. BethAnn argued about it, but her soon-to-be-ex-husband didn’t bother arguing back. He knew she didn’t really want it, knew she was bitching purely for the sake of bitching. (Of course he knew—this tiresome habit was one of the reasons he was heading out in the first place.) She didn’t really want it because it was a stick, and she had no clue how to drive a stick. He tried to show her a few times but ran out of patience after the clutch screamed for mercy and the gears sounded like they were being tortured to death.

  So she ended up with the Celica—a little putt-around junk heap he’d bought for a hundred bucks from a customer at the shop and fixed up in his spare time. It was primarily for her, but he sometimes used it on weekends because it turned out to be a zippy little thing that used virtually no gas. It required occasional attention due to its age and mileage, but since he was a mechanic it was hardly a burden.

  In the years since Kenny had left, BethAnn had made no effort to keep up the maintenance. She followed an entirely different logic—drive it as little as possible and it won’t need fixing. Her luck held for a while, but not forever. A few months earlier, in November, the car began coughing out puffs of sooty black smoke, and sometimes it would stall for no apparent reason while idling at red lights. The battery terminals were encrusted with dried-acid tumors, a sure sign the battery was on its way out. Since she didn’t have the money to buy a new one, she occasionally scraped the crud with a toilet-bowl brush and hoped for the best.

  She dumped the videotapes and the photographs into the trunk; the bags of junk food stayed up front with her. Wiggling her bulk behind the steering wheel was, as always, an effort. The part of her brain that was able to think sensibly once again suggested the idea of moving the seat back farther. The rest of her mind pounded the idea down—anyone who saw that would know she was grossly overweight, and she enjoyed laboring under the delusion that no one would notice otherwise. Also, the farther back the seat was set, the more effort was required to hold onto the steering wheel. As long as the seat was nice and close she could keep her arms in her lap and steer with a minimum of hand and wrist movement.

  When she turned the key, nothing happened.

  Nothing.

  “What the—”

  Tears filled the rims of her eyes. It wasn’t so much the fear of not being able to escape in time, she was sure that if worse came to worst she’d be able to hitch a ride from someone (she’d heard on WNJN that this was one of the rules Harper had set—if yo
u had room in your vehicle, you had to offer others a ride). It was the thought of having to ask for help in the first place, of having to rely on someone else, of losing control of the situation, that she didn’t like.

  Then she remembered: After the last time she’d used the car she had removed the positive battery cable to postpone the battery’s imminent death by minimizing the drain on it. Kenny had taught her this trick ages ago.

  She jumped out, unlocked the hood, and brought it up. She froze when she saw just how bad the acid leak had become—the stubby lead post wasn’t even visible anymore. Acid had fluffed up around it like some psychedelic mushroom, all but consuming it within its speckly, greenish-white mass. It occurred to her at that moment that she’d been in the trailer, watching television, for four straight days.

  She grabbed the toilet-bowl brush from under the driver’s seat and hurried back. In spite of some vigorous scraping, the dried hunks of acid hung on tight. Something more severe would be required.

  She flipped the brush around and tried whacking the tumors away with the plastic handle. Each strike was accented with an angry grunt, and each grunt was roughly one semitone higher than the last.

  When this, too, proved futile, she dropped the brush and ran back into the house. A fine layer of sweat began to form on her brow. The drapes over the kitchen sink were looping and swirling gaily in the breeze, as if in celebration that she had left forever. Now, to complete the irony, they came to rest when she reappeared.

  One of the drawers contained a handful of tools, but she couldn’t remember which. As luck would have it, she had to yank all of them open before she found the right one (next to the stove). The tools were cheap; the kind you find at checkout lines, are meant to be used only a few times, and would never be found in the toolbox of any self-respecting professional. They were all in perfect condition, as Kenny had bought them for her but she never touched them. The hammer still had the Kmart price tag on the unstained wooden handle. She dug around until she found the flathead screwdriver, then raced back out.