When he tried to reenter the house from the back, he realized the door was locked. Bitching the entire way, he went around front. Emily was waiting for him by the front door with tears streaming down her face. He should have known she’d be terrified being left alone.
“It’s okay,” he said and picked her up, laying her against his wet clothes. The house lit up as lightning forked across the sky.
Ryan set her down on the couch and went through the coat closet for something dry. Lillian’s hoodie swallowed her. He then peeled off his wet Star Wars t-shirt and sticky jeans, donning a musty fleece jacket in their place. Emily leaned on his bare leg with her damp hair while wiggling one of the Barbies in the air, its long, black mop plastered to its yellow dress.
“So I guess we got a bath after all.” Ryan chuckled. “Just not the one we expected. And not all that great? Eh? I still stink.”
Emily didn’t find this funny at all. She stood up, looked at him with a blank expression, and wandered off, leaving Ryan alone on the couch. She found a place on the other side of the living room and positioned her new Barbies in a semi-circle as if they were attending an AA meeting. At the head of this meeting, was the studded leather Barbie and her bullwhip. Emily was whipping the other girls with it and laughing.
“Creepy Barbie time for five hundred, Alex,” Ryan mused. He fished the bag of weed from his limp jeans and tossed it on the kitchen island. It was as wet as they were. There’d be no smoking it any time soon. But maybe it was for the best. He’d been hitting the bottle hard enough, and smoking pot while alone with his daughter would be a bad idea and he knew it. A bad idea, but there was no one to stop him either, and it could help with that dull pain in his chest. It could make it recede for a while. Sleep would also help. Sleep was safer for everyone.
“Alright, Emme, let’s eat eat so we can turn in.”
She turned her head to face him, brow furrowed. “Chick chick?”
“We don’t have any.”
She started to babble, “But Mamma doggy on the car, chick chick? Me want so many ride go run with Lany no doggy, no, bad, shew shew, no like chick chick. What? No doggy, no like. But chick chick.”
Ryan took a guess. “Umm. We’re out, Emme.”
“We’re out,” she repeated, and considered this for a long while. “Umm. Kisses?”
“We have no chocolate.”
“Umm.” She put a finger on her chin. “Cookie! Cookie! Cookie!”
He shrugged and opened another MRE. This one had a pair of chocolate cookies that tasted like stale cardboard. Emily didn’t care. He noticed that as she ate them her stomach was slightly distended. He pressed his fingers against it but she showed no discomfort. He tried to remember the last time she’d had a poop diaper and couldn’t recall. That made him nervous.
After dinner, they moved the sleeping bag downstairs to the queen size mattress in the Fancy Bedroom instead of Emily’s hard floor. This made more sense, but the idea still made Ryan nervous. The front door was only a few feet away from here and they were alone. He felt unsafe here.
Emily laid on her left side, staring into her Daddy’s eyes with heavy lids, one arm clutching Bullwhip Barbie. They laid there for a long time, letting the rain fall outside and night come on, until there was nothing left but blackness. Emily curled close to her Daddy and whispered the most important thing he had ever heard in all his life: “I wuv you.”
The hardened scab of hurt encrusting Ryan’s fleshy heart ripped away. Salty tears bled from his eyes and into his mouth where he involuntarily sampled them. This was the first time Emily had said this to him, not that he ever doubted. He wasn’t even sure if she knew the meaning of these words, only that he said them to her every night before bed with a supreme magnitude of affectionate gravity. Nevertheless, it made him happy in equal portions to that which it brought sadness. It left him with a painful longing he knew would never again be fulfilled, as well as a terror for his daughter that she would never understand. He wanted to text Lillian and tell her what had happened, but he’d never get the chance. Not when Emily had learned to make full sentences. Not when Emily had pottied on her own for the first time. Not when Emily had learned to ride a bike or come into her own as an individual. He would have no one to share these milestones with but the walls.
“I wuv you too,” he responded, and the two of them fell asleep.
***
Ryan woke several hours later to a crashing noise outside the window. Barking dogs followed the metallic cacophony, then the screech of a cat fleeing danger. Even with his eyes barely creaked, he could tell something strange was happening besides the fighting animals.
The Fancy Bedroom, their guest room reminiscent of the Marinoffs’ living room decor, doilies and all, was glowing with a faint shimmer of green and blue. He rolled out of bed, sliding his arm from beneath Emily’s neck one inch at a time so she wouldn’t stir. From out the front window, even though tree cover blocked much of his view, he gasped at what he saw. He needed to get a better look.
He rushed through the house, tripping over toys, and burst out onto the back porch. The sky was clear, the storm having swiftly passed. His face was bathed in bright lights. He rushed back to the Fancy Bedroom.
“Emme,” he said, pushing gently on her good arm. “Wake up, Emme, I have something to show you.” She hardly stirred. He took her in his arms and carried her to the back porch. As he neared the door she began to wake. “Look, Emme, look at the sky.”
Emily rubbed her eyes and raised her head, letting a yawn escape her mouth before the world came into focus.
In all of Ryan’s life, despite having traveled to many wondrous destinations around this heliocentric spacecraft known as Earth, he had never before witnessed what he saw above them now. Trillions upon trillions of excited, atmospheric particles glowed green and blue, forming a winding ribbon of light hundreds of miles long that danced and flickered across the night sky, giving Ryan a vicarious chill of wonder.
“Woooooow. What’s that?” Emily asked, finger shooting skyward.
“The Aurora Borealis,” her Daddy marveled for a moment, and then felt strange for having said the words. “Almost all my life I’ve lived here, and not once have I seen anything like this. This is very special, Emme, very special. But why now? What’s causing it to appear this far south?”
He added these unanswered questions to the cache of mysteries, and ventured to do something it was possible no man but the Norse had ever done before. He wished upon the skies of dark color, putting his hope in shifting particles of light like a falling star. He wished upon the aurora.
Something deep inside his soul said that the extinction event, his wife’s work, and these lights might be related. He needed to know how. The wheels began to turn, the plans and endless lines of human process code beginning to form in the matrix of his mind. He knew just where to start, a mere mote of his unspoken wish already answered.
“I have to find a way to power up Mama’s phone.”
Chapter 15
Such as life goes, there were good days and bad days, though lately, Ryan’s days had been extreme in regard to the arbitrary assignment of good/bad values he doled out each time he opened his eyes. On a scale from one to ten, Ryan felt that today was an eight, whereas yesterday had been a three, and the day this had all started, a two. An eight was great. He didn’t have to worry about dinner or clean water—or even a little mind vacation later on if need be.
Everything was super. Super-duper.
Only one issue nagged the back of his mind, and even it resolved itself before breakfast. An issue that made falling asleep after the sky’s spectacular light show exceedingly difficult.
Emily crapped the biggest crap of her life.
It exploded from her diaper like a sewage-filled bomb, covering her inner thighs and running down onto her legs like warm chocolate. It smelled of untreated wastewater recently pumped from a septic tank. It ruined two dish towels and got all over the front of the couch, requi
ring a score of bleach wipes that left the fabric stained beyond repair.
Ryan couldn’t have been more thrilled.
Poop-free, Emily raced around the house in only a diaper as if she’d gotten ahold of a kilo of cocaine. He could now see all of her: dents and dings, scratches and bruises, and they made him sick.
Emily encouraged her Daddy to chase her and he did his best with the bad leg. They made a loop around the living room sofa and through the kitchen, past the island, all the while dodging toys and empty MRE bags.
“Run. Run!” Emily shouted, then squealed.
“I’m gonna get you! Look out! I’m gonna get you!”
“No! No!” She backpedaled and shot off. “Run. Run. No, Dadda!”
“Where’s that corn? Huh? I need me some spareribs! Gimmie those spareribs!”
She took off double time, rounding the kitchen island. Her right foot landed on a plastic bag, and it shot out from under her. She fell back, banged her head on the cabinets and rolled onto her bad arm.
“Emily? You okay?” Ryan picked her up. She shook as blood oozed around her makeshift bandage, tears streaming from her eyes. “Aww, I’m sorry, Emme. Let’s get this cleaned up, too.”
He set her up on the island and removed the bandage, boiling the wounds again with a liberal dose of peroxide. He pushed at the skin around the puncture and she shied away. Her feeling was good and the skin was light pink. The swelling had gone down some. He redressed the wound, this time with gauze and an ace bandage, and sent her on her way.
“’Mon, ‘mon! Run! Run!”
He felt proud at her resilience, the ability to just shrug off the fact that a monstrous dog had almost eaten her alive. Ryan wished he was more like her, carefree and ignorant to how the world had changed.
“One minute, Emme. Daddy needs to check his leg.” He unwound his dressing and the sticky skin ripped. “Ow, shit.”
“Ow,” Emily repeated and he bit off his next stream of words. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ship?”
“Daddy has a boo-boo.” And it was hot, the bite radiating heat like a furnace. He touched its puffy edges and winced.
“Boo-boo?” Emily paused to consider this. “I sorry. Boo-boo’s gone.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” he hoped, and took another antibiotic.
The contents of Lillian’s Hello Kitty messenger bag were laid out on the kitchen island. While Emily was distracted telling her Barbies all about her Dadda’s boo-boo, and her own, he summoned the courage to go through it.
It was the standard mix of items she usually took to work: Chapstick, a pink leather wallet and checkbook, a small makeup kit, nail clippers, a pack of ramen noodles, and a pair of tampons and panty liners. A recently purchased hardback copy of All the Birds In the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders was marked on page 215 with bent corners. Her late model iPhone was off to the right with a lined notebook beside it, covered in notes. The phone was no good without power so he started with the best old tech.
Ryan flipped through her scribblings, most of which made no sense at all. She had random things like “Kevin 675 call right” and “Solar activity not” and “Ryan (heart shape) after four” written on almost all the pages. He chuckled at the last, rubbing a hand over his forehead. In her head these would surely have made some sense, but he only had half a notion of the ideas that inspired them.
“Make up for dinner with Ryan last Saturday night. I know what that one’s about. Correlation does not equal causation. Weird, this one’s all over the notes. Five, six, seven, eight times. Emily doctor call third year appointment. I already took care of that. Peter office five PM. Screw that douche and the boat he came on. Starbucks Furby vibrator mode. Umm, the hell? I can’t even. Coronal. Hmm, this one’s circled. Don’t forget backup power!”
He set the notebook down to investigate her phone. Just because her battery wasn’t charged didn’t mean it was dead. He thought about swapping the battery from his phone into hers, but then realized he’d thrown it away in the vacant house, angry that 911 couldn’t respond to their emergency.
A thought occurred to him—Lillian and he had been terrible when it came to running their batteries flat dead at the wrong time. They had several portable backup chargers around the house kept for just such occasions.
After an hour of searching, Emily and he found fifteen backup chargers. They were shoved in couch cushions, bed sidetables, and in the desks of the sanctuary of nerddom. This shocked even Ryan. He knew that Lillian was bad about losing them, but he hadn’t known she was this bad. He tested them each, one at a time, then handed the dead ones back to Emily for her to do as she willed.
None of them worked. He began to wonder, not for the first time, just how damn long it had been since all this had happened.
Emily handed him one last unit. He flipped the device over—made in Russia. It had the word, Добро пожаловат, Welcome, printed on one side. This little device had come from his friend Uri at WASHU on a day when he was at two percent power and in a bind for time. He shrugged and gave it a try. With a deep breath, he pressed the power button on the phone and was amazed to see a white logo on the phone’s face appear, depicting a neatly bitten Apple. A second later it winked out.
“No no no! Don’t do this to me!” He tried again, holding both the home and power button for several seconds, but it didn’t work. “Screw me.”
“Me!” Emily repeated. “Screw?”
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “I really gotta watch what I say.”
“Say?”
“Well, that didn’t work.” He set the phone down less than careful and it fell off the island. “Oh, shit!”
“Ship?”
He recovered the phone from the kitchen floor and ran his finger over the cracked screen. “Uh, oh.”
“Uh, oh,” Emily repeated and disappeared into the living room.
“I need a power source.” He scratched his chin, looking around wildly as if one would suddenly appear. “Maybe I can build a generator, or, find some solar cells? Maybe the charger just needs a jump?” He neatly stacked Lillian’s notes and put them back into her bag, eyes lingering on the statement, Correlation does not equal causation, written several times and not in Lillian’s handwriting. “Bet its Peter’s. That little twit.”
Emily reappeared on the kitchen floor beside him, trying the backup chargers on the tablet he’d stuffed in the cushions of the couch. Not even three years old and she had some understanding how this worked.
She tore into a rant, “Bears doe partin week copy. Copy copy, drink. Drink copy with meal. Sugar? Bears gone, no broke drink copy, Dada. Want copy? No. No. No like. Dis work no broke pyr. Pyr gone, no like.”
He wasn’t sure what she was on about, as usual, but one thing was for sure. “You are one smart cookie, kid.”
“Cookie?” Her face exploded with excitement.
“I misspoke.”
“Spoke, Dada spoke. No pyr, Dada spoke. Bike, spoke. Dis bears.”
But there would be no Bears today. Even Emily knew they didn’t have any pyr to turn it on, and that’s why it was broken.
Ryan didn’t get as much done as he would have liked. He played with Emily for a long time, keeping his ankle propped up when he could, and thought upon their future. If he was likely to be the only human interaction she would ever know, he needed to start teaching her more than he would have before. She had been part of many outside events where she interacted with other kids and parents, like at Library events and Mom’s Day Out. He might not be able to socialize her, but he could fill in the blanks.
Emily was a blank slate, a learning computer beyond anything he could ever think to design. He merely needed to tailor her play lessons to give her the education to survive and thrive sooner rather than later. He needed to teach her how to communicate, and how to assess danger in this new place. Soon as he figured that part out himself.
It didn’t take long, while playing Barbie’s BDSM Alcoholics Anonymous support group with Em
ily, for him to decide on two primary courses of action. He knew exactly how to input the proper programming and get this kid in line. Because if he didn’t, no one would. There was a scary freedom in that. He had no one to argue with his educational direction or curricular choices.
One: He would start explaining everything he did by speaking out loud. She needed to learn the words for it. Conversely, he needed to be careful what he taught.
Two: He would have to start reading to her, and a lot.
He decided on one or two short books, only slightly mildewed, before nap time, and the same before bed. He had a plethora of Dr. Seuss, Garfield, and Olivia the Pig books. Those would be a good start but he reckoned Karen Mannford, the sixth grade school teacher that had lived next door, would have many, many more. He added her house to his short list of potentials, not that it wasn’t on it before. It was just for different reasons.
He took a deep breath and loaded Emily into his lap. “I think it’s time to read.”
While Emily napped on the couch in only a diaper, Ryan went outside, bat in hand, and hung their wet clothes on a makeshift line. The yipping of animals could be heard just over the fence. He left the windows open so he could hear her if she woke, and scavenged enough random wood to build a fire. After hemming the stack of wood with cinder blocks, he lit a pile of tinder and blew until the wood caught.
As the fire grew in strength he went back into the kitchen, emptied a Pringles can of stale chips, closed the plastic end with a bit of aluminum foil, and piled a pinch of weed atop a small hole. He punctured the bottom side of the tube with a pen and placed his mouth against it, drawing in a deep breath as he lit the crispy green lump with his Bic.
Ryan coughed and wheezed. “Okay, old weed is bad weed. What is that taste? Sour cream dust?” He took another hit and coughed some more, hoping it wouldn’t wake Emily. “You know what they say, if you ain’ chokin’.” The weed didn’t so much get him high as it did help him to forget his burning ankle.
The Two That Remained Page 10