I felt a twinge of worry and stopped.
“Sadie?” I said.
She looked up at me with dark blue eyes. Haunting. Like the sea after sunset.
“Where’s your mom?” I asked.
“My mommy is in Heaven,” she recited.
“And your dad?”
“He’s in our tent.”
“Go back to your tent, now.”
She obediently ran off toward her father. Why would he allow her to run free?
Matthew called again.
“Coming!” I shouted, still feeling unsettled. I trotted into our lean-to area.
“Want me to take care of yours?” Matthew asked while sharpening a knife.
“Sure, thanks,” I said. As I removed my phoenix knife, I scrutinized an abandoned pile of supplies next to Matthew: a memo pad, a couple pens, a slingshot, and a canteen.
“Thommy’s,” Matthew said, catching me looking at the heap. “He’s down by the lake, sporting a migraine. We didn’t usually get hit in the head, but Dad cracked Thom’s skull open once, and he’s gotten migraines ever since. Doesn’t get them often, but they’re bad.”
Rule #8: Try to ease suffering—your own and that of others.
“I’ll see what I can do.” I headed out.
I found Thom lying in the shade near the water, on the far side of the lake. He was covered in sweat in spite of the cool afternoon air. He was obviously suffering. I took an old washcloth from my backpack and dampened it with lake water, then flung it around in the air to cool the water further.
“It’s just me,” I told him as I sat down cross-legged and lifted Thom’s head onto my intersectant ankles. Thom didn’t even bother to open his eyes, but he did manage a grunt of acknowledgment. I wiped his face gently, then set the fabric aside. I set my gloves aside, too. Relieving Thom’s pain was far more important than easing my shame over my palms, in this instance. I massaged his temples and the sides of his head; I pushed and held on the pressure points in his eye sockets. I felt the little indentations there, a bit to the inside of the midline, where the bones dimpled in above his eyes, and I allowed my fingertips to just barely push up on the insides of them. I could feel his pulse, throbbing through. I pushed harder and held there. Thom sighed deeply.
His hair was gummed up with sweat. I scrunched my fingers through it, kneading his scalp, rubbing down the base of his neck and pushing hard at the bunched muscles along the tops of his shoulders. Thom sighed again.
I let up for a moment to rub my hands. They ached; I’d be lucky if I could bend my fingers in the morning.
Thom jabbered sluggishly, an interesting sound, trying to ask me to continue. His forehead was already wrinkled again, his brow furrowing like a ploughed field ready to be sown. I went back to massaging. I stroked over his sinus cavity with my thumbs. I returned to the pressure points in his eyes, holding firmly for a long minute before reverting to slowly massaging his head. I envisioned drawing the pain out from him and into my fingertips. Soon, his migraine eased and he drifted off to sleep. I folded the washcloth and placed it over his eyes, then I slid my overshirt under his neck in place of my ankles and crept away.
As I expected, my hands wouldn’t work the next morning. I couldn’t bend my fingers at all. I reminded myself they’d loosen up as the day wore on. I struggled into day clothes and set out to find something to do. It was hopeless, though. I couldn’t function, aside from walking aimlessly around.
Eric approached. I didn’t want to show I was having trouble, but Eric always seemed able to pick up on anything bothering me.
“What’s going on?” he asked, a hint of suspicion in his voice.
“Nothing. You?” I diverted.
“Nothing. Want to help me with a project?”
I hesitated. “Sure. What’re we up to?”
He tilted his head to the side. “Hold this for a minute?” he asked, handing me a knotted rope.
I fumbled it, and the rope dropped onto my feet. I looked down, knowing I wouldn’t be able to pick it back up.
“You could’ve just said that, you know.” Supporting my left arm by holding onto the underside of my wrist, he took the cuff of my glove between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand and looked in my eyes to wordlessly ask if he could pull it off.
Since the brothers had moved into the lean-to with me, I’d taken to wearing my gloves even to bed, since I didn’t want them to catch a glimpse of my palms during the night and start asking questions. I was sure they were curious about this odd behavior, but they already knew my hands were not a topic I was ready to discuss. (Weeks earlier, during a lighthearted conversation, Matthew had asked me why I always wear gloves. I curtly answered, “Fashion,” and changed the subject. He got the point, and none of the brothers had brought it up again. Even Eric hadn’t tried to pull it out of me yet.)
I looked down and shook my head, but didn’t pull my hand away. He kneaded gently, over my glove, at one of the most painful spots on the back of my hand. It felt nice.
He looked at the backs of my fingers. “They aren’t even swollen, but I bet you can’t bend them.”
I shook my head.
“Advil,” he told me, leading me back to the lean-to, finding the pill bottle, and opening it. He shook two pills into his hand and placed them on my tongue, following with a chaser of Gatorade. Then he pressed my hands together, with his over them. The warmth and pressure eased my aching.
I hated having him see this and was grateful to him at the same time, and I felt confused by the mix of emotions. “Thanks,” I mumbled, embarrassed.
“Anytime. Project’ll wait. I should get going to Post Watch, anyway. I noticed Patrick decided to leave his PW early. See you later.” He touched my shoulder and headed for the cliff.
I drifted back to our version of civilization, determined to be social with someone.
“Hello, Magic Fingers,” Matthew said, sitting down in the grass nearby.
“Hmm?” I asked.
Matthew didn’t reply right away. He was already busy playing with the large pile of daisies Sadie and I had gathered.
My fingers were working again. I was braiding a chain of daisies together, with Sadie at my side. I finished up my daisy chain, attached it back onto itself to form a ring, and placed it on her head. A crown.
“I now present Princess Sadie!” I announced to the world.
She giggled and ran off to show everyone.
“What did you say?” I asked Matthew, thinking of Eric.
“You,” he replied.
I didn’t follow. I was stuck on thinking how my fingers hadn’t been working, and how Eric had helped.
“Thom,” Matthew clarified. “I don’t know how you did that.”
“Oh.” I shrugged.
“Don’t act like it’s nothing. You took it away for him. All that pain.”
Matthew picked up some more daisies and tried to weave them together.
“It would’ve gone eventually,” I mumbled.
I stared into the yellow-greenness of a daisy’s center, at the pattern it held. I thought about the only way I knew of to end my suffering. No longer an option. I allowed myself to mourn it briefly: the loss of that freedom. Permanent escape at any time would be a nice option to have again. Now I had responsibilities and commitments, and the guilt of failing those was too much to overcome. For now.
Matthew looked up. “Where’d you go just now?”
I shrugged again.
“Stay with me awhile,” he said.
“I’ll try.” I fastened a daisy chain bracelet around his wrist.
Matthew fumbled with the flowers he’d been weaving, trying to figure them out.
“It’s easier on hair,” I told him, quickly braiding a small swath of my own.
He slid over and scrutinized the process. I taught him regular braids, French braids, and fishtail braids. He liked the fishtails best. He practiced on my hair all through the early afternoon, chatting about the good things he remembered
from his childhood. He also talked about some of the repair projects waiting in the vehicle yard, and we discussed what should take priority and what we needed for tools and parts.
Before I knew it, there were little braids all over my head.
“Got dinner prep.” Matthew stood and brushed himself off. He headed for the lake.
And then Thom showed up, almost immediately after Matthew left. He eyed my braids. “You’re weird,” he told me. “I like you.”
“These are your brother’s fault,” I defended myself. Daisies were tucked into the little plaits that covered my head.
“Come with,” Thom said, and I followed him away from the camp.
“What are we up to?” I pulled flowers from my hair as we moved along.
Thom plowed on ahead.
“Hey!” I had to jog to keep up.
“Sometimes I feel so trapped back there,” he said, slowing a little.
“Me too. I’m used to spending a lot more time alone.”
“Yeah.” He stopped in front of a small house. Just a shack, really, with a padlock on it. Thom pulled a key from above the door.
“I’ve been here a few times,” he told me, letting us in.
The building consisted of a single room which couldn’t have been much more than fifteen feet by twenty feet. A square table was pushed up against one wall. I crawled onto it, sitting cross-legged in the middle. Thom settled into a musty, overstuffed green chair and reached to the floor behind him, pulling out a guitar. It was an old one, from the 1950s. Its once-glossy white finish had clouded over. This was an electric guitar, with volume and tone knobs and an output jack, but it had an impressive acoustic resonance even without an amp. The music it emitted was full, like the echoing sound one can achieve by singing loudly in a stairwell. I couldn’t see how the guitar’s shape could produce such a sound.
Thom removed a capo and chucked it beside the chair, then checked the guitar’s tuning briefly and began to play. I recognized the song immediately and was surprised by it, but I didn’t sing when the intro ended. He didn’t either. I started humming it, though. Thom stopped playing.
“You know this one?” he asked incredulously.
“‘Needle of Death,’” I said. “Bert Jansch. Yo La Tengo’s cover version.”
“I can play, but I can’t sing for shit,” he said, beginning the song again.
I took the hint: this time when the intro ended, I sang. Thom closed his eyes and relaxed back in his chair. When the song drew to a close, he played another: “The Boy Done Wrong Again.” A Belle and Sebastian song.
I was surprised by this song as well. “Really?”
“Well, why not?” Thom asked, having stopped when I’d spoken and restarting from the beginning after he spoke. I felt like the song told me something about him that he wasn’t ready to tell directly. Or maybe he was testing me. I sang along to that one, too.
We stayed there an hour or so, playing song after song. We knew rotters would be lined up outside the door when it was time to go. We didn’t worry about them, though. All that existed, the only thing important, was the music.
When we finished playing, we cleared the rotters from the path outside, locked up, and left for camp with full hearts.
“That was nice,” I told him, studying our long shadows in the late afternoon light.
“The very best,” Thom said.
esus wants me for a sunbeam/A sunbeam, a sunbeam/I’ll be a sunbeam for him.” Nellie Talbot and Edwin O. Excell, “I’ll Be a Sunbeam”
I’m one of those people who is truly, deeply, clinically depressed most of the time. Ninety-nine percent of days, I can shove it down and at least function. A one percent day was upon me.
I crawled under the lean-to. Way down, in a back corner. The hardest to get to. The darkest. The smallest. I crawled into that space like it was the coop and I’d been very naughty.
I lay there, flat on my back, squished between the wood and the rocks, trying to push my body farther into the corner and its darkness. I crossed my arms over my chest, like I was in a coffin. And I waited.
Thom had watched me go. He got on his knees and peered in, trying to see me.
“Kit?” he called into the darkness. “What are you doing?”
I stared at the wood above me. Although the boards appeared flush from up top, slivers of light shone between them. I stared at those lines. I stared and stared. I reached up and touched them with my fingertips. Splinters and dirt rained into my eyes. I blinked cleansing tears without regret until the scratching was extinguished.
I couldn’t move from there. I couldn’t speak. I felt like I could barely breathe. But I could see. I could hear.
Thom called to me for a surprisingly long time before he walked away. For a moment, I felt as if I should be grateful. He returned, though, with Eric in tow.
“Kit?” they called. “Why don’t you come out now? Come on out here. Please?”
And Eric, once, desperately, “Please come out where you belong?”
Part of my heart turned to coal and crumbled. I couldn’t leave this small, safe spot.
I tried to wish them away, the people who cared about me. Leave me be, I thought at them. This doesn’t concern you. It shouldn’t.
Eric climbed partway under the lean-to, trying to reach me. Matthew and Thom were spotlighting me with their flashlights to guide him. But he was too big. Even his long arms couldn’t reach me. His brothers would’ve been too big, too.
“Please,” he pleaded.
I stared mutely up at the dust motes floating in the light between the slats of wood.
When I get stuck like that, the only thing to do is to wait for it to run its course. I can’t just snap out of it at will.
Thom brought his guitar out and played songs he knew I’d want to sing to. But this little bird couldn’t sing.
They got out joints, blowing their smoke in, to the air under the lean-to, to me. They got high, but this little bird couldn’t fly.
I wanted only death.
I wanted only to die.
All such spells eventually end, so this one did, too. I emerged from under the lean-to late at night. Eric was there, waiting in the dim moonlight. Matthew and Thom were asleep.
I dusted myself off and listened to Eric’s breathing while he continued to wait patiently. I tried to make out his shadow in darker darkness as a cloud covered the sliver of moon and partially blocked its light.
I ran.
Eric ran after me.
“Kit, please!” he implored.
“Bathroom’s this way!” I called back in explanation.
He stopped short at that, laughing so long and hard that he complained about his stomach’s aching for days.
He gave me a moment of privacy and I reciprocated by returning to him. And I did him one better: I stepped up and I hugged him for the first time.
He hugged me back so swiftly and so tightly my heart felt like it was burning from an explosion inside the canary cage of my chest. He held desperately, like he was afraid this was a feint and I would slip from his grasp and I would run off, away, for good. I wanted to die so much in that moment.
But I didn’t die. I just held on.
“What happened to you?”
Thom and I were dangling our feet in the water. He indicated my wild rose leg.
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t sure how far to let this conversation go on, but I tried to let it. I reflexively twisted my hands into my palm-to-palm hiding position.
“When you were a kid. Eric said it was bad, even worse than what we had, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Eric and Mattie and I share just about everything.”
I already knew that, so I nodded my understanding.
“So?” he asked.
“It wasn’t necessarily worse, just differently bad.”
He shook his head. “No. Eric doesn’t exaggerate about these things. Besides”—he hopped into the knee-deep water—“the fact that he won’t tell us is proof.”
<
br /> “Maybe he doesn’t know a lot of it.” I realized this wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all, but it was too late to take those words back. Thom had a knack for making me tell more than I’d intended. I slipped from my rock into the water and we waded out.
“Float?” he asked. The guys had constructed a float from leftover wood (and some pontoons) after we’d made the lean-to. They’d carried it down to the water and moored it a couple hundred feet from shore.
“Float,” I consented.
Thom and I swam out. I was glad to have an excuse not to talk.
We hauled our bodies onto the float, shivering because of the cold water. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun. I stretched on my stomach, folding my arms and resting my head on them.
Thom sat at the edge of the wood, peering into the water, trying to catch a glimpse of the barracudas who liked to hang out beneath the float.
The barracudas. They never bothered us, but most people wouldn’t venture so far into the lake because they were afraid. The barracudas gave us the gift of privacy.
Thom waited, silent. I realized he was waiting on me.
I rolled onto my back, closing my eyes and observing the redness glowing through my eyelids, which were lit by the bright sun overhead. I wondered if rotters viewed the world through a red haze, like I had in my dream.
“What is it you want to know?” I asked.
Thom didn’t help much. Like Eric, he told me, “Everything.”
I responded by saying nothing.
“You had siblings?” he inquired.
“Steps.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died.”
“How?” He tried to figure out how to pull the information from me.
“Which ones?”
He thought about the implications of those words. “Every one?” He knew better.
I shook my head. “The last two,” I said, figuring it wouldn’t do too much harm, “were Zack and May. They died in a car accident.”
“Last two?” He registered the emphasis I’d inadvertently put on the words. “How many of them were there?”
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 10