Eric said, “My understanding was that Jimbo had been away when you were taken there, and they were waiting for him.”
“Yes.”
Eric gave me a tortured look and tried to explain why Jimbo had been in such a rough condition. “I found him a little way out, maybe a quarter of a mile. I was so angry, I…” He went quiet for a moment.
I’d gone rigid, listening to this.
“Should I stop?” he asked.
“No.” I tried to relax my muscles.
“Okay. So I beat him, right? A lot. And I dragged him back there, thinking I might… I don’t know. Maybe we’d punish him further, or press him for more information. But he…” Eric made a frustrated noise. He was trying hard, wanting me to understand. “There was something wrong with him. Like my dad, but worse. What he had done to those people? And what he would’ve done to you? Evil. I felt it practically emanating from him. And I killed him.”
Eric was shaking all over. We both were.
“I—I couldn’t stand the thought of that man living another minute,” he concluded.
Eric’s eyes were wide. He clearly feared I’d think he was a monster for having treated Jimbo so brutally. He was brave, though: he forced himself to watch my eyes as he spoke. Whatever my reaction, he was determined to face it directly.
I kissed Eric, a drawn-out, slow touch of longing from my lips along his. “You did right,” I assured him. “You did a real good thing.” I gazed into his eyes and he relaxed.
Now that he was done speaking, I was finally ready. My side wasn’t going to take long.
I looked at Eric in the dim morning light. Then I covered his eyes with my hands, blocking out the light, blocking out the sight of me. I can’t even say why, but he needed to hear it in darkness. I put my lips next to his ear and breathed my words toward the back of the recliner.
“Jimbo was my stepfather.”
My stepfather’s name hadn’t really been Jimbo. When After arrived, he’d evidently shed his old name, too. Somehow, he’d ended up in practically the same area I had. Rule #3: Virtually nothing is impossible. I wondered when he had joined the group that hosted Tog and Curr, and whether he’d headed up their group on the day I’d hidden in the crate. Most of all, I wondered if he understood even a fraction of what he’d done to us all when he’d been on the receiving end of Eric’s beating.
My head ached. I’d thought releasing painful information, sharing it, was supposed to lighten the load. Rule #7: Healing hurts. Mental anguish is like physical pain that way.
Eric was holding me too tightly, but I didn’t want him to let up. We huddled together, rocking slowly in the recliner for hours.
It was time to go back. We arrived at this conclusion simultaneously, having maintained radio silence and continuing under it. We followed the meandering trail home. We returned to the lean-to and tried to eat, tried to drink, but our efforts were futile.
We curled together against a back corner of the structure, the one I occasionally had to crawl under, and we faced the wood. We didn’t talk at all, to anyone, for a few days.
“Impotent hatred is the most horrible of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I visited with SammyJo during those not-talking days. She seemed to understand I was trying to process information. She didn’t appear to mind, and she didn’t try to talk to me too much.
We’d been assembling a puzzle on a card table out by the lean-to. It was a picture of a woman holding a gargantuan Maine Coon cat. She was slowly coming together as we worked. Kind of like Sam, I noted. Kind of like me.
“Show me the picnic area?” Sammy requested.
I pushed another piece into the picture, and we walked down one of the winding trails that honeycombed the camp together.
“I’ve only ever heard of this place,” she told me. “Might as well go see it.”
When we got there, a small group of rotters was at the base of an old tamarack.
I put an arm up in front of Sammy, a signal to hang back. Then I paused. Only four rotters. Pretty slow. I reconsidered, and handed her a throwing knife as they moved in our direction. I threw a knife, and then there were three.
“Here goes nothing,” Sam muttered. She threw. Her knife flew into a rotter’s head.
Now there were two.
I threw another knife.
One.
I hadn’t looked at it yet, the last rotter headed our way. Not directly. Not until now. Sam hadn’t either, apparently. She dropped the knife I’d just passed to her.
The last rotter was Buck. Well, Not-Buck.
“Fucker deserves worse than that,” she growled. She wasn’t afraid of him now. Not anymore. Just angry.
She picked up the knife and threw it, but her hand was shaking. She cared too much. The knife missed. Sam made a frustrated sound and pulled out her sap.
I held up a hand again to signal she should wait, and she paused. I dug into my backpack and pulled out a small rope. Not-Buck continued to move our way at a snail’s pace. The hairs on Sam’s arms and the back of her neck were raised.
Calm down, Sammy. Settle, I thought to her. I tried to gesture this, putting my hand in the air, palm toward the ground, and pushing it straight down. Sam relaxed a little.
I tied Not-Buck to a tree and held my hammer out to Sammy.
She walked up, took my hammer, and used it until Not-Buck was beyond destroyed.
“Huh. That did feel pretty good,” she said. Bits of Not-Buck stuck in her hair and on her clothes. Insects buzzed around us.
I looked at the mess tied to the tree. Time to clean up.
“The slate’s not blank, it’s just painted gray.” Peyton Pinkerton, “Silent Grotesque”
I felt lost over how to go on when the time to continue talking inevitably arrived. Matthew and Thom tried to get us to break our silence. Then Thom stopped speaking too, and Matthew took to speaking at us. Eventually Matthew went so far as to speak for us.
“Good morning, Kit! What should we do today?” he’d say. Then, in a higher pitch, “Good morning, Matthew! I want to clean the outhouse pits!”
It made me smile a little, but it didn’t make me speak.
Matthew continued on, sitting Eric-style at the edge of the lean-to’s deck, and adopting Eric’s tone. “I’m going to go pick some berries. Come with me, Kit. I want to get some. Berries, that is. I want to get some berries. You guys!” Then he moved to sit in Thom’s usual spot, nearer to the middle of the front of our deck. “I miss sooooy milk,” he said with a plaintive tone, mock-pouting. “And tooofu.”
Thom smacked him across the back of his head.
“Ow! Hey!”
“I STILL HAVE TWO PACKAGES OF UNREFRIGERATED TOFU LEFT,” Thom scrawled on our chalkboard.
“That’s your defense?” Matthew asked him, giggling.
Thom’s the one who broke our silence. One night, he brought his guitar from the shack to the lean-to. He reached out to me with the music that I loved. He’d been listening to my MP3 player, and the songs had resonated with him, too. He began to play, having committed several new melodies to memory. My silence was over.
Thom started with “Embrys’ Crossroads” by New Radiant Storm King, which captured my morose feelings beautifully. It’s a song that makes me feel more balanced, because it reminds me other people understand what it’s like to be hurting and on the edge of madness, too. I don’t feel as disconnected from the world when I hear it.
“Someone must hear you but nobody hears you at all,” I sang.
Eric sat near my ankles and fingered the thorny branches underneath my right foot.
After that song, Thom looked over at me, waiting for my choice.
I drew my knees to my chest and hugged them. “‘If You Want Blood’? Mark Kozelek’s version of the AC/DC song?”
He strummed, understanding my need for these specific songs and feeling them just as strongly.
Matthew let out a little la
ugh. “Them’s our music geeks,” he said to Eric.
As I sang the first verse, Eric scooted closer and wrapped his arms and legs around me. Eric wiped away tears as the song ended.
“Love you,” he whispered. His lips were like a paintbrush being drawn across my mouth as he spoke.
“Love you too.”
Matthew rolled a joint. “Chill time,” he said, lighting it up. “Play more, Thommy. Sing again, Kitbit.”
We did, eventually finishing with “Noble Experiment” by Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: “If the sadness of life makes you tired/And the failures of man make you sigh/You can look to the time soon arriving/When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day,” I began.
Two verses into “Noble Experiment,” Thom said, “Sparklehorse’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” as a cue to switch songs.
I did, and we went through, alternating between the two songs until both were finished. We’d never tried that before, but he made it happen seamlessly. The result was sad and lovely and comforting. It embodied how our world was limping along in the face of annihilation, and the music’s ataraxic, unguarded nature made it feel like a calming lullaby.
“Tranquilizing,” Matthew said. He sat back and took a toke, coughed, and passed the joint to Eric.
I wanted the music to go on forever, so we wouldn’t have to talk, but Thom eventually set the guitar aside as we finished sharing a third joint. (If we’d gotten any mellower, we’d all have been asleep.)
“Gonna have to retune,” he said. “It’ll keep ‘til tomorrow.”
The lean-to was filled with haze. Outside, the night sky was inky black with distant stars that shone through the edges of the curtain-doors, but not brightly enough to light our features. No one bothered to find a light source. No one wanted light. Again, it would have to be in darkness.
Matthew asked Eric, “Is it time?”
I leaned against Eric, shivering. We’d moved to sit side by side against the back wall of our home. I’d sat on the wrong side of him, somehow. Usually he sat on my right side, at the lean-to. It was disorienting; it further dulled the realness of our evening. I didn’t try to move, appreciating the sense of detachment accompanying my disorientation—I’d need it in the conversation we were about to have. Eric pulled a blanket over us both, stretched his right arm around me, and rubbed my shoulder absently while choosing his words.
“It’s time,” he said.
Eric talked about Jimbo. It took longer than I’d expected. He filled our home with all the details of Jimbo’s wretched demise before revealing who Jimbo was. When Eric finished Telling Of, silence stretched out.
Matthew was the first who spoke. “So that’s why you looked at him so strangely, Kit. I thought it was because he was so massively wrecked.”
Thom and Matthew had moved to our sides, and I felt the imaginary glass shard in my heart shift. Not imaginary; there-but-not-there, as it had been when Thom and I were at the piano. It hadn’t ever gone away.
I tugged on Thom’s shirtsleeve so he would lean against me. I curled my arm up behind his neck to pull him closer. I felt him nodding his head against mine.
I reached across Eric and gave Matthew’s shoulder a little jab. He took my hand and held on. Speaking finally felt like letting go of the pain, because this wasn’t just for me.
“His name wasn’t really Jimbo,” I spoke toward the ceiling. “It was Gareth.”
Eric and Matthew both tightened their grips in reflexive horror at the name, then continued holding tightly as stunned realization gave way to grateful relief.
I nodded my head against Thom’s to reaffirm what he hadn’t been able to Tell Of.
The glass in my heart slipped out, leaving another hole. I wished for its bleeding to wash the ugliness of our histories away.
went looking for Thom late in the morning. I found him at the same section of the secret, silent river he’d first led me to when I had that bloody nose and the migraine. I’d brought something for us.
When I arrived, Thom was watching the water roll by. It was near to flooding the banks from recent rains, and it flowed far more quickly than it previously had. I sat next to him and plunked down a small, rusty iron skillet which was beyond salvation.
Thom looked at it, at me.
I’d tuned up a lighter so its flame roared a few inches tall. It’s easier to start Morning Glory sparklers that way. I flicked the lighter a couple of times, then pulled Jimbo’s patch from a pocket and set both items on the ground. Thom picked up the patch and examined it, then set it in the skillet. I held up an intact sparkler and tapped it on what I had in my other hand: a bottle of powder from other Morning Glories. I poured the bottle’s contents into the skillet until Jimbo’s patch was completely buried.
I pulled the paper end off the Morning Glory—it’s supposed to be a fuse, but it’s never enough to get the damn things lit—and I handed the sparkler to him. I pushed the pan away from us and lit the lighter, holding it at arm’s length. Thom ignited the sparkler and we watched it burn for a moment, then he held it to the pan’s edge. The whole thing lit up with a brilliant, quick flash. We watched what remained of the patch until the fire had completely consumed it.
Thom stood and chucked it all, as far as he could throw, into the swiftly cascading water.
Sam and I were hiking along the river, a little past where I’d found Sadie and her friend. Well, Not-Sadie and her… not-friend, I suppose. I noticed something: a swirling in the water. The rocks caused the water to churn and spin as it entered and exited a seven-foot-diameter, bowl-shaped indentation in the granite. A realization hit me and I gave a little hop of excitement.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“Idea!” I told her enthusiastically. “We need some branches. Maybe a half-inch or so thick. Flexible ones.”
We gathered a pile of branches. I cringed a little: it reminded me of Sadie and her overly ambitious pile of sticks when we were making the kite. I tried to push this from my mind. Sam looked over to me, curious about what we were up to.
“Have you ever seen a rattan papasan chair?” I asked her as I pulled a roll of twine from my backpack.
“You mean the upside-down domey thing on a stand? With the thick cushion?”
“Yeah! One of those. We need to make the upside-domey basket part, only filled in more.”
“Why are we making a chair?” She held one of the branches so I could secure it into a circle.
“We’re not,” I replied, tying off the first bit of twine. “We’re making a prototype of something else.”
She didn’t ask what. Instead, she kept holding the pieces of wood where they needed to be joined together until I had them all attached. We held up the product of our labor, a half-sphere of crisscrossing branches. The extra twine we’d strung through it looked like a spider’s web.
I pulled Bob out of my backpack and set the flannel in the basket. “Let’s give this a try.”
Sam still looked confused, but she followed me down to the water. I knelt on the rock and her face lit up as she finally realized what my plan was. She got onto her knees and held a side of the basket, then we submerged the bottom of it.
The swirling water jostled Bob, pulling my (Eric’s) shirt in its eddy and whirling it around.
“New clothes washers!” Sam exclaimed. “This is so cool!”
Laundry Day had become a bugbear lately. The camp washer’s plastic had split, so we’d been washing everything by hand. This new device would make our lives much easier. We took note of the improvements we could make to the basket’s design, and made a bigger one. We found a roll of netting in a shed, and used it to line the new washer basket. We did the laundry in practically no time at all—it took longer to haul laundry out there than to wash it. We carried it back to the lean-to and hung it on the clotheslines.
“Oh, no,” Thom groaned.
“What?” I asked, looking up to him.
He tilted his head toward the shore. We’d been
enjoying hanging out at the float together, but now Sarah was swimming our way. Great.
Though it had taken me a long time to get out there, I stood and casually remarked, “I’m going in soon, I think. I have to… drive the babysitter home. And she left a cake in the oven and…”
“Don’t you dare.” He laughed, but there was pleading in his tone. He tugged my hand and I let him pull me back down. I wasn’t really enthusiastic about the long swim in, anyway. My body still had a lot of healing to do.
“Well, that is brisk!” Sarah announced, climbing out of the cold water. Her Southern accent made it sound like she’d said “brask.” Though I’d been around such accents all my life, I couldn’t seem to get used to hers for some reason. It struck me as particularly thick and grating. Maybe because Sarah herself struck me as particularly thick and grating.
She stood on the float, jogging in place for a moment, trying to warm herself up. “Whoo! I feel so ah-live! So, Thom,” she drawled, turning his way. “I was out walkin’ with Jason and Sandy, and they wouldn’t let me bring ‘em back on account of the weight, but I found some solar panels. You still needin’ those?” Sarah batted her eyelashes.
“Absolutely! As many as we can get!”
“Great! So I figure, why don’t we go out and get ‘em tomorrow, just the two of us? I could bring a picnic.”
“Gee, tomorrow? Maybe I can send someone along… I’ve been so busy, occupied with, um, camp demands that I don’t think I can… I can’t abandon my—my posts,” Thom babbled uncomfortably, wanting to be polite but not wanting to get stuck alone with Sarah in the middle of nowhere.
“Now, I’m sure they can spare you for a few hours,” Sarah said, turning to look at the shoreline. “Whew! We are a long ways out!” she declared as Thom looked to me with horror in his eyes.
I gave him a couple of paths to work with. “I need you here tomorrow, Thom. You said you’d help with my project, and it’s going to take all day. Though I wouldn’t leave solar panels sitting around. If someone else finds them…”
“I did promise I’d help,” Thom said, “and it looks like the weather’s going to be right for it. I’m just going to have to take a chance, unless… Sarah, do you think Jason will go back out with you if Mattie loans him the trike? That way you guys’ll have more time to explore.”
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 27