Luis thought this was pretty interesting. In fact, he wouldn’t mind knowing more. Wasn’t there a nuclear power plant nearby? How did you get electricity from nuclear power—from atoms? It sounded dangerous but also cool. Was that electricity radioactive? If it was, shouldn’t the power lines be glowing?
He decided not to ask Maura any more questions, though. He wouldn’t want her to turn into one of those know-it-all kids, the ones that waved their hands to be called on. He had to protect her from herself.
By now they were almost to Maura’s turnoff, and she stood up on her pedals to pull ahead. Lean right, make the turn, one more street and three houses down, she rode into the driveway and jumped off her bike. Luis was right behind her.
Maura’s house was two stories with puffball yellow flowers lining the front walk, a patch of mostly green grass, and a big tree shading the front yard. Luis looked up into the branches and wondered if owning a tree meant you owned the squirrels and the birds’ nests too.
“It’s an elm,” Maura said.
“I know it’s an elm,” Luis said, even though he didn’t. “What do you think? I don’t know trees?”
“And those flowers are mums, and these plants with the long, striped leaves are hostas, and this kind of grass is called fescue,” Maura said. “That’s all stuff I’ve learned since we moved out here.”
“Well, aren’t you fancy?” Luis said.
“Fancier every day,” Maura said. “Don’t you want to move out of Hampton someday?”
Of course he did, and he wanted to go to college too—maybe West Point, which was where the army sent you. He wasn’t sure where West Point was, but it sure as heck wasn’t Hampton.
Luis wasn’t ready to share his plans. Maura would probably laugh. “Too fancy for me,” he said.
Meanwhile, Maura had pulled her keys from a zipper pocket in her backpack, opened the door, and flipped a light switch in the dark hallway.
Then she laughed at herself because, of course, the hallway stayed dark.
“Beth, are you home?” Maura called, but there was no answer.
Luis pulled out his phone, swiped to turn on the flashlight and shined the beam around. The only other time Luis had been here, there was plastic on the chairs and boxes were stacked everywhere. But now Maura, her mom, and sister were settled in, with pictures on the wall and her mom’s collection of ceramic poodles on display in a cabinet.
“You’re wasting the battery, you know,” Maura said.
“Aw, it doesn’t matter,” Luis said. “The power’ll be back soon.”
Maura shrugged. “I hope. For now we’ve got a closet full of batteries and lanterns and that kind of stuff. We’ve even got bottled water.”
Luis frowned. “Why would we need that?”
“Not sure exactly,” Maura admitted. “Something to do with how it takes electricity to run the water plant, so it gets polluted when the electricity goes out. My grandpa explained, but I didn’t really listen.”
“High-five, Maura Brown!” said Luis. “I thought you always listened to grown-ups. I didn’t know you were mortal like the rest of us.”
“Very funny, Luis Cardenal,” Maura said.
“What else you got in that closet?” Luis asked.
“Come and look.”
The closet was halfway down the hall that led to the bedrooms. When Maura opened the door, Luis saw a shelf of plastic containers with labels: CANDLES, BATTERIES, MATCHES, FLASHLIGHTS, WATER. On another shelf was a camp stove and four lanterns—two kerosene and two battery-powered. There were also four cardboard cartons labeled MRE, VARIETY PACK, EXP 9/2050.
“Wow—what is all this stuff?” Luis grabbed a big black radio with a hand crank on the side and a shiny, flat panel on the top.
“I told you already,” Maura said. “It’s a radio made so you can charge it with the sun—that’s a solar panel on the top—or with the hand crank.”
“That is so cool,” Luis said. “Let’s try it.”
“We can go outside where it’s light,” Maura said.
On the way to the patio, Luis realized he didn’t understand how the crank made electricity or how the sun did either—more things he had never thought about till now with power gone. Not having something focused your mind, he thought, like how you think of nothing but food when you’re hungry.
Outside, the only furniture was a plastic picnic table with benches. They sat down, and Maura fiddled with the radio. It came on with a crackle of static followed by the clear sound of a baby crying and then a woman’s crabby voice: “Oh! Do please take him back if he’s going to bawl. Please!” Luis and Maura both recognized the ad before the announcer’s voice came on: “We’ll all be crying if Julia Girardo is elected. Return Mayor Adam Manuel to office this November.”
Luis made a face. “Ow—that ad is hard on the eardrums. Who wants to hear a baby cry anyway?”
“That’s the whole point,” said Maura. “That Julia lady made the baby cry; therefore she must be bad.”
“Does that even make any sense?” Luis asked.
“Yeah, no—who knows? It’s politics,” said Maura. “People say whatever they want, at least according to my mom.”
“My parents say politicians work for rich folks. Rich like you, I guess.”
“We’re not rich,” said Maura.
“Good joke, Maura. Look around compared to where you used to live—to where I still live,” Luis said.
“Lots of people are richer than us—lots and lots of people,” Maura said.
Luis could tell Maura felt uncomfortable. “It’s not like this is a mansion exactly,” he admitted.
“No, it’s not,” Maura said. “And I don’t think politicians are all bad either.”
Luis shrugged. He didn’t know enough to win the argument. “Anyway, that lady—the one who made the baby cry—she’s the one we saw on the truck, right? She wants to be mayor.”
“Yeah, I think,” said Maura. “And somebody handed her their baby for a picture, and the baby screamed and the other guy—the guy who’s mayor now, the guy who’s running against her—made an ad out of it.”
“It is kind of funny,” Luis admitted. “Hang on, here’s news about the blackout. Listen.”
“. . . a spokesman for NJL, New Jersey Light, says crews are working around the clock, but as yet no cause has been identified for the outage and no estimate is available for power restoration. Asked if terrorism has been ruled out, the spokesman said only ‘No comment.’
“Repeating the day’s top story: An estimated five hundred and fifty thousand South Jersey businesses and households over an area of more than twenty-five hundred square miles are without electricity at the present time as a result of a blackout that stopped clocks shortly before eight this morning.
“So far no deaths or serious injuries have been blamed on the outage, but there are dozens of reports of people stuck in elevators while overstretched crews try to reach them. Emergency generators are powering hospitals, broadcasters, police and fire departments, and other critical facilities at present.
“Should the power outage persist beyond the twenty-four-hour mark, fuel shortages could develop, causing further complications and possibly health risks.
“The city and county’s office of emergency management advises listeners to stay home if possible, stay calm, and stay tuned in right here at 104.5, WJZY.”
A commercial for diabetes medicine came on, and Luis turned the volume down. “It sounds like we can do our part by eating ice cream,” he said.
“It won’t be melted yet,” said Maura.
“Who wants to eat ice cream soup?” Luis said.
“Truth,” said Maura. “Let’s see what’s in the freezer.”
The answer was strawberry ice cream. Without light, they had to root around a minute before they found it though. They got spoons from a drawer and went back outside to share it from the carton. It hadn’t gone soupy yet. In fact, it was delicious.
“I thought your gr
andpa was living with you too,” Luis said after scraping up the last drips.
“He is,” Maura said.
“So where is he?” Luis asked.
Maura shrugged. “I don’t know. He has his own apartment over the garage. He’s probably . . . Oh.”
Luis read her mind. “You were going to say watching TV.”
“Yeah, I was, but I guess not, right? That was his car in the driveway, though.”
“Does he take walks or anything?” Luis asked.
“Ha!” said Maura. “My grandpa believes the recliner chair is man’s greatest invention—right up there with football and color TV.”
“My dad would tell you the same, but make it soccer and add cerveza—beer,” Luis said.
“Maybe we should go say hi.” Maura stood up again. “We can make sure he’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Luis stood up too.
Maura shrugged. “He didn’t feel that good yesterday. We go in through the back of the garage. It’ll be dark, so I’ll turn on the lantern. You’re right. I’m sure he’s okay.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
But Maura’s grandpa was not okay.
The door to his apartment was at the top of the stairs from the garage. Maura knocked again and again but got no answer. Then she remembered that her mom kept a spare key on a hook in a laundry room cupboard, so—while Luis stood on the landing and called through the closed door in the dark—she ran down and got it.
The blinds on the window that looked over the driveway were open, and Mr. O’Hara’s apartment was much lighter than the landing. When the door opened, Luis was blinded by glare. Maura’s eyes adjusted faster and she gasped.
“Grandpa!” she said, and rushed forward.
Mr. O’Hara was, as expected, seated in the recliner in his small sitting room. His eyes were open and he was turned toward the TV, watching the empty screen. At first Luis couldn’t see what had upset Maura. Her grandpa looked okay to him. But then Luis saw that he was slumped to one side, and his face looked strange, lopsided, as if the left half had collapsed. His eyes were blank. A line of drool extended from the corner of his mouth down his chin.
Maura took her grandfather’s wrist. She must’ve remembered that day in health when they all checked one another’s pulses.
Was Mr. O’Hara dead?
Luis held his breath, waiting for a pronouncement, but before Maura spoke, her grandpa blinked and tried to move his head.
“He’p me,” he murmured.
“We’re here, Grandpa,” Maura said. “We will. Luis, call—”
Luis already had his phone out.
The 911 dispatch center didn’t answer till the fifth ring, and then it was a recording: “All lines are busy due to the electrical emergency. If your need is not urgent, please hang up and try again later. If yours is a true emergency, please stay on the line and someone will be with you as soon as possible.”
Waiting was terrible. Luis hated not doing anything, not knowing what to do. Exasperation made his heart pound. Once he had seen a kid get shot—a drug deal and something went wrong; the kid was just unlucky. Hit, he squawked and fell, a bloom of blood on his sleeve. An older kid had known to cover the wound with a T-shirt, press hard to stop the bleeding. In the end the injured arm was patched up, and the kid wore his cast like a medal for bravery.
That had been scary, a shock. But not as bad as this. Mr. O’Hara looked strange and sick and helpless. He wasn’t going to die, was he? He wasn’t much older than Luis’s dad.
After a couple of minutes, Maura pulled out her own phone and dialed her mom. “It’s Grandpa,” she said, and explained. “You are? Really? But what about . . . ? Oh. Okay—good. See you soon.” She hung up and looked at Luis. “She’s coming home. They told her to, which is weird but lucky for us—for him.” She bent down and spoke into her grandfather’s ear. “Hang on. You’re gonna be okay.”
Maura’s grandpa blinked and moved his chin. Was he trying to say he understood? Then he moved his lips and with great effort made a sound—a single soft syllable.
Luis couldn’t make it out. “What did he say?”
“I’m not sure,” Maura said. “But it kind of sounded like ‘zap.’ ”
CHAPTER NINE
While Maura sat with her grandpa, Luis packed a bag for him to take to the hospital. The way he was now, it was hard to imagine he would ever use his toothbrush or his razor, either. But the doctors would fix him up, right?
Maura’s mom got home a few minutes later and charged up the stairs into the apartment. She cried when she saw her father. Maura barely had time to react before the ambulance screamed into the driveway. Soon the apartment exploded in a blur of hustle-bustle—EMTs in a hurry asking questions, attaching Grandpa to oxygen, strapping him to a gurney, muscling the gurney down the narrow stairs, and wheeling it toward the open doors of the ambulance.
Then, just as abruptly, it was quiet again. “Come with us to the hospital?” Maura said.
“I’ll ride my bike and meet you,” Luis answered. He didn’t know what use he would be, but he couldn’t exactly abandon her, right?
This was the strangest day ever. Right about now he ought to have been on his way to lunch. When he imagined the Dudley cafeteria, warm and well lit and full of noise, it was like some other planet.
Whitman Hospital was in central Hampton, so Luis steered his bike toward home when he got out to the highway. As he rode, he noticed that the traffic was heavier than it had been earlier, and grocery store parking lots were full, with lines of shoppers snaking out the doors. This was how things were when a big storm was in the forecast. The shoppers Luis saw were toting cases of bottled water and carts full of toilet paper.
Luis had been to the hospital only one other time, when his dad fell off a ladder on a construction site and hurt his back. Still, he had seen plenty of hospital shows on TV. He knew what hospitals were supposed to be like—bright and busy and noisy with mechanical beeps and gurgles. Now it was nothing like that. There were people everywhere, lots of them, but they were unnaturally quiet, and the light was gloomy.
Mrs. Brown stayed with her father in the emergency room while Maura and Luis sat in a waiting area outside. Two TVs hung from brackets in the wall, both turned off to conserve the emergency power. Most of the chairs were occupied, but with dying phones and no TV, people didn’t seem to know where to look. Several people had solved the problem by dozing off.
Luis shifted in his seat to take his phone from his pocket, then remembered he was saving the battery and left it alone.
“You have done that two hundred times in the last five minutes,” Maura said. “Could you quit? It’s like you’ve got a twitch.”
“I think I’m showing admirable restraint,” Luis said. “There’s no music. No games. No video. No texts. I’m bored.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing when the power’s coming back,” Maura said. “I wonder if there’s a TV that’s on anywhere.”
“I thought I saw one when I came in through the main lobby.” Luis was already on his feet.
“I’ll text my mom to tell her what we’re doing,” Maura said. “I hope her phone is still charged. Mine is right about half dead.”
The lobby was on the same floor as the ER, but at the opposite end of the building. When they got there, Luis and Maura discovered they weren’t the only ones craving news. A crowd of about twenty people were standing around watching the lonely powered-up TV set. Their faces were grim and intent as they stared at the power company spokesperson on the screen. She was Latina, with smooth light hair and straight teeth. She spoke in a soft, clear voice. Luis thought she was lucky that she couldn’t see the frustration on the faces of the people around him. If she could, she might not seem so calm.
“What we can tell you,” the woman was saying, “is that at seven forty-two this morning, an outage of unknown provenance began affecting NJL customers in central Hampton. The outage took the form of a cascading event, by which I mean its effec
ts rolled outward, with customers losing electricity in waves.”
“When will the power be back?” a reporter yelled from off camera.
“What caused the blackout?” someone else asked.
“Is it true a foreign government might be involved?”
“What’s ‘provenance’?” That was Luis’s question. He was asking Maura, but a tall black man wearing scrubs answered, “A big word to fool the people.”
Luis thought, Not helpful, but what he said was, “Oh.”
The man looked down at Luis, and his expression softened. “It means they don’t know what started it,” he explained.
“Somebody knows,” said a white woman wearing a Bernie for President T-shirt and purple sweatpants. “And somebody’s covering it up. I never liked that Julia Girardo before, but she’s right. There’s terrorists everywhere and who knows what all. We need somebody tougher than ol’ Adam in office, someone to protect us.”
“Hey, hush—I want to hear this,” said someone else.
“See?” The white woman sniffed. “We are all of us a little bit on edge.”
Meanwhile, back on TV, the power company spokesperson took a couple of breaths and continued. “At the present time there remain many unknown unknowns, but we are confident—”
More interruptions from reporters:
“Do you have any comment on mayoral candidate Julia Girardo’s allegations of deteriorating infrastructure?”
“Is it true the local grid is particularly vulnerable to attack?”
The power company spokesperson closed her eyes and took a breath. “Okay, folks, I’m calling it a wrap. Thanks very much. We’ll have another update in an hour, or in the event of, uh . . . changing events.”
With that, she gathered up her notes, hugged them to her chest, and strode away from the podium. Reporters continued to holler, but the station cut to a commercial about digestion. A lot of the people in the hospital lobby turned away, but Luis and Maura stayed put. Maybe there would be more news after the commercial.
Zap! Page 3