by Ginger Booth
Amiri nodded. “The viewers clearly confirmed that their leaders got it right. And, as a program note, Project Reunion will publish General Schwabacher’s restatement of the content of the speech from the Speaker of the House. So, keep an eye out for that. Or, of course, you could visit the Congressional website and judge for yourself.” And we signed off.
33
Interesting fact: Military governor Admiral Sondi O’Hara, of Virginia–Delaware–Maryland, bowed to public pressure and ‘liberated’ the Congressional Ark. She turned out all remaining Representatives and Senators and their families, about 440 of them. The other 95 had either never entered the ark, or already chosen to leave. Transportation to their home districts was not provided.
Cam called in May, to ask for my help again. The latest batch of quarantine graduates on Long Island had turned up Maisie Mora, Lt. Colonel Carlos Mora’s younger daughter, now fourteen years old.
Maisie had managed to hide and lie her way through the quarantine’s attempts to get her real name. The relocation camps took great pains to extract real names, especially with unaccompanied minors. Children often had some relative somewhere outside the Apple Zone, someone who’d bend over backward to take a surviving child. Frustrating their efforts, many surviving teens lied about their names, refused to give their stories. The camps persevered. But Maisie wasn’t on the lost and found search databases. She was ill with Ebola when Carlos last spoke to her by phone, her mother and elder sister already dead. Carlos considered Maisie to be confirmed dead.
Maisie nearly escaped into a life of anonymity on Long Island. But Cam gave a speech to the Camp Suffolk graduating class each week. Dwayne spotted the girl in the crowd, and recognized her not as the younger daughter, but the spitting image of Carlos’ elder daughter of a couple years back.
The girl was hysterical, and vehemently denied being Maisie Mora. Her name was Syringe, and always had been. Cam caught her out by saying, “But Keith misses you, too, Maisie.”
“Keith is autistic,” she sneered. “He doesn’t miss anybody.” Then she realized she’d slipped. She wailed in panic until the medics sedated her. She was returned to the quarantine hospice ward, for safe keeping.
“My God,” I said to Cam. “How can I help?”
“Could you tell Carlos?” Cam asked. “And get him to hold tight for now? We’ll work with her here. But when Maisie’s calmer, maybe you could help ease her into the reunion with her father?”
I called Carlos’ brother Manolo first. I told him I had good news and bad news for Carlos, and needed the whole family there to support him. Then I visited them at home after dinner. I was glad I took precautions. Carlos would never lay a hand on me. But I could never have stopped him from bolting straight for Camp Suffolk. Manolo tackled Carlos to the ground and sat on him while Carlos sobbed.
Manolo caught my eye, nodded to me in respect, told me I’d done the right thing. His wife quietly showed me out.
A few days later, I collected Maisie from the ferry in Bridgeport, and brought her to my house. Her father and brother visited every other day for a week or so. Carlos had done his homework, reading up and attending a workshop on adopting a refugee. They arrived exactly on time, like clockwork, never early and never late, never pressing. Between times, Maisie went to refugee support group meetings in Totoket. Alex or I walked her there and back.
It was Keith who eventually broke through to Maisie. At the end of a visit, Carlos invited his daughter to come home again, as always, and was rebuffed again. This time, Keith walked forward, looked her in the eye, and held out his hand. She touched it in slow motion, with just the pad of her finger, an experienced elder sister of an autistic boy. But he grabbed her hand in return.
“Where’s Mom?” Keith demanded.
“Mom’s dead,” Maisie admitted. “Jessie too. I watched them die.”
Keith let go her hand and walked to stand staring at the door, rocking back and forth, waiting to leave. “Keith doesn’t care what you’ve done, Maisie,” Carlos told her. “Neither do I. Just that you’re alive. You’re safe now.”
“I was a whore, Daddy!” she wailed to him in pain.
“Hell, Maisie,” Carlos told her hoarsely. “You did what you had to do. You survived. I’m proud of you. My brave baby girl.”
She went home with them that day. It wasn’t easy. But Carlos looked happier every time I saw him. After a few weeks, he pulled me aside at a Project Reunion meeting. He shyly, proudly showed me a new selfie wallpaper on his phone. Carlos, Maisie, and Keith, flopped in tall grass, all three grinning. What beautiful children Carlos had.
It wasn’t easy for the resettled refugees of New York. We learned not to expect too much of them. But above all, they were survivors. The ones who gave up, did so before they graduated the camps. The ones who made it out to new lives in New England, adapted.
My onetime fiancé Adam Lacey held his wedding on a Staten Island ferry in July. His bride was that other Coast Guard engineer, Kate Monaghan, who’d been stuck on Governor’s Island while I slept in Adam’s tugboat cabin at Thanksgiving. Apparently it was her cabin, too, by that point. In July, she was eight months pregnant, which clearly showed in the fit of her uniform.
Adam wore a dove grey formal suit with tails and ascot, that made a mere tux look plebeian. He glowed like some prize Edwardian duke, come to claim an American beauty heiress. Kate was rosy-red with pregnancy and a sailor’s sunburn, ordinary middle class, and rather horsey of face. They were obviously head over heels in love with each other.
The setting was perfect, the cool ocean breezes a mercy in the July swelter.
The whole festive wedding party was completely at odds with the grubby orange ferry. The front third of the passenger deck was cordoned off for our private party, while the rest was in service carrying regular passengers around the ferry’s city circuit, Staten Island to Manhattan to Brooklyn and back. The natives were still thin and none too clean, but no longer skeletally emaciated. Eyes no longer red, faces no longer covered with weeping sores, lips uncracked. They’d had almost enough food, and clean water, for a couple months now. I stared back at them staring at us. They seemed cheered, or at least amused, at our cluster of well-fed, well-dressed, healthy aliens partying in their midst. They were accustomed to the line of marines on duty enforcing the yellow do-not-cross tape.
I wondered if the New Yorkers were more angry, or more grateful, to see us healthy and strong and there to help them, who’d fallen so low. Perhaps they were as ambivalent on that point as I was. If it were me over there, I’m not sure anything could ever fully quench my rage. I was grateful for the marines, but embarrassed to believe we needed them. Or worse, that we deserved them.
Of course, Adam and Emmett took their armed guards for granted. Their force levels were going down, not up, over time. The occupying army from the suburbs mingled more with the vanquished, as disease levels fell and order spread.
Adam and I had caught up by phone back in February, after Emmett surprised me with the news that Adam had left the Coast Guard to serve as Emmett’s engineering advisor. It took an engineer to vet engineers, and the Apple needed to hire plenty to get its infrastructure and railroads back up and running. Eventually Adam hoped to shift full-time into urban agriculture and hydroponics. He wanted to leverage the work he’d started as an arkitect on Ark 7, to green the buildings and Calm Parks of New York. And then there was Kate, his second in command and new fiancée. One of them had to go, because they couldn’t keep serving together. Adam was delighted to set the Coast Guard aside again, for her and the baby.
The timing of the wedding, so close to Kate’s due date, wasn’t a symptom of a last minute decision. They just needed a house ready for the baby more urgently than they needed a wedding. Their tugboat home was a dream bachelor pad, but not ideal for childrearing. Adam insisted on a house with servants, power, hot and cold running water, and laundry. I could sympathize with that.
Creating a safe neighborhood had taken some
doing, of course. But Adam and Kate’s house near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal was ready in June when he called to invite me to the wedding, ecstatic. I hadn’t seen his Staten Island enclave yet, or any other. I’d been too busy on the farm front to visit New York lately. For the wedding, I sailed down to the city on the Niedermeyers’ yacht, with Cam and Dwayne and Alex. We only barely made it to the pier in time to catch the ferry. Though Adam would have waited for us and commandeered the next ferry if we were late. John Niedermeyer was his best man.
The captain of the ferry officiated, of course – for today, the chief of the merchant marine engineers I’d met on Adam’s tugboat. Kate’s maid of honor was another Coast Guard commander. Adam in his finery was the only one at the altar out of uniform.
I say altar figuratively, of course. They used a small white-draped folding table. Pam and I brought flowers from our gardens in Connecticut. Pam’s elegant carnations and ferns were rapidly converted into a bouquet for the bride and a lapel spray for Adam. My tall and gaudy vases of snapdragons and gladiolus graced the table. After the vows, our flowers moved onto the buffet tables. I’d brought along 20 pounds of strawberries, a small mountain of late sugar snap peas, and 30 pounds of cucumbers for the buffet, too. Navy stewards snatched the food away from us when Alex and I boarded. Our offerings reappeared by the time the service ended, beautifully arrayed on Navy trays and platters, cukes sliced and seasoned.
To my amazement, the food tables were set up by the cordon line with the natives, yellow tape running down the middle, half the food for the guests and half for the random native commuters sharing the ferry with us. Even at community potlucks, I hadn’t seen so much food arrayed at a party in years. As food prices shot up before the Calm Act, providing a meal at a wedding reception had fallen out of fashion. It seemed the other out-of-town guests had donated generously, too.
The champagne and modest wedding cake, on the other hand, stayed well away from the cordon.
Once I’d found him in the throng, Emmett and I stuck together through the ceremony and the receiving line. Alex stayed with the Niedermeyer teens, and planned to stay on their yacht for the night. The trio were the youngest children anyone had considered appropriate to bring into the city. Emmett was quiet, as was I. We drifted apart to socialize after the formalities.
I was chatting with Amiri Baz when Adam claimed a dance with me. The boom box was nothing fancy, but someone had put great thought into composing the play list.
“You look gorgeous, Adam,” I assured him, on the dance floor. “And happy!”
“Deliriously happy,” Adam agreed. No cold feet or altar jitters for this one. “I wanted to thank you, Dee. Even though it wasn’t you and me, you still brought me here.”
I laughed. “How do you figure that?”
“In every way,” he said sardonically. “But especially… I would have stayed with the arks, if it wasn’t for you. My family is still in their ark. Most of the people I grew up with. I’m not as bold as you are, Dee. I tend to follow the herd, go with the flow. When you decided you’d rather stay on the outside, you made me look at that.”
I’d wondered where his father and brother were. I’d seen their photos, professional modeling shots. They weren’t hiding in the crowd. Unlikely as it seemed, gorgeous Adam was the dirty-faced member of the family, the boy who’d loved tinkering as a mechanic instead of cashing in on his looks.
“I’m sorry your family didn’t come today,” I said.
“It’s alright,” he denied. “We’ll visit them in the fall, with the baby. I’ll tell them about the reconstruction business opportunities in the city.” He laughed. “That’ll tempt my brother, at least. Kate’s from Garden City. Long Island. Her family didn’t make it. Confirmed back in April.”
We were dancing to a second song, and I was hogging the groom. With an ex-girlfriend, dancing a third time would be pushing our luck, for both of us. Time to wrap this up. “You’re bolder than you give yourself credit for, Adam. Thank you for everything you’ve done. For New York, and for me.”
“We’re not saying good-bye, Dee,” Adam pointed out. “In fact, I’m still hoping you’ll be our neighbors here in the city. Either way. We’ll stay in touch. Right?”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, and let him go with a hug and a kiss. Adam prudently danced with his bride again at that point, and I danced with Emmett. By then the two of them had been standing together watching us. Though it looked like Emmett kept Kate laughing.
“Any regrets?” Emmett asked, once we were dancing.
“No,” I said. “Not for either of us. It’s good to see him so happy. You?”
Emmett didn’t answer right away. “A big wedding’s not my style,” he eventually managed. “We’re about to come around to Brooklyn again. Let’s leave this party early. OK?”
34
Interesting fact: Project Reunion, the interstate military effort to transport migrants outside the Apple Zone, officially ended in April with the closing of Camp Upstate and Camp Jersey. Camp Suffolk continued its march westward on Long Island as a local public health measure. The Project Reunion website did not end, nor change its name. Its leadership felt that the spirit of the mission continued.
I frowned a question at Emmett, not understanding the suggestion that we leave the wedding early. We hadn’t even broken the cake yet. But he didn’t elaborate.
We retrieved my overnight bag and waved our good-byes. We joined the ordinary passenger throng waiting to disembark at Brooklyn. Four Army M.P.’s detached to escort us. The natives shrunk away, giving us a wide berth. There was a lot of muttering and finger-pointing from the crowd, as the onlookers told each other who we were. Emmett ignored them and watched the approaching shore.
“You’re being formidable,” I told him.
“Uh-huh,” he said absently. “Sorry. Just…want to show you my new place.”
“What? When did you move to Brooklyn?” He’d been living out of a small dumpy apartment in the Staten Island quarantine zone since Christmas, upholstered in ugly plaid. Or he’d been sleeping there, at least. Seasickness had become an issue with getting a decent night’s sleep, living on a destroyer out in the harbor through the winter storms.
“Moved in last week,” he said. “Thought I’d surprise you.”
I nodded judiciously. “Not really fond of surprises.”
Emmett barked a laugh. “No. Me neither. Sorry.” He sighed. “Guess I’m nervous. What you’ll think of it.”
Because…? But I left it at that. There was too much ogling to do right then, as we disembarked in Brooklyn. My eyes drank in the bustling surroundings. By the docks, our route led through a warehouse district. To the right, wagons and trucks and porters carried in plates of glass and salvaged wood for storage and distribution. The warehouse to the left seemed to specialize in electronics. An army of dumpsters collected up the rejects.
Emmett halted and glanced down at my pretty open-toed dancing heels. “Do you have any…?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I fished my deck shoes out of my bag and switched, right there on the street. I’d have to watch my step even in deck shoes. Broken glass was everywhere, glittering painfully bright in the summer afternoon sun. Fortunately I wore sunglasses. The natives all wore something over the nose and mouth, despite the grueling heat, and protective eyewear, to keep the billowing dust out.
I hacked a cough. Emmett fished a clean handkerchief out of his dress uniform and offered it to me. Apparently he didn’t have another. “I have…socks,” I suggested. “Oh, wait! Tissues.” So I held tissues over my lower face, while Emmett deployed the handkerchief.
The breeze off the water died out, blocked by the warehouses. My crisp cool peach cotton party dress was developing a brownish peach fuzz of dust. And we passed on into the land of reclaimed bricks. Whole blocks on either side rose in massive ziggurats. After the buildings were razed, Emmett explained laconically, teams sorted out the reusable bricks. Broken bricks filled in the empty foundations, o
r abandoned subway lines, or were broken up further as an ingredient for soil for the greenbelts. Very industrious. Very dusty.
“You cut down the trees?” I asked. Based on the dirt squares in the sidewalk and the surface-level stumps, this had been a tree-lined avenue once.
“Apples did that,” Emmett replied. ‘Apples’ was polite slang for the survivors in the Apple Zone. “Burned them for fuel. Hardly any trees left alive in this city. Can’t blame them. Ash has new trees on order, from all over. Small ones. We can start planting them, end of August. Not here in the warehouse zone, though.”
The next block was dustier yet, though the apples hosed this one down to control the dust. “Greenbelt,” Emmett explained. This particular stretch was still a rubble-belt at the moment. But it was leveled and attractively graded small rubble. The wide avenue we walked on was left intact. All the abandoned cars were gone. Other streets to right and left were rubbled over. Knee-high retaining walls of brick separated the sidewalk from the greenbelt-to-be. Planting this swath in the heat of July would be a waste of good seed. The natives were just building the substrate here for now, a giant mixing trough.
“The smell…” I said, not really wanting or needing an answer.
“Solids from the wastewater treatment plant,” Emmett confirmed. “And… They were planting the bodies last night when I walked through here. Maybe a half foot deep under the gravel.”
I flung my arms around him for a hug. He held me, harder than I expected. “It’ll be beautiful,” he said. “Soon.”
“What a horror to watch,” I replied.
“If I can order them to do it, I can damn well watch them do it,” Emmett said harshly. But he swallowed and pressed me closer, kissed my forehead. He promised, “Not much farther, darlin’. Three more blocks.”
It hurt to watch Emmett seeing this fresh through my eyes, and finding it horrible. But it was horrible. This whole damned city was a horror. And I felt like a coward and a cad for putting him up to tackling this, while I stayed home on my placid little farm, in my pretty green town of Totoket, amidst the clean salt marshes and the maple woods and the blue-gray waters of the Sound. While Emmett watched them cart in rotted bodies, Alex and I were partying on the Niedermeyers’ yacht yesterday evening. Like the man said, I could damned well face what I’d helped to do. My heart broke for him, though. This was ghastly. And this was on a good day, after nearly 9 months of Herculean effort.