Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  But I have time. I have time to find Hannah.

  I’m lucky I remember where Hannah’s house is. I’m less lucky that it’s a mile away from mine. I’m even less lucky that it starts sprinkling as I cross the Cal campus. We could hide around here. Cal has lots of warm, dry places to hang out, and I bet the library’s open late, for all those overachieving Public Ivy Leaguers. But then again, campus is so close to both our homes, and probably crawling with police officers and security guards. Maybe we’ll go into the hills, disappear into Tilden Park. We only have to make it one more week. In the grand scheme of human existence, that’s nothing at all.

  I wipe my wet shoes on the plaid doormat. I peer up at the gray house and into the second-story bay windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hannah. I rap on the red door.

  It creaks open just enough for me to see one wide blue eye and a tendril of long curly hair.

  “Hi,” I whisper.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispers.

  “I came to get you.”

  The door opens just wide enough for Hannah to slip outside. She leaves it open, just a crack. She wraps her arms around herself. She’s only got a long-sleeved shirt on, no coat or hoodie. And no shoes. We’re going to have to fix that.

  “That was quite a performance today,” she says. I guess she didn’t skip fourth period.

  “I had to do something.”

  “Oh God,” she says, and sighs. “I know I haven’t been around much lately, but what were you thinking, saying shit like that on the intercom? We need to lay low until the twenty-first, okay? Just be chill, just—”

  “Who’s inside right now?” I interrupt.

  “My mom,” Hannah says, throwing a look back toward the door.

  “Then let’s do this fast,” I say. I count off on my fingers. “You need your warmest coat, and your warmest boots. Food if you can grab it, bottled water—”

  “Ellis,” she says, but I’m not done, and time is of the essence, so I ride over her.

  “If you have anything wool, take it, doesn’t matter what it is, stuff it in a backpack.”

  “Ellis!” she snaps, then clamps her mouth shut for a moment. “What are you talking about?”

  “They’re going to send me to Utah. Tomorrow. So we have to leave. Now.”

  She winces. “Your parents were that mad?”

  “Apoplectic. Devastated. Let’s go.”

  Hannah looks down at her shoes. “No.”

  No? What does she mean, no? “We have to,” I tell her. “You need to get what you can, then we’ll go back to school—I have some emergency supplies in my locker. We’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it all out, but you need to get your stuff and we need to go now.”

  “This has gone too far,” she whispers. Her head shakes, and so does her voice. “I didn’t mean for this happen, I swear, I just wanted to find Danny. But you took it too far.”

  Because I locked myself in some admin office? Because I did what she wouldn’t, because I actually warned people?

  “They’ll be glad I did,” I promise. “When the snow comes, when the end of the world comes. Everyone will be glad I told them.”

  She shakes her head again. “The end of the world is not coming.”

  The earth’s core cracks beneath my feet. Iron and nickel explode up like the Yellowstone Caldera.

  “What?” I croak.

  Hannah steadies herself on the red door. She looks me in the eye. “The end of the world is not coming.”

  “But . . .” My brain is spinning; the words aren’t coming. “But you—your dreams—”

  “Everyone has dreams, little kids have dreams, my dog has dreams.”

  “Your dog dreams about squirrels, not the apocalypse!” I shout. Hannah throws a panicked glance behind her.

  “Be quiet,” she says through gritted teeth.

  Why should I be? She said it herself, no one’s inside but her mom, and her parents already know—

  No.

  “Your parents don’t know about the dreams,” I say, and the look she gives me is as good as a nod. “They don’t know, you never told them, you never told anyone but me.”

  “Wait,” she says, but I can’t.

  “Why are you in therapy?” I demand. “It’s not for your dreams, it’s not because your parents think you’re delusional, why do you go?”

  “Because I had to jump out of a car,” she snaps. “Because I can’t let him go. Because I’ve been dealing with some serious shit, Ellis, you don’t need a diagnosis to have problems.”

  “You lied to me,” I croak.

  “I never told you why I saw her, I never said—”

  “You said you’d seen it. You’d said you’d seen the end of the world.”

  “I know!” she says, burying her face in her hands. “I know, but if I’d told you about everything all at once, you would have freaked out. You would have judged me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I needed a way in, and then you brought up the end of the world, and I only . . .” She clamps her mouth shut. Like it’s too hard to say more. She doesn’t need to, I’m piecing it together myself.

  “You wanted my help. You wanted me to help you find your brother and you figured out what I was most scared of in the entire universe and you told me it was happening!”

  “I needed you,” she says, as though need makes it better. “I needed you, and I needed you to trust me, so I said what I thought would work, but then it just sort of spiraled, and you made those posters, and started telling people, and—”

  “And you let me do it! Even though you knew it wasn’t—”

  “I know, okay? I know.” Hannah rubs at her eyes like they hurt. “I guess I didn’t realize how seriously you’d take it.”

  “The end of the world?”

  She shushes me again. “And when I did realize, I tried to . . . back off. I swear. I went looking for him on my own, I stayed out of the Park because I knew you’d be there, I thought if I kept my distance maybe it would be better. For you.”

  All those days I didn’t see her, or hear from her. She spent all those days alone. Because she couldn’t bring herself to tell me the truth. It makes my heart ache and my teeth clench all at once.

  “Yeah, if you tried that hard, how did we end up here?” I demand.

  She winces. “I don’t know. I kept promising myself this was it, and then I kept breaking the promise. I kept finding you, I kept wanting to find you. I kept getting pulled back in.”

  I thought Hannah was the sun, and I was just an orbiting planet. Or a piece of metal drawn to a magnet. It’s not true. We were both the magnets.

  “You kept pulling me back in,” she says, and it feels close to an accusation.

  “This isn’t my fault!” I throw back at her. Salt stings the corner on my eyes. “You lied to me. You used me. And for what?”

  “I can explain that part,” she says, but I’m already taking a step back, then another.

  “I don’t want you to explain.” I spin around so fast it feels like my brain rattles.

  “I didn’t lie about everything,” she pleads. “Not everything. Wait, please.”

  I turn back around. She’s got one hand on the door, one hand reaching out to stop me.

  “I still need you,” she says.

  Worlds crumble. Worlds end. Words fail.

  I walk away, leaving her in the doorway.

  Water sloshes out of my shoes and drips down from my drenched hair as I walk in my front door, realizing too late I should have come up through the basement stairs. Dad is still in the living room, poking at his phone. His mouth drops open when he sees me. “What on Earth—why are you soaking wet?”

  “I’m going to pack,” I say, and it sounds flat and muffled in my ears.

  “Lisa!” he calls into the kitchen. I head him off by walking into the kitchen myself.

  “Ellis,” Mom gasps as I grab an entire package of Oreos from the pantry. “Did you go outside? We t
hought you were down in the . . .” She trails off as I grab a Coke out of fridge. “That is not an appropriate snack.”

  “Hannah’s a liar.” I pop open the soda can. “She lied to me.”

  “What?” Mom says.

  I take a long gulp. “Hannah lied to me. I’m going to pack for Utah.”

  Then I leave her in the kitchen, eyes wide and saucepan boiling over, and go straight to my room.

  Twenty-Five

  WHEN I WAS little, I thought America looked just like the fifty states puzzle I had. When viewed from above, I imagined, you could see each state’s name in bold black letters stretched across the ground, clean borders with clear-cut lines. From my window seat in the second-to-last row, I can’t tell where Utah begins. I can’t feel the split second I cross out from the wilderness into home. But when the Great Salt Lake comes into view on the horizon, a little blue pool hemmed in by desert and mountains, I sigh. This is a homecoming.

  I was born in California and lived my entire life in the same zip code. Berkeley is the place that raised me on its chaos and oddball charm. Seventeen square miles of hills and canyons, elite universities and tent cities. Berkeley is my hometown, and it always will be. But Utah is my home, too. A different kind of home. An ancestral home. A place of belonging. A legacy.

  When I land at Salt Lake City International, I ride the escalator down with a just-returned sister missionary, exhausted but bright-eyed, in a long skirt and sensible, beaten-up shoes. Her family is just past the security checkpoint with balloons and “Welcome Home” signs, and they scream in unison when they see her. And just to their left is Aunt Tonya, staring at me with obvious disappointment.

  Em was always the Golden Girl, from the moment she was born. What choice did I have but to be the Perpetual Disappointment? Every family needs one. So I’ve fallen on my sword. It’s actually very noble of me.

  The car ride to Aunt Tonya’s house is silent. And so are the next few days, as I mope around her house in Spanish Fork. Or as everyone here pronounces it, “Spanish Fark.” Spanish Fark in Utah County. Happy Valley. And yes, we’re all so happy here. I’m so happy I could vomit rainbows. I’m so happy I could shove an ice pick in my eye.

  It’s too far from the city to get anywhere without a car, not that anyone would let me go. Aunt Tonya’s kept me on the shortest of leashes, and I don’t expect that to change when my cousin Sarah gets done with finals tomorrow and flies in from Hawaii. I don’t even expect that to change when my parents and sister arrive the day after that, on the twenty-third.

  But to my shock, today features a surprise field trip.

  “I want you dressed in fifteen minutes,” Aunt Tonya says, passing through the living room with a basket full of laundry.

  “Why, where are we going?” I ask.

  “The Renaissance.”

  Of course, let me grab my corset and petticoat, I almost say, but restrain myself. “The Renaissance?”

  “Grammy Kit’s nursing home,” Aunt Tonya says. “Fifteen minutes.”

  The Renaissance is a two-story brown-brick building on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, and you could mistake it for a real house, except for the bank of wheelchairs on the covered entryway and the sign proclaiming it “an award-winning senior care facility.”

  Aunt Tonya parks near the front, and I grab my bag from the backseat.

  “What’s all that?” she says as we walk to the building, eyes on my backpack.

  “Homework stuff.” I choose not to mention my everyday carry pack at the bottom, or my wallet stuffed with quarters, in case the nursing home has a pay phone and I can sneak away and call Tal, or Em, or—

  No. Not Hannah. Not even if she had a phone.

  “Uh-uh,” Aunt Tonya says. “You’re here to spend time with Grammy Kit, not hole up in a corner. This isn’t a vacation.”

  I wonder in what joyless universe homework is considered a vacation activity. “It’s for school.”

  “And this is for service.” I follow behind her through two sets of doors, heavy and opaque. A lock clicks behind us.

  Aunt Tonya moves through the hallways purposefully, greeting green-uniformed workers by name. I try to stop my stomach from flipping at the piped-in fifties music, the locked, motion-sensored doors, the smell of bleach and urine and lavender air freshener. We stop at a door that reads KIT HOLLEY.

  Inside the room is a tiny, hunched woman in an easy chair. If you didn’t know, you might not guess that she spent her teenage years running cattle on her family farm, or that she spent her adult years wrangling children, nursing her husband until the bitter end of pancreatic cancer, and managing their small grocery shop, all at the same time.

  You also might not know what a pair of lungs she packs inside that small body, but only until she opens her mouth.

  “Ruby!” She hollers as Aunt Tonya shuts the door behind us. I look around for a healthcare worker, but there’s no one in the room but us. Aunt Tonya has her mouth set in a thin line. Grammy Kit is staring straight at me.

  It takes me a second to realize that Ruby is me. Or at least, Ruby is who she thinks I am.

  “Ruby!” She repeats.

  “It’s Ellis, Grammy,” I say, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. It’s not like I couldn’t have predicted this. She doesn’t remember my mom, her own daughter, why should she remember me?

  “Good lord in heaven,” she says. “What are you wearing?”

  I look down at my outfit. The jeans are pretty standard, so it must be the shirt. “It’s flannel.”

  “You look like a field hand.”

  “I’d be a pretty bad field hand.”

  “Nonsense,” she says. “Wasn’t me with that blue ribbon calf in fifty-nine.”

  It wasn’t me, either, but why not? Whoever Ruby was, I’d rather be her than me.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret,” I say, and Grammy Kit leans forward. “It was really a pig painted black and white.”

  She stares at me for a moment. Then she throws back her head and cackles. Aunt Tonya purses her lips.

  “Mama,” Aunt Tonya says as Grammy Kit picks at a back molar. “Ellis is going to keep you company today. I’ll come back after dinner.”

  After dinner? It’s barely noon. “When’s dinner?” I ask Aunt Tonya.

  “Four p.m. I can pick you up around five.”

  That’s a long time to hang around here by myself, but I nod. Aunt Tonya shuts the door the behind her as she leaves.

  Grammy Kit pokes me in the arm. “Thought she’d never leave.”

  “Tonya? She’ll be back.”

  “She’s gone. You can tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About George, you goose. Did he kiss you?”

  I shake my head. “Grammy Kit, I don’t know any—”

  “I won’t tell. Swear.” She holds out her hand, wrinkled and trembling. She extends her little finger. Huh. I curl my pinkie around hers, and she lifts up, then down, like a handshake. Ruby must be a friend. Or, must have been a friend, long ago, when they were young enough for pinkie swears, but old enough to kiss boys.

  “Yes,” I say, because what’s the harm? I think of kissing Tal five days ago. Five eons ago. My eyes prick. “He kissed me.”

  Grammy Kit grins. “He’ll have you in a white dress before supper,” she declares. “And out of it before morning.”

  My mouth drops open. Was that a sex joke?

  “George is all right,” she says approvingly. “Doesn’t tear around town in his car like Bobby.” She sighs. “But oh, those eyes.”

  Bobby? Bobby like my grandpa Bob? I never met him, he died before I was born. I sit down on the bed, next to her easy chair.

  “Tell me about him.”

  She blinks. “You know Bobby.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  So she does. She never talked about him when I was younger, she’d always change the subject when Mom brought him up. Maybe it was just too painful, like tearing stitches. But he’s alive in her
mind, and he comes alive to me as she talks. Grandpa Bob speeding down rural roads in his truck, Grandpa Bob giving her his class ring, Grandpa Bob stealing a pig for a senior prank. She’d never have done this if she were well. But in her mind, he’s alive. In her mind, there’s no pain.

  “It’s four,” she says, finally, though it’s twelve thirty. “You want to watch American Grandstand?”

  “Um. Bandstand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can never find that clicker,” Grammy Kit grumbles. “I think they steal it.”

  “Who does?”

  “The shopgirls.”

  She must mean the nursing home workers. She thinks this is her house, and also her store, and maybe some back porch where she and Ruby sipped lemonade and gossiped about boys. This is her reality, as real as the soft sleeve of my flannel shirt against her arm, as real as the bird squawking outside her window, as real as anything that has happened to her. Reality comes from the Late Latin realis, meaning “actual.” But before that, in Medieval Latin, realis didn’t mean “actual.” It meant “belonging to the thing itself.” I was never quite sure what that meant, but now I think I do. Reality is not a singular noun, even though the dictionary says it is. Reality is a plural, a million things at once, seen from the eyes of a million people at once. Reality belongs to the thing itself, and the thing itself is us. Our reality belongs to us, and we belong to it.

  I’m brought out of my head by the sound of furious, frustrated clicking. Apparently, they didn’t steal the remote. “Can’t get the darn thing to—” Grammy Kit hits the remote against the easy chair, which accomplishes nothing. “It’s broken. I’ll find the receipt.”

  I pry it out of her hand. “Let me give it a shot. What do you want to watch? I don’t think American Bandstand is on.”

  “The news, then.”

  “Do you know which channel?”

  She tilts her head. “Ruby, honey, there’s only four.”

  I bring up the guide screen and click on the first news program, on channel 758. It’s national news, and two anchors are discussing the latest possibility of a government shutdown.