by Jen Crane
“I tried to clear a chain-link fence, but my leg caught.”
Nori looked at the bandage again, but quickly averted her eyes from the exposed skin of his thigh. She cleared her throat. “Why was he chasing you?”
He shrugged.
“You’re not going to tell me?” she asked.
He shook his head, all nonchalance.
“Fine.” Nori huffed a breath. “What’s your name?”
“Cooper.”
“That your first name?” She asked and extended her arm toward the door handle, making sure she could escape if necessary.
“It’s what people call me,” he said. “What’s yours?”
She didn’t answer as manners battled with self-preservation in her brain.
“Oh, come on,” he goaded. “You can’t ask to see mine and not show me yours.”
“Nori,” she said quick and low. The concession pained her.
“That your first name?” he shot back.
She scowled, and he threw up his hands in defense. “Okay, okay. I’m just messing with you. Anyway, thanks again for the help, Dory.”
“It’s Nori.”
Cooper nodded, an amused smirk tightening his lips. “Thanks, Nori.” He rose slowly, hopping on one foot at first, and reached for his backpack in the corner. As he slipped it over a shoulder, he stopped and caught her gaze again. “Why’d you help me—three times? You didn’t have to.”
“I did have to,” she said. The answer came easily. “You were in trouble, and I could help. No brainer.”
“Kindness is not so common as you think,” he said lifting his chin and narrowing his eyes as if trying to get a better read on her. “How long have you been like this?”
“Like what?”
“You burn easy. And you can see well in the dark, right?”
“I’ve been this way my whole life.” The answer was smooth, and without thought. Nori gasped and balled her fists when she realized what she’d revealed. Her condition wasn’t a secret, though it was a mystery. But she didn’t like a stranger knowing so much about her. And she hated that he’d gotten her to talk so easily. Her teeth creaked under the pressure of her jaws.
“Anyone else up here like you?” Cooper closed the distance between them and searched her eyes for an answer. “You know anyone else who burns like you do? Who can see better in the dark?”
She shook her head, blinking in incomprehension. “How do you… What do you mean? What do you know about it?”
“You should go,” he said and pushed open the door.
“No.” Nori pulled the door shut, her heart thundering in her chest. “Tell me how you knew to ask those questions. Do you know someone else like me?”
Cooper let out a long breath, his wary gaze never leaving hers. “It’ll be light soon,” he finally said. “If you want to make it home in time, you’ll already have to run like hell.”
He turned to open the door again, but Nori stopped him. “Wait.” She fumbled for something to say. “Do you live around here?” She threw on her own backpack, wishing to know something about the man who knew so much about her.
“Right under your nose,” he said, and with one last nod, ran from the foyer, into the dark alley, and out of sight with no noticeable limp.
As Nori watched him go the shadows changed, and her heart seized. The sun was on the rise. “Stupid,” she told herself, racing home on shaky legs. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Her father’s voice echoed in the distance. It was panicked, urgent. “Nori?” he yelled. “Nori? Answer me!”
Nori’s name in her mother’s mouth, though, was more like a scream.
She could just see the stretch of orange on the horizon. Beautiful, she thought, not remembering ever having seen a sunrise. It deserved the hype. She was lost in the way the world shimmered under its attention. She slowed, in awe of the maize and terra-cotta hues, of the impossible beauty framing the burned-out and rusted landscape.
When her eyes began to sting, she rubbed them, and the skin of her face felt hot. Too late, she thought as pain seared behind her eyes. It’s too late, but it just might’ve been worth it.
When she stumbled onto Skyler Court, her parents were halfway down the street. Her father ran to her, scooping her up and crushing her against his chest as he ran into the house.
“What were you thinking?” her mother screamed as she slammed the door behind them.
Even through the pain, Nori’s eyes widened with shock. Her mother was a nurturer. She was tender. She never raised her voice.
“One more millisecond, and you would’ve been back in a drug-induced coma,” she said. “One more millisecond. What the devil was so important that you risked your own life, Nori? Where have you been?”
“I…I’m sorry, Mom,” Nori said as her father deposited her in a chair. “Someone was hurt, and being chased, and then he passed out, and…and I threw a book.”
“Wait, wait. Slow down.” Nori’s father said, smoothing a hand across her back. “It’s all right, Ana. She’s gonna be all right.” He turned to Nori. “Now, what happened? Who passed out? Start from the beginning.”
Nori’s heart raced like she was locked inside the foyer with Cooper again when she told them what she’d seen and how she’d dragged him to safety. She told them about his oddly-accurate line of questioning, and they joined in her frustration at his lack of answers.
What she didn’t tell them, though, was that despite Cooper’s outward playfulness, she’d searched his eyes in the foyer of that building and only found sadness. She didn’t tell them she’d have stayed there for hours to see them brighten.
“Thank God you’re alive,” her mother said, peeking through the fingers that hid her delicate face. “Don’t ever do anything like that again. Do you hear me?”
The way her eyes and skin was hurting, Nori doubted she’d be able to do much anytime soon.
“I promise,” she said on the way to her room. “Next time I’ll let him die.”
She hung her backpack on the peg inside the door, remembering too late she hadn’t gone back to get her book.
3
And the Days Were Getting Longer
“Sunset was 11:55 tonight.”
Nori could hear her father’s frantic voice through the walls of her room.
“Daylight came at 3:20 this morning.”
She imagined him stalking across the living room, running nervous hands through the hair at the sides of his head.
“Three hours and twenty-five minutes, Ana.”
“I know.” Her mother’s voice was much more solemn.
Her father’s clipped steps turned to a full-blown pace. “How will we ever get back to the 25th Parallel with only three hours of dark each day?” Her mother didn’t answer, but the question had been rhetorical anyway. “We can’t risk taking her that far, even in the van.” He paused, and Nori imagined him looking toward her door. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” she said, her voice was desolate. “She’s resting now. I’ll take her back to the doctor tomorrow.”
“It’s not worth the risk, and you know it,” her father boomed. “They can’t do anything for her.”
“It’s all I know to do, Norm,” she said. “I have to do something.”
Nori pulled the pillow over her head, but it didn’t smother her mother’s torment.
“She can’t…live…like this,” her mother said between sobs. “I can’t…watch her…live like this.”
Nori’s chest squeezed painfully and she turned her head to the wall as her tears flowed. She could endure her own pain. That she could stand. But causing her parents agony was unbearable.
4
A Tragic Loss
Temps holding steady throughout the week with a high today of 127. Lows tonight of 99. Sunrise was 03:19, folks, and sunset is expected at 23:56.
This decrease in dark hours is the most rapid we’ve seen since the first sunscorch twelve years ago. At this rate, experts suggest nightf
all may cease to occur within the month. As we now know, the increase in the tilt of Earth’s axis is responsible for these extreme temperature fluctuations. Experts warn to take action now if you haven’t already. To move to the temperate regions, to the 25th parallel befor—.
Norman pressed the television’s power button with such force it rocked backward, threatening to tumble off the stand. He leaped for the TV, using both hands to right it before growling in frustration.
“Shh,” his wife chided from the kitchen. “Nori’s still sleeping.”
“Still? It’s nearly eight.”
Ana shrugged and wiped her hands, wet from the sink. “Teenagers,” she said. “What you gonna do?”
Norman smiled at the thought of his teenager lazing in the bed. Remembering the reason she was asleep, though, sucked the air from his body. She’d developed a fever during the night, her skin blistered and nearly raw in places. He could scarcely breathe as the extent of his daughter’s suffering, and his inability to relieve it, threatened to pull him under. His ears flashed hot and roared unmercifully. Burying his face in both hands, Norman sucked hard breaths through his fingers.
Ana stood in front of him, at first trying to pull his fingers from his face, but giving the effort up to simply hold him. He stiffened in her embrace. He would not be comforted, protected. That was his job, and he’d already failed too many times.
Lowering his hands and pulling away from his wife, he darted for the door. “Be back after work,” he said and slammed the door behind him.
“How is she?” he asked as soon as he pushed through the door. He’d thought of little else all day.
Sunken and bruised, the dark circles under his wife’s eyes were made worse by the loose skin around them. Swaths of hair had fallen from her ponytail and hung limply around her face. “She’s sleeping.”
“Again?”
“No, not again,” she said. “She never woke.”
“My God.” Norman started toward his daughter’s room, wiping sweaty palms on his pants. “Did you check on her? Is she all right?”
Ana’s spine straightened. “Of course I checked on her. I’ve cared for her all day. She’s feverish and fitful. Her body is just one big sunburn.”
Norman said nothing as his eyes lost focus on Nori’s closed door. He was hollow, hopeless. Was there really nothing he could do to help her?
He must’ve said the words aloud because Ana nodded and pushed some of the hair off her face. “She could probably use fresh cloths on her head and neck. Nice and cool. That would help.”
Norman dragged himself to Nori’s room. He knew what he would find there. Drawn with pain, her face was an angry red and had already begun peeling. Her neck was splotchy from the fever, and her body covered with a thin white sheet.
The sight of his only remaining child laid before him burned and miserable flooded him with memories, and he cried out in agony. The first sunscorch had taken the lives of over four billion people, including his two youngest children.
It had been a Saturday, and Bevin’s birthday. The kids had been so excited to go out for pancakes they’d giggled and bounced all morning. Nori, five at the time, was excited, too.
As they’d left the café, the little ones wore sugared smiles and syrup-stained shirts. Norman had held Bevin’s sticky hand as they waited beneath the metal awning for Nori to come outside. “Hustle, big sister,” he had called a second before the sunscorch hit.
No warning. No time to escape or find shelter. One moment, he stood smiling down at the baby-faced birthday girl, and the next, a scalding blast of heat blew over them like a wave of cosmic radiation.
Driven by instinct, Norman had dived for Bevin, for Ana and Liam, scrambling to shield them with his body. Even beneath the metal awning, the heat blistered the clothes from his back. He had screamed in pain, in fear, but the sounds of melting and collapsing, of explosions everywhere, drowned out his loudest wails. He’d moved out of reflex, had protected his children as best he could, but he hadn’t done enough.
Although Ana had been holding him under the awning when the sunscorch struck, tiny Liam’s body couldn’t withstand the blast, and he stopped breathing in her arms. Bevin’s short life ended the next morning, the day after her third birthday. Nori, who’d still been inside, recovered with time. But she was never the same.
The days following the scorch had been a miserable blur of despair. Each stab of pain as his back healed was a reminder he hadn’t done enough, that he hadn’t saved them. For months, he wished for his own death with each throb of his still-beating heart. He couldn’t run from the suffocating agony of loss. It haunted him like a throng of specters through the too-quiet house. It tortured him each time a toy or a memory fooled his brain into thinking the children were still alive. Too soon, he’d remember they weren’t, and re-live the loss all over again. He’d very nearly gone mad. The smell of syrup still brought him to his knees.
And his sweet Ana. He’d been in no shape to comfort his wife, though she was as anguished as he was. She’d found purpose in tending to Nori’s recovery, but she cried at night for months, Norman knew, because her sobs rocked their too-empty bed.
In the end, it was his love for Nori and Ana, and nothing else, that paved the way for his redemption. Well, love and time. An awful lot of time. He could get through most days now without breaking down.
But as Norman watched Nori’s face contort in her sleep, the crippling memories of losing Bevin and Liam crashed down around him, and he fell to his knees. With one fist at his aching heart and the other shoved to his mouth, Norman curled into a ball beside his daughter’s bed and tried to smother his anguished sobs. He failed to do that, too, and once the dam was breached, he couldn’t stop until the reservoir was dry.
Like so many times before, his body gave out before his memory did.
5
A Slow Recovery
Nori woke to her father running smooth hands over the hair at the top of her head.
“Wha…” She cleared her throat and worked not to grimace. “What time is it?”
He raised his head from the side of her bed and stretched his back. “Hey,” he breathed. “How you feeling?”
Nori inspected the sores on her arms and felt her cheeks and forehead with a feather-light touch. “I’m all right,” she said. “How do I look, though?” She arched her eyebrows and posed playfully. “Gorgeous, right?”
Her father smiled. “You always look beautiful to me.”
“Oh, Dad,” Nori groaned. “You have to say that.”
“Okay, that’s true. But even if I didn’t, I’d still think so.”
Nori rolled her eyes, but smiled at the man whose worry darkened his face with each passing day. “I’m starving,” she said. “Let me up.”
He backed away from the bed, the beginning stirrings of a sparkle in his eyes. “Ana,” he called. “Our girl’s up, and hungry as a horse.” He grinned at her, though his gaze lingered too long on her face. “I’ll go on down and let you get dressed.”
Suppressing a groan at the pain searing the backs of her eyes, Nori nodded.
After her father had left, she held the bedpost and stood with a muffled gasp. She didn’t want her parents to know how bad it had gotten, but sometimes, when she was alone, she couldn’t stop the tears.
At first, she’d felt cheated she couldn’t enjoy the warm feel of the sun on her face. That didn’t last long. The tiniest sliver of sunlight was like needles to her flesh. Scalding, relentless needles. If it was just her skin, she could deal with that. Maybe. But the sun also caused blinding pain behind her eyes and into the very depths of her skull.
She wouldn’t cry in front of her parents. She was alive. She had a life, such as it was, and her tiny brother and sister did not. Sometimes when they looked at her, she knew they were remembering. The light would fade from their eyes, and their movements became stiff and rote. They’d try to hide their misery, too, but she knew.
One breath at a time. One s
tep at a time. One day at a time. It was how they all lived now, and it had become her motto.
Nori closed her eyes against the pain and took timid steps toward the bathroom. How long had it been since her mother had given her a pain pill? She needed another. Hers was a love/hate relationship with the medicine, which blocked the pain, but also made her drowsy, like living inside a dream. She didn’t remember a lot and fell asleep watching TV—sometimes even eating.
Staying indoors to avoid the sun wasn’t ideal, but sleeping her life away was unacceptable. Too many of those kinds of days gave her the blues. It was a dangerous, slippery slope toward depression.
Nori found the big white pills in the cabinet and halved one. Maybe the reduced dosage would take the edge off the pain and she’d stay alert. She took it with a gulp of water, and with a final, fortifying breath, emerged from her room.
“Did I sleep all day?” she asked, pasting a grin on her lips.
Her parents smiled back, their relief an almost tangible thing.
“Nearly three, sweetie.” Her mother tilted the cast iron pan over a plate at the table. “I made you dinner.”
Nori’s mouth watered at the sauté. “Smells great, Mom,” she said and dug into a dish of heat-tolerant grains, tomatillos, and seaweed. “You know,” she said around a bite. “I’ll never understand why you named me after food.”
Her father threw his head back and laughed, and a grin pulled at the sides of her own mouth.
Nori’s mother, though, was not amused. “Oh, not this again.” She blew out a breath and slid the pan into the sink. “Nori Chisholm, we did not name you after seaweed. We named you after your father. Nor-man. No-ri.” She over-enunciated each word. “We didn’t even eat that much seaweed until the last few years.” Nori and her father both snickered, and Ana pointed a finger at them. “It’s got a lot of protein, you know, which you need since there’s no meat. And it’s easy to get now that they farm it in the Gulf.” She stopped, smoothed her apron. “You know what? You two are in charge of dinner tomorrow.”