by Rumaan Alam
“Too far from the beach to be a beach house. Not actually on a farm, so not a farmhouse. Not especially old, so not an historic house. Not brand-new and tricked out, so not a luxury house. Just a quiet place, the ends of the earth, somewhere to be alone and quiet and comfortable.” Hadn’t they earned the luxury of a little remove from the poor, the ignorant, the worse? “But it’s an illusion, really. It’s just a few minutes. A couple of miles this way. Stores, a movie theater, the highway, people. A movie theater, a mall. The ocean.”
“We went there.”
“A Starbucks.”
“We stopped there.”
“The conveniences. Alone but not really alone. It’s just the idea. It’s the best of both worlds.”
“No cars. Have you heard a plane?” Clay stopped expecting to recognize the trees, the bends, the turns, the rises. “A helicopter? A siren?”
It was clear they’d have to learn a new way through a new world. “I haven’t heard anything.”
From the back seat, Archie listened. He watched out of the window, but he could only see the sky. He thought of Rose, and the deer she’d seen, but didn’t know that they’d all got quite far away, in the night.
There was meaning in G. H.’s exhalation. Age made you more patient. “Everything is different. Are you writing this down?”
Clay looked at the map he’d made. It was illegible, useless. So he’d failed as a cartographer too. You told yourself you’d be attuned to a holocaust unfolding a world away, but you weren’t. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage. “I’m writing it down.”
G. H. was sure of it. “Danny will know something.”
38
RUTH PULLED OPEN THE DOOR TO THE LITTLE SHED. THE hinge complained, but Amanda did not respond.
“Come on, now.” Ruth didn’t want to be this person. The helpmeet; the supporting player. Her daughter was also lost to her. Who would help her find her grandsons? Who would hold her up?
“Where’s Rose, where’s Rosie. What are we going to do?” Amanda was sitting on an upturned bucket.
“Come on. Stand up. Come out of here. Into the light.” The little building smelled.
The women went outside. The sun asserted itself. Ruth checked the timer on the phone. It had been eleven minutes. George would be back in forty-nine. This was not so long. You could reduce it down to seconds and keep vigil, count it out loud. She’d hear the approach of the car on the gravel. She’d see him again. “That’s better,” she said, and it was. The fresh air made some kind of promise. “They took Archie. He was sick again.”
Amanda couldn’t think about this too.
“We made a plan. One hour. They’ll take him. George will be back for you and me and Rose.”
“Should we go to the woods in the back? Should we walk to the road? How far is it? Is it this way?” Amanda pointed, but she wasn’t sure where.
“The road is down that way. Would she go down there?” This didn’t make any sense to Ruth. She couldn’t imagine why the girl would forsake the safety of the little brick house.
“I don’t know! I don’t know why she’d leave. I don’t know where she’d go.” Amanda couldn’t say it, but what if the girl hadn’t left at all, was already dead, somewhere in the house? That thing with JonBenét Ramsey had begun as the search for a missing child, but her corpse had been in the basement all the while. Who killed JonBenét Ramsey, anyway? Amanda couldn’t remember.
“Let’s go back inside. Let’s walk through the house once more.” Ruth had a terrible vision—the girl in the powder room by the side entrance, toothless and faint?
“Rose!” Amanda screamed it. The day was silent in response. There was nothing out there for them.
“Let’s look inside. Let’s be methodical.” Ruth needed them to make sense of things.
They hurried up the driveway, the gravel shifting under their steps. Amanda could feel every rock through the thin rubber soles of her shoes. Ruth could not move quite as fast as the younger woman, but she did. There was an urgent matter to attend to. “Let’s go inside.” Amanda said it like it had been her idea. “Maybe she’s hiding.” There was no reason for the girl to hide, but maybe she was? She was jealous of the attention her brother had earned. She was lost in a book. She didn’t want to go home. “Do you think they’ve got to the hospital yet?”
“It’s too soon. But they’re on their way.” Ruth went into the house by the side door. She opened the little closet where they had some waterproof boots, the chemical ice melt for the steps, one of the two broad plastic snow shovels, an old canvas tote bag stuffed with other canvas tote bags. No Rose.
“They’re going. They’ll be safe.” Amanda was convincing herself.
“George will leave Clay and Archie. They can see the doctor. Then he’ll come right back for us.”
“I’m not leaving without Rosie!” Amanda opened the powder room door. Nothing.
“Of course. That’s the plan. He’ll come back for the three of us.” It was just sensible.
“And what? We’ll leave? We didn’t finish packing!” They needed their things.
“We’ll go back. We’ll see to Clay and Archie. Then I don’t know what.” Ruth wanted to say: You don’t need your things. You have us. We have one another.
“Rose!” The name just fell into the empty house. There was only the exhalation of all those appliances, but neither woman heard that anymore. “Then what? What’s the doctor going to say? What’s the doctor going to do? Did Clay even take the teeth with him?” They’d put them into a plastic baggie. Macabre. Would a doctor screw them back into his head?
“I don’t know then what.”
“We’ll go home? We’ll come back here?” Neither made any sense.
Ruth opened the pantry door. No thirteen-year-old girl would hide there. “I don’t know!” She was, in fact, yelling. Ruth was mad too. “I don’t know what we’ll do, don’t ask me as though I have some answer at my disposal that you don’t. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“I just want to know what the fuck is going to happen. What the fuck is the plan. I want to know that we’re going to find my kid and all three of us are going to get in your fucking expensive car and drive to the hospital and the doctor is going to tell me that my baby is okay, and that we’re all okay, and that we can all go back to our house.”
“I know that. But what if that’s not possible?”
“I just want to get the fuck away from here and you and whatever is happening—” Amanda hated her.
“It’s happening to all of us!” Ruth was furious.
“I know that it’s happening to all of us!”
“You don’t care, do you, that I’m here and my daughter is in Massachusetts—” She could feel the ghost embrace, her grandsons’ four sweet hands.
“I care, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. My daughter is in— I don’t know where my daughter is!”
“Stop yelling at me.” Ruth sat down at the kitchen island. Ruth looked up at the glass globe of the pendant light, the one that had shattered when the planes—she didn’t know those were planes—had flown overhead. Why did this woman not understand that however unlucky they were, they were also lucky? Ruth wanted to sleep in her own bed. But she wanted these people to stay.
“I’m sorry.” Did she mean it? It didn’t matter. “Rose!” Amanda looked at the woman and understood. They could not leave this house. They could not go back to Brooklyn. They could see the doctor and maybe stop at the store and come back here and hide and wait for whatever was coming. This woman was not a stranger at all; she was their salvation. “I’m sorry. I just want my daughter.”
“I want my daughter too.” Ruth could hear Maya’s voice, the sweet register of her girlhood. Ruth could not make
peace with whatever was required. She wanted to know that her child and her grandchildren were safe, but of course, Ruth would never know that. You never know that. You demanded answers, but the universe refused. Comfort and safety were just an illusion. Money meant nothing. All that meant anything was this—people, in the same place, together. This was what was left to them.
“Rose!” Amanda did not sit because she could not. She went back through the living room, into the bedroom that was Archie’s, through the bathroom where the tub was now empty, to the bedroom that had been Rose’s. Amanda knelt on the floor and looked under the bed, where there was nothing, not even dust. She went back to the bathroom and plugged the drain properly and began filling the tub with water.
She emerged into the living room. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sorry I’m terrible. I want my daughter, I don’t know why I yelled at you. I know you understand, but I want my daughter. She was just right here. I don’t understand what’s happening.” She wanted to hug Ruth, but she could not.
Ruth did understand. Everyone understood. This was what everyone wanted, to be safe. This was the thing that eluded every single one of them. Ruth stood up. So, she’d look for the girl, or her corpse, if she was dead. She’d do what was required, she’d do what was human.
Amanda pushed open the doors to the back porch and looked down at the pool. She screamed her daughter’s name at the woods. The trees moved a little in the wind, but that was the only thing that happened.
39
IT DIDN’T EVEN LOOK LIKE A DRIVEWAY, BUT THROUGH A little copse, the way widened, and then was paved. There was a lawn that seemed manicured from a distance but was actually wild, feverish. From afar the green was so dazzling, you assumed it had to be the work of man. There was a fence, and there was the house, colonial, an ersatz echo of the original American ideal, with seven bedrooms, whirlpool tubs, granite countertops, central air.
George saw the silver Range Rover and was reassured. Danny was in residence. They’d been right to come. He’d only begun to say “Let’s go,” but Clay’s need was as urgent as his, because he was already out of the car. “Archie. You stay there. You lie down.”
The boy looked up at the older man. He could see that the sky was more blue now, that it would be a perfect day for lunch outside, though what he could eat with his toothless mouth he wasn’t sure. “Okay. I’ll wait.”
The front door was a slick and jolly yellow, something Danny’s wife, Karen, had seen in a magazine. G. H. rang the doorbell. He almost knocked and then told himself to be more patient. It wouldn’t do to turn up like a lunatic. The world might have gone mad, but they had not.
Danny and Karen had passed the night as uneasily as the rest of them. The family bed, four-year-old Emma between them as the boom died out overhead. Karen almost catatonic, thinking of her son, Henry, at his father’s place in Rockville Center. Their phones hadn’t worked, and the boy was deeply attached to his mother, and she knew, they both knew, he was probably even then calling out for her, fruitless. Would his father bundle him into the car and drive him home? Karen tried to will it to be so, but among their irreconcilable differences was his inability to understand what she wanted. Danny was in the kitchen, taking stock of what they had on hand, and was irritated by the interruption. This was evident as he opened the door.
“George,” he said, recognition but not warmth. Danny was very handsome. This was always the first impression he made. Regular exposure to the sun had rendered his skin golden. Genetic predisposition had salted his brown hair. His stance was wide as his shoulders, his posture confident, because he knew that he was handsome and therefore he stood like he knew it. He offered himself to the world, and the world said its thanks. He was surprised but also not that surprised.
“Danny.” G. H. hadn’t planned what would happen next. But there was some relief in just seeing another human being. It seemed it had been so long since that night at the concert, shaking hands and praising the performers.
The sight of the man reminded Danny of work. That was just a matter of putting on a smile, reassuring people, barking orders, collecting a check; it had nothing to do with his real life—the woman upstairs reading a book about dragons to a frightened but also indifferent little girl. Once he’d seen the news alert, Danny had gone out for supplies, for news. He’d come home with groceries but little else. “This is a surprise.”
G. H. could see he’d miscalculated. He understood the man’s posture. He should have known that what he’d always believed of people was true; that social order had allowed most of them to believe themselves not social animals. “I’m sorry to bother you at home like this.”
Danny looked from George to the stranger beside him. Had he ever liked George? Not really. It didn’t matter; that was not the question. There was nothing to it. So he didn’t like Obama, either. It had to do only with the presumption of it, the fist bumping, the joviality. It insulted him, a mockery of the world as he understood it. “What—what can I do for you?” He made it clear that he was off the clock, not interested in doing anything for the many.
G. H. felt the beginning of a smile, a salesman’s tactic. “Well, something is happening.” He was not stupid. “We were driving by, and I thought I would check in on you. See if you’re here. If you’re okay. If you’d heard anything.”
Danny looked over his shoulder, back into the house, past the curlicue of the banister. He saw motes dancing in the morning light from the living room’s double-height windows. He saw everything as it ought to have been, but he didn’t trust it. He didn’t trust anything. He stepped toward the men and closed the door behind them. “Heard anything? You mean, besides what we heard yesterday?”
“I’m Clay.” He didn’t know what else to say. Clay wondered if this man would walk the woods with them until they met Rose. Would he have medicine for Archie? Would he have an internet connection? Would he welcome them into this handsome house, the size of a hotel, and would it be like a party, and if so did they have a swimming pool? He imagined the women had recovered Rose, playing in the shade of the woods. He imagined that Archie was feeling better, a temporary stomach bug. Maybe they didn’t need anything from this man and all was well, maybe they’d just say hello, commiserate, ask whether the noise—when had that been?—had cracked any of his windows.
Danny went on. “I’m surprised you guys are out.”
“What do you mean?” G. H. was trying to get something, anything.
“What do I mean?” Danny’s laugh was hard, angry. “There’s some real shit going on out there, George. You don’t know that? You can’t hear it from that nice house of yours? My guys did a good job, but I know you heard that last night.”
“My family is renting George’s house. We’re here from the city.” Clay didn’t know why he was trying to explain himself; he couldn’t understand how little Danny was interested.
“That’s a lucky break for your family.” Danny knew the man was from the city. It was clear. He did not care. “Can you imagine what a shitshow that must be?”
“What do you know? Have you heard anything?” George asked.
“I know what you probably know.” Danny sighed, impatient. “Apple News says there’s a blackout. I think, okay, we’re safe out here. I’ve got no service. I’ve got no cable. But I’ve got power. So I drive into town for some stuff. I think the store’s going to be mobbed, right? Nope. Quiet. Not like before a snowstorm, more like after a foot has fallen. No one knows what’s going on. It’s just another day. I come home, hear that noise, and think, That’s it, we’re not leaving. Then last night—the noise again. Three times. Bombs? Missiles? I don’t know, but I’m staying put until I hear that I shouldn’t.”
“You went to the store.” George wanted to be clear.
“Stocked up. Came home. It just doesn’t feel like out there is the place to be.”
“My son is sick.” Clay didn’t know how to explain that something had knocked the teeth from Archie’s sixteen-year-ol
d mouth. It made no sense. “He was vomiting. He seems okay, now.” Clay was still hopeful.
G. H. interjected. “He lost his teeth. Five of them. They just fell out. We can’t explain it.”
“His teeth.” Danny was quiet for a while. “You think it had something to do with that noise?” Danny didn’t know that the teeth in Karen’s mouth were themselves loose, would soon fall out.
“Did your windows crack?” George asked.
“The shower door. The master bath.” Danny thought it was obvious. “It’s something. Had to be a plane. I don’t think there’s any information getting out, so I assume it’s a war. The beginning of a war.”
“War?” Somehow this had not occurred to Clay. This seemed almost disappointing, a letdown.
“Has to be an attack I think? They were talking about the super hurricane on CNN. The Iranians or whoever—they planned it right. The perfect shitshow.” Danny had seen a broadcast of a local Washington anchor in a boat to show the water standing inside the Jefferson Memorial.
“You think we’re under attack?” G. H. didn’t, but he wanted to hear.
“They’ve been saying there was chatter, this has to be what they were chattering about.” Danny pitied anyone who couldn’t see how obvious it was.
This man was a conspiracy theorist. He was crazy. Clay was a professor. “Chatter? What happened at the store? We need to go to the hospital.”
“You’ve got to read the papers. Deeper than page one. The Russians recalled their staff from Washington, did you notice that? That was in bold print, that got a ‘breaking.’ Something’s afoot, man.” Danny coughed and put his hands in his pockets.
“We’re going to the hospital.” Clay said it again, but he was less certain.
“What you do is your business. What I’m doing is staying right here.” Danny wanted them gone.
“This is what you think, Danny?” G. H. turned it around on him.
“Nothing is making a whole lot of sense at the moment. If the world doesn’t make sense, I can still do what’s rational. It’s not safe out there.” Danny nodded toward the expanse of nothing, which did not look any different, but he wasn’t fooled.