Homebodies

by Cheryl Loudermelt

  “Did Barbara say what she thought was wrong with me?”

  “She said it was something that couldn’t be cured with penicillin. She thought you needed time, to process or remember. She didn’t want me to get too close. She said you wouldn’t get better if we pushed.”

  “She’s smart.” She tried to wipe her hands on her pants. It didn’t clean them very much at all and the action was excruciating for her knuckles. “I feel better.” She sighed. “And worse. Much worse than before.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” He seemed immediately uncomfortable. “I mean, you don’t have to. I don’t want to pressure you, I just thought, never mind. I should shut up and eat my food.”

  Emily laughed a little. “You forgot how to talk to strange women, didn’t you?”

  Adam shook his head. “I never knew. If it didn’t need motor oil and an engine, I was never much good at talking.”

  “I think I used to be good at it. I know I had a friend once. I think I had more than one.” Emily crumpled up the wrapper of the granola bar and tucked it in her pocket. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “You’ll find yourself again.”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” she said. “Now I’m the kind of person who kills people with my bare hands in the street.”

  Adam frowned, but tried not to, making his lips into a pancake instead. “You didn’t kill her. Not exactly.”

  “Please, don’t. . .”

  “She was already dead, Emily.”

  Emily burst into tears so violently she nearly slipped off the roof. “They are. Everyone. God.” The words sputtered out of her between sobs. “Everyone is dead.”

  “Not everyone. Not you and me.”

  “But I feel dead. I can’t remember so many things still, and every time I remember there’s only misery. My best friend is gone.” She struggled for a breath. “My parents. I don’t even remember my parents. Not really. It’s like I just deleted them from my head because I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the good memories, and now all I have are bad ones.”

  Adam dug around in his bag for a small package of tissues. “I get allergies.” He extended them awkwardly toward her.

  She took the tissues, and he let her cry. By the time the flood had begun to subside, he was staring off in the direction of the sun.

  “I’m sorry.” She sniffled. “I shouldn’t be unloading on you. This isn’t your problem.”

  “We all went through it. No one alive now lives without a few holes in their heart. I know what you’re thinking. How could I forget? How can I just go on like nothing happened, but at some point, we all had to give up or go on. People change when the world changes.

  “But it hasn’t. It was so easy to let go because nothing changed. I never knew my neighbors. We smiled and waved, but once the front door closes it’s like the lights shut out on the rest of the planet. This has always been a world of mostly silent, hungry strangers. They all had lives in their own little worlds locked behind the front door. The only difference now is that they reach out more.”

  Adam nodded. “I can probably count on two hands the number of people who really knew me. Even less if I only count the ones who really cared. When it happened, me and my girlfriend, Bethy, were camping. She was super smart, much too smart for me. She was getting a degree in Biology and Chemistry, and she wanted to work with endangered animals, so we were always out in the sticks somewhere looking for some stupid turtle or owl that she wanted to see.

  “We’d heard the first reports for a week, some weird thing in Brazil they were calling Dunn-Hitchens disease. So stupid. It sounds like the sort of obscure thing people hold fundraisers for, you know, like a telethon for DHD awareness or something.

  “Bethy couldn’t stop reading about it. She said it was spreading, and people should start taking precautions, but the only thing they did was issue a travel warning for people who might want to visit a DHD affected area.

  “We had been gone about a week, hiking, feeling like we were the only people on earth. Then my mother called. Don’t come home, she said, and I said why not, and she said because of that disease. It was like it exploded. One minute it was some isolated thing and the next minute- mom said there were riots. She said the military was keeping people off the streets, evacuating.

  “Then she told me my dad had got it, that he was showing all the signs, tiredness, inattentiveness, and his skin was so pale it looked grey. I wasn’t supposed to come home. They said I’d catch it, or it would catch me.”

  Emily was clenching her eyes closed so tightly it hurt. As he spoke, her brain was gluing fragments of glass together as thin as needles, it was his story but. . .

  Adam saw the expression on her face. “Should I shut up?”

  Emily wanted to tell him yes. She didn’t want to hear, or remember, or think. Tears slid out of her eyes without blinking and she ran her fingers through Red’s fur. “I told Todd I needed the truth. Please keep telling me the truth. Don’t stop. Even if I cry, or scream, or throw myself off this roof, tell me truth.”

  Adam nodded, and hugged himself with both arms. “At first, we listened. Mom said Dad wasn’t so bad, and for four days, she called me, and said he was feeling better all the time.”

  Emily felt a swell of anger. “She lied.”

  “Because she loved me.” Adam looked up at the sky and then down at the laces on his boots.

  “It doesn’t matter. Lies hurt the most from people you love.”

  Adam dipped his chin and drew his knees closer to his chest. His long legs made him look like a shriveled scarecrow. “On the fifth day, she didn’t call. I knew she was gone. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I did, and I lied to myself. I told myself she’d probably forgotten because dad was so much better, she didn’t think of it. And we packed up and went home.”

  “Did your girlfriend hear from her parents?”

  “Bethy grew up in foster care. She was basically alone, and she lied to me too. She told me not to worry, even though she had to know better. She was too smart not to know.

  “We headed home, and when we got closer to town we saw the planes and the smoke. The jets were burning out the dead in the center of town, and there was chaos on the roads. We had to walk the last two miles, and we were lucky not to get caught. But we didn’t see a single one of them the whole way, until I got home.

  “Mom was in her nightgown. Dad had taken off more than a chunk of her, but she was still walking. Mom went for Bethy, and Bethy jumped out of the way. I went to the coat closet for my Dad’s old shotgun, but I couldn’t do it. She was my mom, even if she was trying to eat us.

  “I think that was the stupidest thought I had my whole life. While I was sitting there, pointing a shotgun at my mom’s face, hoping she didn’t take a bite out of me, and thinking about how much I loved her, my Dad had come down the stairs for Bethy. She screamed, but not for long. Dad went right for her throat.

  “Two minutes, and all the people I could name that really loved me were gone. I shot my mother, I shot my father, and then, I shot Bethy, because she was bleeding out and there was nothing I could do, and I didn’t want to see her get up again. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  “And the world was full of strangers.” Emily put a hand on his knee and offered him his tissues back.

  Adam took them and tucked them back in his bag. He stared straight ahead and said nothing, and she thought if he stayed in that position forever he’d scare away all the birds. He might as well have been a rag doll made of cloth and paper.

  “The woman, I mean the thing, what I did back there, she wasn’t a stranger.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Before it happened, my husband, Todd, was screwing her. I saw her, I remembered, I couldn’t stop myself.”

  There was an unmistakable hint of confusion in his voice. “And you two are still married?”

  “Well that’s the thing, isn’t it? I shouldn’t be. I wouldn’t have forgi
ven him. I barely trusted him before. I would have gotten divorced. There wouldn’t have even been a conversation. I know this about myself, it’s one of the few things in me that are immovable.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think divorce is a thing anymore.”

  She gave him half a smile. “I can barely forgive him for leaving a pair of boxers on the floor. There’s no way I knew about this and everything was okay. I think I asked him for a divorce before. I must have. Todd always wears his wedding band. But I don't have a ring. I don't remember what happened to it exactly. I feel like I took it off, but he’s still around, and I can’t remember why.”

  “Because you love him?”

  “I can’t be in love with someone who isn’t in love with me.”

  “You could leave. The plant has room. You don’t have to be the only people in the world anymore.”

  There were so many things she wanted to do, go with Adam to the plant and just disappear, go home and empty a magazine into Todd’s lying mouth, but none of those things would give her what she needed. “I can’t make decisions when I can’t think. I need to remember. I need my truth.”

  “You will remember everything eventually.”

  “Will you keep following me?”

  He drew his eyebrows up in surprise. “You want me to follow you?”

  “I don’t want to forget again. If it seems like I am the way I was before, I want you to take me and make me listen. Don’t lie to me. Don’t let me lie to me, and if you have time, maybe also keep shooting anything that gets too close.”

  “I will have one kidnapping ready and waiting. Please don’t shoot me.”

  Emily laughed. “I’ll try not to forget.”

  “You want me to walk you home?”

  “No. You need to take it easy on that foot. I won’t go jogging anymore.”

  “Yeah, that hurt.”

  “Just help me get Red down and let me think I’m alone.”

  “No. You told me not to lie to you.”

  “Then take a day off and stalk me again tomorrow.”

  They climbed down, much to Red’s irritation, and walked together as long as their paths were the same. They walked in silence because Emily was walking through a world she’d never seen before.

  She lost count of broken windows she’d never noticed, cars empty, run off the road, and abandoned with their doors open. Everything had begun to rust and warp, and it was impossible not to feel the emptiness or see the strangers everywhere. The dead haunted the windows, pacing back and forth. The dead lurked and sulked and shambled. They spoke, but not like before.

  Because now she could hear sorrow instead of words, and pity, and suffering in the hollow moans that followed her home. At the end of her street, her own private avenue of strangers, she didn’t feel like she was coming home.

  All these people that she’d never known, that she’d wondered about in passing, whispered about in gossip, all the children limping in the tall grass, she’d never seen them as human, not even when they were. She never said hello, except to wave and leave them in their little worlds of ones and twos, and hopes and sadness, and love and loneliness.

  No more.

  She decided and acted in the same moment. Emily kicked through the wooden fence to the back yard of the first house on the street. There was a little girl, a dead little girl that looked like she’d been buried once but clawed back out again. Emily didn’t think. She fired. Mercy.

  In the house, she found the girl’s father, but no mother. There were only pictures of him and the little girl, some sheet music strewn across the bench of a piano. “Hello,” she said, and gave him peace.

  It was her last bullet, but no matter. She found a heavy hammer in the garage and cleaver in the kitchen drawer. She took them both.

  The next house was empty, but the house after that had two teenage boys inside. There were pictures of them in football uniforms all over the place, but no sign of their parents. She dug the cleaver in to both of them in turn and they landed together in a pile on living room carpet.

  An hour later, she had finally met all her neighbors. And they had all been beautiful people in their own private ways. There was only one house left to clear.

  She went through her front door and in to the back yard for the stepladder because she knew Mr. Johnson would still be outside.

  Quietly, she climbed up the ladder to peer over the fence. Mr. Johnson had his back turned to her, and he looked almost human. She wished she could leave him, she wished she could stand on the fence and talk to him again no matter how naked he was. “Mr. Johnson.” He turned, his head first, and then his body, because he couldn’t manage both at the same time.

  “I don’t know if I would’ve been okay without you. You were a good friend, for a dead guy.” He reached the fence, pressing himself into it, craning up to look at her, his arms awkwardly flailing. “But I’m okay now. And you are too.”

  He said nothing in return. She’d never heard him speak, not really. Even when he was alive, and they were neighbors, they’d never so much as said good morning. She brought the cleaver down on the back of his head, pinning him between the blade and the cinder block fence. The wound wasn’t very deep, and it took a little time for him to stop flailing and go lax. He fell on his back in the overgrown grass, his bloodshot eyes staring straight up at the sun, and his nasty bathrobe splayed out beneath him like a picnic blanket. The others on the street she’d left where they’d fallen, but Mr. Johnson had been her friend, his corpse at least. Him, she would find the strength to bury.

  20

  She waited for Todd sitting on the second stair. Now that she knew, she couldn’t help but wonder what he did at work all day. There was nothing interesting at the hardware store to keep him occupied for eight hours a day without any actual work to do. She was sure some of it was just to keep up the ruse of his imaginary world, but part of her just wondered if he wanted to escape her. Still another part suspected he might be just as crazy as she was, and as always, a large, and very familiar part wanted to bash him in the head.

  And his employees, all dead and zip tied around the store. She felt nauseous thinking about it. Why not just kill them?

  He got home at his usual time, but of course there was practically nothing to throw off his routine. She watched the doorknob turn and heard the jangle of his keys. It was amazing how swiftly the familiar had changed. He pushed open the door to find her sitting there. His eyes were bright and unsuspicious. Proof, she thought, that he didn’t know her at all. “Hey,” he said with a thin smile.

  The sight of his smile renewed her nausea. “How long have you known?”

  “Known what, babe?”

  Not this time. She couldn’t bear his nonchalance, his easy unconcern. “How long have you known that everything, everyone, was gone?”

  Todd frowned and closed the door behind him. “I don’t think you really want to talk about this.”

  “So- always. You knew.” She reached out to grip a post of the stair railing. “I hoped it wasn’t true. I wanted so much to hope, but there’s almost no such thing now, is there?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She snorted. “Don’t lie to me, and don’t try to make me think I’m crazy, because I might have been before, but I’m sure as hell not now.”

  Todd’s voice was completely cold. “Of course, I’ve known.”

  “I wanted to think it wasn’t only me, that maybe you’d forgotten too, at least at first.”

  Todd’s face was haughty and impatient. “There are a lot of things you don’t want to be true. And even more we want that can’t ever be.”

  Emily only nodded and stared at the wall above Todd’s head. She tried to find her own coldness, her own piece of casual cruelty. “I saw Jessica today. Did you know she's dead?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about.”

  “Another lie.” She felt her face twist into both smile and sneer. He was getting frustrated, and sh
e thought it was the best thing he could feel next to shame. “Yes, you knew her, Todd. You knew her in that extra special cheating bastard husband sort of way. Well, I saw her, and I put her down.” She held both of her fists out for him to see the blood and bruising. “I broke her face with my hands because I saw her and remembered her with you.”

  “Jesus. Em. This? We can’t go through this again. We’ve already been through. For fuck’s sake if there was one thing to remember, it’s this. You saw me. I admitted I cheated, and you were pissed for a while, justifiably livid, but not forever. You forgave me. You said you still loved me.”

  “How am I supposed to believe you? Everything you tell me is a lie. I remember telling you we were getting divorced. I remember filling out the paperwork and handing it you. I remember taking off my ring.”

  “You did, you did all those things, Em but we tore the paperwork up. You forgave me, and we tore it up together.”

  “I couldn't have forgiven you.”

  “But you did. I thought you wouldn't either, but you did.”

  Emily grabbed the railing post again and dug her nails into the wood. “Why do you keep lying to me?”

  “I'm not. This time. This time it’s the truth.” From his place at the top of the stairs, Red growled. She hadn’t washed the blood off either of them, and she wondered if Todd knew how close he was to having his throat ripped out like a squeaky little chew toy.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Even if I could believe you this time, it wouldn't make up for everything.”

  “You should be thanking me for lying to you. All I did was protect you. I protected you from yourself, and I protected you from the truth because the truth was fucking ugly. What was I supposed to say? Your parents are dead. My brother, my mom and dad, our-” He stopped and took a slow, deep breath.

  “Yes, you were supposed to tell me.” She spat out the words. “What right did you have to keep it from me, to decide what I should get to feel.” She was so angry she could feel her lips trembling.

  “You'd blocked it out, Em, not me. So, I let you, and I lied. Anyone who loved someone as much as I love you would have done the same. I had to go through it. I had to see it all, to feel it. I didn’t get to forget. I had to watch the world burn down around me, and I remember all of it. All I wanted was to keep you from that pain.”