I Hope You Get This Message

by Farah Naz Rishi

  Then she saw it: a pay phone. One that, judging by the line of people beside it, actually worked.

  Adeem appeared beside her. She grabbed his arm excitedly.

  “I can try Mom again!” She’d tried calling the hospital from the police up in Clark County, but no one had answered, and eventually the sheriff had come around and ripped the phone away, saying they had to keep the still-working lines open as much as they could. But now she’d have another chance. She could make sure her mother knew she was all right, and get her dad’s full name so she could actually stand a chance at finding him in time. She dug through her wallet. “I have seventy-five cents—wait, no, make that eighty-two cents. I think that should be enough.”

  “Look at this line! We’ll be here waiting all night,” protested Adeem.

  “The sooner I find my dad, the better chance we have of getting back home before it’s too late, right?”

  Adeem hesitated.

  Before he could answer, Cate was already moving. “Excuse me,” Cate called out as she walked the length of the line. “Is there any way we can maybe cut in? I need to call my mom. It’s an emergency.”

  “Everything’s an emergency these days,” a young man in a camo hat retorted. He was probably fourth or fifth in line. “You’ll have to wait in line like everyone else.”

  “I don’t think Ranger Rick is going to let us butt in,” Adeem whispered behind her.

  “So, what, we just give up?” Cate said angrily. “Jesus, you have, like, the least drive of anyone I know.”

  A woman standing behind the man with the camo hat gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, they’re kids. If you won’t be kind now, when will you ever be?” She waved Cate over. “You can take my spot.”

  Cate beamed. “Thank you, ma’am!”

  “You just have to promise me you’ll pass on good karma,” the woman said with a wink.

  Cate made a mental note to add that to her bucket list, too. Ivy would be proud if she knew. If only Cate ever got a chance to talk to her again.

  The wait to use the phone wasn’t as long as she feared; maybe a lot of them weren’t getting through, or, like Cate, they’d already blown off most of their money, left with nothing more than a couple quarters—only enough for a short phone call.

  Or maybe it was just hard for people to find the right words to say with only two days left.

  Cate glanced behind them; it’d only been thirty minutes, but the line to use the phone had grown, with several dusty vans and RVs now parked beside Priti’s car. So many people with bags—the kind to carry things in and the kind beneath their eyes. And even more had brought young kids, as young as toddlers. Where were they all going? Were they all headed to some makeshift sanctuary like Sunfree? Or were they all on a journey to find something, or someone, lost?

  Cate shivered. The desert became unbearably cold during the nights; San Francisco hadn’t built her for anything below fifty degrees. Another reminder that she was far away from home. That if they didn’t hurry, she’d never see it again.

  “Your turn, Cate,” Adeem said softly beside her. His face, cast in shadows, looked even more gaunt than usual, like the exhaustion had whittled at his cheeks.

  She nodded slowly, dazed.

  A week ago, the idea of calling her mom in front of all these people would have terrified her. Once, during a math test, Mom had called her, trying to stay calm but unable to hide the panic in her voice because she’d misplaced her medication—and maybe did Cate know where it was? But when Cate snuck into the girls’ bathroom to comfort her mom, cradling her phone close to her chest, half the softball team walked in. She hung up on Mom without a second thought. She’d been so mortified at the thought of one of the girls overhearing her conversation and spreading rumors about her and her mom, she spent the rest of the school week tense and on edge, as though a million eyes were watching her.

  She’d been so, so stupid.

  Cate stepped toward the pay phone. “Are you sure you don’t want to call your parents first?” she asked Adeem.

  “Nope,” he said, sheepish. “Not really in the mood to hear my parents crying at me. Or asking if I’ve been accepted to MIT yet. Low drive, remember?”

  “Right.” Even exhausted half to death, Adeem was stubborn as always.

  “Anyway, we don’t have enough quarters for that.”

  That part was true, at least. Next time they came across a phone, though, she’d make him call his parents. Even if they had to beg for more quarters.

  Nervous butterflies rammed against the inside of Cate’s stomach as she dropped in a few quarters into the pay phone, hovered her finger over the keypad, and dialed the number she’d copied onto her cell phone. After a few rings, a woman’s voice answered: “Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, psychiatric unit.” Her voice strained against the background noise in the hospital.

  Cate nearly dropped the phone; a tiny sob of relief escaped her throat. God, phones were magical. She couldn’t believe she was talking to someone back home, someone who might have been only a few feet from Mom. Even though she was in the middle of the freaking desert, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

  She gripped the phone tighter. “I’m trying to reach my mom,” Cate explained, her voice shaky and thin. “She—she was admitted a few days ago in the unit. Molly Collins? She’s a patient of Dr. Michel’s.”

  Someone screamed in the background, a doctor or nurse maybe, issuing frantic commands, before a sharp beeping overpowered them.

  “Let me transfer you. One moment, please.”

  With a click, an elevator jingle, cheerful and light, began to play on the other line, which felt all levels of absurd considering Cate was standing in the middle of nowhere, Arizona, in the middle of the night, filthy and dehydrated, with a bunch of strangers and Adeem.

  Cate closed her eyes. Mom. Her one and only mom. It felt like forever since she’d heard her voice. She’d been trying so hard not to think about how much she missed her. But now she could let everything around her, like Priti’s car, and the stupid desert, and Alma, just fade away, and in this moment, she could just be Cate Collins again: a normal high school girl who just wanted her mom despite it all, despite everything.

  The jingle stopped. Had they been disconnected? She panicked. And then—

  “Catey?”

  “I’m here, Mom.” Relief and longing poured through her together. Cate squeezed her eyes tighter, but they ached, heavy with warm tears that threatened to spill. “It’s me.”

  “Oh God, I was so worried, I thought I’d”—static interrupted, making her mom sound robotic—“again. Where are you? Ivy tried to fill me in, but—but I don’t understand.”

  Ivy? Had Ivy visited Mom at the hospital? Her heart clenched at the thought.

  Cate quickly wiped her nose. “You broke up a little there. I’m okay, I’m safe. Are you safe? What about Ivy? Are they treating you right?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then the undeniable sound of muffled crying.

  Cate’s eyes opened. “Mom?”

  “Where—you?” begged her mom, her voice barely carrying over another surge of static. “Catey, I need you here.”

  Cate took a breath. “Mom, I’m heading to Roswell. I’m trying to find Dad, remember? The letter? I just need his full name, I’m so close—”

  A loud, robotic screech emanated from the phone, so sudden that Cate ripped the phone away from her ear and cringed. “Hello?” she asked when the sound finally faded.

  “I’m so sorry.” Cate heard something like a sob on the other end. “I—I can’t remember. I’m trying to remember what happened—I can’t. I need you.”

  “What do you mean?” Cate clung to the phone now, as if it were the only anchor left in the world to her mom. The wind whipped at her hair and stung her eyes, forcing the tears to leak down her cheeks.

  The phone beeped.

  “Hello? Mom? Mom!”

  The dial tone blared against her ear.<
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  Cate let the phone dangle from its cord. Her vacant-eyed reflection stared back at her in the metal side of the phone booth. She felt sick. Mom had sounded awful. And what did she mean, she couldn’t remember? Did she not remember calling the police, going to the hospital, anything about that night?

  Or did she not remember giving Cate the letter for her dad?

  Cate bent forward, suddenly feeling dizzy, and hugged her stomach. Her mind swirled with dark emotions she couldn’t understand. She couldn’t believe how horribly she’d misread the situation. If she’d just taken the time to think, she would have stayed home or with Ivy, where she’d be safe, where she’d be near her mother. But instead, she’d ditched her mom when her symptoms had been flaring, when she’d been enduring one of her hallucinations—when Mom needed her most.

  Cate should have known better. This really was all just a wild-goose chase.

  Unless . . .

  Unless some part of her had been looking for an excuse to run away.

  She swallowed down the metallic feeling tingling in the back of her throat. That woman at Ataputs said she’d known Dad. He had to be in Roswell. Maybe Mom was alone and scared right now, but finding Dad would ultimately help her. Help them both. She had to believe. She’d been clinging to it. There was nothing else to cling to.

  She had to believe that this would all be worth it.

  Or else she might just break.

  “What happened?” Adeem asked, reaching out an arm to her.

  “The call died,” Cate answered weakly, leaning into him, suddenly having a hard time standing upright.

  Adeem helped her move out of the line. Someone else had already grabbed the phone and begun dialing their own call. “Maybe we’ll find a place with cell service again,” he said soothingly, rationally. “Or even a satellite phone—that could totally work, too. God, I wish I still had my radio. But don’t worry, we’ll find a way to reach her, okay? Come on, Squidward. We’re so close. We got this.”

  His voice was soft. Cate looked at him now, really looked at him, and realized that somewhere along the road, she’d begun to trust him, fully and utterly. Or maybe she always had, since the moment he’d found her huddled in his car in the church parking lot and asked if she was okay. And for whatever reason, he seemed to trust her, too, even though she’d done nothing but make mistakes. He was no Ivy, that was certain; where Ivy was ambitious and self-assured, Adeem was nebulous and lost. Maybe as lost as Cate was.

  But maybe right now, he was exactly what she needed.

  26

  Jesse

  Jesse’s head was broken.

  Maybe his mom was right: he had a concussion. He should’ve eased up on the painkillers. He should have had that nap he’d told Corbin he was going to take.

  As if he could sleep.

  He couldn’t rest—and he couldn’t think, either; his thoughts meandered aimlessly between the crevices of his brain, spelunking so deep into the darkest depths they were never heard from again. And worse, when he did finally grasp a thought, it was all numbers.

  Numbers! Him! The kid who fell asleep in Algebra II while sitting in the first row! If he hadn’t known any better, it really was the end of the world.

  First, the time: 10:03 a.m. The last time he’d properly slept: forty-eight hours ago. Customers he’d served and messages he’d transcribed in the past twelve hours straight (in part because sleeping was a lost cause): fifty-eight, with no end in sight. Price per message: fifty dollars, raised to make up for the thousand dollars he lost at the urgent care center. The decibel levels of sound due to the nearby growing tent city: five billion, give or take—he didn’t know how decibel levels worked, but whatever. Times he’d heard fireworks/vehicle crashes/random explosions: seventeen.

  Number of nonpaying customers Jesse had to chase off: six, including none other than Tom Ralford, distributing cards for his UFOs & U radio channel.

  Channel your regrets and transitory wishes into lasting change! Tom had declared. From now until the end, only UFOs & U is offering the chance to send your messages to the people you care about, free of charge!

  Jesse just shook his head. Too late to use your dumb radio channel now, Tom. The way he figured, if it took the world ending for people to reach out to their loved ones, then they’d never loved them anyway.

  He pushed his mind back to the numbers, such as the number of steps he’d taken toward Tom before the guy pulled his embroidered safari hat farther down his face and skulked off: two.

  Times Jesse could have sworn he’d seen Marco’s fisty friend in the crowd: three. A reminder that at least some numbers would soon no longer need keeping track of, like the amount of dollars he’d have if Marco’s friend got his way: zero.

  For now, though, the numbers went on and on and on, dancing like a bunch of Alma-loving revelers around his burning skull. Lack of sleep was affecting him more than he’d thought.

  But he didn’t mind taking messages. Some of his customers were suckers—hopeful nutjobs, maybe, but not all of them were bad; some, Jesse enjoyed talking to. A lady from Illinois brought boxes full of graham crackers she’d pilfered from a Walmart; she was making s’mores over a tiki torch and handing them out to people in line for free. Jesse hadn’t had one since he was a kid, when his mom had taken him “camping” in their backyard. An older man from Portland even donated a secondhand, but exceptionally powerful, generator to make sure the machine stayed running. “This machine’s too important to let die,” he’d insisted. Jesse was almost touched.

  Most important, taking messages gave him an excuse to get out of the house. For at least a little while, he could pretend he was a normal kid with a relatively normal summer job (even if it meant pulling all-nighters)—a summer job that just happened to include seeing the worst and weirdest of humanity. He could forget that he was out here because his mom wouldn’t leave her bedroom and he couldn’t figure out how to comfort her. He could forget that he was out here because Marco’s friend was going to take everything he had because he was a giant fuckup.

  He could forget the itch in his ribs. The need to see Corbin.

  Maybe that’s why he couldn’t stop thinking about numbers. They were a defense mechanism against his thoughts of Corbin.

  Either way, the numbers kept up their stubborn dance behind Jesse’s eyes, and now he kept making typos. His customers were starting to notice.

  He’d just finished typing one such message.

  “Does this look good to you?” Jesse asked, turning the screen toward the customer, a young guy/skinny chihuahua hybrid with bulging eyes and a shaking frame, probably not much older than Jesse.

  The guy brought his face close to the screen, and his nearly nonexistent lips narrowed as he read. “There’s a typo here.” He pulled away, tutting indignantly. “Her name is spelled C-e-c-i-l-i-a, not C-e-c-i-l-i. You haven’t sent it to Alma yet, right? I want them to protect my Cecilia—I don’t even know a Cecili.”

  “I’ll correct it right away,” said Jesse, rubbing his heavy eyelids.

  “Cecilia deserves to be safe, do you understand? Cecilia Eaton. She’s—she’s everything to me. And I can’t have you typing it wrong and Alma protecting the wrong person.”

  As if Almaens, if they existed, could. As if they would.

  “Of course, I totally understand,” assured Jesse. “I know you want to protect her. I get that. We’ll get the message out there.”

  The guy folded his arms across his chest. “So, how much does this cost again? Because my little brother, Louis, came three days ago. Said it was twenty bucks.”

  “Fifty dollars for one message.”

  “Is that right? Because I could have sworn Louis said it was twenty—”

  “Prices go up with inflation. And thanks to Alma, things are inflated.”

  “Even for a fellow classmate? I went to Roswell High—you went there, right?”

  The vein on Jesse’s left temple throbbed. He was done feigning politeness. “Honestly? Even
if we did go to school together, I have no clue who you are. But lucky for you, now Alma does.” With a loud hum and whirl from the machine’s drive, two white ultra-perforated sheets of paper printed from a narrow slot. Jesse picked up the papers: two copies of the guy’s message for his beloved Cecilia with the same message translated in binary beneath it, and instructions for him for when to pick up Alma’s response, if they “deemed his message worthy” of one.

  “The machine’s encoding.” He put away his copy to keep and reached out a hand toward him. “Fifty dollars, please.”

  “Fine,” the guy said coldly, snatching his copy. “You weren’t exactly a ball of sunshine in stats class, either. Just seems a little wrong to charge so much for something people need right now.”

  His voice was dripping in sarcasm, and Jesse almost laughed. If only he knew. Hope was pricey.

  Fighter jets rumbled overhead like storm clouds; airspace was still closed to commercial jets, but the sky had never looked more crowded with glittering red lights. Jesse’s customers looked up, too; hundreds of faces of people lined up from the shed to his mailbox and down his neighborhood street. Some sitting in lawn chairs, still drinking last night’s cheap beer though it was morning now, their faces in a tight, nervous grimace as they awaited their turn with the machine. Others stood in their worn, dusty sneakers and lumpy hiking backpacks they refused to set down, probably for fear of their belongings getting snatched away.

  And all of them with desperation etched into their faces like raw scars.

  As the guy fished out the cash from his wallet, Jesse’s eyes trailed to his house, to Mom’s window. Sure, to the people in line, Jesse was some benevolent kid hacker who’d snatched NASA’s Almaen language code for public use, charging only a small fee—okay, a relatively small fee—to help them send their messages. To them, he was trying to make people happy, provide comfort in these potentially final days.