Chapter 11
ELEVEN
The screaming is coming from the stream, and Daniel starts sprinting down there, while I follow as fast as I can, my heart pounding in my chest, my mind a blur of panic. Not something else , I think. Not something more.
I half-stumble, half-skid down the path to the stream, where Sam, Mattie, and Ruby are standing on the shore of the creek, immobile and horrified, Ruby pointing toward the stream, where Kyle is wading out into the water—and soon I see why. Phoebe has been caught in the current and is bobbing along, her face tiny and terrified amid the white-frothed waves.
“What happened?” I cry, which is probably the worst thing to ask, because it sounds like an accusation.
Mattie lets out a sound like a sob, while Sam shakes his head slowly.
“It all happened so fast…” he begins, trailing off as his gaze returns to Phoebe; her head dips below the water and then surfaces again.
“Phoebe—” I call, uselessly. We all watch, transfixed, horrified, as Kyle starts swimming toward her. As he’s been shot in the shoulder a mere week ago, I’m not sure he’s up to the job; his head bobs under the water more than once. Daniel is already kicking off his shoes. Then, before he can reach the water, Kyle catches Phoebe in one arm, and someone lets out a ragged cheer. Minutes pass as he tows her back to the shore; Daniel wades in to his thighs to grab her and draw her to safety, while Kyle half crawls, half staggers, to shore, blood spotting his shirt where his wound must have broken open again.
To my surprise, as soon as Daniel puts Phoebe down she runs toward me, tackling me around my knees. I hoist her to my hip, a matter of instinct, as she burrows her face into my shoulder. It seems I’m the mom, after all, when it matters.
My gaze moves to Mattie, another matter of instinct, and I catch her glare, half anguish, half accusation. Then she runs to Kyle, dropping on her knees before him while he pats her arm, comforting her, rather than the other way round, although he is gray-faced with exhaustion and pain. His shoulder will need seeing to.
I stroke Phoebe’s hair and murmur nonsense endearments as my mind whirls at all the shifts in relationships that have happened in the space of about ten seconds. Sam is watching Mattie and Kyle, and Ruby is looking at me. Daniel comes up to me and puts his arm around my shoulders.
“She okay?”
I nod, still stroking Phoebe’s hair. “I think so.”
“I’ll build up the fire. That water is cold.”
Belatedly, I realize poor little Phoebe is shivering. I glance at Mattie again, and see that Kyle has his arms around her. I hoist Phoebe up a little further on my hip, and then up the path to the campsite.
Later, when a warm and dry Phoebe is napping, I go find Mattie. She’s sitting back by the stream, hands clasped around her knees, a blank look on her face that reminds me of Nicole .
“Hey.” I speak gently, like I would to a skittish animal, as I come to sit next to her on the bank of the stream. The current that seemed so treacherous a few hours ago is now tranquil, sunlight glinting off its placid surface. “Phoebe’s okay, Matts. It wasn’t your fault.”
She turns her head to glare at me, her eyes full of accusation. “Why would you even have to say that?”
“I…” I stare back at her helplessly. “Because you were looking as if you blamed yourself,” I finally answer. “And I wanted to let you know that you didn’t have to.”
She curls her lip, disdainful now. “You don’t even know what happened.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes, or maybe even scream. First I’m accused of blaming her, and then of exonerating her. I can’t win. But I think I knew that already. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, then?”
She hunches her shoulders as she rests her chin on top of her knees. “She was splashing around in the shallows and I was watching her. Sam and Ruby were skipping stones, farther upstream. And I just…I don’t know, I just started thinking …about what that guy, Mr.Stratton said, yesterday. About eighty percent of everybody dying.” She turns to face me again, and now her eyes are filled with tears. “That’s like, all our relatives, isn’t it? Aunt Sharon and Uncle Matt and Grandma and Grandpa…”
My sister and brother, Daniel’s parents. My throat turns tight as I swallow, nod.
“We can’t know for sure, but…”
“But probably,” Mattie finishes, dropping her chin back onto her knees. “Almost certainly. And what about my friends? And Drew. I don’t care about him anymore,” she assures me hurriedly, impatiently, “but I don’t want him to be dead .”
“No, of course not,” I reply quietly. “Neither do I.”
She lets out a huff of laughter like she doesn’t believe me, and I let it go. It’s hard enough to think about those we loved dying, never mind all the incidental people who made up the complicated fabric of our lives. Randomly, our mail carrier, of all people, drops into my mind—a smiling, cheerful woman with curly hair and freckles. If she caught me at the door when she was delivering a package, she’d always stopped to chat. It annoyed me a little, made me impatient, to have to suffer through five minutes of meaningless chitchat with someone I only knew a little bit. Now I wish I’d invited her in for tea and cookies.
Mattie suddenly lets out a choked sob as she doubles over. “I don’t want this life,” she gasps out, the words torn from her, rending her apart. “ I don’t want this life! I thought I could hack it if I was strong enough, but I can’t, I can’t , I don’t want to.” She’s choking and gasping and retching, rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped around herself as tears spill from her eyes. I want to hug her, pull her into myself, and give her all the reassurance I know I can’t, because there simply isn’t any for me to give.
“Mattie…” I say helplessly, tears coming to my own eyes as I pat her shoulder; I know she won’t accept a hug. “Oh, Mattie.”
She shakes her head, rejecting what paltry comfort I can give. She’s been so strong, my girl, for so long, that I started to believe she was okay with it all. She could handle it, even as I made noises like I was worried she couldn’t. I’m angry with myself, and aching for my daughter, and there’s nothing I can do about anything.
We might both hate this life, but it’s the one we have.
Mattie straightens, wiping her eyes, and I feel her retreating from me, erecting her armor around herself like an invisible, iron shield. “Don’t take Phoebe from me,” she states flatly, and I struggle not to gape at her.
“Mattie, I?—”
“You don’t even like her that much,” she throws at me, and now I just blink. “I know I should have been watching her better, and she ran to you, but…but…” She sputters and trails away, and I’m pretty sure I know what she’s not willing to say. She’s mine . Phoebe has become my daughter’s security blanket, her teddy bear, and can I fault her for it?
“Trust me,” I tell her quietly. “I’m not taking Phoebe from you.”
She glares at me then, like I’ve said something wrong, and I resist the urge to throw up my hands. I can’t win. We could be back in Connecticut, arguing about her phone. I’m tired of this, tired of it all, but I’m the mom, so I have to keep soldiering on.
“We’re going to pack up,” I tell her, a little abruptly. “Leave tomorrow morning for North Bay.”
“North Bay…?”
“There’s a compound there, bigger than Buffalo. It could be a safe place for us.”
She narrows her eyes, like she’s thinking about asking me a million questions, and then she just gives a terse nod.
“Fine,” she says, and she rises gracefully to her feet, striding away from me without looking back.
I stare out at the now-placid stream and wonder why, when we most need to stick together, we all seem to be splintering apart.
We leave the next day at dawn, when the sky is still pink, and Phoebe is half-asleep in Mattie’s arms. The truck bed is loaded up, a tarp pulled tight across. There is a feeling in the air, almost metallic, of both expectation and dread.
Last night, Daniel and I lay awake in our tent and whispered the possibilities, like promises or threats, depending on how we felt.
“It might not even exist…” he warned me, or maybe himself. “I mean, as a safe place. It could just be an empty underground hangar full of Cold War computers and dust.”
“Or it could be filled with people we don’t want to meet, toting AR-10s and hand grenades.”
He rested his chin on my head. “Kind of stupid, to throw a grenade in an underground complex.”
I let out a soft breath of laughter. “True. But even if we make it there, they might just throw us out.”
“Or they might welcome us in and give us hot showers and a square meal. I’m thinking burgers. Organic beef from Alberta.”
It’s too tempting to imagine. “Or they might lock us inside,” I replied.
“Hmm.” With his chin on my head, his voice thrummed through me. “There could be worse places to be.”
“That’s if we get there in the first place.”
Daniel looped his arms around my waist and drew me close. We’d touched more in the last few days than we had in months, maybe even years. I pressed my lips to his throat and closed my eyes.
“You know we don’t really have a choice,” he said, his voice caught between wryness and a sorrow I didn’t want to think about. Even in his lighter moments, there has been a grief in Daniel that tears at me because I don’t know its cause.
A sigh escaped me in a soft gust. “I know we don’t,” I told him. “But I’m still scared.”
“I think we’ll always be scared. It’s just learning to live with the fear.”
I smiled against his skin, determined to lighten the mood. “I think I saw that on Instagram, with a picture of someone climbing a mountain or something. Or maybe it was on a coffee mug.”
He laughed softly and pulled me closer.
“Daniel…” I felt him tense, even before I’d said anything, an d I knew he knew what I was going to ask. “Do you think you and Sam…”
“I can’t tell you if we were affected by the radiation,” he answered me quietly. “But I did my best to protect him, Alex, I can promise you that.”
I inched back so I could peer up into his face, but it was too dark to see his expression. “And what about you? Did you protect yourself?”
His arms tightened around me again. “I did what I could.”
Which, I reflected, wasn’t much of an answer, but I accepted it because I had to…and the truth was, I didn’t really want to know.
Now, as we climb into the truck and leave the little idyll we created for ourselves over the last week, I try not to think about those terrifying what-ifs. The journey ahead of us is frightening enough.
Daniel traced it on the map last night—one hundred and eighty miles on Route11, heading northwest and then straight north. It’s a two-lane highway that cuts through the woods north of Toronto and Barrie; Daniel assured me we’d be no closer than one hundred and twenty miles to a blast site, and we wouldn’t go through any town centers.
“We could do it in a couple of hours,” he insisted. “It’s a fast, straight road, and we have enough gas.”
That’s not accounting for anyone unfriendly we might encounter on the way, or the very real possibility that the air base in North Bay will refuse to take new people, or isn’t a safe place to begin with. There are far too many variables, and yet, like Daniel said, this is our best option. Really, it’s our only choice.
I spare one last, longing glance at the little stand of trees that felt like the next best thing to a home, and then Daniel drives through the meadow, onto the empty road circling the park, and then turns right onto the road that leads to Route118 and then Route11 north, and to our future…whatever it might be.