Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
In January, when the snow is three feet deep and Red Cedar Lake has frozen hard, when the weather is so breathtakingly cold I don’t move an inch at night lest I encounter the icy bed sheet, when darkness descends on the camp before five o’clock, Daniel dies.
Death, I have found, always comes as a shock. My dad had terminal cancer for months and yet, when he actually died, it jolted me as if he’d been perfectly healthy all along. That’s how it is with Daniel.
He continues to ebb away, sleeping more and more, and being less alert and present when he’s awake. We take turns sitting with him, coaxing him to eat, but by early January he starts refusing all food and that’s when I know the end is looming. Even then it feels like a shock, an insult, because death isn’t natural, I’ve found. It’s wrong. At least, it feels wrong, something to rail against even as you have no choice but to accept it, however you can.
I’m sitting next to Daniel when he dies. For the last few hours, his breathing has become more labored and sporadic, the deep, even breaths of sleep now sudden, gasping breaths, with longer and longer spaces between each one. I’m holding his hand, which feels limp but still has the warmth of life in it—his heart is beating, blood is coursing through his veins, he is alive .
And then he isn’t. It takes me about a minute to realize he’s already taken his last breath. And then just a minute later, he feels very much dead; his body is completely still, immovable, the warmth already stealing away from it. I slip my hand from his and I kiss his cool forehead and then I walk quickly from the room because I know I don’t want to sit with my dead husband.
I want to remember him as he was—alive, funny, thoughtful, giving, warm.
I don’t cry. Some things, I suppose, are too deep for tears, and in any case I know they will come later. For now, I focus on practicalities. I head toward the main cabin, where a handful of people are sitting by the fire—Mattie, Ruby, Sheryl, and Patti. The boys are fishing, and everyone else is somewhere around the camp. I draw a breath, and Mattie gives me a sharp, knowing look.
“He’s gone?” she says, not quite a question.
I nod. I feel my composure start to crack and I have to take another breath, this one more of a shudder, to keep it in check. “I’m sorry.” I come over to my girls and put an arm around each of them, and for a few minutes we simply sit there, clinging together, no one able to say a word.
This is the beginning, I realize distantly, of a new life, a lack of life, a life I didn’t want, and yet here we are.
The next few days pass in a blur of activity, a haze of grief. The ground is too frozen for a burial, but then Kyle remembers how we buried Darlene, just over a year ago, by burning the ground and loosening the soil. He and Sam do it together, and I watch from the main cabin, their solitary figures silhouetted against a wintry sky.
We have a funeral out by the lake, and Stewart, the minister I haven’t yet gotten to know, reads a Bible verse while I stare straight ahead and try not to break down in front of everyone.
“ Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines …”
My head jerks up as I stare at him in shock. That verse? Now? Then I realize that Daniel must have read the index card stuck in the sun visor too, and it must have resonated with him just as it had with me. He must have told Stewart about it and planned to have it read here. It’s something we never shared with each other, as there are now so many things we won’t share, and that realization is enough to have me doubling over as grief finally forces me to break.
I’m not that strong, after all. Not like Daniel thought. I’m weak, horribly weak, and it’s on show to everybody.
Sam, Mattie, and Ruby all put their arms around me as the sobs rack my body, impossible to stop. Grief can’t always be contained or controlled and mine rises up and overwhelms me while everyone watches, and I don’t even care because I simply have to cry. Daniel . My Daniel. Even now, especially now, I can’t believe he is gone, that I won’t get to tell him again that I’m sorry, our gazes won’t meet, full of wry humor as we know exactly what the other person is thinking. I won’t rest my head on his shoulder, he won’t hold me in his arms. I won’t become annoyed by the way he crunches his cereal or clears his throat before answering a question. How can I not have all these things, forever?
The sobs continue to shudder through me, and my children hold me up until I can stand again, wiping my face, whispering my thanks, and Stewart continues reading from Habakkuk.
Afterwards, we head inside for refreshments, of a sort; Sheryl made a cake with precious flour and sugar, although I find I can’t eat anything. My stomach is both hollow and churning, and the future has never looked bleaker. I can’t face the next hour, never mind the next day or week or month. And what’s the point, anyway? What future am I hoping to forge, anymore, without Daniel by my side, holding me up and urging me on in his sure and quiet way?
I end up slipping away from the muted gathering and heading outside to the lake, where I can breathe, even though it’s icy cold. I carefully walk down the cleared path through the snow to the dock and stand there, breathing in the freezing air, my face tingling with the cold, staring out at the blur of blazing whiteness that is the snow-covered lake.
Daniel…
I can’t think about the future; I can’t think at all, and so I simply stand there, and let myself empty out. Then I hear the crunch of boots on snow behind me, and then a voice.
“I know you probably want to be alone.”
Nicole . I close my eyes, tilt my head to the sky. Yes, I very much do.
“I also know there’s nothing I can say right now to make this remotely better. I just…” She blows out a breath. “I admire you, Alex. I know I haven’t acted like I did, but…I do. And…you’re not alone in this, okay?” I hear the hint of a smile in her voice as she adds, “And that is absolutely all the sappiness you’re going to get from me.”
“Good,” I manage to reply even though my voice is hoarse from crying; I’m an empty husk, blown on the wind. “Because that is definitely all the sappiness I can take.”
A month passes, I’m not sure how. Days slip by and I immerse myself in work—sewing, cleaning, baking, sinking my hands into the soil of the greenhouse. Whatever I can do to keep busy, not have to think, or, worse, remember.
For a while it works, but then it stops, and it feels like all I can do is think—and remember. I see Daniel everywhere; I hear his voice, I know what he’d say in any given situation, I can picture his wry smile perfectly. At night I know exactly how it feels to have my head resting on his shoulder, his arms loosely clasped around me. When we’re sitting around the dining table, I can picture perfectly his cocked eyebrow, hear his dry remark…
Strangely, this is no longer a torment but a comfort. It almost feels like he’s there, this ghost version of him that walks by my side. But in the meantime, as much as I long to, I can’t live in this shadow world of grief, because I have five children to think about—my own three, as well as Kyle and Phoebe.
And life, for them, needs to go on.
The first flicker of something new happens in early March, when the snow is still deep but the days are warmer, if not actually warm. Vicky comes to find me in the kitchen, where I’m peeling carrots with Sheryl.
“Alex.” There’s something deliberate about her tone that gives me pause, the peeler in my hand.
“What is it?”
She glances at Sheryl and then says, “I just had a radio communication from a place in Winnipeg. They heard that the U.S. has set up a temporary government in Watford City, North Dakota.”
“Watford City…” I haven’t heard of it, but I recall the rumor from the Strattons that the government had moved to North Dakota. “I heard they might be doing something out there,” I say, unsure why she’s telling me this in such a deliberate way, with such emphasis.
“Not just that,” Vicky continues. “They’ve put a kind of callout to American citizens. They want to populate several communities up there, restart civilization, as it were. They’re going to collect people from various places. Mackinaw City is one of them. That’s about three hundred miles from here.” She stops then, deliberately, and waits for me to catch up .
I stare at her, sensing where she’s going with this, and yet resisting it out of both instinct and fear.
“Do you…do you want us to go?” I ask uncertainly.
“No,” she replies quickly. “It’s not about what I want, Alex. But you’re American, and…maybe I’m wrong here, but I always got the sense that you would, one day. That you wanted to be part of something like this, eventually. Something bigger than what we’re doing here.” She pauses before admitting, “Daniel told me as much.”
Daniel, heckling me from the grave, pushing me forward even as I resist. The thought almost makes me smile, even as I am accosted by both fear and grief. “I suppose I did,” I admit slowly. “Once. But when it actually comes down to it, now…”
“You can think about it for a little while. If you decide to do it, we can contact them by radio, learn a little more, as well. And we can give you enough gas to get you to Mackinaw City.”
I shake my head. “You need it?—”
“No,” Vicky returns, smiling. “I don’t. I’m staying here. We all are. We’re happy here. But you…” She pauses, considering. “Alex…I think Daniel really understood you. He knew you needed something different.”
I think about it on my own for three days, my thoughts pinging around like the proverbial little metal ball in a pinball machine. Vicky gives me a little more information she’s gleaned from the radio: there are twelve settlements that are going to be the start of a new United States of America, and the government is building more infrastructure to support them.
For the moment, the entirety of the United States is concentrated in northern North Dakota, and they will expand from there. There’s estimated to be less than five percent of the U.S. population still alive, around just seventeen million people scattered across the wasted country. Before the bombs, North Dakota had a population of less than a million. There’s going to need to be a lot of building. Of growing. Of hoping. Of believing. But it’s also going to be hard, and unknown, and I really don’t know if I’m up for it. Yet for my children’s future…for the chance for them to have a life that is more than survival, as pleasant as that has sometimes been here at Red Cedars…
Can I risk it? Do I want to?
I decide to put it to everyone else. We gather in the cabin, everyone looking as serious as if I’m about to read a will—and, in a way, I am. This is Daniel’s legacy, I know it is.
We can make a life for ourselves here…
He always had more vision than I did. Then, back at the cottage, when he saw us homesteading and I dismissed it as playing at pioneers, and now, when I’m facing something that terrifies me but that he believed I could do—and he told me so. This is as much about Daniel as it is about me.
“Mom,” Mattie asks, sounding urgent. “What is it?”
Haltingly, I tell them about Mackinaw City, North Dakota, these new settlements that will form the bedrock of a new America. About the idea, the hope, of helping to build something bigger than ourselves. I tell them about the schools that will be starting, the towns that have already been founded. It’s not what we once knew, but it’s an approximation of it. It’s more.
For a few seconds, all I get back are silent stares. No one looks particularly impressed or enthused by all I’ve said, and I can’t blame them. We’ve faced so many unknowns in the last year. Do we really want to face another one, and one as big as this?
“What do you guys think?” I ask uncertainly.
“It’s not going to be like the NBSRC but just… bigger , is it?” Kyle asks, sounding distinctly unhappy about such a possibility.
“I don’t think so,” I reply, “but the truth is, I really don’t know. I think, at least I hope, it will be more an attempt at—at living real life again, but…in North Dakota.”
“This is real life,” Mattie shoots back, sounding fierce. “This is very much real life, to me.”
“Of course it is,” I murmur. “I just mean…more the way things used to be.”
“We can never,” she declares, “go back to the way things used to be.”
Inwardly, I sigh. When Mattie is in a fighting mood, it is impossible to say the right thing. “You’re right,” I tell her, and even that makes her glower.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” Sam ventures after a moment. “I mean, it’s pretty great here in some ways, but it feels…like summer camp.” He glances around at all of us, caught between guilt and excitement. “Or, I don’t know, like a time out of reality. I’m not…I’m not sure I want to spend the rest of my life at Red Cedar Lake.”
Mattie looks like she wants to argue, but Ruby gets in there before she does. “I want to go with you,” she says softly, staring at me. “Wherever you go, I want to go.”
Mattie is glaring at me accusingly, like I’ve turned everyone against her. “Mattie?” I ask gently. “What do you want?”
She gathers Phoebe to her, holding the little girl closely, her expression both defiant and afraid. “I want to stay here,” she declares, her voice trembling. “I’m going to stay here.” She glances at Kyle, and I watch as some silent communication passes between them, and then he gives a little nod.
“I’m going to stay here, too,” he says.
I deflate, a little; I realize I’m disappointed. As scared as I feel, I know by my reaction now that I wanted to go to North Dakota. I wanted to try this. For Daniel’s sake, but also for my own. But I can’t go without my daughter, and I of all people know when Mattie won’t be moved.
“Okay,” I say after a moment. “Then we won’t go. ”
Sam deflates, his breath leaving him in a defeated gust, and Ruby tucks her knees up to her chest. I realize then that I am not the only one who feels disappointed.
Then Mattie lifts her chin, her eyes flashing as she gazes steadily at me. “This doesn’t mean, Mom,” she states, “that you can’t go.”
I stare at her blankly. “What are you talking about, Mattie?”
“You can go,” she reiterates, her voice coming out stronger now. “All of you. You want to, and you should. But Kyle and Phoebe and I…we’re staying here.”
I let out a huff of disbelief. “I’m not going without you.” I’m certainly not leaving my sixteen-year-old daughter alone, living out some romantic fantasy with her maybe-boyfriend.
“I’m sixteen,” she tells me. “An adult.”
“No, you’re not?—”
“In this world, I am.” She cuts me off, sounding very certain. “I can make my own choices, and so can you. And Sam and Ruby can, too.” She glances at both her siblings. “If that’s what you want, you should go. I mean it. I get it, there’s a life for you out there, and you should take it. But I’m staying here.”
I shake my head slowly. The Mattie I know and love would have been up for it, I realize. The challenge, the adventure. What has changed?
“I don’t want to keep running,” she tells me, a tremble to her voice. “I’m happy here. Kyle and I are happy here…together, with Phoebe.”
He puts his arm around her, and my jaw slackens. I suspected something was going on, but…this? This much, at their age? I should have had that conversation with her. I should still have it.
“I’m not going,” Mattie says again. “I don’t want any more than this. I really don’t.”
And now she sounds like Daniel. Can I blame or begrudge her for her choice? I know already that I can’t. And yet…what about Sam, Ruby? What about what they want, what life can they make for themselves?
And what about me? There’s no way I can leave my daughter. Everything in me cries out against it, and yet…
And yet…
“Mom,” Mattie says, and now her voice has turned achingly gentle. “I really think you should go.”