14. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
The dark is absolute.
No light from anywhere. Not from the crack under the door, not from the vents, not from the bulb over the stairs that’s gone out. Just black, pressing against my eyes until I can’t tell if they’re open or closed.
The beam above me is cracking.
I can hear it. These slow, grinding sounds, the house settling, a weight overhead looking for a place to fall.
I’m curled up between the freezer and the wall with my arms over my head and my knees pulled to my chest, and I’m counting the seconds between the sounds because it’s the only thing keeping me sane.
One. Two. Three. Crack.
One. Two. Crack.
One. Crack.
I think about dying.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a scared way, though I am scared, I’m so scared I can taste metal on my tongue and my heart is beating so hard it hurts.
I think about it practically. If this is it, if this beam comes down and pins me here, if I die alone under my own kitchen, what do I want my last thought to be?
And the answer that comes up makes me so angry I could scream.
Jacob. My last thought would be Jacob. His face in my head, his hands, his voice. The way he looked this morning when he walked out without kissing me goodbye. The way he looked through the window an hour ago, closing the bunker door with Daphne right behind him, not even turning around.
He’s in there with her right now. Safe and dry. And I’m down here alone because nobody came for me.
Did he even notice I wasn’t there? Did it cross his mind to look for me before he shut that door? Or was he so focused on saving everybody else that his own wife didn’t register?
The anger is better than the fear. I hold onto it with both hands.
He was scared for me once, in that shed, so scared he yelled. I built a year on it. Under this beam, in the dark, I can’t find the man who was.
If I survive this. If I make it out of here with all my limbs intact. I’m going to give him hell.
I’m going to tell him exactly what I think about his precious Daphne and his precious guilt about her father and his precious inability to see what’s right in front of his face.
I’m done being understanding. I’m done being the good wife who doesn’t make waves.
I’m done pretending that actions without words are enough, that “I know” counts as “I love you too,” that a man who can’t say three words after a year of marriage is just shy instead of broken.
The sound changes.
The roaring is different now, less directly overhead, less like the world is ending right on top of me. Still loud, still terrifying, but moving. Getting further away.
I don’t know how long I wait. Time doesn’t exist in the dark.
It could be five minutes or five hours. I count to a hundred and start over.
I count to a hundred again. My phone is face down on the concrete where I put it and I pick it up and hold it to my chest without turning it over, because if there’s still no bars I don’t want to know, and if there are, there’s nobody I’d call.
The cracking stops. The roaring fades. The silence that comes after is almost worse.
I try the door.
The bolt sticks. Rusted or bent or jammed with debris, and for one horrible second I think this is it, this is how I die, not crushed but starving in a basement I can’t get out of.
I throw my weight against it. Nothing. I throw my weight against it again, harder, and the bolt gives, and the door swings open, and I’m looking at my kitchen.
The kitchen is intact.
I stand in the pantry doorway with my hand on the frame and I breathe. The air up here is full of dust and it tastes like plaster and it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.
Dusty, covered in debris, glass from the windows all over the floor, but standing.
I walk through it in a daze, past the counter with Aunt June’s recipe box still sitting on it, not even knocked over, past the sink where I washed dishes this morning, past the coffee cup I left by the window when the world was still normal.
I get to the foyer and I stop.
There’s a tree in my house.
A whole tree. It came through the roof and it’s standing in my foyer, roots still trailing dirt, branches spread across the floor. I can see the sky through the hole it made. Blue now. Clear and bright and clean, and not one thing about it says what just happened.
I stand under that hole and I look up at the sky and my chest cracks open with a thing that isn’t fear.
I’m alive. I’m standing here, alive, in the wreck of my own house, and my husband is somewhere else. He was fifty yards away the whole time, in that bunker, and he didn’t come for me.
I heard him go past me. I was bent over the kitchen sink with the tap coughing out what was left in the line, getting the dust out of my mouth, and he tore past behind me into the pantry and down the basement stairs screaming my name, and he never looked sideways, and I walked to the foyer while he was down there.
He’s screaming it still, somewhere behind me, a sound I’ve never heard out of him, and I stand here and I don’t answer.
He can find me the way I had to find my own way out.
Hands close on my arms from behind.
I know it’s him before I turn around. I know his hands.
I know the way he grabs me, too tight, the way he grabs me when he thinks I’ll disappear.
I know the calluses and the heat and the size of him, and for one second, one traitorous second, I want to fall into him.
Let him hold me. Pretend none of it happened.
But they did. And I’m done pretending.
“Are you okay?” His voice is ragged, torn up from screaming. “Ellie. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
I pull back to look at him. He’s covered in dust, wild-eyed, breathing hard. He ran here. He ran to me. And for a moment I want to tell him yes, I’m okay, I’m alive, I’m so glad to see you. But the words won’t come. What comes out instead is worse.
“I’m fine.”
“I thought you were in the shelter!” He’s touching my face now, my arms, checking for breaks he can’t see. “Do you know how worried I was? You should’ve gone the second the siren went. Why did you disappear?”
“I didn’t disappear.”
My voice comes out flat. Wrong. I hear it and I can’t change it.
“Jenna told me you said to wait for you. That you were coming to get me yourself.” I pull back from his hands. I need to not be touching him for this. “Everybody was gone. It was too dangerous to go out.”
His face changes. “I never said that. I said Ellie first.”
Before either of us can say the next thing, Daphne appears.
She’s picking her way through the debris toward us, her hair wild, her clothes dusty but intact, and she throws herself against him. Her arms around his neck. Her face against his chest. Her voice high and sweet and grateful.
“Oh my God, Jacob, that was so scary, you saved my life, thank you so much, you’re my hero, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.”
He shrugs her off. Hard. She stumbles back a step and her face flickers, just for a second, before the grateful mask slides back on.
I don’t wait to see what she does next. She’s in silk pajamas under a barn coat that isn’t hers, and there’s dust in her hair and not one hair out of place under it, and I understand that she has been in a concrete room full of men for an hour and come out of it exactly herself. I turn and walk.
“Ellie. Wait.”
I don’t wait. I walk through the rubble toward the stairs that are somehow still standing, and I hear him following me, his boots crunching on the debris.
“It was nothing.”
I stop. I turn around.
“What was nothing?”
“Why are you mad?”
I laugh. It’s not a good laugh. “I’m not mad.”
“Yes, you are. I know you, Ellie.”
“Yes, you do.” I meet his eyes. He does know me. He knows what my hands do when I’m lying and he knows I’m not, and I watch him know it. “And you’re right. I am.”
“Why?”
The question sits there between us, under the tree that came through our roof, in the house I almost died in while he was fifty yards away. I look at him, this man I’ve loved since I was thirteen, this man I’ve given everything to for a year, and I tell him the truth.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I thought I was going to die alone.
Maybe because when I was that scared, the last picture of you I had was you with your fucking Daphne.
” He opens his mouth to interrupt and I don’t let him.
“Maybe because after a year of marriage I still feel like I’m the only one who puts anything in.
Maybe because for two months I’ve lived with a man who acts like he hates me, and I’ve been a supportive nice wife about it.
” My voice is shaking but I keep going. “I’m tired, Jacob.
I married you because I love you. I blindly believed you felt the same, even when you never once said it.
I don’t think I have that much faith left. ”
He grabs my shoulders. “You don’t mean this. You’ve been paranoid about her since the day she got here. You’re overwhelmed. You’re not thinking clearly.”
I step out of his hands. “No. I’m thinking more clearly than I have in two months. I told you so at dawn. You went to work anyway.”
“Ellie, I-”
He stops. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, and I watch him try, and I watch him fail, and I can’t stand to look at it.
“Don’t.” I shake my head. “Don’t force yourself. It doesn’t matter now.”
“It does matter. You matter.”
“Then why don’t I feel like it?”
He doesn’t have an answer. I didn’t expect him to. He looks at the tree instead, at the branches across our floor, and I watch him look for a job for his hands and not find one.
“We can’t stay in the house,” I say. “Maybe we should take this time to separate.”
“No.”
“I need space. And I’m not staying in another house with her. And you.”
“Ellie.”
“What?”
“You can’t just leave.”
I almost laugh again. “I can do anything I want, Jacob. You taught me that this afternoon.” I make myself say it. The word I’ve never said before, not once, not in a year of marriage. “Either you give me space, or we get a divorce. Either way I’m getting out of here.”
The pain in his face, for one second, raw and real and terrifying, before anything else slides over it.
“You’re overreacting. This is adrenaline talking. Don’t do this.” And then, quieter: “Please.”
I waver. God help me, I waver. I love this man so much it hurts to stand here. I take one step toward him. One. His hands come up off his sides, ready to catch me.
And then I hear her shoes on the glass in the foyer, and I stop.
But love without action is just a prettier word for hope, and I’m out of hope.
“I have to pack,” I say.
I turn and go up the stairs before I can change my mind.
Behind me, through the wreck of my house, Daphne’s voice floats up.
“Jacob? I need your help with my things.”
“Looks like you’re needed,” I say over my shoulder, and I keep climbing, and I don’t hear him answer her, and I don’t hear him follow me either.