Chapter 36
Darkness found her at the edge of an unfamiliar neighborhood where the houses stood farther apart, and the trees cast shadows too deep to cross without light.
Charlotte had none. The glow from burning Tuckerton gave her direction, a red-orange smear on the eastern horizon, but not enough light to see the road beneath her feet.
She found the house by accident. Her shin struck a low wall lining a driveway she hadn’t seen in the dark.
Pain flashed through her leg, briefly overwhelming the ache in her chest, and she braced herself with one hand while the other kept hold of the watch.
The house was a single-story ranch set back from the road, its windows dark, its front door ajar like so many in the evacuated subdivision.
Charlotte approached slowly, listening for any movement or the strained silence of someone hiding inside.
All she heard was the wind rustling through the trees and the distant crackle of a fire somewhere to the east. The door opened into a hallway that smelled of old food and stale air.
She felt along the wall until she found a light switch and flipped it on out of habit, but nothing happened.
She moved through the house by touch, one hand on the wall and the other reaching out for door frames.
She found a bathroom and then a child’s room painted a soft blue that she could barely make out in the dark.
The master bedroom contained a queen bed with the covers thrown back.
Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and unwound the cloth from her hands.
The blisters were hot and tight, almost certainly infected, and she knew the antibiotics would need time she might not have.
She took two more pills with the last of the water and set the empty bottle aside.
She placed her father’s watch on the nightstand, unable to bring herself to put it away.
Sleep came in fragmented bursts. Lying on top of the covers in a borrowed T-shirt and her postal pants, she could smell floral detergent lingering on the bed, a scent that reminded her of her mother’s closet.
The memory hurt enough that she nearly moved to the couch.
The bed was comfortable, and her body had reached its limit.
For a little while, with the cough quieter when she lay flat, she managed something close to real sleep.
Then Sophia called for her. The sound was so clear that Charlotte was on her feet before she fully woke, one hand on the nightstand for balance.
“Sophia?”
The house answered with silence. She stood listening, hearing the wind through the trees and the distant fire, but nothing like a sixteen-year-old girl calling for her mother.
Her heart hammered, and the effort brought on a coughing fit that bent her double.
When it passed, she sat on the bed with her head in her hands.
The dream had been vivid. It was Sophia’s voice, her footsteps, the way she cleared her throat when nervous, and the smell of her coconut shampoo.
Charlotte lay back down and counted breaths, as she had after Jacob’s death, when sleep became something that required conditions.
She slept again, but the dream returned.
Sophia was in the basement. She heard footsteps on the concrete and water running from the faucet her father had been fixing.
Sophia called again, and Charlotte tried to answer, but in the dream, she couldn’t move toward the basement door.
She woke up gasping. The bedroom was dark and silent.
Her lungs felt full, and when she coughed hard enough to reach for the nightstand, she found only the empty water bottle.
She lay back and drifted through restless sleep populated by fragments.
There was Jacob’s face, her mother at the stove, and the maple in the yard, its leaves not turning but burning.
The third time Sophia called, Charlotte answered in her sleep.
“I’m here, I’m coming, hold on.”
Only after the words left her mouth did she wake enough to understand that she had spoken them into an empty room.
“I’m here,” she said again.
Charlotte sat up in bed, her body aching in protest, but the determination that had fueled her journey from the wagon to that moment still lingered within her.
As she picked up the watch, she realized that dawn was still hours away, and she had reached the limits of what sleep could offer her.
Lying in the dark, waiting for Sophia’s voice to return, whether real or just a figment of her imagination, felt too heavy a burden to bear.
In that quiet moment of solitude, she resolved to continue her journey at first light.
The faint glow on the eastern horizon had dimmed, but it still provided her with a sense of direction.
Though her body was faltering with each passing mile, the urgency of her quest remained unchanged. She needed to know.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching her father’s watch, she waited patiently for the sky to brighten.
Outside, the wind whispered through trees that had stood resilient long before that day and would endure long after.
Charlotte held her father’s watch close, listened to the soothing sound of the wind, and allowed herself a moment of acceptance.
She didn’t allow herself to hope for grand gestures.
Instead, she embraced something simpler and more enduring.
She allowed herself to keep moving forward.