chapter ten
The closet door is open when I wake.
I sit up and squint at the window. Blurred by the dirt and dust that streaks the panes, sunlight glares into the bedroom.
Definitely morning. I feel caked in dust, and my lungs feel constricted and clogged. I know I slept, but still I ache in every
muscle. My legs feel as though they’ve been stretched and pulled like dough.
There are voices outside my room, and I suddenly remember the thief. Pushing away my sheets, I creep to the door and press
my ear against it. Peter and Claire. I can’t hear their words, but I think they’re in the dining room. From the tone, it sounds
like an ordinary conversation. It should be okay if I shower before I face today.
I fetch the summer dress I found—it’s still in its dry cleaner plastic wrap, and it’s nearly my size. I also have fresh underwear
and sandals, courtesy of a lost gym bag that Claire discovered in a junk heap. I carry them with me to the bathroom and drape
the clothes over the towel racks next to a mismatched set of hotel towels that Peter found. As I turn on the shower and step
in, I think that Mom would like the sandals.
It’s a casual thought, but it hits me with such force that I can’t breathe.
I sag against the shower wall. I feel the slick soapy tile on my side.
Home. Mom. Sinking to the floor of the shower, I let the water fall over me.
It cascades down my face and off my chin.
I can’t tell if I’m crying or not, but my shoulders are shaking, and I’m hiccupping in air and droplets as water sprays in my face.
After a while, I reach up and turn the water off. “Enough,” I say.
I say it again just to hear my voice. “Enough.”
Stepping out of the shower, I dry myself with the (nonmoldy) towel and dress in the (clean) summer dress and wish that I hadn’t
spent the time hunting for either when I should have been finding my way home. Today, that will change. I drag a half-broken
brush through my wet hair. Today, no lessons. No scavenging. It doesn’t help me to balance on a roof better or to learn to
ignore a dead man on a couch.
I think about yesterday’s shower. I’d been so certain I’d find a way home quickly. I’d said my affirmations, like Mom—and
I’d failed to come any closer to a way out.
I won’t fail today. But I also won’t delude myself. It might not be quick or easy to find a way home. So from now on, I will
have only two goals: don’t die, and develop a plan to find a way home.
Squaring my shoulders, I walk into the dining room. Peter and Claire are both perched on chairs—one foot on the back of the
chair, the other on the front of the seat. The chairs are tilted to balance on the back legs only. Whatever I was going to
say dies in my throat.
“I’m not going to ask what you’re doing.” I walk to the backpacks. I carry mine over to the table, unzip it, and pull out
a can of pineapple. “Knife?”
Claire hands me her knife. She doesn’t lose her balance.
I contemplate the can, the knife, the can again, and then I stab the top of the can with the knife. I twist it in a circle, widening the hole. I hand the knife back to Claire. She cleans and sheaths it as I tilt the can to my lips and drink. “Want some?” I hold it out to Claire.
She takes it, sips, and passes it to Peter. He widens the hole with his knife and plucks out a chunk of pineapple, and then
he passes it back to me. We eat that way, the two of them perched, inexplicably balancing on chairs, until the can is empty
and drained.
I hold up the can. “We need to find string. Or twine. Or an electrical cord. Or something. Plus more cans. We’ll string them
together and put them where someone will have to trip over them if they want to reach the house. I want an alarm system.”
First step to not dying: secure the little yellow house.
Claire’s chair tips down. Agile as a cat, she leaps onto the table before the chair crashes to the floor. “I’ll find string!”
Peter’s lips are twitching as if he wants to smile. “And what happens when someone or something sets off your high-tech alarm
system?”
“Booby traps,” I say confidently and firmly.
Claire sighs. “I love her.”
I look in each of the backpacks. “Anyone keep any paper and— Never mind. Found it.” I pull out a pencil case and a notebook.
Flipping the notebook open, I sit on one of the dining room chairs. I sketch the house, add in the windows, lightly catch
the shadows around it as the sun hits in the dusk . . .
Claire peers over my shoulder. “Wow.”
I stop sketching. I didn’t mean to get carried away. Still, the roof needs a bit more texture. I add the hatching to indicate
the shingles. “We need a way to lock the front door and secure the windows when we leave. And we need a way to discourage
people from breaking in.” I make X’s where I think we need to add traps.
Leaving his precarious perch on a chair, Peter joins Claire and peers over my other shoulder.
I’m suddenly self-conscious about my sketch.
I should have done it in a different perspective, gotten a feel for the expanse of the desert, plus the angles on the porch aren’t right .
. . “Hmm,” he says. I don’t know if this is approval or a critique.
“The tricky part is that we need to make it look like we aren’t hiding anything,” I say. “It has to be casually inaccessible.
What would keep someone from entering a house?”
“Rabid dinosaurs,” Peter says immediately.
“Seriously.”
“I am serious. If I saw a rabid dinosaur, I’d skip that house.” He winks at Claire, and she giggles. He then mimes roaring
like a dinosaur, and she laughs out loud.
I tap the notebook with the pencil. “Anything that exists? Like, say the windows were all surrounded by boards with nails
sticking up?”
“Yeah, I’d skip that house, too.”
“Good. What else?”
He shrugs. “If it looked empty.”
I could paint the shades on the windows to look like empty rooms. It wouldn’t fool anyone close up but might dissuade someone
passing by from taking a closer look. But I don’t have the paint, and it would take too much time. I need the house to be
safe but not at the expense of my other goal. Don’t die, and find a way home. My new mantra. “Something fast and easy to do.”
“Plague!” Claire pipes up cheerfully.
Peter nods in agreement.
I hold up my pencil to halt discussion for a moment. “Just to be clear, there aren’t really rabid dinosaurs here, are there?”
Claire giggles again.
“Just checking. Okay, what about plague?”
Peter draws a symbol in the dust on the dining room table: a circle with three linking circles on top of it. A biohazard symbol. “Scavengers paint them on the doors of houses with diseased bodies inside or other kinds of contamination. Happens sometimes. Everyone calls it the plague.”
“Great! I mean, not great about the diseased bodies, of course.”
Peter smiles, and it’s as if his face blossoms. But I can’t let this distract me. I twist the white strip in my hair as I
think. “So . . . we need paint, bright for the biohazard sign,” I say. “Red, preferably. Nails and hammer, which we have.
String and cans and other loud items for the alarm system.”
“Forks and spoons?” Claire suggests.
“Yeah, that would be fine. Anything that makes a loud clatter.”
“Feral dogs,” Peter says.
Both Claire and I spin to look at the window. I retreat behind a chair. Claire whips her knife out and drops to a crouch.
I don’t hear howls or barks, but . . .
Peter rolls his eyes at both of us. “Relax. What I meant is: if a house had feral dogs, then I wouldn’t enter.”
“I don’t want dogs in the house,” Claire says. Her lower lip juts out in a pout. She doesn’t put the knife away.
Coming out from behind the chair and sitting again, I think about it, tapping my pen again on the notebook. “If we had a tape
recorder, we could record the howl, maybe a few other sounds, and then play it while we’re gone. Kind of like leaving the
radio on when you go on vacation.”
“What’s a tape recorder?” Claire asks.
Peter nods. “I may have one.”
“Then we’ll just have to get close enough for some good recordings .
. .” I try to say this like it’s no big deal.
Saunter up to feral dogs that would rather munch your face off.
Sure. Right after breakfast. “Okay, so here’s our plan.
Peter, you get the tape recorder. Claire, try to find red paint, string, and anything metal and loud we can put on the string.
I’ll start on hammering the nails near the windows until Claire returns with the paint. ”
Claire hops off the table. “Yay!”
Saluting, Peter steps off the back of the chair. It neatly drops onto its four legs. “Yes, ma’am.” I notice he isn’t talking
about leaving anymore. I don’t know if it’s because of the intruder, or if he’s decided I’m interesting again.
Alone, I hammer nails through thin boards and then hammer the boards to windowsills. I wince every time the head of the hammer
strikes the wood. The strikes seem to reverberate across the desert. I imagine the sound traveling across the sand and dirt,
through the houses, and into town where the people who want me dead will hear it as an invitation. Come to the little yellow house to kill Lauren. BYOB.
I finished downstairs and am working on the upstairs attic room window. I’m placing the nails askew so they’ll look natural,
as if a sloppy handyman chose to rip out a chunk of the window frame and didn’t flatten the nails afterward—or at least that’s
what I hope it looks like. I’ve never done much construction. Regardless, the nails are long and vicious, and I pound them
through the sill so they’ll point upward. Anyone who grabs the sill to hoist themselves inside will have a nasty surprise
and hopefully reconsider the whole endeavor in favor of breaking into a less prickly house.
By the time I finish, I’m sweating, and my clothes are sticking to me. I look out the window at the haze on the horizon—the
manifestation of the void.
Suddenly, I want to see it again. It’s my jailer. My prison wall.