Parker
Chapter two
Everything is sort of slowing down. I feel dizzy and disjointed. I can’t catch my breath because I can’t stop coughing. I sink onto my knees on the sun-warmed asphalt and my empty stomach begins to heave.
He loads me back into his truck. I’m shaking so hard that I can’t make the seat belt connect.
Lance gently takes the end of the buckle out of my numb fingers and clicks it in.
“We can’t wait here. I’m taking you to the high school,” he says.
“There are tents for survivors. I think you’ll need to go to the hospital. ”
Survivor.
The word rings in my head as he puts the truck into drive and turns right, taking us toward the high school.
If I’m a survivor, then there are people who aren’t.
Lance pulls over to let five fire trucks pass, and I read the logo of the Lynchburg Fire Department on one of them. Lynchburg is about forty-five minutes away, and I realize, dimly, how bad this must be if they’re having to get fire trucks in from there.
I look behind us and put my hand on the latch. If I see Mom’s car, I’m getting out right now and flagging them down, but the road is empty except for the receding trucks.
I call my mother’s phone again. It goes straight to voicemail. I fight the tears. Not yet. I have to keep my head together so I can find them.
“Hey,” Lance says. He puts his hand on my knee. I turn and look at it and it seems so strange. Lance Broussard. Handsome, funny, athletic Lance Broussard, nine miles out of my league. He drove through fire for me. And now his hand is on my knee. How is that possible?
“Do you have some other family here?”
My throat seizes up briefly. “I have an aunt. She works for the University.”
He withdraws his hand and I feel the residual warmth on my leg. “Can you call her?” His voice sounds even.
“I don’t have her number. Mom and Aunt Shelley don’t get along.”
We’re deeper into town now. A man is out mowing his lawn. The horizon behind his house is solid black. Whole streets are gone, and he’s out cutting his grass.
Lance drives with one hand on the wheel. His knuckles are scraped raw. I don’t know when that happened.
I can still feel him wrapping his arms around me and hauling me back into the truck. I can still hear myself screaming. I don’t know how to sit next to somebody after that. I don’t know what you say.
“Why did you come for me?” I say. It hurts to talk, like I’ve been gargling glass and sand, but I can’t stop myself from asking. “You don’t even live in this part of town.”
“We’re friends, right?” he says easily.
“Right.” The last half of the word stops having any voice to it, like my vocal cords just decided to say, enough.
“Actually, no.” He pulls the truck into a drugstore parking lot and swivels to face me. He takes a deep breath. “Because I like you. I like you a lot. And I have for a long time now.”
I can’t answer. I can’t even take it in. I don’t know for sure what it means when he says he likes me. I nod stupidly, and he exhales in pure relief.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay. Could have picked a better time for that.” He flashes me a goofy smile and then turns back to the driver’s seat. He swallows. “Just sit tight. I’ll take care of you.”
I don’t look at him. I just look at my knee and cover it with my hand.
When I look up again, we’re at my high school, only it looks like a scene from a movie.
The back lot is swarming with cars even though it’s Sunday.
A big white tent has been put up in front of the cafeteria.
Whole families are sitting on the pavement waiting to be seen.
Lance puts two wheels up on the sidewalk and cuts the engine.
“Help him!” he calls out to the people at the tent, crossing over and wrenching open my door. “Come on, Parker,” he whispers to me. Then he reaches over and rubs my face with the cuff of his sleeve, smudging the tear tracks on my cheeks. He gives me a tiny, shy smile.
When I step onto the asphalt, my legs won’t support my weight. I feel lightheaded and when I try to suck in more air, I start coughing again. He puts his arm around me and pulls me up.
It’s chaos at the tent. An EMT with a buzz cut is attending to a man with sandy blond hair. Blood trails down the side of his face and onto his singed coat. The man holds his shaking hands in front of him, palm up, and I realize that they’ve been burnt.
“Daniel,” the EMT is saying. “Stay with me.”
“Rig’s out on Jefferson,” a Black woman with a clipboard says.
“I’ll take him,” a man wearing a Volunteer Firefighter T-shirt says. “He’s shocky as hell.”
“No kidding,” the EMT says. “I’m riding with to keep him stable.”
Lance puts a hand between my shoulder blades and steers me into the middle of them, close enough that somebody has to step around us.
“Help,” he says. “He can’t breathe.” I’ve just about caught my breath, but I don’t correct him.
Nobody looks up. He pushes me forward another step.
“Somebody? Please. He was in it, he came out of Denning Court, he can’t breathe—somebody has to look at him.
” I can feel the panic radiating out of him, and my voice is too torn up to calm him down.
The woman with the clipboard turns and looks at us as they walk Daniel back toward the parking lot. “Come on, sugar. Take a seat.”
I sit. I start coughing again and there are stars forming in front of my eyes.
Someone clamps a plastic thing over my mouth and I feel the cold press of air filling my lungs.
My head clears. I close my eyes and concentrate on getting that oxygen into my body.
It hurts, and this time when I start to cough, I pull the mask away and something black comes out of my mouth.
I look to see if Lance saw it, but he’s not next to me anymore.
The woman who helped me is asking my name and address, and then she asks about my family.
I have to whisper, because it’s the only way I can make the words come out.
“Angela Bishop. My mom. And my grandmother, Laurel Bishop, and my brother—Elliott Bishop, he’s fourteen.
” I don’t know the right word to hand a stranger.
“He’s got special needs. You can’t miss him, he’ll have a stuffed snail with him.
Are they here? They left before I did. They should be here already. ”
She takes it down quietly. “I don’t recognize the names, but there’s a notice board in the gym where people are leaving messages. That would be your best bet.”
“My friend. Where is my friend?” I ask the woman. I can’t see Lance, and now I’m panicked that he’s not going to be able to find me.
“He said he had to make a phone call. I can tell him where you’ve gone, though.”
I leave the tent and go to the gym. When I come in, every face turns anxiously to look at me like they are waiting for someone to come through those doors. But I am not their someone, and they turn away.
I notice the decorations are still up from the dance last Friday.
But now they are setting up cots in rows, sharing space with the art deco Gatsby banners and the proclamations that the Farley Foxes were state champions in 1996.
It’s full of people I don’t know. Some of their faces and clothes are dirty. The room smells of smoke.
I start down the rows. Every face is the wrong face.
I’m listening for Elliott—he’d be screaming in a place like this, all these people, all this noise, he’d be on the floor with his hands over his ears and everybody in the building would know exactly where he was.
I get all the way to the back wall. Mom isn’t there.
They left before me. Mom drives like a maniac when she wants to. They should have been here already.
At the back, people are milling around two cork boards. The first one says “SEARCHING FOR” and the other says “SURVIVORS.” A woman is typing on her laptop in front of the boards.
She looks up at me as I approach. “What’s your name?” she asks. “We’re putting up survivor lists online.”
“Parker Bishop.” I’m already reading the cards on the SURVIVORS board, going too fast to take any of them in. “Bishop. Are there any Bishops? They’re not in the gym, I already looked, so they have to be somewhere, they have to be—”
“Slow down, now.”
“They left first.” My voice is going. “They left before me. I don’t understand why they aren’t here.”
She comes around the table. “People are coming in pretty steadily,” she says. “The medics keep hold of some of them a good while, and they’re still bringing folks down off the mountain roads. It doesn’t mean anything yet.” She waits until I look at her.
“It’s best if you add yourself to the wall,” she says quietly, handing me a notecard.
“Leave your number there, so people can contact you, if you have another place to go. A lot of people didn’t take their chargers, so we’re passing around phones right now.
It might not be the number you expect calling, but a lot of people have been getting good news. ”
I hear raised voices near the boards. It’s Henry Drumm, my neighbor. He’s arguing with a man I don’t recognize. Mr. Drumm looks disheveled, his face flushed. The man is leaning into him, jaw set, hands balled at his sides.
“Where is she, Henry?” the man says. “Where the hell is Suzannah?”
“She was right behind me!” Henry Drumm protests. His voice is too loud for the space. People on nearby cots glance over. “I think I’d know where my own wife is.”
“Then where is she?”
“She went back in for her mother’s photo. That’s it. Two minutes. She was right behind me in her own car.” His voice cracks. “Why isn’t she here? She should be here by now. Why isn’t she here?”
Suzannah Drumm. Next door. She has light curly brown hair and she’s always coming or going in scrubs.
I remember that my mother didn’t like her.
What I don’t remember is the last time I saw her.
I find myself looking around the gym for her, the way I’ve been looking for my own family, as if wanting it hard enough puts a person in a room.