Page 13 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Back in the cottage, I start putting away the dishes from last night’s dinner. Part of me wants to hurl each plate to the floor, watch them shatter. I want something tobreak, but I keep myself from such a pointless exercise of frightened futility. Besides, I think with a sort of macabre humor, who knows when we’ll be able to buy a new set?
I focus on the minutiae of the mundane—pick up each plate, open the cupboard, stack it inside. Take the next one, stack it on top. The clatter is somehow comforting, and yet it takes effort to do this simple chore. I have to concentrate.
As I work, my thoughts leapfrog from one impossible idea to the next. If Daniel can get gas in Flintville, he can drive to Sam’s college. Find Sam, come back here, and we’ll all hunker down together until the world rights itself again, within the same six weeks we’d been planning. I want it to be that simple, but already I know it can’t be—even though I have no idea what itwillbe. Will Daniel even be allowed to drive on the roads, if martial law is in place? Is it in place in Canada, if there were no nuclear strikes here? What is happening in the rest of the world?
As for the route from here to Sam’s college…will there be places to stay, people to help, or will the world have descended into instant anarchy like Daniel seemed to think might happen, maybe already has?
And even if he manages to get all the way there, get Sam, get back…what then? I think of what the president said, about restoring services. He made it sound as if it could be a couple of weeks, maybe months at the worst—patch a few wires, flip a few switches, and then life could get back to normal, or almost…a new normal, perhaps, but something still resembling what we knew and took for granted before.
But then I recall that footage on the TV, the nine cities that are now nothing but radiation and rubble, and my stomach cramps because there is no normal now, new or otherwise. How many people whom I know have died, including my own family?
I leave the dishes and go to the living room, slumping onto the sofa as I drop my aching head into my hands. I breathe in and out as I feel panic creeping over me like a cold mist, obscuring all thought, making my heart race and my palms dampen and my mind blank again, that awful snow-screen ofstatic buzzing in my brain.Think, Alex. Think. But what is there even to think? Do I want to think about my sister, who lives in Russian Hill, in San Francisco, and is, if this news is to be believed—and I still can’t quite make myself believe it, not in totality—almost certainly dead, her body, her apartment, her whole building caught up in the blast, vaporized in an instant or maybe just burning in endless fire? Do I want to think about my brother, in eastern Ohio, who—again, if I can truly believe what has happened, if I canacceptit—is, at best, hiding in his home with his wife and two children, with no electricity or water? His youngest son has diabetes. How will they manage his condition in this chaotic world? What if they run out of insulin? What if he has a hypoglycemic attack? Will hospitals be working there? Ambulances, doctors?
Or do I want to think about my mother, in her nursing home, half an hour from where we used to live, outside Worcester, Massachusetts? Worcester is only about fifty miles from Boston. Is she already dead? If my motherisn’tdead, is she waiting for the radiation cloud to fall on her, having no real possibility of understanding what has happened, what is coming? She’s with it, mostly, my mom, in terms of recognizing people,gettingstuff, but she’s in a wheelchair, suffers from confusion and anxiety, and has significant memory loss.
Will the care assistants stay in the home to give her and the other residents their medication, their food, as well as the reassurance they will most certainly need? Or will they panic and run for their own homes, their own families, and leave the elderly residents behind, confused and helpless and alone, locked in their memory care unit with no one at all to help them or even tell them what’s going on?
A shudder escapes me, a sound close to a sob. I can’t think about any of that. Ican’t. I have to focus on the here andnow. Take care of Mattie and Ruby. Get to Sam, somehow,somehow…
“Mom?” Mattie has emerged from her bedroom, wearing a fleece and sweatpants, her hair in a dark tangle around her face. There is a soft sleepiness to her expression that reminds me of when she was a little girl, a snuggly armful, smelling of sunshine.
She blinks slowly at me, and I wonder how I look—like I’m in a silent scream of horror and despair? That’s how I feel. There is something raw and wild inside of me, and I can’t let it out in front of my daughter. I don’t even want to let it out in front ofmyself.
Mattie looks around slowly, as if she already senses something is wrong; without the generator running, and no background electrical hum of anything at all, the cottage feels quieter than ever, a penetrating stillness as if the whole world has stopped, and in a way ithas…but Mattie doesn’t know that. And, I realize dully, I have to be the one to tell her.
“Has something happened?” she asks uncertainly, and I press my lips together to choke back the howl rising in me, forcing its way out. If I give in to it, I don’t trust myself to keep from breaking down completely, and that’s something my daughter can’t see. I take a gulping sort of breath, swallowing it all down. “Mom?” she presses, and now there is an edge to her voice, a wobble.
I gaze at my daughter, only fourteen years old, a child who likes to pretend she’s jaded and street-smart, twisting a strand of her hair around one finger, her head tilted to one side, her eyes narrowed as she waits for me to respond—already I can see her uncertainty is morphing into annoyance, just as mine did with Daniel earlier, because God knows irritation is far easier an emotion to handle. I ache for my daughter in this moment, her very last one of ignorance, of innocence. The sweetness of not knowing, and yet already it’s there in her face, the hintof suspicion, the creeping of fear, although she can’t possibly imagine what I’m about to tell her. “Mom.”
“Mattie…” How can I tell her? The words feel too big for my mouth. “Something has happened,” I state, striving to keep my voice even, although already it is wavering, breaking. I draw another breath while my daughter stares at me in growing alarm, her body tense and practically twanging, her eyes wide and dark, her finger now still, the strand of hair wrapped darkly around it. “There have been…there have been…” It’s as if the words physically won’t pass my lips.
“Mom.” This comes out in a yelp, a squeak of fear. “What’s happened? Is it Granny? Sam?”
It’s everyone. “Mattie, there have been nuclear strikes across the US,” I tell her, and as incredulous as it seems, as completely and absurdly unbelievable, I no longer have the urge to laugh whatsoever. I feel leaden inside, both heavy and empty with the impossible weight of this knowledge, even as I resist it, still.It can’t be true. It can’t be…“It happened last night. Nine US cities were…were hit.”
“What?” She stares at me, looking both disbelieving and stricken, and then she reaches for her phone and starts swiping frantically. “Nothing’s loading!” she tells me shrilly, an accusation, and I realize that this, of all things, is the sign to her that something is wrong with the world.
“Mattie,” I say, as gently as I can, “the internet has been taken out all over. The power is out over most of North America. Nothing is working right now.”
She looks up from her phone, her eyes wide and terrified, her jaw working, yet no words come out. “What…” she finally gasps out. “What…no…”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We need to go back to Westport!” This in a shriek, a demand.
I shake my head, striving to keep my voice even, my manner calm even though my hands are clenched into fists, my nails digging deep into my palms. I’m afraid I don’t have the emotional strength to handle Mattie’s disbelief, the wildness of her anger and pain, and yet I have to. I’m a mother; this is my job. My duty. And, I know, this brief moment of panic is only the very beginning. “Mattie,” I say, still striving to keep my voice gentle, “we can’t.”
Her eyes widen further, her face taut with fear, her hand clenching her phone, pressing it against her breastbone as if to anchor herself. “What about Sam?”
“We’ll get Sam,” I promise steadily. It’s a sacred vow—to her, to myself, to all of us. “Wewillget Sam.”
“If we can get Sam, then we can go back home,” Mattie retorts, and for a second, I can only stare. Then I remind myself that she’s fourteen. She’s thinking about her friends, her old life, as if she can somehow gather its shattered fragments and glue them back together again, if she can just go home. If she can just get there.
“Well, yes, theoretically, I suppose,maybe,” I finally answer reluctantly, “but Mattie, we’re safer here, farther away from the blasts, the radiation, all of it.”
“Theradiation,” she practically screeches. “Is everyone dead? Back home? Is everyonedead?”
“No,” I say quickly, too quickly. “I mean…I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not in Westport.” I rake my hands through my hair, pulling it back from my head, hard enough to hurt. The pain anchors me in this moment in a way that’s necessary. “I don’t know what’s going on,” I tell her, an admission. “How badly things…places…have been affected. I don’t think the blast would have killed people in Westport outright…”But the radiation might? I can’t make myself finish that sentence, butI don’t need to because Mattie is smart, and her eyes narrow in appalled understanding.
