Page 14 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“If we can get Sam,” she says, her tone turning cold, “we can get Drew.”
Drew? I drop my hands from my hair as I stare at her in disbelief. Drew, her punk, drug-dealing waste-of-space boyfriend who gave her weed to keep in her locker at school for him? Who took her to parties with all his druggie friends? Who got her suspended and very nearly expelled? The boyfriend who was waiting in his car outside our house while she blithely told me she was going for a walk—and I believed her? Trusted her, in too many things? More fool me, but I can’tbelieveshe’s even thinking about him now; I thought we’d banished him, along with her social media apps—but then I realize I shouldn’t actually be surprised, that nothing’s that easy, and affections don’t disappear just because you delete an app…or because as a mother you are desperate for them to.
She’s fourteen years old; she had her heart broken, much to my own grief and sorrow. “Mattie,” I state levelly, “we are not getting Drew.”
“Why not?” she screeches at me, working herself up into a fury, fists clenched, looking ready to fly at me, tooth and nail. “You’re willing to get Sam, but not Drew? That’s notfair!”
I make a choking sound; I’m not sure if I’m swallowing back a laugh or a sob. That’s notfair, to choose my son over her horrendous boyfriend? Nuclear war or not, there is no way in hell I’m expending a single iota of energy, emotional or physical, in bringing Drew here, or anywhere. “We’re not getting Drew,” I tell her again, flatly this time. There has been anuclear warand yet we are still arguing about her boyfriend. There’s something absurd about it, and even funny, I’m almost tempted to laugh, hysterically perhaps, but Mattie has now worked herself up into a rage.
“You never liked him—”
“Drew has a family, Mattie,” I interject, “to take care of him.” Not that I have any idea what they’re like, nor do I want to know. “He’s not—he’s not our responsibility.” For some reason it sounds callous, when I say it out loud, but it’s true. It’s absolutely true.
“You don’t even care if hedies,” she flings at me, and, as much as I’m trying to hold on to my temper, I can’t. Not about stupidDrew, when there is so, so much else at stake.
“Mattie, about thirty million people have died,” I snap. “So excuse me if I’m not shedding tears over the boyfriend who almost got you expelled from school.”
Not the most measured response, I can admit that. My daughter lets out a cry like a wounded animal, and turns and darts back into her room, slamming the door behind her so it rattles on its hinges. Teenaged tantrum, Armageddon-style.
A groan escapes me, and I start to sink back on the sofa, only to still at a small, hurt sound coming from the other side of the room. I turn and see Ruby standing by the ladder to the loft, her face pale and stricken, utterly silent.
Daniel returns two endless hours later. The girls and I have hardly spoken to each other in all that time; I tried to explain to Ruby what had happened, in stilted, fragmented sentences, but she turned away from me without a word, and I decided to let it go.
There would be time enough to let the reality of our situation sink into us, ripple out endlessly. Even now, realizations come to me like aftershocks of an earthquake: Ella, my best friend from college, works as a consultant for Deloitte in Manhattan. I texted her right before we came up here, to tell her we were going. I hadn’t been very good about keeping in touch since Daniel hadlost his job, embarrassed by the whole situation. Is she dead now? Almost certainly, I think, with a shudder of incredulous horror; she lived in midtown.
And what about Daniel’s sister? She lives—lived—just outside LA, with her husband Matt and their little bichon frise, Zuzu. For some reason my mind snags on the dog, a furry white puffball with a pink bow in her hair and a yappy bark. My sister-in-law Jennifer absolutely doted on her. All of them surely dead, or at best shut up in their house to protect themselves from the radiation, with no electricity, no water, nohope.
How many others who I know, or knew, liked or loved or even just had a passing acquaintance with? Friends from high school, from college, distant cousins, friends of my parents…so many in danger. So many dead.
When I hear the crunch of tires on the driveway, I’m relieved to escape my own harrowing thoughts. I need to focus on the practical, the future.Sam. I race to the back door as Daniel climbs slowly out of the truck, looking both haggard and resolute.
“I got some gas,” he says, and a small, trembling sound of relief escapes me.
“They were still pumping at the station?” This prospect sweeps over me in a warm wave of reassurance, that things are still going on as normal somewhere.Here. Gas is being pumped, money is being exchanged, life goes on, in Canada, at least. It’s a different country, after all. It can’t be as bad as we’d feared.
Daniel shakes his head. “No, the tanks were empty, and the store was completely cleared out,” he says in a low voice. “I don’t know if it was looted or what, but every last thing was gone. Shelves totally bare. Nobody was even there, the door had just been left open. It was like…” He pauses, a long, low breath escaping him as he runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what it was like.”
A shudder runs through me, and I force myself to shrug it away. I need to stay practical. “How did you get the gas?”
“Darlene saw me driving back here and gave it to me.”
“Darlene…” Even though she’s been coming in to take care of the cottage all this time, I haven’t seen or even spoken to her in years. Probably not since my father’s funeral, and even then, only briefly, because I was exhausted, overwhelmed, in shock. She hugged me, I remember, pressed her powdered cheek to mine, told me how much she’d loved my dad, how kind he’d been. I returned the hug on autopilot, my gaze fixed on a display on the other side of the church hall, photos of the Sunday School’s nativity play. Even now I can envision the slightly blurry picture of a child in a donkey costume that I stared at while Darlene told me how sorry she was.
“She wanted to help us,” Daniel says. “And she remembered Sam, you know, from when he was little. Said it was for him, as well as for…for your dad. You know how he looked after her, since she was on her own.”
I nod because I remember, many times, my dad stopping by Darlene’s to give her a hand stacking her wood or to fix something in her house; he even left her a couple of grand in his will. My throat tightens resolutely, and I swallow to ease it. “And she had gas?”
“Yeah, in her shed, gallons of it. You know how people are up here. They’ve been waiting for Armageddon for the last twenty years.”
He smiles without humor, and I try to smile back, but my lips tremble and I feel my expression collapse on itself. “I told the girls,” I tell him on something close to a gasp. “They…” I can’t finish that sentence. I don’t even know how to; I don’t know how they are. Ruby is curled up on her bed, reading her book like her life depends on it, and maybe it does. Mattie has been sitting bythe fire, staring into space. When I tried to talk to her, she just shook her head.
Daniel nods slowly. “It’s hard to take in.” He takes a step closer to me, dropping his voice to little more than a whisper, which frightens me. “Listen,” he says, “I think it’s worse than we thought.” We’re huddled in the laundry room, the door still open to the outside, cold air rushing in. I take a step toward him, bend my head to listen. “I got some more radio reception in Flintville,” he continues in a whisper, “and Darlene saw some stuff on TV that we didn’t get.”
My stomach swoops, cramps. “And?” I force out quietly, even though I have the urge to clap my hands over my ears, singla la launtil Daniel stops speaking, untileverythingstops. I don’t want to listen; I can’t bear to know.
“No one can say for sure,” he explains slowly, “because no one really knows. But there have been reports of the sky going dark over the whole east coast…from the chemicals released, you know, from the ensuing fires as well as the initial nuclear blasts. Chemical plants, oil refineries that were near the blast centers…it all went up along the whole eastern seaboard. The air pollution will be as bad as, if not worse than, the radiation, all along there, and it will travel with the wind.”
“To here?” My voice is barely a whisper; I struggle to form the words.
