Page 18 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“We’ll make a list,” I say again, in the manner of someone talking about Christmas presents. “We’ll write everything down. Ruby, you can do the writing. Mattie, you’ll help me with the inventory.”
For an awful second, I think they’re not going to comply. Mattie is going to flounce off, Ruby drift away. I don’t have it in me to jolly them along, I know that already. But to my relief, they don’t resist. Quite the opposite, in fact, which fills me with relief and a strange, sudden sort of joy.We can do this, I think,together. Just like Daniel said. The trouble is, I’m not sure whatthisencompasses.
And so I’m glad when Ruby scurries off to get a pen and paper, and Mattie cocks her head thoughtfully.
“Where should we start?” she asks, and I could hug her just for asking.
“We’ll go room by room,” I decide. “Who knows what we’ll find? You know how Granny and Grandpa kept just about everything.” And who knows what might come in useful—a spool of thread, an old pair of glasses, a loose screw. I might have to turn into a female MacGyver, which is laughable considering the extent of my DIY knowledge, especially without any access to Google or YouTube, but I’m going to try.
We start in my parents’ bedroom because it seems like the easiest to manage. The dressers are still full of my parents’ clothes; I’d planned to bundle them up for charity, so Daniel and I could place ours in the drawers, but I hadn’t gotten that far. We’ve been living out of suitcases, but now I realize I’m grateful that I wasn’t so industrious straight off the bat. My father has three heavy, cable-knit sweaters bought from a mail order catalogue, still in their plastic wrap. They’re warmer thananything I own, and they’ll come in handy, as will the hiking boots in the closet—ten years old, but never worn.
We list all the clothes and shoes and boots in the bedroom’s dressers, as well as three blankets folded on a shelf in the closet above my mother’s hanging clothes—which comprise a bunch of evening gowns she wore on a cruise about twenty years ago and never touched again. Not so useful, but who knows. Maybe we’ll find some surprising use for sequins, and at least the blankets have, miraculously, not been attacked by moths or mice.
We find other things, too, things that are poignant without being useful. In the small top drawer of my father’s dresser, we discover a collection of homemade cards and letters my children, and my brother’s children, wrote to him over the years—complete with clumsy writing in thick marker, dried glue, a few shiny grains of glitter. Mattie reads one she wrote when she was about eight and sniffs audibly. I put my arm around her, and she lets me, and then we move on.
The linen closet is no more than a little cupboard set in the wall between my parents’ bedroom and the guest bedroom we’d meant for Sam; Darlene has left everything pristinely folded, scented dryer sheets between every neat layer to keep the mice away. Ruby carefully writes down everything we have—a dozen each of fitted and flat sheets, twenty-two faded pillowcases, five more blankets.
We move onto the guest room, which, like the little room was, is now filled with boxes from when my parents sold their house in New Jersey. There are boxes of old photos, of Christmas decorations, of my mother’s knitting, balls of yarn and several sweaters half-made, missing a sleeve, still on their needles, along with dozens of dog-eared knitting patterns. We make a record of it all.
The closet is filled with more clothes—my father’s tuxedo, more of my mother’s fancy dresses, and, in a jumbled heapat the bottom, a box of ice skates from my childhood. I have a memory of skating across the lake one winter when I was about eight. There had been no snow, and the lake had been like a sheet of glass, an enormous, private rink for my personal enjoyment. The sense of freedom as I’d skated all the way across, arms outstretched, the cold wind rushing past me, had been exhilarating.
“Three pairs of ice skates,” I tell Ruby. “Sizes four, seven, and nine.” I put them back in the box and then slowly, painstakingly, with an intent focus that serves as the best sort of distraction, we continue to move through the whole house. The bathroom has three drawers full of old medicine—some of it prescription, for my mother’s thyroid and my dad’s blood pressure, as well as a host of crumpled packets, half-full bottles, semi-squeezed tubes, all of it at least five years out of date, a lot of it much more. Once I would have swept it all away, straight into the trash, but now I don’t know what we might need one day. We keep it all, document every last pill.
In the kitchen, we take stock of the food. There is an entire cupboard full of stuff my mother canned at least seven years ago—apple sauce, tomato relish, pickles, spaghetti sauce. Mattie opens her mouth as if to protest the very notion that we might want to eat this stuff one day, but then she closes it again. Ruby writes it all down.
We go through all the groceries I bought, writing everything down. Five dozen eggs. Ten kilograms of flour. Eight cans of diced tomatoes. Three cans of puréed pumpkin, for the pies I now know I will not make. Seven packets of pasta. Four of rice. Two liters of sunflower oil, one of olive oil. On and on it goes, and, while it seemed like a lot when I was boxing it all up in Kingston, it certainly doesn’t now.
The stuff from the fridge and freezer is outside, and we inventory that too—milk, butter, juice, bacon, sausages, a turkeyI’ll have to cook in the wood stove because I’m not going to waste twenty pounds of good meat, and as it has already started to thaw, I’d better do it soon. Chicken breasts, green beans, broccoli, Caesar salad kits.
“We have a lot of food,” Ruby says, sounding almost cheerful, and I manage a smile. Already I know it won’t be enough to make it all the way to summer, even if we ration it as carefully as we can.
As we work, my stomach tightens and I struggle to keep my tone cheerfully practical, as if this is a helpful exercise and not the detailing of our eventual demise.
But maybe Daniel is being an unnecessary doomsayer, and things really will be restored in a few weeks. Restored enough, anyway. Won’t the army get involved? The government will come up with a plan. I resolve to check the TV once a day for news, just in case. This might only be weeks, months, maybe, at the worst, and we could have enough food for that, if we ration very carefully.
The trouble is, I realize as Ruby writes down in her careful handwriting1 turkey, I’m not sure I really believe that, even though I desperately want to. It won’t just be months…and we won’t have enough.
We finish the kitchen and pantry, and move on to ‘Grandpa’s room’, as my kids used to call it, back when he was alive—a walk-in cupboard between the kitchen and porch where my dad kept all his bits and bobs—nails, screws, wood glue, and, yes, lots of batteries. Except when I tip them into my hand to count them, most of them are corroded with age, flaking off in my palm. Mattie sucks in a breath and Ruby looks at me questioningly, pencil poised.
“A dozen AA batteries,” I say as cheerfully as I can. I throw the rest in the trash and then dust my hands off before gazing around the little room, its jumble of junk I don’t have the energyto sift through right now. My dad used to know where everything was, could locate a certain kind of nail in seconds, but I certainly can’t. We’ve been going at this for two hours, and we still have the box room, the loft, the living room, as well as everything outside—pump house, barn, and root cellar, if I can figure a way to open its damned door.
“Let’s take a break,” I say, and silently Ruby puts down her paper and pen and then she and Mattie both, as if by unspoken mutual agreement, drift away. I stand there, staring at that room of who knows, maybe one day life-saving junk, and feel a wave of emotion crash over me—a mix of terror and grief, too great for me to withstand.
Abruptly, I whirl away from the room and dig in one of the kitchen drawers for a crumpled pack of cigarettes I saw earlier, back from when my parents used to smoke. Health scares finally made them quit in their seventies, but it was still the cause of my father’s death.
I take it and an old lighter, grab my coat, and head outside. The sky has turned a flat, whitish gray, and the air is breathtakingly cold. I perch on a pile of damp logs behind the pump house and light up. I’ve never been one for cigarettes except for a bit of social smoking at parties in college, which was more about waving them around importantly than actually inhaling, but now I suck the smoke into my lungs without missing a beat, as if I’ve always known exactly what to do.
My head swims and my chest expands, and then tightens, and I close my eyes, amazed at how, for just a few seconds, I feel something almost like relief flooding through me. I bow my head, and instantly it crashes over me again—the fear, the grief, theregret. How could I have let Daniel go without telling him how much I loved him, how sorry I was? Instead, I hugged him as if he was going to work, waved him off with a firm smile.Bye bye now. Have a nice day.
I allowed things to matter that simplydon’tanymore, holding on to old hurts instead of letting this tragedy, this complete and totalcatastrophe, put them into perspective. I’m as bad as Mattie in that regard—and then I think no, I’m worse. I’m an adult, and I should know better. I should know a lot better. I should have been completely honest with Daniel, instead of holding some part of myself apart because I was simply too scared to admit what this meant. I should have told him everything—how sorry I was, how much I loved him. I tell myself he knew, anyway, but it’s no comfort. I should still have said it. I should have been a strong and good enough person to say it.
The cigarette has burned down nearly to the filter, and I take another drag, but this time it just feels like tar entering my lungs, sticky and black. There is no light-headed buzz to bring me relief. I throw it onto the damp leaves and grind the butt with the heel of my boot as I stare into the stark and leafless trees, everything barren and brown, a forest now devoid of beauty, a palette of nothing—nothing but potential danger.
I think of the wolves howling the other night, the bears that I know freely roam this area, and probably more confidently and aggressively now, because no one has been around for years, and they might not have started to hibernate just yet. I think of the iron hardness of the earth, the bleakness of winter coming; soon it will snow,reallysnow, several feet deep, and the temperature will plummet to well below zero on a regular basis. We might freeze before we starve, I think bleakly, and that’s only if no one stumbles upon this place like Daniel seems to think they will. Yesterday, he cut down some trees that he instructed me to lay across the road at various points, to discourage potential explorers. Will it be enough to keep people away? I have no idea.
I take a deep breath, and then another, trying to summon the strength to get up, to keep going, for my children’s sake if not myown. This is day one of how many? When will Daniel be back? When will thisend?
From the cottage I hear Mattie’s voice, sounding small and uncertain. “Mom?”
