Page 63 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Ten miles pass emptily, without a single car. Then he comes upon the town of Clarkson, which is like every other town he’s seen, a mix of abandoned buildings and barricaded ones, homemade signs warning about private property, guard dogs, that trespassers will be shot. He sees a homegrown militia patrolling ahead and swings a hard right to avoid them. His breathing has evened out, and he wipes his face, composing himself. He’s going to find Sam. In a few hours, maybe even a few minutes, he will see him.
At the gates of the college, he stops. There are half a dozen Marines, genuine military, barring the road. The college is on a hill, surrounded by a brick wall of middling height; no wonder it’s being guarded. Just three months ago, he drove through those gates in his station wagon, Sam’s stuff piled in the back, Sam practically bouncing in the backseat. They’d left Mattie and Ruby at home with family friends, so they could do this, the three of them—him, Alex, and Sam. He’d lost his job two months before, but they hadn’t told Sam about it. He’d still been hiding the truth about the house. Really, that day was a mirage, a facade, but he remembered feeling happy.
Slowly, his hand shaking, his heart beating with slow, heavy thuds, Daniel rolls down the window. One of the Marines steps forward, eyes narrowed, his hand on the assault rifle strapped to his chest. Daniel knows he will use it in an instant, without a qualm, without a quaver.
“This is private property,” he tells Daniel, his tone flatly forbidding. “You need to turn around right now.” He doesn’t say it like a threat, more a simple statement of fact; and yet Daniel feels his limbs go watery.
His hands tighten on the steering wheel as he takes a deep breath. “I’m looking,” he says, his voice coming out strong, “for my son.”
TWENTY-ONE
February, two months later
“I don’t think I can do this.”
“Well, I knowIcan’t.” Kerry’s voice holds a hint of laughter as we stare down at the dead beaver lying on top of the picnic table. It was already enough of an effort simply to get it here from across the lake; fifty pounds of dead weight is no small thing, and the truth was I was doing my best not to touch it, at least not too much. The result being that Kerry and I heaved the thing onto a toboggan and sledged it across the frozen lake, trudging knee-deep in snow. Then we dragged it by its hind legs up to the cottage, probably not the best way to transport the animal. It was frozen solid, so we’ve had to wait to let it thaw out a bit before I get to do the dirty—skin and prepare it for its meat. Ruby’s book on sustainable living doesn’t cover wild animals, but there is a page on how to skin, joint, and disembowel a sheep, and I’m hoping that the process is at least somewhat similar. Not that I want to do any of it. Not remotely.
Still, this is what I signed up for, when I optimistically and officiously called our town meeting two months ago, and sold everyone on the idea of making life work here for all of us.
“Not just as a temporary measure,” I explained, “but as a way to live. Because we don’t know what the future holds, but we’ve got enough here to make a life for ourselves, if we want to. If we try.”
“Thrive, not just survive,” Mattie interjected, and I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.
“Well, yes,” I agreed after a pause, although the idea of thriving in the middle of a nuclear holocaust seemed a little ridiculous even at the height of my optimism, but it was what Daniel had said we could do, and for his sake—and maybe his memory—I wanted to try.
And wearethriving, sort of, at least more than we were. Kyle and Mattie worked together to build a greenhouse, made out of the old windows and lumber from the barn and heated by the chiminea. Seeing my daughter confidently wielding a circular saw—we turned on the generator for that—made my heart swell with pride. It’s not the strongest or most solid of structures, admittedly, but it catches the sunlight and keeps the heat in. Mostly.
Ruby planted the seed potatoes in the soil; we used the bags of old compost in the root cellar, mixed with vegetable and fruit peelings and cores, to give it more nutrients. It was Kerry who had suggested that; apparently, it was something her mother did. Darlene’s wisdom lives on.
Three weeks ago, the first shoots sprouted through the soil, tender and green, the very definition, it felt like, of a miracle. Ruby hovers over them like a nursemaid, and we all work on a schedule to make sure to keep the chiminea well stocked and burning day and night. We had chosen to grow potatoes sincethey were hardy and, according to Ruby’s book, which we now consult religiously, they preferred cooler soil.
We’ve had to cut more firewood, a never-ending need that’s left our hands blistered and our backs aching. Kyle and Kerry hauled deadwood from the other side of the lake, building a pile to dry out under a tarp, and Kyle went out to cut down as many of the smaller dead trees around the cottage as he could find. We all took turns, even Ruby, wielding the axe to split the trees into logs. Something that looks easy onLumberjacks: Extreme Competitive Loggersports, which I’d watched a few minutes of, bemusedly, while flicking through TV channels, is, in reality, extremely difficult and exhausting work. But we did it, and now the basement and porch are both stacked high, and there is more outside—not enough, it’s true, and it will always be a huge need. Heating the house and the greenhouse by wood alone means we burn through alot.
We have fallen into a daily routine that seems to work for everyone, taking turns fetching water, making breakfast, building fires. Kyle, Kerry, and I each take turns on a patrol of the road, down to the end of the drive, going in pairs, simply to see if anyone has been about, but thankfully so far, we have been left entirely alone. The logs across the road, the removal of the gate and the road sign, are, I hope, enough to keep people away, even those crazed men from Corville.
Mattie wanted to take turns patrolling as well, but I refused. She helps Ruby with her schoolwork in the morning, and I have insisted that she at least do some of her own reading.
“I’m already getting an education, Mom,” she told me with a theatrical eye-roll, gesturing to the cottage, the lake, the entirety of her existence.
“Yes,” I agreed, “but you still need to read.”
And so, she’s working her way through my dad’s library, an eclectic mix of classic novels, Isaac Asimov science fiction, andLouis L’Amour westerns. It’s not the education I once wanted for her, but it is, in some ways, better than what she was getting.
We have had our moments of pleasure too—we dug out the ice skates and cleared a rectangular rink on the lake, once it had frozen solid, and both Mattie and Ruby learned to skate, Kyle slip-sliding in his sneakers, yelping with fear every time he nearly fell. We went sledding on the big hill behind the old barn, dragging out the old toboggan from my childhood, the same one that carried the dead beaver back home. We’ve had an epic tournament of Go Fish and Spit, with Mattie tabulating the rankings, and in the evenings, if we’re not too exhausted—and often we are—we sit around the fire, listening to Kyle play my dad’s old guitar. He can barely do more than pluck at a few chords, but it’s enough for us. I’d missed music, I realized, along with so many other things. I used to miss the convenience of our old lives, but now I find I miss its beauty—music, art, a well-crafted film. Looking in the window of an art gallery and seeing a hand-thrown glass vase, colors glinting in the light. Reading an interesting opinion piece in theNew York Times. I even miss the comforting hum of a coffeemaker, the whirr of a tumble dryer, sounds of security and safety, so unlike the quiet and stillness that permeates our lives now.
And yet there is beauty here, too, glorious beauty—in the untouched sweep of snow on the frozen lake, the sky a deep, frigid blue above. In the whisper of the wind through the trees, and the utter stillness after a snowstorm, when their boughs are heaped with snow, as softly mounded as icing. There is even beauty in the menacing—one morning I woke up early and, as the dawn mist was clearing the lake, I saw a lone wolf standing in the center of it, its head lifted to catch a scent, its eyes piercing and blue even all the way from where I stood by the window, cradling my cup of hot water, since we’d run out of coffee weeks ago.
The wolf stood there for a moment, its body perfectly still and taut, the moment feeling suspended in time, almost as if it could go on forever—and then it loped off, into the trees, leaving me alone, arrested by the stark, eerie beauty of the moment.
So, yes, we have created lives here, and, while I’m proud of all our achievements, there is still a ribbon of loss as well as fear running right through its center. This isn’t the life I wanted for myself, or, more importantly, for my daughters. We’re all making do, and trying to act like it’s enough, when in the moments of silence, of sadness, when my arms are aching from chopping through the ice or hauling water, when the blisters burst on my hands and blood runs down to my wrist, when Ruby cries in her sleep and nothing I can do will comfort her, when I see Mattie staring off into the distance and I consider how lonely she must be, fighting despair at what her future holds, or, more importantly,doesn’thold, can never hold…the truth thuds through me that this will never be enough.
Worst of all is when I have let myself think about Daniel. It will be three months next week since he left us. I can’t let myself believe he’s actually gone,dead, even though the leaden certainty lining my stomach tells me he is. He must be. And so, most likely, must be Sam, as well as everyone else I can’t bear to think about—my mother, my siblings. My friends. My children’s friends. My neighbors.Everyone. And if they’re not dead, then they’re living lives like we are—a hand-to-mouth existence, teetering on the precipice of extinction. How long can it possibly last?
In a few weeks, we’ll start tapping the trees to make maple syrup. I know it will make me think of Daniel, along with my parents, all the people I’ve lost who loved it here, even more than I ever did. Daniel belonged to the cottage just as much as I did, even if he came to it late.
Worse than the sense that this isn’t enough is the fear that it will be taken away. We are only five people, four of them females, two of them children. We have just one rifle and a fairly paltry stash of ammunition. Besides that, we are living on the very brink of disaster—if someone gets hurt, or falls sick, or our measly potato crop fails…It would only take one of these to have our whole fragile existence rent completely apart.
I have been monitoring our food situation—the fresh fruit and veg are long gone, of course, as is the turkey, the frozen meat and meals, not to mention the treats we tried to ration—the bags of potato chips, the packets of cookies. Once, late at night, I discovered Kyle munching his way through our last roll of Oreos all by himself. I was on the verge of becoming incandescent with rage—aboutOreos—when I remembered he had been hauling logs from across the lake for ten hours that day. Maybe he deserved a couple of Oreos, or even a round dozen.
