Page 79 of The Last Stars in the Sky
He shrugs. “Around then, anyway.”
“But…why did it take so long to get back here?”
Now Sam looks distinctly uneasy. “Hasn’t Dad told you about all that?”
About what? “Not really,” I hedge.
Sam frowns. “It was hard…it took us maybe two or three weeks to get to Granny because there were blockades and gangs and stuff…we lost our stuff, and then we kept having to do detours. And we had to stop to find food sometimes…but Dad always found the food and had me wait with the car. It wasn’t…” He blows out a breath. “Well, it could have been worse.”
“And when you got to Granny?”
“Yeah, he didn’t tell me about that. I mean, he went into the home by himself, and then he brought her to the car, where I was waiting…and he brought another old lady, too, from the home. They were the only two left, but she died a couple of days later.”
“She did?” Why hasn’t Daniel told me any of this? And yet did I really want to know?
“Yeah.” Sam is quiet, his expression turning pensive, sorrowful. “Yeah. She was really weak. We…we could tell she wasn’t going to make it.”
I’m silent, absorbing just this, realizing how much more there is—this vast tundra of my ignorance, my husband and son’s experience. “And then?” I finally ask.
Sam shrugs, his gaze sliding away. He looks like a little boy now, scared and defiant, not wanting to admit he broke my best lamp playing ball in the house.
“Sam?” I prompt gently.
“I don’t know, Mom. It was all kind of a blur. Granny was really weak…we stayed in an empty house for a while, to help her recover, while Dad went out and got food.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.” He nods. “For a couple of weeks.”
A couple ofweeks? I’m trying to imagine my son and my mother stuck in some empty, dilapidated house—frightened, hungry, and alone. And then I ask the most mundane question—“What did you do all day?”
Sam is quiet for a moment. “There are worse things than boredom,” he finally says, and I think of him at fifteen, complaining loudly and vociferously on vacations without a gaming console because there was nothing to do.
“How did Dad get food?”
Sam shakes his head. “He never told me, and I never asked. He said my job was to take care of Granny, and his job was to take care of me.” He looks off into the distance, toward the lake, squinting his eyes in the glare of the sun. “To be honest, I didn’t want to know.”
“Did anything else happen?” I ask, and he turns to look at me with an expression of mingled disbelief and scorn.
“Lots of stuff happened, Mom. We got carjacked on 95—they threw us out of the car, took all our stuff, and drove off. We were lucky they didn’t kill us. There was a time when we had to hide out from some gang—we spent nearly a month in a rat-infested apartment building outside Albany.” He’s silent for a moment. “Do you really want to hear about this?”
“No.” I’m shaken, more than I expected to be. I knew something must have happened; as Kerry said, Daniel and Samwould have experienced far worse than we did, and what we experienced was bad enough. But my son, my firstborn, mybaby…and my husband too. “I’m sorry, Sam,” I say quietly, and he shrugs.
“I just want to move on. It’s a lot better here.”
We have come to the field of oats, the tender, new plants tiny green shoots in the soil, the lake glinting beyond. I take a deep breath of fresh air, let it fill my lungs.Yes, let’s move on,I think.Let’s all move on.
“Mom.” Sam’s voice is quiet, tense. I turn to him, only to see him nod at the long grass growing underneath a gnarled, old apple tree, on the edge of the field. “Where’s that from?”
When I look down, it takes me a moment to see what he’s nodding at—a crumpled can of Labatt Blue, a few cigarette butts scattered around, both clearly recent.
“Is that from someone here?” Sam asks in a low voice and, numbly, I shake my head. We don’t have any beer. We ran out of my parents’ old cigarettes months ago.
Someone else has been here.
TWENTY-SIX
A crumpled beer can catapults us into a state of emergency. Sam and I walk home quickly, half running, hearts beating hard, and then quietly tell both Kerry and Daniel what we saw. The three of us walk back to the field, the can. It’s still there, looking just as innocuous and terrible.
