Page 19 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Still, I can’t move. My limbs feel leaden, my head heavy.Get up, Alex. Get up and be strong, for your girls.
“Mom,” she calls again, more stridently this time, yet with a tremor of fear in her voice.
Slowly, I heave myself up from the woodpile and walk around the pump house toward the cottage. Mattie is on the driveway, her hands lost in the sleeves of her sweatshirt, looking around apprehensively. When she sees me, she breaks into something close to a run.
My heart stills, suspended in my chest.What now?
“Mom,” she says breathlessly as she reaches me, “there’s someone coming down the road.”
EIGHT
DANIEL
He does not let himself look back as he drives down the road, the car bumping gently over the rocks and ruts, away from his family. His hands clench on the steering wheel, and he forces himself to focus on the road ahead, its twists and curves. At the barn he remembers the big rock and steers to the right, going over it gently, a soft bump and then a thud. He drives onward, down the quarter-mile of private driveway to the dirt road, then two miles to the main road as Alex reminded him only four days but what feels like a lifetime ago, an epoch, when they were arriving and all he had to worry about was his wife’s accusing silences, something he’d become used to over the last five months but that still wounded…or, really, annoyed him. You can only be hurt by something for so long, Daniel has come to realize. Even his own grief gets tiresome, a thought that is comforting, considering the circumstances.
He doesn’t know what will happen when he gets to the main road, and he hasn’t let himself think about it too much. When he drove the ten miles to Flintville two days ago, he didn’t see a single car. He doesn’t know if martial law is in force in Canada, although of course it is in the United States; he is not so naive as to think he’ll be able to cross the border even close to the normalway, no matter what he and Alex discussed, in their determined naivete, their stubborn optimism. Hand over his passport while they check his license plate and then wave him across,welcome to the US. No, that’s not going to happen now.
Howhe will get across, he’s unsure. The StLawrence River cuts across from here to Hamilton, two hundred miles away at least with every bridge—and there are only a few—a border point. He needs a plan, but the only one he could think of was togo, and so he did.
He comes out to the main road, utterly empty and silent under the bright blue sky. For a moment, he simply breathes, enjoying the beauty of the day, the simplicity of the moment, when he can, for no more than a second or two, pretend he’s just heading to Flintville for gas, that back at the cottage the girls are playing a board game, Alex is baking cookies. Such simple things, and yet so infinitely precious, so utterly out of reach.
He banishes the image and then he turns left, toward Flintville and the hundred and fifty miles to the border. He has a full tank of gas and enough to fill it at least once more. How far will that take him? Six hundred miles? It’s around two hundred and eighty miles to Clarkson, and then, of course, back again. He could manage it, maybe, if he doesn’t have to detour. If he can even get across the border.
He drives on.
He doesn’t see a single car in the ten miles to Flintville; when he gets there—a right turn at the shuttered chip wagon, then past the gas station—it feels, quite literally, like a ghost town. Curtains are drawn across every window, and he doesn’t see so much as a shadow move. The town, he knows, has never been a bustling hive of activity, but there’s an eerie stillness about itnow, a wariness, like a held breath, and his heart beats hard as he drives through, to the open road beyond.
There are about a dozen towns between here and the highway, none of them anything more than a gas station and a couple of houses and stores on a single street. As Daniel drives through each one, they are all the same: still, silent, empty, and yet he feels watched—a prickling on the back of his neck, his hands slick on the steering wheel. He’s waiting to be stopped by the police, hijacked by renegades,something, but nothing happens, and he feels,almost, a little ridiculous for thinking in such a melodramatic way. Despite what they saw on the news, heard on the radio, nothing feels as if it has really changed, and yet he knows it has. He remembers the looted store in Flintville; there hadn’t been so much as a box of matches left. People are scared and desperate, or perhaps just anticipating feeling desperate soon.
As he drives on, he wonders if, forty-eight hours after the strikes, people are still in shock; maybe he can get to Clarkson and back before the world erupts or implodes, if it ever does. Maybe, he thinks, people will be docile and compliant, meekly obeying the law until order can be restored, the army mobilizes, the power grid is fixed, refugee centers are formed…his mind is a mash-up of disaster movies but, despite the certainty he showed to Alex, he doesn’t know if any of it actually applies.
He drives twenty empty miles with nothing but skeletal trees on either side of the road, semi-submerged in swampy, half-frozen lakes, the sun glinting off their dark surfaces, turning the desolate landscape briefly beautiful.
Once, twenty miles from where Route 41 meets the highway, a truck passes him on the other side of the road, careening wildly. He catches a glimpse of the driver, another man next to him in the cab—both wearing baseball caps, grimy brims pulled low down over their faces; he sees the flash of their plaid shirts,their wild eyes. They disappear down the road with a screech of tires.
He drives on.
After two and a half hours of driving, he gets to the intersection with the highway and hesitates; the large rest stop for truck drivers on the side of the road where they stopped for coffee four days ago, with a gas station, diner, and gift shop selling dreamcatchers and fishing tackle, is completely deserted. One of the gift shop’s windows is broken, as if someone took a baseball bat to it, shards of shattered glass still in the window, gaping like broken teeth. The inside, he sees as he squints, has been looted, racks turned over, the shelves that hold the useful stuff—engine oil, lighter fluid—emptied. A cheap-looking teddy bear lies trampled on the ground, one black, plastic eye staring forward unblinkingly, unnerving Daniel more than it should.
He is reluctant to turn onto the highway, where he feels he’ll be more conspicuous, and perhaps more likely to be stopped by the police, but if he doesn’t take the highway, he knows, he’ll use a lot more gas, on the twisting back roads that meander toward the border.
Yet he can’t bear to be stopped before he gets to the States, at the very least; if he’s turned back here, a mere hundred and fifty miles from the cottage, when he’s encountered nothing but empty road, he’ll feel like a failure, and that’s almost as unacceptable to him as returning without Sam. He has felt like a failure far too many times over the last year—and yes, he knows it was his fault, completely his fault, but that doesn’t ease the burden or make him feel any better.
He felt like a failure when he was laid off from his job after only a month at his new company; starting afresh meant he didn’t get any severance pay. He felt like a failure when he pretended to go to work for six months rather than admit to his wife he was out of a job. He felt it when he took outa second mortgage on their home without telling Alex, even though it had meant forging her signature; he felt it when the bank coolly foreclosed on their home three months later. He felt it when he saw the indifferent pity in the eyes of the guy at the storage facility who told him his credit card was declined and he realized he didn’t have enough money even to store their possessions—Ruby’s teddy bears, Mattie’s bedroom furniture that she’d picked out for her thirteenth birthday, their wedding china, everything. Their whole life packed in boxes, and he had nowhere to put it.
He’d had to call a friend from his old workplace and basically beg to store it all in his barn, out in Old Greenwich; Alex still doesn’t know about that. She’d already been giving him the icy silent treatment for months by then; they’d been staying in a suite at the Hampton Inn, and they couldn’t really afford even that. He hadn’t been willing to make it any worse. Of course, those boxes mean nothing now, just more collateral damage, a paltry sum in light of absolutely everything else that’s been lost.
Still, Daniel resolves, he is not going to feel like a failure in this. He will succeed, no matter what it costs him, even if it kills him. Maybe that will be enough penance for his wife, for himself. Maybe. And maybe he will even be able to get Sam—for a second, he pictures his son as he last saw him, standing in the middle of his freshman dorm room, hands on hips, looking around in quiet pride, but with a hint of childish apprehension in his eyes. When Daniel had hugged him goodbye, Sam had held on for a second longer than he normally would have, then laughed and stepped back, clapping him on the back, a boy turning into a man in front of his very eyes.
Resolutely, he turns away from the highway and follows narrow, country roads toward the border, Route 5 to Route 6 to Route 19, twisting through cornfields, the occasional farmhouse barely visible in the distance. He stays as close as he can to thehighway, which is no more than a winding flash of grey in the distance, the occasional road sign or rest stop visible between the bare trees, all of it utterly empty. He heads southeast, cutting through now barren farm fields, devoid of all life; he doesn’t see a single car or person. He feels as if he is completely alone in the world, an alien in a lunar landscape, shipwrecked, stranded, and yet moving forward.
Hours crawl past; he left the cottage five hours ago, but already it feels like an age, an eon. He hasn’t stopped once, even though he is hungry; his shoulders are cramped, the back of his neck throbbing, along with his fingers clenched on the wheel. He won’t stop, he decides, until he is safely across the border.
Of course, crossing the border will be a big problem. He knows that, and he has yet to think of a solution. He packed food, gas, even a gun, but he has not prepared for this inevitable eventuality. He does have two thousand US dollars secreted in various pockets and pouches on his person, all in twenties; three hundred of it he took out at an ATM in Watertown, before this all began, simply as a sensible precaution. The rest he found in his father-in-law’s top drawer, along with some old birthday cards from his grandchildren.
Daniel is hoping a bribe at the border might work, although he suspects it won’t. He knows he should have come up with a better plan, just as he should have before, when he was out of a job and running out of money and still telling no one, but the difference now, he thinks, is that thereisno plan, for anyone. At least none that he can think of, except to drive on, down this unknown and uncertain road.
A few miles from the border crossing, he turns onto the Thousand Islands Parkway, amazed at how quiet and empty it continues to be. It’s eight miles to the Thousand Islands Bridge across the river, and then the border itself—barricades, immigration officers, questions, being turned back or arrestedunless he can think of another way. His hands grip the steering wheel tightly. His mind remains blank.
