Page 11 of The Midnight Hour
Slowly, with firm decisiveness, she shakes her head. A breath escapes me, my exasperation revealed. Mattie gives me a sharp look.
“I don’t mind staying here,” she says.
“Phoebe can help me,” Ruby interjects softly. That’s the second time she’s spoken in the space of an hour. Today is a good day.
Mattie glances between Ruby and me as Phoebe slips off her lap and joins Ruby by the campfire. Mattie shrugs. “Fine,” she says, and rises from the ground.
We leave Phoebe helping Ruby, Sam and Daniel still working by the truck, Kyle asleep, as we head to a meadow further downstream. I don’t know if there are tiny strawberries nestled among the long grass, but I hope so.
“How are you doing, Mattie?” I ask quietly as we wade through the grass under a bright blue sky, my tone meaningful enough for her to realize, I hope, that I want an honest answer, considering everything we’ve endured. Everything we’ve lost.
“How am I doing?” Mattie repeats thoughtfully. “Well, let’s see. Yesterday I was attacked by a gang, my grandmother and two friends all died, my home burned down, and I had to runfor my life.” She smacks her forehead like she’s forgotten something. “Oh, and the other thing is, there’s this nuclear holocaust thing going on. But you know,besidesall that…” She trails off, giving me a look that is half humor, half teenagedwell-duh, and I let out a little laugh of acknowledgement.
“Yeah, so besides that,” I amend, and my daughter laughs, the sound as clear as a bell ringing through the bright morning air. My heart lightens, like a balloon floating up inside me.
Mattie’s laughter subsides as she shakes her head, and her expression turns pinched and serious. “I keep thinking about Kerry,” she admits in a low voice. “How she saw that guy aiming at me and justdovein front of me. I would have died if it hadn’t been for her. I would have been shot.” Her voice catches, and then irons out. “I feel like I didn’t deserve that. She was only in her thirties. She had her whole life to live.”
“She made a choice,” I tell Mattie quietly. “She’d do it again in a heartbeat, I know she would.”
“I know she would too,” Mattie agrees on a soft, sad sigh. “But that says a lot more about her than about me.”
“Well, the best thing you can do for her now is live your life to the full,” I tell her firmly. “Make it count.”
Mattie shoots me a dryly disbelieving look. “Did you steal that line fromSaving Private Ryan?”
I give a guilty chuckle. “Maybe.”
She shakes her head, rolling her eyes, and I smile again. The sun is warm on my head, and I am happier—if I can even use that word—than I have been since the attack, or even before that, despite all the sorrows and worries that still dog us like a dark shadow.
At the far edge of the meadow, we find berries—tiny, perfect little jewels nestled deep in the long grass. It’s time-consuming and laborious, kneeling on the hard ground and liberating each berry from its nestled home of leaves, but we manage to pick a half a cupful, working in companionable silence as the sun beatsdown. There’s enough for everyone to have a spoonful or two on top of their cattail porridge, which we’ll all hopefully be able to choke down.
As we head back to the campsite, I ask Mattie, keeping my tone as casual as I can make it, “How is Sam doing with that processing?”
Once again I’m the recipient of an eye-roll. “Nice one, Mom,” she says, shaking her head. “Smooth, really smooth.” She lets out a short sigh. “He’s okay.”
“Does he talk to you?”
She shrugs. “Not really.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I just know.”
“What…what exactly is he processing?” I hold up a hand to forestall the usual sarcastic reply. “I know the stuff that happened at the cottage, the attack, all that. Obviously those are huge things that have happened. But…” I take a breath and force myself on. “I feel like he’s…mad at me, for…for what happened out on that road.” It hurts to say it.
“You mean you and Dad killing a guy, maybe two?” Mattie replies with deliberate bluntness, and I can’t help but flinch.
“They were a potential threat to us, Mattie?—”
“But what if they weren’t,” my daughter interjects, her tone turning almost gentle. “I mean, I get that you couldn’t have known, I thought they were dangerous too, and I said as much, but…I think that’s what Sam is upset about. He showed me something he found in the truck, tucked into the visor, on the driver’s side. Some Bible verse or something.” She is silent for a moment while I absorb what she has just told me, what it might mean. “They could have been good guys,” she finishes quietly. “Which kind of sucks.”
Of course, I tell myself, a Bible verse on someone’s sun visor doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good portion of the gun-toting gangs we’ve run into have hadBible verses on their walls handstitched by their wives, or verse-a-day calendars by their kitchen sinks. When I went to the little church with my parents up here, at least half the congregation members were carrying.
Still, it shakes me. I’m quiet as we keep walking back, the long grass whispering against our bare legs, the sky so blue it hurts to look at it. The air is full of sound—the chirp and chatter of birds, the rustle of the grass and the wind in the trees, the insistent buzz of crickets a constant chorus.
“Sam’ll get over it, Mom,” Mattie says after we’ve walked in silence for a few minutes. “Just give him time.”
I nod jerkily, not trusting myself to speak. I feel guilty, yes, but I’m also angry, or maybe just resentful. I might have made a mistake, an enormous one, but I had areason. A good reason, so why should my own child be judge and jury over me, even as I recognize that I’m judging myself? That sense of self-righteousness flares high and hot for a single instant and then burns right out, so all I feel is that wretched, acidic churn of guilt in my stomach. I might have killed an innocent man—and my children saw me do it.
