Page 13 of The Midnight Hour
A laugh escapes me, an unruly, unexpected sound. “Okay,” I reply. After all, the journey to Port Granby and beyond is fraught with uncertainty and danger. Why would I rush into such a thing? I crave safety, and this is probably the closest we’re going to get to it…until we reach that base, if it even exists. And yet…we have to catch a lot of fish, and trap a ton of rabbits, just to keep our bellies even half-full. “Okay,” I say again, and then, doing my best to keep my voice light and my manner relaxed, and probably failing at both, I turn to Sam. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“Wh…what?” He hunches his shoulders away from me, looks both startled and reluctant.
“Just a second, Sam. That’s all.” I take hold of his elbow like he’s a little boy and lead him a little bit away from the campsite to the privacy provided by the drooping boughs of a nearby cedar.
The pungent smell of the needles, with their distinctive notes of balsam and camphor, brings me right back to my childhood, when I’d made a fort under a cedar tree at the cottage. I can picture the little set-up I had—a rough wooden stool, an old medicine cupboard my dad gave me to store my treasures—a pinecone, a smooth stone, a jagged piece of bright blue robin’s eggshell. I blink the memories away and look at my son.
“Sam, I’m sorry about yesterday,” I tell him. I keep my tone quietly matter-of-fact. “The shooting. The killing.” Just like Mattie, I’m going to be blunt. Now is not the time for euphemisms. “I know it was shocking?—”
“Mom.” He cuts me off, sounding both impatient and disgusted. “You don’t know anything.”
I blink, doing my best to absorb that statement and whatever it means. “Maybe not,” I agree evenly, “but you haven’t been yourself with me since yesterday?—”
“Mom!” he interjects again, and now he sounds angry. “Yesterday peopledied, our house burned down…I mean, what do youexpect?”
It’s the same sentiment Mattie expressed, but with far more fury.
I take a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “I know all that, Sam, believe me,” I tell him levelly. “I just…I just want to make sure we’re good.” I gesture to the space between us while my son’s lip curls. For a second, I experience the dizzying sensation of some kind of time warp; we could be in the basement rec room of our old house, the deep-pile carpet littered with dirty socks and cereal bowls, Sam slouched in the L-shaped leathersofa, the two of us arguing about when he’s going to turn off his PlayStation and go to bed.
“We’re good,” he states flatly, and then he turns and walks away, not back to the campsite but further into the woods. Even though my instinct, myneed, is to call him back and keep him safe, I let him go.
I’d wanted to clear the air, but I feel like everything I said was wrong and just made things more complicated between us. At least I tried, I tell myself, and I walk back to where Mattie is playing pat-a-cake with Phoebe.
“Do you want a break?” I ask her. “I can play with Phoebe for a little while.” I glance at the little girl, who gives me the same serious-eyed, wary look as before. I don’t think she wants to play with me.
Mattie shakes her head. “We’re good,” she says, and I wonder if she overheard Sam say the same thing. My children are brushing me off again, but maybe I just need to let them do it. Everyoneprocessesin different ways. Maybe this is part of it, even if it hurts.
I spend the afternoon collecting plants with Ruby; she brings along her book and gives me a tutorial in various specimens, although I feel pretty hopeless at it all. They all look the same to me—green and weedy—but Ruby has a knack for telling the difference between them, even different kinds of the same plant, which is a good thing because staghorn sumac can be used as a spice or made into a tea, but poison sumac is, as the name suggests, poisonous. The only way to tell the difference is from the edges of the leaves. I’m putting a lot of trust in my twelve-year-old daughter, but her quiet confidence both inspires and soothes me, especially after that confrontation with Sam.
By late afternoon, we have collected a whole range of plants with different uses—cleavers to grind into coffee, sumac for tea and seasoning, pineapple-weed to sprinkle on any fresh meat we get to keep it from spoiling, and narrow-leaved plantain,whose leaves can be boiled, its seeds dried and ground into flour. I’m both encouraged by how much there is that’s edible and dispirited at just how much effort it all takes. We’ve gathered enough plantain to make about a tablespoon of flour from its seeds, and a pot of boiled leaves is not, I already know, a satisfying dinner. Still, it’s progress, and Ruby seems very pleased with our haul.
Back at the campsite, Phoebe is curled up on a sleeping bag, fast asleep, her thumb plugged into her mouth, and I can’t see anyone else around. For a second, panic seizes me like a vise, makes it hard to breathe. Where are they all?
Then I see a dark head in the front of the truck, and I realize Mattie is sitting on the driver’s side, Kyle half-seated, half-slumped next to her as they chat. I stride over to the truck and stand in the open doorway of the driver’s side, my hands on my hips. “Where are Dad and Sam?” I ask Mattie, my voice coming out sharper than I mean it to because of my fear.
Mattie’s eyes widen in surprise and then flash with annoyance. “Dad and Sam went to set some rabbit snares,” she tells me in a tone that suggests she wants me gone,now. Kyle gives me a half-hearted smile and tries to sit up a little more.
I glance between the two of them and something in me startles, shifts; there’s a companionship, even an intimacy, between them that I haven’t seen before. Mattie generally tolerated Kyle, had a certain long-suffering sympathy for his general air of patheticness, but she didn’tlikehim. They weren’t friends, except, I recall, they did work together on the smokehouse, and Mattie taught Kyle how to shoot, seeming to enjoy being the one in the know.
A dozen other memories shuffle through my mind like a pack of cards—Mattie and Kyle having a lively debate about the bestArchiecomics in the loft, relics from my own childhood. Daring each other to jump in the lake a few weeks ago, even though the water was absolutely freezing. Banging out songstogether on the very old, very out-of-tune piano on the porch, collapsing into gales of laughter at how bad they both sounded.
I’m stupefied, disquieted too, although I’m not sure why. Why shouldn’t they be friends…or even something more? Not that I think that’s what is going on here, exactly, but…I suppose it could be a possibility, one day. It’s not like there are a lot of others…and yet I resist. I’m not ready, not remotely ready, to deal with that kind of complication.
“Hey,” I say to Kyle, several seconds too late. “You seem to be feeling better.”
“Yeah.” He smiles shamefacedly, like it was his fault for getting shot. “My shoulder’s pretty sore still, but I think I’ll be up and at it tomorrow. I can help with some stuff, maybe.”
“You take your time,” I reassure him. I glance at Mattie and see that she is scowling at me. “How long has Phoebe been asleep?” I ask.
She shrugs. “An hour?”
Is that how long Mattie’s been in this truck with Kyle? Again the disquiet, and I tell myself not to be stupid about this. I alienated my daughter once already because of a bad boyfriend, back in Connecticut; I’m not about to do it again, and besides, Kyle isn’t actually her boyfriendorbad. There is absolutely no need to overreact about this; in some ways, it’s almost funny, the age-old reaction of a mother to stumbling across her daughter sitting a little too close to a boy, never mind the nuclear holocaust we’re living through.
“Okay,” I say, and, with Mattie still giving me a stare simmering with resentment, I finally back off.
Ruby and I spend the next hour making dinner, which is another hodgepodge stew of root vegetables we gathered, a potato or two from our limited supply, and a tiny bit of dried meat. I hope Daniel and Sam’s snares work, because we coulddefinitely all do with some protein; just as I feared, living off the land is not going to feed us properly for very long, if at all.
I haven’t looked in a mirror lately, and I avoided the ones at the cottage after the first few months, because things were hard enough without having to study my grim reflection. I know my hair is now almost entirely gray; coarse too, most likely from a lack of calcium. My skin is weathered and dry, my face seamed with deeper lines and wrinkles, and a few weeks ago I spat out a tooth that had come loose, again most likely from a calcium deficiency. At least it was a molar rather than one in the front of my mouth, I told myself, but it had felt shocking, like something that shouldn’t happen to someone like me—a middle-class woman with a very good dentist and a certain appearance to keep up, although of course none of that counts for anything now.
