Page 44 of The Midnight Hour
“I had,” I admit, and she flashes me a quick smile before moving away.
Feeling weirdly energized by this conversation, I decide to go find Mattie and Ruby. I walk down several streets, all of them seeming the same—a parking lot, a swathe of grass, a building with a number but no other indication of what it is—I pass Building Four, Building Six, Building Eleven. I turn a corner and come across an area with more of a neighborhood feel—modest houses with a playground and basketball court in the middle. I can hear children’s laughter and I start to feel a little better. This looks a little more normal, or what normal used to be.
I see maybe two dozen children on the playground—running around, laughing, playing the usual childhood games. It’s both heartening and strange to see. One boy falls onto his knees, scrambles up, and keeps running. I glimpse Phoebe on a swing with Mattie pushing her and my heart gives a little hopeful twist. On the other side of the playground, Ruby is standing near but not with a couple of girls who look around her age. The girls are chatting, but Ruby isn’t, which is not surprising,but still I want more for my girl. While I watch, she edges a little closer to them, her way of making an effort.
The scene is so normal, and yet so not. If I lift my gaze from the playground to the houses beyond, I glimpse a raggedy fence of barbed wire bordering their backyards. Some of it looks hastily erected but no less forbidding; I’m guessing they tightened the security around the entire base after taking it over.
But if I don’t look at the barbed wire, if I close my eyes and let the children’s laughter drift over me, I can almost imagine I’m back in Connecticut, volunteering at Ruby’s old preschool, and life is easy and good, a thoughtless rolling into the future, one day blurring into the next.
“Mom?” My eyes snap open. Mattie is striding toward me. Another girl is now pushing Phoebe on the swing. “What are you doing here?”
“Just wanted to see where the school was.” I point to a single-story building with beige aluminum siding nearby. “Is that it?”
“Yes.” She shakes her head, impatient. “It’s kind of creepy, to have you just standingon the edge of the playground, you know?”
I try not to feel stung. “I was worried about you.”
She frowns, her eyes flashing ire. “I’m fine.”
I do my best to ignore her irritation. “You’ve settled in here, Mattie?” Like Nicole, I want my child to be happy.
She shrugs dismissively. “We’ve been here, like, five minutes, and you’re asking me that? Yeah, it’s okay. I mean, better than being killed, right?”
My lips twitch with suppressed laughter. Typical Mattie. “Were those the only options?” I quip, although part of me is serious.
Mattie folds her arms as she stares me down. “Mom, don’t go deep on me, okay? We’re here. We’re fine. That’s it.”
I nod slowly, accepting. Maybe I needed thismetaphorical slap across the face.We’re here. We’re fine. That’s it.This is what I wanted, after all. This is what I chose.
Besides, Mattiedoesseem fine, and so do Ruby and Phoebe. I don’t need to poke holes in our happiness, our hope. I don’t need to make more problems for any of us, just because I’m having a little trouble settling in, trusting this new normal. Iwilltrust it, I decide. I want to.
“Sorry,” I tell Mattie. “I’ll see you at dinner, I guess.”
“Yeah, okay.” For a second, her expression softens. “I know this all feels weird, but it’s good, right? I mean, we couldn’t live in the woods forever, eating, like, weeds.”
“No…” That much is certainly true; we were all semi-starving back at Kawartha, even if we tried to act as if we weren’t. But the cottage, I think. I could have lived at the cottage forever. Happily, or almost. And I’m not sure I realized that until I burned it down.
Mattie touches my arm, the barest brush of her fingers. “It’ll get better. You’ll get used to this. We all will.”
I manage a laugh. She’s being so wonderfully mature, but it’s making me feel kind of pathetic. “Yes, I know I will, but thank you for the pep talk.”
“Anytime.” She lopes back to Phoebe, and I hear her laughter as she says something to another girl who looks around her age. I imagine the conversation—That was my mom, being weird. Ugh! I know, right? Mothers.
I drift away from the playground, the children, feeling like a leaf on the breeze, bowled along, going nowhere. I should get back to the kitchen eventually, but I don’t want to yet. I don’t know what I want, and maybe that’s the issue. Everything is finally going right for us, and, as I trudge down the empty street, all I know is that it’s taking all my effort not to cry.
EIGHTEEN
Three weeks of summer slide by in a blur of peaceful drudgery punctuated by brief moments of happiness and sometimes, rarely, like a flash of lightning, of joy. It’s a surreal, suspended sort of time; life has been reduced to so very little, and yet empirically it’s more than we’ve had in months—fairly plentiful food, running water, hot showers, freedom from fear. Freedom, even, from knowing anything, because there are no radios anywhere, no news bulletins or updates, and no one talks about what is happening outside our barbed-wire enclosure.
It’s not that such information is banned; it’s more that no one seems to have either the urge or energy to try to find out. No one wants anything more than what we all currently have, and yet somehow, according to Michael Duart, this raggedy band of survivors is going to be the savior of civilization. Most days, I have trouble believing that we’ll be the savior of northern Ontario, much less the entire western world.
“Do you think he’s got a God complex?” I ask Daniel one evening. We are sitting on the back steps, our legs stretched out in front of us, watching the sun streak its fading colors of violetand orange across a wide, open sky. We are finding beauty where we can, because one thing I’ve learned over the last three weeks is that 22 Wing North Bay is not a particularly beautiful place, with its parking lots and weedy lawns and prefabricated buildings, although we get glimpses of nature’s majesty in the wide, blue expanse of Lake Nipissing far below us. I also saw the tunnel that led to the underground complex; there was a truck parked outside, but that was all the life I saw, and I wondered why it wasn’t being used or at least refurbished, as Michael had said.
Daniel knows exactly who I’m talking about. “Duart?” he muses. “It would be hard not to, when you’re literally trying to save the world.”
I snort with laughter before I subside into a sigh. “But is he saving the world? Really?”
Daniel shrugs, and for a second his wry mood turns dark, the way it so often does, like a cloud sliding over the sun. My husband seems more relaxed in this place, but he’s still keeping secrets. “He’s saving four or five hundred people, at least,” he states quietly, his lips pressed together, “which is certainly more than you or I can say.”
