Page 63 of The Midnight Hour
“I wasn’t planning on testing it,” I tell her, and she smiles before cocking her head.
“What do you think so far?”
“I think it’s all pretty amazing,” I admit honestly. “We triedto do something similar back at our cottage, but I have to say it was nothing compared to this.” I shake my head as I give a rueful laugh. “To be fair, none of us had the skills to start with. All we had was a book on sustainable living. My daughter Ruby practically memorized the whole thing.”
“She sounds like a smart girl.”
I glance at Vicky; as friendly and open as she is, there’s a slight reserve to her that I sense rather than observe. “What about you?” I ask. “You were living in Toronto. Will you stay up here forever?”
“There’s not exactly a lot of places to go,” she replies wryly before her expression turns serious, even sorrowful. “My fiancé died in the Toronto bombing,” she explains. “I was driving up here, like I said…I’d asked him to come, but he had an elderly mom nearby and he wanted to stay for her. And the truth is, I don’t think either of us ever thought Toronto would be hit. I mean, this is Canada. We’re the nice guys. Nobody wants to nuke us, right?” I give a small, sad nod of acknowledgement and she continues on a sigh, “It all got past that, I guess. Too many people with their fingers on the trigger. In any case…there’s nothing to go back to, and what we’ve got here…it feels important. Meaningful. And it’s enough for me.”
“I can understand that,” I tell her.
“And what about you?” Vicky asks. “Were you headed anywhere in particular when you left North Bay?”
I shake my head. “Just away. That place got kind of…oppressive.”
She nods. “I’d heard that. We have a radio,” she adds by way of explanation. “So we’re in communication with a few different groups and we know a little bit about what’s going on, although we try to keep a low profile.”
“That’s probably wise.”
Everyone is heading back up to the main cabin for hot drinks, and so we turn from the lake and follow the group. “Wetry to operate as a true community,” Vicky tells me. “Everyone gets a say, a vote. We rule by consensus. I don’t suppose it would work if there were dozens and dozens of us, but there aren’t.” I nod, not sure where she’s going with this. “If you were to stay,” she continues, “that is, if you were to want to stay, we’d vote on it as a group. Obviously, it would be a big deal for us—you’d be almost doubling our size.”
“Right,” I reply after a moment. I don’t think I’d seriously considered staying here, as great a set-up as it is, although I’m not sure why. “Thank you,” I add, although I’m not entirely sure what I’m thanking her for. Maybe just not killing us for descending on their little group.
Vicky gives a brisk little nod and keeps walking. I decide to peel off and head back to our cabin, to check on Daniel. As I slip inside, I breathe out slowly. So much has happened in such a short time, it’s hard to process it all.
And yet there’s more to come because when I come into our bedroom, Daniel is awake, propped up in bed, gently prodding his stomach with one hand. When he sees me, he yanks down his t-shirt, looking guilty.
I still.
“Daniel,” I force myself to ask, “what are you doing?”
“Alex…” He lets out a sigh, a sound of surrender and weary resignation. Everything in me feels fragile, breakable. I walk slowly toward him, barely daring to breathe. He stares at me silently as I lift up his shirt.
He looks the same, I think with relief—the same lean, brown chest I’ve known all my married life, minus the middle-aged paunch he had before the bombs.
Wordlessly, he takes my hand and guides it to his abdomen, wincing as he prods his stomach with my hand. That’s when I feel it—barely at first, and then more insistently, the hard, round shape of it, pressing into my hand.
A tumor.
TWENTY-FOUR
DANIEL
March the previous year
Near Albany, New York
They’ve been staring at the same peeling wallpaper for over a month. Daniel and Sam have cracked more than a few jokes about it—how ugly it is, maroon and brown stripes in alternating widths, how it must have been picked by someone either blind or a hundred years old, but the jokes wore thin a few weeks ago and now there’s only waiting.
They have no car, no food, no water, and Jenny has been too weak to walk or even stand. They came to this run-down ranch house to recover, but it’s hard to do that when you have nothing to recover with.
At night, Daniel goes out to forage among the abandoned and ruined buildings of these dismal outskirts of Albany; occasionally he finds food or supplies that might be helpful—a flashlight, a box of Band-Aids, a bag of gummy bears. There’s not much left anywhere, but he takes what he can get and is grateful.
“It’s the little things in life,” he told Sam one time as he popped a gummy bear in his mouth, and his son forced a smile.
It’s been two months since that night in Bernardston, when Daniel had thought he’d lost both Sam and Jenny for good. When Dorcas had broken the news to him that the car had been abandoned, he’d stumbled out of bed, reaching for his coat, his shoes, without knowing where he was or how he was going to get back to the car.
