Page 50 of The Midnight Hour
“Aren’t you going?” I ask, and I hear the wavering note of uncertainty in my voice.
“Tell me your impressions,” Daniel replies easily. “Take notes.” He pillows his hands behind his head as he closes his eyes.
“Daniel…”
His eyes remain closed as he tells me gently, “I don’t need to hear Duart’s spin, Alex. That’s all.”
“But what if he says something important?”
He opens his eyes. “Do you really think that’s what’s happening here?”
“No, but…we can’t be passive.”
He gives a little shrug, his head still resting on his pillow. “I’m okay with passive at this point.”
Slowly I lower my brush. I place it very carefully on top of the fake wood dresser, as if this matters, as I meet his gaze in the tiny mirror above. “I don’t understand,” I state clearly and slowly, “why you don’t care.”
For a second, the very air between us almost seems to shimmer and vibrate. I have the deep-seated and desperate impulse to snatch my words back, stuff them in my mouth, and beg him not to answer. He stares at me steadily in the mirror, his gaze resolutely unblinking.
Neither of us speaks, and it feels as if we are hovering on the edge of something, and I absolutely do not have the strength or courage to look down.
Then Mattie bulldozes into the room, just as she has a thousand times before, her energy frantic and intense and entirely oblivious.
“I don’t have any clothes,” she moans, half accusation, half lament.
I almost want to laugh, except I really don’t. Slowly, like I’m agreeing to a stalemate, I move my gaze from Daniel’s in the mirror to turn to my daughter. “I’m not sure this is meant to be a social occasion, Mats.”
She gives a theatrical groan. “Mom, you don’t understandanything.”
Except, I think, as my gaze moves inexorably back to my husband’s in the mirror, registering the bleakness there, I’m afraid that I do.
TWENTY
DANIEL
Six months earlier
Somewhere outside Brattleboro, Vermont
“Dad, I think she’s dead.”
Sam’s voice is low and strained as Daniel hunches his shoulders and peers through the darkness, his fingers clenched around the steering wheel. He’s driving without headlights because it’s safer, but it takes alotof concentration, and he wishes he’d thought to bring his glasses, something that hadn’t even crossed his mind—over a month ago now—when he’d set out from Ontario for this.
“Who’s dead?” he demands in a voice that is just as low and strained as his son’s.
“Pauline,” Sam tells him. “Granny’s asleep.”
Daniel breathes out a quiet sigh of relief. Pauline is one less person to worry about, and she was on her last legs anyway. She was the only other surviving resident of the care home where she and Jenny had been eking out an existence for the last four weeks. Amazingly, when he and Sam had arrived at the home four days after they’d left Tom’sfarmhouse, his mother-in-law had still been, against all his expectations, alive.
Daniel had been bracing himself for the worst, and, in truth, it had been bad enough—there had been twelve residents in the memory unit of the care home, and ten of them were dead, in various stages of decay. He’d left Sam in the car, his son chafing against being treated like a six-year-old but still going along with it. For the four days of their journey, Daniel had hardly allowed him out, save to go to the bathroom, and then only quickly. He was conscious of how close they were to Hartford, how dangerous and damaged everything seemed, in a different way from Utica—no violent gangs here, but instead a steady stream of desperate, frightened people on the highway heading north or west, fleeing the radiation, or at least the fear of the radiation.
As they drove steadily toward Springfield, these poor souls had clawed at the car, or banged on the windows, but Daniel had simply stared straight ahead and kept driving.
Once, Sam had protested, “Dad, you might drive over someone. Killthem.”
“They’ll move out of the way.” He was not about to slow down, to get dragged out of the car, have yet another vehicle stolen from them, not for anyone or anything. His resolve was tested when a young woman, no more than Sam’s age, bravely stepped in front of the car, her chin tilted, her eyes flashing, her face covered with the reddened, dry, and peeling skin of radiation burns. Daniel kept driving, and, thankfully, at the very last minute, she moved.
If she hadn’t…
