I look at my boy. He is so pure, so beautiful. You’d expect a child like this to be marred, damaged. Unfit for the world. And yet it is the world that is unfit for him. Because he doesn’t know any better, he
accepts the facts as they present themselves—trees growing up in the middle of a road, one abandoned house after another, street signs in the middle of the sea. What he cannot accept is his mother, defeated.
“Why are you crying? We’ll find our way. There’ll be another road. Come on, Mom, get up.”
I gesture at the water, the massive dunes beside us, the expanse of sand—itself a sea with little meringue tufts. It’s not supposed to look like this.
Adam hands me a brown tarry energy bar from Dobbs’s survival pack and insists I eat it. “It’s a flood, like you said last night. We’ll find someone to help us. Don’t worry. Now, come on, get up.”
“You’re right.” I ask him to give me a minute. Only because it seems to reassure him, do I take little bite. While I eat, Adam writes his name in the sand again. He does it every time we stop. Putting his stamp on the world, I suppose. He takes off Dobbs’s shoes and rolls up his pant legs. He looks at me hopefully, and I nod. He undoes the knot around his waist, hands me his end of the leash, and approaches the water’s edge cautiously. When the water surges to greet him, he scurries back. When it retreats, Adam advances. He calls to me that the lake is playing copycat. After many back-and-forths, Adam finally braves the water on tiptoes.
He gasps, then looks over his shoulder at me. “It’s cold!” He waves me over.
“You go on.”
I was twelve when Daddy took us on vacation to the seaside. Lost to me now is the name of the California town that was a full three days’ drive from home, but I can still smell the sea. It was fresh-smelling, not like this, something on the verge of spoiling. Gerhard went bounding into the surf. Daddy followed suit, diving under a wave and coming up a boy again. My sister did the do-si-do with the wind, trying to keep her sarong from flapping every which way, while Mama and I stood together at the water’s edge. She slipped one hand into mine and the other settled on her pregnant belly. “You gotta wonder if those scientists are right about us coming from the sea the way it draws us back.”
Adam draws up his feet and then stomps. Spray goes everywhere. He scoops up a handful of water, but it dribbles away before he reaches me. “You’ve got to come feel it, Mom.”
I follow him back to the water. This time, he strolls out till it comes to his knees. He bends down and runs his hands across the surface of the water. He turns, mischief written all over his face. I scoot back, but he still manages to splash me. He laughs, dumps a handful of water on his head, then scoops another handful and holds it up to his mouth.
“Don’t drink that!” I rush toward him.
He makes a face, and spits. “Bitter.”
I insist he come out of the water and that’s when we notice that his feet and ankles are covered in slimy black leeches.
“Agh! What are they?” Adam swats furiously at them. “They’re stuck!”
“Hold still. You have to pull them off.” We pluck and pluck, and when all the leeches are off, Adam’s feet look as though they’ve been pricked dozens of times with pins. He hurries back to his umbrella and crawls under it.
“What if he was right?” he calls.
I cock my head. Engines?
Whatever the sound, it fades quickly. I begin scanning the meadow behind us, the low hills off to the side. “Right about what?”
“What if the world did come to an end?”
Instead of answering him, I ask him to come out from beneath his umbrella because I need a more reliable set of eyes. Stuck like a blue pushpin on the hill about two miles away appears to be a water tower.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A town,” I answer. People. Civilization.
“But we can’t leave it; we have to take care of it.”
With a sigh, I turn.
Adam is crouching over a nest. We are in a field of short grass, a ways from the nearest tree. Gently, he lifts out a speckled brown egg. It is much too large to be a duck egg. I can’t think what kind of bird lays an egg that large. He strokes it with the tip of his finger, then holds it up against his cheek. “Isn’t it wonderful? Is it alive? It must be alive, right?” Putting the egg gently on the ground, he twists it like a top, and it spins and wobbles. He spreads out flat on his stomach and stands the egg on its broad end. He forms a little arch with his arm and rolls the egg under it. I don’t think I have ever seen Adam play with something the way he does with this. He taps his nail against the shell. “Hello in there.” He puts his ear against it, then taps it some more. “You want to be my friend?” He listens and looks up at me with sparkly eyes. “I think that was a yes.”
Despite the layer of fog, the sun still scorches. My skin prickles in protest. Parched, I lift the canteen of water only to discover it empty.
“It’s okay, little guy, I’ll keep you safe.”
I tell Adam to leave the egg where it is, but he ignores me, taking the lace curtain he was using as a veil and wrapping it around the egg. He fashions a little sling and carries the egg on his chest. “There, now you’ll be warm. You think he’s going to hatch soon, Mom?”
I hand him his umbrella. He and the egg retreat into the kiosk, where he resumes his one-sided but very animated conversation.
Adam is too busy with his egg to notice the spicy smell of the woods beside us on our way to the town. He doesn’t notice the sky, how the bruise-colored clouds part every so often for a glimpse of blue. And he doesn’t notice, as I do, how little progress we make for so great an effort. Everything is oversize, or else I have forgotten how puny people are against such a backdrop.
He sticks his head out from his umbrella when we come to a stop.
“Want a blackberry?” I offer him one the size of a baby’s fist and take a bite of mine to show him how it’s done.
He smacks his lips together. “Sour.” He examines his stained fingers, presses them on his egg. It now looks like something you might find in an Easter basket.
“I’ve never seen them this size. Aren’t they delicious?” They say it’s smell that takes you back in time. Not so. Nothing of the outdoors smells right, but one bite of these blackberries is all it takes for me to be in Grandma’s kitchen. If she wasn’t knitting or canning or tanning your hide for being sassy, Grandma was baking pies. Rolling out the dough for her was almost as much fun as pretending my berry-stained fingers were bleeding and having Grandpa fall for the gag, which he did every time.
Gorging myself, I look to where Adam is pointing. On the other side of the bramble is a four-lane highway. A perfectly good road. No signs of flooding and not one tree. We climb through a thinning in the bush and are treated to an unhindered sight of the hill and the water tower and the town that must surely be around the bend. Up ahead, a couple of grain silos stick out above the thickening of trees. The sun temporarily
peeks out from a cloud, and lanky shadows from the telephone poles turn the road into a ladder.
I look both ways for traffic, then step out onto the tarmac. There are no street signs, but painted along the pavement, one after another, are arrows. Hurry, they suggest. This way.
No sooner has Adam joined me on the road when he gasps. I spin around in alarm. The kiosk is lying in a heap and Adam, crouching, is fingering the place where his shoe and his shadow meet. He gets on all fours. Ever so lightly, he runs his fingertips over his shadow and then pats it firmly, as though he can’t trust it before frisking it. He stands, marking how his shadow goes from a squat shape into a tall, skinny one. He picks up his foot, watches as his two-dimensional companion does the same. He takes a step, and then another, lifting his feet as though he’s stepped in gum. Adam turns his back on the shadow and pivots his head quickly to look over his shoulder. His shadow is still there. He walks, watching himself being tailed. He picks up the egg. Facing his shadow again, he extends the egg toward it, as though by way of introduction. Wonderment is written all over his face. Eager as I am to get to the town, I cannot draw myself away from the sight of my child being a child. Thanks to him, I do a little jig with my own shadow.
Adam doesn’t want to put up his mobile tent when he realizes there are certain places his inky friend can’t go, so he proceeds under a scorching sun, allotting equal amounts of attention to his two new companions, the egg and his shadow. None of his focus is directed to what may lie ahead, which is why I have to point out the miracle to him. A ways before we get to the bend is a line of cars. “Adam, look!”
He joins in cheering. “See that, little egg? No, you don’t need to be afraid. My mom says people are nice. They aren’t going to hurt us; they’re just going to ask a lot of questions.”
We hurry toward them.
“Hey! Hello!” I untie the twine-leash and race ahead, waving my hands, screaming on top of my lungs. “Over here!” I keep running and running, and the closer I get the more cars I see. They are not moving. As luck would have it, they’re in some kind of traffic jam.
Adam is shouting, too.
“Come on, son.” I look behind me and wave to encourage him. In the bright sun, his hair now looks like sparks.
We are eighty yards from the first car, close enough to tell that both lanes of traffic are stopped all the way past the next bend. A pileup. Or maybe a roadblock.
I keep shouting and running and waving my hands. Until the futility of this socks me right in the windpipe.
I check on Adam, who is hobbling as fast he can, in one hand his umbrella-tent and in the other the egg. I turn back to the disturbing scene. Out of breath, or hyperventilating—I don’t know what my breathing is doing. Hiccup sounds come out of me. Find an explanation before he gets here. Find something to say when he asks. Because he will ask. “Where are all the people?” he’s going to say.
I stumble to the last car in the lineup, run my hand across its weathered trunk, its streaky windows. Empty. Even the seats are missing. I move to the car in front of it, a blotchy red Ford pickup with no tires. Nobody. Each car I pass is the same way. Doors unlocked, insides gutted, blocks where wheels ought to be. Some of the vehicles have their hoods propped open. Rusty car parts and cracked hoses are strewn along the side of the road like entrails.
When Adam catches up to me, he doesn’t ask. He gives the horizon the hard look I know is meant for me. The clouds draw together and Adam marks the disappearance of his shadow in silence. Then he opens the door of an old Buick, one that still has its backseat, gets in with his egg, and closes the door.
“Adam—”
Before I can lift the handle, he pushes down the lock. He averts my gaze. He lowers himself on the seat and cradles the egg in his lap.
“Adam, open up.”
Eventually, I give up pleading with him. I get in the car behind his and close the door and sit on the console. I watch the back of my son’s
head. Eventually, his face appears in the back window. I wave sadly. After a long time, he waves back.
If I have learned anything from being around Dobbs, it’s not to succumb to the unruly voices in your head. A certain interior discipline is necessary if logic, not lunacy, is to prevail. Scientists used to harp about how global warming would change weather patterns—this would certainly explain the strange trees and altered landscape, might even account for this abandoned line of cars. Maybe these cars weren’t evacuating. Maybe the fuel ran out, like they said it would. Whatever the cause, this is no time to give in. Though I am being forced once again to bear circumstances that are unbearable, to face facts more frightful than nightmares, I must put to good use everything I learned about survival from Dobbs and get Adam to safety.
I rap on Adam’s window again. He pokes his head out from under the curtain, first to check on his egg and then to look at me.
“Adam, we have to find water.” There’s bound to be something up ahead, at the very least a faucet.
He shakes his head at me.
“Come on, son. We can’t just sit here. We’ve got to keep moving.”
Already the sun has dipped below the hill. I’m not sure how much daylight we have left. I insist he open the door.
He refuses. He strokes the egg.
“Adam!”
“I’m not going!” he shouts at me. “You go!”
I pace back and forth beside the car. Worst-case scenario, I’ll have to go back and gather blackberries. Best case, I find something up ahead in the form of a house or a store.
How about a pot of gold?
That Dobbs’s sneering face is now as clear to me as my own hand is all the argument I need for taking off.
“I won’t be long, okay?” I’ll go as far as the next bend.
Adam has taken off his belt and is arranging the pots and mugs and spoons throughout the car the way a newlywed might decorate her cottage.
“You stay right here. Keep the doors locked. Are you listening to me, Adam?”
I am given the barest of nods.
“I’ll be right back.”
It is much quicker going it alone, even though I keep stopping to look back at Adam’s junker, now a bead in a rosary of cars.
A massive bleached tree with shattered limbs lies beside the road. I pass a boat half-buried beneath a pile of river rocks. A little farther along is another boat. One of its sides has burned away, leaving old coals in a makeshift hearth beside it.
There is no town, not even a row of abandoned houses. The only indications that people ever occupied this desolate patch of land are a couple dozen slab foundations, an orchard of apple trees, and a cemetery. In a weedy pasture partially fenced with crooked iron railings are hundreds of lichen-covered crosses. Most are constructed from timber scraps and tree branches, but a few are fashioned from car bumpers. One is marked with a steering wheel. Someone has used pebbles to identify one grave.
BABY
, it states. It would be too wild a coincidence, but it makes me think of my baby Freedom. Somewhere out in this godforsaken territory Dobbs buried her. I ought to stop and pay my respects. Someone ought to mourn loss on so large a scale. Instead, I hurry through the graveyard and gather apples from a nearby tree. Every task, even the toil of putting one foot in front of the other, is an act of determination. Outdoors, I feel every bit as trapped as I did down below. Shelter is my impulse now, not freedom. Fighting it, I do what I must to keep Adam safe.
A rusty gas station is up ahead, but the line of cars veers sharply off the highway, as though in some kind of detour. Many of the vehicles in the meadow are half-buried. Beyond them, on the hillside, is an arrangement of rocks—a message now illegible. What doesn’t need deciphering is the frayed flag on the homemade mast beside it. It is flying upside down.
I hurry on to the gas station, which is surrounded by a formation of vehicles. Cars, RVs, even a horse trailer, are parked like circled wagons.
This encampment must be what the line of cars was trying to avoid, although not everyone kept the distance—some of the vehicles are riddled with bullet holes. The drivers and passengers seem to have set up some kind of camp beneath the massive canopy, with lean-tos made from display counters, Coca-Cola machines, and scrap metal. Two Texaco pumps stand like hostages in the midst of the disarray. A gas shortage, then.
I wander inside the store. Nothing is left, not even water pipes. As I wander back outside, I hear that sound again. The buzzing of a lawn mower. A motorbike, perhaps. I rush over the hood of a car and race back to the street. I look in all directions, but the sound peters out some distance beyond the water tower.
I hurry back to Adam, who is sitting beside his shadow on top of the Buick, with his umbrella, tracking my return.
“Did you hear that noise?”
“There was a really screechy black bird with long legs. It landed in the field over there. I think it was looking for my little buddy here.” The egg is nestled safely in his lap.
“Didn’t you hear engines?”
Adam gives me a blank look, so I do my best imitation of a dentist’s drill, but he wants to talk more about the bird. “It was as big as me, Mom, and when it took off, its wings were as long as this car. It wasn’t like the birds they talk about in books. If that bird landed on this car, I would’ve been crushed. And it didn’t sing. It just screeched and screeched like it was real mad. I don’t like birds. Except for Buddy, here, and when he hatches, I am going to teach him to be nice. Did you find us anything to eat?”
I offer Adam an apple. He accepts it eagerly but then is at a loss. I can count on one hand the number of times he’s eaten fresh fruit, never an apple. “Just take a bite, like this.” The skin is so tough my teeth can’t pierce it. Eventually, I have to use a rock to smash it open. It is mostly core.
“I think it’s time to bury Charlie,” I tell him, pulling off my shoes to inspect my blisters. Large red craters have formed on the sides of my
feet. The pain from the stinging air is nothing compared to the ache that has settled in my hips and knees. My shins are too tender even to touch.
“But you said we were going to give him back to his family.”
I look at him. If only it were a matter of walking into a police station and handing them Charlie’s remains, of having them notify the next of kin. “When we come to a town and find the people in charge, we’ll tell them where Charlie rests,” I say. What we cannot do is carry so heavy a responsibility when all the attention must be focused on taking care of ourselves. Between us passes the understanding that our plight is now desperate.
Adam fetches the first-aid kit and helps me patch my feet with the last of the Band-Aids. The overcast has turned a sickly olive-green color. Spilling through a rupture at its center are coppery clouds. It’s not so much a setting sun as it is a festering one.
Adam’s first encounter with people Above are the dead and buried. Nevertheless, he pays attention to each tombstone as though he were being formally introduced.
“Here’s another one named Rip.”
“Rest in Peace,” I correct. “It’s what people say when they bury someone.”
He examines one of the old headstones. “They should build a big house for people when they die, not just leave them outside like this.”
I find an empty spot and get out the folding shovel.
Adam insists on digging. The ground is soft and yields easily. Before long, he has dug a hole, not quite four feet around, more suitable for planting a tree than burying a body. “Did I dig it deep enough?”