“Boy, was she hungry!” Adam exclaims, putting the empty bottle on the table.
Ginny demonstrates how to pat the baby’s back. As soon as the baby burps, Adam says, “Whoa!” He strokes her head and stops, suddenly alarmed. The tip of his finger is resting on the top of her head. You can see the whites of his eyes. “There’s something wrong!”
Ginny and I both get up. He has her feel where his finger is touching. “It’s a hole!”
Ginny waves at him not to worry, and I explain about a baby’s soft spot. “The bones haven’t closed all the way yet, but they will.”
Not at all assured, he strokes her head very gently and says, “Shouldn’t she wear a helmet until then?”
I can’t get over how good he is with this baby. How quick he is to give his heart. Even before we got out of the silo, when Dobbs first started promising to take us out, I worried whether Adam would adapt. I wondered how long it would take him not to be frightened by everything he saw. Now I wonder whether I am ever going to adapt. Will I ever stop being frightened? Dead, Dobbs is every bit as dismissive as he was in the flesh.
Above for less than a week and already you have him relying on strangers.
Ginny puts a bowl on the table and signals Adam to eat. He hands over the baby reluctantly and wolfs down his food.
“Thank you,” I offer, on Adam’s behalf.
He looks up, startled. “Oh, yes, thank you so much.”
If he finds it odd that Ginny does not talk, he gives no indication. I, on the other hand, react to this fact in all the wrong ways. I tell her how kind she is to take us in without any advance notice and what a lovely home she has, and Adam stops chewing and says, “Mom, she’s not deaf.” My next effort at communication is part lip-synch, part sign language. This, too, is frowned upon by my son.
With the baby on her hip, Ginny dishes up stew and sets down a
bowl for me. Adam follows her silent directions to take the baby from me to give me a chance to eat. Everyone seems comfortable with the quiet except me. Without meaning to, I volunteer details about our ordeal. I tell Ginny how the people at the compound separated Adam and me despite my wishes, and when she shakes her head and looks at me with such empathy, I feel compelled to tell her about Dobbs and the silo and being kept underground for all these years. Partway through the telling she steps beside me and rubs my back. “I was sixteen when he took me. I went mad for a while. I lost a child.” Facts fall out of my mouth, one after another.
Adam hears about Charlie, who I have not been able to talk about in detail until now, now that I am in a warm kitchen, a real kitchen, having my shoulder patted by a smiling woman and my story extracted by her big, accommodating silence. “Do you have any more wine?”
She pours me a glass.
I take a big sip. “We buried him in a cemetery nobody visits. A place you wouldn’t even want to bury a criminal. I have to go back. I have to put flowers on his grave so he knows he’s missed.” I speak of all the many other things I want to do and how none of it might be possible. Eventually, I run out of words. “I’m sorry; you didn’t need to hear all that.”
Ginny waves away my apology and screws up her face.
“She says not to worry,” Adam explains. And then he makes his own face. Uh . . . uhm . . .”
From the way he holds the baby away from his body, Ginny and I get the picture. Exchanging glances, I laugh and she makes a wheezy hiccup sound. She takes us into an adjoining room, a sunroom with lots of windows and cribs. She puts Angel into a crib, grabs a diaper, and pats the changing table. As soon as Adam lays the baby down, he makes as though to leave, but Ginny latches onto his shirtsleeve, and I voice my agreement. “Oh no you don’t. You want to take care of a baby, then you’ve got to know how to do this.”
“Eew,” he says, but only once. After that, he is riveted.
The swaddling is unwrapped, revealing the child’s calico skin. The
brown patches look like giant scabs. The red patches look scaly, like burns starting to heal. The baby gives no indication that she is in pain. Adam is wrapped up in her toes. He measures the length of her foot against the palm of his hand. She responds to his tickling by kicking her legs. Adam laughs and tickles her some more.
Ginny changes her, tucks her into a onesie, and then swaddles her in a yellow blanket. She lifts the baby off the table and hands her to Adam, who understands he is being told to put her in a crib.
“Shouldn’t we give her a name?” he asks.
Ginny’s flattened hand makes a loop: you name her.
“Molly, how about that?”
Ginny gives the A-OK sign.
“Good night, Molly,” he says, planting a kiss on top of her head. I make a mental note of another first: the first time he’s kissed an Outsider.
He fetches Angel, and with the same care, separates her from her rags and soiled diaper. She is perfect but for the paddle where her right foot ought to be. She fusses a little when he uses the damp cloth to wipe her clean and pumps her tiny legs. Instead of remarking on her peculiarity, he folds the diaper perfectly around her little buttocks and hands Ginny the pin. “I’m afraid I’m going to stick her.”
Marcus joins us just as Angel is laid down in her bed. “Shouldn’t have trouble placing these two, right, Gin?”
“You leave the babies here?” Adam asks. His little friend has gone to sleep with her fist curled around his finger.
Marcus nods. “Don’t you worry none. Ginny and Bill will take good care of these girls until the right parents come along.”
Ginny makes some gesture I do not understand.
He translates for Adam and me. “She’s got someone specific in mind for one of them.”
“Which one?” Adam wants to know.
Ginny signals again by rubbing her arm: the child with the mottled skin, Molly.
“What about Angel?”
“There are people who are willing to adopt”—I struggle for the right words—“children like this?”
“Sure. Right after Diablo, the surgeon general called for a ban on baby making, and scores of survivors who were being treated at field clinics opted to get fixed as well. Nobody wanted to pass on the effects of radiation. Well, some of those folks managed to survive, and now they want to raise a family. There are others who just want to do their bit to help out those less fortunate. Sheldon back there will tell you it’s survivor’s guilt. I don’t think so. Caring for a child can give a person hope.”
“Did you work with children before Diablo?” Someone who speaks this way must have been a teacher, a coach, a social worker, perhaps.
Marcus runs his hand over his bald head, sets his glance to a place under the table.
Ginny looks at Adam and cups her hands on her head. Dog.
“We found him in the forest,” Adam answers. “His name is Oracle. He’s got a sore paw.”
She fetches a first-aid kit from the cupboard and motions that she and Adam should tend to it.
“You lost your job helping me and my son,” I say as soon as we have the kitchen to ourselves.
“I ain’t no hero, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Breaking us out of Sunflower, guiding us through hostile terrain, fending off wolves to bring us to safety—if that isn’t valor, I don’t know what is. I start to thank him, but he cuts me off.
“I told you about my boy who died.” He clears his throat. It doesn’t help. Gravelly is how he sounds when he goes on. “Truth is, I hadn’t seen him for years before he passed, not since he was a little kid. Never did marry his mama, like I promised. Never went to one of his Little League games or his school plays.” Marcus looks as though he has something unpleasant in his mouth, a spoonful of rancid meat with no water to wash it down. “You’d think with the kinda dough I was pulling in off the street, I’d have set him and his mama up someplace decent. The last
Christmas before Diablo, I showed up with a Happy Meal, and his mama pushed my sorry ass off the porch, told me never to come back. I coulda gone back, made it right, but I used her as an excuse. The morning of the first explosion, I was hustling business through a fence at a middle school playground. Did I work with kids? I did a pretty good job messing them up, is what I did.”
He turns his milky eye to me before bowing his head. “Yeah. Some hero, right?” Marcus looks at me. “You doing all right?”
I stand up. “Thish ish . . .” I stop, horrified. My tongue’s not working.
Marcus takes the wineglass, which, oddly, has been in my hand this whole time. “Looks like someone’s had enough for one night.”
Maybe it’s the wine, but maybe it is being in a home that looks nothing like the silo or the clinic at Sunflower; maybe it’s the smell of beef stew, the slumber of rescued babies, my son administering care to another living thing for the first time—maybe all of this makes me take the man’s hand. It is not for me to pardon. It is for me to hold the hand of a sinner, so that mine, too, may be held. Because the weight of the world can be held for only so long, I lift his hand and perform a pirouette beneath it.
“Well . . .” he says.
“Well,” I declare.
“Your hood.”
He grabs it and takes off. I hear the screen door squeak open, then bang shut before I am fully upright.
I look in the mirror on the vanity just to make sure there isn’t a huge crack running down the middle of my head, because that’s very much what it feels like, and am surprised to find a hint of color in my cheeks. My freckles have faded, but for as old as I feel, I have very few wrinkles. Only the thick streak of silver hair hints at any disturbance in the aging process. I undo my braid, rake my fingers through my hair. I screw up my eyes, try to imagine what of me would Mama see, or Mercy, someone from my past? Anything of the girl I once was? What would a man see? All those years ago on the bleachers at the Horse Thieves Picnic Arlo had called me pretty. If he saw me now, would he want to kiss me? I pucker my lips at my image and then smile. Not likely.
I have a vague recollection of the room but not of how I got into bed. I use the jug of silty water on the washstand to bathe and brush my teeth, then change into the embroidered linen shirt and gathered skirt that have a note with my name on them. I follow the voices to a dining room, where Bill Bowers and three of the guests from last night are seated around a wooden table. Missing is the elderly couple. They all
call out a greeting. Too loud. They want to know where Adam is, if he might be persuaded to sit and talk with them. I tell them I’ll find out and head for the kitchen. Marcus is pouring juice from a jug. He hands me the glass and takes in the flowing skirt. “You look . . .”
I cock an eyebrow.
“Real nice.”
Like a woman, maybe, and not some stark-raving-mad fugitive. “Where’s Adam?”
He turns to the open window. A warm, wisteria-scented breeze blows in. On a screened patio, Adam is holding a piece of a biscuit in front of the dog. Smeared on his face is some kind of yellow paste.
“Ginny’s sunblock,” Marcus explains. “Don’t ask me what’s in it. All I know is it works.”
“Look, Mom, I’ve taught Oracle how to shake.” To demonstrate, the dog lifts up its bound paw and extends it to Adam. “He’s supersmart. Ginny thinks he could be trained to do just about anything.”
Our host is sitting nearby on a rocking chair with a baby in her lap. In a bassinet beside her is the other child.
“I’m going to take him for a walk, okay? We won’t go far; I’ll stay where you can see me.”
Beyond the patio is an expansive lawn. Like the front yard, it is devoid of trees. Off to the right is a red barn, and forming a boundary to the left is the first row of what look like grapevines. Exactly the kind of scene that would have you believe there are no dangers. “I don’t think so, Adam. What about locusts?”
Ginny shakes her head and taps her wrist.
“She says it’s too early for swarms. C’mon, Mom, it’s beautiful out.”
“He’ll be okay,” Marcus says, handing me a slice of buttered bread. I join Ginny outside so I can keep an eye on Adam. “Thank you for the clothes. I haven’t worn a skirt in ages.”
She smiles.
I watch Adam break out into a run with the dog at his side. The scene could be taken straight from the catalog of fantasies I kept Below. What is new for him might as well be new for me, because I, too, am stunned by
the countless shades of green, by goose bumps and sunburn and the many other ways skin reacts to open air. Still, I don’t trust what I see. New clothes, loose hair, guard still very much up. “I don’t know how I’m going to take care of him out here. I worry that I might only be any good at my job in a controlled environment. This”—I sweep my hand across the expanse—“this terrifies me. How do people do it, let their children make their own decisions?” How do I make my own decisions? Are we to take up the life of gypsies or become homesteaders? Should Adam be allowed to interact freely with others or should I shelter him, hide him, even? Without Dobbs deciding for me, I can’t seem to get my bearings. I must have assumed someone would do all the deciding for us.
A look of understanding crosses her face.
Adam is attempting a cartwheel, and the dog is barking excitedly at him. He doesn’t have enough muscle tone, so he goes butt over applecart and lands flat on his back. The dog is licking his face. Germs! I almost shriek.
“I don’t know why I thought everything was still going to be the same. He kept telling me it was different, but I never believed him, not a single word. Now, I’m the crazy one.” Crazy for thinking it would be exactly how I left it. Crazy for thinking my family and friends would all fall into one long receiving line. Crazy for thinking that my son would need me more, not less.
Ginny lays the baby tummy-down on the mat and nods. It is some kind of rare talent, this ability of hers to turn an otherwise private person into a magpie.
“You know what the strangest thing about being back is?” Besides the hostile takeover of trees, the sinister enterprise at Sunflower, the frequency with which the hairs on the back of my neck are raised—what Grandma would attribute to a haunting. “Not having any children around.”
By way of protest, Ginny rests her hand on the baby’s head.
“But I mean, regular children.” As soon as the words leave my lips, I regret them. Quickly, I backtrack, but Ginny turns her head to watch Adam as if to say, Regular children, indeed.
“Electricity’s on,” Bill says, handing his wife a mug and kissing the top of her head. He sees his wife look at her watch and says, “That’s right, an hour earlier than yesterday.” Bill explains the reason he and Ginny, along with many others, moved here from other parts of the country was because Douglas County had one of the few geothermal power stations still operable. He points out the power lines hooked to the roof. “Labor’s the issue. If we can get enough volunteers to run the operation, we can go back to having electricity twenty-four/seven. God, can you imagine the possibilities?”
“Commercial television,” Marcus pipes up.
“Kill me now.”
“What’d you give me for a PlayStation, still in the box?”
“How about a five-thousand-watt generator?” Bill takes a peek at each baby. “But never mind the virtual world when we have the heavenly host for company.”
There’s what I should have said.
The Bowerses retreat to the kitchen, and Marcus takes Ginny’s seat. He smiles at the babies. I tell him about my remark, and he assures me Ginny’s not one to keep grudges, that she used to be quick to shoot off her mouth back in the day before her vocal cords got damaged from the operation.
He watches Adam, who now appears to be inspecting grass. The dog finds it equally fascinating. “I think that hound is here to stay.”
After the longest time, he says, “It ain’t all bad. What you saw back there at Sunflower, that’s the worst of it. There are enough of us trying to do right. It’ll add up. Maybe not to the point where we’ll have all the luxuries like before, but it’ll be one of God’s sweet mercies if we don’t get back no cable television.
“You’ll see.” He pats my knee. “You’ll see.”
All this, and I didn’t even have to ask, What hope is there for us?
Showing us furniture in various stages of completion, Bill explains that he became a carpenter only after he and Ginny moved out here eight years ago. Acacia, he tells us, is his favorite wood to work with, that hickory can be a bitch, and that milling alder is like trying to throttle a snake. He holds up his hand so we can see where two fingers end at the middle knuckle. The cradle and the set of dining room chairs are to be sold later in the month at the swap meet. Swap meets, we learn, are the new shopping plazas. Everyone from doctors to barbers sets up business at swap meets. Cash is in circulation again, he says, but people are leery of it. Trading goods and services is still the choice of most settlers. A dining table can fetch enough homemade baby formula to feed six infants for two months, a liter of wine will fetch a tooth filling. Nothing is more valuable than gasoline. Bill tells us the biggest pitfall to skillful trading is nostalgia. He shows us his office where shelves are crammed with memorabilia.
Adam studies each item—a corkscrew, a coffeemaker, the SIM card Bill says holds a thousand photographs. Adam screws up his eyes to make sure tiny images are not printed on the piece of plastic, then looks at Bill and nods slowly like all adults really are dippy. Bill hands him a tin box and gestures for Adam to turn the lever. He does as he’s told, humoring our host. Just as he’s about to put it back on the shelf, the top flies off and a scruffy clown launches at him. Adam recoils, loses his balance, and lands flat on his backside. Bill is very apologetic. Adam turns
bright red. He dusts himself off. Instead of returning it to its place, he picks up the tin box again and repeats the process. The next time the clown pops up, Adam is almost as startled as the first time. He is positively shiny with delight.
“I get scolded every time I bring stuff like this home, but I have no restraint.” Bill powers up a row of lava lamps. “Now, you tell me that’s not American ingenuity at its finest.”
“Wow.” Adam exhales. For someone who’s grown up with a father like Dobbs, you’d think Adam would shy away from men, but already he is forming strong alliances, first with Marcus, now Bill. That they treat him nothing like an artifact to be preserved might have something to do with it. To them, he is but an ordinary boy who must graze his knee and face his fears and let go of his mother’s apron strings if he hopes to become a man.
Adam examines a pair of binoculars, looks through the large exit lenses. “You’re so small, Mom.”
I have him turn it around, then point him toward the open door. Adam gasps, takes a step back, and quickly lowers the binoculars. He looks through them again. “Who are those guys?”
I snatch the binoculars from Adam. Securing the vineyard are half a dozen scarecrows. I heave a sigh of relief. No need to run, I tell Bill, who, now armed with a blowtorch, has taken up a defensive position.
Adam thinks there ought to be better ways of scaring off birds other than wasting a perfectly good set of clothes on a bunch of straw. “Why don’t you just chase them away yourself?” As if people have nothing better to do all day than to watch for birds. He puts the binoculars back on the shelf, but Bill tells him to keep them. Adam insists it be a trade and hands Bill the only thing of value he has, another one of Dobbs’s keys. Having hung the binoculars around his neck, he returns his attention to the shelf. He thumbs a small metal ring of spikes that whirrs as it spins.
“Spurs,” explains Bill.
When Adam hears how cowboys used to attach them to their boots, his eyes light up. He asks if he might go with Bill to a swap meet sometime.
“You have something to trade?”
“I’ve got stuff.”
I see straightaway where Adam is going with this. “No, you don’t.”
“It’s ours now,” he argues. “Mister’s got no use for it.” That he speaks of Dobbs in nothing but a passing manner concerns me. The man’s voice has to be in Adam’s head just as it is in mine, his moods and theories and explanations exerting the same kind of push and pull. If we’d talk about him, we could decide together what to make of the man. Instead of waging our own personal battles, we could figure out the new battle lines, because somehow, being Above still feels like a fight to be free. But whenever I bring up Dobbs, Adam clams up.
“We’re not going back there, and that’s final.”
“You have supplies?” Bill asks.
Though I wish he’d drop it, I nod.
Adam is eager to fill him in. “We’ve got tons of supplies. Food, diesel, tools.”
Bill interrupts him and says to me, “Have you told anyone this?”
I shake my head at Bill.
“Good. How secure is the place?”
Adam tells him the locks to the main doors can only be opened with codes and that a bunch of the supplies inside are kept under lock and key.
Bill pulls out the key Adam gave him.
“That one opens the filing cabinet where the microfiche is kept. Mom says Abraham Lincoln’s speech is probably the finest thing ever written, but I like the diagrams of Benjamin Franklin’s inventions best.”
This gets Bill’s attention. “You have documents? Historical documents?”
“The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and one page with a bunch of signatures. We’ve got tons of stuff in those cabinets.”
Bill’s mouth opens, closes, and opens again. “No one thought to safeguard our nation’s archives, or at least anyone that we’ve come across until now. The founding documents went the way of everything else combustible in museums and libraries. You going to preserve a book or are you going to build a fire to keep warm? And all those digital copies
are lost in the ether, never to be retrieved. So, we’re left with this.” Bill Bowers taps his temple. “Less than one percent of the US population survived, and now we’re down to fifty thousand, maybe a little more—how many of them do you think were scholars and teachers of history? Not enough, is how many. We’ve all just assumed that when the last of us died off, there wouldn’t be anything of an oral history, either. Legends and fables are what the future generations were going to inherit, but this”—Bill holds up Adam’s key—“this changes everything. This is the key to who we once were, and to what greatness we are capable of.” Bill turns his gaze of wonderment to me. “You, my dear, have the keys to a gold mine. Have you considered how this resource might be utilized?”