I feel as though my legs are about to take off with or without me. Adam, on the other hand, has grown lead feet. He and Bea are facing each other. For the first time since we’ve arrived, she is not talking.
“I’ll come back.”
She makes only the barest indication that she’s heard him.
“I’ll call you on the radio.”
I don’t have the heart to hurry him, not when it comes to good-byes.
He grabs her hand. “Come with us.”
She shakes her head.
He opens the suitcase, sorts through his stuff, and brings out his favorite sock monkey.
She holds it against her heart.
Adam is calling it a trade. What he asks of her I don’t know because the transaction is done with cupped hands and whispers. And then he hands her one of Dobbs’s keys.
“What does this unlock?”
Blushing, he makes the tiniest of gestures. He aims his thumb at himself.
She makes a little
oh
shape with her mouth.
“Dwell not too much on the former things, my dear. Consider that what is yet ahead might be right and beautiful.”
Marcus is standing at the top of the embankment beside a car in near-mint condition. In a soft voice, I tell Adam it is time to get a move-on and lead the way up the gravelly path. I lift the flap in the fence for Adam and Oracle to climb through. Adam avoids my eyes and then swings around when he hears his name being called.
Bea has stepped out of the tunnel. She is a vision in the daylight. “You’re going to dazzle them!” She waves a bright pink scarf.
“I’ll come back!” he replies.
And then everyone is waving and making a commotion, and Marcus is in the driver’s seat, opening the passenger door for me just as Dobbs once did. For just a second, I hesitate. Sitting in that seat is the closest I can come to trusting a person. I ease down onto the cracked leather seat and find the seat belt.
The breeze is swift, as if it aims to blow the dust out of me. It’s too bright to look up, so the sun reaches down. It’s a warmth you can’t get from a blanket. It soaks into my body, into my bones. If I ever find myself underground again, I’ll be carrying the sunlight in me.
I’ve asked Marcus to park on Church Street so I can walk the rest of the way. Tree roots are still pushing up the bricks on the sidewalk, and I find myself tripping just like I did when I was a girl. In the window of a yellow house, a face appears behind lace curtains. It startles me. Marcus explains that there may be as many as thirty or forty people who have moved back to Eudora. Along the side of the house is a clothesline with britches and cotton vests pinned to it, and in the front yard is a well-tended vegetable garden. The fruit trees have been pruned into dwarf versions and are bowed with fruit. Marcus says much of Eudora’s produce, along with that from a neighboring camp, is donated to the tunnels. Handmade toys, crocheted afghans, knitted cardigans are the same way.
Adam’s spurs, now attached to his shoes, sound like coins falling, as though our every step were a jackpot. We pass another yard where an old man calls out a greeting. I want so badly to recognize him and wave
as if I do. He goes back to tending his washing line, which is full of skinned rabbits. I remember when Dobbs first brought a rabbit Below. I almost hugged him because I mistook it as a pet for Adam. But then I saw it was limp and bloodied around the puncture. Dobbs said for me to quit crying, to skin it and throw it in the freezer, that it was no wonder the boy was so soft. Adam came over to see what caused the fuss. He stroked the dead animal, then begged us to let him play with it. He dragged that bunny around with him till it started to smell because I didn’t have the heart to take it from him. That was the last time Dobbs left skinning to me.
Someone is playing a piano in the house. The bright notes glance off windowpanes and drift away with the breeze. It’s silly, but I have the urge to knock on the door to see if it isn’t Mrs. Littleton at her upright.
We turn the corner onto Main Street and find ourselves at the start of the old parade route. It’s not hard to imagine the crowds, even with all the blooming crabapple trees in the way. I hold Adam’s hand. I feared it would be ruins, but it is all still here. I point out the redbrick two-story that used to belong to the International Order of Odd Fellows. Mama was once the angel in their float. She had to stretch out her arms and hold her angel wings open for the entire parade, and her back hurt something awful for the next few days. The parade is a memory, but the building hasn’t fared too bad. Nor has the drugstore beside it. We cut a path to the front window. I could’ve sworn Doc Hubacher and Mr. Minta were toasting us from their places at the dusty counter, but now all I see are our reflections. I turn, feeling scarcely more substantial than my reflection. I feel like I could pass through solid objects—the rusty mailbox outside the post office, the town’s only stop sign, the lampposts that now serve as potting sticks for fragrant vines. I am the one doing the haunting.
My hometown. How shrunken it seems, how aged. Wasn’t it a good long walk from the soda fountain to the grocery store? Didn’t the buildings stand taller, more proud? Wasn’t the church steeple high enough to put a crick in your neck looking up at its cross? The street seems hardly wide enough for two cars to pass and yet memory insists it was once a
showcase for hot rods cruising Main after Friday’s football game. Memory summons the people, too. Becky Willoby talking loudly on her cell phone outside her salon; the varsity team on a run to the water tower and back; Virgilian Witt doing his rounds, garnering donations from business owners for the historical society. People I haven’t thought about in years rise up like the dead on Judgment Day. How I long to see them now in the flesh, alongside Mama, Daddy, little Theo pummeling the pedals of his Radio Flyer. Something rips off the callus of my heart. Raw is the only way to put it. To be utterly sad is not to cry, but to make unreasonable pledges, the kind of promises that weigh like prison sentences. If I do nothing else with my life, I will write about my people—on these walls, if I have to—so they will exist somewhere other than my memory. I will tell of them even if Adam grows so tired of the stories that I have to whisper them to him when he’s asleep. I will teach ravens how to say their names.
I stop at the statue of Chief Paschal Fish and Eudora. The last time I saw it, I mostly paid attention to the girl. Now, as a parent, it’s Paschal Fish I mind. He looks like a man who knows a good-bye’s coming, that even though his little girl clings to him now with both arms, approaching is the time when she will let go. She’ll go about her way, the way all children eventually do. The man has braced himself for this eventuality with an oar. Rivers to paddle yet.
We continue along Main Street. For me, it is a homecoming. For Adam, it might as well be any other street. He looks down this street as though he’d just as soon take off, probably straight back to Lawrence. For Adam, when it comes to roads, they go only in one direction: to the future. I look at these streets and see them stretching all the way back to yesteryear.
The sun bounces on every surface—on the store windows; on the polished surface of the black-and-white parked out front of the police station; on the dewdrops still clinging to tufts of grass. Everywhere brilliant beams are cast, joyous sounds chime along. Jingles, tweets, chirps, squawks, squeaks, whistles. I don’t know the names for all the sounds. I am a deaf person having my hearing restored.
“Perfect spring day, just like old times,” Marcus muses aloud. “Day like this can break your heart.”
He’s wrong. A day like this can mend a heart, heal a person, make her back a little straighter. A day to make wrongs right, make straight the path.
And here we are at the police station. On the roof are antennae the size of light posts. The flag, frayed only a little, flaps at full mast.
The door opens before I reach for the handle.
The uniform is a little too tight around the middle, the collar is frayed, and the shirt has been washed so many times there’s no color to it but in the seams. It’s freshly ironed, though; the creases on the sleeves and the trousers as precise as a straightedge. Brass buckle is shiny, and I can see my reflection in those worn black boots. There’s no gun, no set of handcuffs, nothing but a weathered face that’s seen it all and then some.
“Blythe.”
He says it like he knows me, not just expecting me.
I don’t know how much Marcus told him about me on the CB radio, more than he ought to by the looks of things. Tracing my kin is what this meeting’s supposed to be about, so I say, “Hallowell,” to keep things on track.
“Blythe,” he says again.
I don’t know what I’m looking at. Handsome might be the word for it. Worn-out would do probably just as well. Scar around his neck, hair too long for a small-town man, cataract on one eye, which is a shame given how blue the other is. With hands that look almost rubbery from burns, he clasps his forearms. I can’t imagine why he sizes me up so, but he has to get a good look, even from the side. I put my hand up to cover the birthmark on my neck. He keeps standing there, looking at me with his arms crossed, hugging himself, like I am ten kinds of wonderful.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, but all of a sudden I wish I’d done a better job fixing my hair.
“Rand McNally.”
And just like that, I see it: the bend in his jaw where the acne has
left scars, the mischief in his cocked eyebrow, the lips that kissed mine a million years ago. Arlo Meier. This childhood friend; this boy from my backyard; this prince of the bleachers. He lives! The end of times is not an apocalypse; it is a reception. It is seeing the face you recognize—that recognizes you—and feasting on it. The table is set with a thousand empty spaces but here is one. One!
I am the first to break the silence. “I waited for you.”
Seventeen years, and it still has the ring of an accusation. If he’d have come back to me on those stands, I would never have walked home, would never have climbed into Dobbs Hordin’s car. Maybe we would have been sweethearts, made plans to marry. There have been times I blamed Arlo almost as much as I blamed Dobbs. But it’s not blame I intend now—it’s so he will know that I was a girl who was once willing to give her heart away.
“I’m so sorry we never found you.” Arlo looks like a man who’s beat up so bad he can barely see straight and yet wants to stand up to take one more round of punches.
He shakes his head. “We looked everywhere, chased every lead, brought in dogs, psychics, you name it. And then Diablo happened. I guess we gave up after that, gave up on near everything. I’m so sorry, Blythe.”
It comes very near to being breached, that levee in me.
What keeps me upright is the realization brought home by the tunnel people, by the man standing in front of me: I am not the only one to have been robbed. We’ve all been left behind. Seems to me none of us are entirely up to the task of being the remnant.
“It’s okay, Arlo.” I touch his arm. Because he finds such hope in that gesture, I pull Adam up beside me. “This is my son, Adam.” You want hope, here it is.
Arlo pumps Adam’s hand. “Son, you’re the spittin’ image of your granddaddy.” Which is about the kindest thing anyone could say in my hearing.
“Well, come on in, don’t just stand there,” he tells the three of us.
You’d think there were a dozen people in the room, but the voices
come from a single item in the middle of his desk. A scanner, Arlo calls it. Turning down the volume, he explains it’s supposed to be used only for emergencies, but it’s become the main source of communication for survivors. “Organizing a buffalo hunt is what’s going on right now.” He has us all sit and seems not to mind that a mutt makes itself at home on the rug.
Concerning Mama and Daddy’s whereabouts, the news isn’t promising. Arlo waits for me to steady myself with a good number of breaths before he uses several ledgers to make his point. Some of the names I recognize, although most without faces to go along with them. In the early years, he explains, information on people’s whereabouts was routinely broadcast; now, months can go by before he gets a tip about someone listing Eudora as their hometown. Usually, it is a deceased notice. He flips to another ledger. A long list of names, columns for name, date of birth, place and cause of death. At this point, he comes around the desk to where I’m sitting. He puts his arm on my shoulder.
I tell him to go ahead, I know what’s coming.
He shows me the listings for ‘Hallowell.’ It’s done no good preparing myself.
Theodore T.; Twelfth Prefecture, Ill.; cause of death, radiation sickness.
Suzie F.; Twelfth Prefecture, Ill.; cause of death, radiation sickness.
Gerhard P.; Sonora, Mexico; cause of death, unknown.
I look at Adam, now without an aunt and two uncles.
Mama and Daddy aren’t listed. I don’t have to ask. Arlo says, “I’ve put out a lot of calls. People all over the country are going through the ledgers.”
Here I am, smack-dab in the middle of Eudora, and suddenly I feel a long, long way from home. You’d think there wouldn’t be any place lonelier than the bottom of a missile silo. And then over and over again you find a place more desolate than the last. A roomful of expecting mothers, a tunnel of children too damaged for heaven. This time, it is
the space in Arlo’s ledger where Mama’s and Daddy’s names are not recorded.
“It’s not out of the question, you know,” says Arlo. “Kin show up all the time. You just never know.”
Before he closes the ledger, I flip through another page of
H
’s and pick up the pen on his table. “I’d like to add a name.”
Adam and I exchange weary glances.
Besides giving birth, there surely cannot be anything more powerful than writing the name of your warden in the Book of Life. All those years ago when I was forced to write that letter about having run away, I could not tell the truth. Now, I can spell out his name. I will press down hard enough to leave a mark on the next three pages, so there can’t be any doubt, so I will never have to write his name again. Capital letters and underlined.
I run my hand down the lines to the first available space and stop short. An entry for Hordin already exists.
Freedom.
So there can be no mistaking it, the baby’s birth date is listed.
Perhaps because of some sound I made, some gesture, Adam scrutinizes the page, too.
“Mom, is that . . . ?”
“Who wrote this?” I ask Arlo.
He tells about a trader who passed through Eudora and stopped at the station. “Strange fellow. Claimed he was curious about who was running the place now. Ran off the names of sheriffs all the way back to Rumboldt and then said it was a wonder that none of them had hauled his ass back here. I figured him for one of those who don’t have all their oars in the water, especially when he wanted to add this here name to the ledger. ‘Freedom,’ I said. ‘That’s quite a name.’ He just gave me a real queer look and said the mama named her, that she might come looking some day and that’s why he wanted to add it. So she’d know he kept his word.”
Adam and Arlo seem to be having a conversation, but I have trouble hearing them. Cotton seems to have plugged up my ears.
“It was Dobbs Hordin,” I finally manage. “Don’t you remember him from the school library?”
Arlo shrugs apologetically. “Radiation eats great big holes in your long-term memory. One day you wake up and discover you can’t remember anything about your wife except a yellow dress and the smell of hair spray.” Arlo closes the ledger gently, as if a slam will expel those resting in it, and sets it on his desk where he keeps faded pictures of what must be his family from before. He then comes back and pats my knee with his burned hand and tells me again how sorry he is.
I stand up. I think I’d like to go outside in the sunshine again.
“You okay, Mom?”
Just as I turn to tell Adam to give me a few moments to myself, I hear the main door open and a voice cry out from the foyer, “Where she at?”
The spirit so ready to fly out beyond the hills and out to the wide yonder in search of those who cannot be found in ledgers is now seized by a voice calling for me.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
No one in Arlo’s office replies. I listen to the hurried footsteps come closer. I shake my head. I have to press both hands against my chest to keep it from bursting clear open.
Should I believe it?
“Blythe Hallowell, you there?”
If there was any doubt, there is none now. Suddenly, it is not a doorway. It is the portal through which the past returns. It is the face and shape of one who loved me, loves me still.
“Blythe,” her voice goes from booming to quivery when she sees me. “It’s me.” There’s a clicking, a series of steady ticks, a metronome cuing some forgotten melody. “Me, Mercy.”
The air is not dead. It is not empty. It is the sum of all things. It is a cloud full of sighs, stifled cries, snickers leaked between fingers. Were whispered prayers and secrets shared to have weight, we wouldn’t need gravity. The air would pin us down.