It’s lack of sleep or too little food or too much worry that’s causing everything to get muddled in my head. If only there were a way to take off my head and put it on the shelf, I’d do better. I’d do better without eyes, eyes that mark a child wasting away before me. I’d do better if I didn’t have a pitchfork smile goading him all the time. If my mouth were up where the books are kept, it wouldn’t keep putting two sentences together that make absolutely no sense. My ears, next to the coffee mugs, wouldn’t keep eavesdropping on his thoughts about how afraid he has become of me. We could sit across from each other, headless me and vanishing boy, and draw pictures of bunnies and trucks and things from the lost world.
Everything about him used to remind me of the good things about home, but now I only remember the bad things: a dead dog, a missing kitten.
When No-Good Cat was getting ready to deliver her kittens in Grandpa’s barn, Daddy drove me over to see them being born. Grandpa and I sat with her as she labored. One tiny pink pellet came out, and then another, and between births the cat licked and cleaned her babies. By suppertime, she’d delivered six. After dinner, I ran back to the barn with a flashlight. This time, I counted only five. I looked behind the cat and under her tail, and still came up one short. I ran in to tell the grown-ups. Grandpa came out to look. He said, “Yup, there’s five all right.” And then he told me the most hideous thing.
“That mama cat has gone and ate it.”
I was appalled. She’d always seemed like a good cat.
“It’s nature’s way. A mama knows if any of her youngins ain’t right. She spared it a life of suffering.”
Spared it a life of suffering. Cruel to be kind.
I have to help the boy. Have to quit him, too. I just have to figure out how. If there were a way to get him out of here and back into my head. He came from my head, didn’t he? I dreamed him up. All of this is my doing. Undoing is what I must now be about. It isn’t cruel to undo him. It’s kind.
Whereas before Charlie made some attempt at eating, he now refuses everything. Already the bones are poking out of his sheet-white skin. He won’t talk about anything anymore, not even the good things. Not his favorite TV shows, not about Eeyore or even his grandma, who always has a penny for him to toss in her fountain, even though it doesn’t have any water in it. No longer does he mention his preschool teacher and her puppet, Gloria, with the yellow yarn hair. He has never talked about his mama, and there are times when I think she doesn’t really exist. I have to remind myself that I don’t tell him about my own mama. The things most precious we keep to ourselves.
Everything about the boy seems rolled up in a great big ache, an ache so bad he can’t complain about it. He’s given up asking when he can go home, and I no longer have to find different ways of saying, Soon. What little trust he had in me has eroded over the past few weeks. He knows I mean to say, Never. If I can tell a lie that big, why bother listening to all the other little lies?
“He’s fading away,” I tell Dobbs, hoping Charlie isn’t just pretending to be asleep.
“He’s doing fine. Not crying like he used to, that’s for sure.”
“Look at him. Does that look to you like a child who is doing fine?” Even buried under a quilt, you can smell death coming off him.
“You sure you’re feeding him enough? Kids need to eat every couple of hours.”
“Strap him down and shove it down his throat, you mean?”
“I’ve never seen you like this. You’re being hysterical.”
The boy wakes up when Dobbs, cussing a blue streak, struggles to free my hands from around his throat.
“It’s okay, sweet boy, everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.” But I keep my fingers knotted around the man’s gullet, a rotten core if ever there was one.
“Are you hurting Mister?”
I drop my hands only when Charlie comes over.
Dobbs rubs his throat, gives a stage cough, and dusts the front of his shirt. “What in God’s name is the
matter
with you!”
“Why were you hurting Mister?”
“I wasn’t, sweetie. We’re just playing a game, is all.” I usher Charlie back to bed, tuck the quilt around him. I sincerely hope my face is doing what it’s supposed to and not giving off that mad look again. “The Sleepy Man will be here soon.”
He shakes his head. “The Sleepy Man doesn’t want to come here anymore.”
“Yes, he does.” There it is again, that weather-vane voice. What kind of crazy storm is going on that it can’t pick a direction and stick with it?
When I return to the kitchen table, Dobbs lifts his palms, as if to say, See, what did I tell you? He’s fine.
Each time Charlie wakes up in here, it’s with more agony inside him. Used to be I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him; now, I can’t stand to see him suffering through the waking hours. I do such a remarkable job staring at the spot on the kitchen table, and Charlie does such a remarkable job of keeping still that he does disappear. For great big chunks of time. In my head, he is strong, like before he came here. He runs in figure-eight formations, airplane arms catching the updraft and lips making propeller noises.
The only time Charlie smiles is in his sleep. He’s free only when he dreams. Fact is, he’s not even free when he’s in my head. He shouldn’t have to be in this place one more day. He shouldn’t have to go through what I go through. Any mother worth her salt can see what has to be
done. Has to be done. Cruel to be kind, is what Doc Caul said. Spared a life of suffering, Grandpa said.
I get the pillow slip. I’ve washed it by hand many times over the last few days. It smells of hand soap. I stuff my pillow in it and press it against my face. So soft.
It would be fitting to say a prayer. If only I knew how.
“Sleep, little one. I will keep watch and chase the demons away. You go on ahead and dream your big dreams and throw your pennies into the wishing well and see how they are all going to come true. No more waiting. They are all about to come true.”
I hold the pillow above Charlie’s face and take one last look at heaven.
Dobbs and I don’t talk about Charlie anymore, which is just as well. He’ll only remind me how it was him who spared the boy, him who’d whisked Charlie out of here, and in so doing, spared me a lifetime of guilt. Him, the hero. I like to think I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I’d already been standing there half the night when Dobbs came in. But I don’t know. I’ll never know. Because of that, I
can’t quite trust myself. There are still parts of me that haven’t quite made up their mind.
I flip the calendar pages back and forth. It would make no difference to me if we undid the binding and rearranged the pages and put the book back together again. July 22, the day I was taken, is six years ago. That is so long ago it almost feels like Never. May 12, three years ago, is the entry for when Dobbs moved down here. That might as well be Always. But just a few months before that, February 4, is my favorite date. Adam was born. That feels like Blink.
I didn’t keep the pregnancy a secret from Dobbs as I had with the first one. Soon as I was sure, I told him. As it turned out, Adam was conceived when Charlie was with us. “I am going to have a baby, Dobbs,” I told the man. And because he had missed it the first go-around, I spelled it out real clear and slow. “
I
am going to have a baby. I. Me.” There was to be no “we,” I told him. Adam was born, and Dobbs had to be reminded all over again when he had the ridiculous notion I name the child after him. I’d remembered Mama deciding Theodore would be a good name for my little brother, saying if you couldn’t pick your child’s destiny, putting your faith in him by naming him after a great president wasn’t a bad bet. I’d remembered Daddy’s lady-friend, Bernice, and the baby she named Elijah, hoping her boy would lead her to great things. “His name will be Adam,” I told Dobbs. He gave his approval, saying it was a fitting name, given that he had been formed in the earth, so I had to set him straight on that, too. It was breath that was to define my son, not soil. And I am right. The boy carries within him a breeze, the breath of God. His first breath knocked down concrete walls and let in wide-open spaces. Turns out that breath has also knocked down the barriers I put up, barriers to keep an emotional distance between him and Dobbs. Adam now understands that Dobbs is his father, not merely the Person Who Brings Food, but he still calls him what he was first taught: Mister.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
My little boy has cat paws. “Oh, Adam! You scared me!”
I close the book and put it up high on the shelf. “Why are you down here? You’re supposed to be asleep.” Adam sleeps upstairs, in a space next to my bed that Dobbs has defined using shower curtains. Adam knows he is not allowed to use the stairs without someone helping him, even though he is three and insists that he is a big boy now.
He holds up his fingers. Between them is a brown tooth. He grins and then sticks his tongue in the bloody gap in his gum.
“Sweetheart! That’s great!” Too early for teeth to be coming out. This one I have been trying to save with much brushing, but to no avail.
“I talk funny now: Thimon thayth touch your toeth.”
“Come on, let’s go wrap it up and put it under your pillow.” I lead him out of the Vault. Dobbs doesn’t like him coming in here, not since he went through the drawers and found the seed packets. Half of Dobbs’s stock got spread out all over the floor. If that garden ever gets planted, we’re going to have cucumbers come up with petunias. I don’t like Adam to come down, either. Stairs scare the heck out of me. We’ve tried a gate, but the child always figures out how to dismantle the lock.
Adam insists I let go of his hand when we come to the stairs. He walks like a puppet with strings that aren’t always coordinated. He makes it to the upper level without my help and grins again. Another milestone.
I tuck him in and kiss him good night for a second time.
“How much money will the Tooth Fairy bring?” He slides his hand under his pillow, making sure the tooth is situated just right.
Bottle caps are what we use for coins, but for Adam they’re as valuable as Dobbs’s cache of Krugerrands. “We’ll have to see. Now, sleep, or she won’t come at all.”
“One story. Please?”
I sigh. “The turtle?” The old standby.
He nods.
I tell him the world has been taken for a ride into a cave on the back
of a giant turtle. Everyone has gone into hibernation, which means to live indoors and get stronger. One day the sun will come out, and all the children will run into the garden of plenty. The end.
“Good night now.” I slip the sleeping mask over his eyes and give him a peck on the cheek.
I tell Adam stories, and the fourteen-foot ceiling rises up, heaven lowers itself a hundred feet underground, the stars are coaxed from their impossible heights to dust his head. I speak, and the walls fold back so he can roam the prairie. It doesn’t take but a few words for my son to be lying on a raft in the middle of an enormous silver ocean. Facts can’t do that. The gospel truth isn’t going to fuel his sense of wonder. Ever since he first opened his eyes, he finds everything wonderful—shoelaces, spit bubbles, toilet rolls, keyholes. At what point am I supposed to set him straight with words like
prison
? If I point to his father and say, “Warden,” what good will this do? Before he was born, I spent sleepless nights worrying about what I would teach him about why we were here. I considered a plague, an emperor king calling for the slaughter of infant boys, an alien invasion, another ice age, war, anything that would make our circumstances down here be about choice, not captivity. Dobbs moving below three years ago and subjecting us to long-winded survivalist sermons convinced me that his clichéd nuclear disaster scenario was as good as any. Adam is being brought up to believe he is a treasure guarded by a mother of mulish good cheer and a charitable, if testy, provider. Someday, he will know the truth, but for now my job is to elaborate on the myth, to find a way to fight gum disease and to keep the Tooth Fairy from getting flush on my boy’s teeth.
I fish out some old bottle caps and trade them for Adam’s tooth.
Dobbs is out of breath when he comes back from his latest foray above. In a state, actually. He is gesturing and jabbering and doesn’t make a lick of sense. Adam is having a nap on his pallet, so I tell Dobbs to hush. I
think he’s gone to his study to calm down, but he dashes back upstairs, this time with his shotgun. He grabs my hand and leads me through the door, up eight stairs, past the first blast door, which he now keeps open so we can have access to the corridor for exercise, and to the second blast door. He tucks his long, greasy hair behind his ears and shoves his ear against the door. I am beckoned to do the same.
“You hear anything?”
There’s a yard of solid steel between us, beyond that the L-shaped corridor and a fifty-foot stairwell. What’s there to hear? “Not a thing.”
He is beside himself, so much so that he punches the combination to the keypad right in front of me. It used to be that a key opened this door, but a few years ago he rigged this and the outer door with magnetic locks. Only the inner doors to the upper and lower levels need keys now. He also installed a security camera up above, which is almost always on the blink, but he will still spend ages watching the fuzzy black-and-white picture. I wish he’d unplug the darn thing because Adam’s now taken up the habit, and I constantly have to pull him away for fear that he will ruin his eyes.
Four numbers. I make out the first three: five, one, zero. I hear the lock release. Dobbs leans against the door. It swings wide. He yanks me by the wrist. I don’t have any idea what he intends to do. “But Adam’s—”
“Come on!”
We race around corners and then up the steep flight of stairs, Dobbs taking them two at a time. You’d think a man who spent so much time underground would let himself go. Not Dobbs. He spends hours “training.” He says unless the hunter wants to become the hunted, one has to stay in shape. He tries to use the same argument to get me to “bulk up,” and says I’ll never be fit for life aboveground if I carry on at this rate. And he’s right, because the stairs have done me in.
I notice the walls are green. I’d forgotten that. I haven’t been up this far since he brought me here. He has to drag me the rest of the way. Again, I am told to stick my ear against the door. Just on the other side is Kansas. Birds, tractors, cars, crop dusters—all manner of noisy things. What I hear is concrete.
My heart starts to race. He’s been pursued? They’ve come for me? I press my ear against the door and strain so hard I think I’m going to burst a blood vessel.
“I told you they’d try this!”
I can’t hear anything. “Who’s out there, Dobbs?” I then wonder what the heck is wrong with me, and start to bang against the door.
“Hello, hello, help!”
Dobbs yanks me away from the door. “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?” He all but throws me down the stairs. I try scrambling up them again, and he twists my arm so hard I think it’s going to break. “Those are Scalpers out there. You have any idea what they’d do if they got in here? What they’d do to you? To Adam?”
On our way back to the living room, he locks all the inner doors. He goes on and on about the End of the World. I’m surprised Adam doesn’t wake up. There’s probably a fancy term for the way Dobbs has turned out.
Crazy
’s my word for it, and I consider myself an expert. Moody, jumpy, afraid to go sleep. Half the time he won’t eat what I prepare because he’s afraid I’ll poison him, even though he’s confiscated anything that could be used to that effect. We don’t even have bleach down here anymore, which goes to show how far he’s slipped. Ever since Adam was born he’s been like this. If he’s not running around with his gas mask on or doing bench presses and sit-ups, he’s holed up with his seed catalogs and his preparedness tracts. Adam and I can go for ages without seeing him. Even when he does come out of his study and joins us for a meal, he’ll be off someplace else. He’ll look up with a mouthful of food, totally startled to see us sitting in front of him. He’ll start talking that gibberish again about the Last Days being in effect and how we’re about to be the last known survivors, and that’s usually when I put my foot down and tell him enough’s enough.
When Dobbs is this upset, it can take ages for him to wear himself out. There’s only one thing that will shut him up. So that Adam will not wake up to a raving lunatic, I fetch
The Manifesto
. I’ve typed it and
retyped it so many times I could recite it front to back. I settle Dobbs in his recliner with hot cider, take my seat across from him, and start to read to him.
By now, I realize the police are not going to break down the door. If they were not figments of his imagination, the Scalpers must have been teenagers wanting to vandalize private property. Still, Dobbs is agitated by the event. He has me come down to the lower level. Before I do, I check on Adam. He is napping again. He sleeps a lot lately. I hope he is not getting sick. Dobbs says this is another good reason why we’re still here. People are Carriers of the Plague.
Everything on the lower level is much the same, only more cluttered. Instead of going into the Vault, we go the other way around, to the Weapons Room. He unlocks the door, opens up the gun safe, and gets out the .38 revolver and a fistful of ammunition.
“It’s time you learned a thing or two about self-defense.”
We tromp down to the utility tunnel, where he has pushed an old mattress up against the blast door of the silo. With masking tape, he has made an outline of a person.
“Head shots,” he says. “You never want to think you can scare them off by injuring them.”
The gun is cold and heavy, and it makes my hand shake.
Dobbs insists this is no time for being weak. He orders me to raise the gun at the target.
“Just think about how you are trying to protect your home.”
I don’t say, “This is not my home,” because with a three-year-old boy, I have been trying so hard to make it home. If I can make it home, my son will not grow up a refugee.
I raise the gun. I steady my arm for the recoil, like he says.
And then I fire.
A deafening bang. My ears ring. I open my eyes.
“Bull’s-eye!” shouts Dobbs.
Sure enough, there’s a hole where a nose ought to be.
As commanded, I fire. Bits of yellow stuffing explode from a bullet hole. I try again. I notice that the trick is to fire between heartbeats. I shoot and shoot, and the mattress gets torn up.
Dobbs reloads. I tell him I’ve had enough, but he won’t have it. All of a sudden he is repositioning the mattress, and I am holding the gun.
The blood drains from his face when he turns to me. We both hear the bullet drop into the chamber.
Every muscle in my body contracts into a supportive position around my forefinger. It is steady with purpose. It is being goaded by a single nerve sending a single message, Fire.
Shoot the bastard.
I hear a cry behind me.
“Mommy.” The racket has woken up Adam.
I don’t turn around. I know he’s at the top of the stairs. I know that with or without my permission, he’s going to use those wobbly legs to come down. “Stay where you are, sweetheart.”
Dobbs’s expression has changed. “Head shots only, like I said.” Smug, is what it is. He doesn’t need to say it; I know. If I shoot him and he dies, Adam and I die down here with him.