Behind the camping gear are the rolls of tinfoil that Dobbs is one day going to use to build solar panels. Perfect. I haul them to the kitchen. I turn the table upside down and cover the bottom with sheets of tinfoil. I wind string between the legs. An overturned kitchen chair serves as the helm. One crazy idea leads to another, and soon I have everything covered—the counters, the washstand, the sugar bowl and the coffeepot, the cutting board, which makes the most excellent shield. And still there are thirty rolls of tinfoil left.
I paper over the bookshelves and food shelves, and tape great long sheets across the floor and the walls. For the first time ever, there is no
door. For the first time, there is no past on the other side of it, and no future, either. There is only the shiny now, in all its crinkliness. I shape a ship’s wheel, a parrot, and a helmet. I leave the last roll for Adam.
The room looks like a pop-up book. Stories, what would we do without them?
When the lights come on, the room is a silver wonderland. It isn’t snow on Christmas morning, it isn’t looking out the window and seeing four-foot icicles dangling like wind chimes from the eaves, but it is pretty darn close to spectacular. I can tell by the way Adam gasps that he thinks so, too. The conniption fit Dobbs is going to throw when he gets back from his mission and finds his precious commodity squandered is nothing compared to the sound of Adam’s surprise.
Adam can be such an old man, but today he acts exactly as a five-year-old on a snowy day is supposed to act. He twirls slowly. The wrinkled walls reflect his amazement. Without being told, he steps into his boat, picks up the wheel, and tacks into the wind.
I hand Adam the last of the homemade jerky and tell him that’s what pirates eat for breakfast.
When he tires of sailing, I give him the roll of tinfoil.
“Let’s have a snowball fight.” I scrunch up a few balls to show him how it’s done.
We take up opposite sides of the room, me behind my upturned cot, him in his boat. He raises his shield. Adam has never needed to be taught how to play.
Nor does he have to be shown just how quickly play turns to combat. One minute we are lobbing tinfoil balls at each other, the next they might as well be grenades. The more I cry for mercy, the more savage he becomes. This gentle boy has turned into a tyrant. When I hold my hands up in surrender, he is fueled for war. I see him casting around for something heavier to throw and yell at him to stop. He can’t hear me. It’s as though his mouth has become unstitched; his grin unravels.
It’s surprise more than pain that makes me cry out, but gauging from Adam’s look of alarm, I might as well have been leveled with a wrecking ball.
“What did you do that for?!”
He is sorry. I can tell by the way he avoids looking at me. He stares at the floor, his shoulders bunched up around his ears.
I right my cot and sit down.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Yes, you did, I keep from saying. I want to tell him it’s in all of us to harm someone else, even those we love. We deceive them or betray them or we throw things at them. How else are we to know they bruise or bleed? How else are we to know the relief of being forgiven?
“Come here,” I say.
It takes some convincing before he comes over. I pull him into my lap and bury my nose in his white-blond hair. After I delivered him, I lay him on my chest and searched him for a resemblance between us. Rather than finding it in the shape of his forehead or in the setting of his nose, I found it in his smell. We smelled the same, him and me. At times, it has been only his smell that has kept me from doubting my own existence.
“You’re warm.” I take off his sweater, and his hair stands straight up with static. I start laughing.
He musses my hair. “You look funny, too.”
I tickle him, and the game is afoot once again.
“Anybody home?” Dobbs calls when he opens the door.
Adam jumps up. He rushes up to greet him. If Dobbs was spiteful and mean to Adam, I might be more inclined to put aside fable for fact,
but as it is, Dobbs is mostly patient. With me, he sometimes still goes on his end-of-the-world tangents, although less than he used to, but with Adam, he could almost pass for regular. If turning my boy against him might lead to anything other than disaster, I would start and end each story with a wolf dressed up in Dobbs’s clothing.
Dobbs has another treat for Adam. This one is too big for Adam to carry. Dobbs puts a vacuum cleaner on the floor, right in the middle of our stage. He hands me the duffel bag and a dead rabbit, which will later end up curing in the stairwell. The pneumatic ram with all the spigots serves as a rack for his coat.
He bends beside Adam, who is running his hands across the canister and the hose.
“What’s it do?”
“Well, it used to suck up dirt, but it doesn’t work anymore. I thought we could take it apart, see if you can put it back together again.” Dobbs is clearheaded today. This is not always the case when he comes back from a “mission.” He can be foul-tempered about how the world’s gone to pot, or landmine-quiet. Only once in a while do we see anything of the deranged person he was a couple of years ago, although we still have to listen to his theory of people being Scalpers.
Adam is most pleased with his gift. I wonder why it can never just be a toy car.
“Hey, what’s this?” Dobbs points at Adam’s getup—my best attempt at chaps and a rather lopsided fringed vest.
“It’s my costume. I’m Henry Pate.”
Dobbs, giving me a once-over, notices the black pants, the button-up shirt, a poor imitation of a bow tie. I’ve scraped my hair into a ponytail and tucked it into the back of my collar. Adam’s assured me I look like a gentleman. “And who might you be?”
“She’s the narrator, silly. We’re doing
The History of Eudora.
”
Slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead, Dobbs says, “Ah, yes. Your mother’s masterpiece.”
I am determined that Adam know where his people come from, that
he have an ancestral home tucked at the confluence of the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers, and that he feel part of some greater arc of history. To that end, I have my play. Each year, I add to it a little more. We are now up to the start of the Civil War. Being five and sharp as a tack, Adam gets more lines and more parts.
“Do you want to see it?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Adam steers Dobbs to a chair. “You need a ticket.” He races to the kitchen table to the stack of tickets he made from old cereal boxes. He slips Dobbs one, then stands ceremoniously with his hand out to collect it. With big solemn eyes, a broad mouth quick to smile, and stick-straight-up blond hair, he’s a good-looking little guy, nothing at all like his father. Except for the splatter of freckles on his nose, he’s nothing of me, either.
“Maybe we should do this another time, Adam.” I can read Dobbs better than a script. Dobbs doesn’t like me teaching Adam American history. He says America is a Fallen Empire. He says what matters is the future.
“Mommy, please.” He runs behind the partition, then gives me the signal to begin. I look at him, and he gives me puppy eyes.
I pick up the script, clear my throat, and begin reading, but he stops me.
“Use your narrator voice.”
In a deep voice, I take us back to the time when seven hundred acres of Shawnee land is sold to three German settlers by Chief Paschal Fish. Adam comes out from behind his partition so the one-member audience can get a load of his homemade feather headdress. “If you name the town after my daughter, Eudora,” Adam recites, “no misfortune will come to you.” His somber expression splits into a grin, so proud to have delivered the line perfectly.
In Adam’s mind, Chief Paschal Fish is right up there with God. I’ve told him that Eudora, smack-dab in the middle of Tornado Alley where great swaths of land are ripped through to the bone and entire towns tossed into the air, has been spared calamity, and in his mind, this is the
chief’s doing. One of the things you cannot teach someone with extremely limited experience is coincidence. Especially not when you’re always going on about Destiny.
I narrate the part where Quantrill and his murderous ruffians raid the city of Lawrence, trying not to pay any mind to Dobbs’s chuffing. Saddled on his broom, Adam gallops around the concrete pillar as the avenging party. He chases the marauding guerrillas into the Sni Hills, in reality a place of high bluffs and deep ravines, but down here the place behind the shower curtain with paper trees pinned to it. We are about to come to the part in the Battle of Black Jack, where John Brown defeats Henry Pate in retaliation for burning down Lawrence, when Dobbs stands up. It sounds like applause, but it looks like a man smacking two old gloves together to rid them of dirt.
“But we’re not done yet.”
He rubs Adam’s head. “That’s enough for today, Sport.”
Adam is about to make another protest, but Dobbs cuts him off. “If you spent half as much time reading what I give you as you do making up these silly plays, you’d know a lot more about the world.” Adam’s smile slips. No matter how amiable Dobbs is with Adam, he has a knack for making Adam feel like he just doesn’t measure up. Reading is one of those ways. Even though I’ve explained a hundred times that not all children are quick to pick up on letters, Dobbs is worried that Adam is slow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Give the child a pile of junk, and he’ll build you the most wonderful machine. At the moment, Adam is constructing himself a companion with an alarm-clock head, limbs made from coils, and hands with spoon fingers. Tell me that’s not genius. Adam can also recite any story I’ve ever read to him almost word for word.
To get into Dobbs’s good graces again, Adam asks Dobbs to help him take apart the vacuum cleaner. While they are busy, Adam prods for information about Dobbs’s venture Above. Dobbs is quick to tell him about bad guys and vicious animals and terrible storms. He knows full well too much disaster nonsense will give Adam bad dreams, but it
doesn’t stop him. If I tell Dobbs I don’t like his filling Adam’s head with stories—those kinds of stories, at any rate—he’ll only say, what makes me think my stories are better than his. Instead of putting a stop to it, I go about opening cans, making as much of a protest as I can with a spoon and a tin plate.
What Adam believes about the outside world, the land we call Above, is something right out of a science-fiction novel. The death of masses of people is how the story starts, followed by the prolonged and agonizing death of the planet as a result of radiation. Severe climate change and barbarism sum up Dobbs’s contribution. So Adam will not feel like the last kid on earth, my contribution to the oral history has been to include survivors his own age hidden in caves and sewers throughout the land, and to reiterate that the Disaster will soon have run its course. On one point Dobbs and I are in perfect agreement—that the ending be happy. Adam, in other words, will one day run free.
“Want to take this downstairs and work on it in my office?” Dobbs asks Adam.
“Yes!” Adam’s out the door in a flash. He loves being invited into the Inner Sanctum. He’s fascinated most by the animals in the specimen jars, even though what Dobbs will want to show him are the reams of preparedness tracts. Dobbs acts more like a recruiter than a father.
When I draw the covers over Adam, he is so tired he can barely keep his eyes open. Nevertheless, he wants a story. I offer to read, but he shakes his head.
“How about
The Hobbit
?”
“That’s way too long, Adam.”
“Just tell the part about the treasure.”
It’s such a relief that after Dobbs’s gloom and doom Adam wants magic. “The Arkenstone is known as the Heart of the Mountain,” I begin. I tell him about its luminescence, how it has a thousand crystal surfaces sharp enough to slice off a finger. It has its own light, and
everywhere it shines, things are made new and beautiful. “And it’s way down deep in the mountain where nobody can see to it.”
“Like me,” he says.
“Yes, like you.”
Doomsday is no match for such purity, such radiance.
Adam is almost seven. This is not the first time he’s asked the question; it’s the first time he’s asked it with the calendar in his hand. He hands me a pen.
“It’s not something we can schedule, Adam. Mister will tell us when it’s safe.” I pretend to keep reading.
“Can’t he just open the door and let me see a little of it?”
I set the book aside. “You know what? I think you are old enough now to become a Boy Scout.” I describe what I remember from Theo’s Cub Scout days.
Adam interrupts. “You’ve told me that before. It’s where you learn how to tie knots and fix a broken leg with a stick.”
“Yes, that’s right, and a lot more than that. Do you know why?”
“So they can get badges.”
I laugh. “They do earn badges, but they learn this stuff so they can take care of themselves in the outdoors, by themselves if they have to. Be prepared, is the motto of a Boy Scout.”
He sees where this is going. “If I can take care of myself, will Mister let me go outside?”
“There are a lot of badges you’ll have to earn.”
“Can I start now?” He starts bouncing on the balls of his feet.
I get up from my chair and walk to the kitchen. “Well, shall we start with teaching you how to cook?”
“I already know how to cook. I can make toast.”
“I was thinking about something more substantial. When you live Above, you’ll need food to give you plenty of energy, for building a camp, say.”
Sometimes I wish I never went along with the end-of-the-world story so I could describe what it is really like outside at this time of year. Spring is when the trees are leafing out and the fields are turning purple with larkspur. It’s that time of year when the mercury barely rises and children go rushing outside in short sleeves. You can hear their mothers calling about how they are going to catch their deaths, mothers who have forgotten how breaking the hard ground of winter is done in the hearts of children first. I can’t tell Adam about spring without telling him about children, so I tell him instead about rivers.
There are rivers that run faster than ocean waves and some that run granddaddy-slow. “Some of them are so wide, you can’t swim across them, especially after the rains, but my favorite are the ones that have stepping-stones across them. Spending a day at the river is like being lost in time.”
“I don’t want to be lost.”
Sometimes, this is how it goes when I describe the outside world. It starts off sounding magical and ends up sounding scary.
I lift his chin. “You’ll never be lost. When we go Above, I’ll be right by your side. Now, how about we get back to cooking?”
I get out a box of kitchen gadgets I seldom use—the egg poacher, though we haven’t had an egg in months and even then, it was something a pigeon might have laid; a cheese grater; a nesting set of measuring cups. I tell him he can take anything from the shelves he wishes, and I part the blue gingham curtain to show him the pots and bowls. “Doesn’t matter what you fix. Get creative, use your imagination.”
My son takes it all in with a seriousness that crushes my heart.
“When you have cooked three meals for us, you will earn your first badge.”
He doesn’t say anything, and for a horrible moment I think this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever come up with. As if fake Boy Scout badges are going to make him stop asking to be let outside.
But he asks, “Do we still have any of those chocolate sprinkles?”
I almost choke on my relief. “Well, now, you’re the chef. You dig through that stuff and see what you find.”
I retreat to the living room and rummage around for fabric scraps to start making badges, while Adam unpacks everything in the kitchen. By the time I have finished making the first badge, an embroidered circle of T-shirt material with a pot drawn on it, Adam’s project seems to have stalled. “You done?”
“It doesn’t look right.” His face is streaked with flour and his fingers are gummed together with some sort of paste.
Beside the mixing bowl are jars and cans and packets and every conceivable mixing utensil. In the bowl is thick sticky dough the color of red dirt. It is lumpy with raisins and the last of the peanuts and other unidentifiable fragments.
“I’m not going to earn my badge, am I?” He is on the brink of tears.
“Oh, I wouldn’t give up that easily if I were you.” I scoop some of the mixture on my finger and pop it into my mouth. Way too much Cup-a-Soup, but not entirely inedible. “How about we add some sugar to it and see if these don’t turn out to be cowboy cookies.”
Anything with the word
cowboy
commands Adam’s attention.
Encouraged, he dumps spoonfuls of sugar into the bowl. I find a cookie cutter, and he tips out the batch onto the table, flattens it, and presses out star shapes. After we’ve browned them on the skillet, we sit down. Neither of us speaks. The mealtime has the feel of a high-stakes card game. Adam studies my face. I chew poker-faced. Too much praise too soon and he’ll know right away I’m bluffing.
He takes a bite, makes his own assessment—several quick blinks, a frown, and a hasty swallow.
When I take another bite, he shows his surprise. “You like it, Mommy?”
If it kills me, I’ll eat every last one of these cookies. “Like it? I think you’re going to put me out of a job soon.”
He grins, then comes around to give me a hug. “Maybe I can earn all my badges before my birthday.”
And just like that, I know scouting isn’t going to be any help to me at all.
“They won’t hurt him one bit.” Dobbs is suggesting a blue pill because something has set Adam off on one of his marathon crying jags. “It’ll just put him to sleep, is all.” This from the man who used to rant about drug companies.
“It’s from being cooped up in this room,” I whisper fiercely. Ever since the incident with the so-called Intruders, Dobbs limits our access to just the upper level when he leaves on his missions. Only when he’s around to supervise can Adam have the run of the place. I push the bottle of pills back across the table. “No.”
“They’re not poison, for pity’s sake. Here.” Nothing makes Dobbs happier than when he can prove me wrong, especially when it comes to Adam.
He slugs down a pill. “Watch. In a few minutes I’m going to have a really decent nap. You two want to have a party, be my guest. Raise the roof, if you want.”
Sure enough, Dobbs is snoring before I finish doing the dishes.
Adam stops crying and goes over to look at Dobbs. He doesn’t get to see such a spectacle because Dobbs does his sleeping in his study with the door locked. Adam decides to conduct a test. He lets off a piercing shriek three inches from the man’s ear.
I find this amusing until I wake up from a deep sleep. I grab Adam’s arm and tell him to hush, to let Dobbs be. I run out of the room and up the short staircase, past the first blast door to the second one. The keypad.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
I remember the first three numbers of the code. Five, one, zero. One more. One, I try. Nothing.
“You mustn’t do that, Mommy!”
“Go get your sweater, and grab Teddy.” I pound five, one, zero, and then two. Nothing.
Adam yanks on my arm to make me stop. “No, Mommy! Don’t!”
“Adam! This is important. Let go of me.” Five, one, zero . . . three.
“You’re going to set off the bomb!”
“Be quiet.” And then I turned to him. I’ve never seen him so afraid. “What?”
Adam starts to rock back and forth on his heels. He shakes his head wildly.
I take him by the shoulders to explain. “Adam, there is no bomb down here.”
He glares at me. “Uh-huh. The Atlas bomb. It’s for Russia, but you tried to open the door, and now it’s going to go off in here!” He twists out of my reach and runs along the passage and back down the stairs.
Five, one, zero, four. I hear the sliding sound. The door is unlocked! I push it open and run through the corridors and up the steep, narrow stairs.
One door! One!
I start punching combinations. My heart is pounding. It could be hours before that pill wears off! I stop and think. Five-one-zero-four . . . Five one zero four. A date but referring to what? I have no idea. The second combination has to be a date, too. What? His birth date. I try those numbers. Nothing. Adam’s birth date . . . nothing. Mine doesn’t work, either. I keep trying different combinations: the date I was abducted, the date baby Freedom was born. Then I realize these numbers are important to me, not to Dobbs. What dates would he care about? The End of the World! Let’s see . . . how many have there been? Dobbs has spoken of several. There was the one called Collapse of the European Union, and there was one called Wall Street Meltdown. I don’t remember when exactly these were—sometime in the early years. The one he called Diablo was a few months after Adam was born—something about a nuclear power plant in California. That was six years ago, early May, as I recall.
I start punching numbers. And then I hear an almighty scream. I race down to see.
Adam is under the kitchen table, beside Dobbs’s legs. He has his arms folded over his head. He is rocking so vigorously, plates and cups clatter and smash to the floor. Rockets may as well have blasted off for
the way he is hollering. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!”
“Adam, we’re going outside, like you wanted.”
I try to crawl under the table, too, try to pull him out so he will quit shrieking, but he shrinks from my touch as though he’s been scorched. I know not to touch him when he’s like this, but we are so close to getting out. I try telling him that, and he screams back that he doesn’t want to go out. I’ve killed him, he cries.
And then,
wham!
He kicks. Blood spurts from my nose. I stumble backward, and something else crashes to the floor. Adam has grabbed hold of Dobbs’s knees. He’s waiting to be blown to smithereens like it’s 1950.
I press a wet towel against my nose and sit across from him, saying, “Sweetie, we’re safe. You’re okay. It’s okay.”
He keeps yelling and rocking until, eventually, Dobbs wakes up. The bucking thing inside Adam is stronger than both of us put together. Dobbs hands me the bottle of pills. Between Dobbs and me is a truce the shape of Adam. I take out a pill. Somehow, we manage to pry Adam’s jaw apart and force the pill into his mouth. The tremors begin to lessen, and the flares in his eyes die out.
As I lay him down on his pallet and stroke his forehead, Dobbs says, “You feel that?” He cocks his head.
“What?”
He looks toward the door, then back at me, eyebrow cocked.
“A draft.”
He goes to investigate and comes back with a very odd expression. “Both doors were open.”
I scream through the gap in the floor for Dobbs. I tell him to bring the book with him. The book has seen us through Adam’s rickets, his broken arm from when he fell down the stairs, a tooth extraction, and several urinary infections. It has to have the answer for this.
Adam answers all of Dobbs’s questions. Yes, his tummy hurts; yes, his head hurts; yes, he feels sleepy. Yes, to everything.
I hold his hand. His palm is yellow, too.
“It could be a dozen different things,” Dobbs explains. “Liver problems, gallbladder. I don’t know, Blythe. I just don’t know.” I’m not used to seeing Dobbs at a loss. It scares me almost as much as his cold-blooded control.
I put a cool compress on Adam’s head. “Give him one of your pills.”
Dobbs brings back a little foil package. “These are the last of the antibiotics.” He breaks one in half.
Adam refuses it. The days of bribing him with bottle caps are over. Dobbs promises him three Krugerrands. Sick as he is, Adam only swallows the pill after Dobbs fetches the coins and puts them in his hand.
Apart from rickets and being a little small for an eight-year-old, Adam is a healthy kid. He’s never been sick like this before.
Dobbs and I sit and watch him, waiting for the color to fade.
“I think his color is better. Don’t you?”
Dobbs says, “I don’t know.” I hate the sound of this. After another long silence, he goes downstairs and comes back with one of the pistols. He packs it in the duffel bag. He tells me he’ll be back as quick as he can.
“You’re not going to leave with him being like this.”
“I’m going to get him medicine.”
Dobbs has taken two children out of here already, children I will never see again. I can’t believe my own ears when I say, “Take him with you.”
It doesn’t help to plead or to cry or even to accuse him of being the cause for Adam’s sickness. Dobbs tells me to get a grip, panicking isn’t helping the situation.
“He’s my son. You must take him!”
Dobbs gets in my face and lowers his voice. “He is my son, too.”
I almost feel sorry for Dobbs until he adds, “You still don’t get it, do you? He’s our future. If anything happens to him, what would all this have been for?”
The Plan—it always comes first.
Dobbs is taking too long to return. Something must have gone wrong. To keep from torturing myself with all the what-ifs, I keep busy. It’s silly trying to fashion a product out of worry, but I crochet anyway. As soon as I come to the end of a pattern, I pull the whole lot loose and start on something else. I read
The Hobbit
to Adam, even when he’s asleep. Knowing full well he’ll refuse to eat, I nevertheless cook him a meal from scratch. Hand-cut noodles from a lumpy mix of stale flour and chemically treated water. Tuna mixed with the last of the crackers. The result is something a dog would turn its nose up at. I scrape it into the trash can. Housework, then. I mop and polish and dust, even though dust doesn’t make it this far down. I organize the already orderly cupboards. I clean where stains and spots should be. And still, Adam is sick. Still, Dobbs is not back.
“And if it isn’t?”
We sit and watch Adam, and then we watch the sand, and then we watch Adam again. Dobbs never answers the question, and I am too scared to ask it again.
“Did you bring me a treat?”
Dobbs and I both snap awake. Adam is sitting up on his pallet, his skin translucent and his cheeks slightly flushed. No yellow.
I rush to him. I hold him and cry.
Dobbs kneels beside us and pats him on the shoulder.
“Why’s everyone being so nice to me? Is it my birthday or something?”
Dobbs and I exchange glances. What a brilliant idea!
“Yes, it is!”
“How old am I?”
“How old do you want to be?”
He thinks for a minute. “Fifteen.”
I hate how he always chooses to be older. He ages so quickly as it is, but this is a favorite game and rules are rules. “Fifteen, right. You go into the supply closet and make a list of all the things you’re old enough to do when you’re fifteen, and we’ll get ready.”
Dobbs heads downstairs. I follow him to get the box of decorations.
Soon, the living room is decked in streamers and paper banners. Dobbs has wrapped a great big present in old newspaper comics, and I’ve dug up a bottle of maraschino cherries and a liter of Coke. I have
a couple of presents for him, too. A knitted cap and Grandpa’s old watch.
When Adam steps out of the closet, we throw confetti on him and cheer, and he acts like he’s never been so surprised in all his life. We put on pointy hats. Dobbs starts whistling, and for the first time, the sound does not turn my insides around. Adam sings “Happy Birthday” to himself and pulls us into a conga line. We do a loop around the concrete pillar until he sees his presents.
Dobbs’s gift is an encyclopedia that looks brand-new even though it was published in 1958. Adam thanks him politely, which means he wishes he’d received anything other than a book.
He tries on the cap that I made him and admires himself in the mirror. “Thanks, Mom.” And then he unwraps the last present. Grandpa’s watch. He looks at me hesitantly.
“You have to take good care of it. That was your great-grandfather’s.”
“I know.” He rubs the inscription. He doesn’t know how to tell time, which is just as well, because one of the hands is missing. “Are you sure I can have it?”
“It’s yours.”
Dobbs is suddenly not having a good time. He withdraws from the circle. Adam doesn’t notice.
“Is it real gold?”
“Yup.”
He clutches it to his chest and then he bounds into my lap to give me a hug. “I love being fifteen!”
Because the time for coming headlong at him has passed, I have to monitor the changes in him with the sideways glance—another growth spurt, a broadening around his shoulders, hair growing in thicker above his lip. There’s less roundness to his face, more pointiness. Grandma would call it the stubborn set of the chin of all Everley men, but to me he looks more like a pixie than a man. So pale is his face that you can see the webbing of blue veins around his cheeks, and his eyes appear even larger and darker. Not that those eyes offer any clues about the changes going on inside him. His turning away from me is, I suppose, what most marks the change from boy to man.
About the only thing Adam will discuss with me is the future. Then, he is full of ideas. All the things he wants to do when he gets out. It scares me half to death the way he talks. If Dobbs catches wind of it, he’ll say I’m contaminating Adam. Plotting, he’ll call it. And it will set us back another few years. Sometime back, when Dobbs was
spending every waking moment indoctrinating Adam about the End of the World and his destiny to spawn a new tribe, I had the notion to use Adam to get to Dobbs. Because Dobbs seemed so eager to give Adam whatever he wanted, I suggested to Adam that he ask to go on a field trip, to insist putting into practice some of those skills Dobbs was so intent on teaching him. It backfired. Dobbs dug in his heels. Adam quickly became sulky when he didn’t get his way, and Dobbs interpreted this as my turning the child against him. I’ve had to play it the other way ever since Dobbs turned the tables and issued the decree that we’ll leave this hole only when Adam is “ready.” I think “ready” means when Adam puts away all talk of leaving. Dobbs increasingly makes mention of moving—resettling, as he puts it—but insists it all hinges on Adam. Who he says is becoming a loose cannon, just like his mother used to be. Never has their relationship been that of a father and son—at best, it has been something of a mentorship program—but of late, the tension between them has ratcheted up. So no harm will come to Adam, so Dobbs might actually keep his word and take us out of here, I find myself on more than one occasion doing Dobbs’s dirty work for him. Talking Adam off his high horse, for example.
The cough comes on suddenly, and as always, it is worse during Lights Off. I hope Adam, now rooming in what used to be the battery room next to the silo entrance, will sleep through it. The cough is Death’s promise to me. Ours was a courtship I protested at first, and then one I longed for like a spinster bride. Ever since Adam was born, though, I am the one who stalls, who bargains: wait for him to get a little older. I don’t know how much longer I can put it off.
It hasn’t helped to broach the subject of dying with Dobbs. He’ll have none it.
“You’re still young,” he has said. “My God, you’re thirty-four.”
In earth years, maybe so. But down here, a person can age ten years in a matter of minutes.
I try to remember what it was like to be a girl, to be Adam’s age, but my memories of the past are not as substantial as they used to be. They
are now more like mobiles, casting intricate patterns of light and shadow on the walls of my mind. Suspended from gossamer threads will be a bright scene, a scene from Way Before. If I am patient enough to wait for it to stop spinning, I might see the four of us kids around the breakfast table, say. Gerhard’s hair catches the dirty beam of light; Suzie pretends to eat; Theo, propped high on his chair by two telephone books, uses his finger to stir cereal formations in his milk. And there, a teenage girl with her head in a book. Try as I might, there is no telling what she is like. Dreamy, perhaps. Eager to get the awkwardness of adolescence over with and become an adult.
You’d think I’d have shared everything about my childhood with Adam by now, but to look back is to walk around an abandoned house. It pains me to search the lonely rooms for some overlooked toy, some snippet of conversation, and to realize even the old ghosts have given up haunting it. It must be in Mama’s memory that the girl with the braids now resides, and in Adam’s imagination, since he insists she is like him, prone to keeping secrets and wishing the grown-ups would meddle less.
Coughing makes my heart start racing. This time it also sets off a tingling that starts in my fingers and works its way up my arm. “This is it, Blythe. Go wake up your son,” the voice says. I don’t move. Am I to tiptoe down the stairs to Adam’s bedside and wake him up for this? So he can worry, too? So I can say good-bye? What are a mother’s last words supposed to be when all along they’ve been designed to keep him from realizing he’s trapped in his own grave?
Like the wake of a boat comes the glow. I hope it’s Dobbs getting ready for another mission. Dobbs leaves for days sometimes. Sometimes I worry he might go off wandering into the woods and never come back. When the foamy green light reaches my bed, I see it is Adam. Worry lines his face like freshly plowed furrows. I make a show of beating my chest as if all it needs is a good scolding.
“Silly old chest.”
Adam blinks hard against welling concern. “Want some water?”
I shake my head, even though he is already pouring me a cup.
After a few sips, the cough runs muddy like the Wakarusa River. I draw my handkerchief away. Fortunately, there is no blood this time.
We go through the ritual. Adam waits for me to finish drinking, finish playing Pollyanna, finish fussing with the bed covers.
“That did the trick. Thank you, son.”
He takes my cup and peers into the bottom of it.
“You can go back to bed, it’s passed now. I’m sorry I woke you.”
Adam sits on the ground beside me, draws his knees up to his chin, and circles his arms around his shins. He’s way too big to get in the cot with me, but I lift the covers anyway. “Want to climb in?”
He shakes his head. “What if you die?”
I have to remind myself that this is not the carefree boy of yesteryear. This is someone leaving his boyhood. Even in here, one world has to make way for another. And yielding, too, must be his mother, whose fairy tales are not wanted anymore.
“I’m not going to die, silly. It’s a cough, is all.”
“But what if you do?”
His lips harden, and his eyes are frozen into treacherous ponds.
“You saying I’m an old lady, is that it?” In some ways, the thirties are a relief, even if I am now terrified of dying. It is a special kind of hell to be twenty-three and clinging to the hope that the youth from which you were robbed is still waiting for you. So Adam will not wake up each day to a skinny old woman, and so Death might be fooled into thinking that I am owed at least some of my prime, I have taken to wearing braids again and have managed to gain enough weight to fill out those old dresses.
I try not to sigh for fear it may dislodge another coughing spell. “Mister will take care of you.”
Adam shakes his head. “I won’t live with him down here, you know.”
This resentment of Dobbs is not a new thing. It’s just now a moving thing, something that keeps gathering speed. I look at this kid, his legs bowed and his back growing more crooked every day, and see him pitting himself against his father in a war he won’t win. If Dobbs lets us out, it will be on his terms, not Adam’s.
“When’s it going to be safe for us to go outside?”
“Why all the questions tonight?”
“He spends most of his time out there. Why won’t he let me go out, even on one mission?”
“I think I will take more of that water, if you don’t mind.”
The task is not enough to redirect Adam. “It could be safe to go Above right now, and we wouldn’t know it.”
“Adam, please. You’re getting worked up for nothing. Go back to bed.”
“There could be people out there who could help you, make you well. It could be like before.” Before the Disaster, he means. “Anything’s better than just waiting,” he insists. “Waiting, waiting, waiting. It’s all we ever do!”
“My boy.”
“I’m not a boy! Stop treating me like one!”
I get up and go to the kitchen to make us something hot to drink.
“What if people have started living outside again? What if there are doctors again, or hospitals?”
I debate whether to tell him what I vowed I wouldn’t until I knew for certain. Waiting for Dobbs to keep his promise and move us out of here is like going for a ride on a giant Ferris wheel. There’s Main Street, ribbed with pickups. Cecil’s Grill has been tarted up with neon beer signs and a wagon-wheel fence. The houses are pegged in place by blooming crabapple trees. We go a little higher, and the old fertilizer plant looks more like a carnival attraction than a rust heap. Down Indian Road is where I pick out the spot where we might live, and the next thing, we are up where the air is too thin to talk. The Ferris wheel gets stuck, and all I can do is look at the scene from an impossible distance.
“Mister is looking for a place for us Above. We’re going to be moving out of here soon.”
On his face is exactly what I have come to expect: suspicion. “When?”
If only we could go back to the time when I started all my stories
with “long, long ago.” He doesn’t want “once upon a time” anymore. He wants stories that begin with “when.” When will the doors open? When can we go free? When can we get a dog?
“Soon,” I say. “Let’s just leave it at that for now.”
We hear the blast door open. Adam doesn’t even look at Dobbs when he pokes his head into the room. He always does this, like he expects to see it empty. We hear him tromp downstairs. He goes to the weapons room and locks away his pistol. His study is directly beneath my cot. I hear him take off his keys. He puts them and the code to the magnetic locks in the safe. Ever since I got the doors open, he uses long combinations of numbers that he changes frequently enough never to be able to memorize them.
“It’s like a morgue around here,” he says when he comes back upstairs. Dobbs hands Adam a hardbound copy of
Ivanhoe
and tells him there’s more where that came from if he plays his cards right.
The years have not been kind to the man. Long, wispy strands of hair do a poor job of disguising the bald spots. His face has a sagging look to it, not aided by the collection of skin around his chin. With his scraggly beard and untrimmed mustache, it is hard to believe that this is the same man who was once so particular about grooming and hygiene. There is a puttylike growth that now covers most of his left ear; it’s a wonder he can still hear out of it. He’s shrunken, a good foot shorter than he used to be, and he is a far cry from the warrior he once fancied himself as being. What we have to listen to most days is a rundown of ailments—constipation, bloating, arthritic knee, jaw pain, dry mouth. It’s no use hoping he’ll drop dead, because Dobbs Hordin has the heart of an ox.
“Seems to me some people have been a little testy lately, so I’m thinking what we need is an outing.”
Adam and I exchange glances. Is “Soon” now?
Dobbs dumps the duffel bag on the table. He pulls out a dress, something a little girl might wear to a costume party. Clearly, the
answer is no. “You’re going to want to dress up for a night at the movies.” He hands Adam an old movie reel.
Adam snorts.
“What? I thought everyone liked movie night.”
Dobbs got his hands on an old movie projector and a box of reel-to-reel black-and-white films some time ago, which means once in a while we “go out.” In other words, we go down to the lower level, where three chairs are set up in front of a sheet hung from a support beam. Popcorn is passed around, and scenes of battleships and bombers light up the screen. This beats game night, when Dobbs brings out a pack of cards and shuffles in such a way that his hand always ends up with all the jokers.
I get up to boil water. I set out three mugs, three small plates for sandwiches. We don’t have the variety or quantity of groceries we used to have, and this latest foray outside amounts to only a dozen cans, none of them labeled.
Dobbs sits and picks at one of the many black scabs on his arm. All his shirts are stained from when they rupture and bleed. The twitch in his cheek fires repeatedly. He’s been up to something. It’s written all over him.
He flicks his head at Adam, who is drawing plans for some new machine in his notebook.
“What you working on, Sport?”
He gets no reply.
“Oh, I see, we’re playing the Silent Game.” As soon as he finishes his sandwich, he leans over and takes my bowl of slop. “You aren’t going to eat that? Guess it’s easy to turn up your nose at food when you don’t have to earn it.”
Adam monitors my reaction. When I do nothing, he tucks his notepad under his arm and stalks off.
“I’m going to have to start coming down harder on that boy.” He says this, but the truth is that disciplining is left to me. Dobbs prefers to play good cop.
Dobbs launches into one of his lectures, blaming me for Adam’s
attitude. He says Adam is impressionable and I shouldn’t fill his head with notions. On and on it goes. I tune out and watch his hands. Flaccid palms, tapering fingers. He still keeps his nails too long, but unlike before, there’s often dirt underneath them. His hands have age spots now. These same hands used to crawl over my body, claiming even the unforgiving parts. And these same hands have crawled over someone else’s body. I can smell it on him; the smell of another woman. He’s itching for a fight because he thinks it’ll distract me from that fact.
“You went to see her again.”
A flicker of surprise.
“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.” He gives me the wounded look. How can I accuse him of being unfaithful, a man who takes his vows to heart? Once in a while, he’ll tell me he loves me. It’s not love. It’s what he feels for
The Manifesto
, for the seed catalogs and the silo. Ownership is what it is.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be Dobbs’s girlfriend. If he weren’t so miserly, I’d say he was paying for it, especially since he never helps himself to me anymore. “You don’t have to pretend for my sake. I don’t care. Heck, why don’t you invite her around for movie night?”
He lifts his hand for me to stop. “It’s not like that—”
Oh my, after all these years, is this a confession? It’s my turn to cut him off. “I told Adam you were finding us a place.”
“I thought we agreed to hold off on that.”
“What else am I supposed to say? He keeps asking me how long we’re going to be down here, and I’ve run out of stories.”
“Why don’t you just tell him the truth?”
You’d think the man would have grown weary with the end-of-civilization plotline by now. Instead, it evolves. We’re long past the Apocalypse. Now, I’m supposed to tell Adam there are thugs running about, bandits who snatch up women and children and use them for their own purposes.
“He’s not going to put up with this arrangement much longer.”
Dobbs arranges his facial muscles just so, draws in a deep breath. A picture of long-suffering.