She knew she had spent a half hour dealing with Levi. Either she had to blow off her assignment at the clinic to go talk with Benjamin, or she needed to do what she was told, and mentally regroup.
It was the thought of Edith that decided her. The woman had spent seven months dealing with every medical emergency and whining person here. She was a good-hearted soul, and Coral would feel like the lowest creature on earth if she failed in her promise to her.
Tonight, she and Benjamin would talk again. He’d have seen more, might have filched some other supplies, and if they decided to leave, they could do it tonight. Goodbye to baths, goodbye to warm meals seated at a table, goodbye to a couple of nice people. But goodbye, too, to this loss of control over her own life, and to the oily Levi.
She pushed through the unlocked clinic doors and mustered a quick smile for a family of three in the waiting room. She went into the treatment room, and said, “Sorry I’m late” to Edith.
“No problem. It was only a few minutes. Here, give me your jacket.”
Coral snatched off her mask and shoved it and her gloves into the jacket pockets. Edith took them away, and Coral took the minute alone to take deep breaths and try to calm herself. She’d focus on the town’s patients for now. None of them had done anything to irritate her, so she should not be taking out her frustration on them.
By the time the little family was coming in, she had herself under control.
There was nothing wrong with the two children or foster mother who brought them in. She wanted a “real doctor check-up” for the kids. Coral didn’t say, “I’m not a real doctor.” She didn’t say, “That world is dead. Get used to it. Bring them in for broken bones and bloody gashes, nothing else.” Instead, she looked the children over.
Except for being underweight, they seemed healthy. One of them was mildly hyper, and he had bruises that suggested not abuse—there were no finger-shaped bruises—but that his hyperactivity sent him bumping into things at a fairly regular rate. She asked about vaccines, which had been up to date for both children as of last year. Edith tried to keep the active child distracted while Coral looked at the calmer one, and in a half-hour, the family was sent on their way.
Coral jotted down a note on the small card that was the patient file for each child, keeping to Edith’s system. “Has there been any sign of childhood illnesses, chicken pox, measles here?”
“Thank God, no,” said Edith.
“Have you taken in any new people other than Benjamin and me?” she said.
“Not since near the beginning.”
“At least you’re not getting introductions of new diseases, then.” She bit her lip. “Maybe there should be a quarantine procedure.”
“Then we would have quarantined you, too.”
“I think maybe you should have,” said Coral. “Neither of us is sick, as it turns out. But you have no reason to believe me when I say that.”
“Why would you lie to me?”
Coral couldn’t believe the gullibility underlying that question. “People do.”
“I doubt you would.”
Coral would lie. Had lied. Would be lying again many times, as long as she was in this city. “That’s nice of you to think so,” was all she said. Another lie, as it happened—it was foolish to think so.
The day wasn’t as busy as her first day, and she had time to explore the building. The shut-off rooms were nearly empty. She and Benjamin could store supplies here for their emergency departure, rather than keeping them in the apartment, where they would be easily discovered or confiscated. One room had a window. Coral unlocked it, to allow her access any time.
Upstairs, she found damaged furniture in empty offices. She didn’t spend long up there, not wanting to leave Edith alone in case a patient arrived with a real problem.
Edith had fallen into an assistant role easily. That surprised Coral. She thought after this many months of being in charge, the other woman might want to stay in charge. But that wasn’t her personality. She was a natural follower, not a leader.
Coral thought she’d have not survived long out in the real world, not without someone to guide her. The real world was the destroyed world, out there, with violent people and crazy cults, separated by miles of emptiness. This here? This was some weird bubble, like something out of a science fiction movie, where time moved differently in this one spot.
Here, it moved more slowly, but even here, time was moving forward. Soon enough, Boise would catch up to the real world. As the day wore on and she saw a dozen more underfed people, clavicles and ribs protruding, she knew she saw the first signs of that happening.
Mid-afternoon, a man with a limp entered the exam room without being called in. “Hey, Edith,” he said.
“Billy,” Edith said.
He turned to Coral. “You must be the doc. Levi says to show you where Victoria is. She’s waiting for you.”
“Is she hurt?”
“No. She’s our counselor, and Levi says you needed to see her.”
“Ah. Right.” She wanted to do that about as much as she wanted a poke in the eye, but for now she’d pretend to be cooperative. Coral turned to Edith. “Are you going to be okay alone here?”
“Fine,” she said.
Coral donned her jacket and gloves and followed Billy outside.
As they walked, he asked about her, where she grew up, how many brothers and sisters she had, normal get-acquainted chit-chat. Problem was, for Coral, the normal behavior from these people seemed wrong. She gave brief answers and turned the questions around. His answers were expansive, and she tuned him out while she walked, wondering if she was going to have to lie to this social worker, and how she’d remember to keep her lies straight.
First lie to remember was that she and Benjamin were married. They’d worked out a brief back-story to that last night, how they met, a lie about his age and a lie about hers that brought them closer in age and had the extra benefit of putting her further along in her medical studies. As Billie led her into the door of another residence hall and up a flight of steps, she rehearsed the story in her mind.
He stopped at the top of the stairs and pointed down the hall. “Second on your left.”
“Thank you for showing me,” she said.
He gave her a shy grin. “No prob.” Then he turned and left her alone in the hall.
She took a deep breath and walked down to the door. She tapped on it.
A few seconds later, it swung open. A petite dark-haired woman in a bright pink ski jacket answered the door and smiled. “Coral? I’m Victoria. So nice to meet you.” She offered a gloved hand.
Coral shook and went inside. It was the first room she’d seen that had anything that could be called décor. A piece of what she supposed to be macramé, of several colors and weights of twine, hung on one wall. On another was another bit of scrap art, material that must have been saved from cannibalized clothing, made into a picture. There was a word for this, too, and Coral’s mind searched for it, finally landing on it. “Appliqué,” she said.
“I like doing something in the evenings. Especially with no TV or music. Please, sit down. Take the sofa.”
There was a loveseat, a wood frame with two mismatched cushions on the seats. Coral sat, wondering why the wood hadn’t been confiscated for the stoves.
“Let’s get acquainted for the first part of this session,” said Victoria, sitting.
“Sounds good,” Coral lied.
“So you like the applique? You do crafts?” She smiled.
“These are nice,” Coral said. Not a total lie. They were pleasant enough to look at. It seemed frivolous to spend time at something that had no survival value. She thought of herself, sitting at a fire shaping arrows, and of Benjamin, his head bent so she could only see the top of his jacket hood, honing the hatchet and knives. She missed those moments. It would sound strange to this woman, but it was the truth. The time of surviving with him—at least the time when they had plenty of fish, were moving camp every couple days, had a few cans of vegetables to flavor a soup—those were the good old days to her.
“And I worked for the schools,” Victoria was saying. “Family counseling, referrals, and so forth.”
“Ah,” said Coral. She’d been given the woman’s professional background but had missed it in her moment of nostalgia. “That’s great.” It wouldn’t have mattered what her experience was. Coral still would have to sit here and talk to her for an hour, or whatever the woman demanded of her, or Levi would hear about her being uncooperative.
No matter if they fled tonight or stayed a week or two for the free food, there was no reason to antagonize him more than she already had.
“Tell me about yourself.” Victoria tucked a leg under herself.
“What do you mean?”
“Where you grew up. Family. Troubles you may have had.”
Coral gave her a brief—and mostly truthful—personal history. She had gotten to her undergraduate school when the social worker stopped her.
“You skipped right over your parents’ death, there.”
“I did?” She thought she had been precise.
“I mean, you said it without emotion.”
Coral shrugged. “A lot has happened since then. My grandmother and brothers are probably dead too. There has been a lot to grieve.”
Victoria looked serious as she nodded. “And how has that been for you?”
Coral felt split into two people. One part of her recognized the technique the woman was using, trying to get her to break down, into tears ideally, and confess her pained feelings. The other split-off part of her felt impatient. When you’re out there surviving, you have feelings, of course. She remembered the trauma of killing the dog, how that affected her. But you didn’t dwell on them. You were surviving. It wouldn’t be merely self-indulgent to dwell on feelings. It would be suicidal.
But she knew, as she thought that, she could not say that here. This woman would judge such an explanation under another standard—under the wrong standard. “Well, it was hard, of course. But other things have also been hard.”
“Tell me about some of them.” Victoria leaned forward a few inches. Her hands were face up in her lap.
Coral had the sense she was supposed to put something in those hands. They were beseeching her. Ignoring the hands, she hit the highlights of her time since the Event. “I was stuck in a cave for days and thought I would die. I was afraid I was the only person left alive on the planet. A guy attacked me. A group of guys attacked me and Benjamin. A bigger group of crazy people held us and threatened to force me into sex and motherhood.” Was that all? “Oh, and a bunch who had enslaved whores came close to finding me, but they didn’t, so that was okay, except for losing our food to them.” She thought about it. “And I’ve been hungry for the better part of seven months and thought I’d starve at times. Benjamin was shot.” That was enough.
“Wow,” said Victoria. But she said it as if it were a line out of a script. She was not wowed by it. “Sounds like a lot.”
“Does it?” asked Coral. “Probably no worse than most people who survived.” She was getting angry at the woman, and made herself push the emotion down.
“Tell me how you felt. Take the time you were attacked, the first time. Why wasn’t your husband with you? Are you angry at him for not being there?”
“No,” said Coral. She couldn’t tell the truth, that she hadn’t even met Benjamin yet. They were supposed to have been married for eighteen months. “We often split up, him to hunt, me to fish. We helped each other survive. Being angry at that would be stupid.” She spit out the last word more forcefully than she intended to.
“But surely you feel something about the man—who, what, raped you?”
“No. I fought him off,” said Coral.
“Attacked you, then. You had to have been thinking, Benjamin, come help me.”
“No,” said Coral. “I was thinking the guy smelled bad and I couldn’t let him drag me into his lair.”
“Lair. That’s a telling word.”
“It’s an accurate word.”
“You seem a little upset.”
“Do I?” said Coral.
“It must be hard remembering it.”
“It’s useless to remember it.”
“No,” Victoria said, her voice gentle. “It’s not. We can’t carry these things inside us, Coral. We have to express our emotions about them. Get them out into the light of day.”
Coral had to fight back a laugh. There was no light of day any more. Had she never stepped outside and looked up this past seven months? “Out there, we have to survive. There’s no time for self-indulgence. There’s the next thing to do, the next fire to build, the next fish to catch, the sled to pull another five miles.” Man, she missed that sled. She wished she were in harness now, pulling it along the snow, her breath condensing within the mask, creating a warm cocoon of air over her chin. She wished she were curled up in a snow cave, listening to Benjamin’s steady breathing.
She wished she were anywhere but here, putting up with this clueless woman.
Victoria was still talking, explaining patiently about how people needed to talk out their feelings and so on. She clearly believed it.
Coral had once, too. Maybe she had always been wrong about that. But she knew that in this world—or at least this world outside the Boise perimeter—that it wasn’t true any longer. You had feelings, you felt them, you used them to survive and then you forgot them. You didn’t indulge them and wring your hands over them for days or weeks or months. They were tools of survival. Fear made you listen more closely, and panic made you run faster. Anger made you turn and fight harder.