Instinct (12 page)

Inside the store, they split up and headed down the aisles. Judy had her list memorized. She was looking for canned fruit, olives, and pickles. Once she had those items, she was allowed to grab anything else that looked good. The store was still pretty clean. Someone had been through already, but they hadn’t made a mess of the place. It always amazed Judy when they’d find a store with broken glass and food scattered all over the floor.

She set down her bag and started to pile in cans of fruit salad and pineapple. Most of the good stuff—peaches, and pears—was already gone. She packed in two layers of cans and tested the bag. It wouldn’t do any good to pack more than she could carry. They never used carts anymore. It was a superstition they all shared. One man had broken an ankle when he was accidentally rammed with a cart. Since then, they always used bags to collect their groceries.

Judy moved her bag down to the savory end of the aisle. She grabbed some jars and then some more cans. She tested the bag again. She could probably carry more, but her goal wasn’t to get as much as possible. Judy turned for the front of the store.
 

She slowed on her way between the registers. The candy was all gone. There was never any candy. She waited for the pair of headlamps to move through the door. They would be the cereal and dry-goods people. Those things were so light and bulky that they would be the first out. She wanted them to be loading the vehicles when she exited.

Judy moved the strap of her bag to the edge of her shoulder as she slipped through the door. She dropped the bag at the exit, moved out from under the roof’s overhang and dropped her headlamp. She turned and ran into the night.

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When people were snatched up into the sky, it almost always happened during the day. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a person would get up from their bed and walk outside. If you could stop them from getting to the door, their trance would break in a few minutes. But, if you let them get outside, one of the invisible forces would pull the sleeping person into the sky and you’d never see them again. You might find a sock or a glove on the ground, but the person would be gone forever. Judy hoped that Richmond and the other people in the supply run would assume that she had suffered that fate.

She waited until the building was far behind her before she dug the other headlamp out of her pocket. Her lungs burned. Too many cigarettes had ruined them. She held the light in both hands and ducked behind a car. Down the hill and across the parking lot, she saw a cluster of red headlamps. She was still too close to risk using her own light. She stayed low and crept farther away.

Judy stumbled over train tracks and crept through gravel. She had to cross an open lot to get around a tall fence. There was a cluster of shops across the street. Judy moved behind them so the buildings would block the sight of her from the grocery store. She decided to risk the headlamp. It was too slow to move without light. Down another side street and up a hill, she found a neighborhood.
 

She took rapid, shallow breaths. Pulling air in too deep just hurt. She felt a sharp pain just below her ribs on her right side. She held her hand to the spot as she ran. Pressing made it hurt less. Judy slipped between two houses that were separated only by a narrow driveway. She opened a low gate and rounded the corner. She rested with her back against the brick wall of a house. Judy shut off her headlamp while she waited in the dark. She tried to take deeper breaths, hoping the pain would subside.

There was a sound from the darkness. Judy held her breath.

Judy thought about the house she’d grown up in. It was a tall house. In the landing at the bottom of the stairs, a grandfather clock sat. Judy’s dad had hated the chimes, so he’d disconnected them, but every time the clock got to the top of an hour, it would give an extra loud TOCK as the mechanism wanted to start banging the chimes. Judy loved that tock. It sounded like the clock was angry that it had been neutered.

She remembered sitting down in the living room, looking at the sunrise light up the blue landscape of winter. She was waiting for six o’clock, when the alarms upstairs would ring and people would come down to open presents.

Their tree had two stars on top. It always had two stars. They always got what her father called a “binary” tree. They would search lot after lot, looking at Douglas firs and Scotch pines. They rejected dozens of trees that any other family would be thrilled to take home. What they were looking for was special. They were looking for a tree with two tops. People always assumed that the tree with two tops was a nod to the twins, Jon and Wes. Judy’s mom always told people it wasn’t.
 

In her memory, Judy folded her legs beneath herself and tucked in her nightgown. It was cold in the living room. When her dad came down he would wait for a few presents to be opened and then use the paper to start the fire. By the time breakfast was ready, the living room would be toasty warm. While she waited on the couch, mesmerized by the sunrise illuminating the frost on the storm windows, Judy waited for the grandfather clock to…

TOCK.

She heard the sound, but it wasn’t followed by the distant bell of her father’s alarm clock. Her father kept a windup clock on his nightstand that said “Baby Ben” in black letters on its glow-in-the-dark face. It was normally in perfect sync with the grandfather clock.

Judy sighed and looked at the picture on the mantle. It was her brothers, Jon and Wes, in their matching sweaters. Most of their outfits were matched. Even if one of them got a ketchup stain on a shirt, it seemed that the other would have a matching stain before the end of the day.
 

One of Judy’s friends had brand new twin baby brothers. Judy had stood at the end of the crib, looking at the two perfect little faces, and she’d wanted to warn her friend. “They’ll take over everything. Your whole family will revolve around them,” she had wanted to say. She hadn’t said anything, of course. After all, Jon and Wes were older than Judy. As far as she knew, they only monopolized the house because they’d come first. Maybe the same fate wouldn’t befall her friend.

Judy had been fascinated by the baby twins because of one thing: she could tell them apart. They were clearly identical, but something about their personalities showed through when you looked at their faces. You could immediately discern one from the other. That wasn’t the case with Jon and Wes. Judy had spent her entire life looking from one to the other, and she never caught the knack of which was Jon and which was Wes. Her mother claimed to know the difference, but Judy had seen her slip up as well. The strangest part was that sometimes it seemed that the twins themselves didn’t know. She caught them one time in their room, pointing at each other, and deciding which one was Jon and which was Wes.

The whole thing was creepy.

TOCK.

Judy looked around at the clock. It read six. Alarms should be sounding. People should be coming down soon to open the presents. Most of the gifts under the tree were in identical twin boxes. The gifts were side by side, waiting for Jon or Wes to pluck them with identical hands.
 

Later, after all the presents were open and Judy was upstairs washing for dinner, her grandmother would come. Judy loved her grandmother. She was the one who’d say, “Can’t you twins go play in another room? You’re so loud.”

Judy’s mom would protest. The twins didn’t actually speak that much. They seemed to communicate with each other by a series of subtle glances and narrowed eyes. “Why do you insist the twins are loud, Mother? They haven’t said a word.”

“They don’t have to,” Judy’s grandmother would say.

Judy refused to use the nickname for her grandmother. The twins called her “Wooly.” They were forever inventing nicknames for people, as if they couldn’t remember the proper thing to say. It was bad enough they called her Wooly, but when they wrote it on cards, they even spelled it wrong. They used only one L, and Judy’s pocket reference said that it definitely should have two. Judy’s mom said that it didn’t matter—nicknames didn’t have to be spelled correctly.

Judy took a deep breath and felt the pain in her side. Her brain wouldn’t let go of the name Wooly. It should have two L’s. It should be Woolly, but it wasn’t. Even when she’d met another woman named Woolly, she hadn’t connected the two people. Where had that been? She couldn’t remember and it seemed important. Suddenly Judy wasn’t on the couch anymore. She wasn’t in her childhood home, waiting for Christmas. She was standing in the dark with her back pressed against a brick wall and waiting to catch…

TOCK.

“Hey, Jude,” her father said as he came down the stairs.
 

“I didn’t hear your alarm,” Judy said.

“You better go get washed up. You can’t sit around in your pajamas all day,” he said.

Judy looked down. She was still wearing her nightgown. There were no more boxes under the tree. Everything had been opened. The twins had already run off with their loot. Judy’s gifts were in a pile on the coffee table. The paper was in the tinderbox. A fire raged in the fireplace, and it was about ninety degrees where Judy sat.

“Where’s Wooly?” Judy asked.

“Your grandmother?” her father asked. “I haven’t picked her up yet. I’m going to leave in a few minutes.” He made his way around the couch and attended to the fire. For some reason, he added another log to the center of the blaze. Judy could feel beads of sweat starting to form on her forehead. She wouldn’t be able to wear her new sweater if the house was going to be this hot.
 

“I thought Woolly got shot,” Judy said.

Her father laughed. “What a crazy dream.”

“Bill shot her. He thought she was hiding something.”

“Who’s Bill?” her father asked.

Judy didn’t know what to say. The ideas of Bill, and Luke, and the horses, didn’t fit in this setting. They didn’t match her childhood home. She couldn’t figure out how to express the concepts in words her father would understand.

“Why am I here?” Judy asked.

TOCK.
 

“You’d better get dressed if you want to come with me to pick up your grandmother.”

“I can’t,” Judy said. Her father didn’t respond. He just looked at her until she was sure he’d turned to wax. Nobody could stand that still.

TOCK.

“Let’s go, Judy. You’ve got so much to do,” her father said.
 

Judy looked down. She was wearing clothes. Her hair was pulled back. She had on her new sweater. It wasn’t too hot after all, but it was itchy. She stared at the pattern of green and white yarn. Pretty snowflakes made of little white V’s decorated the front. She could get lost in the pattern.

TOCK.

Judy shook her head. She pushed away from the wall and pulled at the bricks to get around the corner. She gained speed as she ran between the houses. When her feet got the street, she nearly tripped on the little lip there. She flailed her arms as she slapped her feet against the dark pavement. In the distance, she saw bobbing red lights. Judy ran for them. She stumbled over a curb and then nearly lost her footing as she ran over the roots of a huge tree. She ran downhill, throwing her feet out into the dark and trusting that they would land on solid ground.
 

The lights grew closer.

She heard and felt another TOCK.

Judy pressed her hands to the side of her head to block out the sound. She started to scream. When she reached the red lights, their hands encompassed her.

CHAPTER 9: LAKE ERIE, NEW YORK

T
IM
AND
C
EDRIC
SPENT
the night in a shed between a lawnmower and a tiller. The door to the house was open, but it didn’t look right. After all the running and walking they’d done that day, Tim was too tired to take a risk on a house that didn’t look right. They’d curled up in the shed and slept on the concrete floor. Tim woke at dawn. He had to pee so bad that his legs felt numb. He burst out of the shed and barely got his zipper down in time.

There was a low mist on the lawn. It seemed to flow in and out of the back door to the house, like the building was breathing. The dark windows looked like eyes. Tim was glad he hand’t ventured inside. Cedric approached the house slowly, almost like he was stalking it. When he got to the side of the house, he cocked his leg and relieved himself on the siding. Mist flowed out of the back door. Tim imagined the house was hissing at the dog.

They walked back out to the road.
 

His stomach gurgled and he patted his pockets, hoping that somehow he’d forgotten about a reserve of food. He found nothing. Cedric lapped muddy water from a puddle.
 

The road they followed was a state highway. The interstate was nearby, and might have better opportunities to find an airfield, but Tim wanted to stay off the big road. Somehow he thought that the young man and woman from Sunset Point might look for him there.