“It was only a small thing,” Mom said.
“Yeah,” Rebecca replied, “like fifty of the mayor’s cronies and me.”
“She married Mayor Petty,” I said flatly, still not believing it, but at the same time understanding that it was true.
Mom kept her attention on her sewing. I spun, opened the door, and rushed outside, slamming the door with a satisfying crash.
I knelt to tie my boots back into my skis but couldn’t do it; my hand was shaking too badly. This was a stupid idea. Reaching out to Mom. One thing I knew: Speranta was going to have a law allowing children to divorce their parents. I didn’t know if she could forbid me to marry—in the old world, maybe, although I was eighteen now. In this new world, not a chance.
“Alex, wait.”
I was so freaked out that I hadn’t even noticed my sister following me outside. “Why? Nothing’s going to change her mind.”
“I know. But I’m coming with you. I want to see my big brother get married. It would have been such a delicious scandal in the old world, huh? Eighteen-year-old high school senior marries college-age girl?” Rebecca smiled sadly.
“Hurry then, okay?”
Rebecca went back inside. By the time I had calmed down enough to start strapping on my skis, I started hearing shouting from inside the house. Then crashing noises. I wondered if I should go back inside to make sure Rebecca was okay. But my presence might make it even worse.
Finally Rebecca emerged, looking flushed, wearing a heavy coat, backpack, and ski boots. She was carrying a really nice set of Saloman XADV cross-country skis in her arms. She snapped into them in less than a tenth of the time it’d taken me to get into my jury-rigged setup. “We’d better get out of here before Mom calls the sheriff—or our new stepfather.”
“You think she will?” I asked.
Rebecca shrugged.
We left Warren in silence. I took a different route back to the homestead, weaving in and out of old ski and snowmobile tracks as much as possible to confuse our trail. We had traversed almost half the distance back to Speranta before either of us spoke again.
“You have extra clothing at the new farm?” Rebecca asked. We were single file with me in the lead, so she had to yell.
“Yeah. Plenty.” Clothing was easy to come by now. I tried not to think too much about its provenance, though— some of it came from the closets of the dead. “Why?”
“I don’t think Mom wants me to come back.”
I stopped and stepped out of the ski track, letting her draw alongside me. “I’m sorry.” I drew her into an awkward, one-armed, sideways hug. “How did everything get so messed up?”
She sighed heavily, leaning into me. “I thought I could convince her to, I don’t know, accept you and Darla or something. But it just got worse. It was always Darla this and Darla that—if the bacon stuck to the bottom of the pan, I swear, Mom blamed Darla for it. I tried ignoring her, I tried arguing, but nothing seemed to work.”
“I don’t get it. Why? Mom seemed to hate Darla from the moment they met.”
“Think about how they first met, in the middle of the same gun battle where Dad got shot—”
“But Darla had nothing to do with Dad’s death. If anyone was to blame, it was me! I talked Dad into helping rescue Darla. I did that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Alex.”
“I know that. It was the goddamn Dirty White Boys’ fault. That isn’t my point. So why the hell does she blame Darla?”
“Because she can’t blame you.”
“Why not? I’d rather have her angry at me than Darla!” “It’d be too much like blaming herself.”
I fell silent, thinking about it. When had my little sister gotten so mature, so perceptive? Or maybe she had always been that way, but I was finally open enough to notice it? But it still didn’t completely make sense. “She’s obviously over Dad. She married that politiciansicle, after all.” “Politiciansicle?” Rebecca asked.
“Petty. He’s cold, has a stick up his butt, and you’ve got to lick it to get him to do anything.”
Rebecca laughed. “You always did have a way with words.”
I caught sight of two figures in the distance moving toward us. “Someone’s coming,” I whispered. I unslung the rifle from my back and dropped flat in the snow. Rebecca threw herself prone alongside me.
Chapter 59
I flicked off the safety and chambered a round, then pushed my head up just enough to see. There were definitely only two of them, headed directly toward us on skis, but I couldn’t make out their faces at this distance. I held the rifle ready and watched them approach.
When they got within shouting distance, one of them spoke up, “Alex, if you shoot me, so help me, the wedding’s off,” Darla yelled.
I pointed the rifle away from her, safetied it, and ejected the round from the chamber. When they got closer, I could see that Darla was skiing alongside Zik.
“What were you thinking, taking off on your own?” Darla said as she reached us.
“I’m fast and stealthy on my own,” I replied.
“And if you’d broken a leg or something? Who was going to go get help? Or drag your sorry ass home?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t really thought about that possible scenario. She sort of had a point.
“Sorry.”
“Never mind. Let’s get home.” Darla gave Rebecca a hug, and then all four of us pointed our skis toward Speranta.
“Guess your mom’s not coming?” Darla said after a bit.
“No,” I said.
“What’s the deal? I mean, I get that she blames me for your dad’s death for some reason, but why’s she taking it out on you?”
“That’s the main thing, but there’s more to it,” Rebecca said. “You know she was feuding with Uncle Paul, right?”
“No. When? I never heard them argue,” Darla said.
“It was stupid,” Rebecca said. “It all started about three and a half years ago, before the eruption. Max dared me to jump off the barn into a haystack. I did it, like an idiot, and broke my arm. Mom blamed Max, since he was older and it was his farm, even though it wasn’t like he pushed me or anything. And then Mom and Uncle Paul started arguing over who would take care of the medical copays. Uncle Paul sent her a check, but she wouldn’t cash it. Said it had to come from Max, or he wouldn’t learn. Maybe she was right, but Uncle Paul felt like she was meddling. So the point is, she was never comfortable on the farm anyway.”
“But that’s where she was when Yellowstone blew, right?” Darla said.
“Yeah. That’s why Mom decided to go to Warren that day. To try to patch things up with Uncle Paul.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“You’re a little bit oblivious sometimes, Bro,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, then Mom cracked up before the battle— she would never talk about that, but I think she was embarrassed afterward. Maybe even afraid Uncle Paul would blame her for Aunt Caroline’s death.”
“He didn’t,” I said.
“Either way, caring for Mayor Petty became a way to avoid her brother-in-law. And then I guess Mom and Petty fell in love or something.”
I sighed. My whole body felt heavy, like God had cranked the gravity up by twenty percent. I felt like yelling at him, Could you turn the thermostat up too, while you’re at it? I didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t want to think about my mother anymore.
My sister skied more slowly, falling a little behind. I had to strain to make out her words. “I thought I could help, that I could be there for her, change her mind. But nothing ever really changes, does it? And now . . . and now she doesn’t even want me around anymore.”
I heard a choking sound—half animal snarl, half sob—and twisted to look back. Rebecca was crumpled in the snow behind me, sobbing. I performed a laborious step-turn, wishing I had skis like Rebecca’s that I could snap in and out of easily. Darla and Zik skied on a bit before noticing we had dropped back. I pulled up beside Rebecca and fell into the snow beside her, wrapping my one good arm around her, supporting us both on my hook, thrust deep into the snow beside us.
“No matter what happens, I’ll always be your family” I sat in the uncaring snow, holding my sister and sharing her tears.
Chapter 60
I woke before dawn on the morning of the wedding, dressed quietly, stepped outside, and looked to the east. Light was just beginning to emerge from the horizon, a flame-orange streak that looked more like a prairie fire than a sunrise. On the spur of the moment, I decided to climb the icy roof of the long-house to get a better look. Getting onto the roof was easy—it stretched all the way to the ground. Still, the first time I tried to climb it, I slid back. I went inside, got a claw hammer to carry in my natural hand, and using that and my hook as improvised ice axes, I managed to scramble to the top.
I straddled the peak of the roof, getting cold while staring at the horizon. The sun still wasn’t visible; it existed only as a bright smudge under a yellow-gray sky. But sometimes at dawn and dusk the sky came alight with riotous color—shows so surreal, it seemed as though we had been transported in the night to some alien planet.
That morning the sunrise was exceptional. Yellows, oranges, and reds slashed across the sky in vibrant swathes. Here and there, violets and greens emerged as if to reassure me that there was still some blue sky behind the yellow-gray murk, biding its time patiently until the thinning ash and sulfur dioxide allowed it to reemerge. The whole eastern sky flared with brilliant color, wrapping around and above me in a psychedelic embrace from the god of impressionist painters.
I waited and watched, reveling in the sunrise, until the sky faded to a uniform yellow-gray again. My legs had frozen to the roof. I pried them free and slid down to prepare for the big day.
We held the wedding in the original longhouse. We had cleared all the bedrolls and detritus of our day-to-day lives out of the middle and festooned the longhouse in plastic greenery and flowers. I stood at the front alongside the makeshift altar, trying not to shift nervously from foot to foot. Max and Ben stood beside me, Rebecca and Anna on the other side of the altar.
Darla stepped through the longhouse door on Uncle Paul’s arm. She was a vision in her long white dress, its bodice made of some material that sparkled, playing flirtatiously with the electric lights overhead. With every step she took, the sparkles in her bodice picked up more of the light from the candles burning alongside the altar, making their flecks yellow instead of white, warming her as she neared me at the front of the room.
Her shoulders were bare, showing off her powerfully muscled upper arms. She wore the homemade necklace I had given her three years ago, its pendant—a 15/16 nut— nestled at the curve of her breasts. Her exposed skin was red from the cold wind outside, and I suppressed an urge to run down the aisle and lay my jacket over her shoulders. Despite its shoulderless style, the dress sported sleeves so long that they nearly hid her hand and hook. I almost laughed out loud when her skirts shifted and I caught a glimpse of her feet—she was wearing her usual black leather combat boots under all that frippery. What did brides normally wear on their feet? Glass slippers? I wasn’t sure. Anyway, the combat boots were much more practical for waiting around in the snow outside while the rest of us filed in.
We had no organ or piano, of course, but we had scavenged a fiddle, and Elaine, one of the young women who had been shot outside of Warren, was a Suzuki-method violinist. She managed a pretty decent rendition of “Here Comes the Bride.”
Reverend Evans started saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. All the space between my ears was full—full of Darla. I had been in love with her almost since the first time I’d seen her: an overall-clad angel with a needle and thread to sew closed my wounds. But I had never felt that love as keenly as I did at that moment. I loved the small mole on her back under her left shoulder blade. I loved her earlobes and the way she giggled when I kissed them. I even loved her hook, with its ungainly wrench and screwdriver sockets.
“Ahem,” Reverend Evans was clearing his throat, “would you take the family candle, please?”
Darla was holding a lit candle and glaring at me. I could read that glare as clearly as a billboard—it said, “Now, dumbass!”
I smiled an apology at her and picked up the other lit candle. Five unlit candles were arrayed on a stand between us in front of the altar: four smaller candles in a square pattern and a large one in the middle. The candles were mismatched—purple, red, and white, their sizes irregular too. Candles were exceedingly difficult to come by now and worth a fortune in trade; burning a few inches off these would easily be the most expensive part of this ceremony “We light the memory candles to symbolize those who have passed on and cannot be here in body, but who are surely here in spirit, blessing this union.”
Darla tipped the candle she held to light one of the smaller candles. “For my father, Joseph Edmunds.” Her voice was clear and brave. She lit the next one. “For my mother, Gloria Ed—” A tear raced down her cheek, and she bit her lower lip.
I lit a candle. “For my father, Douglas Halprin.” I lit the fourth small candle. Did it make sense to light a candle for my mother? She wasn’t here, but she wasn’t dead either. Was I saying she was dead to me? She wasn’t, I decided—would never be so long as we were both physically alive. I would hold onto hope even if she couldn’t. “For my mother, Janice.” Did I call her Janice Halprin or Janice Petty? I hadn’t thought about it, so I just used her first name.
After a short pause, Reverend Evans stepped into the silence. “And now we light the unity candle to symbolize the joining of these two families.” Darla and I tipped our candles toward the large one, letting our flames mingle and light it. We put our candles in the candelabrum and stepped back to listen to the remainder of the service.
The rest passed in a blur. There were readings and prayers, and Reverend Evans preached a sermon of sorts—I barely heard it. My mind burned as brightly as the candles before us, full of wonder at the beautiful woman beside me, soon to be my wife.
Then I was repeating after Reverend Evans, taking the vow that would bind us forever. I remembered what Darla had said in the snowbank outside Stockton, when we thought we were dying: that we were already married, that we had taken a vow stronger than the one that bound most married couples.