The Last Town on Earth (14 page)

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ometimes in dreams Philip would remember that feeling of being suspended in the air, of taking flight, of losing all contact with the earth. As bad as the crash was, it was the instant before impact that was all the more terrifying, the realization that he had been released from the calm embrace of his normal life and was hurtling toward something unknowable.

Not that his life before the crash had been entirely normal. By the time Philip turned eleven, he had lived in more towns than most of the grown men in Commonwealth. He had no memory of his father—whether or not he had ever met the man was unclear, as his mother, Fiona, had given him so many conflicting answers that he finally stopped asking. His earliest memories were of sharing a bed with Fiona in the house of one of her cousins in Los Angeles. There, he would play with the cousin’s many children while Fiona was out working for their keep, or so she told him. But the brief idyll was interrupted by an argument, the cousin outraged—Philip dimly remembered accusations of theft—and he and Fiona were tossed out of the house. When Philip told Fiona he missed his playmates, she warned him never to speak their dirty names again.
It’s a big world,
she told him.
You’ll find other friends.

The pattern repeated itself with other cousins, second cousins, and even further removed relatives until Fiona had all but burned down the family tree. Philip’s questions about why Cousin Shelly had thrown them out or why Uncle Ike’s wife had called Fiona a tramp were never answered, and not until years later did he fit things together, forming a picture that was no less disconcerting than the pile of pieces that had confounded him for so many years.

Once their family options were exhausted, the travels continued. They would find a cheap room to let, Philip would sleep beside her in their thin bed, and Fiona would find some kindly lady who felt sorry for her and said she could use a maid, or a cook, or anything. Philip would start classes at a new school while Fiona would catch the eye of a leading man about town, single or otherwise, and their courtship would mean that Philip got the bed all to himself many nights, something Fiona assured him was a privilege for which he should be thankful. He often woke alone, hoping she was only in the bathroom. He would close his eyes and imagine her there.

Just when he was starting to feel at home, his home would dissipate like a much-cherished mirage. One night she’d wake him up—sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the fragile moment before sunrise—and she’d anxiously tell him to pack all his clothes. He would barely be able to do so (many were the favorite shirts and books he left behind, realizing only when he was a hundred miles away), and then they’d be at a train station. Fiona would smile at the old man in the ticket window, her right hand tightly grasping her son’s wrist. Off to a new town.

Whenever he complained, she would remind him he was lucky she took him with her at all, that most other women in her situation would throw him into an orphanage or leave him behind. That kept his complaining to a minimum.

Fiona promised him that their home in Redmond, Washington, would be their last. And she proved to be correct, though not in the way she had imagined. They had moved into the home of a paper mill foreman named Carl Jasper, living with him for just over a year—the longest tenancy in any one place that Philip could remember. Despite this new, tantalizing feeling of permanence, Philip was uncomfortable around Carl. A looming presence whose head nearly scraped against the top of the small house’s doorways, Carl seemed immediately untrustworthy, his house often filled with late-night card games and cigar smoke, bottles clanging while Philip tried to sleep.

Many were the nights when Philip would walk into the kitchen to find the couple huddled over some papers, watching his every move, their voices hushed.
Just wanted to get some water,
he’d say, and after he’d taken the glass back to his room, the whispering would begin again. He didn’t ask what they were talking about, and he didn’t really want to know, but he was hurt by their suspicious glances.

A few weeks after the whispering had begun, Philip came home from school and saw Fiona and Carl hastily packing their bags.
Grab your clothes,
they told him,
we need to leave.
He started to protest, reminding her of her promise. He’d made friends—one boy’s father had even offered him a job delivering newspapers and running errands—and there was a girl he had a crush on, Anna, with green eyes and freckles. Fiona yelled back, saying she didn’t want to do this, either, but they needed to go,
now.
They would explain later. Philip refused, arms crossed, until Carl knocked him to the floor with one blow. The man’s hand had been open, but it still bloodied Philip’s nose, and he lay on the floor stunned and looking to Fiona for aid. She merely softened her voice and told him to pack—and hurry.

They drove a nice new Ford that Carl had bought the day before. It was a beautiful car, the sides and hood so shiny that Philip saw his tear-streaked reflection as he walked up to the door. It was less bumpy than a carriage but colder than a train car, and the air whistled as it came in through the tops of the windows. They drove all through the night, and Philip sat there seething, angry at Fiona for betraying him, furious at Carl for the blow, and enraged at himself for being stupid enough to have thought this wouldn’t happen again. Eventually, he slept, his head leaning back against the seat that smelled like melted rubber and bobbing every time the wheels hit a hole in the unpaved roads.

He awoke sometime in the middle of the night, shivering with cold, to find the world outside turned white, as if some pillow the size of the moon had burst above them, showering its celestial feathers all around. They were almost there, Carl said, yawning. He was driving very slowly, muttering something about so much snow and how maybe they should stop at the next town, wherever that was. Fiona looked at Philip in the backseat and gave him a slight smile, one that was different from any he’d seen on her face before. It looked more adult, the kind of expression parents didn’t normally direct at their children, and the smile might have been an apology and might have been a sign of affection and might have been, finally, an acknowledgment that this was who she was and he would have to learn to accept her, flaws and all.

Carl had been steering the Ford downhill around a sharp bend when Fiona had offered Philip that smile, and the smile disappeared when the Ford lurched sideways. Philip remembered hearing Fiona start to scream something; he remembered a sudden force pulling him deeper into his seat and then that unreal feeling of flight. An instant of weightlessness followed by its opposite, tumbling through the snow and into the blackness beneath them.

Later, he didn’t remember what he saw, whether the world spun in circles, whether he found himself staring at the roof of the Ford or its floor—just the feeling of being tossed and slammed and beaten while trapped inside a steel box that seemed to be shrinking with every blow, collapsing upon him as if it were being hammered into the shape of his coffin.

From there his memories were sharp but discrete, an occasional stark image propped up amid long stretches of nothing but shadow. There was snow on his eyelids when he opened them; he remembered this because he wanted to wipe the snow away but couldn’t move his arms. They were trapped by something, or they were broken, and so were his legs. He felt upside down, his head lower than his chest; maybe that’s why it throbbed so much, but he could barely see, so he wasn’t sure. I’m not dead I’m not dead I’m not dead, he told himself. This realization was almost as shocking as it had been to find himself flying through the air a moment ago. How long ago? What about his mother? He called for her, and his voice was so stripped away by terror into a tiny, jagged sliver that the sound of it scared him all the more. Without waiting long for a reply, he called for her again and heard her moan.

He called again and again, her first name for some reason, louder and louder, even though the sound of his voice was making the situation seem more horribly real. He screamed for her to wake up, because he couldn’t move and he was frightened and cold and didn’t know where she was and she couldn’t talk and he needed her then and she needed to wake up. He screamed and screamed if for no other reason than he couldn’t bear to hear the sound of her moaning. He remembered how white his voice sounded, remembers screaming himself into exhaustion or some weird kind of trance, because that was where the memory ended, interrupted by a long black space until he opened his eyes again.

At that point, he moved his neck, trying to get a better idea of where he was. The coffin that had once been an automobile was made of tangled pieces of metal that wrapped themselves tightly around him, some of them sharp and stabbing at his side. He tried to calm down, tried to free himself, but whatever was on top of his legs could not be moved. It was dark and he could barely see, even when his eyes had adjusted to the night, even when he’d stopped crying.

I’m alive I’m alive I’m freezing I’m alive I’m alive I’m getting out of here somehow, somehow.

During the drive, he had taken off his gloves, and his fingers were going numb. He was able to free his hands from where they had been trapped, but the metal around him was too strong to budge farther. He balled his hands into fists, he breathed on them, he stuffed them under his arms. He tried to use them to free his legs but it was useless—why wouldn’t his legs move? He couldn’t feel them, but he wasn’t sure if that meant he was paralyzed, or maybe they were broken and in so much pain they were beyond him, or maybe they were already frozen, all the nerves dead. The cold surrounded him and there was nothing he could do to protect himself.

He called out Fiona’s name again but she didn’t respond this time. He yelled again, preferring even the sound of his mother in pain to her silence. But he heard nothing. Then darkness again.

Later still he realized that part of whatever was pinning his legs was Carl’s body.

Through a shattered windshield or a torn-off door, the snow continued to fall. First the flakes melted, and then they started clinging to his face, accumulating. He would wipe them away and wake up covered again.

His heart had been racing earlier, but it felt so much slower now. Is fear something your body adapts to? He was still scared but when he tried to scream Fiona’s name his voice was like a soothing whisper, as if it were trying to tell him he shouldn’t be so worried, that he should just be still and go to sleep.

The next time he opened his eyes he found that his mother had somehow moved from wherever she had been and was huddled around him. He wasn’t shivering as much as he had been, and he said her name. She didn’t respond, but he could hear her breathing. He remembers that. Her head was behind his, and one of her arms moved, wrapping itself around his head, protecting his face from the snow.

But her arm must have moved again, because his next memory was of being buried in snow, and when he tried to clear it off, his arms did not heed his call. He was shivering again, colder than before, but not even these spasms could shake loose the snow. He stared into the whiteness as if the power of his gaze could melt it away, he blinked furiously, but he was blind, the snow piling so high it began to glow, to burn into colors.

He tried to call for his mother a final time and realized he couldn’t even talk. The snow was spangled with color, as if a rainbow had exploded into thousands of tiny teardrops. He squinted to make sense of things and the dots of color danced, revolved; he felt himself spinning. He couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t hear anything. His body, his whole being, had been reduced to nothing but his failing vision. That was all he was. The spinning made him feel weightless again, almost the same sensation as when the Ford had driven off the road, but this time it felt like a gift, bestowed on him, and the dots glowed until they were all gold, then they broke apart and washed over him.

Those feelings seemed so fresh when Philip woke up. He was in a hospital room, and Charles would soon walk in and explain what had happened, tell him that his parents had been killed. Philip would lie there and calmly tell Charles,
No, they weren’t both my parents—she was my mother, but the man in the Ford was just some guy.
As if this were the most important fact, as if he needed to clear up any misunderstandings before he could begin to contemplate what had just happened.

Philip gradually realized the stiffness in his limbs wasn’t from the accident but from sleeping on a cold, hard floor, and that he was not in a hospital but in the storage building. He was not eleven but sixteen, not in Everett but in Commonwealth. He sat up, the vestiges of his dream fading back into his memory. He hadn’t dreamed about the accident in a while now, and he wondered if it was his uncomfortable sleeping quarters that had evoked the memories or the sense of isolation, so familiar to him from his earlier life.

He sat up, pressing his palms against the wood floor. It was pitch black in the building. He could hear the soldier breathing heavily in his slumber; it was the only thing to remind him he was not alone.

The previous evening returned to him. Half an hour after Charles and Doc Banes had left, Philip and the soldier had heard a knock on the door. After silently counting to sixty, as he had been told, Philip had opened the door as slightly as he could and discovered two trays of food, two blankets, a box of matches, and a kerosene lamp. Philip brought the items inside, and before he had even lit the lamp, the soldier had started eating. Philip had tried not to stare at the man and the way he tore into the meat, gulping it down, and the way he drained all of his water in one long pull. So this is what a starving man looks like, Philip had thought.

There was a fireplace at the far side of the empty building, so they had wandered about, collecting scraps of wood scattered on the floor, left over from the construction. It wasn’t very good firewood, but it was better than nothing. Philip had held on to his rifle and kept the pistol in his pocket; that had impeded his efforts, but he didn’t trust the man enough to leave the firearms lying around.