The Things That Keep Us Here (18 page)

“Hush,” Ann said, smoothing her hair from her damp cheek. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it. I hate her. I wish she’d never been born.”

Ann tensed for a moment, then pulled Maddie closer.

A whole family was gone. Peter reached over and took one of Maddie’s hands.

The fire had drawn out the neighbors. Some of them. It had been a small group, smaller than he’d have expected. “Did you see Libby or Smith?”

Ann shook her head without looking at him. She had her cheek pressed to Maddie’s and was softly humming, rocking Maddie in her arms. He glanced at Shazia. She shook her head, her face in shadow.

That was surprising. Smith was the kind of guy Peter would have expected to be the first to come running to help.

TWENTY-TWO

W
HERE WERE THEY?

Ann stood on the patio and watched Libby’s house. A wet smokiness blew across from the still-smoldering house behind her. Soot peppered the snow about her. She shivered.

Maybe Libby was driving up to her parents’ adobe house surrounded by beige sand and purple mountains. She was lifting Jacob from his car seat and handing him to her mother, happy to be home. “Merry Christmas,” Libby was saying, and Smith was putting his arm around her. They were all trooping inside.

Ann thought about pulling into her own parents’ driveway. The front door would bang open and her parents would stand there grinning, the lights on the Christmas tree glowing gaily in the room behind them. Maddie would leap about, and Kate would come close for hugs. Her dad would insist on carrying in the suitcases. Ann would scold him and shoo him away. She stopped herself.

Her parents weren’t home. They were still in Charlottesville. Assuming they’d made the trip successfully. Of course they had. Beth was smart. She was clever and determined. She’d let nothing stand in her way.

Not knowing was the hard part. There were so many things she didn’t know. She was marooned in silence. It pounded against her eardrums. It mocked her as she watched out the windows for signs of life. Who knew what was happening in the hospitals, the medical labs, other towns and cities? She didn’t even know what had happened next door.

Her mother, her sister, her best friend, they were all gone. There was no one left.

She stepped back into her kitchen and locked the door.

“Where is it?” Kate yelled from somewhere upstairs.

“Say
please!”
Maddie sang from the family room.

The girls were at it again. Ann could feel a headache punch its way between her eyes. She turned and saw Peter bringing down the first-aid bin. Fear stabbed her. “Who’s sick?”

“I’m just seeing what we have.” He pulled things out and stood them on the counter. “Do we have any more cough syrup?”

He was taking inventory? He’d never been one to track the mundane. That sort of thing had always been Ann’s domain. Now that there were no stores or gas stations, maybe he’d begun to realize their limits. She didn’t know if this reassured or worried her. “There’s some in the girls’ medicine cabinet. Why?”

Stomping footsteps upstairs.

Maddie called out, “Did you check the toilet, Kate?”

“Mom! Maddie flushed Owl down the toilet!”

Aghast, Ann marched into the family room, where Maddie sprawled across a chair, her book in her lap.

“Did you?” she demanded.

“She took all my crayons, Mom, and broke them into pieces.”

Ann tipped back her head and stared at the ceiling. “Did you flush Owl down the toilet?”

Maddie licked her lips, then leaned forward to whisper, “No, Mom. I didn’t. But don’t tell her.”

“Ann?” Peter called from the kitchen. “I can’t find a thermometer.”

“Honey,” she said to Maddie, “it’s terrible she broke your crayons, but you just can’t take Owl away.”

Maddie stuck out her lower lip, thinking, then lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “Whatever.” She pushed herself up.

Ann walked back into the kitchen. “I keep the thermometers in that tin,” she told Peter.

He dug out the small container and pried off the lid. “Here it is.”

“There should be two.”

He shook his head. “Nope. Just the one.”

Ann pulled the bin toward her and shifted things around. A thermometer was small enough that it was probably lying at the bottom unnoticed. “What’s this about, Peter?”

“We need to consider pooling our resources.”

Ann stared at him. “With who?”

“After what happened with the Guarnieris—”

“You’re not talking about getting together with our neighbors!”

“It’s the only way we’re going to make it through this.” He pulled out a bottle of ibuprofen and shook it.

She pictured those children the other day, running around, mingling germs from all their various households. All it took was one sick person, one sneeze, one cough. Panic squeezed her chest. Peter couldn’t be serious. A thousand protests bubbled to her lips, but all she could manage was one shocked “No.”

He set the bottle down. “What if one of us gets injured? You only have a couple rolls of gauze. Singh probably has an entire storage unit of the stuff.”

“He’s around sick people all day. There is absolutely no way I’m letting my girls near him.”

“By building one fire to heat three families, we could triple our firewood. What about antibacterial ointment?”

Peter was still reeling from Sue and Al’s deaths. “Maybe earlier we could have considered something like that. But not now, not when the flu’s everywhere.”

“Three bottles of rubbing alcohol. Good.” He began returning things to the bin. “By driving one car to the store, we can halve our fuel expenditures.”

He wasn’t listening. She rapped her knuckles on the counter and he looked up, startled.

“Peter,” she said. “I said no.”

“You’re not thinking of the bigger picture. It’s not just the flu we have to worry about.”

My God, he could be so patronizing. “This isn’t some lab experiment, Peter. This is real life. These are my daughters, and I say we are not getting anywhere near our neighbors. It was bad enough yesterday, all of us running around outside like that. I stayed up half the night worrying that one of us might have gotten exposed.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took on that stubborn expression she knew only too well. She’d come at him too directly. She sucked in her breath and released it. “Listen. You said it yourself, Peter, remember? You said the girls couldn’t play with their friends. There’s no difference between that and this.”

“Ann.” His voice was cold. “We’re not talking about playing with friends. We’re talking about the difference between surviving and not.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped.

Shazia came down the stairs. “Is Kate okay?” she asked. “I heard …” She halted, hand on the banister, her gaze moving from Peter to Ann and back again.

“Kate’s fine.” Peter turned and set the bin on the pantry shelf. “Do you need the girls for anything, Ann? I’ve got a project I’d like their help with.”

“Good. Take them.” She reached for the broom. The floor was dirty again. She could feel grit rolling against the soles of her shoes. And there was a smear of something on the floor by the sink.

Shazia made up the bucket of bleach solution. She carried it across the kitchen, leaning to one side to offset the weight, and went into the bathroom. That was the routine. Bathrooms first, door handles, kitchen, twice daily, morning and night. A spoonful of bleach poured into the sinkful of water, dishes set in to soak till noon. Everyone got one set of dishes each day. If they lost water, they’d switch to paper and plastic.

Ann stepped into the garage and held the dustpan over the nearest bin and gave it a quick shake. The stink made her eyes water. She’d have thought the cold would have kept down the stench. She turned to leave. Then she paused.

A small white bag lay across the top of their food, not tucked to the side where she kept it. It had been torn in two and its contents were gone. Blueberry muffins. She’d been saving them for the girls. No toys, no gift cards in their Christmas stockings, no new pajamas—just one small package of blueberry muffins, and now, not even that.

Could Kate or Maddie have pilfered it? No, they wouldn’t have left the evidence lying around for her to discover.

“What is it?” Shazia stood on the step, clutching her sweater around her.

“I think we have a thief.”

Shazia picked her way over to where Ann stood. She frowned down at the bin and then crouched, moved things aside. She picked up a Baggie containing doughnut crumbs, its corner shredded. “It looks like an animal got into this.”

“A raccoon?”

“Maybe rats.”

Rats? My God
… in her home? Those horrible, dirty creatures rummaging around, their noses twitching and their long hairless tails flicking. Her lip curled. Disgusting things. They got into everything. They were indiscriminate. They had ticks and lice, and who knew what else? Then a new, more terrible, thought struck her. She turned to Shazia. “Don’t they eat human flesh?”

Shazia was scanning the garage. “If they can.”

Ann put her hand to her throat. They could find their way into the house and nip them as they slept. “We’ll keep the garage door closed.”

“I doubt it will do any good. They can chew their way through it or crawl underneath.”

Ann stared at the door. It was at least two inches thick. How was that possible? “They can chew through the door?”

Shazia studied the bin, moved back to stare at the floor. “Concrete, too.”

“Are you
kidding
me?”

“We need to locate their nest.”

Ann looked around. What did a rat’s nest look like?

Shazia lifted up a box. “Ideally, they’d dig a burrow somewhere outside, but the cold might have driven them indoors.”

So, wait. They could still be in here? She curled her toes in her shoes, shuddering. The way Shazia was shifting things around, a rat could leap out at any moment. She picked up a shovel. “What are we looking for?”

“If it’s just one, he’d have a pad, a few flat items stacked high enough to raise him up from the floor. If it’s more, they’d have shredded stuff into a cup shape.”

The very thought of rats organizing themselves in this scheming fashion nauseated her. She poked the garden pots in the corner with the tip of the shovel. Shazia was flipping through the stack of paper bags they’d been using as kindling.

“See anything?” Ann gingerly lifted aside garden gloves, a trowel, and a bag of topsoil.

“Not yet.”

The door opened. Kate stood there, Owl tucked into her crooked arm. “Mom? Dad wants to know if he can have some envelopes.”

“Close the door.” Ann poked the shovel blade into a dark corner. “Get out of here.”

“I’ll tell him you said ‘Go ahead.’” The door shut.

There were so many hiding spaces. Storage shelves lined one wall. There was Peter’s workbench and tool chest. The bin of sports equipment. “Find anything?”

“No. Perhaps they’ve made their nest elsewhere. I think the freezer out here is okay.”

“You think?”

“They can’t get through metal. But if we remove their food source, they’ll just search out another.” Shazia rubbed a forefinger along the crack where the door met the step. “They don’t need much space. Maybe only half an inch.”

So not even the food in the kitchen was safe from the filthy little beasts. Disease carriers. They’d have to block the door somehow, but how certain could they be that they’d keep them out entirely? She narrowed her eyes. “How do we kill them?”

“We could try some sort of poison.”

“Like what?”

“I really don’t know. Arsenic, I suppose.”

“We don’t have anything like that.”

“I don’t know how successful we’d be anyway. Rats are wary. They’ll take a small taste of something new and wait to see if it makes them sick.” Shazia straightened. “It’d be good to have a cat.”

“Maddie’s allergic.”

“I see.”

Shazia turned and left. Was she actually looking for poison? Was that the sort of thing she’d have brought with her? Ann quickly followed. The girls sat at the kitchen table, pushing folded sheets of paper into envelopes and licking the flaps.

“Don’t go into the garage,” Ann told them. She heard the sharpness in her voice.

So did Kate. She raised her head, staring at Ann, her brows drawn together.

“Want to see what we did?” Maddie said.

“In a minute.”

Instead of heading for the stairs, Shazia veered into the dining room. “Peter?”

Of course, Ann thought.

He looked up from the notebook opened before him. “What’s the matter?”

“We’ve got rats,” Shazia said.

Ann said, “They’ve gotten into the food.”

He set down his pen and pushed back his chair. “I was afraid of this.”

They followed him through the house. “Did you see any droppings?” he said. “No,” Shazia answered. They crowded around the food bin.

Peter ran fingertips across the concrete and rubbed them together. “Any sign of nesting?”

“No,” Shazia said. “We could sprinkle baby powder around the bin and watch for tracks.”

Ann shook her head. “We can’t leave the food out here for them to get into again.”

“It’s no good now anyway,” Shazia said.

The pickles, olives, the salad dressing, the last slices of bread …

“None of it?”

“No tail whips or paw prints, no grease marks.” Peter frowned. “I don’t think rats got into this stuff.”

Thank God.

“You think it was another sort of animal?”

He nodded. “Still, it’s just a matter of time before rats follow.”

“There haven’t been any documented cases of rats spreading H5 to humans,” Shazia said.

“But we know rats can be infected with it,” Peter said. “And we’ve been out of touch for weeks now.”

Ann stared at him. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me these rats could be carrying the flu?”

“I don’t think we have rats.”

“But if we did?” she said impatiently. “Could we be exposed?”

Peter turned his gaze to her. “Yes.”

TWENTY-THREE

P
ETER LIFTED THE KEYS FROM THE HOOK AND CALLED
into the kitchen, “Girls, are you done with those?”

“Almost.”

“Bring them out, will you?” It must have been Finn’s dog, Barney, who’d gotten into their food supply. The animal must have been after more than just shelter the night before. The poor creature was probably starving. In a way, Barney had done them a favor, reminding them of the risks they took leaving their food out like this. A dog today, rats tomorrow.

Ann and Shazia backed up to let him go to his truck. Peter reached into the toolbox in his truck bed and pulled out a pair of latex gloves.

“We’ll have to do the whole neighborhood, won’t we?” Ann looked grim. “If rats get into one house, they’ll make it to ours, too.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Shazia said.

He pulled the tarp from the shelf and shook it across the bed of his truck. Ann and Shazia helped him tuck down the corners. Maddie came running. “Here, Daddy.”

“Good job, honey.” He took the envelopes. “What are those?” Ann said.

“The girls and I wrote a letter to the neighbors.” He tucked the envelopes into his coat pocket.

Ann had been walking around to the passenger side, and now she stopped and looked at him.

“Listen,” he said, wanting to forestall any more arguments. “We can do this without coming into contact with anyone. We’ll work up some sort of system where we leave things on each other’s front porch.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You have a far greater trust in our neighbors than I do.”

In some ways, that had always been the problem. It was one of the reasons they’d left North Carolina. “I’d better get going,” he said. “There’s no need for you to come along. I can manage this.” He got into the truck and slammed the door.

Ann stood back, looking uncertain. Shazia stood beside her. The engine rumbled to life, a welcome, clearing sound. He backed the truck out of the garage.

Averting his eyes from the black thing that had been the Guarnieris’ home, he started at the house on the opposite corner. Small grocery sacks littered the ground around the driveway like huge misshapen snowballs. He grasped a handle and lifted. It resisted. The plastic had melded to the icy slick of the pavement. He tugged harder and the bag ripped, dribbling sodden tissues and fireplace ash. He’d have to scrape it up by hand. Before he drove on, he opened the mailbox, fitted in one of the envelopes, and pulled up the red metal flag. Sooner or later Stan Fox would notice and come investigate.

Metal cans lined the pavement outside the Nguyens’ house. Peter had to work to loosen the lids hammered on too tightly. The cans were too unwieldy to lift over the side of the truck, so Peter pulled out the bags they contained and rolled them onto the tarp. Mrs. Nguyen came out onto the porch and watched. Peter pointed to the mailbox, and she nodded.

A can lay half-buried in the slush in the next driveway. Large bags listed at the one beyond. He let his focus grow distant. He didn’t need to know the Mitchells drank tea and ate pudding from cups, bought this brand of detergent. He wouldn’t match the apple cores to the Hutchesons or the coffee grounds to Singh.

The street curved, and Peter pulled up in front of the yellow ranch at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. He hadn’t been down here in a while. He recalled seeing two small children riding their tricycles in the driveway. Didn’t they have a cat, too? Yes, an obese, yellow creature that had streaked out in front of his truck one spring morning when he’d been on his way to work, the woman of the house running after. “Sorry!” she’d called as Peter screeched to a stop. She’d scooped the cat into her arms and stood back, waving.

Now Peter looked down at the front yard. Soda cans and crushed juice boxes, Styrofoam trays, flattened waxy boxes, and cans with their lids at sharp angles. Empty wine bottles and baby-food jars. Everything had just been tossed onto the snow and left there to be blown away. He looked at the house. The curtains were still, no smoke from the chimney. He turned off the engine and climbed out of the cab, reaching for his gloves. This would take a while.

Finally, the truck bed was too full to accept another bag. He reached in and tamped things down with the flat of a shovel to keep stuff from flying out the minute he picked up any sort of speed. He peeled off his gloves and squirted hand sanitizer onto his palms. Rubbing them together, he swiped his temples with a forearm.

As he drew past the house, he spotted Ann standing on the front porch, watching. He slowed and rolled down his window. “I won’t be long,” he called to her. He wondered if she’d reply, was relieved when she called back.

“Be careful.”

“I will.” He pulled away from the curb, eagerly accelerated through the stop sign at the bottom of the street. It had been weeks since he’d ventured beyond their neighborhood. Had anything changed during his absence?

The roads were unexpectedly clear, the snow gone from the pavement but still standing on the grassy medians and hills. At an intersection, the stoplights dangled overhead, useless. Cars waited to take their turns. Peter drew alongside a minivan the same make and color as Ann’s. He glanced over to see the passenger, a young woman with a hand to her face. She refused to look over at him.

Static hissed from his usual radio stations. Two days before, they’d all sparked out like old Christmas lights. It had been an unwelcome surprise. The AM stations were dead, even the ones the government used to disseminate public information. He’d thought they were foolproof. It must have been some glitch that brought them down, maybe a sequence of glitches. He flicked off the radio and settled back into his seat.

There was the library, the gas station, and the Chinese restaurant, all dark and silent. Normal for Christmas Day, but now they had a more abandoned look, with their long, blank windows completely unadorned by any attempt at holiday festiveness. A fire engine sat skewed in the empty parking lot. No one was around it. There were no lights flashing. Had they run out of gas in the middle of a run?

The dump wasn’t far, five miles perhaps. The map showed it standing off a long curving county road Peter had never been down before. He looked to his gas gauge. The arrow pointed to the halfway mark, more than enough to make it to the dump and back. There was enough to tack on a quick trip to the university. Depending on how long this job took, he might head down there afterward. The power had to be on by now. He wondered about Lewis. Had he been able to tend to his lab animals?

He drove under the freeway and past a sprawling housing development. Everything looked closed and quiet. He slowed as he reached the turnoff and took the left. The road surface changed from asphalt to gravel. Trees crowded in on both sides, and the snow grew thick in the shadows. He bumped over the ruts. A signpost pointed right. The road flattened and he broke through the tree line. Two metal posts stood on opposite sides of the road with a heavy chain lying on the snow between them. The guard box sat empty.

Someone had been through here recently, though. Tire tracks cut through the slush. He could see where they turned around on the berm ahead. He angled into the clearing and rocked to a stop. A mountain of trash rose before him, vast and multicolored, sprawling across the flat Ohio terrain.

White slabs of Styrofoam. Black tires, bundled red and blue rags, steel pipes, yellow plastic buckets. Thousands of twisted bags, their contents undecipherable. The snow had settled, filling in the gaps and softening the edges.

Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He edged his truck right up to the very perimeter. The air was still and frosty. The stink seeped in through his closed windows. His eyes watered, and he tried to breathe through his mouth. He sat there and looked at the heap that filled his windshield.

It wasn’t the presence of something that bothered him, he realized, but the absence. Where were the cawing gulls circling above?

Climbing out of the truck, he slammed the door shut.

He tugged on a fresh set of gloves, unfastened the back gate, and reached in for the first bag. The ride had jostled things around, and the first bag he picked up split open. He did what he could to scoop up the mess before heaving it onto the slope of refuse. Things broke apart and rolled toward him. He stepped back out of their reach and began tossing bag after bag, building up a kind of rhythm. Reach, flex, heave.

When most of the truck bed had been emptied, he retrieved the broom he’d brought along for this purpose and climbed up to sweep out the bed. The tarp that he’d spread to protect the truck bed lay wrinkled and slick. He removed his gloves and left them and the broom in the bed, lifted up the back gate, and latched it into place.

He climbed into the cab and turned on the engine. His entire truck would need to be hosed out and disinfected. The sweat he’d built up earlier made him clammy, and he blasted the heat into the cab. The clock on the dashboard read just after three. He put his truck into gear and backed out through the gate. Time for round two.

He took a different route home, slowing as he approached the grocery store. Someone was there, walking toward the lone car parked in the lot. Peter swung the wheel hastily and bumped into the shopping center. He rolled down the window. “Hey.”

The man turned and looked over. Middle-aged, bulky in a quilted navy coat, he wore a red apron tied around his neck and waist. He had his hand on his car door handle, and he looked impatient. “Yeah?”

“Are you open?”

“We were. You just missed it.” The man swung himself into the driver’s seat. “We’ll open again the next time we get a delivery.”

“Any idea when that’ll be?”

“All I can tell you is keep checking back. Like I do.” He slammed the door and started the engine.

Peter looked to the store. Plywood had been nailed over the picture glass. Shards of glass twinkled on the pavement. The sound of the car engine faded into the distance. Peter slowly pulled forward, loathe to leave.

The little potted fir trees, the empty concrete benches arranged in the little courtyard at the end of the parking lot. There was the mailbox on the corner and a squat metal box beside it.

Braking to a stop, he turned off the engine and patted his pockets. They were empty, of course. Would he have to break the glass? No, wait. The ashtray. He usually kept spare change in there. He fingered out some coins and stepped out of the truck.

The newspaper was thin, the size of the free community papers that used to appear in their driveway every week. He climbed back into the truck and checked the date. Six days old. Still, Ann would be pleased. She’d been hungering for news. They all had.

The front page was completely devoted to H5N1. The vaccine Liederman had been working on had failed and was being pulled. Patients had died. Terrible news. Peter guessed Liederman’s group had been working too fast. The reporter was writing fast, too. He hadn’t even mentioned any other ongoing vaccine programs.

The CDC estimated thirty million Americans were going to die. Ten percent of the U.S. population. A staggering number, but one that came in far below what Peter would have guessed. H5N1 had a fatality rate closer to fifty percent. That translated to one hundred and fifty million American deaths. Either CDC was buffering the numbers or the virus had mutated to a milder form. Peter hoped for the latter, suspected the former.

On the next page was a photograph of a tall building, one side sheared completely off. Steel beams bristled like chopped arteries. He read the caption. Japan had had an earthquake. Thousands of people had died because international relief couldn’t be mustered. All those desperate people waiting for help that never arrived. He read the story below. Militant Pakistanis had marched on Islamabad and overthrown the government. These were headlines that would have carried the front page but which were now relegated to the inside section.

Here was a black-bordered list of things they were supposed to have at home. Below it was an article on caring for the sick. He paused at the next headline.
Mass Fatalities Overwhelm System
. Morgues and undertakers all across the country had resorted to hiring freelancers to collect the dead. Health departments were lagging in issuing death certificates. Thousands of deaths might end up going unreported. The President’s national database was struggling, and gaps were appearing in the more rural areas. At the bottom of one page was a photograph of a familiar curved structure, the ice hockey rink where the girls had learned to skate. Columbus was storing its overflow of dead bodies there.

He glanced around the empty parking lot. His was the only car there.

Maybe it wasn’t that people were staying home. Maybe they were all dead.

He climbed out of the truck and crammed the newspaper past the metal lid of the nearest trash bin.