Thirst (23 page)

She sat in the hole and he covered her up so that only her shoulders and head were out.

“We have to stay like this. We’ll get out of here in the morning.”

“Where’s the other bottle, Eddie?”

“Forget it,” he said.

“Tell me. Tell me or I’ll scream.”

“I must have dropped it back there. It’s my fault.”

Laura collapsed back into the ash and put her face in her hands. Eddie leaned his back against the wall of the cliff. There was dirt there, roots—too steep to hold the ash. He put his hand on Laura’s back. The sky was a trail of unmolested stars.

“We’ll change our plans,” he said. His head was aching again, and he had trouble keeping his eyes open. The knuckles on his right hand throbbed. When he touched his face, there was blood there, too.

“There’s no plan now,” she said.

“We’ll make one,” he said, letting his eyes close.

“Would you have agreed to ever meet me,” she asked, “if you’d known that this was coming?”

“No one knew this was coming.”

“I knew. I knew when I was fifteen.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Everything dies for me. I loved you, Eddie. That’s how selfish I am. I loved you but I let us be together.”

“I’m glad of it.”

“I let us go through with it, even though I knew that this would happen.”

“You didn’t know.”

“When I lost her, I knew. You can’t understand. I could see the rest of my life. Some people are good at it. Some people just make things die.”

“I wouldn’t be alive without you. What would I be living for?”

“You should have just lived for yourself.”

After a while, she asked about the boy.

“Don’t think about him,” Eddie said. “He’s at rest.”

“Not Mike Jr.,” she said. “The other one. The one who was all burned up. Remember? He was gray.”

Eddie stared into the clarity of the sky as he would into a lake, looking for its bottom.

“He was at our house,” Laura said. “Remember? He was standing right out front of our house at the beginning.”

“I looked for him,” Eddie said.

“But then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to him, Eddie? Tell me.”

“He found his way back home.”

The night had made her voice extremely soft. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

The truth was like a breath he’d been holding in.

“He was gone,” he said finally. “I tried to find him, but I couldn’t.”

“You let him go.”

“He was gone already.”

“You can’t just let a child go,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”

Eddie listened to her breath. It came in fits.

“At least we’re okay,” he said, and then was quiet while Laura made retching noises. His memories were smoky as they surrounded him. He could see the weeds in Laura’s daughter’s teeth.

No. It was the wet pieces of spinach stuck in his goddaughter’s. Sleep was coming, unbidden. Eddie was saying, “You’ll be the strongest girl in school,” and he could see the fat thumbprints in the burgers on the grill, the corn on the cob. Her laughter, like water, filling the vessel of the world around them.

But he didn’t let the dream come fully on. He made himself keep talking. “In the morning,” he said, “we’ll go to a bunch of houses. If there are people in them, then they’re drinking something. We’ll knock on doors. Someone will help us. We’re right here in the middle of all these houses.” He looked, for a moment, up beyond the bowl of the spillway. Where Route 29 passed, it was dim. On the other side of the road were more communities like their own.

“Why would anyone help us?” Laura said.

When he looked again, there was no sky, just the grassy spot in his dream. At the edge of the grass, the woods started and the land dropped off beyond them. It was a steep grade, and he could hear a stream down there.

“If they want to live,” Laura continued, “they won’t help us. Oh, please don’t let them. I can’t do it to anyone else.”

The earth in his dream was soft. They were driving home from Jason’s, having left Eddie’s goddaughter laughing on the lawn. Eddie couldn’t stop smiling. He said to Laura, “What a cutie,” but Laura was silent. She sat rocking in the passenger’s seat, looking ill. “Are you carsick?” he asked. “Do you want me to pull over?”

In his dream, he stood on the slope behind the pull-off and took a step, sliding, pressing his palm into the dead leaves on the ground to brace himself.

“Come on!” he called to her.

“What are you doing?”

She stood above him, looking into the sky beyond his shoulder.

“It’s not that steep,” he said, holding out his hand to her.

She took a step and slid, and soon she was down on top of him, hugging his neck.

They could see the water—silvery gold—and his mouth filled with the taste of it, how sweet it would be.

At the bottom was a gravel bed, and Eddie tried skipping a stone, but it hit the water and sank. He was out of practice, and the water was shallow. He found a few muddy ones and rinsed them off. He tried again, but the water only gulped as the stones disappeared.

Laura sat on the bank behind him, running her hand over the moss growing there. There were big roots where the soil had eroded from around the base of a tree.

“Look how it grows here,” she said, stroking the moss between the roots. “It’s perfect. Doesn’t that drive you crazy? How everything is perfect?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “It’s just nature. You don’t have to think about it.”

“Everything is set up to fit inside everything else. It’s just makes me so sad, sometimes, to see it.”

Eddie looked at her.

“Come feel it,” she said, petting the moss again. “It just grows here on its own. Nobody asked it to.”

“I’m not going to feel it.”

“It’s perfect and it doesn’t even try. Nothing else has to try.”

In the breeze overhead, dark birds swirled like rags above the tree line.

Eddie woke when the sun was still behind the world, but the sky was almost gray.

Laura slept next to him, gray with ash, still mostly buried in it. The contents of the backpack were strewn out in front of her from when she’d rummaged through it: the tent, a couple of unfolded T-shirts, the packets of ramen. Eddie ran his hands over it all.

A sudden fear overtook him.

He hadn’t packed the knife.

Laura’s knees had poked through the ash—two islands of skin. Ash was in her hair. Her face was streaked with it. Eddie could see the dark spot in front of her arms where the water had released from the jug on impact.

Soon, it would be light enough for them to be seen from above.

The can of wasp spray was almost empty.

They had to move right away.

“Laura,” he said.

When he touched her shoulder, she slumped to the side and her arms rolled out of the ash, which had clotted on her wrists.

Eddie’s hands shook; his fingers refused to bend. He tried to touch her, but only bumped his hands against her shoulder. Beneath her, like an artifact, was the black handle of the knife.

It was covered in bloody smudges.

There were sounds. Low mewling noises. An animal in the woods, maybe. He would lie there and wait for it to come—he would wait to be ripped apart.

He heard the sounds again.

They were sounds that he was making.

He draped his body over hers, and her head moved sickeningly beneath his chest, her jawbone digging into his ribs. His face pressed into the ash beside her and he breathed it in. He could die this way, too, simply by breathing—he would drown himself in the ash.

But he couldn’t do it. He lifted his face and scraped his tongue with his fingernails and spat.

He picked up the knife. The heaviness shocked him, the length of the blade, its sharpness. It seemed only an instrument of terrible violence, and it trembled in his hand.

His girl. Oh, God. His wife.

Beneath smears of gray, veins still branched along his own wrists. He touched the blade to one of the raised channels but couldn’t make himself push. He moved it to the bulge of flesh beneath his thumb, sliding it diagonally across. A thin edge of skin lifted up as easily as the corner of a page, and a bulb of blood emerged.

He touched the blade back to his wrist and closed his eyes. She’d sliced where she knew the blood would run. Would one cut be enough? Or would he feel the pain, and then have to cut again?

His arms were weak. He could barely raise them.

If only he could cry. His face was hot, but his throat was clear. He could breathe. The air was the same air, and he dug into the ash around her, piling it up to her neck. When he got to her head, he stopped. He couldn’t bury her face. Her eyes were closed.

“
Talk to me
,” he whispered. “
Laura.
”

He reached to wipe the ash from her cheek. Her head wouldn’t stay still—it lolled back, a terrible weight atop her neck.

When the water came back, her body would wash downstream. Until then, it would swell in the heat like all the rest. He held the knife. How many times had he sharpened it on a rod when he could have been pounding it dull with a hammer?

It was too late to think about that.

Her head was out of the ash, but not by very much. No one would see it. If this was her grave, it was almost hidden. The sky was yellow and hot. He could feel it burning up the skin on his face and arms. His neck was moist again, and he cursed it. He was not yet close to dying.

He held the knife in both hands, like a sword he would drive into the ground. He wouldn’t allow her body to swell. He would keep her down beneath the ash. He closed his eyes and pressed the tip into the mound of her chest, leaning until it twisted in and sunk.

“Oh, God,” he cried.

He pulled it out and forced himself to lean down on it again and again. He wanted to feel as if the blade were forcing its way between his own ribs—for each incision to be an incision through his own flesh and lungs.

But he felt nothing but the heat of the day. The work of stabbing his wife was only making it hotter. He held the knife in front of him—a dull reflective silver—and tried to find his veins again, but couldn’t. He couldn’t even look. Steve McCarthy had said his systems would shut down, but his thirst hadn’t even stopped. That would be the sign—when the thirst went away.

In front of him was the boy. He stood along the bank where the ash hadn’t piled.

“Stay there,” Eddie said.

The boy stood very still. He seemed held there by the weak filament of Eddie’s gaze. Then he started to turn.

“No,” Eddie called. “Wait!”

He ran, and Eddie raised himself from the ash, tumbling through until it was shallower underfoot. The boy picked his way along deep drifts like he knew them by heart. Eddie’s knees bumped together. He wasn’t ready to run yet.

At the bottom of the spillway, the boy ran across Route 29, to where the park picked up on the other side. Eddie saw the back of his burnt hair as he went down among the boulders following the streambed. There was sand where the pools had been—a streak in each, like a cat’s eye. He felt his chest strain, but forced his legs to follow. When the trail leveled off, the ash was almost gone. There had been a sandy bank there. The boy was getting smaller in the distance and then he was gone.

“Hey!” Eddie called. “Come back!”

The trees up the hill were only burnt on the side facing the stream, so that each was two-toned. Near the streambed were blackened shrubs. He kicked one and it collapsed over his shoe. The air was close down there. He sat on a rock and looked at the scrape on his wrist. It hadn’t even bled.

The knife was back on the trail. He’d left it there. He’d left everything. But when he looked into the woods, she was there, too—she was all around him—and when he pushed his fists into his eyes to dispel the image, she wouldn’t go away.

He pushed harder, grinding down with his knuckles. He saw her hair—black and straight and moving around her shoulder as she turned her head. He could taste it in his mouth. The hopelessness in his stomach began to spread.

He hit his fist into his ear, and hit it again until an ache reached down his jaw and his skin went numb.

He thought of Steve McCarthy, who had talked of taking it slow—how that was the only way to survive. But Steve McCarthy hadn’t really known how long a body could last in the heat without water because he’d been drinking all the while. Steve McCarthy had thought that moving slowly had been the key, but Eddie knew now that the key was moving fast. Eddie could see Steve McCarthy’s shoulder bursting open. He could see the look on his face the moment the jug had dropped from his hand—as if he no longer shared a history with his own arms and legs. Eddie felt it, too. If his body was not his own, then he owed it nothing, depended on it for nothing, and was free. There was nothing to keep him there.

And so he ran.

If the boy was up ahead, Eddie would find him.

He ran and his legs did not give up. He would run until he caught the boy or until the thirst vanished and he could run no more. He was going as fast as he could go with his eyes open, but then a strange revelation arrived. He suspected he could go even faster with them closed.

It was true.

Seeing had only been slowing him down. With his eyes closed, the ground turned to air and his body made no sound. He couldn’t feel his legs moving or his jaw aching. He couldn’t feel the flutter in his chest.

He went until the toe of his shoe clipped an imperfection in the path and he shot forward in the manner of a base runner stealing third. The skin of his palms tore into white strips, and more blood welled beneath. His palms were already bruising, and he felt a healthy, functioning pain taunting him with its throb. He had stores of wretched life left in him.

If the boy was still ahead of him, he would have to rest, too. Eddie lay down on the rocks and saw above him the great metal underside of the Beltway. He’d already come this far. He remembered running this trail and hearing the groans of big rigs overhead thumping and tapering off. All was quiet now, even his heart—though it was beating gently. How many more miles before the trail emptied out and he was walking on the highway? It would be flat up there and maybe he’d see some drivers. Then it was Route 50 and over the bridge, and he’d be just eight miles from Laura’s parents’ house.