We Are Unprepared (30 page)

Eventually, Crow spoke again, relaying all of the painful and confusing memories of the previous weeks. His ex-wife and daughter wanted to hitch a ride up from Putney before The Storm struck, but he told them initially that there was no room. After the first day of The Storm, he realized that he'd made a mistake and changed his mind. Crow wanted them there with him in his little shelter. They worked out a plan to meet in White River Junction, where Crow would pick them up and take them back north. But when Crow got to their meeting spot, only his daughter was there, injured and in shock. The van they had been riding in with a group of travelers had been struck by a tree on I-91 and most of the people in it died instantly. His ex-wife was one of them.

It seemed a miracle to me that Crow and his daughter managed to get back up to the Northeast Kingdom unharmed at that stage of The Storm, but I didn't point this out. He was in the deepest throes of grief at that moment. And now he was a single parent to a teenage girl he'd hardly seen in recent years. Crow's bunker was unscathed, but his new life was unrecognizable to him.

We stayed in the cramped space for a cup of tea and so many heart-wrenching silences. Crow cried on and off. Maggie held him awkwardly at times while I watched. I had never been so close to this kind of grief—violent, preventable, complicated death. It felt something like the time Pia convinced me to do a guided meditation in a sweat lodge when we were vacationing in Sedona. I remember my body transitioning from uncomfortable to unbearable in that hut and then to a heady sort of lightness where I detached entirely from my own selfish senses. I lost all awareness of my own grief and guilt while we were in there with Crow. It was clarifying, but I couldn't endure it for long.

Eventually, Crow stopped talking entirely and we sat in silence for a while. I didn't know how long we should stay or what one was supposed to do in such a situation, but it was getting dark and we were nervous about the drive home. We had to go. So Maggie hugged Crow's limp body and I promised to visit again soon. We left him there, in the indestructible little shelter that couldn't protect him from much at all.

Our walk back to the truck seemed so much longer than the walk there, accompanied by only the sound of our boots on the forest wreckage, which was deafening in my pounding head. I couldn't account for what we'd just learned. Crow had invested everything in the promise of his own survival—which he'd achieved—and it had ruined his life. But hadn't August's parents and the nice man who died in the shelter that week and all the families of the missing had their lives ruined, too? All the nonpreppers who had put family first had been punished by The Storm with the same wrath. If there was a lesson in all this, I couldn't find it. There was no order or reason behind the destruction and that was almost as frightening as the destruction itself.

Maggie had gained some distance ahead as I got lost in my thoughts, and I could see her climb into the driver side of the red truck through the darkening air. She had been crying again and her face looked pale even from that distance. What had she said to me on our walk to Crow's?
I love that about you.
She wasn't really talking about me, but my attachment to the land. Still, she had said the word. And, more important, she saw this in me because it was in her, too. We knew so little about one another, but it had been clear from the moment we met that we shared this fundamental trait. We were ourselves in those woods...the way they used to be.

I opened the passenger-side door and slid in, but I didn't bother closing it behind me. As I looked at her hopeful face, her soft reddish hair that fell around her shoulders and her small, strong body that sat behind the wheel, I felt a surge of something wild and alive. I reached around with one arm and pulled her toward me. We kissed desperately and clumsily on the giant bench seat of her dad's truck. Her body was warm and we both wore the ripe stink of people who no longer enjoyed daily showers. It surprised me how much I liked it.

She went for the zipper on my jeans first, and then we rearranged our positioning, with her lying flat on her back and my knees searching for somewhere to go. It was awkward and cramped, but there was no stopping, not for either of us, as we clawed gently at one another's bodies, working to move aside our grubby clothes just enough to make contact. A mosquito bit my lower back. I considered swatting it away, but just then...we found each other. Past zippers and layers and all that anger. We pressed tightly together, making sounds that were most at home in those haunting woods. I hadn't had sex in what seemed like a lifetime, but that wasn't why it felt so necessary, so essential to our survival. All the fear and confusion and loneliness of the previous weeks was unleashed between us and, if not fully exorcised, forgotten for the briefest moment.

No explanation or justification exists for why I betrayed Pia in the truck that day, but I believe that a decisive action of some kind was needed then to prompt me to start making choices about my poststorm life. Without that nudge, I would have just dried up with the rest of the wreckage. It was a complicating, terrifying and irreversible action that jolted me back into my life.

TWENTY-SIX

IT WOULD BE
three more days before the supply truck that transported Pia could get over the mountain from her valley to mine. I spent that time away from Maggie in an attempt to clear my mind of her and minimize further temptation, but the memory of our indiscretion in the truck played on a constant loop behind my eyes. I saw flashes of her bare skin while I ate breakfast in the cafeteria and smelled our unwashed entwined bodies in the malodorous shifting winds from the open windows. That moment followed me everywhere as both a thrilling memory and a new layer of guilt.

I had only one discussion with Maggie in those three days, to ask if I could borrow her dad's truck. Most of the roads in Isole had dried out and I couldn't wait any longer to see what had become of my house. She was happy to lend it and asked no questions about why I wanted to go alone. Everyone around us was slowly reacquainting with their former lives—seeing their wrecked homes or, worse, identifying the bodies—and it was understood that we each had to do this in our own way.

The drive home was solemn and surreal as I took in the changes to the Northeast Kingdom landscape—a landscape I expected never to change. The Atkins family's sugar house had vanished from where it normally sat and half of their home was collapsed. Half a mile up, a rusty green Chrysler sedan blocked the entrance to the Pinaults' farm. Beside it, the hand-painted sign advertising a new litter of bunnies lay unreadable and cracked. And the centuries-old stone walls that snaked around the properties, delineating lines of ownership from generations past were toppled over, finally beat by something stronger than themselves.

Most haunting was the total absence of human life. Where had everyone gone, I wondered. Certainly, some people had left before The Storm. And others were stuck indefinitely in rescue shelters like myself. Still, that didn't seem to account for everyone. It wasn't just that I saw no one; it was that I saw no signs of anyone even passing through. There were no ditches marked with the wheels of stuck, spinning trucks. There wasn't even the occasional crushed Bud Light can from the bored teenagers that drove around at night. There was nothing.

I pulled the truck off to the side of the road at the entrance to our driveway, which was predictably impassable. As I worked my way on foot through the messy path, I noticed that all the trees to my left had fallen in exactly the same direction, while most to the right remained upright. More cruel evidence, I thought, of nature's random and meaningless punishment. Stop looking for order where there is none.

It was April and unseasonably warm, which was beginning to seem seasonal. Buds were appearing on the trees that still stood, but the sound of birds was noticeably absent. All I could hear was the ubiquitous hum of mosquitoes, which I didn't know then would follow us indefinitely thereafter. The mosquitoes on our new earth are fast and resilient. By the time you try to slap one, it's already grown fat with blood and is on its way to another donor. I was grateful for the protection that my long sleeves and pants provided as I walked toward the house, despite the sweat that was collecting underneath.

The first sight I caught of it was like a punch in the gut. It was mostly upright, but a massive fallen maple tree lay right through the center, its branches splayed out wildly. The windows were all broken and debris from the wreckage was scattered around the yard, baking in the sun. In case there was any question of whether I could return to this life, it was an inarguable sign that everything behind me was condemned to the past. Move forward, it said.

I crept through the house, awed by the destruction and inexplicably frightened to touch anything. It was like a nightmare I still hoped to awake from. The flooding had bizarrely rearranged all the furniture in our living room and drained color from the tattered fabrics. Upstairs, a wasp's nest sat comfortably at the foot of our bed, stopping me at the doorway. I was most startled to find that the antique fixtures that used to gleam in both bathrooms had disappeared; someone had taken them. It wasn't that I wanted them back for any material or sentimental reason, but it was the first evidence of the desperation many would find themselves in after The Storm. I didn't know then that stripped and looted homes would soon become commonplace across the country. Those were the earliest signs of our new economy.

When there was nothing left to see, I sat empty-handed on the collapsing porch one final time. I thought I would find more artifacts of my former life there—faded pictures in broken frames, mementos from noteworthy events—but there were none. I had never noticed it before, but Pia and I stopped building a life together when we moved into that house. Moving to Vermont was the realization of all our shared dreams, and once it became real, the longing for it disappeared and we didn't know how to define our existence anymore. Our future was blank.

Eventually, I walked down the path that separated our land from August's badly-damaged-but-still-standing little house. He wasn't there, but it appeared that his family had returned, so I left a note on the door, promising to come back soon. Knowing that August was alive was the greatest comfort I had. It wasn't enough, but it was something; a wish fulfilled (or a prayer answered) and an antidote to the hopeless confusion that occasionally overtook me.

I didn't visit Peg's house that afternoon. I don't know what kept me from walking through the woods—the woods that had almost killed me weeks earlier and now looked so flaccid and powerless—but I couldn't do it. I hadn't yet heard from or anything about Peg, and a part of me knew that the news wouldn't be good. Instead, I squinted through the jumble of fallen trees at her house, straining to imagine her drinking a cup of coffee at her kitchen table, and continued walking to my truck. I knew that she wasn't in there.

“Did you go to Peg's house?” Maggie asked when I handed her the keys an hour later.

I shook my head.

She searched my eyes. “Sit down.”

We were standing in the crowded gymnasium that still served as a sort of recreational space for the wards of the shelter. A ring of women were knitting to my left while younger children darted around playing tag.

Space was whatever we made of it there, so Maggie and I sat on the floor, her compact form cross-legged and me hunched forward around my bent knees. My body felt stiff and cumbersome.

“What is it?” I sighed.

“I just got news of this while you were out,” she started. “We don't really know much...”

“It's Peg?”

“Yes. Salty came by. He wanted to tell you personally. They found her body.”

I dropped my head, unsure of whether I would throw up or burst into tears at the news. Instead, I was overcome by a dizzying ring in my ears. I watched the floor spin.

“Ash, I'm so sorry. I know you had grown close.”

I could barely hear Maggie through the ringing, which continued for another minute before I could get any words out.

“She was outside? Alone in the woods?” I asked.

“Yes, how did you know? She was about a half mile from her house. No one really knows how exactly The Storm got her, but it was too late by the time she was found.”

“I know what happened,” I whispered.

“What?”

“I know what happened,” I said again, more loudly this time. “The Storm didn't
get
her—she went to it. She asked for this.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Peg couldn't stay to see what life looked like after The Storm, how it would devastate the environment. It would have been too much for her. She knew how bad things would be and that there would be nothing left for her here.”

Maggie looked baffled but didn't argue with me.

I stretched out onto one side and pressed my cheek into the cool, dirty floor. Eventually, I felt Maggie beside me, close but not quite touching me. She began talking in a low, soothing voice that I thought probably worked well with the young children she taught. I closed my eyes and drifted between awareness and a sleepy haze while she spoke. She told stories about small, sweet moments she'd had with Peg, bumping into her at the coffee shop, occasionally riding her beautiful horses. I couldn't comprehend the finality of Peg's departure. I needed her there, in that new life, to help me make sense of things with her peculiar spirituality that I was beginning to understand.

When Maggie ran out of things to say about Peg, she reported on all that she'd learned from Salty's visit. He knew which roads were still bad, which local buildings would have to be demolished and who was leaving town for good. I didn't move or make a sound, but I think Maggie knew that I appreciated her efforts to steady me. And Salty was okay, which was good news. It sounded as if he was busier than ever, working to rebuild our devastated town and stay hopeful for everyone else's sake. His oldest daughter, who had been planning on coming back to Isole after college, had apparently decided to move to San Francisco instead. Maggie noted that this seemed to make Salty very sad, but it was probably the right thing to do; opportunities would be scarce in the Northeast Kingdom for a while. And on and on. Maggie stayed with me until I drifted to sleep there on the floor of the busy gymnasium.