“No, I know,” said Sophie. She tapped her cheek, palmed a smile. She was remembering, repositioning the fragments of another life whose darkest moments now seemed like twilit reflections of some unrecoverable and ancient earthly paradise. Mitch, you’d never believe this because you two were such black-and-white reversals of one another, she thought. But to the gold of your heart? You’re so, so much like my Tom. Too much. This is so hard.
He gave her that awkward, soulful smile, his over-generous outpouring of empathic reception. Sophie was still taking him in, marveling at the fact that he was actually there. He was so much like Tom, but forty pounds lighter and three inches taller, with that charming, somehow gullible and cadaverous face. He had the same gold hair as Tom’s, yet tinged with auburn, and almost all his thinning crown chased away by grizzled silver. She knew he grew his beard out to give himself some substance, for whenever he had been forced to let the world look in at him. And now?
She shrugged a little at Mitch and said, “You know, when I was so much younger, the night after I met you? Did you know Tom almost broke up with me? For telling him that joining the NSA would probably make him feel in later years not like a patriot, but like a defector to our dreams. I was a spitfire back then. I had no place, but can you believe that? In bed, no less, he said he was seriously ‘mulling it over.’ And I quote. Oh, he was just barely joking and mostly serious, he was even a bigger shit than I was.”
She laughed, when it was out there. It was so off-hand, private and random, almost gauche. But it had been an eternity since she had felt so comfortable in a place, another’s presence. Lacie shifted in her sleep, gave a contented sigh. Mitch tried not to laugh along with Sophie, mostly succeeded, but his thin shoulders were shaking and it was a very near thing.
“And then there was the other time you saw,” she said. “After our engagement. That horrible time when I was drinking.”
“I remember. It’s nothing now. Ingri, you don’t need to—”
“I do. Do you know he actually did break it off with me that time, until I swallowed my pride, almost choked on it, and begged him to take me back?”
“I thought it was your idea,” said Mitch. “To end it before it began.”
“No. But do you know why he wanted to?”
Mitch shook his head. He waited.
“It was because whenever we went out in downtown, or gambling in Black Hawk, I kept talking down to people, like, the homeless people. Old people. Waiters, even. The disabled. Poor people. Whatever. Anyone who was too messed up to be sensible, anyone who slowed me on my merry and spiteful way. In Tom, I had finally found someone I could be vulnerable enough with to talk to about mother, about Patrice, and that was a good thing, yes. But every night I shared, when Tom was asleep I started drinking, and then when I really thought about how much I had bottled up inside of me, I got… I…” She realized she was rushing through this without a breath, almost babbling. She forced herself to slow down. “Damaged people, you understand. Or people I never even knew. Or people who were good, like, like Silas. People who looked useless to me. I can’t believe what I used to be like. That’s hate, Mitch. Hate you don’t let out until it’s almost too late, it blackens everything.”
She had more to say. But nothing else would come.
“Silas. He was your dear friend, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, yes.” She stopped fanning with the cardboard-taped broom for a few moments longer, touched the skin beneath her eyes with numb white fingers. “Silas Colson was a wonderful, wonderful man. I owe him everything.”
“Then honor him,” said Mitch. He gave a fretful tug to his beard, a nervous flinching that didn’t even register with him.
“How?”
“By loving your daughter who’s been aching for you every night. By living.”
She and Mitch spent nearly an hour going through the pictures which he had salvaged from the upstairs during his first supply run after the strikes at Greeley and Loveland and Cheyenne. Sophie’s favorite so far was a picture of their father, a shortwave radio man in Vietnam. She immediately thought of the Grundig, Tom’s instructions in the binder. And Chris… no. Don’t think of that.
Thomas Senior had taught Tom all about the shortwave, and the boys had their love of radio and Walkie Talkies chronicled there in almost every one of Aunt Jemm’s album pictures. Because of Tom’s love for that one hobby he could genuinely share with his traumatized and crippled father, Tommy Junior had put a radio in the shelter and had even built a war-ready communications lattice above the canyon cave. Indirectly, this unknowable man whom Sophie had barely known, except through her husband’s grief which had bonded man and wife, this distant yet present soul saved her and her daughter’s lives.
Mitch bandaged Sophie’s free hand, she always insisted on sifting pictures with the other one, back and forth she went as he cleansed, treated, injected. There were pictures of Tom’s mom, Mitch holding Tom as a baby, two boys running down Kersey’s Main Street in bright orange hunting vests, their freeze-framed Auntie yelling and laughing as she chased after them. These eternal photo-glimpses were treasures for the people who would come into the world, sacred treasures of the elder age. How else would anyone understand? She almost felt guilty touching them.
She stroked the thumbprint-sized blot of a blurry profile in oak-leaf sun and shadow, her dead and gone husband’s face at thirteen or fourteen years of age.
Oh, Tom. Lacie is beginning to look so much like you.
As Mitch prepared treatments and prioritized the binders, he and Sophie began to plan. They had both agreed almost at once on trying for Yellowstone, if the H4 could be repaired. Mitch was worried that serious fighting would soon begin as the Chinese were scattered and weakening in Colorado, and that the U.S. Army might soon attempt a triangulation of the territory between I-25, Fort Morgan and the artillery silos at the Cheyenne bombing range. That triangle’s interior included Kersey.
As Sophie described the road conditions and sorted pictures, Mitch crunched away at strange pieces of food. After he munched and swallowed each one, he gasped, and Sophie had demanded to see just what he was eating. She was bemused to find that Mitch, recently hoping to see his brother and to mend some aging fences, had stocked up on limited edition Dr. Pepper flavors, as well as Tom’s cherished cellophane bags of Hapi wasabi peas.
Sophie smelled the bag of the odd-looking stinky clusters, crinkled up her nose. “I almost had some of those in the shelter. Are they any good?”
“They’re pretty terrible.” Mitch gave her a guilty grin. “I can’t stop. Want some?”
She declined.
Mitch told her then almost casually about his shortwave eavesdropping, the telegraph signals that had erupted in a clatter over the airwaves when the missiles had been falling. He was certain it was the Russians who had launched first, a miscommunication over disasters along the border of Kazakhstan and the China. Everything had begun at a place called the Alashankou Railway Station, and American agents might well have been to blame.
Sophie wanted to say that she believed the Americans had indeed forced the catastrophe with their denials and then the Wikileaks intelligence breach about the black market uranium assassinations in Alashankou, which led to the U.N. crisis meeting with Russian and China in New York, which led to everything.