She always remembered savoring that beer. It had been a busy day, with a lot of running around: the grocery, the bank, the laundry, a secondhand bookstore. Linda’d been…not terrible, but enough to keep Marian on her toes. She felt she’d earned the Oly.
Everything else about the day seemed the same way. She worried about Bill, over there in Korea. She worried about the war in Europe, too. But all of those concerns lay thousands of miles away. They were noises from another room, like her daughter’s snores.
She turned on the radio to catch some news. “It’s nine P.M. on Thursday, March 1, 1951,” the broadcaster said. “Mayor Bill Devin has announced that Seattle’s civil defenses are being beefed up. Air-raid warnings are scheduled to begin next week. Mayor Devin said, ‘We did this after Pearl Harbor, too. We turned out not to need it then. I don’t expect we’ll need it now, either. But, as the Boy Scouts say, it’s always better to be prepared.’ ”
Everett actually lay about twenty miles north of Seattle. Unless the suburb did the same thing as the big city, the air-raid alerts wouldn’t matter here. Just as well, Marian thought. If the sirens weren’t enough to throw Linda into a tizzy, she didn’t know what would be.
The broadcaster bragged about how many planes the Boeing plant was turning out. “Full speed ahead for the war effort!” he said. As Boeing went, so went business in Seattle and all the bedroom communities. Sometimes you wondered which was the tail and which the dog.
She listened to the radio till nine o’clock, then turned on the TV. KING-TV was the only station in Seattle-the only station in the Pacific Northwest, come to that. They’d beaten Portland to the punch. Unfortunately, the comedian prancing around on it lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny. She gave him five minutes, made a face that would have got Linda a swat on the fanny, and turned him off again.
Maybe a murder mystery would be more interesting. It was, for ten or fifteen minutes. Then she found herself yawning and reading the same paragraph three times. Was the beer making her that sleepy? Or was it taking care of a little girl by herself while her husband fought a war on the other side of the Pacific?
Whatever it was, going to bed before ten o’clock seemed a depressing way to end the day. When she was a kid, staying up as late as she wanted seemed one of the big attractions of turning into a grownup. No bedtime! What could be better than that?
Marian yawned. Not being so goddamn tired could be better than this. She yawned again. Staying up as late as you wanted could also mean going to bed as early as you wanted. It could, and tonight it did. Linda would be up at the crack of dawn, one more habit that failed to endear little kids to their parents.
The bed was cold. She often thought that when she slid into it by herself after Bill got summoned to active duty. It seemed especially bad tonight, though. She shivered under the covers till her own body heat warmed things up a little. Then, with a sigh, she gave up and went to sleep. That was five minutes after she lay down-six, tops.
She woke in the middle of the night from a confused dream of howling dogs. The howling went on after she stopped sleeping. Sirens? she thought, more confused than ever. But Mayor Devin had said they would start next week, and that was in Seattle, not here. A couple of guns went off. Big guns. Cannons.
All the windows were closed. The shades were down to the bottom. She’d made sure of that-there’d been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood the year before. The curtains, dark ones, were drawn. The light that filled the room was brighter than the sun even so, brighter than a thousand suns. If a flashbulb the size of a car had gone off in front of her nose, it might have felt something like that. Her left cheek felt as if someone had pressed a hot iron to it.
She screamed and buried her face under the covers, which helped not nearly enough. Blast hit the house while she was doing that. Had the Jolly Green Giant put on hobnailed boots before kicking the place, that might have come close. It slid off the raised foundation as all the windows broke and everything that could fall down did. The bed suddenly developed a tilt. The roof beams creaked and groaned and then shrieked as they pulled apart. Chunks of plaster rained down. One, luckily not a big one, hit her in the head.
“Mommy!” High and shrill and terrified, the squeal overrode everything else. “Help, Mommy, help! It hurts!”
Marian jumped out of bed. “I’m coming, darling!” she yelled, and ran toward the bedroom door. Halfway there, she tripped over a fallen nightstand she couldn’t see in the now-returned dark and took a header.
She landed on her face-luckily, not on the burned side. When she brought her hand up to her eyebrow, it felt wet. She tried to blot the cut with the sleeve of her nightgown. She smelled gas. She also smelled smoke. She didn’t see fire anywhere, but that proved nothing. They had to get out of there right now.
“Linda?” she called.
At the same time, Linda was calling, “Mommy?” They ran into each other in the pitch-black hall. They both screamed. Then they both laughed. Marian snatched up Linda and ran for the back door. It was closer than the front door, and also downhill in the new, off-kilter world inside. As she ran, she noticed her feet hurt. Then she wondered how much broken glass she’d stepped on, and how much was still in her feet. Glass didn’t show up on X-rays.
That was the least of her worries about X-rays. How big a dose of them had the bomb just given her…and Linda? She couldn’t do anything about that. That she couldn’t do anything about it made her hate herself.
The back door stood open. She’d locked it, but atom bombs, like love, laughed at locksmiths. She stumbled out into the chilly night.
“What’s that, Mommy?” Linda pointed to the southern sky.
“It’s the horrible bomb that did this to us,” Marian answered. The mushroom cloud, still swelling, still rising, towered high into the night sky. Though fading, it glowed with a light of its own. The colors had a terrible beauty: goldenrod, peach, salmon. She also discovered that Linda had a flash burn on her neck like the one on her own cheek.
Here and there, fires were beginning to burn, some on her block. How far from the terrible cloud were they? Too far to be erased in an instant, like the people peacefully sleeping under the bomb when it went off. Too close to get off scot-free.
Neighbors were calling to one another. People were screaming, too, people who’d had pieces of furniture or big pieces of their house fall on them and people who were burning. A man ran skrieking down the street. His hair was on fire-bright yellow flames shot up at least six inches. Maybe he used too much greasy goop. Maybe he’d slept with an uncurtained window facing south. Maybe, maybe, maybe…Whatever exactly had happened, it was dreadful and funny at the same time-unless you happened to be him, in which case it was just dreadful. He shrieked and tried to beat out the flames with his fists as he dashed along the street in his pj’s.
With a sudden thrill of horror, Marian recalled that this was what her husband did to other people. He did it for a living. He incinerated them and smashed their houses and set them on fire. You took that for granted when it happened to other people, dirty Japs or Commies, thousands of miles away. Of course you did. It didn’t seem real then.
But when it happened to you…That was when you saw what atom bombs were all about. They were city-killers, nothing else but. And the Russians had killed her city. Sirens began to wail. But there wouldn’t be enough fire engines or ambulances on the whole West Coast to deal with the disaster here.
A sudden, hot rain pelted down on her and Linda. “Eww! That’s disgusting!” her daughter said. It was bound to be radioactive, too.