When they were done, the tents overlapped and stretched from couch to fireplace, in some places as high as the girls sitting and in others almost touching the floor. The girls crawled under an edge and got in and moved into the middle, where, near the armchair, they could sit upright without the tents touching them, the overhead light coming differently through the different blankets around them, shining oddly on their flesh.
“I’m hungry,” said the youngest girl.
“We had a snack,” said her sister.
“When is he coming?”
“Soon.”
“Did you call him?”
The oldest girl did not answer. She did not want to call the father, though she knew that was what the mother would do. She wanted him to come on his own. Instead, she crawled out of the tents and got some bread and a knife and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter and crawled with it back into the tents.
“We’re not supposed to eat in the living room,” said the youngest girl.
“We’re not in the living room,” said the oldest girl, “we’re in the tents. Besides, mother isn’t here.”
When the bread was gone and they had scraped the rest of the peanut butter out of the jar, they sat and waited. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s pale and anxious face, and wondered how her own face looked. And while she was sitting there, looking at her sister’s face and wondering about her own, she saw the face begin to change and her sister begin to cry. The oldest girl reached out across the tent and put her hand on her sister’s back and began to move her hand. It was like she was petting an animal — or rather, since she herself, concentrating on staying as calm as glass for the sake of her sister, felt distant not only from her sister’s back but from her own hand, as if she were watching someone else pet an animal.
The youngest girl, she realized, was asking about the father. Where was he? Wasn’t he coming? Where was he? Why wasn’t he here? The oldest girl just kept patting her back. And where was the mother? the youngest girl wanted to know. Not only where was the father but where was the mother?
“She’s not here,” said the oldest girl.
The youngest girl kept crying and asking questions, which made the oldest girl think that she didn’t really want an answer, or at least didn’t want the real answer. The oldest girl kept patting her sister on the back and waiting for it to be over, waiting for her to calm down. When she finally did, her face was blotched red and her eyes were puffy. She sat in the tents looking drained and not looking at anything at all.
“What do we do?” the youngest girl asked.
“We wait for him to come,” said the oldest girl.
“But what if he doesn’t come?”
“He’ll come,” said the oldest girl.
“But what if he doesn’t?”
“He will,” said the oldest girl firmly.
She crawled out of the tents and got some pillows from their bedrooms. She brought them back into the tents and coaxed her sister into lying down. We’ll just wait, she told her. We’ll just lie down and relax and wait for him to come.
Later, the oldest girl was not sure how long they had stayed there together, waiting, the oldest girl sitting, the youngest girl lying down. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s eyes narrow and finally close. Then she kept sitting and watching, the blanket fabric brushing her head lightly. She waited.
When her own head began to nod, she shook it and got up, crawled out of the tents. In the kitchen she checked the clock; it was after eleven, much later than she was allowed to stay up. She looked out the window; there was no moon, the night thick and dark. She could see the dim shape of the porch supports, the ghost of the garage a dozen feet past them, but little more. It was as if the world had dissolved.
She locked the back door, left the front door unlocked so the father could get in. She went around the house, turning lights on. When she was done, she went back into the living room, sat just outside the tents.
She could hear her sister inside the tents, breathing softly. Otherwise the house was quiet. Why not telephone the father? she wondered. But that was the sort of thing the mother would do, the sort of thing, the oldest girl thought, that made the father less dependable. The father, she felt, had to come on his own.
She sat there cross-legged, just outside the tents, guarding her sister, waiting for the father to come. Eventually, he would come, she was sure of it. He would remember them. He would remember her.
And, she thought as her eyes grew heavy, when the father did burst through the door, wild-eyed and unshaven, wearing only his pajama bottoms, she would still be there, she was certain, sitting cross-legged just outside the tents. He would look at her and she would look back, and then she would turn and crawl back into the tents and lay her head down next to her sister’s on the pillow, and sleep. If the father wanted to follow her in, that was fine — there was plenty of room in the tents, and for the mother, too, if she wanted to come. But they would have to understand that in the tents it was the two girls who made the rules. It would be up to the girls now to be in charge, she thought, yawning. It was up to them, not the parents, which meant it was mostly up to the oldest girl. The father would have to understand that.
But if he didn’t come, she finally thought hours later, her legs tingling from being crossed so long, the sky beginning to grow light outside, if he didn’t come, she could learn to live with that too.
Wander
And after many days of wandering — days of bitter cold, days in which we wore out what remained of our shoes and then lost toes and then wrapped our feet in rags, days in which we were hard-pressed to decide what wounded and floundering flesh was safe to consume and what must be passed over, days when we passed warily by other tribes of men such as ourselves, days when we were forced to decide whether to haul one another forward or abandon one another along what remained of the roadside — we came at last to a place not utterly undone by devastation. The snow and ice first acquired a different sheen, and then grew slick underfoot, and then began to give way to water and soon was entirely gone. God in his mercy had left it undiscovered and awaiting us, or so we believed at the time.
The feeling returned to our fingers for the first time in many months. There were a dozen dwellings intact and sufficient among the ruins, and we made our way into one to find there the dead huddled together dry and hollow now, their bodies like emptied sacks. We lay them with respect in one of the beds of the house and sealed the room because the living should not hold ground in common with the dead. Then we took, from cabinets and closets, dried goods and cans, and many of these proved still edible, and for the first time in many days we did not have to scrabble for food.
We chose a room and tore the planking from the floor and built just outside the house a fire and slept the sleep of the dead.
But in the morning, we began to recall the dead boarded into the room beside us and began to wonder if we had sinned in our actions against them. Our leader, Hroar, determined that we must show them our respect by aiding them on their way to heaven, and so with the smoldering remnants of our fire we made of their house a pyre and let it burn until the dead were nothing but smoke.