But had she been fooling herself? Was her staircase really just a net worth calculator? And what did it matter now? Because the pulse had halted forward movement, had ensured all remaining steps would be back down the stairs. The smallest slip meant a tumble toward some destination too far away and terrible to see.
Until now, the worst hardship she’d ever endured was the summer when her father, after an awful fight with her mother, fled to their lake house. She was fourteen then, prone to emotional turmoil, and the idea that her parents might divorce sent her spiraling toward full meltdown.
While her father was away, she lost her virginity to a baseball player who had followed her around school ever since spring break and who, when she finally kissed him, squeezed her boobs like he was trying to drain juice from them. One afternoon, during the third week of her father’s absence, Skylar walked over to the baseball player’s house and watched a movie about an asteroid crashing into Earth. This time, when his squeezing hands reached between her legs, she hadn’t pushed them away. She still remembered his arms on either side of her, smooth and hard and shimmering, his face gone red with concentration. His piston thrusting ended as a woman and her father in the film cowered before an enormous tidal wave, and Skylar wondered what her own father would think if he knew, at that very moment, a thick-headed baseball player was squirting his own wave inside her.
“How’s the book?” a voice asked. “I see you’ve almost finished.”
She looked up. Thomas was carrying a plate of breakfast, about to sit across from her.
“It’s fine.”
Today was Tuesday, four days since the pulse, though to Skylar it felt more like forty days. The sun was out and the sky was a smoky shade of blue. Natalie and Seth and their two boys were nowhere to be found.
“You know,” Thomas finally said. “You don’t have to read that.”
“No? Should I read your screenplay again instead? So I’ll know what happens next?”
“I’m saying you don’t have to read anything like that at all. It obviously upsets you.”
Skylar could feel her coherence dissolving into something like haze. Her head seemed to inflate with the pressure of it.
“You come across like this sweet guy, but I’m not sure you feel human emotions at all.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Thomas. “Because I’m pretty fucking pissed at you and Seth right now. Inviting that nutcase for dinner just to prove a point.”
“We didn’t invite him.”
“By revealing your presence, that’s exactly what you did. And probably half the neighborhood before it’s all over.”
“Let me say this one more time,” Skylar said, “since you don’t seem to get it: There’s no reason to survive this if it can’t be on our own terms.”
She spent most of the day in her room, sprawled across the bed, reading the rest of Alas, Babylon and then staring at the ceiling. In the book, months after a nuclear war had obliterated most of humanity, the protagonist’s girlfriend longed to be married. In a study of contrast, following their wedding on Easter Sunday, the protagonist had hunted down and killed a group of havoc-wreaking men in the manner of frontier justice. The obvious point being that the new order of things was the old order of things. The invisible armature of civility had been blown apart by nuclear warheads, leaving behind a daily struggle for survival that left little time to dwell on philosophical concerns.
But Alas, Babylon had been written in the 1950s, and the world had come a long way since then. Women had come a long way. Skylar was going to survive or she wasn’t, but she definitely wouldn’t place her destiny in someone else’s hands.
For dinner Thomas made sandwiches and a side salad of black beans, corn, and diced tomatoes. By then no one was spending much time in the common areas of the house, choosing instead to sequester themselves in bedrooms or the game room upstairs.
Skylar didn’t make a decision to leave. Instead, she inched toward her departure one move at a time. When no one was in the kitchen, she found a plastic container and shoveled some of the bean and corn salad into it. She grabbed several bottles of water. After dark, when the candles and lanterns had been extinguished, she stuffed her dirty clothes into the Hello Kitty bag, along with the water and corn salad and a box of Raisin Bran she found in the pantry. Then she lay on the bed and stewed in the hypocrisy of stealing supplies to support her fight for independence. She thought about her parents. She wanted to believe Manhattan had been evacuated, that right now her mother and father were headed somewhere safe. But even if the Army had arrived, there was no way to transport two million people off the island. Her parents were left to their own devices, which meant their fate was sealed.
It was something like midnight or maybe 2 a.m. when Skylar finally climbed out of bed. As quietly as she could manage, she carried her bag out of the bedroom and down the hallway. The kitchen and den were lit by silvery moonlight, which produced shadows that were both dramatic and confusing, because one of those shadows made it seem as if a person was sitting at the kitchen table. But why would someone sit there in the dark? She walked past the kitchen and approached the front door. Turned the deadbolt until it slipped free, and now all she had to do was open the door and walk through it. All she had to do was reach for the knob and turn.
But was someone really in the kitchen?
If someone was, they’d probably come over to look when she opened the door. She decided to check, just to be sure.
“Was that a suitcase?” said a woman’s voice.
Skylar’s heart nearly thumped out of her chest.
“Natalie!” she hissed. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“I’m here to watch a crazy woman give up food and water and shelter for the chance to be raped or killed.”
Skylar had never imagined she would see anyone before she left and had constructed no story to explain what she was doing or why she was doing it.
“Is it really that tough being stuck here with us?” asked Natalie. “Are we such poor company that you’d rather wander around Dallas until you’re taken hostage?”
“It’s nothing to do with you. And I don’t plan on being taken hostage. I can fend for myself.”
As Skylar stood there, staring at the dark form of a woman, Natalie’s face began to resolve itself in the moonlight. She might have been smiling.
“You want to sit down and tell me how you plan to do that?”
“Sit down?”
“If you need to go,” Natalie said, “I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”
This couldn’t be a sign, could it? Natalie’s presence here this late at night?
“Maybe I’ll sit down for just a minute,” Skylar finally said, and lowered herself into a chair. “But you have to tell me why you’re sitting alone in the dark.”
Now Skylar remembered she hadn’t heard Natalie speak aloud in something like two days.
“I’ve been feeling very strange. My ears have been ringing a lot, and I thought I was going crazy, but maybe it’s stress. I’m so overwhelmed I can hardly get out of bed.”
“I know what you mean. This is the worst—”
“It’s not that,” Natalie said in a shaky voice. “I don’t love my husband.”
“Hey,” Skylar said, and reached across the table for Natalie’s hand. “He’s struggling like all of us are. Maybe you should cut him a little slack.”
“Before all this, when Seth was gambling away our life savings, I thought he was cheating on me. And part of me wanted it to be true, because then I would have a legitimate reason to leave. Instead, he felt so guilty he tried to kill himself to get the money back. How could I not love him for that?”