Alex pulled the bus over to Jon’s stop. Jon walked to the front. “See you later,” he said.
Alex nodded, and Jon got off. Mom’s apartment was three blocks away. It was in a good neighborhood, as White Birch went. The houses had been converted into two- and four-family apartments. There were no drunks or corpses on the street, and the only guard Jon saw was more interested in flirting with a grubber girl than protecting visiting clavers.
Matt opened the door and gave Jon a hug. “You look great!” he said. “You’ve grown. More muscle.”
Matt was thinner than Jon remembered, but it wasn’t sickness thin. It was the leanness of someone forever in motion. “You look great yourself,” Jon said. “How’s Syl?”
Matt shrugged. “She took the last miscarriage hard,” he said. “But she’s back to work, and we keep hoping.”
“Give her my love,” Jon said. He and Miranda found it wildly amusing that Syl was working as a domestic. When she and Matt had first married, Syl did nothing but stay in their bedroom while the rest of the family did all the cleaning and washing. Not that Jon had done so much. Maybe that’s why he was so comfortable having Val do the housework. He was used to others taking care of him.
Mom grabbed Jon from Matt and hugged him even harder. She’d lost weight, too, Jon noticed. It would be like Mom to eat less so Miranda could eat more. Jon wondered if Matt had noticed and spoken to Miranda about it.
Miranda glowed. The last time Jon had seen her, he could hardly tell that she was pregnant. But now there was no mistaking it.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“Fine,” she said. “I get a little tired at work sometimes, but otherwise I feel great. They even doubled my food allotment. I’m going to be the fattest person in White Birch.”
“There’s not a lot of competition,” Jon said. “I saw Alex. He drove my bus in.”
Miranda nodded. “He’s working seven days a week,” she said. “He says he’ll stop when the baby is born. I don’t know. I won’t be able to go back to work for a couple of months, so we won’t have my salary. It’s going to be hard getting by on just his and Mom’s pay.”
“We’ll manage,” Mom said. “Look at us. My three children together, all grown, all beautiful. It’s almost four years since everything happened. And we’re still here, still together.”
“Remember Crazy Shopping Day?” Miranda asked. She and Jon burst out laughing at the memory of their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Nesbitt, attacking some poor guy who’d tried to steal her shopping cart.
Matt hadn’t been there for Crazy Shopping Day, but soon they were reminiscing about their lives. Jon had learned not to think about the past any more than he had to, but it was wonderful talking about Christmases and birthdays and even fights they’d had growing up. Mom told how pleased Matt had been when Jon was born and he had a little brother, and how angry Miranda had been since she was convinced she’d been promised a sister of her own.
“What are you going to name the baby?” Jon asked Miranda. “Have you decided?”
Miranda laughed. “It had better be a girl,” she said. “Alex and I keep fighting over boy names. If it’s a girl, it’s Liana. The ‘li’ is from Julie and the ‘ana’ from Briana.”
Miranda hadn’t even known of Briana’s existence, Jon thought. Julie had told him about her, but when they began the long walk to Sexton, Jon had mentioned Bri to Miranda, only to have Miranda ask who he was talking about. Miranda and Alex had had a terrible fight after that, Miranda enraged that Alex never told her he had a sister who’d died.
That was the first of their two terrible fights. There were squabbles after that, but they all squabbled. The trip was a nightmare. It would have been impossible to stay in good spirits through those long terrifying months. But the second fight Alex and Miranda had was something far beyond a squabble. No one could tell what the fight was about, but a day later Alex left. Miranda said he was going to Texas to see Carlos and tell him of Julie’s death. But Jon knew—they all knew—it was something more than that, something far deeper.
Jon had actually been surprised when he learned Alex had returned to Miranda in White Birch. By that point Jon had slipped into Sexton. But he came for Alex and Miranda’s wedding, and now, in a matter of months, he’d be an uncle.
As they sat down for lunch, Jon knew Mom was giving up supper for a couple of days so the table would be full. Even so, Jon noticed the food was nowhere near as good as what he was used to in Sexton. He felt like he was seeing things through Sarah’s eyes. The apartment Mom shared with Miranda and Alex seemed smaller than Jon remembered, and grimier. The only heat came from a coal stove in the kitchen. That’s where they ate, but when they were through and went back to the living room, Jon felt a dank cold.
He also noticed that, at different moments, each one of them coughed. White Birch homes didn’t come with air purification systems.
Jon had been to his family’s apartment maybe ten times. He tried to remember if he’d noticed the cold before, the dirty air, the just adequate food. Maybe he hadn’t cared because it was so much better than what they’d had in Pennsylvania, where the four of them slept in the sunroom, all of them near death from starvation.
No, that wasn’t true. Jon had never been that close to death. The others had given their food to him. He’d been hungry, and he’d been tired from the endless labor of chopping firewood, but they’d seen to it that he would survive.
He looked at his mother, his brother and sister and thought about how he alone was living in the enclave, with its well-heated homes with breathable air, and fresh vegetables, chickens, and eggs. Before, somehow it had felt right. He was the youngest. He was the closest to Lisa. When they’d learned that one of the three passes Alex had given to Miranda would have to be used for Gabe, it made sense that Jon be the one to live with him and Lisa. They’d talked it out. Miranda, holding on to the thought that Alex would return, had refused to move to Sexton. Matt and Syl had decided to make a home somewhere else. Mom said it wouldn’t work for her and Lisa to live together. They got along remarkably well, given they’d both been married to the same man, but enough was enough.
So, just as they’d given their food to Jon, they gave him their chance at a decent, comfortable life.
The passes had been meant originally for Alex, Bri, and Julie.
“Julie would want you to have her pass,” Lisa had said. Lisa had loved Julie and been closer to her than any of them, except Jon.
But Jon knew something Lisa didn’t, something Lisa would never know. Julie might still be alive if it weren’t for him. Taking the pass was like stealing from the dead.
Still, he took it. Miranda and Alex, who could have used the passes for themselves, were grubs now. Their baby was coming into a world of inequality at best, hunger and cold at worst.
“How’s the teaching going, Mom?” Matt asked.
Mom shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t know why I even try,” she said. “I teach three classes, fifty kids in a class. Most of them don’t care. They’re killing time until they’re sixteen and can start working in Sexton. But there was this boy. I’ve never seen a kid that intelligent. Not book-learning smart. He hasn’t had the chance. But he grasped concepts faster than I could discuss them. Brilliant kid. I thought maybe he could get into Sexton University. There’s no rule against it, and a boy that smart should be able to find sponsors.” She sighed. “He left two weeks ago. He was nice enough to tell me, which is more than most of them do. His father got arrested, and his mother is dead, and he has two younger brothers. The kid is fifteen. He’s going to work in the mines. You don’t have to be sixteen to work in the mines. He’ll send the money home to support his brothers until the older one is sixteen and can go to work.”